Gvosdev: President Obama Has No Russia Game

September 24, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Iran, Russia, The National Interest | Leave a Comment 

The National Interest’s Nicholas Gvosdev argues that President Obama doesn’t have a coherent diplomatic strategy with Russia vis-à-vis Iran’s nuclear program. In other words, he made a big concession and is now hoping for the best:

What we’ve gotten so far from the Kremlin is not substantive help over Iran in return, but a Russian commitment that Iskander short-range missiles will now not be deployed in Kaliningrad as a response. So Moscow can argue two things: 1) the Iranian threat isn’t that bad after all, if the United States is canceling a program that before was seen as so urgent for the defense of Europe and the West, and 2) Russia has already responded, trading one missile deployment for another.

And if Russia does not intensify pressure on Iran, then what? The Obama team re-activates the BMD program in eastern Europe—after admitting that it doesn’t think that the technology in hand can meet the threat?

This could have all been avoided—and handled much better—if there were clear organizing principles in terms of how to prioritize the threat posed by Iran, and consistent, reliable threat assessments that would enable Washington to firmly and decisively put the matter to its friends and partners. But there are not. Thus, when the president says at the United Nations that there should be “new coalitions that bridge old divides” in tackling issues like the proliferation of nuclear weapons to states like Iran, there is no mechanism in place to build them. Neither is there a better understanding of what trade-offs Washington would be prepared to make with Russia to ensure full Russian participation in and compliance with the needs of such a coalition. The BMD system was cancelled on the lack of its own merits—and Moscow knows this. To try and then get concessions from Russia on Iran in the absence of both a clear negotiating framework and without a sense of the costs and benefits involved seems another example of “U.S. officials hoping for the best.”

Featured Articles — September 24, 2009

September 24, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles | 2 Comments 

Interesting Takes From Home And Abroad:

The President Risks Getting Stale By Karl Rove, The Wall Street Journal
Continuous TV appearances can’t rescue a bad argument.

ACORN fights back By Jake Sherman, Politico
A week after undercover videotapes made it the butt of a national joke, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now is launching a three-pronged effort to rebuild its reputation and try to hold on to the millions of dollars in funding it gets each year from the federal government.

Why we can’t go small in Afghanistan By Bruce Riedel and Michael O’Hanlon, USA Today
A narrow counterterrorism mission sounds like a win-win. One problem: It won’t work.

Two Cheers for Andrew Breitbart By Jack Shafer, Slate
Sometimes it takes an outsider to show the press corps the way.

We can’t decide Iran’s struggle. But we can avoid backing the wrong side By Timothy Garton Ash, The Guardian
Iranians will choose their own fate, but the west must not abandon the reformers for the sake of an elusive nuclear deal.

Lots of People Love Obama, But Does Anyone in the World Really Fear Him? By Greg Sheridan, The Australian
It may seem rather unkind to express some serious doubts about US President Barack Obama just now. He is wowing the UN with talk of nuclear disarmament. He is mesmerising the Group of 20 with talk of global recovery. He is leading a policy review that talks of winning in Afghanistan and he will not send more troops in response to the request of the US military commander in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, without deeper talks.

Obama the un-Bush woos the UN By Michael Tomasky, The Guardian
An admirable and bold speech to the UN general assembly – but Obama had the political capital to go much further.

UN report a victory for terror By Michael Oren, Boston Globe
CONSIDER THIS scenario. In response to the atrocities of 9/11, the United States invades Afghanistan and battles non-uniformed Taliban terrorists who fight within densely populated areas.

The Partisan Industrial Complex By David Paul Kuhn, RealClearPolitics
President Obama’s five Sunday television interviews included a telling thread. “The media encourages some of the outliers in behavior, because, let’s face it, the easiest way to get on television right now is to be really rude,” Obama said on ABC’s “This Week,” repeating himself on other networks.

9.23.52

September 23, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, History, Media, News media, Pat Nixon, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

Taking matters into his own hands:  On 23 September 1952, RN went on radio and TV to answer charges of financial impropriety.   The phenomenal success of his speech assured Ike’s victory and put RN’s bench mark on the emerging medium of television.

Today is the fifty-seventh anniversary of the speech that changed the course of RN’s life and of politics as practiced in America.

It was also the first of the remarkable comebacks from defeat or adversity that marked his long career.

Garry Wills described the spectacular risk RN took, and the stunning success he achieved:

Nixon first demonstrated the political uses and impact of television. In one half hour Nixon converted himself from a liability, breathing his last, to one of the few people who could add to Eisenhower’s preternatural appeal — who could gild the lilly. For the first time, people saw a living political drama on their TV sets — a man fighting for his whole career and future — and they judged him under that strain. It was an even greater achievement than it seemed. He had only a short time to prepare for it. The show, forced on him [by Eisenhower's advisers], was meant as a form of political euthanasia. He came into the studio still reeling from distractions and new demoralizing blows….[A]t the time he went onto the TV screen in 1952, he was hunted and alone.

It had all started several days earlier.  On 14 September 1952,  just as RN was launching his campaign as Ike’s VP  with a whistlestop train trip aboard the Nixon Special, up the coast from Pomona to Seattle.  Three thousand miles across the continent the New York Post ran a headline: Secret Nixon Fund!  Secret Rich Men’s Trust Fund Keeps Nixon in Style Far Beyond His Salary.

Under Dorothy Schiff’s ownership and Jimmy Wechsler’s ownership, the Post in those days was a proudly-identified left-wing tabloid.   The story was completely bogus, and the rap was totally bum.  Far from being secret, the fund had been solicited by letters to hundreds of supporters throughout California, individual contributions had been limited to $500, and the account was administered by a trustee and was regularly audited.

But the reporters smelled blood in the water, and the story soon overwhelmed all campaign coverage.

Not the least of the many ironies of the Fund Crisis was that the Democratic presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson, did have an unreported secret slush fund of campaign contributions that he had used for purely personal expenses.

It was finally decided that RN should take his case directly to the American people with a speech to be broadcast both on the radio and the new medium of television.  Depending on the popular reaction to the speech, he would either remain on the ticket or voluntarily withdraw.

The approach he took to this situation was as inspired as it was unprecedented.  Instead of the self-serving boilerplate blather usually produced in such situations, he decided to take his national audience on a guided tour of his net worth.  In addition to proving that he clearly met Ike’s ethical standard of being “clean as a hen’s tooth,”  the speech showed that he was just a regular guy, like most of his viewers.

While Adlai Stevenson’s ‘52 campaign slogan was “Let’s talk sense to the American people,” his rhetoric was often elegant bordering on highfalutin.  But RN’s plain speech put everything right out front right up front:

I come before you tonight as a candidate for the Vice Presidency and as a man whose honesty and — and integrity has been questioned.

Now, the usual political thing to do when charges are made against you is to either ignore them or to deny them without giving details. I believe we’ve had enough of that in the United States, particularly with the present Administration in Washington, D.C.  To me the office of the Vice Presidency of the United States is a great office, and I feel that the people have got to have confidence in the integrity of the men who run for that office and who might obtain it.

I have a theory, too, that the best and only answer to a smear or to an honest misunderstanding of the facts is to tell the truth. And that’s why I’m here tonight. I want to tell you my side of the case. I’m sure that you have read the charge, and you’ve heard it, that I, Senator Nixon, took 18,000 dollars from a group of my supporters.

Nothing like this had ever been seen or heard before.  The effect was immediate and electric.

From the moment RN’s image faded off the screen, the Checkers Speech —as it immediately became known— was controversial in direct proportion to its success;  in other words, off the charts.

Nixon supporters reveled in the tsunami of national warmth and support for this honest and plainspoken young man who had, by risking all, turned the tables on his foes.  And his foes, not surprisingly, carped that it had been mawkish and unseemly and embarrassing.

RN preferred to talk about the “Fund Crisis” — because the speech, important as it was, was only part of a greater and no less significant story of a badly wronged man fighting back and coming out on top.  But although the Fund Speech was RN’s preferred term of art, that tale continues to wag the dog, and it has gone down in history as the Checkers Speech.

The drama of those September days has been described by many authors — including RN himself, who made it the second of his Six Crises.   More than four decades later, Six Crises presents incomparably the most vivid and dramatic account, and it still makes exciting reading.   In the first volume of his Nixon trilogy, Stephen Ambrose surveys a lot of the press coverage.  And Conrad Black’s recent magisterial biography supplies both drama and analysis:

Abandoned by everyone except his wife, his mother, [political adviser Murray] Chotiner, [RNC Chairman Arthur] Summerfield, [RNC public relations director Robert] Humphreys, and a few others, put right to the wall and verging on nervous and physical exhaustion, Nixon had staged a political version of MacArthur’s Inchon landing.  He had destroyed his enemies, given the vice presidency a political significance it had never had in 164 years of the history of the office, sacked his judge and the kangaroo court around him and replaced them with his friends in the National Committee, while impeccably restating the greatness of Eisenhower.  Dwight D. Eisenhower was, by most measurements, a great man, but his greatness was not in evidence on this occasion, and that was not the description of him uppermost in Nixon’s thoughts at this time.

The role played by PN throughout the Fund Crisis was pivotal and inspirational.   And it wasn’t easy for her, as Julie Nixon Eisenhower revealed in her biography of her mother; and as RN described in the interviews I conducted with him in 1983:

The homely and memorable example of the cocker spaniel has come to dominate —and characterize— thinking about the speech.  In fact, aside from RN’s heartfelt peroration and the central core of reporting his net worth, the speech was an example of extremely sophisticated and hard hitting political rhetoric.  As RN wrote in RN, even  the pooch had a political pedigree:

On the plane [a night flight from Portland to LA where the speech would be delivered], I took some postcards from the pocket of the seat in front of me and began to put down some thoughts about what I might say.

I remembered the Truman scandal concerning a $9,000 ink coat given to a White House secretary, and I made a note that Pat had no mink — just a cloth coat.  I thought of DNC CHairman Mitchell’s snide comment that people who cannot afford to hold an office should not run for it, and I made a note to check out a quotation from Lincoln to the effect that God must have loved the common people because he made so many of them.  I also thought about the stunning success FDR had in his speech during the 1944 campaign, when he had ridiculed his critics by saying they were even attacking his little dog Fala, and I knew it would infuriate critics if I could turn this particular table on them.

“It isn’t easy to bare your life”:  When RN arrived in LA, he refined his thoughts for the speech on a yellow pad.

But enough exposition — here is the speech itself.  After all this time, and despite the outdated and stilted production values of the hastily mounted production  (the opening and closing titles were RN’s Senate calling card)  its human honesty and emotional intensity can still pack a punch.  Imagine what it must have been like when there had never been anything like it.

The complete text of the speech and an mp3 audio will be found here.

Every Dog Has Her Day — And Checkers’ Was 23 September 1952

In my 1983 interviews, I asked RN if he had ever played a practical joke on anyone.  He thought for a moment and replied:

Yes. Oh, I remember, for example, the — the Gridiron speech that I made in 1953.

This was, in effect, similar to a practical joke. That was after I had made what was called the Checkers speech in the fund controversy.  And so, the Gridiron had a very rough skit on me about Checkers, and I knew that it was going to be rough. And I had learned it in advance, thanks to them.

[Political columnist and later best selling novelist] Fletcher Knebel came on set.  He was dressed as a dog, and he cried, and so forth and so on.

And so what I did was to get the real Checkers, our Checkers, and I arranged to have that dog brought to the — backstage in the Statler where the Gridiron was held, and when I made my speech, I started out in a way that really scared my supporters to death.

I remember [newspaper publisher John S. Knight] Jack Knight, who was a great supporter of mine at that point, was just sitting there saying, “He mustn’t do it. He mustn’t do it.” — because I started out and I said, in a very serious way, “I know that everybody is supposed to take whatever barbs are thrown at the Gridiron dinner in good form”, and so forth and so on, “and not respond. But this is one time you’ve gone too far.  Fun is fun, particularly when that is directed against a lady.  And now I want you to see the real Checkers.”

And then Knebel came out holding Checkers.  Checkers, of course, was a female. Well, it brought the house down, and my supporters thought,  ”Well, he’s not as serious as we thought.”

The Checkers Effect

September 23, 2009 by David Emig | Filed Under American Politics, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

Beginning of Fund Speech

I come before you tonight as a candidate for the Vice Presidency and as a man whose honesty and — and integrity has been questioned.

—Richard Nixon

September 23, 1952

We all know that Richard Nixon is one of the most complex and important figures of 20^th Century American history.  To understand his time; you must first consider the events of the Fund Crisis and the resulting speech that RN made to a national audience fifty seven years ago tonight.  It was the real, somewhat impromptu introduction of Richard Nixon to a national audience of 60 million, the largest audience up to that time.  Those days in 1952 created the public’s prejudice towards RN, and even Nixon’s prejudice towards politics itself.

The fund crisis would also have long term consequences for Nixon’s career.  One can see the seeds of it later appearing in the 1962 final press conference and the siege mentality that dominated his presidency.

On September 18, 1952, “Secret Nixon Fund!” was the front page headline in the New York Post.  It was recognized as a partisan paper of the time.  The revelation of Nixon’s fund was probably made by a supporter of Earl Warren.  (See Newton, Jim, “Justice for All: Earl Warren and The Nation He Made,” (2006) p. 257.) {Warren was governor of California, the Vice Presidential nominee in 1948, and a rival for the VP nomination in 1952.  In fact, many advisers wanted Warren to be the VP nominee — after of course Nixon stepped aside.} It was one that almost ended his career before it started.

It was about a fund that took care of some of Nixon’s expenses that were political in nature, and ones that couldn’t be covered by a senator’s salary.  Originally it was created in anticipation of a 1956 re-election run for the Senate.  (See Morris, Roger, “Richard Nixon: The Rise of the American Politician”, (1990) p. 634.) Opponents would call it a ‘slush’ fund.  However in the aftermath of the Fund Crisis, it was discovered that the Democratic nominee for President, Adlai Stevenson had a ‘slush’ fund ten times the size of Nixon’s.

But Nixon’s was the first fund that was revealed.  Many top party leaders and Eisenhower advisers wanted the junior senator from California to withdraw from the Vice Presidential nomination.  Even the reporters on the ‘Nixon Special’ train almost unanimously (40-2) thought Nixon should leave the ticket.  (See Wicker, Tom, “One of Us,” (1991) p. 88.) However, RN decided on a unique approach.  He would take his case directly to the American people in a televised address to the nation.

The speech took place at the El Capitan in Los Angeles.  It was a complete explanation of his finances, that left nothing to hide.  After Nixon pleaded with his audience “to wire or write the Republican party” — he thought that he failed.  Yet, the positive response to the speech was overwhelming for Nixon.  For the first in many times, Nixon survived after being counted out.

The Fund Crisis and the speech would transform his career; and how Nixon was thought of in the country.  While the Hiss case five years earlier might have started it, the fund crisis and speech polarized and cemented opinions about Nixon.  It would garner lifelong friends and enemies as well.

The Checkers speech did this the most.  Supporters of Nixon’s began to see him as an everyman, a common person with the same financial problems as everyone else, with a populist philosophy.  According to Herbert Parmet, to these supporters Nixon “was a figure from a Frank Capra movie, a “Mr. Smith” who had gone to Washington and found himself contending with all the problems that the Mr. Smiths of America could recognize.”  (See Parmet, Herbert, “Richard Nixon and his America,” (1990) p. 246.)

On the other hand, the critics of Nixon would point to the speech as the first example of Nixon’s manipulative politics, and questionable character. Walter Lippmann described the speech “a disturbing experience…with all the magnification of modern electronics, simply mob law.”  (See Morris, p. 854.) To these observers, Nixon would always have a political target on his back, and questions about character.

The positive reaction to the speech suggested to RN that he could go over the heads of the print and other media.  He could use the new medium of television to talk directly to the American electorate.  In the future, RN would have no use of the press, in spite of the favorable coverage given to Nixon in his campaigns for Congress in 1946-1950.  RN would be one of the first national leaders to use television in its infancy.  Years later, in the debates of 1960, Nixon would see the negative impact of television as well, since most people though Nixon won the first debate on the radio.

It also forever altered his relationship with President Eisenhower.  RN would always resent Ike for allowing him to twist in the wind.  Relations with the Eisenhower staff started on the wrong foot and stayed there, since many, including close advisers Sherman Adams and Thomas Dewey preferred Nixon’s withdrawal from the ticket.

For his part, Eisenhower didn’t appreciate his young running mate’s call for full financial disclosure during the speech.  The subtle schism only affected the administration behind the scenes.  It would set the stage for Eisenhower’s attempt at nudging RN off the ticket in 1956, and his lukewarm support of RNs presidential bid in 1960.

The events of this night 57 years ago would be a bitter learning curve for the young nominee.  RN was surprised and embittered with the number of friends who would abandon him.  In the words of Jonathan Aitken: “What really hurt them was the public questions of the financial integrity that had been the cornerstone of their lives.”  (See Aitken, Jonathan, “Nixon: A Life”, (1992) p. 221.) In his Memoirs, Nixon said that he learned that “In politics most people are your friends only as long as you can do something for them or something to them.” (See, Nixon, “RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, (1978) p. 110) Nixon would recount the lessons of the Fund Crisis for the rest of his career, and make the Fund speech required reading for his speech writers and staff. (See Safire, William, Safire’s Political Dictionary, (2008), pp. 113–15.)

For his wife, the reaction to the Fund Crisis would be starker.  While Mrs. Nixon was very critical of revealing private details of their lives, her encouragement of Nixon minutes before the speech would be decisive.  Still the experience scarred her for the rest of her life.  It was one matter that Pat Nixon wouldn’t talk about, the one person that RN didn’t remind about the anniversary of the speech.  (See Eisenhower, Julie Nixon, “Pat Nixon: The Untold Story,” (1986), p. 126.) Nixon would write in his memoirs that those difficult days would make his wife “dream of the day I would leave it behind.”  (See Nixon, p. 108.)

Featured Articles — September 23, 2009

September 23, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles | Leave a Comment 

Interesting Takes From Home And Abroad:

The UN loves Barack Obama because he is weak By Nile Gardiner, Daily Telegraph
It is not hard to see why a standing ovation awaits Barack Obama when he addresses the United Nations General Assembly today, writes Nile Gardiner.

Obama to usher in new age of co-operation with UN By Ewen MacAskill, Guardian
US cannot wall itself off, or solve world’s problems alone, president will tell assembly.

Democrat lead over GOP is smallest in five years; doubts about Obama continue to grow By Byron York, The Washington Examiner
The new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll asked respondents whether they would prefer to see next year’s elections result in a Congress controlled by Democrats or a Congress controlled by Republicans.

Obama and the Politics of Concession By Mark Helprin, The Wall Street Journal
Iran and Russia put Obama to the test last week, and he blinked twice.

McChrystal to Obama: More Troops Or I Quit! By Dan McLaughlin, The New Ledger
If you are old enough to remember the George W. Bush Administration and the 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns, you will recall that a favorite theme of critics of Bush’s war management was that Bush hadn’t listened to Army brass asking for more troops in Iraq and/or Afghanistan. In particular, the Democrats practically made a secular saint of General Eric Shinseki, who supposedly was fired for delivering this message.

Cracks in Iran’s Clique By Tom Friedman, The New York Times
For the first time since Iran began enriching uranium that could be used in a nuclear weapon, we have a glimmer of hope for a diplomatic solution to this problem — as long as we are not too diplomatic, as long as the Iranian regime is made to understand that biting economic sanctions are an absolute certainty and military force by Israel is a live possibility.

Woodward And Bernstein As O’Keefe And Giles

September 22, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under New Media, Nixon Administration, Richard Nixon | 1 Comment 

The scandalous videos depicting ACORN (Association of Community Organizers For Reform Now) employees recently revealed by young undercover journalists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles hardly struck a cord with the left wing media.

In fact, they unabashedly ignored it. But such is the fractured political landscape of our times. Or possibly the past 40 years.

Just to recap, O’Keefe, 25, acting as a pimp and Giles, 20, as a prostitute solicited ACORN offices for advice on running a brothel — involving among other things the smuggling of children — and tax evasion. O’Keefe said he wanted to use the money to fund a political campaign, the ACORN employees depicted, willingly — and often enthusiastically — offered their services.

Conservative new media ace and Drudge friend, Andrew Breitbart, used his star power to promote the videos, coinciding with the launch of his biggovernment.com, a sequel to his hugely successful Big Hollywood blog.

Fox News, and its conservative commentators Glen Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity used their large audiences to magnify the scope of the story prompting Republicans in the House and the Senate to slip amendments into bills that would defund the embattled grassroots organization.

Byron York of The Washington Examiner put the rapid turn of events this way:

It was an absolutely mind-blowing turn of events, a total collapse of longtime Democratic support for ACORN. Republicans had worked for years to reduce ACORN’s influence, with little success. Now, in the span of a few days, the GOP scored major victories.

At this point, just as in the Van Jones case, the left wing media shifted gears and — rather than investigate the issue further — questioned the partisan motives of the persons who uncovered the story.

Courtesy of PJM’s Ed Driscoll, The Washington Post is the latest:

O’Keefe insists that he and Giles’s work was done independently and rejects liberal suggestions that the videos were bankrolled by conservative organizations. He does, however, acknowledge receiving help and advice from a conservative columnist and Web entrepreneur.

The North Star’s Don Calabrese imagines how rival newspapers may have reacted to the reporting of two certain Washington Post journalists in the early Seventies. That is, if they did the impossible:

Post Reporters Deny Using Questionable Tactics to Entrap Nixon

The proposition seemed outlandish. Two Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, would accept information from a secret source who would only be known as “Deep Throat.” This information would be so damaging to president of the United States, it would unleash a scandal that would shake the foundations of the nation’s government to its core.

Woodward and Bernstein deny being beholden to left-wing interests, but admit taking advice in their reporting from left-wing editor Ben Bradlee. They insist that no left-wing organization bankrolled their reporting efforts.

Of course it wouldn’t have been reported this way.

Obama is their man.

RN wasn’t.

Greg Gutfeld, a writer and host of Fox News comedy hour Red Eye, takes the unscrupulous to task for this selective method of whistle-blowing:

Arthur Ferrante, 1921-2009

September 22, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Entertainment, In Memoriam, Music | Leave a Comment 

In August of last year I noted the death of Lou Teicher, who, with Art Ferrante, formed the “grand twins of the twin grands,” a duo trained at Juilliard whose instrumental renditions (often of movie themes) were a mainstay of American easy-listening stations throughout the Sixties and Seventies and earned them invitations to perform for Presidents Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan. Last Saturday, Ferrante passed away as well, at his home in the Florida Keys. Here are Ferrante and Teicher circa 1970, complete with their trademark bushy sideburns and mustaches, inimitable dinner jackets, and black-rimmed glasses, at their back-to-back pianos, performing the “Theme from Exodus.”

What Are the Odds That This Story is Fake?

September 22, 2009 by Jack Pitney | Filed Under Richard Nixon, Teddy's Bet | Leave a Comment 

Jonathan Movroydis previously noted a The Los Angeles Times story quoting an Edward Kennedy yarn about the 1960 election:

“And, believe me, I knew the odds. I was so certain of Jack’s victory that I placed a Las Vegas bet on it. My winnings could have given me enough money to buy a new car, a really fancy new car. The speedy Aston Martin DB4 had just come out of England a couple years earlier, and I really wanted one. Well, I won that bet, but I never bought the car. I made the mistake of telling dad about it, and he hit the roof … He went at me tooth and nail. I never did collect on my bet … “

This story is, as the Obama White House would say, fishy.  How could Ted Kennedy have scored so much when his brother was the odds-on favorite to win?  From a UPI story in The Los Angeles Times, October 23, 1960:  “LAS VEGAS: Oddsmakers in this desert gambling community were quoting 3-2 odds on Sen. Kennedy defeating his Republican rival Vice President Nixon in the Presidential race Nov. 8. The odds previously favored Kennedy 6-5.”

Featured Articles — September 22, 2009

September 22, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles | Leave a Comment 

Interesting Takes From Home And Abroad:

Job One By John Judis, The New Republic
The only way Obama can pull his presidency back from the brink.

Acorn Who? By John Fund, The Wall Street Journal
Obama heads for the high grass.

A D.C. whodunit: Who leaked and why? By Ben Smith, Politico
Bob Woodward’s Monday-morning exclusive on a 66-page report from Gen. Stanley McChrystal to President Barack Obama about Afghanistan policy was a rite of passage for the new administration: the first major national security leak and a sure sign that the celebrated Washington Post reporter has penetrated yet another administration.

The Underdogs By Thomas Sowell, RealClearPolitics
It is a good reflection on Americans that they tend to be on the side of the underdog. But it is often hard to tell who is in fact the underdog, or why.

Obama’s Befuddling Afghan Policy By Leslie Gelb, The Wall Street Journal
Why is the president hesitating on more troops to fight his ‘war of necessity’?

Bob Greene, Richard Nixon, Civility, And Mystique

September 21, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Healthcare, Hillary Clinton, Interviews, News media, Nixon Administration, Nixon in the News, Obama administration, Presidents, Public Opinion, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, TV News, U.S. History, Vietnam | 3 Comments 

Yesterday, Bob Greene – the veteran journalist, not Oprah’s trainer – wrote a column for CNN.com about the nation’s winter of partisan discontent. (Well, yes, it is September, but the air did get perceptively colder this morning.)

For decades, Greene’s column at the Chicago Sun-Times, then the Chicago Tribune, was syndicated across the country, and many of his two dozen books were bestsellers. Seven years ago this week, a scandalous incident from 1988 involving a female high-school reporter surfaced and resulted in Greene’s dismissal from the Tribune. Since then he has maintained a much lower profile, but from time to time he still has unexpected and fairly perceptive things to say.

Sunday’s column opens with a reference to high-school “chicken” races. As longtime readers of Greene know, the days of his adolescence in the early 1960s, and his childhood memories of the 1950s, are never far away from his mind, so the allusion to Rebel Without A Cause is not unexpected. Then he draws a comparison between teenagers frantically racing toward a collision, and the intensity of the current debate over health care and “big government.” Greene expresses the view that when compared to the feelings generated in the last few months, even the arguments surrounding the 2008 election seem to evoke a vanishing atmosphere of civility.

To prove this point, he tells of traveling the country last fall, asking various ordinary Joes (plumbers or not) and Janes whether they planned to vote for then-Senator Barack Obama or Senator John McCain – and then asking them what they found to admire in the man they did not plan to vote for. He quotes an Obama voter who, not unexpectedly, admired McCain’s fortitude as a POW in Vietnam, and a McCain voter who observed that Obama was energetic, charismatic, intelligent. “People seemed to welcome this exercise,” says Greene, but then he glumly muses: “Somehow, it feels that a similar experiment would be doomed to failure now,” and that “it feels like we’re all in one of those old hot-rod movies[....], speeding straight toward each other’s headlights.” And then he wonders what can be done about it:

One answer may be found in an unlikely place — in words spoken by the most divisive political figure of his era.

Richard Nixon, in his first inaugural address during a time of widespread public rage in the United States, talked about “reaching with magnificent precision for the moon, but falling into raucous discord on earth.”

Nixon’s presidency would end in shambles. But on its first day, here is what he said about how to soothe the anger that was consuming the nation:

“To find that answer, we need only look within ourselves. … To lower our voices would be a simple thing.”

Some people’s feelings about Nixon undoubtedly cloud their opinion of everything he ever did. Yet what he said as he took office in a time of nonstop partisan conflict is worth considering as we pass through similar days:

“In these difficult years, America has suffered from a fever of words; from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric that postures instead of persuading.

“We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another — until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.”

Bob Greene has thought about RN’s life, and the lessons to be learned from it, for a long time. Indeed, in his mid-twenties he covered the 1972 campaign and wrote a book about it, Running. a decade later, he scored a one-on-one interview with the ex-President, which stretched over several of his columns and is included in his 1985 book Cheeseburgers, and extensively excerpted in his 2004 book Fraternity: A Journey In Search Of Five Presidents.

In that interview, Nixon reflected at some length about how a President should be perceived by the public. He told Greene: “A president must not be one of the crowd. He must maintain a certain figure. People want him to be that way. They don’t want him to be down there saying, `Look, I’m the same as you.’ . . .In all the years I was in the White House, I never recall running around in a sport shirt, let alone a T-shirt. Or sneakers and the rest.”

When RN said this, he had in mind leaders he greatly admired like Charles De Gaulle of France, Konrad Adenauer of West Germany, or Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore – men whose rather austere and remote personal style nonetheless commanded enormous respect and admiration from their countrymen (or, as would be said now, countrypersons). While this sort of political style has generally been less admired by American voters, as the careers of John Quincy Adams – or Richard Nixon – demonstrate, there’s no doubt that most Americans do want their Presidents not to be too folksy or too accessible to the public. Dwight Eisenhower certainly struck the right balance. He was from middle-class, heartland America – but he was not “the same as” the ordinary voter. Ronald Reagan, as “down-home” as he could be, was always meticulous about keeping a certain mystique around his personality.

In the case of Barack Obama, the mystique has started to fall away, in a rapid and, for many of his followers, disillusioning manner. Twelve days ago he delivered a speech before Congress on health care which, in itself, was a good effort at rallying the nation to his cause, though far from a grand slam or a home run – more like a double. Then the Congressional leadership became preoccupied with punishing Rep. Joe Wilson for shouting “You lie!” during the address, and forced a vote on the matter which seemed to many Americans like an exercise in pointless overkill. Obama’s latter-day Brain Trust seemed aware of this, but no one in the Capitol Hill Democratic leadership was bothering to take heed of their concerns.

Today, Newsweek.com has a blogpost about the latest poll data. It turns out that most of the surveys do find an increase in Obama’s favorability ratings following the speech – but by one or two or, in CNN.com’s survey, five points, from 53 to 58. Compare this to the polls following Richard Nixon’s November 3, 1969 speech on Vietnam, when 77 percent of Americans expressed support for his policies – a spectacular rise from the President’s numbers before the speech. Even Jimmy Carter’s notorious “malaise” speech in 1979 temporarily lifted his approval rating from 25 to 37 percent, before the Iranian hostage crisis lowered it for good.

Last weekend President Obama, evidently wishing to build on what small momentum his speech generated, took the unprecedented step – for a President, anyway – of appearing on five Sunday-morning talk shows on the same day: NBC’s Meet The Press, CBS’s Face The Nation, ABC’s This Week, CNN’s State Of The Union (formerly Late Edition) and Univision’s Al Punto.

This garnered the President the distinction of having achieved something approaching what media folk call a “full Ginsburg.” Back in 1998, in the first frenzied Sunday after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, that ex-intern’s attorney, William Ginsburg, appeared on the first four of the aforementioned shows as well as Fox News Sunday. This achievement remained unique for about five years, then Vice President Cheney duplicated it, to be followed by then-Senator John Edwards (during his weeks as Sen. John Kerry’s running-mate) and then-DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff. The last to manage it was then-Senator Hillary Clinton in the fall of 2007 when she was still the Democratic presidential nominee-apparent (and, in the minds of many in the media, virtually the President-elect).

But it’s one thing for even a Vice-President to undertake such a feat – and another for a President to think he has to make the rounds of the talking-heads programs. (Or, for that matter, the talk shows – if the Chief Executive feels he needs to make his case on The Late Show With David Letterman as I write this, can Carson Daly or Chelsea Handler be that far behind?) When that President pointedly declines to appear on Fox News Sunday, apparently because the network decided not to broadcast his speech to Congress, the semblance of a mystique certainly diminishes, and some, like Dwight Schwab of examiner.com, are even ready to compare Obama’s quarrel with Fox to Nixon’s difficult relationship with the networks. (For me, another analogy comes more readily to mind – former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura’s honeymoon with the media in 1998 that so rapidly turned sour. But that’s a subject for another post.)

So it makes sense for President Obama to try to follow in the path RN outlined in that first inaugural – a path RN himself found difficult to follow, because of the polarization that he inherited – and also to maintain an image befitting a President instead of a Sunday-morning regular. The right approach for him is not to start thinking about going on Olbermann, Matthews, King and Maddow – or Conan, Colin, and the two Jimmies – on the same night, but instead to focus on the effectiveness of getting his message across on the stage that only a President can command.

Gander Sauce Now Appearing On White House Menu

September 21, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, National Security, News media, Nixon Administration, Obama administration, Presidents, Public Opinion | Leave a Comment 

From the earliest days of RN’s administration he was plagued with leaks of highly classified material that ended up in the media.

RN condemned the leaks as undermining his ability to end the war and conduct the nation’s foreign policy.

The anti-war establishment justified them as acts of conscience, and the media celebrated them as examples of a free press at work and doing its very best.

Now everything old is new again, and it will be interesting to see how President Obama deals with the leaks that are already causing him problems.  The most serious appeared today as a story by Bob Woodward on the front page of the Washington Post:

The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan warns in an urgent, confidential assessment of the war that he needs more forces within the next year and bluntly states that without them, the eight-year conflict “will likely result in failure,” according to a copy of the 66-page document obtained by The Washington Post.

Gen Stanley A. McChrystal says emphatically: “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”

His assessment was sent to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Aug. 30 and is now being reviewed by President Obama and his national security team.

How will —how can?— the President maintain his former equanimity regarding leaks now that he is actually in charge and his policies will be at risk because of them?  Will the goose sauce he dished out so liberally as a Senator and a candidate be so tasty now that he’s the gander?

RN knew how the  accumulation of leaks had driven LBJ into an increasingly narrow corner.

In RN, he vividly recalled his visit with Johnson at the White House  on 12 December 1968:

I sat on one of the sofas in front of the fireplace in the Oval Office while he sat in the king-size rocking chair that he had brought in to replace Kennedy’s smaller one…..

Jabbing his finger at my chest, his voice raised, he said, “Let me tell you, Dick, I would have been a damn fool to have discussed major decisions with the full Cabinet present, because I knew that if I said something in the morning, you could sure as hell bet it would appear in the afternoon papers.  It’s the same thing with the National Security Council.  Everybody there’s got their damned deputies and note-takers with them sitting along the wall.  I will warn you now, the leaks can kill you.”

But RN didn’t take LBJ’s advice to hunker down and only deal with a minimum of aides; and he was soon being threatened with the death of a thousand leaks.

The leaks began almost with the start of my administration, and before long I experienced firsthand the anger, worry, and frustration that Johnson had described.  In the first five months of my presidency at least twenty-one major stories based on leaks from materials in the NSC files appeared in New York and Washington newspapers.  A CIA report listed forty-five newspaper articles in 1969 that contained serious breaches of secrecy.

Within a matter of days after the NBS held its first meeting on the Middle East on February 1, the details of the discussion that had taken place were leaked to the press.  Eisenhower, whom I had personally briefed on this meeting, considered any leak of classified foreign policy information, whether in war or peace, treasonable.  When he saw the news story he telephoned Kissinger and warned him in no uncertain terms.  “Tighten your shop,” he said.  “Get rid of people if you have to, but don’t let this go on.”

Not only did it go on; a trickle became a tsunami.

Today, forty years later, leaks are an inevitable part of the Washington scene, where agendas and egos first mix, then match, and then go looking for a friendly reporter.

It will be interesting to see how the Democrats, so long used to enjoying the leaks undermining and embarrassing the Republicans, will handle this particular reality of the power they now possess.

Ted Kennedy: I Gambled On The 1960 Election

September 21, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Richard Nixon, Teddy's Bet | Leave a Comment 

Reading through Teddy Kennedy’s memoir, True Compass, the LA Times’ Richard Abowitz notes an excerpt from the book that reveals that the late Massachusetts Senator went to Las Vegas to gamble on the outcome of the 1960 election:

“And, believe me, I knew the odds. I was so certain of Jack’s victory that I placed a Las Vegas bet on it. My winnings could have given me enough money to buy a new car, a really fancy new car. The speedy Aston Martin DB4 had just come out of England a couple years earlier, and I really wanted one. Well, I won that bet, but I never bought the car. I made the mistake of telling dad about it, and he hit the roof … He went at me tooth and nail. I never did collect on my bet … “

Senator Kennedy — who (as it has been recently revealed) spearheaded the effort to bring down the Nixon presidency– must have placed a very risky bet. The 1960 election was one of the closest elections of all time, separated only by a margin of 113,000 votes.

Historians, and many Kennedy supporters, later acknowledged serious and substantial voter fraud on election day in 1960.

The change of one vote per precinct in any one of four key states —including Texas and Illinois— might have changed history.

In Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago, one voting machine recorded 121 votes after only 43 people had voted, and in LBJ’s Texas there was one county where 4,895 voters were registered, but 6,138 ballots were miraculously recorded.

According to former Washington Post editor Benjamin Bradlee, Mayor Daley reportedly told John Kennedy, “Mr. President, with little bit of luck and the help of a few close friends, you’re going to carry Illinois.”

The New York Times columnist Tom Wicker also opined: “Nobody knows to this day, or ever will, whom the American people really elected in 1960.”

Some how the late Senator knew the odds.

Was it just luck? Or was it the help of a few close friends?

Rashomon — Cape Cod Style

September 21, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

Jonathan Karp, the editor of Senator Edward Kennedy’s posthumously published memoir True Compass, was a guest on C-Span’s Washington Journal the other morning.

He discussed the Senator’s version of the disastrous 1979 CBS interview with Roger Mudd.  The two men sat down on at the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis on Cape Cod for an interview as part of  the CBS Reports production Teddy, an hour-long prime time profile of the man who everyone knew wanted to be President.   And Mudd pitched the softest of possible balls by simply asking:  “Why do you want to be President?”

But instead of hitting it out of the park, he had a hummuna hummuna moment that many people feel put paid to his candidacy before it was even announced.

The Karp rendition of the Kennedy version —set down in the chapter “Sail Against the Wind”— was that the Senator was sandbagged.   His understanding was that the interview was to deal with his feelings about his family and the sea. So the question about his presidential ambitions flummoxed him.

According to the memoir, Mudd was a denizen of Hickory Hill, and it was his social friendship with Robert and Ethel Kennedy that led the Massachusetts Senator to entertain favorably Mudd’s request for an exclusive interview as a way of gaining a leg up on Dan Rather in the then heated battle to succeed Walter Conkite as the CBS Evening News’ anchor.

Yesterday on Politico, Roger Mudd states that the True Compass version of those events is “fantasy.”  As Ben Martin reports:

Kennedy, who died August 25, said he agreed to talk to Mudd, a social acquaintance of his and friend of Robert and Ethel Kennedy, because Mudd had pleaded with him that an exclusive interview with reclusive matriarch Rose Kennedy could be a clincher in his battle with Dan Rather over who would succeed Cronkite as anchor of the CBS Evening News.

The former senator wrote in “True Compass” that Mudd approached him in June of 1979 following a reception for the president of Mexico at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. “As I walked out of the hotel at about 10 p.m., Roger approached me and said – I cannot recall the words verbatim – ‘I’m in this contest with Dan Rather for the anchor position at CBS News, and I’d love to get an interview for your mother.”

Mudd, now 81 and speaking cautiously but firmly to make his side known without, as he put it, getting “in a match with a man who’s no longer with us,” said that not only did such a conversation never take place, but that Kennedy’s entire account of the circumstances surrounding the interview is a fabrication.

“The whole scenario that he lays out is a complete fiction,” Mudd says. “There are no pieces of the truth in it. It’s almost beyond preposterous.”

“There was never any mention, never any proposal or any idea to interview Rose Kennedy,” he said. “The idea that I would’ve thought that an interview with Rose Kennedy would have won me the footrace for Cronkite’s seat just stretches credulity. Her name never came up.”

Rose Kennedy, then 89, made few public appearances, and as her son noted in his book, largely avoided interviews. Kennedy wrote that he was initially resistant to having his mother interviewed – but wrote that Mudd continued the pressure.“It would make a big, big difference if I could ever do that interview down at Cape Cod,” Kennedy recalled Mudd saying.

As Kennedy tells it in his book, his mother became ill and was not available for the interview. But after telling this to Mudd, Kennedy wrote that the newsman insisted on still coming down to Hyannisport to do an interview with him about his connection to the sea and Cape Cod.

“The agreement, as I’d understood it, was that our topic was to be the sea, and the connections between the Cape and the Kennedy family,” Kennedy writes, adding that the first 40 minutes of the conversation were about just that.

But Mudd s ays those topics never even came up.“I have a transcript of the original interview and there’s not a single mention in there of the sea, of the Kennedy relationship to the sea, of his love for sailing,” Mudd says.

To prove his point, the newsman reads back the first question he asked: “What’s your definition of Camelot?”

Many will feel that the idea that CBS would have preempted its prime time lineup for an hour-long program dealing with Edward Kennedy’s feelings about the sea raises at least as many questions as it answers. And why even a presidential candidate not yet ready to announce his candidacy would have such a deer in the headlights reaction to being asked such an obvious question will be endlessly intriguing to students of the Kennedys and the presidency.

And that is where the story might have ended — a simple case of he-said-he-said in which one of the participants only participates posthumously.

Now Politico produces some other points of view and turns this event into a Rashomon effect-like puzzle of conflicting perceptions and interpretations.

For example, Senator Kennedy’s press secretary of the time, Robert Southwick, supports his former boss’ version while leaving just a sliver of wiggle room regarding some fairly crucial details.

Southwick, now an executive at the Starz premium television company, makes clear that three decades later he still feels strongly about what happened. “Mudd sandbagged us and distorted the truth to create a piece that he thought would give him a leg up in the campaign against Dan Rather for Cronkite’s job,” he said.

However, Southwick said he had “no clear recollection of the Rose Kennedy part of the story. “It seems unlikely as I don’t recall Rose giving any interview at all while I worked for Kennedy.”

He said that he recalls first having discussions with CBS in the spring of 1979, but it was about an interview with the senator.

And, Southwick said, Kennedy never mentioned to him that he thought he was doing Mudd a personal favor by agreeing to the interview.

Again, Mudd has different recollections of that September weekend.

“I don’t want to call Tom a liar and I won’t, but that is also a complete fiction,” Mudd says of Southwick’s contention that there was to be no interview that day on the Cape.

Mudd points out that even Kennedy admits in the book that he agreed to some form of an interview.

Where Mudd and Southwick agree – raising questions about Kennedy’s claim that the interview was to be with his mother – is on the fact that CBS spent weeks trailing the senator in Washington and in his home state, including on a family camping trip, to get footage for the eventual package. “If we had been planning to do an interview with Rose Kennedy, why on earth would we have spent all the time and money shooting film of him?” asks Mudd.

Southwick recalls the push-and-pull negotiations with the network in which the senator’s office finally, and grudgingly, allowed CBS to film Kennedy, his children and nieces and nephews camping.

Mudd has no explanation for the sharply differing accounts of the autumn of 1979. “For me – because I came to admire him immensely as a senator – it’s really rather sad that he somehow embraced this fantasy in his final years of his life,” he said.

Whatever the real backstory, the interview turned out to be a double whammy for Roger Mudd.  It failed to catapult him into the Cronkite chair, and ended his halcyon days at Hickory Hill.

The broadcast brought all communications from and invitations to Ethel Kennedy and Hickory Hill to an abrupt halt,” he wrote, after recounting how he threw dinner parties at his suburban Washington home for Robert and Ethel Kennedy and dined out with the couple in 1967 after they watched an RFK documentary together that Mudd had made.

9.21.72

September 21, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Nixon Administration, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

On 21 September 1972, RN announced the establishment of an Advisory Committee on the Economic Role of Women within the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.   He wrote:

Women are playing an increasingly important role in the economy of our Nation. We in this Administration believe that women must have full equality of opportunity and freedom of choice to pursue their careers, whether they be in the home or outside of the home.

We have taken many strong steps to promote equality and that freedom, but we must recognize clearly that much more needs to be done, especially in the subtle areas of changing attitudes.

Accordingly, I am asking the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to organize an Advisory Committee on the Economic Role of Women. The Committee will be composed of women and men in both the private and public sectors, who are concerned with the changing role of women in our Nation’s economy.

The Committee will meet periodically with the CEA Chairman to appraise progress and problems in this crucial area. I am confident that it will also fulfill a significant role in the vital areas of education and communication to ensure that progress and change in this important area of human rights will be constructive.

CEA member Marina van Neumann Whitman and Staff Assistant to the President for Executive Management Barbara H. Franklin took the lead at the press conference accompanying the announcement.

Barbara Franklin, who was one of the first women to graduate from the Harvard Business School, was leading the Nixon administration’s unprecedented efforts to recruit more women for high level executive branch jobs.  Under her leadership, between 1971 and 1973, the number of women in such positions almost tripled.

The initiative began on 6 February 1969, when a reporter asked RN a question at his first news conference after his inauguration.

Vera Glaser of the Los Angeles Times asked him why there had been only three women among the administration’s  first 200 appointments. RN was unaware of this but promised to correct the imbalance.  (Vera Glaser died last January at the age of 92; her obituary in the LA Times proclaimed “Glaser’s tough questioning about the role of women in President NIxon’s administration led to changes in federal recruiting practices.”)

RN established a White House office to recruit women into executive positions in the federal government.  Barbara Franklin, who had been an assistant vice president and head of the governmental relations department at Citibank, joined the White House staff and assumed that portfolio in 1971.

All cabinet secretaries and agency heads were now required to submit Action Plans to the President, describing how they intended to place, recruit, advance and train women in their departments. Only one year later, the number of women in posts paying $28,000 and up (GS-16 and above) increased from 36 to 105, many in positions women had never held before.

Four years later, in March 1973, there had been more than 1,000 women hired or promoted to middle management positions.

Women also became forest rangers, FBI agents and sky marshals. The logjam of promotions for women in the military service was also broken. The former limit of one female colonel per service branch was put aside and women were promoted for the first time to general and admiral.

Barriers against women in the foreign service were lifted.

Women headed the Federal Maritime Commission, the Tariff Commission, and the Atomic Energy Commission for the first time. Numbers of women appointed to the federal judiciary increased.

In the mid-1990s, Secretary Franklin (she had served as Secretary of Commerce in the George H. W. Bush Administration) donated her papers to her alma mater Penn State and created an oral history project called “A Few Good Women: Advancing the cause for Women in Government, 1969-74.”   The project’s website provides information about the project, including biographies of the men and women interviewed.

Featured Articles — September 21, 2009

September 21, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles | Leave a Comment 

Interesting Takes From Home And Abroad:

McChrystal: More Forces or ‘Mission Failure’ By Bob Woodward, The Washington Post
Top U.S. Commander For Afghan War Calls Next 12 Months Decisive

Our Missile-Defense Race Against Iran By Ilan Berman, The Wall Street Journal
The Bush-era plan was the best of the realistic alternatives.

The Story Behind the ACORN Story By Andrew Breitbart, The Washington Times
Everything you needed to know about the unorthodox roll out of the now-notorious ACORN sting videos was hidden in plain sight in my Sept. 7 column, Katie Couric, Look in the Mirror. ACORN was not the only target of those videos; so were Katie, Brian, Charlie and every other mainstream media pooh-bah.

The Risks for Dems Going It Alone on Health Care By Jay Newton-Small, Time
Max Baucus unveiled his bill last week. His Senate Finance Committee begins its formal markup of the legislation on Tuesday. And still no Republicans have signed on.

President Barack Obama is beginning to look out of his depth By Edward Lucas, The Daily Telegraph
It is lovely to feature in other people’s dreams. The problem comes when they wake up. Barack Obama is an eloquent, brainy and likeable man with a fascinating biography. He is not George Bush. Those are great qualities. But they are not enough to lead America, let alone the world.

The President’s Best Hope in the G.O.P. By John Harwood, The New York Times
President Obama intends to keep wooing the public to support for his health care goals in a scheduled Monday night appearance on the “Late Show with David Letterman.” Polls suggest he has had mixed results so far.

Strangers to Dissent, Liberals Try to Stifle It By Michael Barone, Washington Times
It is an interesting phenomenon that the response of the left half of our political spectrum to criticism and argument is often to try to shut it down.

Reform or Bust By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
In the grim period that followed Lehman’s failure, it seemed inconceivable that bankers would, just a few months later, be going right back to the practices that brought the world’s financial system to the edge of collapse.

China’s Predatory Trade By Robert Samuelson, The Washington Post
For years, American presidents have faced a China conundrum: How to deal with a country that practices predatory trade without unleashing global protectionism?

President Obama’s request turns Gov. Paterson into lame duck By Elizabeth Benjamin, New York Daily News
Gov. Paterson is a dead man walking

The Way We Were

September 20, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Art, Lifestyle, Media, Popular Culture, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

Bernie Fuchs, who showed middle class America the way it wanted to live during the 1950s and then changed the ways Americans looked at sports, died on Thursday at the age of 76.  He was one of the most —if not the most— influential illustrators of the last second half of the 20th Century.

An excellent obituary by Adam Bernstein in today’s Washington Post limns his life and describes his influence:

Mr. Fuchs was adept at balancing art and commerce. He met the needs of mass-circulation magazines accustomed to Norman Rockwell-style realism, but he injected a fresh vitality and impressionism that became hugely popular and transformed the illustration field. He even experimented with bold designs based on the abstract expressionism movement popularized by painters Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

Norman Rockwell’s 1943 painting “Freedom From Want” —from his Four Freedoms series painted for the Saturday Evening Post based on FDR’s 1941 Message to Congress— is still the idealized iconic version of that American holiday.  (In the same way that his “Freedom of Speech” was, at least until its recent brush with reality, the ideal of what town hall meetings would look like.)

Fuchs’ illustration for a story in the December 1962 issue of  McCall’s magazine paid homage to Rockwell’s vision while updating it and adding some homely touches of reality.

This late-50s ad —one of his many illustrations for Coca-Cola— is full of rich details of the carefree and glamorous middle class lifestyle few attained and most coveted.  Today it looks charmingly innocent; back in the day it was the epitome of hip:

The WaPo obit deconstructed the creative elements of a Fuchs illustration for a McCall’s short story:

One vivid example, commissioned by McCall’s magazine in the late 1950s, was a portrait of two young couples relaxing in a small room after dinner. One man is lying on the ground, his head nestled on a woman’s lap and smoking a cigarette as she strokes his hair.

While the image has the control and realism of Rockwell, it also has several more dynamic features taken from avant-garde techniques: the vigorous brush strokes; the tilted horizon that heightens a sense of drama; a lampshade in the foreground that appears slightly distorted; and, most strikingly, the placement of the couples in the distance instead of being the center of the picture.

By the age of 30, Fuchs had been named Artist of the Year by the Artist’s Guild of New York — the first of many honors that included being one of the youngest inductees into the Society of Illustrators’ Hall of Fame, whose company included Rockwell, N. C. Wyeth, Winslow Homer, and John James Audubon.

Men With Hats: A Fuchs illustration for a late ’50s Seagram’s ad.

Don Draper Please Call Home: a Fuchs Seagram’s ad that could be a story board for Mad Men.

In an interesting obit on his blog Illustration Art, David Apatoff describes the next phase of Fuchs’ career:

So Fuchs was feeling pretty cocky by the time Sports Illustrated called him in the early 1960s to ask him to illustrate an article. Fuchs met with the legendary art director of Sports Illustrated, Richard Gangel. A tough minded visionary, Gangel gave Fuchs an assignment, but as Fuchs was leaving, added– “Oh– and I don’t want that shit you do for McCalls.”

Fuchs could have walked off in a huff. It would have been easy for him to continue working for other clients in the successful style he had already developed. Instead, he rose to Gangel’s challenge and became even bolder and more innovative.

The result was the introduction of an impressionist immediacy that quickly became the gold standard for sports illustration.

Bernie Fuchs painted Sandy Koufax for the cover of SI’s 1964 Baseball Issue.

A Fuchs illustration of a golf match in the rain.

Bernstein quotes illustrator-educator Murray Tinkelman about Fuchs’ long run as the beau ideal of illustration art:

He became the most emulated and imitated illustrator in the field through the 1980s . . . when the vogue turned to more decorative, whimsical, punkier illustrations that were influenced by underground cartoons like those of Robert Crumb.

Fuchs continued to draw and paint into this century.  A retrospective including his later work can be seen here.

Bernie Fuchs’ drawings were used as the cover art for Frank Sinatra’s 1967 LP The World We Knew.

The Soundtrack Of Our Lives

September 20, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Soundtrack Of Our Lives | 1 Comment 

Every Sunday, 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.

SUGAR, SUGAR (ANDY KIM + JEFF BARRY) performed by THE ARCHIES

The Number One spot on the Billboard Hot 100 at end of the summer of 1969 shifted from the sublime to the ridiculous on 20 September.  After four weeks at the top,  the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” was replaced by the Archies’ “Sugar Sugar” — a bubblegum song by a group that didn’t actually exist.

The Stones’ talent was so prodigious that the B-side —the B-side! — of “Honky Tonk Woman” was “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”  (albeit a 45-RPM single-friendly truncated version without the participation of the London Bach Choir that so distinguished the album track on the LP Let It Bleed).

“You Can’t Always Get What You Want” was already a classic when, in 1983, Lawrence Kasdan used it (in the version without the London Bach Choir) with memorable ironic effect on the soundtrack of The Big Chill.

But the Stones were, admittedly, were a hard act for anyone to follow, and I intended no disrespect to the extravagantly successful pop confection “Sugar, Sugar” or the formidable creative talents behind it.

Although Wikipedia aptly describes “Sugar, Sugar” as “the canonical example of bubblegum pop musical genre,” Billboard voted it the number one record of 1969, and even includes it —at #63000 on its list  of the 100 All Time Top Songs:

On the Sept. 20, 1969, Hot 100, the top five comprised Three Dog Night, Johnny Cash, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Rolling Stones and, at No. 1, a group that actually never existed. The Archies comic strip, created in 1942, became a hit Saturday morning TV show created by Don Kirshner-who had guided the Monkees. The bubble-gum bauble remained at the peak for four weeks and sold 3 million copies. Obviously its melody had legs: A year later, Wilson Pickett recorded a cover of “Sugar, Sugar,” which reached No. 25 on the Hot 100. The Archies were hardly a one-hit wonder; among their four top 40 hits, follow-up “Jingle Jangle” reached No. 10 later that year.

Here is the maddeningly catchy song as it appeared each week under the opening credits of The Archie Show on CBS:

Sugar, honey honey
You are my candy girl
And you’ve got me wanting you.
Honey, sugar sugar
You are my candy girl,
And you got me wanting you

I just can’t believe the lovliness of loving you,
(I just can’t believe it’s true)
I just can’t believe the one to love this feeling to
(I just can’t believe it’s true)

Sugar, honey honey
You are my candy girl
And you got me wanting you
Honey, sugar sugar
You are my candy girl
And you got me wanting you

When i kissed you girl I knew how sweet a kiss could be
(I know how sweet a kiss could be)
Like the summer sunshine pour you sweetness over me
(Pour your sweetness over me)

One of the big TV hits of 1968 was CBS’ The Archie Show — a cartoon series based on the Archie comics. Archie and Jughead, Betty and Veronica, and the students of Riverdale High had been mainstays of America’s comic book racks since 1941; and after their creator Bob Montana returned from the war in 1946, they began appearing daily on the funny pages.  Since 1943, they had been given voice on the radio, so TV was the logical next frontier.

In various forms —The Archie Comedy Hour (1969), Archie’s Funhouse (1970), Archie’s TV Funnies(1971), etc.— the gang’s adventures continued on the small screen for several years. The cartoon characters played in a band —The Archies— and the show’s music franchise was phenomenally lucrative.

In 1969, uber producer Don Kirshner asked Ron Dante to sing on the Archies’ demo record of a new song written by Jeff Barry and Andy Kim.  The demo was so good that Dante got the gig. Another Kirshner songwriter, Toni Wine, became Betty and/or Veronica and provided female backup.  In fact, the finished product represented a virtual Who’s Who of the Kirshner empire.  Songwriters Kim and Barry sang along as backup, as did Mrs. Barry, the late Ellie Greenwich.  Ray Stevens, who was on the cusp of his major career as a performer and TV star, supplied the hand clapping that propelled the arrangement.

Unfortunately there is no available YouTube video or mp3 audio version of Wilson Pickett’s version; it is on his album of Greatest Hits.

YouTube does offer a terrific —but unidentified— rendition from an October 1969 TV show:

Featured Articles — September 20, 2009

September 20, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles | Leave a Comment 

Interesting Takes From Home And Abroad:

A Better Missile Defense for a Safer Europe By Robert Gates, The New York Times
THE future of missile defense in Europe is secure. This reality is contrary to what some critics have alleged about President Obama’s proposed shift in America’s missile-defense plans on the continent — and it is important to understand how and why.

The CIA did its job By John Yoo, Miami Herald
Ayoung, fresh face campaigns for the presidency by attacking the CIA: “Our government should justify the character and moral principles of the American people, and our foreign policy should not short-circuit that for temporary advantage,” he says.

Even Glenn Beck Is Right Twice a Day By Frank Rich, The New York Times
IF only it were just about the color of his skin.

The Truth About Bureaucracy By Matt Bai, New York Times Magazine
How successful was the recent government giveaway known as “cash for clunkers”? The answer, I suppose, depends on how you want to look at it.

Obama’s Worldwide Star Power Finds Limits By Michael D. Shear and Howard Schneider, The Washington Post
Skepticism Abroad Echoes Doubt at Home.

TNN Weekly Weekend Reward

September 19, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Weekly Weekend Reward | Leave a Comment 

This weekend’s Reward is two Charlie Poole songs — “White House Blues” and “He Rambled”—  one by the master, and one by a devotee  who has mastered the oeuvre and even successfully supplemented it.

The Wainwright family, and all its various roots and branches, has been responsible for some of the best American popular and folk music of the last half century.  Now the patriarch —Loudon Wainwright III—  has produced a 2-CD retrospective-hommage masterpiece: High Wide & Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project.

“A crazier version of Jimmie Rogers”:  Charlie Poole circa 1923.

Charlie Poole (1892-1931) was born in Eden, North Carolina.  As music blogger Robert Baird nicely and accurately put it, he was “sort of a crazier version of Jimmie Rodgers. He was a drinker, raconteur, baseball player, ladies man, the works.”  Poole developed his unique three fingered banjo picking style after he said he could catch a baseball without a glove, closed his hand too soon, and ended up with a broken thumb that left his hand permanently arched.

Didn’t he ramble: A postcard picture of New York’s Bowery sent by Charlie Poole on a lonely afternoon in July 1920 in Chester, Pennsylvania.

Poole used the southern phrase high wide and handsome to describe the way he wanted to die.  But he died at 34 in 1931, after what was supposed to be a three month drinking binge.  A story survives —and sounds strangely familiar today— that it wasn’t the alcohol that killed him, but an injection by some local doctor who was, presumably, intending to counter the effects of the booze.

Charlie Poole wrote few if any of the many songs he sang and recorded.  Loudon Wainwright has chosen a terrific selection of Poole’s range — including some of the humorous songs, all of which are endearing, and some of which are actually still funny.  He has also written some original material that reflects Poole’s inspiration.  You can hear four of them here (including the goose-bumb-beautiful “Beautiful”).   There is a lot to be enjoyed —and learned— on Wainwright’s Charlie Poole Project website.

Unfortunately, at least so far, there are no really good videos from the album.  There is an interesting documentary, but it interrupts the songs with commentary; and there are a few amateur performance videos of poor quality.  But please don’t let that discourage you from getting this superb album.  Trust me now, and you can thank me later.

With his group the North Carolina Ramblers, Charlie Poole made many records for the Columbia label during the period 1925-1930 — including the first ever major country hit “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down Blues.”

Another hit was  ”White House Blues” — a contemporary song about the assassination of President McKinley by a gunman at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in September 1901, and the accession of his Vice President Theodore Roosevelt.

McKinley he hollered,
McKinley he squalled
The doc said
“McKinley, I can’t find that ball”
From Buffalo to Washington

Roosevelt in the White House,
he’s doin’ his best
McKinley in the graveyard,
he’s takin’ his rest
He’s gone a long old time

Hush up little children,
now don’t you fret
You’ll draw a pension
at your papa’s death
From Buffalo to Washington

Roosevelt in the White House,
drinkin’ out of a silver cup
McKinley in the graveyard,
he never wakes up
He’s gone a long, long time

Ain’t but the one thing
that grieves my mind
That is to die
and leave my poor wife behind
I’m gone a long old time

Standing at the station,
just lookin’ at the time
See by it you’re running
by half-past nine
From Buffalo to Washington

Pay in the train,
she’s just on time
She’ll run a thousand miles
from eight o’clock till nine
From Buffalo to Washington

Yonder comes the train,
she’s comin’ down the line
Throwin’ them a station message:
McKinley’s a-dyin’
It’s hard times, hard times

Look a-here, you rascal,
you see what you’ve done
You shot my husband
with that Ivor Johnson gun
Carry him back to Washington

The doc told the horse,
he tore down the rein
Said to that horse,
“You’ve got to outrun this train
From Buffalo to Washington”

Doctor came a-running,
taked off his specs
Said “Mr. McKinley,
better cash in your checks
You’re bound to die, bound to die”

Here’s Charlie Poole and the New North Carolina Ramblers’ 1925 recording of “He Rambled”:

And here’s Loudon Wainwright singing “Didn’t He Ramble” last summer in New York’s Madison Square Park last June:

In the likely event that the Wainwright CD inspires an interest in the original material, the Poole recordings are easily available.  Probably the best of the lot is the three CD collection of remastered originals titled You Ain’t Talkin’ To Me, that comes in what looks like an old cigar box and includes an interesting booklet.

R. Crumb provided the cover art for the 3-CD box set of Charlie Poole’s 1920s recordings.

Featured Articles — September 19, 2009

September 19, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles | Leave a Comment 

Interesting Takes From Home And Abroad:

The Godfather, R.I.P. By Myron Magnet, City Journal
Irving Kristol, realist, humanist, institution-builder, friend.

G.O.P. Checks for a Pulse, and Finds One By Adam Nagourney, The New York Times
Less than a year after an election that nearly wiped them out politically, conservatives are showing signs of life.

A Team Player Who Stands Apart By Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post
Tension Between Leading or Blending In Marks Clinton’s Tenure at State.

Virginia Moves Back to the Right By Fred Barnes, The Wall Street Journal
Republicans are competitive here again after a string of losses. Is Obama the reason?

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