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 | 1 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 | 1 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 | 2 Comments 

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 | 1 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 | 3 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 

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