Catch-2008

November 20, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Cold War, Economic issues, Election 2008, Entertainment, Humor, Nixon Administration figures, Obama administration, Sarah Palin, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

Erica Heller is a New Yorker in her fifties.  In her twenties and thirties she worked in advertising. Then she dropped out of the field and wrote a novel, Splinters - a natural thing to do when one is the daughter of the late Joseph Heller, author of Something Happened, God Knows, Good As Gold, and that all-time bestselling antiwar novel Catch-22. 

Splinters was published in 1990 and, unlike most of her father’s books, was not well-received; Publishers Weekly called it “pretentious and self-indulgent.”  So Ms. Heller went back to advertising, where she remains.  Recently she began blogging on The Huffington Post.  Just before election day, she wrote there that her father - who, she acknowledged, never voted in any election in his life, because he was, by his own admission, “anti-political” - would surely have trooped down to the booth, were he still living, to choose Sen. Barack Obama. 

 (That strikes me as doubtful. Heller, a very shrewd fellow as his many interviews attest, would have likely foreseen that doing so would help bring about the situation this week where Dr. Henry Kissinger, the target of innumerable venomous barbs in Good As Gold, expressed his support for the President-elect’s choosing Sen. Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State.)

This week, Ms. Heller, perhaps like many another writer with an Amazon sales ranking in the low seven digits, is on the warpath about the book deals being rumored for Gov. Sarah Palin and secured by Joe the Plumber.  She seems convinced that S. J. Wurzelbacher is receiving a fortune from a small press for his book.  In fact, what Joe is earning is probably just a shade above the $1000 or so her dad got for what was then Catch-18 nearly a half-century ago, and far below the advances for every other book he wrote. 

 Ms Heller also fulminates about the $7 million that’s being tossed around where the Palin book is concerned, bemoaning all the trees that will fall to make it.  Well, President Clinton was paid considerably better for his memoirs.  And a lot of trees fell to get it to the stores.  And, most strikingly of all, that rather soporific tome was edited by none other than Robert Gottlieb, the brilliant editor who helped make Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 a classic.  (I should point out Mr. Gottlieb always has my admiration.  Imagine being in one’s late seventies and fielding 3 am calls from the man who remains the First Night Owl, not to mention trying to get Robert Caro to finish those last thousand pages of his LBJ saga.)

Most bizarre of all is an aside where Ms. Heller reminisces about the good old days when Catch-22 is published and in which the series Mad Men is set.  She reminds us that back when Roger Maris was earning his asterisk, gas was 33 cents a gallon and stamps were four cents.  Well, guess what?  If her liberal idols in Congress and the White House can’t figure out how to get us out of the recession and deflation sets in, prices may drop to those levels again.  The difference will be that you won’t see too many people wearing clothes as good as the ones in Mad Men.  On the bright side, there will be plenty of free grass, growing up from the sidewalks, and in some places from the floorboards.

Speaking of Robert Gottlieb, time for me to tell my favorite story about his many quirks.  A friend of mine - we’ll call him Hank, because his first name’s the same as Gottlieb’s - was in the early ’60s an up-and-coming editor, as Gottlieb was.  One day he got a call from his colleague.  “Come over for lunch,” quoth young Bob.  His habit, then as now, was always to eat a sandwich at his own desk at Simon & Schuster (and, later, Knopf), so Hank stopped at an Italian deli, got some antipasto, and proceeded to S&S’s offices.

This particular afternoon, incidentally, was a day or two after JFK’s speech announcing the presence of Russian missiles in Cuba.  Things were pretty weird in Manhattan all around. Even so, Hank was a bit surprised, when he arrived at Bob’s office, to find it unoccupied.  Assuming that the editor was in the restroom, he waited a while in the hallway.  Then he asked Gottlieb’s secretary where he was.  “In there - he hasn’t left all day,” she replied.

So Hank stepped in and approached his friend’s desk.  There came a whisper - from under it. “That you, Hank?”  Hank stepped around and found Gottlieb crouched underneath, sandwich in hand. “I talked to my shrink this morning - he sounded kinda worried,” Bob said by way of explanation. “There’s some space here - sit down.” So Hank squeezed in and took out the antipasto.  “Just a second,” said Bob. He then emerged from the desk, went to the window, lowered the blinds, and got back under.  Thus suitably protected from the threat of The Big One - in an office in the midsection of a skyscraper in midtown Manhattan - the two young editors dined and chatted as usual.

Ah, those wild, crazy days of Mad Men.

McCain’s Solomon Moment

September 25, 2008 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Cold War, Democratic Party, Election 2008, History, Presidents, Republican Party, U.S. History | 2 Comments 

For much of the 20th century, the Blackstone Hotel, located at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Balboa Street in Chicago, was known as the “hotel of the presidents.” The 21-story facility, recently renovated by the Marriott people with a price tag of 128 million dollars, has long been listed on local and national registers of historic places.

The Blackstone was where the legendary political phrase “smoke-filled room” entered the American vocabulary. It was a description of where and how Warren Harding’s Republican presidential nomination was decided in 1920. Harry Truman was staying there when he was picked to be the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1944, as was Dwight D. Eisenhower when he was notified that the GOP had nominated him on the first ballot in 1952.

The most dramatic Blackstone presidential moment, however, took place on the morning of Saturday, October 20, 1962. Hours before, after a long day on the campaign trail for local politicos, President John F. Kennedy sipped clam chowder in his suite and decided to return to the White House rather than continue his tour. Having made a speech in Chicago, he was scheduled to go to Milwaukee - then out to the west coast to work on behalf of several Democratic candidates.

The fact that the Soviets were installing offensive missiles in Cuba, which had been kept pretty much below media radar for several days, was about to become a very public national crisis. Things were reaching critical mass.

By breakfast time, Secret Service agents were sweeping the lobby, along with every nook and cranny in the common areas of the historic hotel. At mid-morning, Mr. Kennedy emerged from an elevator, adorned with an overcoat and rarely worn hat, and walked briskly though the lobby toward the main door and his limousine.

Less than 24 hours before, he had entered the hotel through the same door after seeing a protest sign calling for, “Less Profile – More Courage.” There were no such signs this morning though, few even knew that Lancer would be on the move – not even the press. Reporters, many of whom were already on busses ready to go to Milwaukee, were informed that the president had a cold and a slight fever and was heading back to Washington on the advice of his doctor.

The collective response of the press was, “yeah right.”

This mysterious malady was apparently quite contagious, even leaping several time zones, because Vice President Lyndon Johnson was similarly afflicted and also leaving the campaign trail. He flew that day from Honolulu back to the nation’s capital.

JFK and LBJ knew a thing or two about politics and governing. They understood with Solomon-like wisdom that, “there is a time to campaign, and a time to break off campaigning.”

It’s a leadership thing.

John McCain was right to do what he did recently when he announced the temporary suspension of his presidential campaign and returned to the Senate. Barack Obama was caught flat-footed and, one suspects, a little upset that he didn’t think of it first. Both men are sitting U.S. Senators. In a campaign famous for chronic discussions about experience and preparation for the job they seek, one way to size these men up is to watch how they actually do the jobs they already have.

Mr. Obama has suggested that John McCain’s decision indicates an inability to multi-task. But that dog won’t hunt. The issue is not whether or not a person can do two or more things at once – as both men clearly can. The real question is – are there circumstances that loom so large, that become so compelling, that transcend the times in such a way as to call for unusual, even unprecedented, attention and action?

Of course, the answer is yes.

This is clearly a time for such action and leadership. What is more presidential – making a stump speech, participating in a debate, or actually taking some time away from center stage to do a job one has already been elected to do?

John McCain instinctively gets that. Barack Obama does not.

If President Bush were at his ranch in Crawford, or on some foreign farewell tour, or doing some other ceremonial president-stuff, both candidates would be rightly calling for his return to Washington to deal with the crisis at hand.

On September 11, 2001, the local election campaign in New York City stopped. It became instantly insignificant in light of the horrific developments of that day. Politics went away – leadership kicked in. We need that kind of gut-level “work the problem” approach from both of the men running for president this year.

Frankly, we can learn more about a potential president by the response to real problems, than we can by the response to a question in a debate. McCain and Obama are already elected officials. One way to demonstrate that you can do a bigger job is to be faithful and diligent in your current assignment.

If Mr. Obama does not see the need to at least go through the motions of working with the Senate on the bailout package President Bush has sent to congress, then he should resign his seat – and let the citizens of Illinois get someone to Washington who will condescend to a role that Barack may see these days as an annoyance.

Barack Obama needs to move beyond trying to one-up John McCain, who is clearly skilled at keeping an opponent off-balance by not telegraphing his punches. He may need to ask himself what his hero, JFK, would do. Kennedy understood that sometimes a campaign has to take a back seat to a crisis.

It might also be good for Mr. Obama to figure out that a wise leader not only comes up with good ideas, but is also capable of recognizing value in those developed by others - even political opponents.

The Left’s Second Thoughts On The Rosenbergs

September 21, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Cold War, History, National Security, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

In recent days interest in the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted on Federal espionage charges in the early 1950s and sent to the electric chair, has been revived after Morton Sobell, the last living defendant charged (and convicted) with them, acknowledged to Sam Roberts of the New York Times that he and Julius Rosenberg had in fact spied for the Soviet Union. In the Week In Review section of today’s Times there is a very illuminating article by Roberts discussing how widespread belief in the innocence of the Rosenbergs has affected the whole direction of the American political left since 1953, and how some of the notable figures in that movement are reacting to Sobell’s admission.

Those quoted in the article include E.L. Doctorow, the writer who first made a major impact with his novel The Book Of Daniel, based on the Rosenberg case (and later adapted into a film directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Timothy Hutton); pre-eminent leftist historian Howard Zinn (who says, “I never was going along saying I know they were innocent, and I’m not shocked by the fact they turned out to be spies. To me it didn’t matter if they were guilty or not, the most important thing was they did not get a fair trial”) ; SDS founder Tom Hayden; longtime Nation editor and publisher Victor Navasky; and Leonard J. Lehrman, co-director of the National Committee To Reopen The Rosenberg Case.

The End has Come

September 17, 2008 by Jonathan C. Movroydis | Filed Under Cold War, Russia | Leave a Comment 

Ron Radash writes today in the LA Times that the controversial debate surrounding the Rosenberg case is a fait accompli. In a recent confession, co-defendant Morton Sobell has re-affirmed the couple’s guilt, a development that should bury any inkling of national guilt brought on by their left-wing supporters.

Hiss And The Rosenbergs In Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

September 16, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Cold War, History, National Security, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

Bob Hoover, the book-review editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (and, thus, belonging to a breed now perhaps more rare than the ivory-billed woodpecker) has written an article for that paper concerning Sam Roberts’ recent New York Times stories about the Rosenberg case, in which he also discusses the lingering echoes through the decades of the saga of Alger Hiss.  Included are several quotes from G. Edward White, author of Alger Hiss’s Looking-Glass Wars. Well worth reading.

The Spy Who Almost Stayed In The Cold, and RIP DFW

September 13, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Cold War, Culture, History, In Memoriam | 2 Comments 

The London Times has just published a lengthy interview, conducted by the paper’s Rod Liddle, with renowned British spy novelist (and former MI6 agent) John Le Carre. He spends most of it reiterating his anger, often manifested in his recent statements and writings, regarding neoconservatism and the war in Iraq. But there is one rather startling item:

And then there are the things [Le Carre] didn’t do but perhaps almost did - such as defecting to the Soviet Union when he worked for MI6. This is the sort of confidence I hadn’t expected, to tell you the truth.

“You were genuinely tempted?” I ask him, in some surprise.

“Yes, there was a time when I was, yes,” he says.

“For ideological reasons, like the rest of them - Blunt, Philby, Maclean?”

Le Carré is considered to be on the left these days, of course - a consensus arrived at largely through his visceral dislike of recent US foreign policy. One of that coterie of British literary greats - Pinter, Hare, Amis - railing at the supposed cretin in the White House, snarling about rendition and Guantanamo and Halliburton. Surely, though, he was not that far to the left, back then?

“God, no, no, no. Never for ideological reasons, of course not . . . ” “Then why?” Not money, surely, I think to myself.

“Well, I wasn’t tempted ideologically,” he reasserts, in case there should be any doubt, “but when you spy intensively and you get closer and closer to the border . . . it seems such a small step to jump . . . and, you know, find out the rest.”

Further on in the interview, Le Carre notes that in 1987 he was offered a chance to dine with the most notorious defector in espionage annals, Kim Philby - the model for the character Gerald in his own novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and the man who blew Le Carre’s cover to the Soviets and forced him out of espionage and into writing about it - not long before the latter’s death, but declined the opportunity because he did not want to meet the man responsible for the deaths of dozens of British agents sent into Albania in the 1940s.

In sadder literary news, David Foster Wallace (known to his legions of fans by his initials), the fiction writer, MacArthur fellow, and professor at Pomona College, author of the brain-bendingly complex (but widely acclaimed) thousand-page novel Infinite Jest, was found dead in his Claremont home Friday night, an apparent suicide at the age of 46.

Martin Tytell - 1913-2008

September 11, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Cold War, In Memoriam, Lifestyle, Russia, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

On the day after the 91-year-old co-defendant of the Rosenbergs finally admitted that he was, like them, a spy, comes word of the death of the 94-year-old typewriter expert who was dragooned into service for the appeal lodged by Alger Hiss’ defense team.

Hiss’ appeal finally boiled down to what amounted to a “who are you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes” defense.  The secret documents he was accused of stealing had been retyped before being passed on to a Soviet courier on a Woodstock typewriter — the typeface of which was identical to one owned and used by Alger and Priscilla Hiss during the period in question. 

Everyone knew that typewriters were like fingerprints — each unique and uniquely identifiable.  So, with the dramatic discovery of the Hiss’ old Woodstock, the case seemed to have been solved and closed.

And that’s where Mr. Tytell came in.  Hiss’ attorneys tasked him with recreating in his workshop a typewriter whose characteristic product would be identical —right down to the tiniest indented Rockwell serif— to that of the damning Hiss machine.  

Martin Tytell was apparently able, after two years working on it, to do what he was asked.  All his work went for naught when the the appeal requesting a new trial was unsuccessful.  

Mr. Tytell’s obituarist, Bruce Weber, notes that, in addition to providing the basis for the abortive appeal, Mr. Tytell’s recreated machine became, after Hiss’ release from prison in 1954, “the foundation of…the debate over his guilt, which goes on to this day.”  I don’t know anything about the circles in which Mr. Weber moves (presumably the ones in which Morton Sobell’s innocence is still an article of faith), but they must be pretty rarefied if that debate is still current among them.

 

 

 

 

I’m sure that at least some TNN readers are old enough to remember (and remember fondly) the typewriter technology of the mid-to-late twentieth century.  They will, like me, still revel remembering the sight and sound and feel of a stately solid old office Underwood (the kind PN would have used when she taught typing at Whittier High School, with the bell to warn you of the approaching margin, and the satisfying heft of the carriage return); or the sleek sensual thrill of boarding a plane carrying a bright new Olivetti portable (designed by Ettore Sottsass who, alas, died in Milan last January at the age of 90); or the no-nonsense authority of the IBM Executive (the only machine on which Rose Mary Woods would type RN’s White House documents); or the IBM Selectric’s “end of history” technology (with its easily interchangeable tying elements and its automatically spooling correction tape that made errors obsolete).

For those of us, there will be great charm —and not a little nostalgia— in the more professional details of Mr. Tytell’s obituary:

Mr. Tytell worked on typewriters that could reproduce dozens of different alphabets appropriate for as many as 145 different languages and dialects — including Farsi and Serbo-Croatian, Thai and Korean, Coptic and Sanskrit, and ancient and modern Greek. He often said that he kept 2 million typefaces in stock.

He made a hieroglyphics typewriter for a museum curator, and typewriters with musical notes for musicians. He adapted keyboards for amputees and other wounded veterans. He invented a reverse-carriage device that enabled him to work in right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew. An error he made on a Burmese typewriter, inserting a character upside down, became a standard, even in Burma.

Martin Kenneth Tytell was born on Dec. 20, 1913, the next-to-last of 10 children whose Russian Jewish immigrant parents lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Eventually, going to school mostly at night, he earned a bachelor’s degree from St. John’s University, and an M.B.A. from New York University.

But as a boy he worked in a hardware store, carrying a screwdriver everywhere, and one day in school he got himself excused from gym class by volunteering to answer the telephone in a nearby office. Sitting on a desk was an Underwood typewriter, which he took apart. The man who came to fix it gave him his first lesson in typewriter repair. Before he was out of high school he had the typewriter-maintenance account for Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital.  

In 1943, a contraband shipment that included 100 Siamese typewriters was seized by the federal government, and with typewriters needed by overseas forces and typewriter producers having largely converted to other wartime manufacturing, Mr. Tytell, then in the Army, was asked to convert the Siamese typewriters for the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency.   His machines, capable of reproducing 17 different languages, were airdropped to O.S.S. headquarters at various war fronts.

Mr. Tytell wore a white lab coat and a bow tie while waiting on customers who included writers and journalists such as Dorothy Parker, Richard Condon, David Brinkley, and Harrison Salisbury.  Both Adlai Stevenson and Dwight Eisenhower were among his clients.  He was sufficiently established to have letters addressed to “Mr. Typewriter, New York,” delivered to his premises at 116 Fulton Street in lower Manhattan.

It is one of my firmly held (and, I realize, not entirely orthodox) beliefs that God, Who recognizes eternal excellence, continues to use His old Remington.  So perhaps Mr. Tytell is still wearing his lab coat and bow tie and simply pursuing his honorable old trade in a new and  better place.

Illustrations (top to bottom): Woodstock, Olivetti, IBM Executive, IBM Selectric, Underwood.

The Last Shoe Finally Drops

September 11, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Cold War, National Security, Richard Nixon, Russia, U.S. History | 4 Comments 

Not all old men forget.  Morton Sobell, one of the three defendants in the Rosenberg case, is now 91 and living in the Bronx.  And he has just admitted, in an interview with Sam Roberts of The New York Times, that he was, in fact, guilty as charged: a Soviet spy during World War Two.

 

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, call it that,” he responded to Mr. Roberts’ direct question whether he was a spy.  “I never thought of it as that in those terms.  What I did was simply defensive, an aircraft gun.  This was defensive.  You cannot plead that what you did was only defensive stuff, but there’s a big difference between giving that and stuff that could be used to attack our country.”

Mr. Sobell was drawing a distinction between plans for radar and artillery devices —which were what he claims to have passed along, and which could be considered defensive weapons— and the secret of the atomic bomb, which is what he and his Rosenberg co-defendants were charged with having stolen and betrayed.

All three defendants pled not guilty.  All were convicted (of espionage rather than treason because at the time the alleged events occurred, the Soviet Union was an ally).  Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were electrocuted at Sing Sing  on 19 June 1953.

 Morton Sobell refused to testify at his trial; his silence saved his life and he was sentenced to 30 years in prison.  He served 18 —including five in Alcatraz— and was released in 1969.  Up until this interview with Mr. Roberts, he has insisted on his complete innocence.  In 1974 he published a long memoir —On Doing Time— that revisited the spy case and reaffirmed his innocence, but mostly dealt with his experiences in prisons and the prison system.

His former wife, Helen Sobell (they divorced in 1980), died in 2002.  She was one of the leading activist proponents of saving the Rosenbergs’ lives; she obtained endorsements from Bertrand Russell and Pablo Picasso.  After their execution she focused her attention on the National Committee to Secure Justice for Morton Sobell — for which she helped raise the more than $1 million that funded more than eight appeals.  She seems to be (unlike Ethel Rosenberg) a case in point of the observation that women are often the more fiercely committed partner in an ideological marriage.

Two major books led to substantial revisions —as well as continued controversies— regarding the Rosenberg case.

In 1983, Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton published The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth.  (When it was updated for a 1997 edition, the subtitle was dropped.)

The authors, whose liberal credentials were well furbished, reached the conclusion that the Rosenbergs were guilty as charged (although he more so than she); that the government had resorted to underhand means, and the court to unfair conduct, in their prosecution; and that their execution had as much to do with the temper of the time as the seriousness of their offense.

In 2001, the Times’ Mr. Roberts published a major breakthrough study of  The Brother: The Untold Story of Atomic Spy David Greenglass and How He Sent His Sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the Electric Chair.  Mr. Roberts’ conclusion, basically, was that the Rosenbergs were guilty but had been set up by her brother, David Greenglass.  The book was based on interviews with Mr. Greenglass — who was no more attractive or less reprehensible an individual in 2001 than he had been in 1952.

And now Mr. Sobell has squared the circle by admitting his guilt.  And only a real naïf would imagine that this will allow the case to be closed.

For starters, Mr. Sobell’s current state of mind will rightly be considered.  Mr. Roberts, however, is inclined to accept what he says, and he has found confirmation from another knowledgeable source:

 Mr. Sobell is ailing, but says his long-term memory is sound. He has repeatedly professed his innocence and has said earlier of the Rosenbergs, “I would not take the position that they were absolutely innocent.”

In the interview on Thursday, Mr. Sobell affirmed what has become a consensus among historians: that Ethel Rosenberg was aware of her husband’s espionage, but did not actively participate.

“She knew what he was doing,” Mr. Sobell said. “The only thing she may have done is talked to her brother, but Julius knew her brother as well as she did.”

Mr. Greenglass, in an interview for a book by this reporter, “The Brother,” acknowledged that he had lied when he testified that his sister had typed his notes about the bomb — the single most incriminating evidence against her. That allegation emerged months after Mr. Greenglass and his wife testified before the grand jury and only weeks before the trial was to begin.

Government prosecutors later acknowledged that they hoped a conviction and the possibility of a death sentence against Ethel Rosenberg would get her husband to confess and implicate others, including some agents known to investigators through secretly intercepted Soviet cables.

That strategy failed, William Rogers, who was the deputy attorney general at the time, admitted: “She called our bluff.”

Mr. Sobell has been interviewed a number of times recently by Walter Schneir who, with his wife, Miriam, wrote a damning indictment of the Rosenberg prosecution years ago, but, on the basis of decoded Soviet cables and other information, have since reconsidered their verdict that Julius was innocent and was completely framed by the government.

“Do I believe Morty?  Yes,” Mr. Schneir, who is writing a memoir, said on Thursday. “The details that he’s given us so far we’ve been able to check the peripheral parts and they check out.”

During my 1983 interviews with RN, I asked him about the Radosh book — which had only just been published.

FG: There’s a book that’s recently been published about the Rosenberg case, which, if it’s true, upsets the liberal pantheon in that, based on government and other documents, it indicates that the Rosenbergs were, in fact, guilty — at least Julius Rosenberg was specifically guilty and Ethel to a perhaps to a lesser extent. But it also indicates that the government went overboard in framing a case against them. Does that–did that shock you as you read about that, or surprise you, or make you feel vindicated?

RN:  No, as far as the Rosenberg case was concerned, of course, that final decision, the decision not to delay the sentence, was President Eisenhower’s. I was in the room when it happened. It was in the Cabinet Room, and I recall very well the attorney general, Herbert Brownell, and Bill Rogers, the deputy attorney general, bringing the facts to the president, to his attention, and the decision was made. Not in that room  —he made it later—as he always did.

FG:  Did anybody argue for clemency?

RN:  No. The evidence was clear. There was no question about their guilt, as even this book–in which the authors started out convinced they were innocent and then came around to becoming convinced they were guilty.

FG:   Does it bother you, though, that some of the evidence–although they were apparently guilty–that some of the evidence was–was cooked by the F.B.I. to make them appear even more guilty — which might have affected the judgment on clemency, at least for Ethel Rosenberg?

RN:  Oh, certainly. If I had known–if we had known that at the time–if President Eisenhower had known it, he might have taken a different view with regard to her. In other words, tainted evidence, even though a person is totally guilty, is a reason to get him off.

Take Daniel Ellsberg. Daniel Ellsberg was guilty of illegally taking top-secret papers from the Pentagon and turning them over to be published in a newspaper. And yet, because the evidence was tainted, he’s scot-free, making a lot of money on the lecture circuit, particularly at the elite Ivy League colleges. So, as far as Mrs. Rosenberg was concerned, she was entitled to get off on that basis, too.

FG:  Does it disillusion you about J. Edgar Hoover that presumably he —it wouldn’t have been done without his knowledge, if, indeed, without his direction— that the F.B.I. was cooking evidence in such a way?

RN:   Well, I wouldn’t — if I followed that book that you refer to. And the case they made for cooking the evidence is–is pretty weak. It’s–it’s a question of, really, a matter of judgment, and if you look at the times then, if you look at the fact that the Soviet Union acquired the atomic bomb two to three years before we thought they could, all the evidence points to the fact they wouldn’t have gotten it if it hadn’t been for not only our atomic spies, but the British atomic spies.

You can see why overzealous prosecutors, and those that are assisting prosecutors, like J. Edgar Hoover, would certainly tilt their prosecution and their investigation in a way toward guilt, rather than toward innocence. Now if you look at it coolly, in retrospect, at this point, certainly we would have preferred that it not be done. But at the time I understand why it was done. And let us understand–Mrs. Rosenberg was guilty. This wasn’t a case of somebody not guilty going to the chair.

A Conversation with Khrushchev

September 10, 2008 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Cold War, Election 2008, History, Russia, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

I had a conversation recently with Sergei Khrushchev, son of the late former Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, as part of my work with the Smithsonian-affiliated Cold War Museum.  Mr. Khrushchev is a member of the museum’s advisory board.

Our discussion was wide-ranging and included his thoughts about a so-called new Cold War.   We also talked about his father’s relationship with Presidents John F. Kennedy (including the assassination) and Dwight D. Eisenhower, as well as Josef Stalin, Vladimir Putin, and the current U.S. Presidential campaign.

This is part of a series of podcasts I have developed and hosted for the museum.  You can hear the complete interview here.

Also, with the 40-year reunion of the crew of the USS Pueblo in the news, there is an earlier podcast interview I conducted with one of the crew members also at the Cold War Podcast site.

Old Hot War, Not New Cold War

August 14, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Cold War, International Affairs, Russia | Leave a Comment 

Counting those who seem to look at Russians and see Soviets, Andrew Sullivan makes an important distinction:

Wasn’t the entire point of the Cold War that totalitarian expansionist states are different than authoritarian ones? Are we now going to elide this…distinction when it comes to Russia? Putin is not a saint; and his attitude is Cheney-esque in his fondness for secrecy, brute force and contempt for international law. But he is not a communist and he is not attempting to take over the world. The West fought the Cold War based on this distinction. Why should we forget it now it’s over?

Moscow Rules

July 25, 2008 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Book Review, Cold War, Iran, Israel and Palestinians, Russia | 1 Comment 

The International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. displays a list of what are called Moscow Rules – commonly accepted guidelines for the good guys during the Cold War. Basically, they are based on a through-the-looking-glass approach to reality, where nothing is as it appears to be.

Some directories note as many as forty of these espionage nuggets, including things like, “float like a butterfly; sting like a bee” (guess who inspired that?), or “Murphy is right,” or “technology will always let you down” (actually, I think that one’s true). But ten are in the commonly accepted list:

1. Assume nothing.
2. Never go against your gut.
3. Everyone is potentially under opposition control.
4. Don’t look back; you are never completely alone.
5. Go with the flow; blend in.
6. Vary your pattern and stay within your cover.
7. Lull them into a sense of complacency.
8. Don’t harass the opposition.
9. Pick the time and place for action.
10. Keep your options open.

Author Daniel Silva has brought these deep-background precepts to life in his latest novel that bears the actual name, Moscow Rules. His eleventh book is a bit of a departure from recent ones because it shifts from using the Middle East as a backdrop in favor of the intriguing world of present-day Russia.

The spy novel has come back home.

With the feel of a Cold War story, and a pace unmatched by most war-on-terror thrillers, this book is likely Silva’s best to date. Spy-Mystery-Thriller writers all have their favorite characters. John Le Carré gave us George Smiley, William F. Buckley introduced us to Blackford Oakes, Jack Higgins writes about Sean Dillon, and, of course, there’s Vince Flynn’s creation, Mitch Rapp. But in art restorer-Israeli top spy Gabriel Allon, Silva has a hero for all seasons, shapes, and sizes - a man who is intensely human, fiercely intelligent, and quite good at what he does.

In Moscow Rules, Allon finds himself moving with ease between worlds of religion, politics, and history. From the Vatican, to a CIA house in Georgetown, to the dark and dank inner-sanctum of old Soviet-style brutality in the Lubyanka, he’s a hero for everyone who still believes that there are good guys and bad guys.

Mr. Silva’s style matches the prose gold standard of Mr. Le Carré. He then, however, leaves the Brit far behind to wallow in his well-worn and historically inaccurate arguments about Cold War moral equivalency between east and west. Moscow Rules reminds us that the U.S. and Israel, though far from perfect, provide the world a vital strategic partnership against enemies of freedom. And it’s especially important to have such a relationship up and running when nations like Russia and Iran draw close to each other for their own ends and agendas.

In a sense, Daniel Silva has written a new Cold War novel. By that I mean, a story that’s very much about how an old enemy has come back from the abyss to taunt and haunt us once again. History is repeating itself. This time, however, the weapon we ultimately used to defeat that old “evil empire” – our economic strength – is no longer completely available to us. And it’s very available to them.

Today’s Russia is vastly different from the empire we tried to contain fifty years ago. It’s a place no longer marked by colorless uniformity and severe deprivation. Quite the contrary, today we find a land of great contrasts and contradictions. And we also find a nation recently flooded with petro-dollars.

If the Soviets of old had been able to tap into that kind of resource-driven wealth, the Cold War would have never ended. And the rules of engagement, even history itself, would have been very different.

The fact is that Russia today represents a greater threat to the security of the world than it ever did in the days of Cold War bipolarity. And our old adversaries are taking great pains to reconstruct an empire, one that would include their strong presence, as was once the case, in the Middle East.

Daniel Silva’s story is told against this backdrop, and it has a ripped-from-the-headlines feel. Readers encounter stories that are reminiscent of recent real-life dramas such as the intriguing murder of former FSB Colonel Aleksandr Litvinenko, who died while investigating the death of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. The new Russia is starting to strongly resemble the old Soviet Union - only with nicer cars.

Along the way, the novel takes the reader on a jet-set paced ride to places like Saint-Tropez, Courchevel, Paris, London – but back time and again to Moscow. All the while it tells a cautionary tale, one that should be widely heard these days. It’s not just the Islamists we should be watching – and watching out for – we need to keep our eye on that big old bear roaming once again in the global woods.

As Russia becomes stronger and stronger, and as its leaders tighten the reins more and more on all aspects of national and international life, the world becomes a more dangerous place with each passing day. Vladimir Putin and his puppet, Dmitry Medvedev, have an agenda. They have empires in their brains. And, if the past is any indicator of the future (of course it is!), they will also play by a sinister set of rules - the most important one being: the ends justify the means.

When it comes to characters out of Cold War literature and media, I can’t help but resonate with something said by Boris Badenov. No, he wasn’t a KGB leader. Nor was he ever on the wall overlooking Red Square as the missiles rode by on May Day.

Boris was a diminutive fellow with a distinct accent who, along with his wife and side-kick, Natasha, tried to foil the good guys, Rocket J. Squirrel and Bullwinkle the Moose. He had a memorable saying I thought about as I read Daniel Silva’s book, Moscow Rules. It came to mind every time one of the bad guys did something rotten. In fact, what Mr. Badenov had to say should be heeded by both candidates for the presidency this year.

He said:

“Never underestimate the power of a schnook.”

People Of The World…

July 24, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Cold War, Democratic Party, Election 2008 | Leave a Comment 

Well, the Senator has spoken. And while the avalanche of clips hadn’t reached Youtube when last I checked, the prepared text of Sen. Barack Obama’s speech in Berlin has now appeared online.  It’s one of his canniest, most carefully crafted addresses yet. Note his reference, in the opening minutes, to his Kenyan grandfather working as a domestic servant of British colonialists, ably playing on a rather ancient German sentiment - you can just picture most of the 100,000-strong crowd nodding and saying, “Ja, ja. The British are bastards. The Russians were right about that at least - they’re hooligans.” 

Then Obama moves on to quoting a famous speech - but it turns out to be the one made by Berlin’s mayor in 1948, Ernst Reuter, during the airlift.  “People of the world, look at Berlin,” Obama intones, echoing the burgomeister - it isn’t quite JFK’s “Lass’ sie nach Berlin kommen!”  but it’ll do.

And, as several bloggers have noted, he said “tore down that wall” just like Reagan did - a  well-aimed gesture toward independents and wavering GOP supporters.

Obama concludes with his customary “this is the moment” finale, which may be a bit overused on these shores, but undoubtedly wowed the German audience.  Ah, if only they could all be airlifted here come the first Tuesday in November and driven to the nearest polling place.  All in all, it looks like another well-handled Barack moment.

Alger Hiss at Starbucks

July 21, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, Cold War, Election 2008, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

In a review of Conrad Black’s biography of President Nixon, TNN’s Jack Pitney (writing in the summer 2008 issue of the Claremont Review of Books) offers an account of the definitive conflict of RN’s early career:

As the 2008 presidential race unfolds, this book reminds us that Nixon’s career anticipated key features of contemporary politics. There has been much talk lately about the “latte liberals” who played such a big part in the early Democratic primaries. The term is fairly recent, but the concept was familiar to Nixon. During his first term in Congress, he fought liberal intellectuals over the Alger Hiss spy case. Whittaker Chambers, the repentant ex-Communist who exposed the story, contrasted “the glittering Hiss forces” with Nixon and his fellow anti-Communists. “The inclusive fact about them,” wrote Chambers, in Witness, “is that, in contrast to the pro-Hiss rally, most of them, regardless of what they had made of themselves, came from the wrong side of the railroad tracks.”

Hiss did not hide his disdain. Black recounts a hearing in which Hiss told Nixon: “I attended Harvard Law School. I believe yours was Whittier.” Hiss erred in two ways. First, he got his facts wrong: Nixon received his legal education at Duke Law School. More important, Hiss’s hauteur made it easier for Nixon to portray him as a villain. (It also helped, as declassified documents later confirmed, that Hiss was guilty as sin.) Nearly all of Hiss’s supporters were patriotic and well-intentioned, but a fair number shared his arrogance. “No feature of the Hiss case is more obvious, or more troubling as history,” wrote Chambers, “than the jagged fissure, which it did not so much open as reveal, between the plain men and women of the nation, and those who affected to act, think, and speak for them.”

Ich Bin Ein…..Halt!

July 9, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Cold War, Democratic Party, Election 2008, History, International Affairs, Presidents, Russia, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

I rather suspect Sen. Barack Obama is welcoming former Gov. Jesse Ventura’s reported plans to run against Al Franken and Sen. Norm Coleman for the latter’s seat. After all, once “The Mind” starts making the rounds of CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, the attention of the American public will be diverted not only from the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s latest faux pas regarding the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, but also from the latest example of Obama’s tendency to overreach himself in spectacular fashion.

It’s one thing for the gentleman from Illinois to plan to move his acceptance speech from the 22,000-capacity Pepsi Center in Denver, where he (presumably) will be nominated at the end of August, to 75,000-seat Invesco Stadium at Mile High, home of the NFL’s Broncos, much as John F. Kennedy, after being chosen by his party in the Los Angeles Sports Arena, moved his acceptance speech to Memorial Coliseum. After all, his soaring oratory usually works better when his audience is bigger, and having the Rockies for a background doesn’t hurt.

But it’s quite another thing when Obama, moving into his “statesman” mode, decides to lead off a visit to Germany, France and Britain later this month with an speech on July 24 in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate.

The Gate, built in the 1790s by order of Prussian Emperor Frederick William I, has been the symbol of German unity since 1870. In the 1930s, no Nazi parade in the city was complete without a procession through the Gate, as shown in this photo of Adolf Hitler riding through it on the way to the 1936 Olympics opening ceremony.

But after 1945, and especially after the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Gate gained a greater significance. The western border of the Soviet zone of occupation in the city (and of Communist-controlled East Berlin) ran just a few feet in front of the gate, and thus concrete and barbed wire went up, barring West Berliners from access to the national landmark. This remained the case for 28 long years.

On June 26, 1963 - just under 45 years and a month before the date of Obama’s proposed speech - President Kennedy visited the area in front of the Gate (the East German authorities chose to hang black cloth banners between the pillars to obscure his view of their side of the city), then traveled to Schoneberg Rathaus, Berlin’s city hall. There, before a massive crowd that filled Rudolph Wilde Platz (renamed John F. Kennedy Platz after his assassination), the president spoke from the Rathaus’ balcony. His address, one of the finest of his career, ended with words that have never lost their resonance: “Ich bin ein Berliner!” (The question of whether some in the audience thought he was saying he was the German pastry of that name is still debated.)

Just under 24 years later on June 12, 1987, President Ronald Reagan visited Berlin and spoke directly in front of the Gate and the Wall. Before another enormous crowd he issued the challenge to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that, stunningly, was fulfilled just 29 months later: “Tear down this wall!”

But Obama’s hope to follow in the footsteps of JFK and the Gipper is being frustrated by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has diplomatically, but unmistakably, made it known that in her view speeches at that hallowed monument of Cold War triumph and German nationhood are the province of leaders of nations, where politicians from overseas are concerned, not political candidates, whether or not they represent a unit within a nation as Obama represents Illinois. It’s hard to tell whether she can make that stick; Obama probably has a more enthusiastic following in Germany than any other European country, and in that land the media long since has anointed him der schwarzer Kennedy. But whether or not he does speak at the Brandenburg Gate, you have to wonder what he’s got up his sleeve for his birthday on August 4 - Scarlett Johannson singing “Happy Birthday” at Madison Square Garden, perhaps? (Assuming Michelle would permit it?)

Into Africa

June 25, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Cold War, International Affairs, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Foreign service officer Gregory L. Garland gives Vice President Nixon substantial credit for spurring the State Department to pay more attention to post-colonial Africa and adds this about his civil rights record:

[T]here’s a consensus that RN’s [civil rights] position at this point in his career was driven as much by morality and Cold War strategy as by ambition. In 1960, Jackie Robinson, the gifted second baseman of the Dodgers who had integrated professional baseball, wrote a favorable commentary about Nixon. Then a presidential candidate, Nixon thanked Robinson in a letter, noting that “I have consistently taken a strong position on civil rights, not only for the clear-cut moral considerations involved, but for other reasons which reach beyond our nation’s borders.” Without strong action on civil rights, Nixon continued, “we will suffer in the eyes of the emerging nations and uncommitted peoples. Beyond this, our present struggle with the forces of atheistic communism is an economic as well as an ideological battle. To deny ourselves the full talent and energies of 17 million Negro Americans in this struggle would be stupidity of the greatest magnitude.”

Appeasement and Detente: Two VERY Different Things

June 25, 2008 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under China, Cold War, History, International Affairs, Political Philosophy, Richard Nixon, Russia, Vietnam | Leave a Comment 

The current on-going review of the history of APPEASEMENT during the 1930s and the lessons, if any, that can be applied to current geopolitics, has reminded some of the Nixonian philosophy of DÉTENTE. And there may appear to be a surface similarity.

The argument goes something like this: “Well, Nixon sat down with Chairmen Brezhnev and Mao, is that so different from Barack Obama wanting to break bread with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?”

Actually, it’s very different. There’s very little, if any, real comparison between the neophyte dreams of an inexperienced political celebrity and the well thought out and executed policies of our nation’s thirty-seventh chief executive.

One cannot imagine Richard Nixon sitting down with a volatile, mercurial, and visibly unstable foreign counterpart early on in his administration. Nor is it easy to envision Mr. Nixon promising to do so during a campaign. His penchant for appropriate secrecy and his practiced unwillingness to telegraph punches before they needed to be thrown would have inhibited him from that kind of political pandering.

He never said that he had a “secret plan” to end the War in Vietnam, nor can anyone remember him talking about the possibilities of having a steaming bowl of pho with Ho Chi Minh.

Also, his détente-driven overtures to the Soviets and Chinese were part of a STRATEGIC worldview, not mere tactics designed to impress American voters or assuage crazy warlords. In fact, Mr. Nixon risked his conservative political base with the China initiative – and could only pull it off BECAUSE of his bona fides as a Cold Warrior and anti-communist (“only Nixon could go to China”).

Years after leaving office, while writing a book about leaders (my personal favorite of all his writings), he reviewed the concept of DÉTENTE in light of the failed policies of Jimmy Carter and the increasingly successful ones of Ronald Reagan. “LEADERS: Profiles and Reminiscences of Men Who Have Shaped the Modern World” was written in 1982.

Here’s what he said. This applies, I think, to the argument that APPEASEMENT and DÉTENTE are essentially the same. They are not:

“…to apply the Golden Rule to our dealings with the Soviets is dangerously naïve. President Carter, with the best of intentions, tried unilateral restraint in the hopes that the Soviets would follow suit. The result was disastrous. As he cut back on American arms programs, the Soviets stepped up theirs. Consequently, President Reagan has had to institute an arms buildup to restore the nuclear balance of power.

There are two kinds of détente: hard-headed and soft-headed. Hard-headed détente is based on effective deterrence. This kind of détente encourages the Soviets to negotiate, because it makes the cost of Soviet aggression too high. Soft-headed détente, by contrast, discourages negotiation, because it makes the cost of Soviet expansion so low that the Soviets find the rewards of aggression too tempting.

Hard-headed détente, backed by the force to make deterrence credible, preserves peace. Soft-headed détente invites either war or surrender without war. We need detente, but it must be the right kind of détente.”

“DSPQ/Can’t Be All We Say And Do!”

June 24, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under American Politics, Cold War, DSPQ, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Abundant thanks to Frank Gannon for naming, and acronyming, the beast.

I was lamenting just last night how much time I spend mired in my own DSPQ pathology. This was right after I wrote about how the liberals who idealize Sen. Obama’s small-amount givers might well despise a conservative’s. When it comes to campaign finance, it’s not just how much they give. It’s who they are and what they want, yadda yadda yadda.

But who’s that whispering in my ear?: So what?, deal with it, move on! There’s no question that President Nixon spent long hours computing the mammoth and no doubt infinitely frustrating DSPQs of the Vietnam era. Yet no matter how much DSPQ steam he let off in taped White House conversations, his legacy of principled, creative pragmatism is far more than that. I remember him during his post-Presidential years writing to young people interested in politics that if all they did was bemoan media bias, they wouldn’t get anywhere. He warned them that the double standard would always be flying. Republicans and conservatives had to take it for granted and govern anyway — and govern he did.

Got Smart?

June 23, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Cold War, Culture, Richard Nixon | 4 Comments 

“I’ve been wanting to do this since Nixon,” shouts the Chief (played by Alan Arkin in the new movie “Get Smart”) as he lunges across a conference room to attack the Vice President of the United States. The VP (who doesn’t look like Dick Cheney, but you’re definitely supposed to think it’s he) chairs a hidebound interagency task force at Homeland Security including CIA, the Secret Service, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and CONTROL, workplace of Agents 86 (Max Smart) and 99 (played in the new movie by Anne Hathaway). Shown a video of the Chief’s assault on the veep, a Bush-like President (James Caan) is perversely pleased. You know it’s supposed to be Bush because of Caan’s stab at a Texas drawl and because a Secret Service agent has to nudge the snoozing President during a concert at which works by Mozart and Beethoven are performed. Everybody knows George W. Bush hates the classics.

But what’s President Nixon got to do with it? It could just be a throwaway line. But before we decide, let’s apply the Is the goofy fed in the movie a white or black hat? test.

Here’s how it works. Thrillers and sci-fi movies sometimes have a character who comes from Washington to throw his weight around ineffectually and serve as a comic foil. He’s usually wearing a coat and tie in 120-degree desert heat. If the intefering fed’s a good guy, it usually means there was a Democratic President when the movie was being made. In “Broken Arrow,” for instance, a renegade military officer played by John Travolta steals two nukes. The hapless fed in the coat and tie turns out to be okay. Check the date: 1996 — Bill Clinton. How about “Starman,” in which Washington sends a creepy guy to try to capture and dissect benevolent space alien Jeff Bridges? It was made in 1984, so Ronald Reagan would’ve been dissector-in-chief. In post-Watergate spy comedies made during the Carter Administration such as “Hopscotch” (1980) and “The In-Laws” (that is, Arthur Hiller’s 1979 original), the feds are warm, fuzzy, and inoffensive, like the President (unless the fed has a picture of RN on the wall, such as the Ned Beatty character in “Hopscotch,” in which case he’s a bad guy).

In the new Indiana Jones movie, Harrison Ford being interrogated by humorless, red-baiting feds is an anti-GOP twofer: Steven Spielberg, making the movie in the Bush era, set the the movie in the Eisenhower era.

As for “Get Smart,” as a TV series, created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, it straddled the Johnson and Nixon Administrations, premiering in 1965 and airing until 1970. As I recall, the show was more interested in making fun of James Bond than either Lyndon or Richard. The movie version, directed by Peter Segal (with Brooks and Henry serving as consultants), follows the prevailing Hollywood practice, recently identified by Ross Douthat, of avoiding identifying the United States’ principal enemies as violent Islamic extremists. Instead, Max and 99 take on a post-Cold War KAOS seemingly still operated by Germans, Russians, and Chechens. Nobody’s ready to laugh at Al-Qaos yet, anyway, especially when you remember that they’re actively trying to figure out how to get a dirty bomb into the multiplex (and I don’t mean “Showgirls”).

Discerning about its bad guys, “Get Smart” also has complicated fed semiotics. The film’s CIA and military intelligence characters? Incompetent — they overlook or discount credible threats. Secret Service? Doltish. Alan Arkin gets to punch one of them out, too.

In “Get Smart,” the only good feds are fictional feds — the ones from CONTROL, hanging on by that much since the end of the