Before addressing the phenomenon that has come out of the Atlanta suburbs to startle C-SPAN viewers and then the nation in the last week, going by the name of Jonathan Krohn, it seems fitting to mention a conversation I had a few weeks ago with my friend Chris Lehmann, an editor at CQ and occasional Washington correspondent for the New York Observer.
I told Chris about a chat I had some years ago with a secondhand bookseller in Louisville whom I knew to be a man disinclined to tell tall tales. The bookseller had attended middle school in that city with the future Senator Mitch McConnell. He told me that one day, he, the Senate Minority Leader-to-be, and some friends were sitting on the curb talking. The question came up: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
The answers, according to the bookseller’s recollection, were what you’d expect from some 14-year-olds: “I wanna be a cop.” “I’m going to be a fireman.” “I’m going to play for the Reds.” “Aw, to heck with the Reds – I’m gonna play for the White Sox.”
Then it was McConnell’s turn. He said: “I want to graduate from college and then law school. After that I want to be elected Jefferson County [Kentucky] judge, and then I want to be elected to the Senate and become Republican Whip and then Republican Leader.” And later, this all happened just as he’d described it.
Chris gave me an expression that made it clear that he thought the bookseller might have been stretching things a little. I pointed out to him that McConnell had undergone a bout with polio between the ages of two and four, and that such a trauma forces a maturity on many of its victims that healthy people are allowed to postpone to a later age. But I had the feeling Chris still wasn’t buying the idea someone so young could have that kind of political consciousness, much less those kind of ambitions.
Chris, meet Jonathan Krohn.
Until the very end of February, Jonathan (who celebrated his fourteenth birthday last Monday) was simply a normal child, homeschooled by middle-class parents in Duluth, Georgia, who, last summer, took the money he’d earned as a child actor to self-publish his 80-page book, Define Conservatism. Jonathan had been interested in politics since the age of eight, when he tuned into C-SPAN and watched Democrats on Capitol Hill filibustering the Bush Administration’s judicial nominations.
The book was dedicated to Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley Jr., and argued the case for why conservatives should support Sen. John McCain as the Republican presidential nominee. It garnered some attention in the local media, partly thanks to the youthfulness of its author.
After meeting with some GOP elders in Georgia who were impressed by his articulation and poise, Jonathan was emboldened to contact the organizers of this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference and request to speak at the event. Though initially skeptical of the notion, CPAC’s honchos finally gave him a three-minute spot for Friday, February 27. On that day, Jonathan took the podium and, as can be seen in this clip, made the most of it, to borrow a phrase from his fellow orator Patrick Henry.
The CPAC attendees (and C-SPAN viewers) were amazed, to say the least. I caught part of the appearance during a rebroadcast. At first I didn’t know what to make of it. Was this something akin to the appearances of “Li’l Bill O’Reilly” on Fox’s Talkshow With Spike Feresten?
But it was for real. Jonathan displayed an aplomb and rhetorical skill that would do credit to speakers three or four times his age and twice his height. And I was not alone in being amazed.
Within the last seven days, the number of listings for Jonathan on Google has skyrocketed from a few hundred to over half a million. Nearly a hundred more Youtube clips of him have popped up. Last night he showed up on former Governor Mike Huckabee’s Fox News show, this morning the New York Timesfeatured him, and this evening he appeared on ABC’s World News Tonight.
Jonathan informed ABC’s reporter that he’s made up his mind not to seek the Presidency, but instead to devote himself to revitalizing the conservative movement as his hero did over a half-century ago by founding National Review. But Bill Buckley didn’t get started on this task until he published God And Man At Yale at the age of 25 in 1950 – a veritable greybeard compared to the lad from the Peach State. One has to wonder if Jonathan will stick with this resolve. What does he know yet about girls? Or cars? Or any of the other things that generally grab the attention of an adolescent as he goes on to college?
But then again, Mitch McConnell had a similar dream when he was that age, and he stuck with it. So let that be a lesson to those ready to pronounce the Right dead and buried.
Thomas Ricks, the WaPo’s military correspondent, was the author of the 2006 bestseller Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq.
He is now making the rounds promoting his new bookThe Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008. And, giving credit where it’s due, he is a very appealing and (no pun intended) disarming guest. Not surprisingly, given his credentials, he has been widely welcomed and little challenged.
Mr. Loyola, an attorney and former Senate and Pentagon aide and speechwriter, praises Mr. Ricks’ felicitous prose style and (unlike another WaPo best-selling author) his restraint in not making up mindsets for people he quotes. But he has major methodological reservations:
…in the absence of archival research, this mountain of quotations fails to communicate so many critical aspects of what happened — and of how decisions were made — that it would risk incoherence if it had to stand on its own as history. Ricks solves that problem by weaving his reportage around the most familiar propositions of the conventional media narrative: 1) Rumsfeld and his senior generals stubbornly refused to implement a proper counterinsurgency strategy and nearly caused a disaster; 2) the surge has succeeded militarily but failed politically; 3) democracy is a pipe dream in Iraq, where “lots of little Saddams” have replaced the one we toppled; 4) the Iraq war has been most of all a victory for Iran; and 5) Obama will be fighting the Iraq war long into the future, with an uncertain outcome. Each of these propositions is seriously flawed if not completely wrong.
He examines each of these propositions at considerable length and succeeds in raising many interesting questions.
Henry Hey is an Iowa-born, Texas and Interlochen-trained, New York-based musician and composer. Inspired by President Bush’s farewell press conference, Mr. Hey composed a supplementary and complementary soundtrack.
Mr. Hey is a go-to session player for many jazz artists; he has toured with Rod Stewart. You can read about his piece Watershed here; and you can listen to examples of his work here.
I have lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, since November 1997, and so have been within a twenty-minute subway ride to downtown Washington for the last three Presidential inaugurations. But I didn’t go downtown for either the 2001 or 2005 swearing-in. I was not quite up to braving the crowds, and since I was not invited to witness the event from indoors, I also was not keen on dealing with winter weather for hours.
But this year was different. Thanks to my wife Rene, we were invited to attend the inauguration as guests of a Treasury Department employee, and so, at 6 am, we awoke, met our host and some other guests, proceeded to Silver Spring’s Metro station (already phenomenally crowded at 7 am) and managed to catch a train to downtown.
We emerged at Metro Center, got breakfast, then walked to the Treasury Department’s annex, east of Lafayette Square. After going down an underground corridor, we emerged in the oldest part of the Treasury Building, constructed in the 1830s.
We then went to the Andrew Johnson Suite, got some coffee, sat down, and watched the televised proceedings for a while. This group of rooms is where the seventeenth President conducted the business of the nation from the hour that Abraham Lincoln died on April 15, 1865, until Mary Todd Lincoln moved out of the White House six weeks later.
It was here that Johnson met with his Cabinet, oversaw the concluding stages of the Civil War (such as Johnston’s surrender to Sherman), and read and listened to reports about the manhunt for John Wilkes Booth and the capture of his fellow conspirators. (I thought about this on Wednesday night when I watched a History Channel show on the search for Booth. These shows are so much more exciting to watch when you’ve been in one or another of the locations being described and depicted.)
After a while, one of the other guests called me to the window, and I watched the limousine carrying the 43rd and 44th Presidents come down the street between Treasury and the White House’s East Wing on its way to the Capitol. That was a powerful moment.
But not quite as powerful as witnessing the swearing-in ceremony itself, with the stirring music of Aretha Franklin and John Williams (as performed by a quartet including Itzhak Perlman and Yo Yo Ma), and President Obama taking the oath of office — even a somewhat botched version that enabled my fellow Indiana native, Chief Justice John Roberts, to become the first man in history to swear in a President twice for the same term.
I watched the swearing-in on a big-screen TV set up in a hallway where nearly every President from Martin Van Buren to the present has walked sometime during his time in office. The sense of history in the making was palpable.
After another hour or so in the Treasury Building, our host told us we were to come outside and sit in the bleachers at the south end of Lafayette Square, almost directly across from the White House. So we braved the cold and proceeded to those seats. In front of us, Al Roker spoke to NBC viewers. A voice came on over the PA speakers set up on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was Charlie Brotman, who has provided commentary to the spectators at every inaugural parade since Eisenhower’s second term began in 1957.
After a wait that wasn’t especially long but seemed an eternity thanks to the cold and my decision not to wear jeans, the police motorcycles came down the street, followed by bands representing the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, and Coast Guard, and, finally, President and Mrs. Obama and Vice President and Mrs. Biden. We all reached for our cameras. It was as thrilling a moment as I can remember having. Then we went back to the land of crabcakes and orioles and watched the rest of the parade in the comfortable warmth of the Tastee Diner.
I was going to call this “A Week To Remember” and cover some of the other events since Sunday, but the one that comes to mind just now – Caroline Kennedy’s bizarre withdrawal from consideration for the U.S. Senate seat formerly occupied by Secretary of State Clinton – seems a bit anticlimactic after the moments I just recounted. I’ll just note that Time’s “Swampland” blog put up a very interesting timeline of how the Kennedy withdrawal went down. It clearly came as a shock to much of her family and several of them seem to have attempted to get her to change her mind at the last moment, with no luck. And then there was the embarrassing attempt by her “people” to spin the withdrawal as having happened because of Sen. Ted Kennedy’s health, which evidently annoyed him considerably. This definitely has not been one of Camelot’s more shining moments, though perhaps it was just brief enough to be overlooked when the time comes for another Kennedy to seek office.
President Obama’s executive order regarding presidential records is a victory for future historians. (See here) Truly it is a new day for GWBs future historians.Before January 20, 2009, the future biographers of GWB faced a difficult road in the true telling of their history.While they will probably have many, many accounts from people who worked in the administration; because of the actions of the 43rd President; they would have lacked important archival materials.Important documents that would have shed light on important issues of the last administration such as Iraq, the recent economic crises, Katrina, and other domestic and international events.However, the recent executive order makes their road a somewhat easier one.
As Nixon historians, we have some experience in dealing with historical materials — so we know the future historians’ pain.We are aware that it seems that the 43rd president is compared with the 37th president quite a lot these days.Often it is not in the best light.However, one way in which they are quite different is the resources that historians will have to assess their presidencies.As a result of this executive order, the difference has narrowed.
We, as Nixon historians are quite fortunate in the resources we possess.Not only do we have thousands of books, including memoirs from people were a part of the administration; we also have 42 million documents concerning Richard Nixon’s presidential years.As an extra added benefit, we also have thousands of hours of White House tapes where historians are given an unprecedented view into Richard Nixon’s deliberations and personality.Because of the error that later turned out to be for Nixon, future presidents will not be providing that sort of access again.
With the access of the tapes, comes also a solemn responsibility.It is the responsibility of the Nixon historian that we always keep in mind the different circumstances and context that the tapes were produced in.Mr. Gannon in a recent post (Refresher Course, December 19, 2008) gives an important perspective into that.
Because of these comprehensive historical materials and both primary and secondary source material; we as Nixon historians have the tools necessary for a three dimensional view of Richard Nixon for future Americans and scholars.
Future historians of George W. Bush however will have a more difficult time in assessing his presidency.While is fundamentally true that the effects of the Nixon years, and the Presidential Records Act of 1978 have altered the archival landscape; the current administration has been bent on secrecy and in covering up the historical record.
Superseding the previous Executive Order by President Reagan and the National Archives regulation in August 2001 on release of Presidential materials, President George W. Bush had limited access to presidential records past and present by Executive Order 13233.(1)The Presidential Communication privilege limited the American people from viewing the actual interworkings of history being made.As we have seen throughout the Bush Administration, the deletion of important e-mails and other documents have been infamous, and will place future nonpartisan historians into a real disadvantage in any event.
Recently in the news, Vice President Cheney has asserted his control of his records, away from the prying eyes of future historians and Americans.The US District Court decision a few days ago regarding Vice President Cheney’s records creates much doubt whether or not these records will be preserved and transferred to the Archives has required under federal law.Making the vice president responsible for determining how the records are dealt with is like having a fox responsible for guarding a hen house.
“The Executive Order on Presidential Records brings those principles to presidential records by giving the American people greater access to these historic documents. This order ends the practice of having others besides the President assert executive privilege for records after an administration ends. Now, only the President will have that power, limiting its potential for abuse. And the order also requires the Attorney General and the White House Counsel to review claims of executive privilege about covered records to make sure those claims are fully warranted by the Constitution.”
For any serious future historians, the goal must be the true telling of history.For the biographers, this will lead to the timeless biography that will be consulted for years to come.We, as Nixon historians, are fortunate to have the tools available to accomplish this.In light of the Obama order: the GWB biographer has a better opportunity to tell the true story as well.
(1)The Bush Order created new privileges, (such as the presidential communications privilege) for restricting documents past the 12 year limit established in the Presidential Materials Act of 1978, and supported by the previous executive order of President Reagan, gives former presidents the right of executive privilege over their documents after their term of office, which the incumbent president could have closed these records permanently.
Despite numerous successes in a foreign policy (the positive regional effects of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) that ran in opposition with many of his foes, it is precisely their preferred use of soft power that Bush applied with Iran, Russia, and North Korea that has contributed to global instability in the past eight years:
On his own post-9/11 terms, Mr. Bush’s biggest failure has been Iran. He outsourced diplomacy to the Europeans and U.N. — despite his caricature as a go-it-alone cowboy. But these efforts merely gave the mullahs cover and years to build their bomb. The President also indulged Condoleezza Rice’s illusion that some grand bargain could be found with Tehran’s revolutionary regime. The same could be said for his diplomatic dead end in North Korea.
The President tried smooth talk on Vladimir Putin, with equally poor results. His famous misreading of the man gave the Kremlin confidence to repress its own people and intimidate its neighbors without fear of serious U.S. rebuke. Mr. Bush did stay a stalwart ally to the young democracies in that region, helping keep Ukraine and Georgia, so far, out of Moscow’s reconstituting empire.
Charles Krauthammer believes that President Bush’s rehabilitation will begin sooner than everyone thinks, thanks to the PE retaining key Bush Administration personnel as well as the fundamentals of his anti-terrorism policies. Of course it all hinges on Iraq, which will loom large in Bush’s legacy:
Obama opposed the war. But the war is all but over. What remains is an Iraq turned from aggressive, hostile power in the heart of the Middle East to an emerging democracy openly allied with the United States. No president would want to be responsible for undoing that success.
In Iraq, Bush rightly took criticism for all that went wrong — the WMD fiasco, Abu Ghraib, the descent into bloody chaos in 2005-06. Then Bush goes to Baghdad to ratify the ultimate post-surge success of that troubled campaign — the signing of a strategic partnership between the U.S. and Iraq — and ends up dodging two size-10 shoes for his pains.
Absorbing that insult was Bush’s final service on Iraq. Whatever venom the war generated is concentrated on Bush himself. By having personalized the responsibility for the awfulness of the war, Bush has done his successor a favor. Obama enters office with a strategic success on his hands — while Bush leaves the scene taking a shoe for his country.
Which is why I suspect Bush showed such equanimity during a private farewell interview at the White House a few weeks ago. He leaves behind the sinews of war, for the creation of which he has been so vilified but which will serve his successor — and his country — well over the coming years. The very continuation by Democrats of Bush’s policies will be grudging, if silent, acknowledgment of how much he got right.
In March 2003, at the beginning of the war, when I was still a ministry intern, I preached a sermon at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Tustin, California in which I said that Bush would be judged on the basis of whether, 20 years after the war had ended, we were closer to peace in a fractious region. While not exactly bloodcurdlingly pro-war, it definitely wasn’t antiwar, and many of my brothers and sisters were disappointed.
In the years since, when the war was going poorly, I’ve regretted this witness, especially because I had erred by lumping Saddam Hussein with Muslim fundamentalists. In the wake of the surge, I’ve felt better. Perhaps this shows that preachers shouldn’t talk about foreign policy or they should do it better than I did. Far more important, it reminds us that leaders sometimes have to make decisions whose consequences, for good or ill, won’t be fully clear until long after they leave office. Do we want Presidents who will only take a risk on a policy they believe is best if they can be guaranteed favorable results in the next two or four years, or in time for the opening of their Presidential libraries? (Seeing the Krauthammer column as mere partisan repositioning, Andrew Sullivan takes exception to Krauthammer’s rosy assessment of the situation in Iraq. Sullivan supported the war, too, of course, so to that extent he and Bush are in this together. Yet while Bush’s approval numbers are historically low, Sullivan just won best blog. Go figure.)
As of now, many can’t wait for George W. Bush to leave. This group may well include George W. Bush. Some, including Katie Couric, can’t bring themselves to say the word “President” when introducing him. Others wish he had communicated as openly over the last eight years as he has in the last two weeks. And yet how interesting that the Presidential transition has gone so well, a tribute to the temperaments and love of country of both men. How interesting it would be if President Obama took the same pains to keep Bush informed as President Nixon did with his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, and especially if it became known that 44 was having the occasional private chat with 43.
Many are eager for new leadership because they think that Obama will be able to wave a magic wand and quickly repair an economy stunted by a generation of bipartisan mismanagement. Perhaps when he can’t — perhaps when he too is tested by challenges to U.S. security and interests — we’ll gain new appreciation for the complexities and ambiguities of the office. Perhaps then we’ll say to George W. Bush, as Barack Obama no doubt will on the inaugural stand next Tuesday, “Godspeed, Mr. President.”
Noted by Tom Shales in his critique of President Bush’s farewell address:
Although noting Bush has five more days in office before Obama is sworn in, CBS News anchor Katie Couric even prematurely deprived Bush of the traditional introduction afforded America’s chief executives when they deliver broadcast speeches or stride out to face the press (which Bush, of course, rarely did): “Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States.” Instead, Couric said simply, “And here he is, George W. Bush.”
Columbia University Provost Allan Brinkley writes that Bush’s inherent character flaw is not a thirst for power, but unbending PRINCIPLES:
On the other hand, Herbert Hoover, Roosevelt’s immediate predecessor, exemplifies the dangers of sticking to one’s principles. One of the ablest and most widely admired men in America when he was elected president in 1928, Hoover left office four years later discredited and reviled–a victim of a Depression that he had not created, to be sure, but also a victim of his choice of conviction over pragmatism. Unwilling to challenge the pillars of free-market capitalism, strongly committed to balanced budgets and fiscal prudence, convinced that the natural laws of economics would bring the Depression to a close, he responded to the Depression with such restraint and timidity that had his administration not ended when it did, the entire financial system of the United States might have collapsed.
Bush, like Hoover, has blanketed himself with principles and commitments. But, unlike Hoover, he has built an administration that seems almost purposely designed to ward off any challenges to the President’s goals and to protect him from the need to compromise with other areas of government. To a remarkable degree, the Bush White House has created defenses from other areas of government–Congress, the states, leaders of other nations, even other parts of his own administration–in a way that seem designed to create something like an autocracy. This was not because power itself has been Bush’s principal goal. He was, apparently, a happy man serving in one of the weakest governorships in the country. But the accumulation of power in the White House has protected him from the need to negotiate and make compromises with others.
Hardly, but Bill McGurn thinks that Pres-Elect Obama shouldn’t readily dismiss the Vice President’s propensity to fall on his sword:
These days, after all, Mr. Cheney is a synonym for torture, a punch line on late-night television, and — as he himself conceded in a CBS interview the other day — a new Darth Vader. Mr. Obama’s own running mate calls Mr. Cheney “the most dangerous vice president” in American history.
Mr. Obama, however, is no fool. Whatever decisions he will make on hot-button issues from Iraq to Guantanamo, he has no intention of allowing another 9/11 to happen on his watch. And that’s where Mr. Cheney comes in.
During a lunch last week at the vice presidential residence, Mr. Cheney was frank and far-ranging, in particular about “the measures we’ve taken to defend the nation.” Two days ago, in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Mr. Obama criticized Mr. Cheney for defending at least one of these measures — enhanced interrogation.
But Mr. Obama would profit by looking past the caricature of the vice president to consider just two things: why Mr. Cheney has been so unpopular — and why he was willing to endure this unpopularity.
Most would agree that the demonization of Dick Cheney has its roots in his steadfast defense of three of the most controversial Bush administration policies: enhanced interrogation for terrorists, the detention of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, and the National Security Agency’s surveillance of terrorist communications.
On all these issues, Mr. Cheney could have stayed on the sidelines and cultivated his own reputation. After all, before signing on with George W. Bush, the vice president was a paid-up member of the Beltway establishment, enjoying its good favor and moving comfortably in its circles. All that is now gone. Whatever critics might say about him, he cannot be accused of having cut his conscience to fit the latest fashion.
“There was never any question about who was in charge. It was George Bush. And that’s the way we operated. This whole notion that somehow I exceeded my authority here, was usurping his authority, is simply not true. It’s an urban legend, never happened.”
Morale is low after the organisation [sic; they're British] has lurched from failure to scandal in the past few years. Under George Tenet, the long-time director who was beloved by his staff, the CIA failed to spot the September 11th attacks in the works. Then came intelligence mistakes over weapons of mass destruction and Iraq, followed by controversy over the use of torture and harsh interrogation techniques, such as the “waterboarding” of suspected terrorists (making the detainee believe he is suffocating or drowning).
Another possible reason for low CIA morale: The failure of most in the media and politics to give the agency any credit for helping avert a catastrophic attack on U.S. soil since Sept. 11.
From Carolyn Lochhead of the San Francisco Chronicle, an extensive and fair assessment of the Bush Presidency. Read the whole thing, but here’s a nugget:
He sought “to end tyranny in the world.” He began two wars. He cut taxes three times, tried to privatize Social Security, and added the biggest expansion of Medicare since it was created under Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. He took on AIDS in Africa and redrew the federal role in education. He named two relatively young conservatives to the Supreme Court. He declared by himself a “global war on terror” and asserted unprecedented executive powers to fight it.
As bold and brash as his father was cautious, W. rolled the dice at history. And history rolled them back.
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?
On Iran, also for over five years, Mr. Bush has endorsed vigorous European diplomacy. The Europeans offered every imaginable carrot to persuade Iran to drop its nuclear program in exchange for a different relationship with Europe and America. This produced no change in Iran’s strategic objective of acquiring deliverable nuclear weapons. The only real consequence is that Iran is five years closer to achieving that objective. It now has indigenous mastery over the entire nuclear fuel cycle.
The Obama alternative? “Present the Iranian regime with a clear choice” by using carrots and sticks to induce Iran to give up its nuclear aspirations. What does Mr. Obama think Mr. Bush and the Europeans have been doing? Does he really think his smooth talking will achieve more than Europe’s smoothest talkers, who were in fact talking for us the whole time?
While Mr. Obama has uttered only generalities on North Korea, his Iran policy will be worse than Mr. Bush’s. He acts as though the years of failed efforts to dissuade Iran from going nuclear simply didn’t happen. That is blindness, not continuity. And that’s without Mr. Obama’s pledge to meet personally with Iran’s leaders, an incredible act of legitimization he seems willing to give away for nothing.
It is hard to determine whether the number of books read by a President during his or her term, and which ones, have any real correlation to ability in leadership and governance. Lyndon Johnson, famously, was reported never to have cracked open a book in his five years in the White House (except perhaps for British economist Barbara Ward’s The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations, a volume of 148 pages), but, in domestic affairs at least, he put together a considerable list of achievements. Franklin Roosevelt seems to have read a lot of mysteries, which no doubt agreeably whiled away an hour before bedtime but had little relevance to policy; Harry Truman read perhaps countless volumes of history, but much of his book-reading appears to have taken place before he succeeded FDR in 1945.
Richard Nixon was a careful and thoughtful reader, concentrating on history and biography during his White House years. (He had read a considerable amount of literature and philosophy as part of his studies at Whittier College, and in the years after 1974 took up such books again.) His admiration for Robert Blake’s biography of Benjamin Disraeli is well known; less so, the fact that he spent part of 1971 reading Winston Churchill’s four-volume account of World War I, The World Crisis. From these and from books such as Charles de Gaulle’s Memoirs Of Hope and Andre Malraux’s Antimemoirs he learned much that proved useful, especially in constructing foreign policy. He didn’t peruse the flashier bestsellers, such as I’m OK, You’re OK or Airport or the several novels Harold Robbins wrote during those years. RN’s reading was weighty – and it took him a while to get through it, with the duties of office. It appears unlikely that he had the time to read more than one or two books a month.
But in recent years – whether or not it has anything to do with the need to assure those in the flagging book business that their wares are still in demand – White House insiders, past and present, have gone out of their way to emphasize the enormous degree of erudition of the Chief Executive. During Bill Clinton’s eight years in office we heard a lot about his habit of utilizing his night-owl hours to read any solid nonfiction book that was handy, with the occasional Walter Mosley mystery on the side. (Indeed, his endorsement of Mosley in 1992 catapulted that writer to bestsellerdom.)
But it turns out that George W. Bush has Clinton, and seemingly every other President, completely beat when it comes to the printed page. In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal Karl Rove, the former deputy chief of staff famed for his own wide reading ranging from Jorge Luis Borges to Paul Horgan to David McCullough, discusses a competition he has had with our outgoing President to see who can read the most books in one year.
Rove says that it all started on New Year’s Eve of 2005 when he told President Bush he planned to read a book a week during 2006. Two days into 2006, the man in the Oval Office informed Rove: “I’m on my second [book]. Where are you?”
And so the contest was on. If Rove’s account can be trusted, he personally managed to finish the year with 110 books read. The President, during that time, had read 95 books – not nine, 95. The books read included eight Travis McGee mysteries by John D. Macdonald (a writer Rove identified as one of his own favorites in Vanity Fair), Albert Camus’s The Stranger, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team Of Rivals (that favorite of the President-elect), James L. Swanson’s account of the Lincoln assassination Manhunt, and biographies of Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, Babe Ruth, King Leopold, William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, Lyndon Johnson, and Genghis Khan. The nonfiction-fiction ratio was 58-37.
In 2007, the contest was repeated and Bush read 51 books to Rove’s 76. With a few days left in 2008, Rove has read 64 books, the President 40. Well, Bush has an excuse for the slackened pace – he had to deal with a major recession, after all. But Rove left the White House in August 2007 and has focused on writing, TV appearances, and the occasional lecture since then, so I have to wonder what has slowed him down.
Among the books Rove says the President read in the last two years are Jacobo Timmerman’s Prisoner Without A Name, Cell Without A Number; Khruschchev’s Cold War by Nixon Library director Tim Naftali and Aleksandr Fursenko; biographies of Dean Acheson, Andrew Mellon and Andrew Jackson; David Halberstam’s book about the Korean conflict, The Coldest War; and Hugh Thomas’s mammoth history of the Spanish Civil War. One very noticeable thing about the titles Rove lists is that none of them primarily concern economics – the one subject that, I would guess, many people wish the President had focused on during his second term, at least starting with the buildup of the housing crisis in the summer of 2007.
In 2000, Michael Beschloss, as eminent a figure as there is in the field of presidential history, wrote an article for the New York Times concerning the question of just how literate a president needs to be, as opposed to how literate he or she needs to appear. He noted that Adlai Stevenson, during his lifetime a figure idolized by intellectuals from coast to coast as the archetype of the philosopher-statesman, in fact could let a whole year go by without finishing a book. I would say it’s a good thing for Presidents to read books – and an even better thing if enough of the books have a direct bearing on the duties and concerns of the Presidency.
In the ongoing Bush vs. Nixon debate, Veteran political reporter Jules Witcover draws a distinction:
[T]hrough it all, Nixon’s image has managed to survive the kind of assault on his intellect to which Bush has had to suffer. Nixon continues to be widely regarded as having had a shrewd political mind, sustained perhaps by the books he wrote on foreign policy in his post-resignation years.
I’ve long believed that the two pillars of the restoration of Richard Nixon’s reputation in history are the recognition of his seriousness of purpose when it came to the pivotal issue of East-West relations and his effectiveness as a wartime commander-in-chief. More than a keen political mind, Mr. Nixon had a reconciling vision that contributed to a reduction in tensions between Moscow and the U.S. as well as the end of the Cold War. As for Vietnam, he and Gen. Creighton Abrams managed to turn a sure loser into a possible winner, and do so against titanic political odds.
By all accounts, “Frost/Nixon” takes Nixon seriously as an intellectual. One down. A few good books on Vietnam will help with the second pillar.
