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.

The Amazing Colossal Presidency

June 19, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, Comedy, History, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, Presidents, U.S. History | 2 Comments 

In April of 1979, a week or so after the nuclear-near-disaster at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Saturday Night Live did a sketch featuring Dan Akroyd as President Jimmy Carter. Playing on the idea that Carter had a background in engineering and nuclear physics, Akroyd insisted on visiting a place called cryptically, “Two Mile Island,” and his character was exposed to contaminated water.

Rosalyn Carter: Where is Jimmy? I have a right to see him!
Ross Denton: Mrs. Carter, the president is receiving special treatment right now.
Rosalyn Carter: What kind of special treatment? Why can’t I see him?
Ross Denton: Mrs. Carter, this is Dr. Edna Casey. Perhaps she can explain better than I what has happened to the president.
Dr. Edna Casey: Mrs. Carter, your husband was exposed to massive doses of radiation. Now this has affected the entire cell structure of his body and greatly accelerated the growth process.
Rosalyn Carter: Well, what does that mean?
Dr. Edna Casey: It means, Mrs. Carter, your husband, President Carter, has become THE AMAZING COLOSSAL PRESIDENT.
Rosalyn Carter: Well how big is he?
Dr. Edna Casey: Well Mrs. Carter, it’s difficult to comprehend just how big he is but to give you some idea, we’ve asked comedian Rodney Dangerfield to come along today to help explain it to you. Rodney?
Ross Denton: Rodney, can you please tell us, how big is the president?
Rodney Dangerfield: Oh, he’s a big guy – I’ll tell you that – he’s a big guy. I tell you he’s so big, I saw him sitting in the George Washington Bridge dangling his feet in the water! He’s a big guy!

It was a funny bit. But it’s not so funny to see life imitate art these days.

The founding fathers and framers of the constitution were very concerned about vesting too much energy in the American chief executive. In his book, The Cult Of The Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion To Executive Power, Gene Healy reminds us that many these days see it as “the president’s job to protect us from harm, to ‘grow the economy,’ to spread democracy and American ideals abroad, and even to heal spiritual malaise.” In fact, this job description is completely foreign to what was created back in the day. “If the public expects the president to deal with all national problems, physical or spiritual,” he writes, “then the president will seek – or seize – the power necessary to handle that responsibility.”

In other words, an amazing colossal presidency.

So, how did we go from what the constitution meant to where we are now? The trouble began around the turn of the 20th century and the Progressive movement. And it was very much an equal opportunity problem – with Democrats and Republicans to blame.

A careful look at the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson yields abundant clues about how we got here. TR was a Republican and a strenuous occupant of the White House – and in many ways, admirably so. He is seen by many today as a hero, though it is likely that his personal qualities inspire people more than his actual policies or approach to the presidency itself. He was a man of courage and confidence. His post-presidential speech about “The Man In The Arena” is one of my favorites.

Mr. Roosevelt, however – all his wonderful traits notwithstanding – dramatically expanded the role of the presidency and with it the expectations of Americans. Then later, Woodrow Wilson picked up where Teddy left off and transformed the office into one that became, in fact, an amazing colossal presidency. And it wasn’t a good thing.

The day after his election in November of 1912, Wilson told his party chairman: “Before we proceed, I want it understood that I owe you nothing. Remember that God ordained that I should be the next President of the United States.” I think he may have showered in contaminated water that very morning. He was, after all, from Jersey.

Wilson had written a book back in 1908 entitled Constitutional Government. In it, he talked about his views of the presidency: “The President is at liberty, both in law, and conscience, to be as big a man as he can.” His administration was living proof of this. This so-called “Progressive” man was a civil liberties wrecking crew, though revered by most Democrats today as a hero – even a saint. The nation under Wilson, and at the end of The Great War, was as close to totalitarianism as it had ever been. An editorial in The New Republic on November 16, 1918, gives a snapshot of what the country looked like, and this periodical clearly saw all of it as great:

The whole issue hinges on social control. For forty years we have been widening the sphere of this control, subordinating the individual to the group and the group to society. Without such control, vastly magnified, we should not have been able to carry on the war. We conscripted lives, property, and services; we took over railroads, telegraphs and other economic instruments. We fixed wages, prices, the quantity of coal, power, labor or transportation a man might command, and the quantity of food we might consume. All this we did on the narrowest of legal bases, for no one dared question our power.

It did happen here – thanks to an amazing colossal presidency.

In between Teddy and Woody came William Howard Taft. Now largely dismissed by historians as a presidential failure, what it is missed is how much of a voice of reason he was. Roosevelt’s handpicked successor ratified by the voters in 1908, Taft and TR eventually had a falling out and conducted a party-dividing battle for the 1912 Republican nomination. Taft won that race, but Teddy decided to run as a third-party candidate that November, effectively conceding the overall election to Mr. Wilson.

It was humiliating for Taft and while in the political wilderness he wrote a book about the presidency entitled, Our Chief Magistrate and His Powers. What he had to say back then needs to be read, and read again by Americans today, in this new age of the amazing colossal presidency:

Ascribing an undefined residuum of power to the President is an unsafe doctrine and…it might lead under emergencies to results of an arbitrary character, doing irremediable injustice to private right. The mainspring of such a view is that the executive is charged with responsibility for the welfare of all the people in a general way, that he is to play the part of a universal Providence and set all things right, and that anything that in his judgment will help the people he ought to do, unless he is expressly forbidden not to do it. The wide field of action that this would give to the executive, one can hardly limit.

Warren Harding appointed William Howard Taft as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1921, the only job he ever really wanted. Harding also undid much of the damage Mr. Wilson had done to the economy, not to mention liberty itself.

Sure, Harding had his share of personal problems. And Taft was not too great on the campaign trail. But compared to some of the amazing colossal presidents we have had, I think the men who served before and after Wilson look better than the man in the middle, and even in some ways, though it’s hard to admit, than the man in the arena.

Michael Ramirez Talks Cartoons

June 14, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Book Review, Nixon Library events, TNN TV | Leave a Comment 

Michael Ramirez, the Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonist and opinion editor for Investor’s Business Daily was at the Nixon Library Wednesday where  he discussed the current political landscape and presented a slide show of some of his award winning cartoons.

Afterward, Ramirez signed copies of his new book Everyone Has The Right To My Opinion.

He also gave TNN TV some time for an interview,  discussing the impact of editorial cartooning on the political process:

Caesar Salad With A Kaiser Roll

June 12, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Book Review, History, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

Lebisch: Rabbi! May I ask you a question?
Rabbi: Certainly, Lebisch!
Lebisch: Is there a proper blessing… for the Tsar?
Rabbi: A blessing for the Tsar? Of course! May God bless and keep the Tsar… far away from us!

Why is it that so many Americans are enamored of the title “czar” these days, and why are we the people apparently so willing to sit idly by while various areas of national turf become autocratic fiefdoms?

For several decades now, it has been fashionable to call someone who – usually during a crisis – demonstrates bold leadership minus the annoying details of complete accountability, a czar. We admire the go-for-it person who seizes the reins of a troubled entity and eventually makes its trains run on time. In the private sector, this is seen as effective leadership.

But in the political realm, there is something awkward, even unseemly, about referring to someone who is tasked with oversight of an area of public policy as the equivalent of the kind of ogre this country was founded to get away from in the first place. A czar was a king, an imperial autocrat. The title is a form of “Caesar,” and in Russia – where the role was perfected – it was “Tsar.” But the big bear wasn’t alone; one of the cousins used the appellation in Germany. He was called “Kaiser.” And of course, yet another cousin was called “King,” and he was the hereditary descendant of that wacky potentate Jefferson wrote those famous declarative words about in 1776.

It took several centuries for Russia to accumulate 19 tsars. The land of the free and home of brave did not take nearly as long. Are we cool or what? When in Washington these days, order the Caesar salad. It’s the politically correct appetizer du jour.

Here’s a question, though: Is Czarism Worth The Price?

The very essence of putting czars in charge is to give one individual wide latitude and authority to presumably fix or manage a problem that has resisted correction through normal means. It’s all in the spirit of Kenan Thompson’s Saturday Night Live bit calling for someone to “Fix it!”

In its American form, czarism manifests itself with a proliferation of micro-czars, accountable to one macro-czar. Yep, you guessed it.

In promoting good government via czarism, President Obama is actually guilty of the very thing he recently accused George Bush and the rest of us for doing nearly eight years ago. During his Egypt speech about Islam, he talked about how we, in his opinion, generally overreacted to the attacks on Sept. 11th, leaving our “values” behind.

But isn’t that exactly what Mr. Obama’s administration is doing with the financial crisis? Aren’t the bailouts, stimulus packages, government takeovers of private enterprises, and the appointment of so many unelected and quite unaccountable (except to him) czars, a departure from what he likes to call “our fundamental values?”

He shouldn’t be able to have it both ways. The president can’t criticize America for “abandoning its principles” during a terrorism-driven crisis, only to turn around and abandon the nation’s core political values with his Caesar-salad-like approach to problem solving outside of the electoral or representative box. But frankly, he seems to be pulling it off, largely because he has the mainstream media as an ally for the moment.

We are witnessing the emergence of a new czarist America, not just with the appointment of so many experts who will watch the store, but from the very top of the ladder, or better: pyramid.

One of the best books written in the past couple of years is Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism. If you haven’t read it, you should. It’s now out in paperback with a new after-word by the author. Though this book has been predictably dismissed by the mainstream press, and mocked in the enlightened circles of the left, it is well-documented, powerfully written, and right on target when it comes to explaining where we are; and how we got here. (You can hear my interview with Jonah Goldberg here.)

Goldberg documents the history of the fascist movement and how some of its pernicious philosophy has found its way over time into the American bloodstream. Of course, the idea of fascist tendencies in America has long been part of the usual-suspect-criticism of the conservative political point of view. Former President Bush was repeatedly described by the left as a fascist – in spite of the ironic fact that many who painted him with that brush better resembled the epithet than did our 43rd president.

Most associate fascism with right-wing politics, but history tells us that current day liberalism, with its roots in the Progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, better resembles it. That is, if you really understand what fascism was and is: The Corporate State. Fascism is not when big corporations supposedly run the government, this being the common caricature promoted by the left in order to apply the term to conservatives: Fascism is the government running countries like they are big corporations.

Originally rooted in socialism (Benito Mussolini’s background), fascism is statism; state-run everything. Goldberg calls it “a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people.”

He writes in Liberal Fascism: “It views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives.”

Now, many simply reject the idea that anything done by a liberal Democratic administration could be at all fascistic. They point to Hitler and the Holocaust, equating the idea of a fascist state with racism and genocide. This misses the point that Stalinist Russia was racist and genocidal as well, and that Mussolini’s Italy protected the Jews (until taken over by Germany), as did Franco’s Spain. The anti-Semitism of the Nazi’s did not reside in their form of government, but rather was rooted in the cultural fabric of the nation. Fascism – the state running everything – just gave wicked people a pathway to work out their depravity with little opposition.

Most Americans either don’t know, or simply choose to forget or ignore that in the 1920s and early 1930s, before Hitler’s Nazism took over in Germany, Mussolini was viewed by many in this country as a man of the future and someone to emulate. Columbia University was a “schoolhouse for budding Fascist ideologues.” After the famous humorist Will Rogers visited Italy in 1926, he said: “I’m pretty high on that bird. Dictator form of government is the greatest form of government: that is if you have the right Dictator.”

In 1933, Columbia Pictures released Mussolini Speaks, a documentary narrated by Lowell Thomas. Il Duce oversaw its production and it was a very effective propaganda piece for him in America. Theaters such as the RKO Palace in New York had sell out crowds. An ad in Variety told readers: “It Appeals to all RED BLOODED AMERICANS. It Might Be the ANSWER TO AMERICA’S NEEDS.” Mr. Thomas’ fawning narration describing images of Mussolini reached a peak when he said: “This is his supreme moment. He stands like a modern Caesar!”

In other words: a czar.

Reading Material: D-Day

June 6, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Book Review, History | 2 Comments 

Landing on Omaha Beach, 6 June 1944: “What chiefly stays in the mind…is the dreadful moment of stepping out into the bullets. Planners anticipated that 20,000 would be killed or wounded in a single day, more than a quarter of all those going ashore.  ’Don’t worry if you do not survive the assault’, one officer breezily assured his men, ‘we have plenty of back-up troops who will just go in over you.’” 

Tom Brokaw’s Greatest Generation books began with a visit to the battlefields of Normandy to film a documentary in 1984.  He told that story a couple of weeks ago in a moving interview on NPR’s Liner Notes‘ “War and Peace.”  (Here is a link to that conversation.)   And he describes them in a piece in today’s Wall Street Journal: “Sacrifice and the Greatest Generation.”    He had expected a week of “stirring stories, evenings of oysters and Calvados, and long runs through the countryside.”  Instead he found a life- and career-changing experience listening to and learning from the veterans as he listened to their tales and reflected on their lives.  

As I began to write the wartime accounts of that generation, I realized how much they were formed by the deprivations and lessons of the Great Depression. During that period life was about common sacrifice and going without the most ordinary items, such as enough food or new clothes.

So many veterans told me they got their first new pairs of shoes and boots when they enlisted. When I recently interviewed Walt Ehlers — a poor Kansas farm boy who received the Medal of Honor for his heroism at Normandy — he lit up when he described the breakfasts during basic training. “Every kind of cereal you could imagine!” he said. “And pancakes and bacon and eggs.”

As for basic training, he said putting up hay on his uncle’s farm in August was much tougher.

If you look at the old black-and- white photographs of the physicals conducted during induction, there’s no obesity in that crowd of young men. In fact, some look malnourished.

These are the same young Americans who went thousands of miles across the Atlantic and thousands of miles across the Pacific and defeated the mightiest military empires ever unleashed against us. Their sacrifices at home and on the frontlines make our current difficulties look like a walk on the beach in comparison.

The surviving members of that generation — now in their 80s and 90s — are living reminders of the good that can come from hard times. They can teach us that if we’re to get through this time of crisis a better nation with a fundamentally stronger economy, we’d better learn how to work together and organize our lives around what we need — not just what we want.

Two new books about D-Day —D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, by Anthony Beevor, and  The Forgoten Voices of D-Day, by Roderick Bailey, in association with the Imperial War Museum— were recently reviewed in The Spectator (London) by Andro Linklater.

The first corrective offered by these two new histories of the operation is their reminder of the colossal risk it entailed. ‘It may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war’ confessed Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke on the eve of the invasion. The supreme commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, had even prepared a provisional press release, ‘The landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed, and I have withdrawn the troops.’

What is striking, almost shocking, today was the high casualty rate they were ready to accept in order to earn success. Even in a rehearsal, Exercise Tiger, that took place a month earlier at Slapton Sands in Devon, close to one thousand died. Planners anticipated that 20,000 would be killed or wounded in a single day, more than a quarter of all those going ashore. ‘Don’t worry if you do not survive the assault’, one officer breezily assured his men, ‘we have plenty of back-up troops who will just go in over you.’ Even before the firing started, hundreds died as paratroopers drowned in flooded fields and crews of water-going tanks capsized in the rough seas.

Yet no less remarkable was the meticulous organisation that made it possible to land 70,000 soldiers under fire within a few hours. To one German NCO, the closely marshalled fleet of 7,000 vessels looked like ‘a gigantic town on the sea’, and the 11,000 aircraft that darkened the dawn left witnesses awed. Behind it lay intricate preparation and supply lines reaching back to Scotland, Nova Scotia and Virginia. It is a flaw in both these books that they do not give General Frederick Morgan, the chief planner, his due.

What chiefly stays in the mind, however, is the dreadful moment of stepping out into the bullets.

While Linklater is impressed by Antony Beevor’s book (which is in the tradition of his Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege and The Fall of Berlin), he finds Bailey’s use of the actual words of the participants “incomparable”:  

The voices speak with utter immediacy of fear, determination, bewilderment, indifference, and unmistakable courage. Among the mayhem, however, the least martial comments stand out, like the caustic reaction of Bill Millin, piper to Lord Lovat, when asked to play the pipes under a hail of mortars and machine-gun fire, as commandos went ashore on Sword beach:

The whole thing was ridiculous, so I thought I might as well be ridiculous too. I said, ‘What tune would you like, sir?’ and he said ‘Well, play The Road to the Isles.’ I said, ‘Would you like me to march up and down?’ and he said, ‘That’ll be lovely.’ So the whole thing was ridiculous in that the bodies lying in the water were going back and forward with the tide, and I started off piping.

And Private Roebuck’s exasperation on finding a picture of Hitler in a gun emplacement his company had just captured is redolent of the self-restraint of an earlier era: ‘I smashed it to the ground with the butt of my rifle in anger. To think that that chap had caused all this trouble for us.’

Here, for the Greatest Generation on the anniversary of D-Day, is “The Road to the Isles.”

Mr. Reagan And The Boys

June 5, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Book Review, Europe, History, Military, Presidents, U.S. History | 3 Comments 

It was in the papers, but covered far from sufficiently, when Elisha “Ray” Nance died six weeks ago at the age of 94. He was well known around Bedford, Virginia, a picturesque town located at the feet of the Blue Ridge Peaks of Otter, where for years he delivered the mail on nearby rural routes. It was for what he did before becoming a letter carrier, though, that he is best remembered.

Ray Nance was one of The Bedford Boys.

In fact, he was the last surviving member of his town’s contingent in Company A of the 29th Infantry Division’s 116th Infantry – a group that waded ashore on a beach nicknamed “Omaha” in a far away place called Normandy in France, 65 years ago this weekend. And of the 30 soldiers from Bedford, then with a population of 3,200 (today, about twice that), he was one of only eight from his hometown who lived to tell the story.

Ray lost 22 Bedford buddies that day, 19 of them in the very first moments of the battle. By the time he made it to the beach in the last of his company’s landing crafts to reach that point, he saw “a pall of dust and smoke.” He could barely see “the church steeple we were supposed to guide on.” He couldn’t see anyone in front, or behind him; only that he “was alone in France.”

Mr. Nance was a hero “proved through liberating strife.”

Six years ago, Alex Kershaw wrote a fascinating book about it all called, “The Bedford Boys: One American Town’s Ultimate D-Day Sacrifice.” A year ago, on the 64th anniversary of the fierce battle, I had a conversation with him about the story, as well as the modern tendency toward the kind of historical reductionism and revisionism that, in effect, dishonors true heroes.

As the world pauses to mark the 65th anniversary of the longest day, long ago, it is for some truly meaningful. For others it is a bit awkward, but certainly obligatory. Many, however, will think to themselves: “What’s all the fuss about? It’s a different world today.”

Indeed it is in many ways a different world. But interestingly – even ironically – the challenges today are not completely unlike those days when bands of citizen-soldier-brethren from the greatest generation saved the world for those of us who would be later born to enjoy abounding liberty.

Next to ingratitude, forgetfulness is the most serious indicator of cultural decline; and in truth, the two are intertwined. Thanksgiving and remembrance are flipsides of the same precious cultural coin.

I am struck this week, as we watch President Obama conduct his latest international “wea” culpa tour, by the contrasting image evoked with the unveiling of the new statue of Ronald Reagan in the U. S. Capital Rotunda. And I find myself thinking back to a moment 25 years ago this weekend when, on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, the Great Communicator captured the attention of history and honored some of the other “Boys” who did so much for all of us on June 6, 1944. He called them “The Boys of Pointe Du Hoc,” and many of them were in his cliff top audience in Normandy that day.

If you wanted to pick a more foreboding, certainly unlikely, place for an important military attack, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a spot more uninviting than the imposing, rugged cliffs overlooking the English Channel four miles west of Omaha Beach. A few years back, when I had the privilege of visiting that region for a speaking engagement, I stood there silently for quite some time and tried to wrap my mind around the quite-evident impossibility of what the United States Army Ranger Assault Group accomplished that fateful day.

Mr. Reagan honored those men there in 1984, saying, “We stand on a lonely, windswept point on the northern shore of France. The air is soft, but 40 years ago at this moment, the air was dense with smoke and the cries of men, and the air was filled with the crack of rifle fire and the roar of canon.” It was one of his finest rhetorical moments. He continued:

“Behind me is a memorial that symbolizes the Ranger daggers that were thrust into the top of these cliffs. And before me are the men who put them there. These are the boys of Pointe Du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.”

Now, 25 years later, we mark another chronological milestone. But the Boys of Bedford are now all gone. And noble ranks of the Boys of Pointe Du Hoc have been thinned out by the course of time, as well. So, what happens when those who really remember are no longer around to remind us never to forget? What happens when eyewitness memory is no longer vivid and available and we must resort to stories handed down from generations before?

This is where memorials come in, monuments to important men and moments of a sacred and so-easily-forgotten past.

It has been less than 10 years since the National D-Day Memorial opened in that tiny Virginia town of Bedford, a community that gave so proportionately of its finest young men 65 years ago. Now, it is in serious financial trouble and in need of help. Representatives from the Memorial reached out to nearby Liberty University, in Lynchburg, but though school leaders took a look at it, they passed.

At any rate, logic, if not patriotism, suggests that this should be a national concern. There should be a place for this beautiful and appropriate memorial in the family of our National Parks. The Bedford facility has a $2.2 million dollar operating budget, drawing a little less than a third of that from visitors. The rest must be made up by donations, but the tough economy has slowed giving way down.

Of course, one might wonder why, if we can “stimulate” a study in Iowa about “controlling hog-created odors” to the tune of $1.7 million, not to mention earmarking $5.8 million for the of-course-desperately-needed, “Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the Senate,” we shouldn’t be able to find a few bucks to honor those who presumably mean more to our national heritage than swine or a senator.

A while back, my wife and I, along with other family members, visited the D-Day Memorial. I loved talking to two of my grandkids, David (10) and Karen (8), about it all. They acted interested. The man who took us around was Mr. James E. Bryant. He had served as a Glider Infantryman with the 82nd Airborne Division and was part of all of his division’s campaigns from D-Day through to the end of the European war in May of 1945. He wrote a fascinating little book about it all called “Flying Coffins Over Europe.” I purchased a copy in the Memorial’s gift shop and asked him to sign it for me. I was honored and humbled to be in his presence. Really.

So, while we watch another president make the rounds “over there,” I am thinking this weekend about Ronald Reagan and “the Boys.” I am also pondering the Gipper’s words from 25 years ago as he addressed some of those who swarmed Normandy’s treacherous shores in 1944:

“Strengthened by their courage, heartened by their valor, and borne by their memory, let us continue to stand for the ideals for which they lived and died.”

Reading Material

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

TMI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So do we need a new memoir?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading Material

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The American Future: A Review

May 26, 2009 by Joshua Treviño | Filed Under Book Review | Leave a Comment 

Simon Schama is a great scholar, a great writer, and a great historian. Among his many works, The Embarrassment of Riches is the finest history of the Dutch Golden Age in English; and Citizens is among the best surveys of the French Revolution in any language. He is that most rare and privileged creature, the celebrity-scholar, who has proven his mastery in multiple subjects — he teaches in two departments at Columbia University, and boasts an academic pedigree from both Cambridge and Oxford — and is therefore allowed free rein in any. For the most part, he sticks with what he knows: a History of Britain, the Power of Art. This is for the best, because when he does not, it shows. Nowhere does it show more clearly than in his latest book, The American Future, already available in the United Kingdom, and slated for a May 2009 release in the United States.

The American Future is a sort of ersatz companion book to a four-part documentary series by the same name that Schama is starring in for the BBC. As of this writing, it has only recently aired (and it will assuredly make its way to PBS in due time). The description offered by the BBC would be nice if applicable to the book: “Simon Schama travels through America to dig deep into the conflicts of its history as a way to understand the country’s contemporary political situation.” Perhaps the television series both digs deep and arrives at some understanding. In print, The American Future does neither. It is, in fact, the worst Schama book this reviewer has ever read.

This does not necessarily mean it is not worth reading. Simon Schama’s worst is better than most people’s best. Yet because he is such a sterling historian elsewhere, it is all the more disappointing to see him phone it in here. The structure of the book purports to examine the American past as a means of discerning its future, and he does this in ways that vary wildly from interesting to absurd.

Much of the book is taken up with a narrative history of the august and rightly respected Meigs family, who managed to participate in the whole sweep of American history, mostly with rifle in hand, from the colonial era to the present. (The most recent Meigs of note commanded NATO forces in Bosnia in 1998-1999.) Yet Schama’s implicit argument, that the Meigs family history is a reasonable metaphor for the American experience, falls flat. He attempts to transform Montgomery C. Meigs, the Union quartermaster-general in the Civil War, into an emblematic American figure of that era. It works in the most awkward way, inasmuch as it works best if you don’t know much about that war. If you do, you know that though that Meigs was a deeply interesting man, he was eclipsed by far more interesting men in a period suffused with them. Shelby Foote on several occasions stated that the two towering figures of that war were Nathan Bedford Forrest and William Tecumseh Sherman; and he makes a better case in a few sentences than Schama manages in an entire book.

Even as he strains — or doesn’t — to make a case for his chosen narrative set-pieces wrested from American history, the reader of The American Future is left with the troubling sense that Schama has perhaps not done his due diligence in sourcing and research. There are the odd, Edmund Morris-style digressions into first-person recollection that cannot possibly be anything but fiction: “Sonofabitch,” Schama has yet another Meigs think just before dying at the Battle of the Bulge, “if it was this cold then you think the mud would’ve frozen … Clean it out, get into Deutschland, finish them off, good guys win, bad guys, very bad guys, lose.” Did any soldier actually think this? It is perilously close to tinny Hollywood rhetoric — what a British expat professor thinks an American infantryman speaks like — and if Schama made it up, shame on him. And if he has documentary evidence that the fallen Meigs of World War Two expressed these thoughts, shame on him for presenting it as his own weird reconstruction.

The reader’s confidence in these episodes, strewn throughout the book, is further marred by the occasional factual error. “[T]he second president of the Texan Republic was a Tejano,” Schama writes, though depending on how you count it, Sam Houston and Mirabeau Lamar were not Tejanos of any sort. There never was a Tejano president of the Republic of Texas: Schama is probably referring to Lorenzo de Zavala, who was interim vice-president of the Republic during the Texas War of Independence. Or rather, one of Schama’s graduate students is probably referring to de Zavala. This is emblematic of the minimal attention the author appears to have given this work, which stands in such regrettable contrast to his earlier, justly famed efforts.

It should be acknowledged that there are some interesting ideas in The American Future. Schama highlights the contrast between the present-day American disavowal of nation building, and the explicitly nation-building purpose of the pre-Civil War American military. He does it in a ham-handed way, and obscures his point with a fondness for illustrative anecdote that illustrates very little, but it is there. Similarly, his treatment of the Cherokee removal of the 1830s (via another Meigs, of course) is moving and vivid. In these brief passages, The American Future shows us what it could have been: a moral argument about American history, or an exploration of contradictions in that history. Schama neglects both routes in favor of anecdote upon anecdote.

We are presumably to plow through these anecdotes as a means of arriving at what the BBC promises, “a way to understand the country’s contemporary political situation.” Nothing like this emerges. We go from a touching account of a colonial Meigs romance, to a dusty Texas chow hall, to Thomas Jefferson’s Koran, to a somewhat dubious recounting of the time the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan educated a young Simon Schama into the pageantry of American democracy. None of it is linear, and little of it is thematically coherent. Out of this great, wonderful mess of history, Schama tries to say, the American character emerges, and its contradictions are with us still. Well, yes: but Walt Whitman said it better, and briefer, and much earlier.

Lurking throughout The American Future is the specter of Barack Obama, not yet President-elect when the book was written. It is no surprise that Schama sees Obama as the culminating figure of all that history: the embodiment of what is good, true, and worthwhile about our country. No doubt he is, from the perspective of an expatriate Briton, celebrity academic, and longtime Manhattan resident. So be it: but the acknowledgement makes The American Future less an explanation of America, and more an explanation of what Simon Schama wishes America was.

Susan Jacoby’s Notes From The Middle Ground

May 23, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Book Review, Cold War, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

Yesterday David Chambers, whose grandfather Whittaker Chambers was one of the two primary figures in the case that brought Richard Nixon to the notice of the whole nation and then the world, reviewed Susan Jacoby’s Alger Hiss And The Battle For History in the Washington Times. Mr. Chambers makes its clear that, to put it mildly, he is far from impressed by Ms. Jacoby’s thesis that Hiss’s actions of the 1930s and 1940s, and subsequent perjury when testifying about them, was less significant than the rise of the anti-communist right that she believes the negative publicity surrounding Hiss helped to further, to the country’s detriment. Here’s one passage from the review, which notes Ms. Jacoby’s less-than-thorough research on the case:

Perhaps strangest is this book’s omission of new findings by another recent Yale publication. “Spies” (May 2009) opens with the bold chapter title, “Alger Hiss: Case Closed.” It claims to seal the coffin (if not bury the grave plot) on Mr. Hiss’ guilt. Nothing from “Spies” appears in Ms. Jacoby’s book. According to “Spies” co-author Harvey Klehr, Yale’s editor Jonathan Brent offered her access to the book’s new findings. Apparently, Ms. Jacoby took a pass.

Overall, it is distressing to read this book. Clearly, Ms. Jacoby prizes secular, liberal intellectualism. Yet her book is compromised by the very type of bias she claims to despise in her intellectual opposites.

The Original Decider

May 9, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, George W. Bush, News media, Nixon Administration, Nixon Center, Political Philosophy, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

From Michiko Kakutani’s review in yesterday’s New York Times of Presidential Command, the new book by the late Peter W. Rodman of the Nixon Center:

Mr. Rodman [argues] that Nixon, not Mr. Bush or Harry S. Truman, “deserves the title of the ‘decider,’ ” and that while the “exclusionary style of his management” led to the “demoralization and alienation of the rest of the government” — and for that reason should not be emulated — it “produced what was probably the most centralized, consistent and strategically coherent policy making of any modern presidency.”

Ed Nixon Returns To Prescott

May 2, 2009 by David Emig | Filed Under Book Review, Richard Nixon | 2 Comments 

A standing room only crowd was at Barnes & Noble in Prescott Arizona for a book signing by Ed Nixon, the youngest brother of RN. In Friday’s addition of the local paper, the Daily Courier; Ed Nixon said that he decided to include Prescott in his book tour as a tribute to his older brother Harold Nixon. Harold Nixon passed away from TB in Prescott in 1933. An event that Edward Nixon says changed Richard Nixon’s life.

The book signing opened with a brief presentation by Mr. Nixon about his memories of Prescott, and reflections on RNs influence in his life. He stressed the importance of family in the influence that his parents had on all of his brothers and him. He also mentioned that the impetus for the book was his brother, Donald. In 1986, Donald who was on his deathbed, admonished his younger brother Edward to take over writing a book about their family. As Ed noted, his other brother was busy writing his own books… All of these things are explained in great detail in the book.

“The Nixons” is an important book for Nixon’s scholarship. Apart from Julie Nixon Eisenhower’s book, “Pat Nixon: The Untold Story”, and the oral history collection entitled “Young Nixon”; there is precious little writing concerning that important period in the life and times of Richard Nixon. By writing “The Nixons”, history and those who are interested in RN owe his youngest brother a debt of gratitude.

Michael Barone Reviews Nixonland

April 21, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, Democratic Party, International Affairs, Nixon Administration, Nixonland Nitpicks, Political Philosophy, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Vietnam | 2 Comments 

Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland came out in paperback last week, a month after his study of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign, Before The Storm, was reissued by Nation Books. And, as it happens, the Claremont Institute’s website has just put up the review of Nixonland by columnist Michael Barone that appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.

Barone has often written perceptively about RN – one thinks in particular of his long article about the Nixon years which US News and World Report published some years ago – and this review continues that tradition, with a very insightful comparison of FDR and RN’s political styles. Its concluding sentences raise an important point about the Nixon presidency that escaped many of the book’s reviewers:

[I]n policy terms Nixon had his successes. His China policy, denounced by every successful presidential candidate but one since his day, remains in place, a more important part of American policy than ever. Some of his leftward domestic policies do, too. But the major difference, perhaps, between Roosevelt and Nixon was that the people Roosevelt professed to hate were still willing to serve with him because they wanted America to win a war. The people Nixon sincerely hated wanted America to lose a war. And, as we have seen in the past few years, the descendants of the people Nixon sincerely despised still want America to lose a war. Rick Perlstein’s indictment of Nixon is an even harsher indictment of the people who cheered when he was brought down.

NYT Review: The Unforgiving Minute

April 8, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Afghanistan, Book Review | Leave a Comment 

Though it is dated for February, Small Wars Journal had this New York Times books feature headlined today. The title is The Unforgiving Minute by Craig Mullaney, a Westpoint grad and Rhodes Scholar, who despite all his experiences, realized his ultimate rite of passage as an Army Captain in Afghanistan:

“The Unforgiving Minute” is former United States Army Capt. Craig M. Mullaney’s brisk, candid memoir about his education as a soldier. He learned different lessons in different places. As a cadet at West Point he learned to be dutiful, punctilious and unerringly accurate, even about the military method of folding underwear. At Ranger School he learned how to navigate difficult physical terrain and endure grueling tests of mettle. At Oxford, as a Rhodes scholar, he had a teacher who advised: “Read and think. Simultaneously if possible.” At home he thought he had learned how to make his father proud — until that father walked out and never came back.

As a reader he learned from writers as diverse as T. E. Lawrence, Rudyard Kipling (from whose poem “If” this book takes its title), Jane Austen and Thucydides. As a traveler he vacationed with buddies, partied heartily and learned that the world is very large. And as an American he was in New Zealand on Sept. 11, 2001, when someone asked if he had seen the news and said, “I’m so sorry.” At that point every lesson absorbed by this soldier in training suddenly took on different meaning.

“The Unforgiving Minute” is Captain Mullaney’s attempt to reconcile the precombat lessons that seemed so clear to him with the exigencies of battlefield experience. He makes it clear that this is no easy process. At one point Captain Mullaney, who led a platoon in Afghanistan and later became a teacher at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., explains how he told his students about the most difficult battlefield experience of his career. To do that, he writes, he had to give two different accounts of the fighting at Losano Ridge, which occurred in Afghanistan in 2003, very close to the Pakistan border.

First he gave his students the straightforward version. He described the basics, like “movement to contact, suppressive fire and medical evacuation.” But that version did not do justice to the “chaos, noise, fear, exhilaration.” So he retold the story from a different perspective. “This time I tried to put them under my helmet,” he writes about trying to convey the full experience of battle. He is honest enough to acknowledge that he cannot be sure that the decisions he made under fire — in that minute to which the book’s title refers — were right.

Watergate And Foreign Policy

April 7, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, Watergate | 1 Comment 

Len Colodny, author of the revisionist Watergate book Silent Coup, has another coming out in the fall. Here’s a preview from the HarperCollins catalog. The contention of the shrewdly titled The Forty Years War: Don’t follow the money. Follow the neocons:

In this groundbreaking book, renowned investigative writers Len Colodny and Tom Shachtman chronicle the surprising evolution of the neoconservative movement—from its birth as a rogue insurgency in The Nixon White House through its ascent to full and controversial control of America’s foreign policy in the Bush years. The Forty Years War documents the neocons’ undermining of the Nixon White House, their success at halting détente during the Ford and Carter years, their uneasy alliance with Ronald Reagan, and their determination to eventually take the U.S. all the way to Baghdad.

The Gamble Deconstructed

March 31, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Book Review, George W. Bush, International Affairs, Iraq War | Leave a Comment 

TNN’s Joshua Trevino wrote this review for Thomas Rick’s new book about the the final chapter of the Iraq War, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008. What I found particular noteworthy was Trevino’s acknowledgment that though President Bush initially went full brace on a strategy that plunged us to failure, he showed un-reluctant and unflinching commitment to a strategy change that is now bearing success:

The most surprising — and least discussed — transitional figure in The Gamble is President George W. Bush. It’s no secret that the President was tightly bound to the persons and policies he chose to trust: a sometime virtue that became, in war, too often a flaw. In this light, his decision to support the surge over the record of his own leadership, the advice of his entire uniformed military leadership (excepting Petraeus himself), and his outgoing Secretary of Defense was a profound departure from expectations. Yet once he did shift course, he adhered to it with the same tenacity with which he pursued his previous strategy. As Ricks notes, it is certainly easy and even right to fault Bush for taking three years to get things right — but he was ahead of the actual leadership of the U.S. armed forces when he did. Ricks (who is, it should be noted, no Republican) also allows the reader a glimpse into the private conduct of the former President, who comes across as more than the incurious mouthpiece of popular media portrayals. “In these meetings [on Iraq strategy,]” Ricks reports one Army officer saying, “he is masterful — good political insights, good handle on the subject.” Among The Gamble’s many contributions to the history of this era must be a credit to George W. Bush, who got so many things wrong, but got this one big thing right.

Wall Street Yes, Duane-Reade No

March 27, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, Nixon Library, Nixon family, Richard Nixon | 10 Comments 

Jack Dreyfus’s death today, at the age of 95, closes a noble chapter in Wall Street history with an odd pharmacological footnote. The legendary founder of the Dreyfus mutual funds, who helped pave the way for a revolutionary increase in the rate of individual investing and gave millions a new stake in the stock market (for better and, of course, worse), was also an obsessive promoter of Dilantin, an anti-inflammatory drug used to treat epilepsy but which Dreyfus credited with helping with his depression and also promoted for treatment of a variety of other ailments.

Experts disagreed, but Dreyfus persevered. Many years ago, President Nixon’s elder daughter, Tricia Nixon Cox, and I visited him in New York City. He spent the whole time talking about Dilantin and said that if the Nixon Library would help him with his crusade, he would help the Library. Since lobbying the FDA was within neither our abilities nor our portfolio, his contribution remained unconsummated.

He had already been a generous friend of the late President over the years. When RN was running in 1968, besides being a contributor, Dreyfus sent over plenty of Dilantin to help him bear the burdens of the campaign. Mr. Nixon was always careful about doctors’ orders and completely disinclined to self-medicate, so there is almost no doubt the stuff ended up in the plumbing system of the Nixons‘ Fifth Avenue apartment. But when British scandal merchant Anthony Summers tracked Dreyfus down while researching, if you can call it that, his 2000 book Arrogance of Power, Dreyfus of course said that Mr. Nixon had gobbled down every pill.

Though Summers must’ve seen the same manic glint in the great man’s eye that Tricia and I had, the story made it into the book with no further checking. Then the usually more careful New York Times made matters worse. In exchange for getting first dibs on an advance copy of the Summers book, the Times’s Adam Clymer rushed out an article that gave widespread credence to Dreyfus’s and other otherwise unsubstantiated and appallingly false claims. A week later, the Times thought enough of contrary assertions by President Nixon’s White House body man, Steve Bull, who saw Mr. Nixon almost every day of his Presidency, and me that it ran a followup story:

Mr. Bull, who is now director of government relations for the United States Olympic Committee, said: ”I never saw any evidence that he used any medication of that kind. Never.”…

Mr. Taylor produced a summary of White House records from April 1969 through mid-1973 recalling numerous attempts by Mr. Dreyfus to gain government backing for Dilantin through Mr. Nixon. The records state that Mr. Nixon met with Mr. Dreyfus now and then socially, but they portray the president as reluctant to get into lengthy discussions about Dilantin.

Mr. Taylor said that Mr. Nixon might have accepted Dilantin from Mr. Dreyfus so as not to hurt his feelings, but that if he did he threw it out rather than taking it.

Which is exactly what we in the former President’s offices in New York and New Jersey did when Dreyfus sent us our own batches. Today, Dreyfus’s Times obit repeats his statement that he gave pills to RN in 1968 and also discloses:

From 1990 to 1997, he also sought the help of Gov. Frank Keating of Oklahoma to promote the use of the drug to control violent tendencies in inmates. Governor Keating wrote every governor in the country, as well as President Bill Clinton, to recommend experimenting with Dilantin on inmates. Over the course of a decade, Governor Keating and his family also received $250,000 in gifts from Mr. Dreyfus, which they returned after the gifts came to public attention.

The lion of Wall Street now prowls heaven’s Serengeti, safely beyond the reach of both Dilantin and derivatives. May light perpetual shine upon him.

Two New Books On Hiss-Chambers

March 25, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, Cold War, History, Political Philosophy, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

May 31 marks the 50th anniversary of the start of Alger Hiss’s first trial for perjury, during which the onetime advisor to FDR at Yalta and secretary-general of the founding session of the United Nations in 1945 managed to secure a hung jury, thanks to an all-out attack on his accuser Whittaker Chambers by his attorney Lloyd Paul Stryker. Shortly afterwards, a second trial was held, in which Claude B. Cross, who replaced Stryker at Hiss’s bidding, led the defense. The jury at this trial, given a less dramatic atmosphere, found Hiss guilty and he went to jail, still insisting on his innocence – as he continued to do until he died at age 92.

It has been more than a decade since Hiss’s death and nearly a half-century since Chambers passed away. 2013, four years from now, will see the 100th birthday of Richard Nixon, whose dogged determination to seek the facts of the case helped launch his political career. But in spite of all the decades that have gone by since Chambers appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee and made his charges, the Hiss case still generates strong interest. Indeed, this month sees two new books about its principal figures from America’s two leading university presses.

Yale University Press has just published Alger Hiss and the Battle for History by journalist Susan Jacoby, and it’s reviewed in today’s New York Observer by Glenn C. Altschuler. The writeup is favorable, but I don’t know how keen I am to read the book. Ms. Jacoby is well known for her polemics championing the enlightened center of the political spectrum. Her interpretation of the case, in this context, seems to amount to the argument that sure, all the evidence points to Hiss’s guilt – as has been the general consensus since Allen Weinstein published his definitive book Perjury in 1978 – but the real question is, did the atmosphere of the times prevent Hiss from getting a fair trial? One somewhat wishes Arthur Schlesinger Jr. were still here to point out that Hiss got two trials, rather than the one that most defendants have to get by with, and that every attempt on his part to seek another trial was rejected by one judge after another over the span of three decades, right into the decidedly liberal era of the late 1970s.

A book that interests me rather more is by Michael Kimmage of Catholic University: The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism, which Harvard University Press just released. Former New York Sun book reviewer Adam Kirsch discusses this volume at nextbook.org, and from what he says, it promises to be the most carefully considered examination of Chambers’s pivotal role in American political thought since Sam Tanenhaus’s landmark biography in 1997. Here’s how the HUP site describes it:

Kimmage argues that the divergent careers of these two men exemplify important developments in postwar American politics: the emergence of modern conservatism and the rise of moderate liberalism, crucially shaped by anti-communism. Taken together, these developments constitute a conservative turn in American political and intellectual life—a turn that continues to shape America’s political landscape.

For Chapter 7, I’ll Need, Oh, 12 Years

March 19, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, George W. Bush, Richard Nixon | 2 Comments 

Robert Stein, a distinguished figure in U.S. publishing circles, notes the correlation between the methodology of President Bush’s upcoming memoir, Decision Points, which will study 12 epochal moments in his Presidency, and Richard Nixon’s first book, Six Crises. Predicting that W. will use the format to evade unpleasant subjects such as the aftermath of his decision to invade Iraq, Stein writes:

Nixon’s “Six Crises” similarly stopped short of Watergate by only covering events until 1960.

Six Crises stopped short of Watergate because it was published in 1962. It also stopped short of Vietnam and the breakup of the Beatles. Watergate got a third of the space in RN’s post-Presidential memoir.

“The Nixons” Now Available At Amazon

March 11, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Book Review | 1 Comment 

Give it your customer reviews.

Everyone Knows RN Served Until 1989!

March 9, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, Culture, Movies, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

One review after another of “Watchmen,” including this one in England’s prestigious Guardian, says that the movie’s fictional Richard Nixon was serving a third term as President. Evidently reviewers are being thrown off by the opening titles, which show RN reelected in 1976 after a constitutional amendment permits him to seek a third term. But by 1985, when the action of the story occurs, he’s on his fifth.

RN’s luck’s about to run out, though, because at the very end of the graphic novel (I’m not sure about the movie, which I haven’t seen yet), a newspaper headline says that “RR” is considering running in 1988. Presumably the reader is expected to think Ronald Reagan. If so, the authors are teasing us. As we learn on “Watchmen”’s very last page, the candidate’s actually another famous cowboy: Robert Redford.

alt.-37 And Blue Man’s Group

March 6, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, Culture, Richard Nixon, Vietnam | Leave a Comment 

Reviewing “Watchmen” in the New York Times, as a public service A. O. Scott notes the use of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” during a sex scene and beseeches filmmakers:

[C]an we please have a moratorium on the use of this song in movies? Yes, I too have heard there was a secret chord that David played, and blah blah blah, but I don’t want to hear it again. Do you?

Amen and alleluia.

Several “Watchmen” reviews, including Scott’s, have persuaded me to watch for the DVD, if only to restrict the gushing blood, cracking bones, and exploding bodies to a smaller screen.

Having missed the graphic novel phenom entirely, I did buy a copy of the book and am about halfway through. Reading a comic book at 54, I feel self-conscious, even though it’s strictly for research purposes. President Nixon, of course, is in his fifth term, having sent a big blue superman called Dr. Manhattan to defeat the Viet Cong, enabling the U.S. to win the war. That’s alt.-37 above, anxiously contemplating the possible loss of the entire Eastern establishment in a hypothetical nuclear exchange. It’s now the mid-1980s. The Soviets have invaded Afghanistan and plunged into Pakistan. But the blue man has broken up with his girlfriend and been accused of giving everyone cancer. He’s gone to Mars to sulk and so isn’t available to RN to blunt the invasion.

The reflections of another from “Watchman”’s band of troubled superheroes on the meaninglessness of the universe and the pivotal role played by chance in our lives reminded me of one of Woody Allen’s best movies. A ring decides a character’s fate in Allen’s “Match Point,” a broken watch in “Watchmen.” The book has also been giving me weird dreams. Its looming apocalypse resonates discomfitingly with our all-too-real economic crisis.

Like Obama Going To Havana, Only Real

March 4, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Barack Obama, Book Review, China, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

From The Moderate Voice, props for Margaret Macmillan’s book on RN’s China breakthrough.

Vanity Fair Game

February 12, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, Cold War, Richard Nixon | 2 Comments 

In this “Vanity Fair” excerpt from his upcoming book about Reagan and Gorbachev, veteran journalist James Mann, a former LA Times columnist, quotes from a memo former President Nixon wrote to his own file about his April 1987 meeting with President Reagan in the White House family quarters. I called Mann this morning and asked (graciously, I hope) whether a copy of RN’s memcon had somehow ended up in a public archive somewhere, since as far as we know, it’s still in non-deeded post-Presidential files at the Nixon Library. Mann graciously declined to tell me where he’d seen it.

Bipartisanship or Groupthink?

January 29, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Book Review, Congress, Democratic Party, Election 2008, History, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, Republican Party, U.S. History, UK Politics | 5 Comments 

“They could write like angels and scheme like demons.” This is how author Edward J. Larson describes two of our nation’s founding fathers – Thomas Jefferson and John Adams – in his book, A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign.

Those wonderful and often cantankerous giants also grew to define the partisanship of their day. This difference of philosophy and policy was part of our national DNA just about from the beginning. Sure, there were always cries back then – as there are today – for the end of partisanship. Even General George “Father-Of-Our-Country” Washington feared the approach of party politics. But the partisanship he dreaded was the kind that would bring about change contrary to what he wanted. And there’s the rub.

It’s bipartisan if you agree with me. It’s partisan if you don’t.

Like it or not, partisanship has been part of our national fabric all along. And all Americans should fervently hope that we never actually see bipartisanship break out all over. For some reason, possibly naivety on the part of some, though maybe something more manipulative on the part of others, the cry of bipartisanship is the ultimate political trump card these days. Getting everyone to work and play together – to walk in complete utopian agreement – is seen as the ultimate political ideal.

It sounds nice. It feels good when political foes trade rancor for civility, and it makes sense on a certain level that people need to talk with, rather than at, each other. I get that. But is the current call for bipartisanship really little more than the glorification of something quite detrimental to effective governance?

I’m talking about groupthink.

As President Obama and his new administration grapple with the complex issues before them, and try to find traction dealing with a surprisingly feisty, if not recalcitrant, Republican minority in Congress, they would do well to look in depth at the age of Camelot. But they should study the fall of 1962, not the spring 1961.

President John F. Kennedy learned a thing or two from the Bay of Pigs fiasco – an early failure for his administration. What he learned, he then applied when faced with Soviet missiles in Castro’s Cuba 18 months later. He learned how to listen to many different points of view – and to temper his approach based on what he was hearing.

Of course, I realize that the analogy falls short as completely relevant to the workings of partisan politics, but there is a basic idea that rings true. In scripture we are told: “in the multitude of counselors there is safety.” The best policies are those forged out of the give and take – the “iron sharpening iron” – of contrary opinions. And the iron doesn’t get sharp without sparks flying.

The wisdom we need is usually in those sparks.

I try to watch Prime Minister’s Question Time on C-Span, when I can. This is where Great Britain’s top elected official stands in the House of Commons and wages verbal war with friend and foe alike over current policies and practices. The best days for this exchange in recent years were back when Margaret Thatcher was PM, but even a journeyman like Gordon Brown can be entertaining.

Across the pond, their big political kahuna answers to other elected officials, the way our leaders occasional face a hostile press (though mainstream media hostility toward the White House is a rarity these days). I think we would have better leaders, if they had to actual debate their stuff directly with congress – at least on occasion. Photo-ops and handshakes aside, I wonder how much better a good, heated, executive-legislative argument might be for our national political health.

Some years ago, the late psychologist Irving Janis identified some of the symptoms of groupthink, and it is interesting how relevant they are in the face of a clarion call about bipartisanship.

Back in 1977, Janis observed that groupthink is indicated when there are illusions of invulnerability, the kind that are created when a particular policy or point of view is not help up to contrary and critical analysis. Also, unquestioned belief in the morality or superiority of the group making the decision breeds groupthink.

The tendency to stereotype those who oppose is also a sign that groupthink is hovering around, as is the practice of rationalizing warnings. The bottom line is that groupthink yields flawed fruit. It leads to bad decisions, sometimes even catastrophic ones.

Groupthink is an equal opportunity problem. It is not reserved solely for democrats, republicans, or independents. It rears its ugly head any time a group takes over, or gets comfortable in power, and loses the capacity for objectivity. And when there is a “we won/it’s our turn” mindset, groupthink is usually in the air. It is a most subtle and self-deceptive toxin.

How does this relate to the current mantra of bipartisanship? Well, it would be wise for President Obama to remember that, though he and his party did win, this should not be interpreted as a mandate to get everything they desire. If 46 percent of the people voted for the other guy and party, then trying to pull off an 80-20 policy deal might not be warranted.

True bipartisanship can only happen when the party in power reaches out in a way commensurate with the percentages in the most recent election. A mandate is not a blank check. The recent election suggests that any real stimulus plan should be about 55 percent democratic ideas and 45 percent republican contribution.

That would be actual bipartisanship.

The fact is that, since the days of Adams and Jefferson we have had this national tug of war between competing ideas about what government should or should not do. The pendulum has swung both ways several times in our history. The big government vs. little government, higher tax vs. lower tax, and interventionist vs. laissez faire debate has been our country’s persistent yin and yang struggle.

And that should never change. We are better because of that tension.

If bipartisanship means the end of debate and the ushering in of an unfettered liberal nationalist hegemony over the American way of life, then we will find ourselves on a slippery slope. Many believe we are already feeling gravity’s pull that way. The danger is the idea of surrendering liberty for the promise of financial security.

We might just wind up with neither.

The Perilous Journey From GITMO To NIMBY

January 22, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Barack Obama, Book Review, History, Iraq War, Obama administration, War on Terror | 2 Comments 

There is a Caribbean legend that when Christopher Columbus, on his second voyage to the new world, came ashore at what he that day called Puerto Grande (now Guantánamo Bay, Cuba), he was less-than-impressed. No gold was to be found, nor gems – not even fresh water. He left the next day mumbling something in Italian that comes down to us more than 500 years later loosely translated as “this place sucks.”

A brass plaque marks the spot, though not the actual language of the moment.

This arid and unwelcoming spot of eroding land is these days the focus of national – even international – attention as the Obama administration takes over in Washington. Among the first actions taken by our new president has been a move toward fulfilling a promise made all along the recent campaign trail – to close GITMO “within a year.” This order also includes halting all trials currently under way at the facility, where as many as 800 “detainees” in the war against Islamist terror are being held.

Taking a page from the great explorer’s phrase book I might add: “This decision sucks.”

Though any potential relocation of those held at GITMO is at least a year away, the suspension of all trials should send chills throughout a country still basking in the warmth of the recent inauguration. Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch, reminds us: “When you take the case of Omar Khadr, whose trial was halted, there is a great deal of evidence that he is not only guilty of jihad activities but his family also has been deeply involved with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida for years.”

And Khadr is just one of many dangerous people who may be emboldened by the new directive.

I believe we are on our way – a slippery slope of sorts – to seeing the very idea of a “war on terror” morph into something more benign. First it may become a Truman-like “police action” against bad guys. But what I fear most is the potential for a dangerous, but vital, conflict to be eventually redefined as a moral-equivalency “game” of misunderstanding between shirts and skins.

One top House Democrat, John Murtha of Pennsylvania – a man who has been a vocal critic of most aspects of the war we have been fighting since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 – is so pleased with Mr. Obama’s action that he would apparently welcome the GITMO prisoners to a facility in his district. But he notes, with a “darn-it-all-to-heck” dismissal, that there are no maximum-security facilities in his area. So he will be spared “not-in-my-backyard” (NIMBY) letters from sane constituents.

Murtha suggests that the prisoners in question are “no more dangerous in my district than in Guantánamo.” Sure, John – bad people 1,000 miles away are “no more dangerous” than bad people 15 miles away. Right. And a fire in your neighbor’s townhouse is no more dangerous than one in Saskatchewan.

Interestingly, just as the nation begins to grapple with the actual consequences of noble-sounding utterances about civil rights and liberties for enemy combatants in a time of war, there is a new resource making a bit of a splash. Timing is everything they say – and Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu (retired Army) has written a book that is being released at just the right moment.

This Tuesday, January 27th, INSIDE GITMO: The True Story Behind the Myths of Guantánamo Bay will hit bookstores across America – and it is a must read. I have spoken at length to Mr. Cucullu about the book and its development, and have read an advance copy. It is a monumental contribution to the great national debate we should be having about what has really happened at GITMO, and what will likely happen upon the closing of that important facility, complete with the transfer of very dangerous people to a neighborhood near you.

Col. Cucullu initiated the project several years ago after hearing so many reports of abuse going on at GITMO. He decided to find out the facts for himself. Over the course of five separate visits he inspected the facility in its entirety, interviewed guards, nurses, cooks, and other personnel. What emerges is a compelling description of what day-to-day life has been like in the facility, these past several years.

The book details the techniques used in interrogation, how detainees communicate with each other, even the food they eat and medical care they receive. It highlights how dangerous it is at GITMO – but not for the inmates, rather for the guards and staff.

People who have spent time at GITMO tell me that prisoners have been treated better there than they are at prisons in America. In fact, it is commonplace for American personnel to be the recipients of abuse meted out by the Guantánamo detainees. And when provoked by the bad guys, our people can do nothing to respond or retaliate.

I wonder how stateside wardens and guards will handle these “special” people?

Col. Cucullu reminds his readers that, over a multi-year period, thorough investigations covering more than 24,000 interrogation sessions at GITMO revealed only three actual violations. He also notes that the average detainee in Cuba sees a physician four times a month (the average American does so three times per year).

The book also reminds us that in 2007, 94 United States senators voted in favor of a “nonbinding” resolution that GITMO detainees “should not be released into American society, nor should they be transferred stateside into facilities in American communities and neighborhoods.”

Cucullu acknowledges that in the immediate aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks things were done that were certainly excessive, motivated by what had just happened and in fear of another attack. But any such tendencies were corrected early on and reports to the contrary are simply politically motivated distortions and exercises in misinformation.

Get the book. Read it. Read the end and source notes, too. You be the judge.

The idea of transferring hundreds of detainees to the custody of the American prison and court system may resonate with some and sound rather civil, but many people are simply not thinking this through.

I know the mantra is that some of these people don’t belong there, they are innocent – they are just farmers or peasants. And Mao and Castro were mere agrarian reformers. But frankly, GITMO is not “the gulag of our time” – as some have described it. There are bad people there – people who would love to kill you and me. As a norm, we believe someone is innocent until proven guilty, but the presumption is quite different when dealing with enemy combatants in time of war.

These terrorists would even gladly kill those who promote their cause and freedom.

If GITMO detainees are brought stateside and, at least in some cases, mingled in with our mainstream prison population, what about the potential for recruitment? American prisons are already hotbeds of rage-driven fanaticism and conversion to terrorism. We don’t need more catalysts for terrorist breeding on the “inside.”

And what happens when these “detainees” have their day in an American court? One doesn’t have to be a legal expert to figure out that battlefield evidence is difficult to gather and document, at best. Those who want the “warm-fuzzy” of seeing a misunderstood terrorist go free to sin no more, should watch an occasional episode of TV dealing with evidence, loopholes, and criminal investigation.

Sometimes bad guys beat our good system.

And when the first really bad terrorist dude has a case against him dismissed because of evidence left on a battlefield somewhere, he will walk free and blend in with us.

Then Mr. Formerly-GITMO-Detainee-Who-is-Now-Free will do everything he can to bring the battlefield to a backyard near you.

Whose Violations Of The Constitution?

January 18, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, Nixon Administration figures, Richard Nixon, Watergate | 2 Comments 

Reviewing a posthumous book by Peter Rodman — Kissinger aide, Nixon Center scholar, and Pentagon official under George W. Bush — former Sen. Gary Hart takes issue with a surprising turn that Rodman took:

Rodman succumbs to the fantasy that the much-maligned permanent government, frustrated at being systematically marginalized by the Nixon-Kissinger duo, colluded to bring down the Nixon presidency. Other presidents may have been “rogues and miscreants,” but Rodman finds “in­triguing” the theory that “the demise of Nixon was due to no less than the revolt of the bureaucracy whose power he had striven so assiduously to break in every sphere.”

This kind of nonsense seriously under­mines an otherwise worthwhile and instructive book and, by implication, excuses many troublesome abuses in the current administration. It is one thing to insist on presidential authority in foreign policy. It is quite another to casually accept violations of the Constitution in executing that policy.

Fantasy and nonsense? Pretty harsh language, senator. Here’s what we know. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Thomas Moorer, who was worried about Richard Nixon’s foreign policy initiatives toward China and the Soviet Union, received and poured over documents stolen from the White House by a Navy yeoman. At the FBI, a federal police agency, several officials and agents, worried because President Nixon had appointed an acting director from outside the agency, responded by illegally giving government secrets to reporters in order to undermine an elected President. Thanks to a suggestion from a book editor to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, these Nixon-hunting FBI officials were gathered together under the name of a pornographic movie. But it was more than lawbreaker W. Mark Felt, which means it was, technically, an FBI conspiracy to damage or destroy the President in order to protect the agency’s prerogatives and perhaps keep its own embarrassing secrets under wraps.

Secret, extra-constitutional moves against Mr. Nixon by the military and FBI are certainly not the whole story of Watergate, but they’re a part of it that has been neglected so far. Too bad Gary Hart wants to cover it up with name-calling.

Is Len Colodny Next?

January 16, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, Cuba, George W. Bush, Intelligence, Nixon Administration figures, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate | 4 Comments 

The website of the Washington Post yesterday featured an online chat between assorted websurfers from around the world and an author trying to promote his new book. That, in itself, is unsurprising; the Post hosts such a chat once or twice nearly every week. However, it is downright startling when the earnest young author in question happens to be Russ Baker and the book is the newly published Family Of Secrets, his study of the Bush family that claims the outgoing President’s father, our 41st Chief Executive, was somehow involved in arcane ways in the JFK assassination and in Watergate.

And it’s downright stunning to find Baker chatting there when the same book also extensively cites Jim Hougan’s Secret Agenda and Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin’s Silent Coup in maintaining that Pulitzer-winning journalist Bob Woodward had, as a young Naval officer, all manner of intelligence contacts that somehow influenced his choice of career and choice of investigative subjects when he got out of the service. You have to wonder if this is the cue for Hougan or Colodny and Gettlin to issue updated editions of their books and see about using the Post’s cyberspace to present their meditations on the career of the author of The War Within.

But, having said all that, I have to inform TNN’s readers that the transcript of the chat does not have one reader after another asking about George de Mohrenschildt, Operation Zapata, the true origins of “Deep Throat,” the Townhouse mystery, or any of the other persons and things that enliven Family Of Secrets, though Baker, several times, refers to the numerous “revelations” in his book. Instead, a series of unexceptional questions about the highs and lows of the Bush era are asked, and Baker, usually, answers in quite workmanlike fashion.

I know that during these chats washingtonpost.com employs a moderator who screens questions submitted, to make sure that queries from cranks, the illiterate and/or muddled, and self-styled employees of African financial institutions do not turn up onscreen. The definition of what constitutes an “acceptable” question seems to be narrow sometimes.

Last year, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi turned up in the site’s discussions to talk about her new book. I used the occasion to send in a question about her reasons for urging then-Sen. Barack Obama, who had won the Democratic nomination partly on a platform of opposition to the Iraq war, to choose Rep. Chet Edwards, one of that war’s most steadfast supporters, as his running-mate. The Post’s moderator did not put it up, but opted instead to present queries on the order of: “How did you establish yourself as a woman who has both brains and a feminine side?”

I wonder if Russ Baker’s chat was similarly homogenized, and if so, who was doing the homogenizing. I keep having a mental picture of Bob Woodward himself hunched over the screen, making an expression familiar to Sunday-morning TV viewers and moving the mousepad to “delete” whenever a question comes up on the order of “What is your opinion of the claim of David Obst, the literary agent who sold All The President’s Men, that Deep Throat was a composite?”

And in yesterday’s Post proper, Nixon Library director Tim Naftali reviewed two recent books on the events of November 22, 1963: The Road To Dallas by David Kaiser and Brothers In Arms by Gus Russo and Stephen Molton. Though Tim, the author of the volume on George H.W. Bush in the American Presidents Series, does not mention Family Of Secrets in the review, my guess, based on his dissection of Kaiser, Russo and Molton’s conspiracist arguments, is that he would take a rather dim view of it. Tim advises those interested in the subject that, rather than the books under review, they’d do better to examine Reclaiming History (Vincent Bugliosi’s gigantic volume, the fruit of 20 years’s research, which was published two years ago to undeservedly poor sales), and also the work of Max Holland of WashingtonDecoded.com fame. (Here I should mention that earlier this week Max’s site posted a very informative and illuminating review of Brothers In Arms by Brian Latell, the author of After Fidel.)

Washington Post Reviews “Family Of Secrets”

January 11, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Book Review | 4 Comments 

The book section of today’s Washington Post includes a review of Russ Baker’s book Family Of Secrets by Jamie Malanowski (once a mainstay of Spy magazine in its 1980s heyday, later managing editor of Playboy) which includes this observation:

In a particularly weak section, [Baker] argues that [George H. W.] Bush was complicit in a plot to undermine Richard Nixon. Here Baker relies on revisionist accounts of Watergate that point to John Dean as the one who ordered the break-in, or to the CIA as conspiring to oust Nixon. Bush is linked to these fuzzy schemes primarily by having, like the Watergate burglars, a CIA connection. In addition, Baker finds it suspicious that Bush advised Nixon to come clean about the break-in. But such advice was highly conventional and could be considered anti-Nixon only if you buy the idea that Bush prodded an innocent president to admit to something that didn’t involve him. Baker doesn’t convincingly cast Bush as anything beyond a sycophantic, Zelig-like presence in the Nixon years.

Baker’s Half-Baked?

January 11, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, Intelligence, Richard Nixon | 3 Comments 

In its “Secrecy News” e-newsletter, the Society of American Archivists engages with Russ Baker, whose conspiracy-minded Family Of Secrets has significant content on the Nixon Administration:

The Central Intelligence Agency did provide a copy of intelligence files relating to the Bay of Pigs to President Nixon in response to his request, an official of the National Archives and Records Administration said yesterday. He said that the statement to the contrary in Secrecy News on January 5, citing the new book “Family of Secrets,” was in error.

“The CIA did not refuse the Nixon administration’s request for records on the Bay of Pigs and other topics,” John Powers of the National Archives said. What happened, rather, is that “[Director of Central Intelligence Richard M.] Helms insisted that if the President wanted these records, he would only give them to the President himself.”

“There is a fascinating Oval Office taped conversation of this meeting in October 1971 that is publicly available. You can hear Helms putting the papers down on Nixon’s desk,” Mr. Powers said.

He identified the conversation as tape number 587-7 dated October 8, 1971. “Helms enters during [Ehrlichman's] briefing and they quickly change the topic, then get down to the issue of the papers.”

Mr. Powers added that the CIA papers provided by Mr. Helms to President Nixon are contained in Boxes 36 and 37 of the John D. Ehrlichman files at the Nixon Presidential Library.

Mr. Powers said that some of the material may have been declassified and released since he departed from the Nixon Project nearly two years ago. “But my recollection is that most of the two [Ehrlichman] boxes were still classified. They are awaiting a researcher to file a Mandatory Declassification Review request.”

Leon Panetta, Jack Bauer, And The Bad Guys

January 9, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Barack Obama, Book Review, Cold War, Ethics, History, Intelligence, Obama administration, Terrorism, U.S. History, War on Terror | 1 Comment 

This weekend, Jack Bauer returns to save all things great and small during the latest fictional crisis to be played out over one agonizingly long day. No doubt he will be the same old Jack, not a man known for subtlety or nuance. Bullets will fly, some bombs will explode, while others tick away, and the good guys will ultimately prevail.

In a strange and ironic juxtaposition, as faithful viewers begin another seasonal journey with 24, a real-life drama is unfolding, one that involves the appointment of someone who represents ideas as un-like Jack Bauer as possible. President-Elect Barack Obama is tapping old Washington hand Leon Panetta to head the Central Intelligence Agency.

Mr. Panetta is, by all accounts, an able manager and savvy politician – both qualities will certainly help him in this new role. But many have raised questions – serious ones (and not all by Republicans) – about his qualifications for this unique role. I hear the Secretary of Commerce position is open once again, wouldn’t a manager do well there? There is a difference between management and leadership.

It doesn’t take a mind reader to discern that Mr. Obama is determined to tame the CIA and bend it to his will and vision. Not all of his appointments have demonstrated the kind of change he campaigned about, but this one surely does. He is taking a cue from his hero, John F. Kennedy – specifically the JFK who tried to clean the spy house after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Goodbye, Allen Dulles the espionage expert, and hello, John McCone the efficient manager.

Panetta is the new McCone.

The only thing the Leon Panetta appointment and Jack Bauer have in common is the lack-of-subtlety thing. A signal is being sent to the nation and nations. A kinder-gentler sheriff is in town. No more ugly stuff – certainly no hint of torture. And GITMO? Well, we’re going to shut that bad place down and bring its residents to our mainland – maybe even a backyard near you.

Americans are decent people. We understandably flinch and recoil at violence. We deplore senseless killing. We cannot even begin to grasp the fanatical insanity of our Islamist enemies.

But the mistake often made is to assume that others – in places far away and vastly different – think and feel as we do. We regularly and all too predictably underestimate the wickedness and bloodthirsty nature of those who would just as soon wipe us off the face of the planet as look at us. Too many think that people are all basically reasonable and we just need to find some common ground.

Lyndon Johnson used to speculate that if only he could sit down with Ho Chi Minh and promise him some kind of Tennessee Valley Authority-like public works initiative for Vietnam that the communist leader would make peace. But LBJ missed the point that some people are wired differently – especially those who use actual wires tied to bombs.

It is a monumental mistake for anyone on our side to think for a moment that there is any point or place of accommodation that will bring peace, when those we are fighting have a ferocious and fanatical passion for our complete demise.

So – when we telegraph our punches (or better, pull the punch) by putting someone in charge of our major intelligence arm who has long indicated there are some things we will not do in this war, we need to understand that our enemies are not going to be impressed with our “humanity.” Instead, they will know that they have gained an important upper hand in their struggle.

Torture is an ugly word. It is unpleasant and decent people abhor the very idea of it. But, if it is permissible and considered as a necessary evil by a just society to kill terrorists, to bomb them, to send missiles their way, and to otherwise fight them with cruel might, why is torture, under certain circumstances, where we draw the “moral” line?

Years ago, when then heavyweight boxing champ, Muhammad Ali, refused the draft and was stripped of his title, comedian George Carlin (not yet famous) appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show and mocked the pugilist. He suggested, humorously, that there was some inconsistency in a case where a man was claiming to be a pacifist who regularly beat people up for a living.

We can’t have it both ways in this current international climate. We can’t profess to fight a war on terror – using violent means. We can’t target enemy leaders for death, launch missiles, or drop bombs to kill terrorists, but say at the same time that we won’t rough up a “detainee” to obtain vital life-saving information. The Panetta appointment is, in effect, a public indication that the new sheriff in town will – as Sean Connery put it in the movie, The Untouchables – be bringing a knife to a gun- fight.

Of course, intelligence work is a murky business. But it is a necessary evil in war. Many are drawing parallels between our times and 1929, when the wheels fell off the economy en route to the Great Depression. There is, however, another interesting comparison between then and now. That year, Henry Stimson – Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of State – shut down a spy operation while uttering the famous and naïve words: “Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail.”

It’s a pretty good thing we grew out of that notion – considering what unfolded during the ensuing decades. Stimson meant well, in trying to “civilize” a business that is inherently uncivilized – war. But the time for such tenderness is after the battle is won, not when guns are blazing.

Torture is certainly horrific. But is it at times necessary – in at least some forms? Henry Kissinger once said, “Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”

It would seem that the important factor is context – in other words, a case-by-case approach is the best way to make such moral judgments. For example, no decent human being would consider torture for the sake of torture (getting sadistic pleasure from inflicting pain) to be morally acceptable under any circumstances. And, even in cases where authorities used torture to obtain a confession in a criminal proceeding – that would be inappropriate and of bounds.

But how about when a “detainee” is believed (strongly believed) to have important information – the kind that, if known, would save the lives of civilians or military personnel?

Former Chief of CIA Counterintelligence, James M. Olson, has written an excellent book about all of this – one every American concerned about this issue should read. In Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying, he traces the history of espionage back to the days of the Bible and beyond. With an intelligence career that included assignments in Moscow, Vienna, and Mexico City during the Cold War, he knew first hand of the challenges and issues of conscience spy work involves.

Now serving in a key academic post at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, he teaches about intelligence and national security issues.

In the book, Mr. Olson describes various scenarios – some involving the potential use of methods considered by some to be torturous. He has interviewed leaders from several walks of life – from intelligence agents, to clergymen, to professors, even someone from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals – and chronicles their opinions.

Torture is just one of many methodologies Olson analyzes – others include: journalism cover, homosexual blackmail, kidnapping, truth serum, missionary cover, feeding a drug habit, bogus websites and chat rooms, – even plagiarizing a Ph.D. Dissertation. For anyone interested in the moral implications of intelligence work in a dangerous world, Fair Play is a must-read (originally published in 2006, it is now out in paperback).

Olson concedes “spying is a dirty business,” but asks: “Should we put all our trust in overt sources of information, diplomacy, and the peaceful arts – and hope are enemies will not take advantage of us?”

At a time when a highly and fanatically motivated enemy is watching and waiting to strike at the heart of all we hold dear, Mr. Obama seems to be sending the clear, unmistakable, and potentially ominous signal that the CIA is an entity to be managed and tempered.

I am sure radical Islamists worldwide are going to be very impressed. But I find myself earnestly hoping that we keep a few guys like Jack Bauer around – just in case.

Baker’s Not-So-Fabulous Bush Boys

January 3, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, Bush Administration, Richard Nixon, Watergate | 3 Comments 

It’s not surprising that “The Huffington Post” would run a long expose on George W. Bush’s National Guard service. What’s surprising is that it’s an excerpt from Russ Baker’s new book, Family of Secrets. I’ve read about half of it, including all the Nixon chapters. It’s a massive exercise in conjecture which hints that George H. W. Bush had something to do with JFK’s assassination (Kennedy wouldn’t do the bidding of Texas oligarchs, who were fiercely protective of the oil depletion allowance) and also oiled the skids for President Nixon’s downfall because of his independent-mindedness on economic and foreign policy. Here’s an example of Baker’s style:

Maureen Dean, before meeting John during his White House residency, had been a Dallas-based flight attendant. She had been married to George Owen, who worked for Clint Murchison Jr. — a central figure in the oil depletion-[Oswald associate] George de Mohrenschildt circle. At minimum, it certainly is a small world.

In part by drawing lines such as that between mid-century elites — Baker must’ve had a thousand yellow stickies on his dining room wall — he asserts that the CIA’s behind almost everything in Washington’s recent history, including John Dean. Even Watergate historian Stanley Kutler, who calls Dean a personal friend, is drawn into the fray. The tentacles, Baker hints, reach even that far.

We Nixonians are instinctively drawn to anything which exonerates our man, as Family of Secrets largely does. Baker draws on under-appreciated Watergate findings by Jim Hougan, Colodny-Gettlin, and most recently James Rosen. His book was praised by Nixon biographer Roger Morris and also carries an endorsement of the author (though not, it appears, of the book itself) by Bill Moyers. It’s not that more scholarship about the Vietnam-Watergate era isn’t needed, particularly since the corrupt FBI’s self-protective machinations against an elected President have been cast in sharp relief by W. Mark Felt’s death.

And yet time after time, Baker makes fateful implications and suppositions without quite closing the deal. Conviction by connection isn’t the same as history. Which brings us back to “The Huffington Post”’s seeming opportunism in running a Baker excerpt. If it’s in your political or ideological interests to promote Family of Secrets on W.’s Guard service (as Huffington does) or indeed on the alleged CIA frame-up of RN during Watergate, aren’t you endorsing his whole enterprise, including, especially, the dark hints about the Bush family and the events of November 1963?

Poppycock?

December 23, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, Bush Administration, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Old conventional wisdom: Nixon worse than Bush. New CW: Bush worse than Nixon. New Russ Baker book: Bushes destroyed Nixon.

Christmas Book Suggestions

December 18, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Book Review, Culture, History, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

At the Huffington Post Glynnis Macnicol, editor at FishbowlNY.com, polls a number of notables (including Salman Rushdie, Fred Armisen and Ana Marie Cox) about their favorite recent reading.  Jon Meacham, editor-in-chief of Newsweek (and author of the recent biography of Andrew Jackson, American Lion) chooses Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland which he describes as “brilliant and fun.”  (An opinion shared by Ms. Macnicol who calls the book “thoroughly fabulous.”)  Peggy Noonan turns out to be a fan of Duff Cooper’s diaries, but the list overall leans toward the current-events side.

It was not that surprising, I guess, that none of those surveyed by Ms. Macnicol mentioned James Rosen’s The Strong Man, but I did hope to see it listed when I examined the American Spectator’s annual “Books For Christmas” selections.  But such wasn’t the case.  However, the volumes suggested by TAS’s distinguished group of recommenders include many good titles in the history field.  Conrad Black, Jonathan Aitken, and Michael Barone all speak highly of Andrew Roberts’s Masters And Commanders: How Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall and Alanbrooke Won The War In The West. Aitken and Barone also commend Daniel Walker Howe’s What God Hath Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. And Jonathan Aitken, author of an excellent one-volume biography of Richard Nixon, gives his approval to Lord Black’s Richard Nixon: A Life In Full.

The surprise figure in the group choosing books for TAS readers is S. Joseph Wurzelbacher of Ohio, with whom America became familiar this fall.  Three of the four books Joe The Plumber selects pertain to his chosen profession; the fourth is Ludwig von Mises’s 500-page Theory Of Money And Credit. It makes you wish that the conversation with the President-elect that shot Joe to fame had lasted just a little longer.

The Spy Who Really Came In From the Cold

December 17, 2008 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Book Review, Cold War, History, Russia, U.S. History | 2 Comments 

Several years ago, David Cornwell (better known by his nom de plume, John Le Carré) told an interviewer that, “espionage was not really something exclusive and clandestine. It was actually the currency of the Cold War. Spies were the poor bloody infantry of the Cold War.”

They still are – though these days we are in a different war and battling another pernicious ideology.

Cold War spy novels make for entertaining reading, but the more we learn about the nuts and bolts of what actually went on back then, the more we come to understand that truth is in many ways even more dramatic than fiction.

Consider, for example, the case of Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski. He was a Polish patriot who may have saved his nation, the whole continent of Europe – maybe even the world – from massive suffering at the hands of a Soviet war machine once poised to race from behind Warsaw Pact borders to the Atlantic Ocean.

I recently attended a symposium at Langley on the life and work of this remarkable unsung hero who risked life, limb, and loved ones to pass along vital information at a crucial moment during the Cold War.

Under the watchful eye of CIA Director General Michael V. Hayden, and as part of a very real “social-contract” with this country, voluminous de-classified materials are being made available to researchers and the public at large. General Hayden was a history major back in college days and has not lost his love for thorough and informed analysis of the past. This passion has clearly informed his directorate.

The most recent historical symposium corresponded with the release of materials relating to Rsyzard Kuklinski and his work on our behalf, but especially that of his beloved Poland. In fact, Kuklinski, who died in 2004, did not see himself as working for “us” – rather he consciously recruited America, via the CIA, to work on behalf of Polish freedom during a dark and difficult time.

In August of 1972, Kuklinski sent a letter to the U.S. Embassy in Bonn, West Germany, establishing contact with our intelligence operatives. Signing it “P.V.” (later Kuklinski said this stood for “Polish Viking”), this singular act began a relationship that would bear the fruit of literally thousands of vital documents and crucial information helping us to understand Soviet doctrine and intent.

The definitive account of the Polish spy’s fascinating story is a book written by Benjamin Weiser, a reporter for the New York Times, entitled, A Secret Life: The Polish Officer, His Covert Mission, and the Price He Paid to Save His Country. Rsyzard Kuklinski is described at the time of his espionage work as “a small man with tousled hair, penetrating blue eyes and the gestures and mannerisms of a man within whom an unbounded supply of energy is bottled up.” He focused that energy on doing everything he could to prevent his country from being sacrificed during the Cold War, as it had been in so many ways during the Second World War.

Kuklinski was motivated by patriotic fear. His role as a high-ranking staff officer made him privy to information about what a major Soviet offensive in Europe would mean. Though always framed via lip service as “defensive” in nature, the Soviet and Warsaw Pact war plans, in fact, were entirely designed to be offensive operations.

The salient point, as far as Kuklinski was concerned, had to do with the so-called Second Strategic Echelon – a massive potential Soviet offensive involving roughly 2 million soldiers and at least a million armored vehicles. Rsyzard and others in a place to know about these plans discerned accurately that the only real response NATO forces would have to counter such a massive Soviet mobilization would be nuclear.

And those bombs would drop, not in Moscow, nor in Western Europe – rather they would obliterate Poland – the perpetual 20th century European pawn.

In fact, the materials passed to us by this highly effective Cold War spy enabled the United States and NATO to effectively plan for such a scenario. And the other guys never knew we had the information.

But even beyond the role he played for us strategically, he also became our eyes and ears during those turbulent months (1980) as the world watched a fledgling political movement known as Solidarity, led by Lech Walesa, begin to achieve political traction in Poland. The world also wondered if and when the Soviets (with the complicity of their puppets in charge of things in Warsaw) would intervene as they had in Budapest (1956) and Prague (1968). It seemed like only a matter of time.

Rsyzard Kuklinski was uniquely positioned in those days to report on what was going on – enabling us, in the waning days of the Carter presidency, to effectively warn the Soviets off. At one point, he sent a 16-page letter to the CIA describing high-level meetings of the Polish government where the discussion included the potential for a Soviet invasion of their country.

And the next year, 1981, as it became clear that the Polish government led by General Wojciech Jaruzelski, was preparing to declare martial law in the land, Kuklinski kept us informed in great detail. He despised Jaruzelski, writing in one covert dispatch that the strongman was “unworthy of the name Pole.”

In a dramatic moment on November 2, 1981, Rsyzard Kuklinski was summoned to a meeting in the office of one of his bosses. Six men sat at a T-shaped table and learned that there was a “mole” among them – someone had been leaking information to the Americans. Somehow managing to keep his composure, Kuklinski joined the chorus of voices in the room denouncing such an act of “treason.”

But he knew his days were numbered and soon found a way to communicate to his handlers: “I urgently request instructions for evacuating from the country myself and my family. Please take into consideration that the state border is possibly already closed for me and my family.”

For several days, CIA personnel in Warsaw tried to carry out a plan to evacuate Rsyzard, his wife, and their two sons. Eventually they were spirited away for the long drive to Berlin. I spoke with the driver during a reception near the famed CIA floor seal in Langley’s lobby, and he told me that they managed to get through three checkpoints en route – though acknowledging he still gets chills when thinking about that perilous trip – even 27 years later.

Life in America was no picnic for this Cold War hero and his family. They had to live under an assumed identity and avoid relationships, particularly with Polish-Americans, for years. The two Kuklinski sons met with untimely accidental deaths less than a year apart, breaking the hearts of mom and dad. Questions were raised about the nature of the deaths – one in a boating accident (the body never found) – the other on a college campus, felled by a hit-and-run driver. But no evidence (beyond the circumstantial) was ever discovered that pointed to anything conspiratorial or sinister.

Rsyzard Kuklinski was tried in absentia in 1984 in Poland, found guilty of treason, and sentenced to death. After the Cold War ended, his sentence was commuted to 25 years (something that hurt Kuklinski deeply). In 1995, the chief justice of the Polish Supreme Court annulled his sentence. Then in September of 1997, all charges against him were revoked, enabling him to return to Poland a free man.

In April-May 1998, Rsyzard Kuklinski made an 11-day tour of several Polish cities. He was greeted by some as a hero – on a level with Pope John Paul II. Others, however, protested that he was – and would remain – a traitor.

Lech Walesa, for all his good work in the cause of freedom, never completely accepted Kuklinski’s account of things – even suggesting publicly that Rsyzard was a “double-agent” working for the Soviets, as well as the Americans. No such evidence exists – in fact, as new information comes out the case being made that Kuklinski was a Polish patriot and one of the good guys gets stronger and stronger. But Walesa’s remarks highlight the tension when “state” becomes synonymous with “country.”

Frankly, Rsyzard Kuklinski’s work – his willingness to risk it all for what he believed was right – left the world a better place. The Soviet Union eventually fell apart and freedom broke out in his beloved Poland. Neither would have happened had Warsaw Pact nations acted on clearly defined plans for continental – even global – hegemony.

When Kuklinski died in February of 2004, then Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet said: “This passionate and courageous man helped keep the Cold War from becoming hot, providing the CIA with precious information upon which so many critical national security decisions rested. And he did so for the noblest of reasons – to advance the sacred causes of liberty and peace in his homeland and throughout the world.”

Long before that, Rsyzard Kuklinski reflected, “I am pleased that our long, hard struggle has brought peace, freedom, and democracy not only to my country but to many other people as well.”

So are we.

A Hero Tells His Tale – And He Has Quite A Tale To Tell

December 11, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Book Review, Iraq War | Leave a Comment 

As we approach Saturday, the fifth anniversary of the discovery of Saddam Hussein down the most famous spider hole in history, we now have the story of the intelligence, ingenuity, dedication, and, to be sure, luck, that led to his capture.

Army Staff Sgt. Eric Maddox (left) —the man who had the hunch that broke the case— has written a book about this extraordinary accomplishment: Mission: Black List #1: The Inside Story of the Search for Saddam Hussein—As Told by the Soldier Who Masterminded His Capture.

While the conventional wisdom was that Saddam had long since skedaddled, Sgt. Maddox —who was a newbie and something of an inspired amateur— felt that the dictator would be sticking closer to home in order to run the insurgency.  As it turned out, he turned up in Tikrit — which couldn’t have been closer to home.

Sgt. Maddox was a guest this afternoon on the Big O and Dukes show on Washington’s WJFK-FM.  Their show is always entertaining — although the subject matter more usually deals with MMA fighting, video games, snack foods, and dick jokes. They are, however, capable of depth, and their interview with Sgt. Maddox captures the respect of the interviewers, the humility of the man, and the adventure of his story.  Give it a listen

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A One Time Only Invention

December 9, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Book Review, China, Cold War, History, Science | Leave a Comment 

In today’s New York Times, veteran science correspondent William A. Broad previews two new books that combine to do some rewriting —or at least some major revision— of the atomic history.

The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and its Proliferation by Thomas C. Reed and Danny B. Stillman and The Bomb: A New History, by Stephen M. Younger are both based on extensive research supplemented by insider insight and information.  And both conclude that the atom bomb was only invented once — by the scientists of the Manhattan Project led by J. Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

The proliferation that now plagues the world is the result of spying that leaked the secrets and national policy or ideological interests that spread the technology.  A striking graphic charts the claim.

All paths stem from the United States, directly or indirectly. One began with Russian spies that deeply penetrated the Manhattan Project. Stalin was so enamored of the intelligence haul, Mr. Reed and Mr. Stillman note, that his first atom bomb was an exact replica of the weapon the United States had dropped on Nagasaki.

Moscow freely shared its atomic thefts with Mao Zedong, China’s leader. The book says that Klaus Fuchs, a Soviet spy in the Manhattan Project who was eventually caught and, in 1959, released from jail, did likewise. Upon gaining his freedom, the authors say, Fuchs gave the mastermind of Mao’s weapons program a detailed tutorial on the Nagasaki bomb. A half-decade later, China surprised the world with its first blast.

 “Since the birth of the nuclear age,” they write, “no nation has developed a nuclear weapon on its own, although many claim otherwise.”

Among other things, the book details how secretive aid from France and China helped spawn five more nuclear states.

The book, in a main disclosure, discusses how China in 1982 made a policy decision to flood the developing world with atomic know-how. Its identified clients include Algeria, Pakistan and North Korea.

Two of the major sources, and resources, for nuclear proliferation have been China and France.

Why did Beijing spread its atomic knowledge so freely? The authors speculate that it either wanted to strengthen the enemies of China’s enemies (for instance, Pakistan as a counterweight to India) or, more chillingly, to encourage nuclear wars or terror in foreign lands from which Beijing would emerge as the “last man standing.”

A lesser pathway involves France. The book says it drew on Manhattan Project veterans and shared intimate details of its bomb program with Israel, with whom it had substantial commercial ties. By 1959, the book says, dozens of Israeli scientists “were observing and participating in” the French program of weapons design.

The book adds that in early 1960, when France detonated its first bomb, doing so in the Algerian desert, “two nations went nuclear.” And it describes how the United States turned a blind eye to Israel’s own atomic developments. It adds that, in the autumn of 1966, Israel conducted a special, non-nuclear test “2,600 feet under the Negev desert.” The next year it built its first bomb.

Israel, in turn, shared its atomic secrets with South Africa. The book discloses that the two states exchanged some key ingredients for the making of atom bombs: tritium to South Africa, uranium to Israel. And the authors agree with military experts who hold that Israel and South Africa in 1979 jointly detonated a nuclear device in the South Atlantic near Prince Edward Island, more than one thousand miles south of Cape Town. Israel needed the test, it says, to develop a neutron bomb.

 

The Deaths Of Journalism

November 27, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, News media, Presidents, Russia | Leave a Comment 

Mary Cassatt’s Children Playing on the Beach, or a painting much like it, stars in Daniel Silva’s riveting thriller Moscow Rules, about a Russian oligarch whose promiscuous weapons sales put him in bed with al-Qaeda. The deal with the devil is uncover by a brave editor in Moscow.

A former UPI foreign correspondent who’s married to NBC’s Jamie Gangel, Silva, in extensive author’s notes, reminds us that while journalism appears to be dying in the U.S., elsewhere it’s the journalists:

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 47 reporters, editors, cameramen, and photographers have been killed in Russia since 1992, making it the third-deadliest country in the world in which to practice the craft of journalism, after Iraq and Algeria. Fourteen of those deaths occurred during the rule of Russian president [now PM] Vladimir Putin, who undertook a systematic crack-down on press freedom and political dissent after coming to power in 1999. Virtually all the murders were contract killings, and few have been solved or prosecuted.

Silva also thanks Jean Becker, “amazing” chief of staff to former President and Barbara Bush. Hear hear! Jean has also extended many kindnesses to the Nixon family and Foundation over the years.

***

I should have noted that my colleague David Stokes beat me to Silva’s yarn by fourh months. Read his excellent comments here.

Aglet: Another Name For A Whatjermecallit

November 20, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Book Review, Humor | 1 Comment 

Back in the ’80s, Rich Hall invented Sniglets: Words that should —but don’t— appear in the dictionary. Such as:

ACCORDIONATED (ah kor’ de on ay tid)
adj. Being able to drive and refold a road map at the same time.

CARPERPETUATION (kar’ pur pet u a shun)
n. The act, when vacuuming, of running over a string or a piece of lint at least a dozen times, reaching over and picking it up, examining it, then putting it back down to give the vacuum one more chance.

ELBONICS (el bon’ iks)
n. The actions of two people maneuvering for one armrest in a movie theater. (or on an airplane!)

PUPKUS (pup’ kus)
n. The moist residue left on a window after a dog presses its nose to it.

TELECRASTINATION (tel e kras tin ay’ shun)
n. The act of always letting the phone ring at least twice before you pick it up, even when you’re only six inches away.

Now Danny Danziger and Mark McCrum have written The Thingummy — providing the actual dictionary-based words for the things you always think need a word to describe them. For example:

AGLET: the little plastic or metal tube at the end of your shoelace. Its purpose is to stop the thread of the lace from unravelling, as well as making it easier to feed through the shoe’s eyelets.

BORBORYGMUS (pronounced bor-buh-rig-mus): the name for the rumbling sounds made by the stomach. These are caused by the movement of fluids and gases, as food, acids and digestive juices migrate from the stomach into the upper part of the small intestine. The average body makes two gallons of digestive juices a day.

GLUTEAL CREASE: the place where the lower buttocks meet the upper leg. If those buttocks are particularly comely, they might be described by the adjective callipygian, a word which derives from the Greek for beautiful (kallos) and buttocks (pyge).

INTERROBANG: one of the most eloquent punctuation marks in the English language, combining a question mark, and a bang (printers’ parlance for the exclamation mark). EG: He’s going to appoint Hillary Clinton Secretary of State?!

PHILTRUM: the vertical indentation between the upper lip and nose.

PHLOEM BUNDLES (pronounced flo-em): the stringy bits between the skin and the edible part of a banana.

ULLAGE: the space in a wine bottle not occupied by wine.

It would be a perfect stocking stuffer, and the deteremined can order it from England.  The more patient may wait for the US publication in May.  In the meantime, there’s a whole universe of stocking-sized Sniglets (including Unexplained Sniglets of the Universe) easily available.

Price Slashed On New Inflation Book

November 20, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, Economic issues | Leave a Comment 

Just in time for our not worrying about inflation anymore — as we (can it be?) pine for our summertime fretting about mounting gas and food prices — comes Robert Samuelson’s not exceptionally well-timed new book. From an “Economist” review:

Milton Friedman was wrong. Inflation is always and everywhere a social phenomenon, not a monetary one. At least, that is how Robert Samuelson sees it. “The Great Inflation and its Aftermath” dwells little on the economics of inflation; the main text does not mention the Federal Reserve until page 31. Instead, it examines the intellectual and political currents that let inflation rise from 1% in the early 1960s to nearly 15% in 1980 and then brought it down again.

The current intellectual and political current: Sheer panic. That works, too.

 

“The Coca Cola of Democracy”

November 14, 2008 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Book Review, Nixon Library | Leave a Comment 

Jon Meacham in the Nixon Foundation’s replica of the White House East Room.

Raised without a father, he succeeded the unpopular son of another New England President, and brought real change by communicating straight to the people, permanently altering the cultural and institutional landscape of America. Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham’s characterization of the seventh President, Andrew Jackson, shares much in common with the incoming 44th President, Barack Obama. Meacham was in Yorba Linda yesterday to talk about his new book, American Lion, Andrew Jackson in the White House.

But in listening to Meacham’s talk, Obama’s and Jackson’s temperament for the White House couldn’t be more dissimilar. For “Old Hickory” as the Tennessean came to be called, people power was passionate and entirely unambiguous. According to Meacham, because Jackson’s whole family died during the American Revolution, “their blood consecrated the country.” The people were ostensibly his Revolutionary family, the realization of an affectionate and intense love for the common; no person and institution were going to get in the way of individual liberty. Accordingly, a Jacksonian democracy meant the extension of suffrage, and an unabashed position of anti-clericalism and opposition to powerful government institutions like the national bank. “He was the first President to see his job as representative of the people.”

“Another reason for writing this book,” Meacham joked, “is if a President tried to assault his own assassin, twice, he has the right to his own book.” “He longed for defiance.” Meacham said. One wanted him on their side, because “if he was preying on you, God help you.” “He preferred dueling rather than talking.” “His greatest regret was that he didn’t shoot Henry Clay or hang John C. Calhoun.”

Meacham also characterized Jackson as a person who always needed to be in control. “He imagined his own reality,” recalling a time the President was saved from drowning on a river raft, but re-told the story as if he were the hero. Jackson’s political enemy Henry Clay characterized this propensity for control as despotic and dictatorial; but according to Meacham a careful look at Jackson’s presidency indicates a measured approach of governance. “He had the capacity to occasionally overreach, but he kept in the back of his mind that the people had a right to take a different course.” Ostensibly Jackson created a democracy from a republic, as the “first six presidents were less inclined” to listen to the political common. In short, Meacham described Jackson’s style of governing as “the coca cola of democracy.”

As for historical lessons learned from Jackson’s presidency, for Meacham it is the political principle of always corresponding to the base. Something he believes President-elect Obama understands. “People just don’t show up every four years, there has to be constant communication. People need to feel involved.”

Another lesson from Jackson’s presidency is the understanding of personal fallibility. Jackson was not a perfect man. Meacham argued while he was deeply flawed, an unrepentant slave owner, and cruel to the Native Americans, he like us, had a mixed soul. Jackson allows us “take stock in ourselves” and helps us avoid the simple opinion of self-righteousness. After all, according to Meacham, “one generation’s good is another’s questioned evil,” and “we will become better Americans as we profit not only from the grandeur, but the sadness of the past.”

An Unexpected “Nixonland” Review

November 13, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, History, National Security, Nixon Administration, Nixon Administration figures, Nixonland Nitpicks, Richard Nixon, Terrorism, U.S. History, Watergate | 6 Comments 

It has now been about a half-year since Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland was published, and some time back I noticed that no review had appeared in The American Spectator, a magazine avidly read by the 37th President and usually not a place where major books about him go unnoticed.

Well, Perlstein’s book is finally discussed in TAS’s November issue, which you’ll have to buy or browse at a store, for it’s not online. The author of the review is none other than Tom Charles Huston – one of the most important figures in Young Americans For Freedom in the mid-1960s, associate counsel at the Nixon White House during the administration’s first two years, and, of course, author of the 1970 “Huston Plan” which presented a comprehensive proposal for coordination of the FBI, CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, and local law enforcement to combat the threat to the United States posed by violent antiwar and anti-government radicals, such as the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground.

This plan was never implemented primarily because of objections from the aging J. Edgar Hoover, who viewed it as a threat to the FBI’s autonomy, and Huston left government service in 1971 to become an attorney in his native Indianapolis, where he has practiced ever since. During the last 37 years he has been prominent in efforts to preserve the Hoosier State’s historical sites, but has not been heard from concerning the years in which he was an up-and-coming figure on the political stage. Possibly as a result of this silence, he has tended to be among the figures most demonized in the vast anti-Nixon literature, especially after 1973 when his “plan” came to public notice during the Senate Watergate hearings.

But it now appears that Huston is ready to come out of the cold, so to speak. Earlier this year I was surprised to find his name among the list of interviewees in James Rosen’s fine biography of John Mitchell, The Strong Man, and even more surprised when Rosen told me that Huston had spoken at considerable length about his White House years, though little from this talk appeared in the finished volume, which focused on the period after Huston left Washington. And, to judge from the TAS review of Nixonland, Huston has much more to say.

The review vigorously pans Perlstein’s book, to such a degree that it makes Conrad Black’s scathing New York Sun notice almost look like a Harriet Klausner five-star puff from Amazon. After listing such descriptions in the book as Strom Thurmond being called a “dirty-neck” and Robert Kennedy referred to as “Senator Love Beads,” Huston remarks: “This sort of language may be pitch-perfect for a duet with Keith Olbermann on Countdown but is hardly appropriate for an allegedly serious work of history.”

“There is a point at which the frequency of factual errors raises the legitimate question of whether the author is a scholar or transcriber,” the reviewer continues, and then cites a half-dozen examples, including several that even escaped Jack Pitney’s watchful eye. Huston also takes issue with Perlstein’s beloved Orthogonians-vs-Franklins dichotomy, noting that the historian uses the terms as “trap doors through which the author conveniently disposes of men and ideas he is unwilling to confront on their own terms.”

Toward the end of the review Huston takes strong exception to Perlstein’s argument that the Nixon years represented a battle between two equally sized, equally bloody-minded factions for the soul of the Republic:

The decade of the 1960s was the most turbulent in America since that which began with John Brown’s Kansas raids and ended at Appomattox Courthouse. There was a lot of anger, a lot of goofiness, and an indecent amount of violence. It commenced on Lyndon Johnson’s watch, during the high tide of liberalism. Richard Nixon didn’t cause it; he inherited it. The deranged landscape of the 1960s was the product of a liberalism untethered from common sense and good judgment, which elicited a reaction that was often ill considered and ill advised but was hardly homicidal. There were, of course, extremists who resorted to violence and haters who, while less lethal, were nonetheless menacing, but these were outriders, not mainstreamers. The very notion that the mass of Americans were prepared to kill each other over their political and cultural differences is more than nonsense; it is a calumny.

One wonders if Huston, when he speaks of an “ill-considered and ill-advised” reaction to rampant New Leftism, is thinking in retrospect about his “plan” which provided, on the assumption that extraconstitutional measures were needed to combat violent radicals, for the opening of mail, wiretaps, and an increased use of campus informants. (It is a little-remembered fact that some of the Libertarian Party’s founders-to-be were among Huston’s closest associates in the YAF, which would suggest that his 1970 proposals were intended to be a response to a wartime crisis and applicable only for the duration such a threat existed.) It may be that, as his professional career winds down, we’ll be hearing more from him in the future. Which is all for the best, since he was among the genuine intellectuals in the Nixon White House and, as his review makes clear, has read extensively and carefully in American history and can take the long view regarding the era in which he played a brief but significant part.

Honey, The New Puppy Chewed My Striped Pants!

November 6, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, Obama administration, Presidents, The New Nixon | 1 Comment 

In the Wall Street Journal, TNN’s Frank Gannon reviews Stephen Hess’s new book on Presidential transitions and inaugurations:

What do you wear to your Inauguration? Ike and JFK wore a morning coat and striped pants. (The general donned a homburg, and Kennedy sported a top hat.) Jimmy Carter inaugurated the new tradition — a plain business suit. What chapter and verse should the Bible be opened to as you are sworn in? Nixon chose the “swords into ploughshares” passage from Isaiah. Both Kennedy and George W. Bush, perhaps hoping to avoid interpretation, left the Bible closed. As for furnishing the Oval Office, you can be like LBJ and bring your own desk or select from four in the White House inventory: the Theodore Roosevelt, the Wilson, the Resolute (made from the timbers of a 19th-century ship) or the C&O (made in the 1920s for the railroad’s owners).

Too Busy Plotting a Revolution to Make Time for History

November 3, 2008 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Book Review | Leave a Comment 

Jonathan Karl reviews Ira Stoll’s Samuel Adams.

The Corps, And The Corps, And The Corps

October 30, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, Military, Nixon Library events | 4 Comments 

Vietnam War scholar Bob Sorley, third-generation West Point graduate, brought his copy of the 1952-53 Bugle Notes (indispensable handbook for each class of plebes, or freshmen, at the U.S. Military Academy) to the Nixon Library last week. He was in Yorba Linda to talk about his new book, Honor Bright: History And Origins Of the West Point Honor Code And System. Copies of Honor Bright were on sale. The Bugle Notes were not. Sorley would just as soon give you his right arm. The well-worn volume contains this answer to the question of what advantages an Army career has to offer, which he read out to his audience:

The answer is, paradoxically, practically none; [but,] in another sense, everything that is worthwhile in life. It depends entirely on your viewpoint….If you measure success by things accomplished, by a niche well filled, by the gratification of duty well and faithfully done, if your joy in life finds fulfillment in playing the game for the game’s own sake, of winning the love and respect of the men serving under you…, if you do not count the work, the trouble, the cost to yourself and do not stop to think of where the credit will go, but only of the success of the team, then in the Army you will find contentment.

Bolstering this countercultural vision of community and mission-critical interdependence is West Point’s honor code: “A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.” Cadets violated the code most famously in 1951, when 90 were dismissed (with the personal acquiescence of President Truman) after one revealed the existence of an academic cheating ring designed to help members of the football team, and in 1976, when an instructor read this on a cadet’s computer science paper: “This is not entirely my own work.” Over 150 cadets were involved that time, though many were permitted to return after a redemptive year off. Sorley says the returning cohort did just as well making colonel (an important benchmark in an Army career) as those who weren’t involved in the scandal.

The friendly and phlegmatic scholar choked up just once, and just a little, as he talked about his and Virginia Sorley’s (his wife and a former CIA librarian) friendship with West Point graduate Dawn Halfaker, severely injured while leading troops at Baquba, Iraq in June 2004. Among many other activities, Halfaker is now vice president of the Wounded Warrior Project. Recruited to play basketball at West Point, she had no special calling to military service until she arrived at the academy and got to know her instructors and coaches and her brother and sister cadets. Sorley said she told him later, “I’d found my tribe. These were the people I wanted to be with.”

After Sorley’s talk, the last question was posed by Orange Countian Lee Hobbs, who’d brought his son, Tobin, West Point ‘96, a veteran of service in Bosnia and now a Chapman University law student as well as a major in the Army reserves. Such is the bond in the long grey line that, before the applause had died, Bob Sorley was making his way up the aisle to shake the hands of a fellow cadet and his proud father.

 

The Messiah From Another Planet

October 27, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Faith | Leave a Comment 

Bruce Handy is a “Vanity Fair” editor who recently reviewed some children’s books about the 2008 candidates for the New York Times. Go here if you have iTunes and want to download the Oct. 10 Times Book Review podcast in which Handy talks with Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus about his findings, which are a little creepy when it comes to the books about Sen. Obama:

They really are hagiographic….Some of these books almost present him almost in a kind of a spiritual light, he’s almost kind of a messianic, almost a Jesus-like figure. It actually reminded me a lot of when I was a kid going to Sunday school and the kind of the books we would have about Jesus — very sort of denatured, a sort of nice man who loved children. And that’s almost the presentation of Obama.

Even in the drawings — there’s one, a picture of him kind of praying in front of the Lincoln Memorial in one of the books, kind of taking on the mantle of Martin Luther King.

In one of the other books, there’s this scene of him where he’s got this sort of weird glowing aura. He almost looks like something out of Steven Spielberg’s “ET” or “Close Encounters.” There’s something about these books– I just think with politicians who are always flawed people like we all are, kids are bound to be ultimately let down.

Pre-Order Now For Your 2009 Stocking Stuffing

October 23, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Book Review | Leave a Comment 

Alas, it won’t be available in time for holiday giving this year, but a new book by William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn —Race Course Against White Supremacy— will be published by the Third World Press on 1 June 2009.

The appealing and evocative title alone should guarantee that the book flies off the shelves. The prudent can pre-order now on Amazon.

The book’s thesis —that white supremacy explains everything in American history from the beginning of time until at least 1 June 2009— is so obvious that it only requires 192 pages for the Ayerses to nail it down.

Here’s how Amazon summarizes it:

Product Description

White supremacy and its troubling endurance in American life is debated in these personal essays by two veteran political activists. Arguing that white supremacy has been the dominant political system in the United States since its earliest days—and that it is still very much with us—the discussion points to unexamined bigotry in the criminal justice system, election processes, war policy, and education. The book draws upon the authors’ own confrontations with authorities during the Vietnam era, reasserts their belief that racism and war are interwoven issues, and offers personal stories about their lives today as parents, teachers, and reformers.

And here’s how Amazon describes Professor and Mrs. Ayers:

About the Author

William C. Ayers is a distinguished professor of education and a senior university scholar at the University of Illinois–Chicago. He is the author of To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher and Fugitive Days, a memoir about his life with his wife, Bernardine Dohrn. Bernardine Dohrn is the director of the Children and Family Law Justice Center and a clinical associate professor of law at Northwestern University. She is the coauthor of A Century of Juvenile Justice and Justice in the Making. They live in Chicago.

Recommended Reading

October 17, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Book Review | Leave a Comment 

Here’s a link to an article about the upcoming election by Joan Didion. It’s a short piece with a long provenance; it is brought to you via The Daily Beast (where it is nicely titled “Slouching Toward Washington”), from today’s Salon (where it is given the rather slapdash title “Election by sound bite”), which reprints it from the election issue of The New York Review of Books, where it was printed as part of a series of untitled articles.

It’s offered here as much on the grounds that anything Joan Didion writes ought to be read than for any particular intrinsic merits. In its NYRB context it was intended to present a series of observations rather than make any particular point. And there’s no doubt that it’s a typically stylish collection of apercus.

For at least some months it had been clear that we were living in a different America, one that had moved from feeling rich to feeling poor. Many had seen a mandate for political change. Yet in the end the old notes had been struck, the old language used. The prospect for any given figure had been evaluated, now as before, by his or her “story.” She has “a wonderful story” we had heard about Condoleezza Rice during her 2005 confirmation hearings. “We all admire her story.” “I think she’s formidable,” Senator Biden said about Governor Palin a few weeks ago. “She has a great story. She has a great family.”

Senator Biden himself was said to have “a great story,” the one that revolved around the death of his first wife and child and taking the train from Washington to Wilmington to be with his surviving children. Senator McCain, everyone agreed, had “a great story.” Now as then, the “story” worked to “humanize” the figure under discussion, which is to say to downplay his or her potential for trouble. Condoleezza Rice’s “story,” for example, had come down to her “doing an excellent job as provost of Stanford” (this had kept getting mentioned, as if everyone at Fox News had come straight off the provost beat) and being “an accomplished concert pianist.”

Now as then, the same intractable questions were avoided and in the end successfully evaded. The matter of our continuing engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan and our looming engagements throughout the region had been reduced to bickering over who had or had not exhibited “belief in the surge.” “Belief in the surge” had been equated with the “success” of the surge, and by extension of our entire engagement in Iraq, as if that “success” were a fact rather than a wish. Such doublespeak was rampant. The increasing destabilization of the economy was already clear — an average of 81,000 jobs a month were lost all through the summer — but discussion of how to resolve the bleeding still centered on such familiar favorites as tort reform. This word “reform” kept resurfacing, but the question of who exactly was to be reformed was left to be explored mainly on “The View,” by Barbara Walters.

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