The Soundtrack Of Our Lives

May 31, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Soundtrack Of Our Lives | 1 Comment 

 The Soundtrack of Our Lives looks back at some of the music that was popular, and the performers who were influential, around the time Richard Nixon became President in 1969.

BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND by BOB DYLAN

Because of the holiday last weekend, Soundtrack was unable to wish Bob Dylan a happy 68th birthday (on 24 May).

His contributions to American music and history and culture over the last five decades are, to put it mildly, well and widely known. So there’s not much more, much less anything new, that the Soundtracker can add.

But by way of wishing Mr. Dylan a happy birthday —and many more— we’ll look back today, and in some weeks to come, at several of his most important and influential songs.

This week it’s 1962’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” — the song that raised the consciousness of a generation.

“Blowin’ in the Wind” was written in the spring of ‘62.  In the time-honored folk tradition, the melody was based on an historical source — in this case an old slave song called “No More Auction Block.”  An early live performance of that song at the Gaslight Café in 1962 was captured on tape and can be heard singing on Disc One of the Bootleg Series.

The first performance of “Blowin’ in the Wind” at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village in April 1962 was also recorded.  At this point there were only two verses and a few of the words were slightly different, but the power of the song, even as a work in progress, is already clear.

  

The finished version of “Blowin’ in the Wind” was published in June 1962 in the folk magazine Sing Out (which has been publishing since 1950, and which deserves support).

In one of his typical explanatory non-explanations, he said:

There ain’t too much I can say about this song except that the answer is blowing in the wind. It ain’t in no book or movie or TV show or discussion group. Man, it’s in the wind—and it’s blowing in the wind. Too many of these hip people are telling me where the answer is but oh I won’t believe that. I still say it’s in the wind and just like a restless piece of paper it’s got to come down some …But the only trouble is that no one picks up the answer when it comes down so not too many people get to see and know …and then it flies away I still say that some of the biggest criminals are those that turn their heads away when they see wrong and know it’s wrong. I’m only 21 years old and I know that there’s been too many …You people over 21, you’re older and smarter.

“Blowin in the Wind” was the first track on Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, released on 27 May 1963 — forty-six years ago last Wednesday.

How many roads must a man walk down,
Before you call him a man?
Yes, ‘n’ how many seas must a white dove sail,
Before she sleeps in the sand?
Yes, ‘n’ how many times must the cannon balls fly
Before they’re forever banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind,
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

How many years can a mountain exist,
Before it’s washed to the sea?
Yes, ‘n’ how many years can some people exist,
Before they’re allowed to be free?
Yes, ‘n’ how many times can a man turn his head,
Pretending he just doesn’t see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind,
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

How many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky?
Yes, ‘n’ how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, ‘n’ how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind,
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan sold consistently and well. But Dylan’s unadorned delivery and purposely raspy voice was, for many, a taste that needed time to acquire. And, after the first recorded Ur-version, his acquaintance with his own melodies was frequently more in the breach than the observance.  As a result, other artists were frequently more faithful exemplars of Dylan’s work than Dylan himself.

“Blowin’ in the Wind” became a major hit in the hands of Peter, Paul & Mary — a group that shared the properly legendary manager Albert Grossman with Dylan and Joan Baez and many of the important and emerging folk performers of the time. In the summer of 1963, PP&M’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” hit Number Two on Billboard’s Hot 100.

For a few years in the mid-1960s, “Blowin’ in the Wind” could be heard wafting from open windows of every dorm on every campus in every state in America. It was sung in concerts, and at rallies, and in parks, and in homes, and in churches. And it supplied, for a generation of young middle class Americans, a profound and poetic bridge to the civil rights movement that had hitherto been taking place around, but without, them.

Much of the civil rights rhetoric of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s had been exhortatory and inflammatory; and the nature —and the danger— of involvement in the movement was often exclusionary. But the deceptively gentle —and even equivocal— nature of Dylan’s rhetorical questions allowed each listener to fill in the blanks for themselves. The result was the conversion to commitment and participation of a generation that is still playing itself out today in American politics and letters and academics.

Folk purists considered Peter, Paul & Mary’s sweet harmonies to be commercially homogenized, and their presentation to be inauthentic. Joan Baez referred to them as “Peter, Paul & Misery,” and her own characteristically affectless covers were considered to be more faithfully Dylanesque without being any less moving.

The frequently heated dispute between the purists and the popularizers over the proper rendition of Dylan’s songs continued for a couple of years —- until, on the night of 25 July 1965, Dylan himself put it behind when he stepped on stage at the Newport Folk Festival and put an electric plug in his guitar.  In the next few minutes he reinvented himself as the man who, having changed folk music forever, would now do the same for and to rock and roll.

 

THE FREEWHEELIN’ BOB DYLAN

RELEASED 27 MAY 1963

 

What an amazing album!   The Don Hunstein cover photo alone (showing Dylan walking with his girlfriend Suze Rotolo in the middle of the street outside their apartment at the corner of Jones Street and West 4th in Greenwich Village) has spawned a cottage industry.  

The track list  shows the incredible range and creativity of this twenty-two year old artist.

SIDE ONE
1. Blowin’ in the Wind
2. Girl from the North Country
3. Masters of War
4. Down the HIghway
5. Bob Dylan’s Blues
6. A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall
SIDE TWO
1. Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
2. Bob Dylan’s Dream
3. Oxford Town
4. Talkin’ World War III Blues
5. Corrina, Corrina
6. Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance
7. I Shall Be Free

Featured Articles — May 31, 2009

May 31, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles | Leave a Comment 

Interesting Takes From Home And Abroad:

New York on the Precipice By Fred Siegel, Commentary Magazine
Modern Washington, with its vast powers and giant bureaucracies, was created in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression that followed. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal brought an end to New York City’s reign as the nation’s unofficial capital and gave Washington pride of place, which it has held ever since. FDR’s “brain trust” of intellectuals and academics quickly superseded the heavily starched class of bankers and stockbrokers who seemed to have brought the country and the world to the brink of permanent ruin.

Sotomayor’s Deliberate Choice of Words By Ruth Marcus, Washington Post
Nice try, Mr. President, but I’m not buying the poor-choice-of-words defense for Sonia Sotomayor. “I’m sure she would have restated it,” President Obama told NBC News about his Supreme Court nominee’s now-famous 32 words: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Said White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, “I think she’d say that her word choice in 2001 was poor.”

‘Shock And Awe’ Statism By George Will, Washington Post
Epiphanies are a dime a dozen among congressional Democrats as they discover urgent new reasons to experience the almost erotic pleasure of commandeering other people’s money. For example, freshman Rep. Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat whose district includes Disney World, was recently there and was inspired.

Guns, Liquor and the Age of Obama By Jon Meacham, Newsweek
Pro-gun sentiment in America is rising, not falling. Firearms sales are up, and there are reports of ammunition shortages.

Change in the Air in Iran By David Ignatius, Washington Post
As Iran heads toward its presidential election on June 12, there are signs that Iranian voters are embracing their own version of “Change we can believe in.” The fiery incumbent, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, appears to be losing ground to a more pragmatic and experienced rival, former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Kim Jong-il is a headache, but not a nightmare By Malcom Rifkind, Daily Telegraph
The very idea of North Korea becoming the new regional power in the Far East is ludicrous.

Settling the Settlements By Marty Peretz, The New Republic
There’s a bit of a fracas today just below Michael Crowley’s astute Plank, “Obama v. Netanyahu,” about whether or not I had ever criticized the settlements. Well, the truth is that I have, actually from early on when they were creations facilitated by peace icons like Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin. Just to test me, take a look at my writings from Hebron during the summer of 2005.

Can Iran’s Minorities Help Oust Ahmadinejad? By Nahid Siamdoust, Time
The presidential candidate was greeted last Monday at the airport by a jubilant throng, chanting “Azerbaijan is awake, and is supporting its son!” That slogan, shouted in the Azeri language, might sound a little discordant, given that Mir-Hossein Moussavi is running for President not of Azerbaijan, but of Iran.

A Nixon Speaks On North Korea’s Nukes

May 30, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under International Affairs, Nixon family, North Korea | Leave a Comment 

Christopher Nixon Cox, the 37th President’s grandson who gained prominence last year as the New York executive director of the McCain campaign, explains at Fox News’s website why he thinks North Korea’s recent saber-rattling is primarily the result of internal political struggles in that nation.

Woebegone: Garrison Keillor’s Memorial Day Song

May 30, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Entertainment, Music | Leave a Comment 

Last week’s edition of The Prairie Home Companion was broadcast from Wolftrap Farm, just over the Potomac from the nation’s capital.

During the show, Garrison Keillor did a good thing and a bad thing.

This is is praise and his comeuppance.

The good thing: He invited the audience to stand and join him and the cast and musicians in singing the National Anthem. It was a stirring and fitting moment.  So kudos to Mr. Keillor for that.

The bad thing: He closed the segment that preceded singing the “Star Spangled Banner” by mangling one of the most powerful anti-war songs ever written in order to bend it to an inappropriate and tendentious purpose. And in doing so he managed to desecrate the day that honors the memory of the fallen and to dishonor the sacrifice of the many wounded in battle by appropriating them for his own bathetic use.

The song is  Eric Bogle’s 1971 “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda.”

It is impossible to listen unmoved —or unshaken— to this chilly and chilling masterpiece. Not the least of its power lies in its site-specificity. It was written about the ill-conceived and mismanaged Dardanelles expedition and the Gallipoli Campaign of April 1915, when Australian and New Zealand troops were thown against superior Turkish positions and succinctly massacred. It refers to the thinning ranks and equivocal emotions of the survivors of that brutal and bloody disaster as they celebrate Anzac Day each April.

Bogle brilliantly uses “Waltzing Matilda” —a song that is deeply engraved on each strand of Anzac DNA— as an ironic leitmotif, until, at the very end, it finally manages to break free in time for a mordant and melancholy finale.  After listening to “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda,” you will never hear “Waltzing Matilda” again in the same way.

Here is Eric Bogle’s song performed by Liam Clancy, You can read the lyrics here.

Mr. Keillor full well understands the power of music.  Indeed, he understands the power of Eric Bogle’s song — which he has sung on his program in its original form on Anzac Day.

But last Saturday he hijacked it on Memorial Day for his own purposes.  In his ersatz version, the band plays the “Star Spangled Banner” (now incongruously to the tune of “Waltzing Matilda”), and Mr. Keillor equates the Anzac bitterness over the Gallipoli debacle with the American mobilization after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

He introduces the segment by describing his visit to the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery near the Anzio battlefield, where the invasion of Italy began in December 1943.  He describes walking around the marble memorial to the 6,000 men killed, the 18,000 wounded, and the 6,000 taken prisoner or missing.  Then he observes that “People are still arguing about the allied campaign in Italy.  If it should ever have been done…the decisions that were made.  They’ll never resolve that.  But there they all lie.”

And then he sings his misappropriation of “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”  — the apparent point of which has now become the futility of  having fought World War Two.

You can hear it here (at 58:50).

This is dishonest historically, musically, and emotionally.  Prairie Home listeners deserve better on Memorial Day.

Art Imitates Life

May 30, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under History, Humor, Presidents | Leave a Comment 

The image has become iconic.  The group photograph of the 1945 Yalta Conference in February 1945: the unhappily marginalized WSC, the ailing, failing FDR, and the grumpy Uncle Joe greedily counting the chickens he was about to hatch.

The scene will be recreated in the course of Into the Storm, the HBO-BBC series about Churchill’s war leadership that premieres tomorrow night.

Then there was the Photoshopped (or was it, in fact, the unretouched?) version in a Diesel Jeans ad a few years ago. 

Stanley Kutler On The Sotomayor Choice

May 30, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Bush Administration, Presidents, Richard Nixon, Senate, Supreme Court, U.S. History | 3 Comments 

At the Huffington Post Stanley I. Kutler, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, discusses President Obama’s selection of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. Professor Kutler, who was the subject of some TNN posts last year concerning challenges to transcriptions of White House recordings that he presented in his book Abuse Of Power, begins with the statement, referring to Judge Sotomayor’s rise from poverty to the heights of accomplishment, that “[l]ife narratives are compelling, and Sotomayor clearly has one, perhaps side-by-side with the President’s — and Clarence Thomas.”

To mention Justice Thomas in this context is bound to make many liberals wince. Like Judge Sotomayor, the justice was educated in Catholic schools – and he subsequently converted to the Catholic faith, whereas Judge Sotomayor was born into it. Judge Sotomayor’s views, as expressed off the bench at various academic forums, sometimes suggest some kinship to those of the late Dorothy Day, who combined social radicalism with a committed pro-life agenda, and who unhesitatingly called abortion “genocide.”

In a previous TNN post I noted that in one case concerning a challenge to the Bush Administration’s refusing to fund international organizations that advocated abortion, Judge Sotomayor decided for the administration. Her opinion in that case did not conform to the idea of abortion-as-universal-human-right supported by much of the pro-choice contingent. It makes one wonder whether she might turn out to be the Harriet Miers of the Obama era – too conservative on one or two particular issues for some in the President’s party, far too liberal in other issues for the opposition.

Another concern of Kutler’s in this article, not unexpectedly, is to wax nostalgic for the days before 1968 (and the ascension of the dreaded RN to the White House), when “Supreme Court nominations only rarely resulted in contentious confirmation battles.” He remarks that among Franklin D. Roosevelt’s nominees to the Court, only Hugo Black stirred much opposition, as a result of his brief membership in the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Well, by the time FDR had the chance to make his first nomination to the Court, the Democrats were solidly in control of the Senate, and that remained the case until the end of his Presidency. If he had had to confront a predominantly Republican Senate over his Court choices, as RN was obliged to confront one that was Democratic, Roosevelt might well have had one or two or more of his choices rejected. Before FDR, Herbert Hoover had had one of his Court selections narrowly rejected by a Republican-controlled Senate (John J. Parker). And then again, Kutler seems to forget the titanic struggle between the White House and a Democratic-controlled Congress over FDR’s “court-packing” plan in 1937.

Between FDR and Nixon, only Harry Truman, from 1947 until 1949, and Dwight D. Eisenhower were faced with Congresses in which the opposition had a majority. Truman was not called upon to fill a Court vacancy during that time; Eisenhower’s five choices all enjoyed considerable bipartisan support. At the end of his Presidency, Lyndon Johnson met with opposition to his choice of Abe Fortas to replace Earl Warren as Chief Justice, partly from Southerners in his own party, and the nomination was withdrawn.

Since RN, the selections made by Presidents to the Court have almost always met with trouble if the Senate was controlled by the opposing party. (Gerald Ford’s selection of John Paul Stevens, and George Bush’s choice of David Souter, were the exceptions.) When the Republicans were the Senate majority from 1981 until 1986, Ronald Reagan’s selections of Justices O’Connor and Scalia, and his elevation of Justice Rehnquist to Chief Justice, went through the Senate comfortably. When the Democrats were back in control of the Senate, that chamber rejected Robert Bork. So, Kutler’s notion to the contrary, strife between the White House and the Senate over Court choices didn’t start with Nixon, and if it hasn’t ended since his time, that’s not his doing.

Kutler also muses on the subject of judicial activism vs. strict construction, that duality upon which many a debate about the Court has centered since the 1960s. He somewhat slyly remarks that whereas Nixon’s statements after the Engel v. Vitale decision of 1962, which ruled against prayer in public schools, criticized Justice Black’s majority opinion as leaning too far toward a strict interpretation of the Establishment Clause, as President he was a strong supporter of a literal interpretation of the Constitution. Kutler makes it clear that he sees Judge Sotomayor as leaning toward the activist side, and that he thinks this is all for the best. But are liberals really ready for the judge to be an activist where it might be inconvenient for them?

TNN Weekly Weekend Reward

May 30, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Weekly Weekend Reward | Leave a Comment 

For more than three decades John Hiatt has been a man for all musical seasons — a singers’ singer, a songwriters’ songwriter, a musicians’ musician, a consummate performer both acoustically and hotwired, and an erstwhile genial host to boot.  

His latest album is 2008’s Same Old Man. 

John Hiatt: makin’ ‘em that way since the early ’70s.

Last week’s Reward was “My Thunderbird.”   This week it’s “Tennessee Plates,” (written with Mike Porter) from the 1983 classic album Slow Turning.

I woke up in a hotel didn’t know what to do
I turned the TV on and wrote a letter to you
The news was talkin’ ’bout a dragnet up on the interstate
They were lookin’ for a Cadillac with Tennessee plates

Since I left California baby, things have gotten worse
And the land of opportunity for me is just a curse
Tell that judge in Bakersfield that my trial will have to wait
Down here they’re lookin’ for a Cadillac with Tennessee plates

It was somewhere in Nevada, it was cold outside
She was shiverin’ in the dark, so I offered her a ride
Three bank jobs later, four cars hot wired
We crossed the Mississippi like an oil slick fire

If they’d known what we was up to they wouldn’t ‘a let us in
When we landed in Memphis like original sin
Up Elvis Presley Boulevard to the Graceland gates
We were lookin’ for a Cadillac with Tennessee plates

Well, there must have been a dozen of them parked in that garage
There wasn’t one Lincoln and there wasn’t one Dodge
There wasn’t one Japanese model or make
Just pretty, pretty Cadillacs with Tennessee plates

She saw him singing once when she was seventeen
And ever since that day she’s been living in between
He was never king of nothin’ but this wild weekend
Anyway he wouldn’t care, hell he gave them to his friends

Well this ain’t no hotel I’m writin’ you from
It’s the Tennessee Prison up at Brushy Mountain
Where yours sincerely’s doin’ five to eight
Stampin’ out my time makin’ Tennessee plates

Featured Articles — May 30, 2009

May 30, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles | Leave a Comment 

Interesting Takes From Home And Abroad:

The Limits of Empathy for Sonia Sotomayor By Christopher Caldwell, Time
If you doubt that President Obama has changed American politics, consider that we are about to have the first Supreme Court confirmation hearing in almost a quarter-century that does not revolve, in one way or another, around Roe v. Wade. The appeals-court judge Sonia Sotomayor has ruled on just three cases that dealt, indirectly, with abortion. She has written a lot about racial preferences, though. That is one reason the country is set to have a knock-down, drag-out fight over affirmative action instead.

Middle East hangs on Obama’s words By Simon Tisdall, Guardian
A strong speech in Cairo could help tip the balance in Lebanese and Iranian elections and convince Arabs of American intentions.

Sotomayor And ‘Disparate Impact’ By Stuart Taylor, National Journal
The controversial New Haven firefighters case illustrates a civil rights paradox.

MPs’ expenses: America admired the Commons – no longer By Christopher Hitchens, Telegraph
US reverence for Parliament has collapsed over the past month, says Christopher Hitchens.

North Korea provokes with impunity By Mark Steyn, OC Register
A colleague of mine once interviewed a Balkan politician who left the room in mid-session and also incautiously left his briefcase standing open on the desk. Deciding to risk a peek, my friend looked inside and found only (A) a revolver and (B) a James Bond novel. “I thought to myself,” as he told me later, “maybe one or the other, but not both.”

Next Time You Think You’ve Had A Bad Day

May 29, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Next Time You Think You've Had A Bad Day | Leave a Comment 

As reported today in the Daily Telegraph:

Embarrassing pictures of Sue Brearley, were accidentally loaded onto a computer at Whitecross School, in Lydney, Glos, it was reported.

Pupils allegedly discovered the private images and passed them around the school IT system.

They are being treated as stolen and two teenage boys have been spoken to by police about the matter.

Mrs Brearley is said to have told colleagues that the photographs were originally taken on her mobile phone and loaded onto her laptop which was then plugged into the school system.

Her fiancé David Gaston, the previous head teacher, told the Daily Mirror: “We believe the photos were stolen. They are private.”

A Gloucestershire County Council spokesman was quoted as saying: “As far as Sue is concerned the photos were stolen.

“They are just of Sue, not both of them, and show her in underwear and are not of a pornographic nature.

“She will not face disciplinary action.

“Two boys, one of whom is over 16, have been spoken to by police.”

This Just In Re: 16

May 29, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Presidents, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

Four score and seven years ago tomorrow —on 30 May 1922— the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated.   As the Memorial’s website notes:

President Lincoln’s only surviving son was a special guest at the May 30, 1922 dedication ceremony for the Lincoln Memorial, receiving an ovation when he reached his seat. Robert Todd Lincoln did not deliver remarks but listened with great interest as other speakers paid tribute to his father. Robert took great interest in the memorial as it emerged within Potomac Park and frequently requested that his driver pass the site so that he could observe the progress; he even secured permission once to visit the site in the midst of ongoing construction.

There will be a re-dedication ceremony tomorrow at 2.15 — which will be carried on C-SPAN.

That’s tomorrow.  Yesterday, a letter written and signed by President Lincoln on 14 November 1863 —five days before he delivered the Gettysburg Address— was donated by the National Archives by a private Arizona collector.

The later had, at some point —not to put too fine a point on it— been pinched.  But Acting Archivist Adrienne Thomas was looking forward not back when she said: ”It is both a great honor and a pleasure for me to give this very important Abraham Lincoln letter back to the citizens of the United States of America, especially during this bicentennial year of Lincoln’s birth. It may always remain a mystery as to how this letter left the public domain and has remained in private hands for as much as a century. However, what is more significant is that today I am returning this letter to its long lost home.”

AP’s Natasha T. Metzler reported:

In the new letter, Lincoln asked his treasury secretary, Salmon Chase, to allow the fired head of the U.S. Mint in San Francisco, Robert Stevens, to review the charges that led to his removal. Lincoln had appointed Stevens as a favor to Oregon Sen. Edward Baker, the ousted director’s father-in-law.

“This letter, while seemingly routine, is an extremely important key to understanding President Lincoln’s relationship with Sen. Baker,” said James Hastings, director of access programs at the archives. “It shows his interest, even in the midst of the Civil War, in political issues on the West Coast.”

The archives says it was torn years earlier from a bound volume of Chase’s correspondence with government officials. The removal occurred before the book of letters was inducted into the archives.

Specialists at the archives will reattach the letter to the place it was torn from the book.

“We will have this piece of the puzzle now where it belongs and scholars can now interpret its importance to this critical period,” Hastings said.

When the folio was torn along its fold, small portions of the upper most layers of the paper support were torn, leaving behind matching indentations known as “beveled” or “shelved” areas. The small portions of the support that remain attached along the folio fold exactly match the shelved areas on the remaining folio half adhered in the volume.

The National Archives became aware of the existence of this Lincoln hand-written letter in 2006. Because the letter was written from the President to the Secretary of Treasury concerning a federal government matter, the National Archives launched an internal review to determine whether the document belonged in the National Archives.

The investigation revealed that at one time the letter was part of the General Records of the Department of Treasury, series 82 “Letters Received from Executive Officers, 1831-1869.” These included 141 volumes in which original letters were bound. According to the index to Volume 91, the letter should have been on page five. Upon examination of page five, it was discovered that only half of the page remained pasted into the volume — it included a one sentence summary of the letter, the date, and the author of the letter. The body of the letter was missing.

In part, the newly-found Lincoln letter is significant because the information in it was not known to Lincoln scholars or historians. The multi-volume Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln by Roy P. Basler, published in the 1950s, does not include a copy of this letter. Although it is unclear exactly when the letter fragment was torn from the Department of Treasury volume, it appears that it predates Basler’s publication and may have happened when the volume was still at the Department of Treasury, sometime between the 1880’s when the letters were bound and the 1940’s when the records were transferred to the Archives.

Recently, the National Archives Document Conservation Laboratory examined the two parts of the letter with normal and transmitted light, ultraviolet lamp and stereo-binocular microscope. The letter and half folio were found to be identical in visual appearance. Both are on soft tan, medium-weight, smooth machine-made wove paper of even and identical formation. Both letter and half folio were measured with a micrometer and have the identical thickness of .012 millimeters. The one physical difference noted was the unevenly trimmed bottom edge of the letter. It appears approximately 1/2″ to 1/4″ of the sheet is missing; otherwise the overall dimensions (5″ x 8″) are identical.

President Lincoln’s letter is addressed to:  ”Hon. Sec. of  the Treasury” and opens “My dear Sir,”.  The text reads: “Mr. Stevens, late Superintendent of the Mint at San Francisco, asks to have a copy, or be permitted to examine, and take extracts, of the evidence upon which he was removed. Please oblige him in one way or the other. 
Yours truly, A. Lincoln.”

A National Archives press release provided the backstory for the newly-acquired Lincoln letter:

At the end of March 1861, President Lincoln had approved the appointment of Robert Stevens as head of the U.S. Mint in San Francisco. The President had appointed Stevens to the patronage job as a favor to Lincoln’s old friend, Oregon Senator Edward Baker. Stevens was Baker’s son-in-law. Baker, a fellow Republican, died in battle in 1861.

    In 1863 Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase announced changes in the Customhouse and Mint, based on a report by special agent Thomas Brown who was sent to investigate Federal services in California.

    The report listed six charges against Stevens:

    1. The hiring of bad men

    2. Encouragement of insubordination and contempt for authority on the part of workers

    3. Partiality as to the wages of clerks and laborers while others’ were fixed much lower

    4. “Sponges and barnacles” – many were absent without working but were still highly-paid

    5. Purchase of inferior supplies at exorbitant rates

    6. Being arrogant and discourteous to his managers

    Based on these charges, Stevens was fired by Secretary Chase in April, 1863. For months following his removal, Stevens protested the firing, finally resorting to writing to President Lincoln.

At last week’s National Memorial Day Concert held at the Lincoln Memorial, co-host Joe Mantegna read a moving letter President Lincoln wrote to the daughter of a friend who had been killed in battle.  Although it’s a bit mawkishly over-produced, the tenderness of his words and the elegance of his simple expression reach right across the centuries.

Annals Of The Obama Administration

May 29, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Annals of the Obama Administration | 1 Comment 

The President left the White House this afternoon on another hamburger run.

This time he sampled the limited offerings but manifest delights of Five Guys — a local-joint-made-good that is the subject of some pride in these parts.

The good news is: He has lost none of his charm and suavity, and he still knows how to work a room like nobody’s business — all the while snacking on the unshelled peanuts available by-the-box at each red-and-white tiled Five Guys.

The bad news is: It takes him almost a minute to decide on the toppings for his burger (with lettuce added later as an afterthought) and almost three minutes to place the order for his small coterie.

The unspoken etiquette of Five Guys is that you know what you want before you reach the head of the line.  If just some dude took a minute to choose his toppings, he would be pelted with peanuts from the disgruntled ranks behind.

Where any POTUS is concerned, even free time is too precious to be wasted (a rule that equally applies to placing orders at Five Guys), so the entire outing was filmed by NBC as part of a “Day In The Life” special.

The prominently displayed choice of free toppings that caused such cogitation on the part of POTUS:   Mayo, Relish, Onions, Lettuce, Pickles, Tomatoes, Grilled Onions, Grilled Mushrooms, Ketchup, Mustard, Jalapeno Peppers, Green Peppers, A-1 Sauce, Bar-B-Q Sauce, and Hot Sauce.

 

The Emphathetic Justice Thomas

May 29, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under American Politics, Supreme Court | Leave a Comment 

President George H.W. Bush in 1991, plays up then-nominee to the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas as a man of “great empathy:”

Make of it what you will but I heard GWHB connote Mr. Thomas’s decency; I didn’t hear that empathy would be a criteria in decision making.

Feelings, Nothing More Than Feelings

May 29, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Featured Articles, History, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, Presidents, Supreme Court, U.S. History, Vice President Biden | 1 Comment 

Empathy is all the rage these days. It’s the hot new word that some would like to become the transcendent Zeitgeist. It’s all about being inside the skin of others, feeling their pain, and rendering judgment accordingly. The nation is a big emergency room, people are bleeding, limbs are falling off, as are the wheels of society, this is no time for textbook medicine, no time for looking at the flight instruments – let your gut guide you.

Crash and burn.

Empathy, by definition, can only be felt and expressed by someone with a common life database. It’s very different from sympathy. While some would suggest that the best – and to them, the only – way to really bring about a vision of social justice, is for those making vital decisions and pronouncements to be marinated in empathy, history tells us that great strides have been made without it.

It was just regular old, vanilla, garden-variety, sympathy that worked for Lincoln. He couldn’t empathize with slaves, because he never had to live that way. Sympathy feels for the plight of another, but not necessarily by having “been there.”

As a minister, for years I could sympathize and show compassion to congregants who had lost a parent, but until I lost my mother in 2002, I really couldn’t empathize. Before her death, I could say: “I am so sorry for your loss, I want to do my best to provide comfort to you.” Since her passing it is now: “I am so sorry for your loss. I know exactly how you feel. I lost my mom a few years ago and it still hurts.”

So, should I limit my ministry expressions to cases where I actually understand stuff because I have gone through it? When I minister to someone who has experienced pain I have not known, am I somehow ill equipped?

Better – should I be in my job only because I have had the requisite experiences that make me empathetic to a wide-variety of individuals? Or is it OK to reach out, even if it is just plain old empathy-deficient and second-rate sympathy that I can offer?

To make empathy the litmus test – and that is what is happening right now, it trumps everything – is to render all else not nearly as important. But empathy is by definition a narrow focus and there is no guarantee that decisions guided predominately by it are right. What happens, for example, when the cries of those one empathizes with because of certain commonalities clash with the rights of those who don’t elicit or even deserve empathy?

What we have here is a prescription for a trend in the legal system of our nation to gain virtually unstoppable momentum en route to becoming the new national orthodoxy. And it has all been talked about before – a long time ago. Many now look back on the days of the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt’s government-by-experimentation as a golden example of what should be done now. He talked much about the Constitution of the United States being a “living” document.

That’s code. In my world – that of theology and scripture – the same thing has been used for a long time to suggest that you can’t really take a lot of the Bible literally, that it is always subject to interpretation in light of the times. But understanding historical context, intent of authors, etc., is vital.

To find out what something means; first figure out what it meant.

When you find out what something meant, and, well, the nation doesn’t like what it means today, there is one remedy – change the Constitution via amendment. This is a process designed to be ugly, messy, political, and deliberately slow – with millions of minds working on it – not just nine. To short cut that pathway is not empathy, or even sympathy; it’s pathetic.

When you go back and read the Federalist Papers, Common Sense, and other materials from our foundational era, you get the sense that those guys would have a hard time making it to the political big-time now. You see, they would probably begin a spoken thought with: “Here’s what I think” – or, “I think this.” Eyes would incessantly roll to that in our day when everyone knows you start such a sentence with: “Here’s what I feel.”

It’s about feelings, nothing more than feelings.

Speaking of that cool New Deal period, in many ways there is another ghost haunting the White House these days, beyond that of Mr. Roosevelt (who also couldn’t really empathize with the poor, but alas, he did sympathize). The spirit of “Friendly” Henry A. Wallace seems to be alive and well – too bad for America.

Wallace was Roosevelt’s second vice president, serving from 1941 to 1945, and every American should be thankful that our 32nd chief executive dumped him in favor of Harry Truman for the 1944 election. Henry was one strange guy, and had he been VP when FDR died, we would have had a real lunatic-in-chief running the store.

Try to imagine a combination of Joe Biden, Deepak Chopra, Jerry Brown, with a dash of Ralph Nader.

In 1936, while Mr. Roosevelt was running for reelection and contemplating his first new term action – to change/pack the Supreme Court – Wallace was his Secretary of Agriculture. Henry wrote a book that year about the constitution, and it was reviewed in the July 4, 1936 issue of Newsweek, with a picture of him on the cover, and the words: “Secretary Wallace Warns the Court.”

The article is very revealing and has a ripped-from-today’s-headlines feel. Frankly, Mr. Wallace was all about the empathy. Among the things the article about the-man-who-could-have-been-president said were that he insisted: “It (the court) can, by relying on one set of precedents rather than another, shut its eyes to fundamental economic and social trends. It can do this, but it will be at the cost of the faith of the people and ultimately at the cost, I fear, of the court itself.”

Wallace clearly, according to the Newsweek story, believed that “a broadly interpreted Constitution” would yield “ample room for the still-distant development” of what he loved to refer to as his “cooperative society.” His vision was for “a national commonwealth rid of competition and based on cooperative production, marketing, and consumption.”

In other words, the guy was all about an empathetic interpretation of the Constitution.

Poor Henry Wallace. He was born out of due time. Like Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas (grandfather of current Newsweek man Evan Thomas, of the now infamous “We’re All Socialists Now” cover), the dreamer who served as Vice President of the United States for four years never lived to see his fantasies go mainstream. He’d sure be having fun today.

Wallace was dumped, largely because some strange and embarrassing letters were floating around – stuff he had written to a guy named Nicholas Constantin Roerich, a self-styled Russian mystic. The correspondence was sappy and scary with thoughts like:

“My Dear Guru: The search, whether it be for the lost world of Masonry or the Holy Chalice or the potentialities or the age to come is the one supremely worthwhile in objective. All else is Karmic duty. Here is life.”

It took me a few readings of that to figure out what the guy meant, but I finally deciphered it. He was simply saying:

“It’s the empathy, stupid.”

Vrrrrroooom To All That

May 29, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Energy, Environmental issues, Lifestyle, Music, Obama administration | Leave a Comment 

Daniel Henninger’s “Wonderland” column today —”Obama vs. The Beach Boys – Daddy’s taking the muscle car culture away” — casts a gimlet eye on President Obama’s plans for America’s automobiles. And he doesn’t like what he sees. Not one bit.

When Barack Obama announced that the government will use its fist to wave onto the highways of America cars that get 39 miles to a gallon of liquefied switch grass or something, he said, “Everybody wins.”

Everybody? What country has he been living in? This marks the end of the internal combustion engine as we knew it, and it is the way Americans have defined, designed and literally driven much of the nation’s culture for as long as anyone can remember. Car culture is America’s culture.

Mr. Henninger notes that the President likes to give iPods as gifts.  So he proposes a playlist that might bring him back to his senses.

The first track would be the Beach Boys’ 1964 “Shut Down.”

The second would be their 1963 anthem “Little Deuce Coupe.”

“She’s got a competition clutch with a four on the floor, and she purrs like a kitten til the lake pipes roar.”

It’s 2016. Imagine a Brian Wilson ever thinking to write: “And she’ll have fun, fun, fun til her daddy takes her Prius away.”

At Mr. Obama’s “Everybody wins” announcement ceremony in the Rose Garden, no one knew better how much has been lost than the cowed auto chiefs arrayed behind him. CAFE, the fuel-mileage standards Congress mandated 34 years ago, gradually squeezed the size and life out of America’s cars. But something’s getting phased out here other than gas-fueled cars.

Some of the most famous celebrity converts to the politics behind this new, shrinking world of plug-ins once wrote and sang paeans to muscle cars and a more muscular culture.

The third track would be Bruce Springsteen’s 1975 hit “Born to Run.”

 ”Beyond the Palace hemi-powered drones scream down the boulevard.”

Time was Bruce Springsteen knew that “Jersey boys” mainly meant steel, chrome, rubber and auto tech. Check out the lyrics to “Pink Cadillac” (“but my love is bigger than a Honda”) or the car-crazy “Racing in the Street,” invoking Chevys with 396 Fuelie heads, Hurst speed-shifters and Camaros running “from the fire roads to the interstate.”

The fourth track would be Ronnie and the Daytonas’ 1965 hit “G.T.O.”

“Turn it on, wind it up, blow it out — GTOoooo.”

We are being offered a different world now. One designed, defined and driven by a new set of un-fun obsessions — carbon footprints, greenhouse gas and alternative energy. This large transition passes before us, barely seen, as the gray water of public policy. Hardly anyone notices how much is being changed.

To put a stop to the new sin of spending too much time out on Highway 9, we are getting the mark-up hearings this week in Washington for the Waxman-Markey climate bill. It’s 900 pages long, dripping with thousands of Mickey-Mouse rules to reorder how we live. A Senate Finance Committee document last week on the Obama health-care plan proposes “lifestyle related revenue raisers.” Lifestyles like drinking beer. This is the “taxing bad behavior” movement. They get to define what’s bad.

The fifth track would be Commander Cody’s 1972 cover of the 1955 “Hot Rod Lincoln.”

Mr. Henninger isn’t hesitate to pin his colors to the antennas of the glorious gas guzzlers that appear to be driving down the road to oblivion:

This tension over how we live arrived before the world began standing on its head over global warming. The guys in the hemi-powered drones used to mock the granola and Birkenstock crowd. Look who’s on top now.

“Everybody wins?” Not quite. What’s winning is a worldview that goes deeper than the data beneath global warming. The gasoline cars they want to turn into scrap were about a lot more than the thrill of roaring on.

The cars and their culture were a manifestation of what made the U.S. really different. The cars, like the country, were big, fast and unfettered. Their drivers were delirious with the possibility of finding something new in life. “It’s a town full of losers, and I’m pullin’ out of here to win!”

When Americans grew up, that’s just what a lot of them did — win. Now, it looks like we’re being asked to throttle down to government-approved survival. They’re even running the car companies, telling them what to build, and then they’ll pay people to buy the product. Save the planet and lose the nation’s heart.

 
Here is Mr. Henninger discussed his thoughts on the Wall Street Journal’s Digital Network.

Featured Articles — May 29, 2009

May 29, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles | Leave a Comment 

Interesting Takes From Home And Abroad:

Sotomayor: Rebut, Then Confirm By Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post
Sonia Sotomayor has a classic American story. So does Frank Ricci. Ricci is a New Haven firefighter stationed seven blocks from where Sotomayor went to law school (Yale). Raised in blue-collar Wallingford, Conn., Ricci struggled as a C and D student in public schools ill-prepared to address his serious learning disabilities. Nonetheless he persevered, becoming a junior firefighter and Connecticut’s youngest certified EMT.

The General Motors Reorganization and the Federal Government By Richard Posner, The Atlantic
It now seems certain that General Motors will declare bankruptcy on Monday, that the federal government will as part of the reorganization in bankruptcy acquire more than 50 percent of the common stock of the reorganized company, and that the government will invest perhaps $30 billion in the new company, bringing the total cost of the GM bailout to a shade under $50 billion.

Obama is a pro-engagement president with nobody to engage. By Michael Hirsh, Newsweek
Kim Jong Il has always been pretty wacky, with his bouffant hair and awkward habit of kidnapping actresses while starving his people, but at least the diminutive Dear Leader was someone you could talk with now and then. Today, with a stroke-damaged Kim apparently in eclipse and North Korea erupting out of control again, Barack Obama has a serious problem. As much as he might like to, it doesn’t look as if the president has anyone to engage with, even in North Korea’s traditional language of blackmail.

Inflating the Guantánamo Threat By Peter Bergman & Katherine Teidemann, The New York Times
ABDULLAH GHULAM RASOUL and Said Ali al-Shihri may be the two best arguments for why releasing detainees from Guantánamo Bay poses a real risk to America. Mr. Rasoul, who was transferred to Afghanistan in 2007 and then released by the Kabul government, is now the commander of operations for the Taliban in southern Afghanistan. Mr. Shihri, sent back to his native Saudi Arabia in 2007, is now a leader of Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen.

The List: How Sotomayor Sees the World By Joshua Keating, Foreign Policy
Five ways Obama’s Supreme Court nominee could change U.S. foreign policy.

Crazy Compensation and the Crisis By Alan Binder, The Wall Street Journal
We’re all paying now because skewed financial incentives led to too many big bets.

The pygmy that Dubya turned into a monster By Richard Lloyd Parry, The Times
Iraq and Afghanistan are failures of US intervention. But the North Korea crisis arose because the President refused to talk.

Abbas’s Waiting Game By Jackson Diehl, The Washington Post
True, the Palestinian president walked into his meeting with Barack Obama yesterday as the pivotal player in any Middle East peace process.

Obama must respect the choice of Lebanon’s voters By Roula Khalaf, Financial Times
Democratic experiences in the Middle East are few and far between. Where credible elections do take place they tend to produce undesirable outcomes for many in the west, as voters lean towards Islamist parties.

Don’t let Iran cross the nuclear threshold By David Harris, Christian Science Monitor
While there is a broad consensus in the West that Iran should be dissuaded from pursuing its nuclear weapons program, no clear strategy has emerged for attaining that goal.

The Sotomayor Rules By Kimberley Strassel, The Wall Street Journal
President Barack Obama has laid down his ground rules for the debate over Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. The big question now is whether Republicans agree to play by rules that neither Mr. Obama nor his party have themselves followed.

Israel and the Axis of Evil By Caroline Glick, Jerusalem Post
North Korea is half a world away from Israel. Yet the nuclear test it conducted on Monday has the Israeli defense establishment up in arms and its Iranian nemesis smiling like the Cheshire Cat. Understanding why this is the case is key to understanding the danger posed by what someone once impolitely referred to as the Axis of Evil.

Queen Elizabeth Snubbed! War Declared on France By Bruce Crumley, Time Magazine
France and England have fought each other in the 100 Years’ War, the Seven Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars and scads of less memorably named conflicts. And more recently, the French and English have treated the blood-and-tears clashes between their national rugby and soccer teams as fetishes for those battles of yore. The geysers of bile pouring forth from the London tabloids this week suggests a new chapter in Anglo-French enmity may be upon us. Call it the “Great D-Day Hissy Fit.”

Reading Material

May 28, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, Nixon Administration, U.S. History, Watergate | 3 Comments 

For many years I had a degree of respect —a minimal degree and a reluctant respect to be sure— for Richard Ben-Veniste.  This was partly because he had dated Mary Travers (although that may have merited props more than respect); and partly because, although I felt that he had participated in some of the most egregiously over-the-top leaking and extra-legal abuses of the Watergate investigations at their height, I was prepared to accept that he was —however misguided and over-zealous— at least sincere in a belief that he was pursuing some kind of objective standard of truth and justice.

Then I watched him as the Minority Counsel on the Senate Whitewater Committee.  Even allowing for what is expected of a Minority Counsel on a Committee investigating a political scandal, his conduct was so blatantly  partisan and unimaginatively hackish that even I (who, Lord knows, have not been a total stranger to partisanship and hackery) blushed for the shame he clearly didn’t feel.   This was not just a partisan; this was a bitter partisan; and, from the looks of it, not a very nice one.

Mr. Ben-Veniste has just published a memoir —The Emperor’s New Clothes: Exposing the Truth From Watergate to 9/11.   His reputation around town —which he has cultivated— as a high-powered, powerful, prickly man with a long memory and a penchant for settling scores, may explain some of the book’s early reviews, which mete out their praise in very precise measures.

In the Washington Post the excellently named Isaac Chotiner (the answer to your question is: I don’t know) writes:

do not expect much insight on how power is actually wielded in Washington. Instead, the reader is fed page after page of Ben-Veniste heaping praise on . . . Ben-Veniste. One minute he is being approached by random, grateful citizens, and the next he is telling us that he is nothing more than a humble “partisan for the truth.” A little later, he speaks of his reputation as “a streetwise kid who was not intimidated.” I think we will be the judge of that. Pretty soon Tom Daschle is calling for his help because only he — Ben-Veniste — asks the tough questions. The 9/11 Commission transcripts he reprints even note spectators applauding his courage.

Ben-Veniste has indeed done some good work during his time in Washington, but next time let’s hear about it from a more neutral observer.

And in a long, thoughtful, and foot-noted review on the DC Bar’s website, Washington legal light Leonard H. Becker doesn’t so much damn as darn with faint praise:

In Ben-Veniste’s memoir, the author comes across as the Lone Ranger of the Legal Pad, single-handedly cooking Richard Nixon’s conspiratorial goose before the Watergate grand jury; ferreting out corruption in the office of the Speaker of the House; defending a victim of government duplicity in the Abscam scandal; striving to protect Bill Clinton from impeachment-minded Republicans; and fighting the good fight, as a Democratic member of the 9/11 Commission, to defend truth and justice against the Bush administration’s ceaseless stonewalling.

 Ben-Veniste’s book, like Wagner’s music, is not as bad as it sounds. 

Regarding the chapter devoted to Watergate, Mr. Becker writes:

Ben-Veniste’s recounting of the Watergate special prosecutor’s battles with the Nixon administration contains little that the reader will not previously have encountered in the literature. One exception is Ben-Veniste’s claim that he alone came up with the idea that the grand jury should designate Nixon as an “unindicted co-conspirator,” but without naming Nixon in the indictment, instead authorizing the special prosecutor to divulge the designation at an appropriate future interval, such as when the indicted defendants sought a bill of particulars. The idea, Ben-Veniste suggests, was to retrieve some measure of retribution against Nixon after Jaworski ruled out Nixon’s indictment, and to stiffen Jaworski’s wobbly spine when it came to going after a sitting president.

Naming bad guys “unindicted co- conspirators” is an accepted prosecutorial practice, codified in the U.S. Attorneys’ Manual. But the practice is disfavored because of the prejudice it works on the named individual who is deprived of a formal setting, such as a trial, in which to vindicate his reputation.  Such considerations do not detain Ben-Veniste while he claims credit for thinking up the idea of getting the grand jury’s carte blanche to label Nixon at some future time. The pertinent passage in Jaworski’s memoir is both cursory and inaccurate. The history of the Watergate special prosecutor’s office, written by its chief spokesperson, neither contradicts nor supports Ben-Veniste’s claim, but it suggests another prosecutorial motivation (also adverted to by Ben-Veniste but plainly attributable to another member of the legal staff)—to ensure that the damaging tape recordings reluctantly surrendered by the White House would be admissible in evidence against the indicted conspirators.

I can’t say that I find anything particularly untoward about a man tooting his own horn in his own book.   And if people in politics only claimed credit for the things they really did, the memoir section at Borders would be a shelf and a half at most.  But I will report further when I’ve had a chance to read Mr. Ben-Veniste’s book and form my own opinions.

 

Ed Nixon In South Carolina

May 28, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Nixon family, Nixon in the News, Obama administration, Presidents, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Last night Ed Nixon, the last survivor (and youngest) of the five brothers that included the 37th President, spoke to a meeting of the Spartanburg County (South Carolina) Republican Party about his new book, The Nixons: A Family Portrait. (The audience included 93-year-old textile magnate Roger Milliken, who played an important role in swinging the support of conservative and Southern Republicans to RN in the 1968 campaign.) Ed also spoke with the local newspaper, the Spartanburg Herald-Journal, about his memories of his older brother, and also about the current President:

“I really have high hopes. I really think the president we have now has given us one freedom. And that is, when you fill out a form that asks for race, all you have to write now is human. So, racism goes by the wayside now that we have this president in there. There’s no call for racism anymore. There will be those who try to retain it because they’ve come to depend on it. And make a living at it. But we’re humans. And we’re Americans first. Otherwise, we might as well move to Tasmania,” [Ed Nixon] said.

“I really feel that we have a great future for us in the country as our president becomes educated with real experience.

“But right now, he needs people who have experience to advise him on pitfalls that lie ahead if he goes the same direction he seems to be going.”

More About The Story The New York Times Missed

May 28, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, News media, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, UK Politics, Watergate | 3 Comments 

It’s been four days since an article by Richard Pérez-Peña in the New York Times told the story of how Robert M. Smith, a reporter in that paper’s Washington bureau, learned from FBI Acting Director L. Patrick Gray in late August of 1972 something about the larger story behind the Watergate burglary of two months before, and dutifully notified his superior, Robert Phelps. The article further explained that what seemed to be a chance for the Times to catch up to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Washington Post coverage failed to pan out because the day after notifying Phelps, Smith left the paper to begin studies at Yale Law School and subsequently became an attorney, never returning to journalism, while Phelps completely failed to put another reporter on the story and now offers no excuses, not least because, at age 89, he can hardly remember what happened.

So far the preponderance of newspaper commentary on this story has come from Britain, where many of Fleet Street’s finest profess to be completely flummoxed about how the Times could let this story slip away.

It should be pointed out, however, that it is not unknown for members of the Fourth Estate across the pond to miss a big story for reasons that might perplex an American colleague. I remember reading a tribute to the late Henry Fairlie by one of his colleagues on Fleet Street, whose name I forget. The journalist described an occasion in the early 1950s when he was covering a Labour Party conference in the company of Fairlie, who in those days was regarded by his peers as the foremost political reporter in the kingdom.

During a break in the conference’s proceedings, the two reporters repaired to a bar for refreshments. There, they spotted two men engaged in activity of a romantic sort in a dimly-lit corner. “I could almost swear that poof looks like Tom Driberg,” the reporter observed, referring to Labour’s leading gray eminence of the period, who was widely rumored to be homosexual at a time when to act upon such a preference was a felony in the UK.

“You would be well justified in such an oath,” said Fairlie in his slightly formal manner, “because that is Tom Driberg.”

The reporter, in his 1990 tribute, remarked that had he seen Driberg up to such activity in, say, a remote hallway of the hotel where the conference was being held, he would not have hesitated to report a story that would have shaken Labour’s establishment to its very foundations. But since he and Fairlie were off-duty for the moment, they simply sat and wondered at the indiscretion of Driberg’s actions, and so the politician’s proclivities went unreported. (It’s worth mentioning that next month Yale University Press will publish Bite The Hand That Feeds You, an anthology of Fairlie’s essays for British and American publications, edited by Jeremy McCarter.)

One thing worth mentioning about the Times article is that the paper was not only scooped on Watergate as it describes, but that the Times was scooped - twice – on reporting being scooped.

In a comment appended to Michael Calderone’s post on this subject at Politico.com, NPR ombudsperson Alicia C. Shepard, author of Woodward and Bernstein: Life In The Shadow of Watergate, observes that in her book, published in November 2006, she referred to Robert Smith’s learning about Donald Segretti’s involvement in Watergate and Smith’s telling the Times about this in August 1972 – and although the book was rather widely reviewed, the passage about Smith seems to have escaped everyone’s notice at the time. Shepard states that she did not learn about this from Robert Phelps, but she does not specify who told her. My guess is that she might have heardthe story from Smith himself.

And in a post at the Sidney Hillman Foundation’s site, Charles Kaiser, formerly of the Times, Newsweek, and the Wall Street Journal, reports that some time back, after learning that Phelps would write about the Watergate story that got away in his memoirs, Smith wrote an op-ed telling his side of the story, and submitted it to the Times. There was no reply to his submission and Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor of the Times, says that the paper has no record of the op-ed’s having been received.

So Smith submitted his account instead to the American Journalism Review, which scheduled the piece for its June-July issue but this week posted it on its website in the wake of Pérez-Peña’s article.

What Smith has to say is rather interesting. While he was at Yale Law, he says he read the Times every morning during that fall semester of 1972, looking for anything indicating that the paper’s Washington reporters were following up on his lead. He found nothing. (Indeed, the Times didn’t start moving on Watergate until Seymour Hersh took it up in January 1973, just when James McCord wrote his much-publicized letter to Judge John Sirica.)

Smith also has this very interesting story to tell:

At some point, an editor at the Times called and asked me to come back to the paper. I thought it over for a couple of days, and decided not to. In my mind, it was the story of the century versus the intellectual experience of my lifetime. And I had already given a major breakthrough on the story to the Times.

But I did offer to make a telephone call. I called Pat Gray.

He did not call back.

This seems to suggest that the editor was calling Smith to ask that he get back to work on the Watergate story. But when did this happen – before or after January 1973? And who was the editor?

Smith’s comment about “the story of the century vs. the intellectual experience of my lifetime” is noteworthy. In the fall of 1972, investigate reporting had little of the prestige it had as soon as a year later, after Woodward and Bernstein’s book All The President’s Men was published, not to mention its allure after the ATPM film was released in 1976. So Smith’s decision, in the context of the time, is not quite as inexplicable as it probably appears to the thousands who went to journalism school in the wake of “Woodstein’s” rise to fame (or to just about any British reporter, who takes it for granted that he or she is immeasurably the superior of almost any barrister or solicitor in the land).

And it’s worthwhile to speculate what would happen if a young reporter, a day away from entering law school, came across a colossal story like Watergate now. Would the reporter drop academic plans just like that? Or would he and she start thinking about just how long and how well-paying a career in journalism, in today’s America, would be, compared to a career in the law, and do what Smith did – go off to the lawbooks and more or less forget about the scoop?

TMI

May 28, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Book Review, Presidents, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

Over at Salon today Carina Chocano writes about “the magical moneymaking properties of humiliating self-exposure.”  Her cases in point are last night’s ratings grabber season opener of John & Kate Plus 8, and Elizabeth Edwards’ recent, unfortunate, Resilience.

Until recently, standard protocol for handling a humiliating personal betrayal in public was to tough it out. This rule applied mainly to public figures who had no choice but to handle such challenges with all eyes on them, like political wives, who were required to stand by their men in purse-lipped silence, hands folded, eyes cast hellward, or celebrities, who were obliged to pretend to work through their painful feelings in public while carefully drawing the line at revealing anything that might jeopardize future career prospects. In both cases, the same general rule held true: The more painful the humiliation, the greater the need to maintain dignity by refusing to stoop to the humiliator’s level.

But those days are over. Thanks to the increasingly public nature of our lives, the ranks of people who might find themselves having to deal with private humiliations in public have now expanded to include basically everybody. And a surprising number of people recently have trumpeted their private grievances against the bastards who done them wrong, using whatever means are readily available to them.

Which set me thinking about the recent New York Times story by Motoko Rich regarding Mrs. Mimi Beardsley Alford’s budding literary career.  The headline was to the point: “Paramour of Kennedy is Writing a Book.”

Mimi Beardsley Alford, a retired New York church administrator who had an affair with John F. Kennedy while she was an intern in the White House, is breaking a silence of more than 40 years to tell her story in a memoir to be published by Random House. 

In fact, Mrs. Alford’s story is already a twice and thrice told tale — but one from which only others, to date, had profited.  Her long-kept secret first surfaced in Robert Dallek’s 2003 Kennedy biography An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963.  The Times’ story explained:

Ms. Alford’s secret was initially divulged six years ago when a biography of Kennedy was published with portions from a 1964 oral history that described the president’s 18-month sexual affair with a young intern named Mimi Beardsley. The Daily News tracked her down and discovered that she was Marion Fahnestock, who was divorced, working for the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church and living in Manhattan. At the time, she gave a short statement confirming that she was “involved in a sexual relationship” with Kennedy from June 1962 to November 1963.

When the definitive Dallek tome appeared, the floodgates of memory opened, and TIME’s presidential maven Hugh Sidey reminisced in his magisterial (and much-missed) Sideyan way  (and under the nicely racy headline “All the Way with JFK“):

Yes, America, there was a Mimi, a teenage cuddle for President John Kennedy back in 1962 and ‘63. But there was also a Pam, a Priscilla, a Jill (actually, two of them), a Janet, a Kim, a Mary and a Diana I can think of offhand.

The Kennedy sex industry will march on. Sharing the sheets with J.F.K. seems to have become a badge of honor — and perhaps a route to publishing riches. But beware of boasting or true confessions: I’ve never met anybody who was a witness in the bedroom. It is all circumstantial — or was, until Judith Exner, the Mob moll who wrote it down and changed everything.

Mimi Beardsley rings a bell for all of us creaky White House journalists, but it is easy to forget one or more of the young nymphs. They were once described by an astounded British visitor as being like new tennis balls with the fuzz still on them.

Mimi was another slender, pretty, pleasant young thing wandering in the White House corridors, looking for a desk and something to do that did not require shorthand or typing or any other known secretarial skill. How a senior at Miss Porter’s School captivated a swinging and sophisticated President is a mystery not yet solved — or perhaps it is. J.F.K. was captivated pretty easily. Testimony by some of Kennedy’s girls is that he was a lousy and hurried lover, but who cared when it was the leader of the free world, with all the trappings of power like Air Force One and the Lincoln Bedroom?

So Mimi now is Marion Fahnestock, mother of two, grandmother of four, and a church lady with the tony Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City. Actually, many of Kennedy’s girls have done well: wives, mothers, grandmothers, authors, painters, philanthropists, social workers, and there is even one who became a noted Hollywood impresario.

At first, the old White House reporters had a hard time recalling Mimi. But at a monthly luncheon last week, we pieced together sightings of her slipping out of Air Force One and confirmed Gamarekian’s account of the top of a female head being seen in one of the limousines in Kennedy’s motorcade at the 1962 Bermuda summit with British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. When staff and reporters looked in, Mimi was sitting on the floor of the car like a child playing hide-and-seek.

Some gossip out of an earlier summit in Nassau was that Kennedy told Macmillan he had to have sex once a day or he would get a headache. This story has been largely discounted, but now it has new currency. The friends and admirers of Kennedy are disappointed once again. The steady procession of scandal is nibbling away at his credibility as a leader. The excess, the recklessness of his actions stuns almost everyone. Old gossip gets new legs, like the story of the ravishing Indian journalist spotted by Kennedy in the Rose Garden and promptly invited to dinner at the White House. Or the one about a friend’s alluring wife, whom he propositioned at a reception. When she said, “I’m married,” he replied, “So am I. What of it?”

Back then, of course, there were no tabloid-TV confessionals or presidential tapes or paparazzi pictures, just the mysterious comings and goings in and around the White House. So what did a reporter report? Well, we had the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall, the space race, the Cuban missile crisis and Bull Connor in Birmingham, Ala . Never saw one of the girls in the Cabinet Room interfering with the President on how to handle Vietnam. In that pre-Geraldo world, the Mimis were a nonstory.

And yet I suspect Kennedy was living on borrowed time. The media were beginning to change; their fascination with the young President and his family was intensifying daily. Had he lived into a second term, there was a good chance that one of the numberless and heedless stories of sexual indulgence would have broken over his head, embarrassing him and his family, perhaps crippling his presidency. In that case, Mimi might have got into the history books a lot sooner.

Things did indeed change, and with the kind of vengeance that only the taste of a commercial profit can inspire.  

The “JFK as horndog” catalog became a growth industry that now includes far less serious works than Seymour Hersh’s harsh The Dark Side of Camelot and Nigel Hamilton’s breathless JFK: Reckless Youth.  The serious biographers —Dallek, Reeves— now take these particular proclivities into both account and stride.

The story is already known.  There is a surfeit of information.   And we already have Mrs. Alford’s oral history.  

So do we need a new memoir?

I vote no.  There is such a thing as too much information — especially when you already have enough.

I don’t mean to be callous or flippant.  Ms. Beardsley, however alert and compliant, was a victim of abuse.  And there is no reason not to believe that the effects of keeping the secret were any less traumatic than the circumstances of its unexpected revelation and tabloid exploitation.

But then was then and now is now and, besides, the interests of history have already been served.  

Over the last couple of decades, what began as a healthy airing of cupboards spilled over into a sordid displaying of dirty laundry.  And in 2009 we’re awash in a degraded and debauched culture of conspicuous exhibition — one in which Mrs. Alford, whatever her motives, will, willy nilly, be subsumed. She will become an object of crass exploitation and prurient interest, and the better she gets at it (the promotion, not the prurience) the more unhappy I suspect she will become.  (Her coy working title —Once Upon A Secret—with its attempt to combine a Camelot harkback with an Age of Oprah hook, will be no help, and needs rethinking in any case.)

Back at Salon, Ms. Chocano has a possible explanation for the phenomenon:

“Self-righteousness makes people feel superior,” says Pauline Wallin, a psychologist in Camp Hill, Pa., and the author of the book Taming Your Inner Brat: A Guide to Transforming Self-Defeating Behavior. “People always find a logical reason for what they want to do — like, that company fired me, the world needs to know what they’re really like. We decide emotionally and justify rationally. We decide first, justify later.” In other words, there’s nothing like getting screwed over to bring out the smugness and moral superiority in everybody. And, these days, who isn’t getting screwed over? The fact that we’re all just an angry e-mail, late-night status update, drunken text message or hormonal tweet away from more disclosure (self- and otherwise) only adds to the already considerable anxieties of the age. Technology doesn’t cause lack of impulse control, it just creates a nice, dark, moist and warm environment in which it can thrive.

It’s possible, if improbable, that there could be something healthy in the impulse to take ownership of one’s own humiliation and cash it in for attention and money, if not sympathy. Maybe it’s a sign of idealism, in an endearing belief in the goodness in people and the brotherhood of man that makes people trot out their lowest moments like circus ponies. Or maybe it’s just the result of a long, slow process of indoctrination. As long as there have been formulaic Hollywood movies, there have been scenes in which the bad guy gets his very public comeuppance.

Reading Material

May 28, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Book Review, Presidents, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

UC Davis history professor Ari Kelman has written a long and interesting review article for the latest TLS, surveying four recent books about Abraham Lincoln.

He makes a particularly compelling case for Looking for Lincoln: The making of an American icon, by the documentary-writing-producing team of Kunhardts (Peter B. III, Peter W., and Peter W. Jr.), who know their way around a story and how to tell it.  Looking for Lincoln began life as a PBS documentary broadcast on the eve of the sixteenth president’s bicentenary last month.  The book is actually a companion to the DVD.

The story of Lincoln’s murder, though frequently retold, feels like a new wound here. The impact stems from a formula the Kunhardts employ throughout their book. They begin chapters by recounting, with only light analytical interventions, a representative event from the years after the assassination, moments in which key memories of Lincoln took root in the culture. They then include brief excerpts from eyewitnesses, including, in the book’s opening chapter, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton’s bloodless statement: “The pistol ball entered the back of the President’s head and penetrated nearly through the head. The wound is mortal”. So it was. In this way, the Kunhardts allow history’s actors, famous, infamous, anonymous, to speak for themselves. Finally, an extraordinary array of images – drawings, newspaper clippings, editorial cartoons, paintings, photographs – render what might otherwise have been an episodic history into something organic. A grainy photo of the room in which Lincoln died, for example, provides the first chapter’s motif. A bloodstained pillow, easy to miss at first glance, transforms an otherwise innocuous tableau of rumpled covers, a framed landscape print hanging over a spindle bed, and an empty chair, into one of history’s most notorious death scenes.

In the aftermath of the assassination, the Kunhardts travel on to Easter Sunday, 1865, when Northern preachers began comparing Lincoln to Christ; to New York City, that same year, when a young boy named Teddy Roosevelt, who later modelled his politics on Lincoln’s, watched the funeral train; to the studios of artists and sculptors, whose works etched Lincoln’s image – the deeply lined face, the rangy body with absurdly long limbs, and of course the iconic top hat – into the national imagination; to the Lincoln centennial in 1909, celebrated in both North and South, sections reunited by a common desire to get back to the business of doing business; to the parlours of authors who published Lincoln biographies that still inform our judgements; to the start of construction on both the Lincoln memorial in Washington, DC and the Mount Rushmore monument in South Dakota’s Black Hills; and finally, in 1923, to the Library of Congress, where Robert Lincoln, who until then had jealously guarded his father’s reputation, turned his papers over to the American people for posterity.

With these cases and others, the Kunhardts demonstrate the futility of separating history and memory where Lincoln is concerned.

One of the sixteenth president’s top hats dominates the cover of the Kunhardts’ Looking for Lincoln.  The PBS documentary has an excellent and interactive website on which you can watch the entire show.

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