The Most Enduring Legacy Of Nazi Hate

April 23, 2010 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Book Review, History, Islam, Islam and the West, Israel and Palestinians, Middle East, Presidents, U.S. History, UK Politics, War on Terror | 6 Comments 

On February 1, 1944, two unlikely allies in the United States Senate—Robert Wagner (D-New York) and Robert Taft (R-Ohio)—introduced a resolution that caused shockwaves around the globe. Their initiative advocated American support for “free and unlimited entry of Jews into Palestine for the creation of a Jewish commonwealth.” This was a bold move and one that put the Roosevelt administration on the spot.

Nearly five years earlier, the British government had released a White Paper on the issue of Palestine—one that largely abandoned the Jewish people in that region. Since the 1917 Balfour Declaration and during the period of the British Mandate they had been largely supportive of Jewish migration to Palestine and the idea of a Jewish state there. In essence, the White Paper changed all of that. It advocated severe limitations on Jewish immigration to Palestine—this at a time when European anti-Semitism was reaching critical mass.

The gang in Berlin was pleased.

Interestingly, at the time of that 1939 White Paper, two men who would later strongly support the creation of the modern state of Israel saw things differently. Winston Churchill spoke to the House of Commons on May 22, 1939 “as one intimately and responsibly concerned in the earlier states of our Palestine policy,” and insisted that he would not “stand by and see the solemn engagements into which Britain has entered before the world set aside.”
And here at home, Senator Harry S. Truman from Missouri—who had no clue at the time that he’d be a major player on the world stage in a few years–also issued a forthright condemnation that was inserted into the Congressional Record:

Mr. President, the British Government has used its diplomatic umbrella again,(this being an unmistakable dig at Neville Chamberlain) …this time on Palestine. It has made a scrap of paper out of Lord Balfour’s promise to the Jews. It has just added another to the long list of surrenders to the Axis powers.

But instead of embracing the ideas put forth by Taft and Wagner in 1944, the White House, State Department, and other powerful entities in the government pulled out all the stops to make sure that the idea of proposing a homeland in Palestine for Jews went away. They did this even though they knew very well about the ongoing mass extermination of European Jews at the hands of the Nazis.

The standard answer to the obvious question as to why the Holocaust evoked little official response from our government until near the end of the war has been to cite “isolationism,” or “economic Depression,” or “xenophobia” in our nation. Presumably, the idea of doing anything overtly “pro-Jewish” was politically untenable—so goes the argument.

But a closer look reveals something else going on at the time—and ever since.

The most lasting legacy of the toxins that created an epochal global conflict is the fact that elements of Nazism in many ways survive to this day in Islamism. The short-sightedness of FDR’s cronies was corrected in part by his successor, a man of courage who chose to recognize the new State of Israel eleven minutes after its birth in May of 1948. But the question remains: Why did FDR and company not get on the bandwagon, even while millions of Jews were being slaughtered?

Sadly, the real reason has a lot to do with U.S. surrender to Nazi propaganda—its power and content.

Largely overlooked or dismissed in the years since is the fact that the Nazi propaganda machine, the distortion factory that shaped attitudes in Germany throughout the duration of the infamous Third Reich, had its most lasting impact far away from the boroughs and beer halls of Deutschland. In fact, Hitler’s nightmarish vision of ridding Europe of Jews was only the beginning of what he wanted to do—he wanted to extend The Final Solution to Palestine.

And he had been preparing the hearts and minds of the Muslim world for many years.

Jeffrey Herf, a professor of history at the University of Maryland, has written an eye-opening book about the effectiveness of Nazi ideas in the Middle East during the Second World War called, “Nazi Propaganda For The Arab World.” In it, he describes the Nazi campaign for the minds and hearts of the Arab world in great detail—particularly the Axis radio programs that ran in Arabic around the clock from late 1939 until March of 1945.

These broadcasts spewed venomous anti-Semitism and pushed every demagogic button imaginable. They were also highly effective. In fact, long after the last vestige of Nazi rhetoric faded from consciousness in Europe, the poisonous seeds planted back then are still bearing deadly fruit.
The mind-set that gave way to the Third Reich is very much alive and well in the Muslim world of the Middle East.

When those two senatorial strange-bedfellows offered their visionary resolution in 1944 about a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the “Axis Broadcasts in Arabic” were way ahead of the story. Mr. Herf has accessed a significant cache of transcripts and leaflets produced by the Nazis during the war—materials that have not been adequately examined—until now.

So back in 1944, any hopes a couple of well-intentioned voices in Washington might have had to garner widespread national support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine were dashed by forces largely influenced by the hate-speak of Nazi propagandists. Berlin, broadcasting in Arabic, referred to Taft and Wagner as “criminal American senators,” while announcing, “a great tragedy is about to be unfolded, a great massacre, another turbulent war is about to start in the Arab countries.”

And in phraseology that sounds eerily familiar to what we still regularly hear from Islamists, the Nazis described the stakes as kill or be killed:

Arabs and Moslems, sons of the East, this menace threatens your very lives, endangers your beliefs and aims at your wealth. No trace of you will remain. Your doom is sealed. It were better if the earth opened and engulfed everybody; it were better if the skies fell upon us, bringing havoc and destruction; all this, rather than the sun of Islam should set and the Koran perish…Stir up wars and revolutions, stand fast against the aggressors, let your hearts, afire with faith, burst asunder! Advance your armies and drive out the menace.

Bear in mind that this is a Nazi broadcast to the Arab/Muslims in Palestine. Of course, the relationship between Hitler and Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti in Jerusalem, is well known and documented (see my article: “Hitler’s Favorite Jihadist”), but the broadcasts from Berlin to Palestine are just now beginning to be examined. And what is being found is further evidence that to refer to Islamists as Nazi or Fascist-like is no smear—or stretch.

The rhetoric broadcast to the Middle East 70 years ago is still being noised about—and even more pervasively and effectively. Back then, the attitudes it reinforced, complete with distortion, hate, and prejudice, caused U.S. officials, from FDR on down, to “go wobbly”—as Margaret Thatcher would say.

It is sadly clear that the most lasting impact of the Nazi propaganda machine is that murderous ideas espoused back then are alive and well in our day and age and still being used to threaten and kill Jews—while nouveau wobblers turn away.

Jennings’ Heroes

April 2, 2010 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Book Review, Vietnam | 16 Comments 

In Regnery’s most recent Politically Incorrect Guide, author and Marine Corps Veteran Phillip Jennings thinks highly of RN’s handling of the Vietnam War:

If Mr. Jennings has a hero, other than the American and South Vietnamese soldiers who fought the battles, it is Richard Nixon. Unlike LBJ, Nixon was unafraid to employ American air power against the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos, against North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia, and finally—with the “Christmas Bombings” of 1972—against Hanoi and Haiphong in an effort to force the North Vietnamese to the peace-conference table. Mr. Jennings, as a pilot, may have an excessive faith in the efficacy of air power, but there is no doubt that the battered North Vietnamese did wind up signing the Paris Peace Accord in 1973 (only to immediately violate the terms). The rest is sad denouement and catastrophe: Watergate, a weakened presidency, a rebellious Democratic Congress, a cutoff of promised military support to our South Vietnamese ally, a massive North Vietnamese invasion of the south, and collapse.

Read an excerpt of the book here.

“At The Age Of 9, I Decided I Was For Richard Nixon”

March 13, 2010 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Book Review | Leave a Comment 

The Wall Street Journal is running an excerpt of Karl Rove’s new book Courage and Consequence:

At the age of 9, I decided I was for Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election. I got my hands on a Nixon bumper sticker, slapped it on my bike’s wire basket, and rode up and down the block, as if that alone would get him a vote. Instead it drew the attention of a little girl who lived in the neighborhood. She had a few years and about 30 pounds on me and was enthusiastically for John F. Kennedy. She pulled me from my bicycle and beat the heck out of me, leaving me with a bloody nose and a tattered ego. I’ve never liked losing a political fight since.

Continue reading.

Apparent Danger By David Stokes

March 10, 2010 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Book Review, History | 2 Comments 

In July of 1926, the pastor of America’s first megachurch shot an unarmed man to death in his church office. The preacher, who already had a well-deserved notorious reputation, was indicted for murder and faced death in the Texas electric chair.

It may be the most famous story you have never heard.

Using more than 6,000 pages of newspaper articles, court records, and a variety of other published works, I have written a book about it all, one that vividly recounts the story of the fundamentalist movement’s most colorful and controversial figure—J. Frank Norris.

The book is called, “Apparent Danger: The Pastor of America’s First Megachurch and the Texas Murder Trial of the Decade in the 1920s.”

From his pulpit at First Baptist Church in downtown Fort Worth, Texas, Norris waged war against a culture that was changing dramatically, while demonstrating remarkable skills as a showman, promoter, organizer, and orator. He became a composite personality, blending some Billy Sunday with a touch of P. T. Barnum, and a little William Randolph Hearst thrown in. He also had a Napoleon complex.

Not your typical man of the cloth!

Thousands flocked to his church. Multiplied thousands more listened to him on the radio (he was one of the first preachers to effectively build a large following via new medium). He even published his own tabloid newspaper distributed weekly around the country. When the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Sinclair Lewis was doing the research for his character Elmer Gantry, he visited Norris’ church. Having for years kept a big file of news clippings about the preacher, Lewis was amazed at how many people went to hear Norris every Sunday.

A lot of people were.

They came in droves. In fact, by the summer of 1926, J. Frank Norris was poised to become America’s premier Protestant leader following the death of William Jennings Bryan. All of it, though, changed in a moment of violence one sweltering hot Saturday afternoon, when Dexter Elliot “D.E.” Chipps walked into J. Frank Norris’ office for the first and last time.

In Apparent Danger, we meet the Mayor of Fort Worth at the time, H. C. Meacham (the city’s municipal airport bears his name to this day), a wealthy department story owner. He had secrets the preacher learned about and exploited. And many other leading citizens of the day in the city on the Trinity River figure prominently in the story, including Amon Carter, the owner/publisher of the American south’s largest newspaper, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Carter also owned radio station WBAP. Carter and Meacham were friends of the slain man—even pallbearers at Mr. Chipps’ funeral.

The story of the killing of a Fort Worth business leader by one of its most famous citizens plays out against the backdrop of the 1920s; a turbulent time in the country. It was the age of flappers, Model Ts, Cal Coolidge, Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, new movie theaters, and A & P stores popping up everywhere, like Starbucks shops 75 years later. Apparent Danger is a story that weaves in the thrills and agonies of the great post-World War I oil boom in Texas—with Fort Worth as a center of activity. And the story explores how seemingly mundane city politics became a prescription for murder.

This book will be widely released in bookstores in the next few months, but is now being made available (limited release) at at www.apparentdanger.com. If you’d like to order a copy, please use the promo code: NIXON for a special 20% discount.

“Only Nixon” Reviewed

February 6, 2010 by admin | Filed Under Book Review, China, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon Library events, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

The Pueblo (Colorado) Chieftain has just published this review of James C. Humes and Dr. Jarvis Ryals’s book Only Nixon, which recounts the President’s historic China trip as seen from the perspective of the Chinese who helped arrange for RN’s meetings with Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong. (TNN previously has posted a video about this book.)

RN’s Trip From The Chinese Perspective

December 9, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Book Review, China, Richard Nixon | 2 Comments 

James Humes is the author of a new book filled with new insights on RN’s trip to China.

Former RN speechwriter, historian, author and all around polymath  James Humes was at the Nixon Library on Monday to discuss and sign copies of his new book Only Nixon: “His Trip to China Restudied and Revisited.”

Humes arrived with his co-author Dr.  Jarvis Ryals, and was introduced by the President’s younger brother Ed Nixon, who helped inspire the book when he joined the authors on their trip to China in 1999.

“Only Nixon” is a unique study of RN’s 1972 trip, Humes argues, because it tells the story through the Chinese perspective and addresses key information neglected by scholars and historians.

Humes sat down with Nixon Foundation Vice President Sandy Quinn to discuss his new insights on this latest episode of TNN TV:

Courtesy of TNN contributor and radio talk show host David Stokes, a podcast of Humes full remarks will soon become available.

Clinton on Nixon

November 4, 2009 by David Emig | Filed Under Book Review, Hillary Clinton, History, Presidents, Richard Nixon | 3 Comments 

Just as Nixon was considered the only president who could open diplomatic relations with China, Clinton was the only one who could bestow upon Nixon the kind of public credibility he so desired.

—Monica Crowley

“Nixon in Winter” (1998)

In my library, I try to keep one or two good biographies of each president since FDR.  This timeline of course, corresponds with Richard Nixon’s political career.  The recently released book, “The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President” will not disappoint those who are interested in Richard Nixon and his interactions with Bill Clinton during Nixon’s final years.

Much has been written about President Clinton’s eulogy of President Nixon where Clinton states “may the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.”  In the Clinton Tapes, Clinton told Taylor Branch that he received a lot of grief for the tone of the eulogy.  However, Clinton “wanted to frame Nixon as the last liberal in a larger historical cycle, by highlighting his innovative proposals for the environment, income maintenance, and comprehensive health insurance.”  {See Branch, “The Clinton Tapes,” (2009) p. 153.}

I was struck by how Clinton viewed RN much more sympathically, even though Clinton was from the opposite party and had a different political philosophy.  It is his wife that holds the partisan grudges of the past.  This is illustrated in a story about where Presidential portraits are to be hung in the White House.  Hillary was adamant that the Nixon official portrait be taken upstairs and hidden from view.  {See “Clinton Tapes, p. 284.}

In spite of his wife’s partisanship, President Clinton saw RNs foreign policy experience, especially as it related to Russia in the immediate aftermath of the end of the Cold War; to be the biggest asset to Clinton.  There were other reasons as well, as President Clinton hoped that RN could provide political cover with Republicans in Congress regarding aid to Russia. {p. 124.} RNs trip to Russia in 1993 turned out to be a valuable resource to President Clinton.  The report of the meeting in Russia was in the words of President Clinton: “the most brilliant communication on foreign policy to reach him as president.”  {p. 135.} The former president had a glowing review as well. The following telephone call between the two was “the best conversation with a president I’ve had since I was president”, according to RN. {See Crowley, “Nixon in Winter,” p. 129.}

It was most interesting to compare what the 42^nd thought of the 37^th and vice-versa.  The best source material to accomplish this is Monica Crowley’s second book on her professional time with Nixon, the previously cited “Nixon in Winter.”

According to Crowley, RN wasn’t enamored with Clinton at first.  RN saw that Clinton’s election showed that the country “had adopted a more permissive view of personal morality,” a precedent for lower moral expectations.  {See Crowley, p. 321,322} Still RN courted Clinton from the beginning, writing him a note congratulating Clinton on running an excellent campaign for president in 1992. {p. 103-104.} Crowley notes the irony that it was Senator Bob Dole, the future nominee who would run against Clinton in the next election; as the very person who brought the two together. {p. 127-128}

It would be fair to say that Nixon would still have his doubts about Clinton.  He would cite Clinton’s indecisiveness and failure to lead “were robbing America of the extraordinary power, leverage, and creditability it had done so much to achieve.”  {p. 139} Nevertheless, through renewed access (as RN thought the previous president didn’t consider his advice) Nixon warmed up to Clinton.  He was an attentive pupil in the area of foreign affairs.

Crowley sees the relationship between Clinton and Nixon well:

Nixon was a realist and knew that Clinton sought his advice for his own benefit, not for Nixon’s.  But Nixon, aware that his position close to Clinton’s ear guaranteed him access and influence, flattered Clinton as Clinton flattered him.  It was a mutually beneficial relationship: Clinton got much needed foreign policy advice for the nation’s elder statesman, and Nixon got a measure of public credibility and access to the president. (p. 135}

In several ways, it can be argued that the teacher-student relationship that the new president had with the recognized elder statesman was RNs last attempt of both redemption and service to his country.

Russians Reject Our Reset Button In Favor Of Theirs

October 16, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Book Review, Cold War, History, U.S. History, Vice President Biden | 2 Comments 

U. S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got a lesson in geopolitics this past week. It may be best described by comparing the now-all-rage reset button metaphor to that gizmo put out by office supply giant, Staples – yes, that red button that when pushed says, “That was easy!”

From the moment the use of the term “reset” as a synonym for do-over, start-over, or make-over, entered the political vocabulary – inserted by none other than that wonderful wordsmith, Vice President Joe Biden – it has been applied foremost to our relationship with Russia. But as a recent, likely very reluctantly chosen, headline in the Washington Post indicated, a reset button can often create an error message.

“Russia Not Budging on Iran Sanctions: Clinton Unable to Sway Counterpart,” was how the largely pro-administration paper put it.

This past week, while my wife and I were enjoying a few days in Maine, she went shopping for things for the grandkids and I, as is my very predictable pattern, gravitated toward the local bookstore, this one a newly constructed establishment in Kennebunkport. Among my catch for the day was an interesting and well-written work by Nicholas Thompson, who has, in fact, written for the Washington Post, about two men who greatly influenced U.S. policy during The Cold War – George Kennan and Paul Nitze. The author is actually the grandson of the latter. The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War, is a great read describing two giants who maintained an uneasy friendship, while usually working on opposite sides of the foreign affairs street.

Early in the book, there is a passage about a memo written by George Kennan in May of 1945. The diplomat was living and working in Moscow when the war in Europe ended. Most Cold War buffs, such as myself, know very well of Kennan’s memo writing skills. His February 1946 “long telegram” is considered to be one of the seminal documents of the period, in which he described the Soviet Union’s “neurotic view of world affairs” and the “instinctive Russian sense of insecurity,” not to mention their, “secretiveness and conspiracy.”

But the memo written roughly 10 months earlier, though largely overlooked at the time due to his relatively insignificant role as “nothing more than a highly competent clerk,” is one that all the reset button aficionados in the State Department and elsewhere should revisit right about now.

Kennan began with the quaint, “Peace, like spring, has finally come to Russia,” but the reader is quickly confronted with the fact that the change of seasons was “far more noticeable on the Moscow scene.” And in language similar to what he would use in 1946, he bluntly acknowledged that Joseph Stalin knew just what buttons to push to get the United States to do his bidding. The Russians were already manipulating reality and events and had been all along. Kennan wrote: “They observe with gratification that in this way a great people can be led, like an ever-hopeful suitor, to perform one act of ingratiation after the other without ever reaching the goal which would satisfy its ardor and allay its generosity.”

In case some haven’t noticed, all this talk about the United States pushing the reset button is meaningless because the Russians have long since pushed theirs. And it took them back about 65 years.

Jesus told some of his disciples of the need to be at times “wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” This kind of clear-headed approach balances good intentions with a realistic view of the fact that others may not be operating from similar motives. You can almost see the image of Gorbachev rolling his eyes about now, as he stood next to Ronald Reagan again and again and heard that phrase, “Trust, but verify.”

By the way, is it just me or has anyone else actually tried to reboot a computer to fix a problem only to have the error right there again on the screen when the machine came back on?

Political reset buttons are, of course, pure contrivance. What some are really longing for is to erase the past eight years – or the past 50. Let’s all go back to August of 2001, or December of 1989, or July of 1941 – wouldn’t that be cool? Sure. It also, though – and please get this – can’t happen. To even try to do so is like trying to glean public policy philosophy from the script of Napoleon Dynamite:

Uncle Rico: Kip, I reckon… you know a lot about… cyberspace? You ever come across anything… like time travel?
Kip: Easy, I’ve already looked into it for myself.
Uncle Rico: Right on… right on.

Many these days are betting the future on the fact that the leaders of Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela will approach global politics with the same level wisdom as those serving on the Nobel Peace Prize committee (did they meet in Amsterdam this year?). Good luck with that. Go ahead and press all the reset buttons you can find or create. But in the end, let’s hope that someone, somewhere has kept a paper copy of the map back to reality, because it will certainly be needed.

An aging and seriously ill Franklin Roosevelt gave the store away to Mr. Stalin and company at Yalta. His inexperienced successor, Mr. Truman, didn’t do much better at Potsdam. But of course, they were dealing with a Soviet dictator and we are dealing with Vladimir Putin. Putin is nothing like Stalin, right?

Of course he’s not. Putin is taller and looks better without his shirt (possibly channeling his inner-Mussolini). Anyone knows that.

Actually, Mr. Putin has more in common with the pock-faced “man of steel” than most people care to notice. He is driven by power and operates as his own Lavrentiy Beria. The guy is one dangerous dude.

It took a glorified clerk and a recently-rebooted-out-of-office politician to remind the world that danger was the default human experience. Kennan wrote his telegrams, read by insiders, and a man named Winston Churchill gave a speech about “the sinews of peace” and that ominous “iron curtain,” heard by the world.

Let’s hope that there are clerks somewhere in our camp writing about reality and that their warnings will be noticed. Let’s also pray that there will be voices crying in a wilderness disguised as never-never land, voices that will refuse to be silenced. The message of danger is never a comfortable one to deliver or receive, but without it we may find ourselves with no real comfort zone at all.

I say let’s forget about this whole reset button nonsense. Frankly, what some in Washington should actually be concerned about is an eject button. It is shaped like a lever and every voting booth in the country will be equipped with one over the next few Novembers.

Lessons In Disaster

October 13, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Book Review, Vietnam | 1 Comment 

Courtesy of Kathryn Jones from the The Massachusetts School of Law, here is a recent video of a special q and a with former UN security official Gordon Goldstein on Afghanistan and the lessons learned in Vietnam.

While Sorley’s book A Better War has been passed around the Pentagon, Goldstein’s Lessons In Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam, has been circulating around the White House and is now being read by President Obama.

The Lesson From “A Better War”

October 8, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Afghanistan, Afpak, Book Review, Vietnam | Leave a Comment 

Fred Barnes is also promoting Sorley’s A Better War. He reviewed it ten years ago in The Weekly Standard, and now writes why it is more important than Gordon Goldstein’s Lessons In Disaster:

Sorley’s book is relevant because it points out what actually happened in Vietnam: by employing what we now call a counter-insurgency strategy, American forces had actually won the war by 1970, only to toss it away later by abandoning the South Vietnamese government. That strategy, similar to what has been pursued successfully in Iraq with the “surge,” replaced the failed search-and-destroy effort of General William Westmoreland. Despite this history, search-and-destroy, which had failed in Iraq, is what Vice President Biden and other Democrats are urging in Afghanistan. They refer to it today as counter-terrorism.

The hero in Vietnam was General Creighton Abrams. He concluded that concentrating on killing enemy soldiers, as Westmoreland had, was a losing strategy. Under Abrams, “the object was not destruction but control, and in this case particularly control of the population.” It worked. “There came a time when the war was won,” Sorley writes. “The fighting wasn’t over but the war was won.”

and

A Better War is far more timely and applicable to Afghanistan in 2009 than is Lessons in Disaster, which deals with military pressure on the White House to escalate the American effort in Vietnam in 1965. We know more now than the generals or the politicians did then about what works militarily and what doesn’t. They were stumbling in the dark.

Since the 1960s, two things have happened. As Sorley argues cogently, counter-insurgency worked in Vietnam after counter-terrorism failed. In Iraq, we experienced a rerun of that scenario.

So let’s review the bidding in the current debate on Afghanistan. Biden and many Democrats, reportedly including White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, want the president to adopt a strategy that failed twice and, so far as I know, has never led to success. Gen. McChrystal and Republicans, along with Senator Joe Lieberman and a few other Democrats, are in favor of a strategy that has twice proven to be successful.

Lewis Sorley And A Better War

October 7, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Afghanistan, Book Review, Richard Nixon, Vietnam | 6 Comments 

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the White House and the Pentagon are circulating literature to bolster their respective arguments over the debate in Afghanistan.

For the White House, it’s Gordon Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster (now in President Obama’s hands), which examines Johnson National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy’s  “disavowal” of his previous hawkish stance on the Vietnam War.

For the Pentagon, it’s Lewis “Bob” Sorley’s A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam.

Dr. Sorley — a Vietnam war veteran — argues that with a new counter-insurgency strategy under the leadership of the wunderkind General Creighton Abrams  — who as John Taylor recounts here was Petraeus-like in making momentous gains in Vietnam working under the political cover of President Nixon — the war began to turn.

It wasn’t until the politicians in Congress pulled the rug from underneath General Abrams that Vietnam was effectively lost to the North.

One year ago, Dr. Sorley paid a visit to the Nixon Library, where he gave a lecture on the history and origins of the West Point honor code from his latest book Honor Bright.

Sorely also saved some time for a TNN TV interview on the new battles our military faces, in which he discussed A Better War and the lessons learned from Vietnam:

Update, 11:11 am (pst): The Wall Street Journal has an excerpt of The Better War here.

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.

Missiles, Crocodiles, And Doves

September 18, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Book Review, Europe, History, International Affairs, Iran, Russia | 2 Comments 

Cue the doves in places like Prague, Warsaw, Moscow, Tehran, and Caracas. Peace is at hand. Peace in our time. Central Europe, the region that has provided the kindling for so many of the conflicts that have burst forth into full flame for nearly 100 years, is once again safe from its protectors. Pardon me while I pause to fan myself as I tear up. We have been once more delivered – we, as in all humanity, that is – delivered from the mean old policies of Dubya, and company. The good guys know better. Trust them.

Pardon the preacher in me (it is, in fact, my day job), but I can’t help but think of a scripture, one that has an ominous ring to it, in light of the recent decision by the Obama administration to back away from the previously proposed and planned nuclear missile shield in and around the Czech Republic and Poland.

For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them… – I Thessalonians 5:3 (KJV)

One might call what we are seeing these days Yogi Berra-like foreign policy, as in “It’s déjà vu all over again.” We are underestimating Iran and appeasing Russia – all in the same fell swoop. Remarkable!

Okay, one more time. The year is 1938, and there are some very bad people who are being underestimated by some very, supposedly bright, but actually just incredibly naïve people. Though it happened more than 70 years ago it is still relevant. Its relevance is reinforced each and every time those who play with matches and kindling ignore the obvious-to-anyone-with-a-brain lessons. The story will cease to be relevant when the world finally figures it out. My advice is: Don’t hold your breath.

In fact, the long ago, yet up-to-date, fiasco is known now simply by the city-name-as-a-metaphor, Munich – apologies to that wonderful Bavarian city, a place unfortunate enough to have been an international and diplomatic crime scene. David Faber, the grandson of former British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan, and a former Conservative Member of Parliament (1992-2001), has written a fresh, factual, engaging, definitive, and, well, haunting account of what happened back then.

The book is called, Munich, 1938: Appeasement and World War II.

Appeasement was never really a bad word until it became forever identified with the foreign policy failures in Great Britain under the premiership of Neville Chamberlain. The word itself simply means to pacify or soothe. Most of us understand that there is a measure of this required for peaceful and civilized living and discourse.

But when appeasement met Adolf Hitler, it was manipulated, twisted, scorned, and ultimately dismissed. To put it in the words of Sean Connery playing a character in the 1987 movie The Untouchables, Mr. Chamberlain had brought a knife to a gunfight in Munich. A knife crafted out of a very thin sheet of paper. But our leaders are doing even better – they are throwing the knives away.

The appeasement of the 1930s, gave way to the resolve of the 1940s, but it was a lesson learned the hard way. Is history repeating itself?

I think a better case can be made that history may be reversing itself. Back then, our nation moved from isolation and denial toward eventual engagement. It was a progression that was somewhat understandable – after all, who wants war? Now however, it seems that some are determined to move us from resolution and vigilance – the qualities that have, indeed, kept us safe for the past eight years – toward appeasement.

Think of it this way: It’s one thing to cut Neville Chamberlain some slack for what he did back then with his deliberate policy of appeasement. Many people then had been seduced into a sense of sleepy underestimation of Hitler and his henchmen. After all, even former Prime Minister David Lloyd George had visited the dictator at Berchtesgaden a couple of years earlier and was clearly smitten. He returned home, calling his Nazi host “the greatest living German” and “the George Washington of Germany.” He even had a device installed at his home in Surrey – one that would lower a large picture window into the ground, creating “the feel of a covered terrace.” It was something that had captivated him at the Eagle’s Nest.

Then there was the other Nevile, now largely forgotten in the appeasement story, Nevile Henderson (he spelled his name with only one “L,” unlike the PM, the only apparent difference between the two men). He was the British Ambassador to Germany at the time and was fond of saying things about the Nazis like:

Far too many people have an entirely erroneous conception of what the National Socialist regime really stands for. Otherwise they would lay less stress on Nazi dictatorship and much more emphasis on the great social experiment which was being tried out in Germany.

These days, you could sub out the words “National Socialist” and “Nazi” and “Germany” and insert the names of guys like Putin, Castro, Chavez, et al – and it might sound eerily familiar to some current diplomatic-speak coming out of Washington, or the U.N. But I digress.

Oh, and we must not forget good old Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, better known as the Earl of Halifax, or Lord Halifax. He was Chamberlain’s Foreign Secretary. He had been to Germany, as well – as a hunting guest of Hermann Göring. All of this is chronicled fascinatingly in Faber’s book.

Of course, Winston Churchill – a voice in the wilderness of those days – said, famously: “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile – hoping it will eat him last.”

But again, this was new territory for all of them. In fairness, they had no clue at first that the rules of geopolitics and diplomacy were quickly changing, such a revolution being driven by a mad man. They all saw the light, eventually. And even Winston Churchill, who had been so solitarily tough on his Conservative party brothers over the whole appeasement issue, understood – graciously so – that Chamberlain and company were sincere in what they tried. Speaking at his Downing Street predecessor’s funeral in November of 1940, and as events by then had cruelly proved Neville Chamberlain so sadly wrong, Churchill waxed philosophical:

It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart–the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril, and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour. Whatever else history may or may not say about these terrible, tremendous years, we can be sure that Neville Chamberlain acted with perfect sincerity according to his lights and strove to the utmost of his capacity and authority, which were powerful, to save the world from the awful, devastating struggle in which we are now engaged. This alone will stand him in good stead as far as what is called the verdict of history is concerned.

Now, however, things are both the same and different. We are certainly bearing witness to the forming of threatening storm clouds. And it’s all being largely ignored or minimized by those who should know better. History, yet to be written, will not, however, cut current leaders – who are apparently convinced that today’s threats aren’t substantive or substantial – any such Churchillian slack.

Why? Because we ought to know better. Our experience, sense of the past, not to mention just plain old common sense should scream to this moment: “Crocodiles eat doves!”

The Lion And The Bear

August 28, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Book Review, Cold War, History, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

When then President Bill Clinton spoke at former President Richard Nixon’s funeral, he suggested that the “day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.” The speaker had no clue at the time how much he would need that kind of big-picture graciousness later on, but these sentiments are common on such occasions.

Having been a member of the clergy for 32 years, it has been my duty to officiate memorial services, comforting mourners while doing my best to eulogize the deceased. The word eulogy is rooted in scripture, most often translated as some form of “bless,” it literally means “to speak well of.” It is actually not intrinsically a word for funerals, but that’s where the concept shows up for the most part in our culture.

Apparently the idea is that to eulogize someone before death is, well, premature.

Of course, it is easier to eulogize some people more than others – always the minister’s dilemma. What do you say when there is a shortage of good anecdotal material? Vernon Johns, the legendary, eloquent, and controversial forerunner to Martin Luther King, Jr. in the pastorate of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, reputedly once made quick work of a funeral sermon for a particularly notorious man. Against the grain and at the risk of offending the sensibilities of his very proper audience, he uttered a few sentences about the dead man’s notable wickedness and then ended with an abrupt: “Now, carry out the body!”

But usually it’s nice stuff that is said. Much of it is true and most of it is presented with a positive spin. It is, of course, this way with the various tributes, remembrances, and yes – eulogies – about Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy, who died the other day after a valiant battle with brain cancer.

Mr. Clinton’s fantasy about no bigger-picture judgment notwithstanding, it is simply not realistic, nor is it very honest to ignore the “warts-and-all” aspects of someone’s life en route to putting it all into perspective. His executive order delivered to a crowd of mourners in Yorba Linda, California on April 27, 1994, was not obeyed. In fact, it was almost instantly dismissed, largely because Nixon wasn’t one of “them” – the liberal media elite.

Of course, if someone is a liberal lion and has made a career of championing the “right” (the term used in the sense of “liberally enlightened,” not as a directional cue) causes, it is generally more acceptable to give the person a pass on other embarrassing stuff. Therefore, the scandalous death of a young woman is not a crime, it’s a tragedy that means – in the ultimate example of missing the point – an anointed man won’t ever be president. Yet, even in that “tragedy” there are seeds of hope, because the man gets to become the greatest senator since, like, Cicero.

I have tried very hard to find the basis for authentic eulogy in the current hagiographic moment, but in the final analysis (a pet Kennedy phrase – Jack, Bobby, and Teddy all used it), I find myself frustrated. You see, I really think there are some good things that can be said – and were I speaking at the service, I would emphasize those.

Mr. Kennedy was a surrogate father, and effectively so, to the children of his fallen brothers. I find that endearing and worthy of commendation. He also seemed to mellow in later years, following his marriage to Vickie Reggie in 1992. She may have tamed, or at least tempered the lion. And he once helped conservative columnist Mona Charen parallel park her minivan on a busy Washington, D.C. street.

But again, in the final analysis (it really is a very good phrase) it is hard, in fact virtually impossible, to ignore the enormous body of evidence that so obviously speaks to the fact that Ted Kennedy was a deeply flawed man, who could here-and-there do some good things.

Most of his flaws are being noised about right now, but one that seems to regularly escape public view has to do with the Lion of the Senate’s machinations at a particularly crucial moment during the Cold War.

The year is 1983, and it is beginning to appear that Ronald Reagan will be virtually unbeatable for reelection the next year. One of the Gipper’s passions is to end the Cold War – and he is a strong advocate of peace through strength. Reagan is playing hardball with his Soviet counterpart, former KGB (once KGB, always KGB) chief, now premier, Yuri Andropov over the potential deployment of Pershing II missiles in Western Europe.

Years later, a letter from that time (May 1983) held in KGB files surfaced, one that reflects very badly on the man being remembered right now. It was written to Andropov by KGB head, Viktor Chebrikov and labeled “Special Importance.” The subject head read: “Regarding Senator Kennedy’s request to the General Secretary of the Communist Party Y.V. Andropov.” Apparently, long-time Kennedy friend, former U. S. Senator (D-CA), John Tunney – the son of Dempsey-beating heavyweight boxing champion, Gene Tunney – had recently visited Moscow and acted as Ted’s emissary.

The would-be Lion was reaching out to the big-bad Bear.

The letter is interesting to say the least – and also a window into the political soul of Mr. Kennedy, who is now being remembered for his propensity for bi-partisanship (?). The senator from Massachusetts was clearly interested in undermining Mr. Reagan politically, and flying close to the flame of actual treason. Among the things the letter said were:

Kennedy believes that, given the current state of affairs, and in the interest of peace, it would be prudent and timely to undertake the following steps to counter the militaristic politics of Reagan and his campaign to psychologically burden the American people. In this regard, he offers the following proposals to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Y.V. Andropov.

1. Kennedy asks Y.V. Andropov to consider inviting the senator to Moscow for a personal meeting in July of this year. The main purpose of the meeting, according to the senator, would be to arm Soviet officials with explanations regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they may be better prepared and more convincing during appearances in the USA. He would also like to inform you that he has planned a trip through Western Europe, where he anticipates meeting England’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French President Mitterand in which he will exchange similar ideas regarding the same issues.

If his proposals would be accepted in principle, Kennedy would send his representative to Moscow to resolve questions regarding organizing such a visit.

Wait, there’s more:

2. Kennedy believes that in order to influence Americans it would be important to organize in August-September of this year, televised interviews with Y.V. Andropov in the USA. A direct appeal by the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to the American people will, without a doubt, attract a great deal of attention and interest in the country. The senator is convinced this would receive the maximum resonance in so far as television is the most effective method of mass media and information.

If the proposal is recognized as worthy, then Kennedy and his friends will bring about suitable steps to have representatives of the largest television companies in the USA contact Y.V. Andropov for an invitation to Moscow for the interviews. Specifically, the president of the board of directors of ABC, Elton Raul and television columnists Walter Cronkite or Barbara Walters could visit Moscow. The senator underlined the importance that this initiative should be seen as coming from the American side.

This entire episode is described in detail by historian Paul Kengor in his book, “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan And The Fall Of Communism.”

Had this all come to light back then, would Ted Kennedy have been able to survive politically? No one, of course, knows the answer to that question, but it is possible that the brightness might have faded from Camelot’s apparently endless “brief and shining moment.”

Now, here we are more than a quarter of a century later, with the Cold War a fading memory – a conflict won by our side largely through the work of Mr. Reagan and in spite of Mr. Kennedy – reviewing a life writ large. With all the eulogies – all the attempts, rightly so, to “speak well of” someone in the tender moments following his passing – let us resolve “in the final analysis” not to give him a complete pass on the things he did that fell short. Some of those things really mattered.

Rules For Witnesses

August 7, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, Cold War, Congress, Domestic issues, Economic issues, Faith, Healthcare, History, Movies, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, Public Opinion, Religion, U.S. History | 15 Comments 

There is a scene early on in the movie Patton, where the feisty general watches the forces under his command do battle with those led by the legendary German Panzer leader, Erwin Rommel. To prepare for this particular skirmish, “Old Blood and Guts” studied the writings of his adversary, prompting the memorable line uttered in a gravely voice by actor George C. Scott: “Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!”

Later, the general found out that Rommel himself had not actually been present for the confrontation, but he is comforted by an aid: “If you defeat Rommel’s plan, then you defeat Rommel.”

It is a fascinating thing when an adversary ironically uses a methodology that was previously owned by an opponent – especially when he does so with surprising effectiveness. When a football team known for its excellent running game throws the bomb on the first play from scrimmage, when a home run hitter bunts, and when a political adversary takes a page from the book of the other guy, well – you gotta love it.

Under any credible definition of the phrase “dazed and confused” there now appears the look on Nancy Pelosi’s face. Yes, that one. That, “we are the good guys, why are people giving us a hard time, they must be Nazis, or just nuts” look. Surely you’ve seen it. I have had a persistent “where-have-I-seen-that-look-before?” feeling when seeing the speaker’s visage on the screen, but it took me a while to make the connection.

The date is December 21, 1989 – the place Bucharest, Romania. Nicolae Ceauşescu, the man who had ruled his country with an iron first for a couple of decades, was on his balcony trying to address an increasingly unruly crowd. It was a moment of truth for the dictator. The look on his face – one of complete incomprehension – was one of the Kodak moments capturing the scene at the end of the Cold War.

That look might be described by my grandkids as: “clueless.” Others might simply say that it is a facial expression that begs the question, “what the?” But it is a look that is botoxed in place for Ms. Pelosi. And that same expression has recently been found on the faces of many members of the House and Senate as they have gone home to meet with constituents.

Sadly, the time has come in America where recess is no longer any fun.

What Nancy Pelosi is seeing is her side being on the receiving end of some of the kind of methodological medicine the left has been forcing down the country’s throat for quite a long time. I recently got around to reading Saul Alinsky’s book, Rules for Radicals. Yes, I know I should have done so long ago, but I thought I had a good enough grasp on what the man said back in 1971 via the thorough treatment his musings have received from the conservative punditry.

I was wrong. My bad. Every American should read it. It’s chilling.

I believe what we are now witnessing is a case of people being, as the saying goes (and as is actually used in Alinsky’s book) “hoisted with their own petard.” Fire is being fought with fire. The reflexive dismissal of angry citizens showing up at town hall meetings these days to give Washington insiders a piece of their mind as somehow orchestrated, notwithstanding.

This is not a top-down campaign with a few sinister puppeteers pulling the strings. The opposition to liberal health care machinations and other stuff is very real. What they see as orchestration is actually mobilization. And it is only the beginning. We are, I think, on the verge of seeing one of the great collapses of political popularity and good will in American history. The nation is on the verge of a Network moment, where “Yes, we can” is being drowned out with cries of “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

George Washington died because of misguided notions about how getting the bad blood out via leeches would cure his ailment. It was a case of a cure that killed. Sure, his cold was gone, but so was he. In a sense, the draconian measures some would use to remake our nation’s fabric, from health care, to national security, to the economy itself, are somewhat akin to bleeding the nation en route to restoration. All this will do is make us weaker. Or dead.

I shared a sermon last Sunday at my church based on a haunting passage from the writings of the prophet Jeremiah called, A Dying Nation At A Crossroads. The prophet was a patriot, but he knew that sometimes patriotism involves even more than waving a flag – a stand must be taken. His message was:

“Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.” Jeremiah 6:16 (New International Version)

Jeremiah was speaking to a nation at a pivotal moment – a time that called for clear thinking and action. They had been on a slippery slope for a long time and the clock was running out. Nothing short of a return to what made them strong – even great – in the first place would correct the problem.

The week Winston Churchill traveled to diminutive Fulton, Missouri to deliver his most famous speech – the one that talked about a sinister iron curtain born of Soviet expansionism – Time Magazine published a review of two recently publish books. One was a work by Frederick L. Schuman, the Woodrow Wilson professor of government at Williams College, called Soviet Politics. It was basically a defense of the Soviet system. The other was by Saul Alinsky, who had written Reveille For Radicals, the spiritual ancestor of his 1971 work. The title of the review was: Problem Of The Century.

The reviewer suggested that, “the dominant problem of the 20th century is the reconciliation of economic liberty with political liberty.” He saw this issue resolved in Schuman’s book by simply “liquidating political liberty.” He saw Alinsky’s ideas in a little more favorable light, suggesting that it was written with a “burning honesty” and that the author had “glimpsed a vision which is greater than his ability to put it in practical terms.”

In other words, the review for Time saw something constructive in what Alinsky was saying in those days immediately following World War II and as the Cold War was just barely being noised about. But he indicated that only time would really tell.

In fact, that reviewer did not live long enough to see the fruit of Saul Alinsky’s attempt to put his vision into those “practical terms” in Rules For Radicals. He died 10 years before that. His name was Whitaker Chambers.

He never got to write a review of that book, but he did write one of his own and it became a classic called simply, Witness. It was his treatise as a man who had once been a communist, even an agent. Then he had seen the light and spent the rest of his days fighting, at a great personal price, his former faith. Along the way, he exposed a traitor or two, gaining him the wrath of the liberal elite in America, though he has long since been vindicated as a truth-teller by many infallible proofs.

He began his book with a letter to his children, letting them know the nature of the struggle and the craftiness of the enemy:

Communists are bound together by no secret oath. The tie that binds them across the frontiers of nations, across barriers of language and differences of class and education, in defiance of religion, morality, truth, law, honor, the weaknesses of the body and the irresolutions of the mind, even unto death, is a simple conviction: It is necessary to change the world.

It is not new. It is, in fact, man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’ It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man’s relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God.

It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man’s liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man’s destiny and reorganizing man’s life and the world.

The Communist vision has a mighty agitator and a mighty propagandist. They are the crisis. The agitator needs no soapbox. It speaks insistently to the human mind at the point where desperation lurks. The propagandist writes no Communist gibberish. It speaks insistently to the human mind at the point where man’s hope and man’s energy fuse to fierceness. The vision inspires. The crisis impels.

Too bad Mr. Chambers didn’t live to see the demise of such thinking. But then again…

More On “Inherent Vice”

August 4, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Book Review, Culture, Nixon Administration, Presidents, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Last week I posted about Inherent Vice, the new novel by Thomas Pynchon set in Los Angeles during the spring and early summer of 1970 – that is, in the second year of the Nixon Administration. Today the book went on sale nationwide, and to promote it Penguin Press, its publisher, put up a video clip on Youtube depicting scenes in the book’s “Gordita Beach” (recognizably Manhattan Beach, where Pynchon lived for much of the 1960s and very early 1970s), and narrated by a voice sounding very much like the one credited to the publicity-shy writer on two episodes of The Simpsons. Penguin is not confirming or denying that Pynchon is heard on the clip. It’s accompanied by music that seems to be some version of Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive,” though perhaps performed by some other band.

From page 117 of Inherent Vice, with my notes in brackets:

Sauncho [Smilax, an associate of the book's detective protagonist "Doc" Sportello] had been out all day and night with a posse of federales aboard a garishly overequipped vessel belonging to the Justice Department, visiting a site previously identified as the spot where the Golden Fang [a mysterious ship that figures prominently in the book] was supposed to have left some kind of lagan [a nautical term referring to material deposited in the ocean]. Divers went down to have a look and, as the light shifted over the ocean, presently were bringing up one connex [sic: this seems to be a typo and Pynchon is probably referring to Conex portable containers] after another full of shrink-wrapped bundles of US currency [...] except that upon opening the containers, imagine how surprised everybody was to find that, instead of the usual dignitaries, Washington, Lincoln, Franklin or whoever, all these bills, no matter which denomination, seemed to have Nixon’s face on them. For an instant a federal joint task force paused to wonder if they might not after all, the whole boatload of them, be jointly hallucinating. Nixon was staring wildly at something just out of sight past the edge of the cartouche, almost cringing out of the way his eyes strangely unfocused, as if he had himself been abusing some novel Asian psychedelic.

According to intelligence contacts of Sancho’s, it had been common CIA practice for a while to put Nixon’s face on phony North Vietnamese bills, as part of a scheme to destabilize the enemy currency by airdropping millions of these fakes during routine bombing raids over the north. But Nixonizing US currency this was was not as easily explained, or sometimes even appreciated.

It may be that Pynchon is alluding to the recession (and the beginning of the raging inflation of the 1970s) that was underway at the time the events of his book take place. But it’s hard to tell; a page or so later the book’s characters are wondering why it is that, since there’s “Chicken of the Sea,” there is not also “Tuna of the Farm” – it’s that kind of a novel.

And a page or so after that, the President himself shows up to speak at the Century Plaza Hotel, to a group calling itself “Vigilant California.” (In real life RN did appear at the hotel in 1970, but at a press conference in June, a month or so after the time in which this passage takes place.) One of the book’s characters shows up to heckle him, and is dragged from the room by security as the President remarks a la Futurama, “Better get him to a hippie drug clinic.”

Incidentally, the mystery of the underwater currency never is cleared up – like much of what takes place in Inherent Vice.

Pynchon In Nixonland

July 31, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Book Review, Culture, Nixon Administration, Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Thomas Pynchon, the mystery man of modern American letters (though not exactly all that mysterious – his voice is, after all, a familiar one to regular viewers of reruns of The Simpsons), has a new novel out in about a week. Its title is Inherent Vice, and it’s his venture into detective fiction, in which, according to the early reviews, he brings his customary blend of hazy paranoia, eccentric characters, and goofiness alternating with high seriousness to the hard-boiled tradition of Hammett, Chandler and Ross Macdonald (who, of course, had some of their qualities in their own work).

Pynchon often writes in an historical setting. Much of V., his first book, takes place in pre-WWI Europe. Gravity’s Rainbow, his most acclaimed novel, sets its action in a hallucinatory Europe of WWII. Mason & Dixon features the adventures of the two famed Englishmen in the 1760s as they the line bearing their name, and Against The Day, his thousand-page 2006 opus, describes a plot occuring between the 1880s and 1919.  Inherent Vice is set in a past now much more distant than the Second World War was in 1973 when Gravity’s Rainbow appeared – the Los Angeles of 1970.  Yes, Pynchon, who reportedly lived in the LA suburb of Manhattan Beach in that time, is now giving his diverse readership a tale of the days of bell-bottoms and waterbeds. As Christopher Taylor reports in his review in tomorrow’s Guardian:

Although Doc [Sportello, the private-eye protagonist of Inherent Vice] himself is vague about what year it is, the novel is also located quite firmly during the run-up to Charles Manson’s trial, which started in June 1970. The murders committed by Manson’s followers are a well-worn symbol for the end of the 60s, and we’re encouraged to see Doc as a kind of anti-Manson, Manson’s non-evil double. Nixon and Reagan are much discussed too, making the book serve as a loose prequel to Vineland [Pynchon's 1990 novel set in Northern California] in which burned-out hippies and fascist cops get to grips with Reagan’s America. Yet the book’s most effective crushing-of-the-60s-dream scenes are more equivocal about who or what did the crushing than the plot’s top-down conspiracy suggests. Watching people in a record shop listening to rock’n'roll on headphones "in solitude, confinement and mutual silence", or passing through a town where old TV shows are endlessly reviewable, Doc gets glimpses of "how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all", with technology dispersing communality as much as aiding it.

This is not the first time the 37th President has shown up in Pynchon’s fiction. In 1972, the writer selected a quote from Joni Mitchell’s song "The Circle Game" to use as the epigraph to the final section of Gravity’s Rainbow (at that stage still titled Mindless Pleasures). Reportedly, his publisher could not secure permission to use the quote (which appeared in the advance galleys of the book), so at the last minute Pynchon inserted instead the single word "What?" and attributed it to RN (who also appears in the last pages of that book under the name Richard M. Zhlubb). 

No word yet on whether Spiro Agnew shows up in the new novel.

Correction: The Joni Mitchell song Pynchon quoted in the original text of Gravity’s Rainbow  was "Cactus Tree" from her first album rather than "The Circle Game," and the lines he used for an epigraph were:

She has brought them to her senses,
They have laughed inside her laughter;
Now, she rallies her defenses
For she fears that no one will ask her
For eternity
And she’s so busy being free

Support Your Local Sharia

July 31, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Book Review, Cold War, Europe, Immigration, Islam, Islam and the West, Religion, Terrorism, War on Terror | 2 Comments 

It is pretty clear at this point that barring some kind of last minute reality check the Fairfax County (Virginia) Board of Supervisors will approve the Islamic Saudi Academy’s application for a special exemption this Monday, August 3rd.   This will enable the Saudi-funded madrasa to expand and plant even deeper roots in America’s backyard, teaching in the anti-democratic traditions of wahhabism.

It will happen despite the fact that neighboring home owners associations are opposed, the land use and legal issues argue against the school and would have been a death knell to any other application, and the academy in question has on many occasions failed to honor previous county agreements, not to mention state law.  

Oh, and the wise ones on the panel defiantly refuse to factor in the fact that the Saudi curriculum taught at ISA is filled with hateful things that most Americans would find repugnant – even dangerous.   We’re not talking about mere religious ideas.  What has been taught there in the past should have caused the powers that be to shut the place down years ago.

Interestingly, just a few days ago one of the academy’s past students – in fact, a former valedictorian and a young man voted “most likely to be martyred” (really) named Ahmed Omar Abu Ali – was resentenced to life in prison for plotting with al-Qaeda and trying to kill President George W. Bush.  As the cool song says: “I believe the children are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way.”  He graduated in 1999, bounced around for a bit and wound up in Saudi Arabia in 2002.

In his written confession, Abu Ali said: “It was decided that I would go [to the United States] and live a normal life [overtly] to keep attention away from me, marry a Christian woman, and at the same time I would prepare as best I could for operations.”  If all this seems decidedly inconsistent for someone who practices a religion of virtue and peace, bear in mind that there is an Islamic doctrine called taqiyya.  What it basically means is that deceit is a legitimate weapon when dealing with infidels (read: “We the People”).

Grasping the fact that our determined enemies will at times use monumental deceit to further their cause is imperative right now.   The members of the Fairfax County panel seem oblivious to this. More than a quarter of a century ago the board of supervisors denied a similar application by a Christian school, citing traffic concerns.   Of course, the traffic is much better now.  Right.

“I cannot put the safety of the American citizenry at risk,” said U.S. District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee, when he handed down Abu Ali’s sentence.  Good call, your honor.  Now, would you ever consider becoming a county supervisor? 

Christopher Caldwell, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, has written a book called, Reflections On The Revolution In Europe.  In it he notes: “In the middle of the 20th century, there were virtually no Muslims in Western Europe.  At the turn of the 21st century, there were between 15 and 17 million.”  Now in many major European cities the most common baby names Mohamed, Ayoub, Hamza, etc.

He suggests that these Muslims have not assimilated, but rather have formed “a parallel society.”  And they are bringing anti-Semitism back big time.

“Imagine that the West,” Caldwell writes, “at the height of the Cold War, had received a mass inflow of immigrants from Communist countries who were ambivalent about which side they supported.  Something similar is taking place now.”

And it’s not just happening over there.

The expansion of the Islamic Saudi Academy may not seem to be that big of a deal to some and certainly the members of the board of supervisors see no threat in allowing them to get a better foothold.   But such things are, in fact, part of a pattern of denial and outright stupidity on the part of people who should be intelligent enough to know better. 

Convinced, though, of the liberal notion of “enlightened tolerance,” such political leaders are playing a dangerous game of mindless appeasement.   There is a growing subculture in this country, a network of nefarious groups sharing a common theo-political vision for taking over everything.  Operating under the aegis of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and so many others, they all say one thing, while doing another.  

Ignore what they say; watch what they do.

Their unmistakable goal is the dominance of Sharia-law in this country – the world for that matter.   In other words, they envision a political overthrow and remaking of everything we know, love, and hold dear as Americans.  And they are using the Bill of Rights and opportunities created by a systemic decrease in vigilance to gain ground toward their objective. 

I believe in the Christian faith.  I therefore do not believe in the tenets of Islam.  Nor am I into Buddhist doctrine.   I do, though, believe in religious liberty and free speech.  But what we are seeing is a case where religious liberty and free speech have become weapons in the hands of would-be terrorists and tyrants.  

I will defend with all my heart the right of any Muslim to pray and live according to the precepts of that faith.  I will also do all in my power to bear witness about Christianity in the free marketplace of ideas.  But if anyone, in the name of religion, or under its cloak, seeks the overthrow of the very system that grants us those freedoms, that’s where the line is drawn. 

Free speech ends with the cry of fire in a crowded theater.   Religious freedom ends when there is deception en route to coercion that would ultimately lead to an end of liberty for all.   And no municipality or government entity should deliberately ignore the toxicity of certain ideas that would undermine the Constitution.
 
What if the Ku Klux Klan wanted to put a school in Fairfax County?  How about if Kim Jong-il decided to put a nice North Korean institution in our backyard – fully funded?   I imagine such enterprises would not even get a hearing.   Why then the Saudis?  The wahhabism taught at the Islamic Saudi Academy should be every bit as objectionable to freedom-loving Americans as what some other enemy might espouse.  

But some might ask: What about “moderate” Muslims?   Well, as Bruce Bawer points out in his book, Surrender: Appeasing Islam – Sacrificing Freedom, “that while there are such things has moderate and liberal Christianity, there is no such thing as a moderate or liberal Islam.  Yes, there are millions of good-hearted individuals who identify themselves as Muslims and who have no enmity in their hearts for their non-Muslim neighbors and coworkers.  Some of these Muslims are religiously observant, some are not; but their moderation is not an attribute of the brand of Islam to which they officially subscribed but is, rather, a measure of their own individual character.” 

In other words, their moderation comes not from a particular interpretation or variant, but rather “they have chosen to put a certain distance between their own religious thought and practice and the strict tenets of institutional Islam.”

Those of us in Fairfax who oppose the expansion of the Islamic Saudi Academy will likely have to concede defeat this Monday. But in doing so we will long remember – at least until the next county election – where the supervisors stood on the issue.   Stay tuned.

It appears that many liberal-minded types want us to be more like Europe and their views may be ascendant these days, but those who see European-socialistic-democracy as a model for our future should pay attention to how it is being threatened by an enemy within. 

As Mr. Caldwell says in his new book about what is happening there, “When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture (Europe’s) meets a culture that is anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines (Islam’s) it is generally the former than changes to suit the latter.”

 

Which Revolution?

July 3, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, Europe, History, Holidays, Religion, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

In my opinion, the best part of John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address on January 20, 1961, had nothing to do with asking anyone anything. The moment to remember was when he said:

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe – the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God. We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution.

It is interesting, even sadly ironic that what is going on in our nation right now does resemble an old revolutionary spirit, but not necessarily that of Lexington, Concord, or Philadelphia. In fact, a case can be made – if one looks closely – that the spirit of 2009 is more like the spirit of 1789 than 1776.

The American and French Revolutions are linked in our minds because of chronology; but they were vastly different affairs. One led to a new birth of freedom; the other to terror and tyranny. That one also became the model for horrors to come.

As our nation morphs its way along, en route to becoming what some liberal diehards very much want it to be, a significant number of people would seemingly prefer “Liberty – Equality – Fraternity” over “Life – Liberty – and the Pursuit of Happiness.” And it is in the parsing of those vitally important words that we find the keys to understanding where we came from, where we are, and where we are going.

One revolution was about individual rights and dreams. The other was about “the people” as a group and the highest virtue being “the greater good.” Can you guess which one is which?

When Thomas Jefferson wrote about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence, he was borrowing from 17th century English philosopher, John Locke, whose triad was “life, liberty, and the pursuit of property.” Jefferson’s use of this language was clearly designed to describe the rights of individual people to live free, be free, and freely pursue their dreams in a free marketplace. Those thoughts were very much in presence in that Philadelphia birthing room.

The French Revolution, on the other hand – though similar to what happened here in the sense of changing things and breaking free from an old order – had little to do with individual rights. It was all about collectivism. And in many ways, the French Revolution is the ancestor of all totalitarian systems to follow. Hitler, Mussolini, Pol Pot Lenin, and all other political gangsters were heirs of Robespierre and later, Napoleon. Those tyrannical manifestations were not misguided aberrations – distortions of something that started out good (like Lenin was cool, too bad Stalin messed it all up) – the seeds of the horror were present at the beginning.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 18th century Enlightenment philosopher, had written about volonté générale or “general will” and the Jacobins, followed by others, ran with it insisting that voice of “the people” could best, actually only, be expressed by so-called enlightened leaders.

Our revolution indeed drew a measure of strength from the Enlightenment, but it was of the earlier Locke variety. And America’s use of Enlightenment concepts was tempered by something else; something that set it apart from what happened in France – a spiritual foundation.

Vive la revolution – Vive la difference.

The French not only declared war on the monarchy, they also attacked Christianity, replacing it with a religion of the state, introducing the worship of secularism. Sound familiar?

In America, it was very different. Now, I am not one of those who spends a lot of time trying to prove the Christian bona fides of our founding fathers, but I do believe that the influence of The Great Awakening, which ended about 20 years before the shot heard around the world was fired, was still very much a part of our national fabric at the time. And another such movement, usually referred to as The Second Great Awakening began while the French were unsuccessfully trying to figure out how to be free. To ignore those religious and cultural movements in America is to miss an important piece of the puzzle.

You see, the very concepts of liberty, equality, and fraternity sound nice and make for great propaganda. But in the end, without virtue born of something deeper and greater, it all ends up looking the same. This is why all totalitarian regimes like to call their realms The Peoples’ this or that – like The Peoples Republic of China, or Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or The Peoples Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Fast-forward 200 plus years and here we are remembering our revolutionary beginning. As we do so, let us beware of those who share our vocabulary, but use a different dictionary.

Are we still about the individual, personal, hard-fought-for rights: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, or does the cry: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity seem to increasingly be the spirit of this age?

The reason it has all worked and endured so well in this land is because we are a nation “under God.” There I said it. There is no real liberty without that. All attempts at actual freedom end up moving toward tyranny without some sense of higher purpose and power. I believe firmly in the separation of church and state. But minus positive religious influence, a nation cannot long remain free.

Thomas Paine’s story should be a cautionary tale. He, of course, wrote Common Sense in early 1776, and it was by all accounts vital to shaping public opinion in support of our patriotic ancestors. He was a revolutionary. In fact, there is a new book out by Glenn Beck, bearing the title Common Sense, using Mr. Paine’s ideas as a springboard for his own thoughts about what is wrong with America and how to fix it. I have read Beck’s book and like it. But I certainly hope he doesn’t write a sequel, or at least delve further into Thomas Paine’s bag of literary tricks to make future points about saving America.

Mr. Paine helped us early on, but as he moved on and shared more of his thinking via his acerbic pen, he expressed ideas that, while probably resonating with some today, would in no way mesh with the spirit of 1776.

While Common Sense supported the ideas of freedom, small government, and even low taxes – all very much part of that old revolutionary spirit – by the time the French were acting out his writings became increasingly more radical. When parts one and two of his work, The Rights of Man, appeared in 1791 and 1792, he became a pariah in England and fled to France like where he was treated like a hero, being made an honorary citizen of the republic. But by this time, his writings advocated a progressive income tax, public works for the unemployed, and guaranteed minimum incomes.

And don’t even get me started on his next bestseller, The Age Of Reason; a rant against revealed religion. Paine died virtually alone and penniless in 1809. Only six people attended his funeral.

This of course, brings us back full circle to the thesis of this article – that concepts of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, expressed individually (the intent of our founders), can only keep from drifting toward collectivism when there is a spiritual impulse – or at least a spiritual pulse.

C. S. Lewis said it very well in The Screwtape Letters more than 65 years ago:

Hidden in the heart of this striving for Liberty there was also a deep hatred of personal freedom. That invaluable man Rousseau first revealed it. In his perfect democracy, only the state religion is permitted, slavery is restored, and the individual is told that he has really willed (though he didn’t know it) whatever the Government tells him to do. From that starting point, via Hegel (another indispensable propagandist on our side), we easily contrived both the Nazi and the Communist state. Even in England we were pretty successful. I heard the other day that in that country a man could not, without a permit, cut down his own tree with his own axe, make it into planks with his own saw, and use the planks to build a tool shed in his own garden.

On The Jimmy Carter Years

June 21, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Book Review | Leave a Comment 

TNN’s very own Frank Gannon has a comprehensive and new book review on this very subject at the Wall Street Journal: Ken Mattison’s What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President? Jimmy Carter, America’s Malaise, and the Speech That Should Have Changed the Country.

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