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

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

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

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

Continue reading.

Apparent Danger By David Stokes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not your typical man of the cloth!

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

A lot of people were.

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

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

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

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

“Only Nixon” Reviewed

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

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

RN’s Trip From The Chinese Perspective

December 9, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Book Review, China, Richard Nixon | 1 Comment 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clinton on Nixon

November 4, 2009 by David Emig | Filed Under Book Review, Hillary Clinton, History, Presidents, Richard Nixon | 2 Comments 

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

—Monica Crowley

“Nixon in Winter” (1998)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crowley sees the relationship between Clinton and Nixon well:

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

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

Russians Reject Our Reset Button In Favor Of Theirs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lessons In Disaster

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

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

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

The Lesson From “A Better War”

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

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

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

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

and

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

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

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

Lewis Sorley And A Better War

October 7, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Afghanistan, Book Review, Richard Nixon, Vietnam | 4 Comments 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rashomon — Cape Cod Style

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Again, Mudd has different recollections of that September weekend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Missiles, Crocodiles, And Doves

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lion And The Bear

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wait, there’s more:

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

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

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

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

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

Rules For Witnesses

August 7, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, Cold War, Congress, Domestic issues, Economic issues, Faith, Healthcare, History, Movies, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, Public Opinion, Religion, U.S. History | 14 Comments 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More On “Inherent Vice”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pynchon In Nixonland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Support Your Local Sharia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it’s not just happening over there.

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

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

Ignore what they say; watch what they do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Which Revolution?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vive la revolution – Vive la difference.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On The Jimmy Carter Years

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

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

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 | 3 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 | 6 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?

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