December 14, 2007
Back Talk IV Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:25 PM EST Fred Smoler proposes some good explanations for why confronting the media can backfire. “My first and perhaps unthinking response,” he writes, “is that nowadays the press often sticks together and holds grudges, while very sustained attacks on some politicians can go unchallenged by what would once have been the faction of the press nominally favoring their own side.” I think this is definitely part of the reason why press-bashing can hurt candidates. In my previous post, I described the way Hillary Clinton’s evasiveness has recently begun to undermine her campaign. Her tendency toward obfuscation was bound to cause some self-inflicted damage at some point, but I doubt the damage would have been quite so severe if her campaign hadn’t treated the media with such unremitting hostility. After months of getting stonewalled, misled, and insulted, reporters finally saw Clinton bleeding, and they jumped all over the story. I’d offer another partial explanation, though, for why candidates harm themselves by attacking the press. Sometimes, as in Ronald Reagan’s case, candidates go at their journalistic interrogators because they are getting treated badly. But in other cases, candidates knock the media because they don’t want to give honest answers to fair questions (again, see: Clinton, Hillary). When this happens, the public is often smart enough to see what’s really going on. When a candidate acts slippery or mean, voters can tell—even without the help of a grudge-holding press. Voters can distinguish between fair treatment and unfair treatment, and when candidates respond resentfully to reasonable questions, they don’t like it. I’ll add that candidates can respond to unfair treatment in more than one way, and the best way to swat away a nasty question isn’t always to get nasty back. For evidence of this, I offer this clip of Christopher Dodd speaking in yesterday’s Democratic debate. Dodd was asked, bizarrely, whether his run for president was motivated by a desire to clear his family name, which the moderator said was tarnished by his father’s 1967 censure in the Senate. This was a totally unfair question, based on cheap armchair psychoanalysis of the candidate. Dodd’s response, however, was graceful and direct, and it garnered the applause of the audience and his fellow candidates. If Dodd had trashed the moderator, he would have been justified in doing so, but he would not have demonstrated the same kind of maturity and decency he showed yesterday.
December 13, 2007
Back Talk II Posted by Alexander Burns at 12:20 PM EST A footnote to John Steele Gordon’s post this morning is that in 1980, when Ronald Reagan attracted national attention by snapping at a moderator, “I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green!,” the future President was paraphrasing Spencer Tracy. In the 1948 film State of the Union, Spencer Tracy plays an idealistic presidential candidate whose less scrupulous backers try to co-opt his campaign. In a climactic moment, as someone tries to interrupt one of his speeches, Tracy exclaims, “Don’t you shut me off. I am paying for this broadcast!” There’s an MSNBC clip noting the similarity between the two moments here. My guess is that Fred Thompson’s performance yesterday was intended to inspire comparisons with Reagan. I don’t think Thompson pulled it off as well as Reagan did. I think Mr. Gordon is right that confronting the media can work in candidates’ favor. But in reply to his query about why candidates don’t do it more often, I’d answer that it’s also a risky business. If it’s done in an excessively self-righteous way, or by a candidate who’s not a particularly deft performer, it can come off as obnoxious or evasive. Consider Alan Keyes’s performance in yesterday’s debate. He rants about how the media wants to silence him but doesn’t seem to consider the possibility that the American people don’t want to hear him either. Keyes ends up looking (appropriately) like an egomaniac without an actual policy agenda. A less obviously botched media showdown took place in July, when Hillary Clinton faced off with Chris Matthews at a forum with organized labor. Matthews asked Clinton whether she would approve of a presidential pardon for Scooter Libby. Clinton, recognizing this as an attempt to draw her into a dispute about her husband’s presidential pardons, replied by demanding that Matthews ask “a question that’s really about the people in this audience, and not what goes on inside Washington.” Matthews snarked back: “Okay, so we’ll leave that as a non-answer.” It was a sloppy exchange on both sides, as you can see here. Initially, many believed that Clinton won the point against Matthews. The audience, at least, fell for her performance. Looking beyond how it played with a group of Clinton’s natural supporters, though, this exchange might very well have reinforced concerns in the general public about Clinton’s trustworthiness. A dispassionate observer, harboring no special affection for Clinton, might (appropriately) conclude from the exchange that the New York senator has something to hide. What’s more, you can only dodge questions for so long, as Clinton found out here. In answering a tricky question about illegal immigration, she flip-flipped and accused the moderator of “playing gotcha.” But she looked ridiculous, and she exposed herself to scorn from a distrustful public and attack from an insulted press. Confronting the media works well sometimes, but when the tactic fails, it can fail very, very badly.
December 11, 2007
Cleverness from PBS Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:55 AM EST There’s a funny video making the rounds online. It’s taken from a PBS series, Vote for Me: Politics in America, and it’s a send-up of political advertising, past and present. The authors take some of the attack lines Federalists used against Thomas Jefferson in 1800 and combine them with old film footage to turn them into a twenty-first-century negative commercial. “Female chastity violated. Children writhing on the pike and halberd,” a narrator intones. “It happened in France, but it could happen right here in America if Thomas Jefferson is elected President.” See the video here on YouTube. The ad is an effective satire partly because it so closely resembles real attack ads and partly because the attacks it repeats seem so ludicrous in retrospect. But in 1800 the Federalists really did level these charges and more against Jefferson. “God—and a Religious President” versus “Jefferson—and no God” was the choice John Adams’s supporters gave America. Americans chose Jefferson despite these slurs. It is unclear what divine consequences this choice had. As funny as it is, the PBS clip is also a little depressing, since it’s a good reminder that negative, personal elections are probably here to stay. It would be nice, though, if videos like this one had the effect of reminding us just how silly and transient so many electoral controversies are. If we look back on the election of 1800 and see that it was ridiculous to charge Jefferson with fomenting Jacobinism, just imagine what Americans in 2100 will think of the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth. Actually, for a send-up of that crowd, we don’t need to wait for 2100. Just see here and here. If you liked the PBS video, these are worth your time.
November 28, 2007
A New Yorker’s Objection to the Electoral College V Posted by Alexander Burns at 08:45 PM EST I am hesitant to reply to Mr. Gordon’s latest post, as I don’t want to belabor this issue too much. I also don’t particularly want to respond to sarcasm. But there are a couple issues that I feel are worth clarifying. Mr. Gordon says that my last post was “taking advantage of [his] careless choice of states, which is good for scoring college debate team points but not so good for finding the truth. Idaho and Vermont are both solidly in one camp. . . . But there are plenty of small states that tend to move back and forth between parties: New Mexico, Nevada, Delaware etc.” Mr. Gordon might find this hard to believe, but my last post was not just intended to highlight his carelessness; I actually made a broader assertion than he suggests, and it’s one that happens to be backed up by data. I wrote: “Presidential elections are fought in big, politically divided states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Florida. The practical impact of the Electoral College isn’t to favor small states; it’s to favor certain kinds of big states.” Delaware, Nevada, and New Mexico clearly do benefit, to at least some small degree, from having the Electoral College in place, and I never said otherwise. But the big winners from the Electoral College are the large states that happen to be politically divided. Allow me to offer some factual evidence (this tends to be a good strategy for college debaters and courageous truth-seekers alike). Between April 1 and September 30, 2004, $333.4 million was spent on presidential campaign advertising. The top five states where that money was spent were Ohio (17.9 percent), Florida (17.1), Pennsylvania (12.3), Michigan (6.7), and Wisconsin (5.8). That totals 59.8 percent of presidential campaign advertising during the period, to a set of states that contain something like 20 percent of the country’s population. If television advertising is a reliable indicator of where a campaign is sending its resources, and I believe it is, then clearly large, competitive states benefit from our system of subdividing the national electorate far more than the great majority of small states. Now, it may be that Mr. Gordon and I have an irreconcilable difference of opinion (surprise!). He would rather have our current system, which somewhat favors small states, strongly advantages big, politically divided states, and disadvantages ideologically homogeneous states of all sizes. In contrast, I’d prefer a system that leaves some small states behind—Delaware, most likely, with its special Delaware issues—but puts places like Oklahoma, Georgia, and Massachusetts back on the table. I’m obviously quite convinced of my position, and Mr. Gordon of his, and unless he’s surprisingly convinced by the data above, I expect things will stay that way. I have two other, less lengthy clarifications to conclude with. First, Mr. Gordon says that the Electoral College results in 1876 and 2000 were “clear enough” that Al Gore and Samuel Tilden didn’t have any objective reason to complain. Actually, the 1876 election saw an enormous controversy about the Electoral College after three Southern states sent multiple slates of electors to Congress. The resulting imbroglio makes the resolution of the 2000 election look brief and civil by comparison, and the election fight only ended when a special commission decided, by an 8–7 vote, to give the contested electoral votes to Rutherford B. Hayes. Despite Tilden’s three-point margin in the popular vote, this Electoral College fiasco denied him the Presidency. As for the 2000 election, we all know that history. If you think the Electoral College provided useful clarity in these circumstances, I have a profession to suggest to you. Finally, Mr. Gordon asks how I can be so certain that the outcome of the 2000 election would have been a clear victory for Gore if we had just been going by the popular vote. “A mere 544,683 votes, a little over 10,000 per state, separated Al Gore and George Bush, out of 101,463,105 cast,” he writes. “I imagine the Republicans would have fought just as ferociously and screamed fraud just as loudly over the country as the Democrats did in Florida.” I find this an implausible scenario. Finding an extra 10,000 votes per state would have been a totally impossible feat—the typical difference after a recount is no more than a few dozen, or at most a few hundred votes. In 2000, the Democrats were fighting for some 500 votes in Florida. That’s a close margin by any standard. But imagine if we hadn’t had the Electoral College, and George Bush had gone on television in November 2000 to declare, “If authorities miscounted 10,000 votes per state it would have changed the outcome.” He might as well have told America that if his grandmother had wheels she’d be a bicycle. It would have been hugely embarrassing for Republicans. The congressional GOP would probably have made President Gore’s life miserable, but I very much doubt they would have tolerated a 50-state scavenger hunt for votes. I’m not a fan of counterfactuals, but this seems like a pretty open-and-shut case.
November 28, 2007
A New Yorker’s Objection to the Electoral College III Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:10 AM EST John Steele Gordon raises a reasonable objection to my argument in favor of ditching the Electoral College: “In a race determined only be the national popular vote, much of ‘fly-over country,’ as coastal elites call it, would be ignored, and the race would be fought in the great media centers . . . and the major cities. That would not be a good thing. The Electoral College forces candidates to consider each of the 50 states and to spend time and resources in those that seem possible to win, no matter how small. Without it, they would ignore the Vermonts and the Idahos.” There are a few problems with this statement. First of all, on the level of broad principles, I’m not sure why the United States is necessarily better off with an electoral system that theoretically favors small, rural states over big, urban centers. There are arguments for promoting such a system, but it doesn’t strike me as an absolute political good. Second, and more important, the system we currently have doesn’t actually favor small states very much in practice. Mr. Gordon’s statement that abolishing the Electoral College would lead to candidates’ ignoring “the Vermonts and the Idahos” would be a good point—except for the fact that candidates already ignore Vermont and Idaho. Presidential elections are fought in big, politically divided states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Florida. The practical impact of the Electoral College isn’t to favor small states; it’s to favor certain kinds of big states. I’ve never actually heard a “coastal elite” use the term “flyover country,” but if some do, the Electoral College isn’t doing much to discourage them. Mr. Gordon makes an additional point that the Electoral College tends to establish more decisive winners than the popular vote, and suggests that this is a good thing because “clear winners are always better than unclear ones, and the great virtue of the Electoral College is that it always produces clear winners.” I’m not sure that Al Gore or Samuel Tilden would agree about the consistent clarity of the Electoral College, but I actually think there’s an argument to be made that the apparent clarity of Electoral College results is a bad thing. In 1992 Bill Clinton won by a clear Electoral College vote but took office with less than 50 percent support from the public. He proceeded to try and ram health-care reform through Congress as though he’d won an overwhelming mandate. A similar thing happened with George Bush and Social Security reform after the 2004 election. Both Presidents overestimated the public’s support for their administration, and both suffered gravely as a result. I doubt this kind of hubris would occur so easily if we didn’t have an Electoral College to disguise and distort the results of close elections. Finally, Mr. Gordon suggests a counterfactual: “Imagine a squeaker election . . . without the Electoral College. In 2000, because of the college, the messy, divisive legal battle was fought only in Florida, and it still took over a month to sort out. But without the college it would have been fought in all 50 states, because each and every vote would have been precious.” On this last point, I’ll note that the idea that each and every vote is precious is sort of the point of a democracy. As for Mr. Gordon’s larger thought experiment, to paraphrase The Princess Bride, I do not think it means what he thinks it means. If the 2000 election had been settled without the Electoral College, there would not have been a 50-state scavenger hunt for votes. In fact, there would not have been a “messy, divisive legal battle” at all. The outcome would have been an indisputable victory for Al Gore.
November 26, 2007
A New Yorker’s Objection to the Electoral College Posted by Alexander Burns at 04:05 PM EST I see that I’m a latecomer to the discussion about the Electoral College. Thanksgiving has a way of keeping one busy (or asleep). I enjoyed Julie Fenster’s post last week about Abraham Lincoln’s scheme to undermine the Electoral College. It does seem similar to the law Maryland has already passed, which would effectively form a coalition of states that pledge to give their electoral votes to the popular vote winner, although the Maryland effort strikes me as rather less partisan. There are other sly ways that states have tried to make the Electoral College more representative of the popular vote; both Maine and Nebraska currently award two of their electoral votes to the candidate who wins a majority of votes in the state, and then apportion the rest of their electoral votes by congressional district. If a Democratic presidential candidate wins Maine overall by running up huge margins downstate, but a Republican ekes out a win in the rural second congressional district, the state’s electoral vote gets split 3–1 in the Democrat’s favor. Fred Smoler and John Steele Gordon both ponder the consequences of eliminating the Electoral College. The basic argument against doing so, as Mr. Smoler relates it, is that “people who detest all barriers to immediate majoritarian politics should think hard about precisely what they are wishing for.” Perhaps. But the Electoral College is not much of a check on the majority; there have been only three instances when the electoral vote has overridden the popular vote. What the Electoral College practically accomplishes, in the present day, is to take the vast majority of states off the radar of presidential candidates. Our current system makes it insane for a Democratic presidential candidate to waste his time campaigning in Texas, or for a Republican to blow a weekend in California (except for fundraising). It just isn’t cost-effective to take your message to your adversary’s home turf. You’re never going to convince enough Mississippians to vote Democratic to get their electoral votes, so why try to convince any of them at all? When you can focus on snagging Ohio’s electoral votes, why would you spend money elsewhere? This isn’t fair—not to any party in particular, and especially to the great majority of American voters. Mr. Gordon doubts liberals “would be so up in arms about the Electoral College these days had George Bush won the popular vote and Al Gore the College in 2000.” My complaint with the College, though, isn’t the complaint of a Democrat (the 2004 campaign showed that Democrats can benefit from the Electoral College, too, as John Kerry came within 60,000 votes of winning Ohio and the Presidency but lost the popular vote by a much larger margin). Mine is the complaint of a New Yorker. If we elected the President directly, it would make sense for Democrats to visit Texas (or parts, anyway) and for Republicans to visit California (Orange County, anyone?). Democrats could actually benefit from visiting rural Oklahoma, and Republicans could pick up useful votes in Queens. I suspect the electoral majorities that would result from such a system would probably look a lot more like America, and less like Ohio. Given the political polarization of recent years, geographically broader, more inclusive presidential campaigns might be just what the doctor ordered.
November 10, 2007
The Politics of National Security II Posted by Alexander Burns at 08:40 PM EST Thanks to John Steele Gordon for linking to Sen. Joe Lieberman’s speech “The Politics of National Security.” I’m not really sure where to begin responding to it, except to say it is a good example of why I find Lieberman a very sad public figure. There have always been aspects of Lieberman’s politics that I’ve found problematic, but I used to be a fan of his. I considered him a decent man and, even when I disagreed with him, an unusually honest politician. But as the centrist Democrat Ed Kilgore writes, the Connecticut senator’s latest speech “seemed designed to validate everything [Lieberman’s] Democratic critics have said about him over the last few years, and to humiliate Democrats who have defended him.” I do not think I can critique Lieberman’s address more effectively than Kilgore already has, so forgive me for quoting liberally. The heart of Kilgore’s argument is that Lieberman’s speech “provides an exceptionally simplistic and mechanical history of partisanship and foreign policy. Democrats were ‘good’ from World War II until Vietnam, and Republicans tended to be ‘bad.’ Democrats were ‘bad’ from Vietnam to the First Gulf War, and Republicans were ‘good’”—and so on. Kilgore continues: “These judgments appear to be based on an interpretation of the ‘muscular’ Democratic foreign policy tradition that’s all about the willingness to use military force, and a rhetorical commitment to democracy-promotion and tyranny-denouncing. You’d never know from Lieberman’s speech that the Democratic tradition he’s pretending to uniquely defend had a lot to do with multilateralism, collective security, international institutions, diplomacy, non-military means, human rights, bipartisanship, and the rule of law—all parts of the tradition that Bush and contemporary Republicans have aggressively rejected, and that today’s Democrats explicitly support.” To Kilgore’s observations I’ll only add that Lieberman’s speech totally misses the present political reality in the United States. In Lieberman’s view, the source of antiwar opinion in this country is the “politically paranoid, hyper-partisan sentiment in the Democratic base.” According to a brand-new poll, 68 percent of Americans oppose our continuing commitment in Iraq. That is a new high. If Joe Lieberman still supports the war that’s his right, but someone should disabuse him of the notion that he’s the voice of a beleaguered and sensible quiet majority.
November 6, 2007
Pork and the Line-Item Veto IV Posted by Alexander Burns at 01:25 PM EST As one proponent of the line-item veto might have said: “Here we go again.” Mr. Gordon responds in several parts to my thoughts on the line-item veto. First, he takes issue with my use of the word “patently” to describe the unconstitutionality of the line-item veto. “The fact that three justices thought it constitutional makes the word ‘patently’ inappropriate here,” he writes. “Yesterday’s Supreme Court dissent has very often become tomorrow’s majority opinion, as Mr. Burns knows full well.” Indeed I do know this. However, if you look at the justices who dissented—Breyer, O’Connor, and Scalia, with the latter only dissenting in part—it seems likely that the anti–line item veto majority on the Court has actually gotten stronger over time. O’Connor has retired and was replaced by Justice Samuel Alito. Along with Chief Justice Roberts, the other new member of the Court, Alito does not strike me as a likely prospect for recruitment to Justice Breyer’s minority view. A 7 to 2 vote against the line-item veto is not what I would call a close-run thing, especially when you consider that Justice Scalia’s dissent was not exactly ringing. As for Mr. Gordon’s suggestion that President Bush and the Republican Senate leadership might not understand the Constitution—well, to paraphrase Francis Urquhart, you might very well think that, but I could not possibly comment. Second, Mr. Gordon speculates that Rudy Giuliani, who is a good prospect to lead the GOP ticket next year, actually opposed the line-item veto in his capacity as New York mayor, but not as a matter of personal conviction. This is demonstrably incorrect: Giuliani has continued to argue that the line-item veto is unconstitutional long after leaving the office of the mayor. But don’t take my word for it, just ask this guy. Third, Mr. Gordon proposes an alternative means by which the President could cut down on pork: by reviving the power of impoundment. I don’t know enough about this matter to judge whether it’s a good idea, so I’ll stick to the question of the line-item veto as such. I imagine, though I do not know, that all the concerns I raised earlier about expanded presidential power would likely apply. I’m still interested to hear Mr. Gordon’s thoughts on that subject. Finally, Mr. Gordon clarifies that when he “referred to a new contract with America, [he] did not mean simply the line-item veto but a whole panoply of reforms, most of them congressional rules, not laws.” He also argues that this “hasn’t been tried yet,” and “invite[s me] to take a look at the ridicule heaped on the first contract with America in 1994 by the mainstream media, on precisely the grounds that the voters didn’t care, before the election of that year. The ridicule stopped on Election Day.” I’m not sure what media scorn Mr. Gordon is referring to—this New York Times article, for example, seems perfectly respectful—but I would actually challenge the premise of Mr. Gordon’s argument here. Not only would I submit that a latter-day contract with America is unlikely to gain many votes next year, but I’d observe that it’s not really clear how many votes the original contract actually won for the GOP. According to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll right before the 1994 election, just 31 percent of voters even knew of Newt Gingrich’s magnum opus. There was indeed a “political tsunami” that year, but whether earmarks and pork had anything to do with it is hardly a settled question. To end on a high note, it seems Mr. Gordon and I agree about at least one thing: I should have directly cited the blog post I was quoting when I mentioned a previous comment of his. Some might very well think of this as a minor, even frivolous correction, but I generally try to set high standards for conduct in blogging and I regret my error.
November 5, 2007
Pork and the Line-Item Veto II Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:40 AM EST Mr. Gordon addresses a major political subject, wasteful spending, in his post this morning, and suggests that the President of the United States ought to have a line-item veto to use on spending bills. He argues that a line-item veto would curb pork-barrel congressional appropriations, and that any party “willing to seize the issue . . . would do very well next November.” To quote Mr. Gordon, “There’s only one problem: It is patently unconstitutional.” His post does not go very far into the history of the line-item veto, but we’ve actually seen this movie before and we know how it ends. In 1996 Congress granted the White House a line-item veto, only to see it struck down by a district court, and then, in June of 1998, by the Supreme Court in Clinton v. City of New York. As John Paul Stevens observed in his decision, the Constitution explains how bills become law and how the President can veto them, and it’s quite obvious that the line-item veto isn’t part of the plan. Any politician who wants to enact a line-item veto, therefore, must be prepared to amend the Constitution, not just pass a bill. Constitutional obstacles aside, is the line-item veto a good idea? I have serious doubts. Despite Mr. Gordon’s faith in the President as “the only [official] without parochial interests,” and his rather strange assertion that the President is “the only one who looks at the budget . . . as a whole,” I am not so sure that this enhancement of presidential power would not alter the political process in an adverse way. Right now, the President’s more limited veto is an essential mechanism of our balanced government. On the one hand, under this system, Congress must consider the President’s preferences before passing legislation in order to avoid provoking a veto. On the other hand, legislators can also force the President to compromise with their priorities. Members of Congress can effectively override the President’s preferences by passing bills that combine initiatives he dislikes with initiatives he judges essential. If the President wants to get his, he has to make sure Congress gets theirs. It is clear that there are problems with this system, and Mr. Gordon outlines some of them, but it is equally clear that amending it with a line-item veto would rather dramatically enhance the President’s power in relation to that of Congress. Mr. Gordon is pretty comfortable labeling congressional spending “corruption,” but the overwhelming majority of legislative appropriations are perfectly legal, if often undesirable. Perhaps these appropriations are so out-of-control that it would be worth expanding the Presidency in order to restrict them. But I would be uneasy about the unintended consequences of such an act. One last note: As I quoted above, Mr. Gordon suggests that the line-item veto could be a powerful element of a reformist political platform, and that any party that supports it could reap benefits at the polls. Consider, though, that President Bush asked Congress to enact the line-item veto in his 2006 State of the Union Address, and Senators Bill Frist and Mitch McConnell moved to comply. But their party got wiped out in the midterm elections that year. Right now, the leading Republican candidate for President, Rudy Giuliani, is also the man who initiated the lawsuit that ultimately stripped Bill Clinton of his line-item veto. If this is an issue that voters currently care about, I don’t think we’ve seen any evidence of it yet.
November 3, 2007
Paul Tibbets II Posted by Alexander Burns at 07:55 PM EST John Steele Gordon notes the passing of Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., the commander on the mission to bomb Hiroshima. Tibbets’s obituary reminds me of this article by Robert Kaplan, in the September Atlantic, about the B-2 bomber, “The Plane That Would Bomb Iran.” The piece is behind a subscription wall, but it’s also posted, perhaps illegally, here. One of the featured characters in Kaplan’s narrative is Paul W. Tibbets IV, a B-2 pilot who is the grandson of the Enola Gay officer. For those familiar with Kaplan’s writing, the article is predictable. But it contains a poignant sketch of the Tibbets family, including Paul Tibbets, Jr., whom his grandson calls “the ultimate warrior . . . the mission was everything, which meant his family suffered.” A brief thought on Tibbets’s most famous mission. It seems to me that there is a growing consensus that using the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the right thing for Harry Truman to do. I’m not necessarily in disagreement with this consensus, but I’m also not totally comfortable with this position as Mr. Gordon presents it. “Truman really had no political choice,” he writes. “I think he also had no moral choice. The roughly 110,000 deaths from the two atomic bombs is a ghastly number. But it is a tiny fraction of the deaths Truman had every reason to believe would result from the alternative.” Truman’s decision was excruciating, and I envy no leader faced with a similar choice. But part of the reason why the President’s call was so difficult was because he did have choices, both politically and morally. It’s easy to frame the debate over Hiroshima in binary terms—should Truman have used nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or left them unused altogether? These, however, were not the only options available to the man in the Oval Office. He could have chosen other targets, or issued a warning first, or not dropped the second bomb, or taken any number of alternative courses. I’m not saying America, or the world, would be better off today if Truman had done so. But if one wants to make an effective assessment of the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it makes sense to consider the full range of Truman’s options, and the painful degree of freedom he actually had.
November 2, 2007
Waterboarding, Then and Now Posted by Alexander Burns at 08:00 AM EST About 10 days ago, Fred Smoler and I had an exchange about torture and the moral rectitude of the American government. I argued that the executive branch’s current endorsement of what is effectively torture indicates “some kind of decay in the moral compass of the American government.” Mr. Smoler took issue with this characterization, suggesting that torture “isn’t, and cannot be [the only issue] if we are assessing moral compasses in wartime.” Mr. Smoler also observed that Americans used torture as a counterinsurgency tactic in the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century. Readers who followed this exchange with any degree of interest might direct their attention to this article from Politico.com. The self-described “amateur historian” Daniel A. Rezneck details an event from the U.S. effort in the Philippines, in which Theodore Roosevelt overrode the decision of a court-martial and dismissed a general accused of permitting torture. President Roosevelt declared at the time: “Great as the provocation has been in dealing with foes who habitually resort to treachery, murder and torture against our men, nothing can justify or will be held to justify the use of torture or inhuman conduct of any kind on the part of the American Army.” Rezneck cites Edmund Morris’s description of the episode as one that garnered Roosevelt “‘universal praise’ from Democrats . . . and from Republicans, who said that he had ‘upheld the national honor.’” In order to avoid reopening a blog debate that’s gone cold, I won’t claim that TR’s example highlights a certain, shall we say, ethical degeneracy on the part of the present-day American state. Rezneck’s article does make me wonder, though, if we’ll ever again be a society where the President can win bipartisan plaudits for forcefully opposing torture.
October 28, 2007
Our Wellsian Future Posted by Alexander Burns at 01:05 PM EST There’s a new report from the London School of Economics that might give half of everyone’s descendants cause for alarm. According to Oliver Curry, an evolutionary theorist, “Humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years’ time. . . . The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the ‘underclass’ humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.” Those curious to know more about the “genetic upper class” can read, in this BBC article, that “men will exhibit symmetrical facial features, look athletic, and have squarer jaws, deeper voices, and bigger penises. Women, on the other hand, will develop lighter, smooth, hairless skin, large clear eyes, pert breasts, [and] glossy hair.” Leaving aside the question of what Pantene and Victoria’s Secret would do in such a future, not to mention all the “male enhancement” spammers, this prediction is just flat-out ridiculous. As the BBC points out, it’s really just a rehash of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, except with the London School of Economics behind it. But Wells’s book wasn’t supposed to be a scientific prediction, and in any case we now know enough to resist taking such projections too seriously. Curry’s underlying assumption, that “sexual selection . . . was likely to create more and more genetic inequality,” runs contrary to most everything we know about evolution. Sexual selection leads to the development or exaggeration of specific animal features—the male mandrill’s colorful face, for example—but if there’s been any instance of a species electively dividing itself through sexual choice, I’m certainly not aware of it. Even if there were, it seems pretty dicey for Curry to assume that humans 100,000 years in the future will favor the same physical characteristics our pop culture glorifies today. If there is anything of intellectual interest in Curry’s theories, it is probably his emphatic assertion that humans are still subject to evolutionary pressures. One of the major debates in evolutionary science is over the question of whether humans still face natural selection, or whether technology and culture have moved us beyond that point. Curry—who, incidentally, is not trained as a scientist—seems to have made up his mind on this question. Indeed, he apparently thinks technology will serve as an evolutionary force of its own. This is an intriguing notion, but I’ll wait for someone else to articulate it before taking it seriously.
October 26, 2007
Expiration Dates Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:05 PM EST James Watson lost his job yesterday. The Nobel Prize–winning biologist resigned as the chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he has worked on and administered genetic research for decades. The impetus for his resignation was the uproar over comments he made last week about genetics and racial differences. Speaking with London’s Sunday Times, Watson had commented, “All our social policies are based on the fact that [Africans’] intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really.” Going further, Watson announced that racial equality is a sham: “People who have to deal with black employees find this is not true.” A few people have suggested that the resulting outrage over Watson’s comments was an inappropriate response to the man’s free speech. It seems obvious, though, that the scientist’s comments were not the stuff of which intellectual debate is made. Watson himself has professed surprise at having made such remarks. One hesitates to question the mental capacity of an eminent scientist, but Watson’s comments, and his subsequent retraction of them, look like a pretty good case study in public senility. It’s probably inevitable that our society is going to fixate on the words of famous, accomplished people like Watson, no matter how old they are. But this latest affair makes me wonder whether we wouldn’t be better off imposing a kind of expiration date on public figures. A consensus agreement, perhaps, that 25 years after someone’s career-making accomplishment, we can stop assuming that he remains an impressive person. This sounds a little cruel, but in the long run I think people like Watson would benefit from it. If they stayed lucid in their old age, they would keep making headlines. If they acted like cranks, society would sigh and move on. Biographers might find their ramblings useful, but the rest of us could focus on more important news. Of course, there’s also reason to doubt whether anyone should ever have valued Watson’s opinion as highly as some do. I once had a biology teacher who said Watson’s main gift wasn’t for genetics but for self-promotion. Given how skillfully Watson’s evaded allegations of academic dishonesty, I think that assessment might be merited. I’d say we were fortunate to have him out of the public eye for good, but I doubt we’ll be that lucky.
October 26, 2007
Contingency and Political History Posted by Alexander Burns at 12:25 PM EST A few months back I made a post on what would have been President Kennedy’s ninetieth birthday. It struck me as a fitting occasion to consider the role that chance events play in history. This week, the anniversary of another event—a death, not a birth—seems perhaps an even more appropriate time for such reflections. It was five years ago yesterday that Sen. Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash, along with his wife, Sheila, daughter Marcia, and aides Will McLaughlin, Tom Lapic, and Mary McEvoy. Locked in a competitive reelection campaign, Wellstone was on his way to a funeral at the time he died. Though his opponent, St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman, was giving Wellstone a run for his money, the most recent polls had shown the incumbent pulling away from his challenger. One of the reasons was a controversial vote Wellstone cast in the middle of October, against authorizing the use of force in Iraq. At the time of the vote, Wellstone feared he had doomed his reelection bid. Just weeks later it seemed that Minnesotans were rewarding his risky stance. If Wellstone had not died on that day in October 2002, I think there’s a pretty strong chance he’d be neck-and-neck with Hillary Clinton in a fight for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Wellstone, who considered a run for the White House in 2000, might even have entered the 2004 race to face George W. Bush. We never would have heard of Howard Dean if the 2004 nominating contest had also featured a popular, charismatic, experienced Democratic senator who had voted against the war. Whether Wellstone would have captured the nomination in 2004, or subsequently won the White House, is something we can never know. But three years after that election, and five years after the Iraq War began, it seems clear that Wellstone’s credibility with today’s Democratic primary electorate would be extraordinary. Wellstone’s was not the only political career to get snuffed out in such a tragic way. The list of political figures who have been downed in plane crashes is actually quite astonishing. Democratic Rep. Jerry Litton died in a crash in 1976, in the middle of a Senate campaign. He would have likely defeated his Republican opponent, John Danforth, who instead went on to a long and influential career in Congress. In 1978, Virginia politician Richard Obenshain went down with a plane; he was replaced on the ballot by former Navy Secretary John Warner, who is today the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. In 1991, Republican Sen. John Heinz and former Sen. John Tower both died in the space of 48 hours in separate plane crashes. Tower was certainly at the end of his career, but Heinz’s future was still bright. Believe it or not, the list goes on. Of these men, Wellstone seems the most compelling example of political history gone awry through vehicular disaster. But in a country that celebrates its open, safe political process, these random accidents have exerted an uncomfortably significant influence in shaping the present. There’s not really a way around this, but it’s chilling all the same.
October 22, 2007
Moral Compasses, Then and Now II Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:30 AM EST Thanks to Fred Smoler for his thoughtful response to my post on torture. Mr. Smoler presents his point as though we have some serious disagreement, but I’m not sure that we actually disagree about much. We do, however, appear to be talking past each other a little bit. Mr. Smoler writes, in response to my suggestion that institutionalized torture shows “some kind of decay in the moral compass of the American government”: “The Bush administration’s insistence on loosening the definition of torture has shocked and disgusted many Americans, but I am no means certain that we nowadays wage war with much less tenderness and restraint than the World War II generation did.” That’s a fine and reasonable point, and one that I partially agree with, but I didn’t argue that our military apparatus has undergone a process of total moral degradation. My suggestion, as I quoted above, was that our greatly increased willingness to torture shows a loss of certain moral values. Mr. Smoler describes a few instances of World War II–era torture and torture-like behavior. I will note, though, that in all these examples, soldiers were acting on their own, in the field, under the stress of combat, without any evident institutional endorsement of their behavior. Are our soldiers today less ethical people than their grandparents were? I doubt it. But I think it’s obvious that the government they work for permits and encourages practices that would have been unacceptable six decades ago. A Dutch interrogator’s rough treatment of a 17-year-old German boy is distasteful, if arguably necessary. There’s a giant moral gap between his actions and those of a state that systematically tortures its prisoners. This week our President’s nominee for attorney general declined to say whether he believed waterboarding, one of the Khmer Rouge’s choice interrogation methods, constitutes torture. Last spring, a Republican candidate for President, Tom Tancredo, was asked what methods he would use to extract information about imminent terror attacks on American soil. His answer, delivered to thunderous applause, was, “I’m looking for Jack Bauer at that time, let me tell you.” Tancredo is a bit of a nut, to put it mildly, but he is not the only Jack Bauer groupie in government; Justice Scalia has also cited 24 as an inspiration for his thinking about counterterrorism law. For readers who are not 24 watchers, I’ll note that Mr. Bauer’s interrogation methods have included cutting off a diplomat’s fingers, shooting an innocent bystander in the leg, and suffocating his own brother with a plastic bag. My argument here is not that 24 is a pretty gross show. My point is that a significant and powerful portion of the American government believes the best way to question a prisoner is to assume that at any given second there may an atomic bomb counting down to detonation. This strikes me as a basically insane approach to the ethics of interrogation. In 1944 our government didn’t think every interrogation had the Battle of the Bulge riding on it. That would have been a recipe for random and pointless cruelty. Does our government’s altered reasoning constitute moral decay? I guess readers can decide for themselves. My answer is, unreservedly, yes.
October 18, 2007
Stuart Taylor, Legal Reporting, and Torture Posted by Alexander Burns at 04:45 PM EST I want to thank John Steele Gordon, belatedly, for directing my attention to Stuart Taylor and K.C. Johnson’s Until Proven Innocent. I have not yet had the opportunity to take a glance at this book, but I look forward to doing so – even if it was reviewed well in (cue music) The New York Times. I am generally a fan of Mr. Taylor’s work, and though I know little about Professor Johnson’s, I am sure their collaboration was a fruitful one. One subject where I think Taylor’s writing has been particularly strong has been that of counterterrorism policy. While plenty of people have weighed in on topics like torture, detainment, and extraordinary rendition, Taylor is one of comparatively few who have done so in a legally-minded, evidence-based way. National Journal, where Taylor is a columnist, has perhaps the tallest, widest, most expensive subscription wall ever created for a publication, so forgive me for not linking. But in a January 2005 piece titled “Distorting the Law and Facts in the Torture Debate,” Taylor called for officials to cut through the “fog of confusion” over interrogation policy, and detailed the various ways in which the Bush administration and, to a lesser extent, their critics, simply weren’t addressing the real legal issues surrounding detainee treatment. More recently, in May 2007 Taylor urged Congress and the White House to stop improvising and enact meaningful guidelines for dealing with “a noncitizen suspected of being an Islamist terrorist.” Sometimes Taylor engages in a kind of on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand, let’s-split-the-difference reasoning that I find unpersuasive. All the same, though, he’s stayed on these tricky, important legal issues when many other opinion leaders have given them only fleeting attention. That’s admirable. I was reminded of Mr. Taylor’s work last weekend, even before Mr. Gordon’s post, by this Washington Post article on a group of World War II veterans who interrogated Nazi POWs at Fort Hunt. “Back then,” Petula Dvorak writes, “they and their commanders wrestled with the morality of bugging prisoners’ cells with listening devices. They felt bad about censoring letters. They took prisoners out for steak dinners to soften them up. They played games with them.” Said one former interrogator: “We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture.” This struck me as an incredibly sad illustration of yet another way in which the World War II generation is passing away. Comparing the interrogations at Fort Hunt with those at Guantanamo Bay, it’s hard not to wonder if the 60 years since the Second World War haven’t brought about some kind of decay in the moral compass of the American government. It’s a good thing that there are lawyers and legal reporters wrestling with the subject of torture. But there’s something tragic about the fact that they even have to.
October 15, 2007
On the Norwegian Nobel Committee Posted by Alexander Burns at 01:00 PM EST For readers interested in this weekend’s exchange about the Nobel Peace Prize, I recommend this article from yesterday’s New York Times for further reading. It provides a good snapshot of Nobel Committee members wrestling with the question of what, exactly, “peace” is supposed to mean, and also with the political consequences of awarding such a prize. On the latter question, the key comment seems to be from Francis Sejersted, the former chairman of the committee, who tells the Times: “Awarding a peace prize is, to put it bluntly, a political act.” On the former question—the changing meaning of “peace”—the Times cites Ole Danbolt Mjos, who chaired the committee that awarded Wangari Maathai in 2004. Mjos said the prize is really “about how we live together, share resources, preserving the earth.” I find this a compelling, if not 100 percent satisfying, explanation of what the committee now looks for in a laureate. Check out the article and see what you think.
October 14, 2007
The Nobel Peace Prize IV Posted by Alexander Burns at 04:25 PM EST Mr. Gordon makes a new argument in his latest post. He writes that Al Gore is different from other Nobel recipients, like Norman Borlaug and Muhammad Yunus, who have won without literally working toward peace because his most important potential contributions are, at this point, largely unrealized. This strikes me as a fairly reasonable point: If we’re going to have what is, essentially, a Nobel Humanitarian Prize, perhaps it makes sense to recognize the individuals who have made the greatest concrete progress toward achieving their humanitarian goals. From this perspective, Borlaug and Yunus are clearly worthier honorees than Gore. From another perspective, though, the Nobel has frequently been given to people whose most significant contributions are, on a basic level, still just potential contributions. Frank Kellogg won the Nobel Peace Prize the year after the Kellogg-Briand Pact, banning war, was signed. Nicholas Murray Butler was a joint recipient of the prize two years later (with Jane Addams) for his work promoting the pact. So, in three years you had two men honored for the same treaty, which had not yet had any demonstrable impact in discouraging war. As we all know, the world erupted in bloodshed a few years later. Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho won the prize in 1973 (the latter declined it) for the Paris Peace Accords. Fortunately, in this case, the Nobel Committee was rather more farsighted than it was in its optimistic assessment of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Just look at the lasting, two-state solution that endures in Vietnam. Oh, wait . . . My point here is not to berate the Nobel Committee for a few judgments that seem silly in retrospect. My point is to say that Al Gore’s “paper profit” is at least as significant as those of numerous other Nobel honorees. For what it’s worth, I’d say he’s much more likely to end up a metaphorically wealthy man than Frank Kellogg or Henry Kissinger did. I have no interest in debating Mr. Gordon on the issue of climate change, or responding, by proxy, to the criticisms of a marginally significant British judge. (Although I will, incidentally, note the irony of many conservatives’ appealing to the jurisprudence of a—gasp!—foreign legal authority. Imagine if a liberal used such an argumentative tactic on a subject like the death penalty.) On the subject of climate change, the science is in. The planet’s getting warmer, and a leading cause is manmade carbon emissions. Estimates can disagree over whether climate change will raise sea levels by one foot or twenty. But sea levels are only one metric by which to gauge the impact of climate change, and flooding is only one of the many negative consequences humanity would face if it decided to ignore this problem. On this particular subject, we might want to try and see the forest for the drunken trees. As to the question of whether the Norwegian Parliament or the Norwegian Nobel Commitee awards the Peace Prize, Mr. Gordon suggests that this is “a distinction without a whole lot of difference.” I’d argue otherwise. Legislative bodies, such as the U.S. Congress and the Norwegian Parliament, are driven by electoral concerns. Bodies they appoint, like the 9/11 Commission, or help appoint, like the Supreme Court, are much less susceptible to such motivations. For people who wish to devalue the Nobel Peace Prize, or to cast aspersions on the worthiness of its recipients, the notion that craven Scandinavian socialist politicos decide who wins it is a useful misconception to spread. I’m certainly not saying that Mr. Gordon intended to do anything like this, but I do think this was an important mistake to correct.
October 12, 2007
The Nobel Peace Prize II Posted by Alexander Burns at 04:30 PM EST I was a little disappointed to see that John Steele Gordon tackled the subject of the Nobel Peace Prize before I could get to it today—although not that disappointed. Predictably, Mr. Gordon’s thoughts are rather different from the ones I’ve been mulling over. There is plenty in Mr. Gordon’s post that I find ill-reasoned and problematic, but rather than setting our views in direct and artificial opposition, I thought I’d offer the alternative observations that occurred to me this morning. The Nobel Peace Prize has an interesting history. As Mr. Gordon helpfully detailed, many winners of the prize have been people who worked on peacemaking in a formal, legalistic sort of way. Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Ralph Bunche are good examples of this kind of Peace Prize recipient. The majority of Nobel honorees, not just the American winners, have been of this variety. Consider the examples of Oscar Arias, the president of Costa Rica who was awarded the prize in 1987 for his efforts to end civil strife in Central America, and John Hume and David Trimble, who won in 1998 after they worked to forge a lasting peace in Northern Ireland. An increasing number of honorees, however, have been coming from outside the sphere of government and have been winning as a result of accomplishments outside the field of legal peacemaking. Historically, plenty of Nobel Prizes have gone to activists, like Martin Luther King, Jr., Lech Walesa, and Desmond Tutu, whose political contributions improved the condition of humanity but didn’t directly deal with preventing war. Now, two years in a row, the Peace Prize has gone to a private-sector actor whose accomplishments seem even more tenuously tied to literal concerns of war and peace. Last year’s recipient, Muhammad Yunus, is a pioneer of microfinancing, which aims at promoting popular entrepreneurship and business growth in impoverished countries. This year’s winner, Al Gore, has worked to build international consensus around the need to act on the issue of climate change. Neither of these men, or the organizations with which they shared the Peace Prize, has dealt with ending an armed conflict or anything like it. Yet they have both won the highest award a peacemaker can receive. It seems, then, that the Nobel Commitee (not, as Mr. Gordon stated, the Norwegian parliament) is judging Peace Prize nominees by a slightly different understanding of “peace” than it used to. Their principal interest seems to be in honoring individuals whose work has advanced humanitarian, internationalist ideals, rather than in picking out the best peace negotiators. Yunus may not have stopped a war, but he has contributed a remarkable economic innovation in the form of microcredit. This invention may, in the long run, help far more people than the Treaty of Locarno ever did. I think that outcome is pretty likely. Similarly, if Gore’s activism continues to spur international action on the environment, it will help reverse the deleterious effects of climate change and avert famines, epidemics, and disastrous flooding. It seems to me there’s a pretty good case to be made that this achievement would be equivalent to Norman Borlaug’s or Linus Pauling’s. In Akira Iriye’s Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World, the author argues that the Nobel Committee’s decision in 1999 to award the prize to Doctors Without Borders signaled a recognition that international NGOs had begun to rival governments in their ability to shape the common path of humanity. Now it seems the Nobel Committee has come to understand that our world is one in which private individuals, like Gore and Yunus, can effect similar changes in the global social landscape by interacting primarily with other private individuals. This morning Gore sent out an e-mail to his supporters calling the climate crisis “our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.” I find it amazing, and moving, to think that the “global consciousness” he’s referring to is grounded not only in compacts between states but also in an actual community of countless, disparate, concerned individuals. Whether or not you want to call them “peacemakers,” the men and women who have helped build this community are blessed indeed.
September 28, 2007
The Great (Board) Game Posted by Alexander Burns at 06:10 PM EST All the talk of “Great Powers” over the last few days has reminded me of one of my favorite board games of all time: Avalon Hill’s classic Diplomacy. It’s kind of like Risk, but without the dice. The game has up to seven players, each of them representing a major European power of the World War I era (the choices are Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Russia, and Turkey). All the countries start with equally balanced military forces, and there is a limited amount of free territory to gobble up. I won’t go into the minute details of game play, except to say that the game’s crucial innovation is that it does not permit any power to build up hugely superior armed forces in any one geographical area. As a consequence, you can only defeat your opponents through negotiation and deception. If you want to invade Trieste, you must somehow persuade the player holding it that, in fact, those armies you’re shipping through the Adriatic are actually heading toward Italy. Then you catch him off his guard and you’re on your way to Belgrade. This might sound like players have a limited set of actions available to them, and that games should get predictable pretty quickly. I assure potential players that this is not the case. The range of possible actions and outcomes is restricted only by the creativity of the players involved. Because there is no element of totally random chance, as there is in Risk, you won’t end up having the game dissolve into a series of ridiculous, strategy-free battles and utterly unlikely outcomes. You just might need to patch up a few friendships after a winner is declared. A while back I was speaking to a friend about the dearth of new board games after the model of Risk or Diplomacy. We agreed that part of this had to do with the expanding comparative appeal of computer games. But he pointed out that it also probably stemmed from the fact that the world we live in today doesn’t lend itself so much to a Diplomacy-style board game. As John Steele Gordon observed a few days ago, warfare between heavily armed, developed nations is a far less likely prospect today than it was a century ago. Maybe that helps explain why a Diplomacy enthusiast like Henry Kissinger has become even less effective with age.
September 27, 2007
Are There Any Great Powers? Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:05 AM EST John Steele Gordon poses an enticing question about how we assess the relative strengths of nations: “Do we have 5 Great Powers, based on nuclear weapons, or 12, based on GDP?” I don’t know if he means this as a rhetorical question or whether it’s intended to invite a response, but I’ll take a crack at it all the same. This query follows a more challenging, broader question: What defines a Great Power? To this second question, Mr. Gordon essentially offers four potential answers. First is the reply of his former international politics professor, who said a Great Power is “any country whose interests must be taken into account by every other country.” Second is A. J. P. Taylor’s definition: “The test of a Great Power is the test of strength for war.” A third method is by asking whether a country has nuclear weapons. Fourth, and lastly, is by measuring a nation’s GDP. Taking each of these methods individually, I find them problematic. Mr. Gordon’s old professor’s definition probably works fairly well for defining the Great Powers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But in a world where nearly 200 countries interact with one another, is there any country other than the United States that must have its interests considered by every other one? Countries like Britain and France, which hold veto power on the United Nations Security Council, don’t necessarily meet this high bar. China might, but even if it does I think the list stops there. Maybe it should, or maybe this definition is flawed. I’m slightly more tempted by Taylor’s. This actually fits better with the example of Britain’s casual attitude toward Icelandic sovereignty in World War II. In that case, it seems that Britain was the greater power because it could act with impunity in military affairs, whereas Iceland could not even provide for a common defense. Yet in a world bound to an increasing degree by systems of international arbitration and law, range of military action doesn’t quite work as a definition of Great Power status, either. It’s much harder these days to disregard your neighbor’s sovereignty (ask Saddam Hussein, circa 1991). Even the United States, which remains, in military terms, the world’s most powerful country, lacks the unilateral ability to successfully invade a smaller nation and occupy it at will. In our time, when the international community has so many platforms from which to express outrage, and when every disgruntled ex-Baathist can find his way to a firearm, asymmetrical warfare just ain’t what it used to be. Counting Great Powers by their nuclear arsenals is a tempting third alternative, but it is also a limited one. Mr. Gordon says that five countries would qualify by this rubric, but that estimate is actually a little low. To the five nations that signed the original Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1968, we have to add India and Pakistan, and probably North Korea and Israel. When you throw in those last two, this definition gets especially dicey. Kim Jong-Il can’t be totally ignored by other world leaders, but North Korea’s interests don’t carry nearly as much weight as those of nuke-free nations like Japan and Mexico. Nuclear arms empower a country to hold others hostage, or to trigger a global war, but they don’t necessarily increase the prestige or bargaining power of a nation’s government in general. The fourth option Mr. Gordon offers, GDP, is also an interesting measure to use, but the list of the top 12 nations, as judged by this statistic, leaves me with serious doubts. Some of the countries that come out on top, economically, are relatively insignificant by any other standard for national greatness. By any of the other suggested rubrics, countries like Canada, Italy, and Spain are decidedly less significant. I’m not sure that GDP alone can compensate for a comparatively weak military and diplomatic position. These are a lot of objections, so let me try my hand at a positive answer of my own. To some extent, I think you have to measure a nation’s power by a subjective mixture of these various standards. Is a nation economically robust? Is it heavily armed? Is it advanced enough to possess nuclear weapons? Is it empowered by international institutions to advance its interests? I think you have to answer all these questions to know if a country’s power is really extraordinary. On the other hand, though, we might just be dealing with an outdated set of vocabulary. The term “Great Power” comes from a time when the Western world was led by a set of competing nations with differing but matched capabilities. Today, no such set of countries exists. The United States and, to a lesser degree, China, far outpace their nearest competitors by most assessments of national power and potential. To pretend otherwise is to flatter countries like Britain, Germany, and Russia, but without good reason. Maybe it’s time to bury the term “Great Power” alongside the man who coined it.
September 26, 2007
Two Presidents in Action Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:05 AM EST Following this week’s exchange about Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia University, I encourage readers to see for themselves what kind of welcome the man received. Video of President Lee Bollinger’s introductory remarks is available here, and continued here. Ahmadinejad’s reaction to Bollinger can be viewed here, and clips of his extended remarks are elsewhere on YouTube. As I wrote earlier this week, I don’t know that I would have invited Ahmadinejad to speak, had I been in Lee Bollinger’s shoes. But if the Columbia president wanted to host him, this was the way to do it. Bollinger’s introductory remarks were, in my view, totally magnificent–beginning with a sophisticated argument about free speech and concluding with this blunt address to Ahmadinejad: “A year ago, I am reliably told, your preposterous and belligerent statements in this country, as at one of the meetings at the Council on Foreign Relations, so embarrassed sensible Iranian citizens that this led to your party’s defeat in the December mayoral elections. May this do that and more.” One can see, from the video of Ahmadinejad taking the stage, that not everyone in the audience shared President Bollinger’s sentiments. But for the Iranian president, this event was a humiliation. He was publicly castigated by an American scholar and then laughed at by a room full of college students. I can think of few illustrations of American freedom more compelling than the image of 18- and 19-year-olds scoffing in the face of a despot.
September 24, 2007
Protecting Homosexuals at Columbia from Discrimination II Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:00 AM EST John Steele Gordon calls my latest post “utter nonsense.” “If discriminating against homosexuals is bad, hanging them is far, far worse,” he writes. Obviously, I agree. Mr. Gordon continues: “If gay students at Columbia need be “shielded” from having to face the presence on their campus of an organization that requires homosexuals to keep quiet about their sexual orientation, they surely should not have to face the presence on their campus of someone who hangs people for being gay, even if that person will not be hanging any homosexuals on Morningside Heights.” In my view, there is a difference between actively discriminating against someone and advocating for the subjugation of similar people. I’ve already attempted, twice, to outline this distinction, as I see it. Mr. Gordon evidently finds this distinction unconvincing, and that’s fair enough. He views this pair of moral problems and resolves them differently, and I find his reasoning interesting. It’s disappointing to me that Mr. Gordon would call mine “nonsense.” Given what a civil and respectful conversation this has been, such labeling seems rather cheap. But hey, I’ve been a Mets fan for 21 years and I can live with disappointment. I’ll add one correction. Mr. Gordon suggests that I do “not seem to understand what ROTC is.” I am actually quite familiar with what ROTC is, if not with the specifics of Columbia’s relationship with the organization. Harvard also bans ROTC, and ROTC-enrolled students here take their classes at MIT. I have good friends in the organization. I regret my careless wording, which may have inadvertently conflated the issues of allowing ROTC on campus and allowing military recruitment in general. The issues are, of course, related. For what it’s worth, I also know plenty of people who actively oppose bringing the military back to Harvard’s campus, for reasons totally unrelated to “anti-military posturing.” Their opposition has to do with the fact that the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy is an institution of tremendous intolerance. I do not doubt their sincerity.
September 23, 2007
President Summers and President Ahmadinejad V Posted by Alexander Burns at 01:50 PM EST I’m grateful to Fred Smoler for his discussion of the 2002 controversy concerning Tom Paulin’s invitation to speak at Harvard. I agree with him that the Crimson’s position, in favor of withdrawing Paulin’s invitation, was wrong. To kind of backhandedly defend the Crimson, their editorial page has to find reasons to express moral outrage five days a week, and the Paulin controversy gave them a more interesting pretext for righteous indignation than, say, Harvard’s changing the date by which one must declare a major. One imagines this opportunity was too good to pass up. Similar motives could, I think, be accurately ascribed to some of Paulin’s faculty backers as well. Lawrence Summers’s role in the whole affair seems a bit murky to me, but I hope the account Mr. Smoler heard is correct. That would certainly add a measure of irony to Summers’s recent flap with the University of California. Let me quickly address Mr. Gordon’s further thoughts on Columbia University. Mr. Gordon writes: “ROTC is banned from Columbia because that institution disagrees with the official policy of the United States government, a policy that discriminates against homosexuals in the military by requiring them to keep silent as to their orientation. But Columbia welcomes the president of Iran, although the official policy of the government of Iran that he heads—not just his personal opinion—is to execute homosexuals by hanging them.” This is a nicely symmetrical but oversimplified description of Columbia’s moral dilemma. The university does not ban ROTC recruiters solely as a means of protesting a policy it does not like. I can think of many government agencies that have policies to which the Columbia faculty and administration most likely object, but their recruiters are still allowed to visit the school. ROTC is singled out for special treatment because the process of military recruitment, as it would take place on campus, might violate the university’s nondiscrimination policies. If recruiters came to Columbia, they would be engaging in an activity that treats some students in a degrading and discriminatory way. Banning them from campus has a whiff of political protest to it, but at heart it is a pragmatic move designed to shield students from immediate and active discrimination. President Ahmadinejad’s visit is different. It is an absolute abomination that his government executes homosexuals. But he’s not going to be executing them at Columbia, and he’s not going to be recruiting for the Revolutionary Guard, either. His visit will be limited to a speech that cannot actually harm anyone, except insofar as it wastes 45 minutes of their lives. As I wrote earlier, I’m not saying that Columbia has resolved these two quandaries—whether to ban ROTC and whether to invite Ahmadinejad—correctly. If I had Lee Bollinger’s job, I don’t think I would have decided to welcome the Iranian president into the halls of my school. But both of these situations are complex and tough to resolve. By answering them differently, the university isn’t showing hypocrisy. It’s acknowledging the individual complexities of each situation and dealing with them independently. A final thought. Earlier today I was discussing this issue with a friend who had an interesting take on Bollinger’s invitation to Ahmadinejad. It’s not an example of moral hypocrisy, this friend said, but rather a case of applying certain moral principles very consistently, and perhaps too much so. Over the summer, Bollinger led an effort to reject a boycott, by some British academics, of Israeli scholars and their home institutions. Bollinger decried the measure, saying it “threatens every university committed to fostering scholarly and cultural exchanges that lead to enlightenment, empathy, and a much-needed international marketplace of ideas.” In other words: You can’t keep someone out of your school just because you don’t like where he’s from or what he believes. I don’t know whether it’s totally appropriate to apply this principle to President Ahmadinejad. But if this is the reasoning behind Bollinger’s decision, then I’d say it’s at least a little respectable.
September 22, 2007
President Summers and President Ahmadinejad II Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:00 PM EST Following this comment in the discussion section of the site, I hesitate to respond to Mr. Gordon’s latest post, lest something tiresome should result. I’ll limit myself, therefore, to a few very brief comments. First, I agree with Mr. Gordon that the withdrawal of a speaking invitation to Lawrence Summers was an embarrassment for the University of California, for obvious reasons. Similarly, it was appalling to see the University of California, Irvine, offer and then rescind the deanship of Irvine’s new law program to the accomplished constitutional lawyer Erwin Chemerinsky, a famous liberal, for fear that he might be “polarizing.” There are certainly more liberals in academia than there are conservatives, but the politics of academic discourse is rather more complicated than Mr. Gordon’s barb—“No diversity of ideas at the University of California, please, we’re scholars”—suggests. I don’t really believe the Summers incident has anything to do with Columbia University’s extension of a speaking invitation to the President of Iran. It’s not really employing some kind of academic double standard for the University of California to do one thing while Columbia does another. Focusing on Columbia alone, though, Mr. Gordon suggests that it is hypocrisy for the university to allow Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on campus while banning military recruiters. William Kristol recently made the same point. This seems a grotesque distortion—in the literal sense of grotesque as the yoking together of heterogeneous ideas. There is a difference between the beliefs of an individual, expressed publicly, and the policies of an organization, maintained by law. Ahmadinejad’s politics are repugnant to me, but if I listened to him speak on the campus of an American university I would be doing so with all the protections of an American citizen. The good president could say what he likes and then I could go on my way, without any fear that his rhetoric of prejudice and hate might subject me to immediate harm. In contrast, homosexuals who wish to enlist in the armed forces are subjected to immediate and absolute discrimination, as mandated by the U.S. government. Whether or not you believe Lee Bollinger should let Ahmadinejad speak, or let ROTC recruit, it seems crude to call his decisions hypocritical. The two issues are entirely different. Perhaps surprisingly, I think I’m actually less warm than Mr. Gordon to the notion of letting President Ahmadinejad speak on Columbia’s campus. Everyone’s entitled to free speech, but that doesn’t mean everyone’s entitled to an auditorium, an audience, and a microphone at one of America’s greatest institutions of learning. Once an invitation is extended, however, it should be maintained unless there is an exceedingly compelling justification for its withdrawal. By my calculus, whiny complaints from The Weekly Standard or from P.C. faculty members don’t qualify.
September 20, 2007
Washington, D.C. VI Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:50 AM EST Thanks to John Steele Gordon for his further thoughts on Washington, D.C. I believe Mr. Gordon is correct that amending the Constitution is probably the best method of granting congressional representation to the nation’s capital. I have a few further comments on his post, and also on Joshua Zeitz’s thoughts on this subject. To start, I’m not sure Mr. Gordon has understood my meaning perfectly well when he discusses my point about fudging constitutional nomenclature. What I was hoping to convey was not a sense that “strict construction” can be followed “out a window” (though I agree that it can), but rather that our government has a record of ignoring constitutional strictures based in shortsighted choices of vocabulary. The example of applying Fourth Amendment rights to telephone conversations represents a related, but different kind of judicial reasoning. A better example of what I’m talking about is how we recognize that Congress has the power to make rules for the U.S. Air Force, though the founding document only refers to its authority over “land and naval forces.” Let’s call it the “looks like a duck, quacks like a duck” theory of interpreting the Constitution. Mr. Gordon writes that “the District of Columbia is neither a state nor the functional equivalent of one. . . . If the capital were to move to, say, Omaha, the District of Columbia would be nothing more than Williamsburg, Virginia, writ large, within a week.” There’s an argument to be made that D.C. is not the “functional equivalent” of a state. The nation’s capital does, however, have a very substantial permanent population, an elected chief executive, a legislature, a local economy not dependent on the federal government, and a history and interests distinct from those of its surrounding environs. If the federal government left town, Washington would still possess many or all of these characteristics. There’s definitely room to argue that D.C. basically functions as a small, entirely urban state, similar in some ways to the Providence-dominated district—er, state—of Rhode Island. Now, I’ll reiterate that I am very much in agreement with John Steele Gordon that it would be best to upgrade D.C.’s voting rights through a constitutional amendment, rather than through a risky attempt to force action upon the Supreme Court. Joshua Zeitz’s view, though, that Congress’s approach to this issue is governed by “politics, and pure politics,” makes me wonder whether the Davis-Lieberman option, as it currently exists, isn’t worth a shot. The proposal is a unique, time-sensitive option, based entirely on the shortfall in congressional representation shared by both Utah and D.C. There’s an incentive for both Republicans and Democrats to support this bill. When it comes to a constitutional amendment, this is not so true. There are members of the Republican caucus in both houses of Congress (and one amazingly obtuse Democrat) who would go to the trenches rather than hand out a single new seat to Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, when the 2010 census comes along and congressional seats get reapportioned, the opportunity for relatively even-handed reform might disappear.
September 19, 2007
Washington, D.C. II Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:55 AM EST John Steele Gordon wrote an interesting post about the dilemma of granting congressional voting rights to citizens of Washington, D.C. Mr. Gordon suggests that the current proposal under consideration by the Senate is “patently unconstitutional,” since, for the purposes of electing the House of Representatives, it would treat the District of Columbia as a state even though it has not been admitted to the Union as such. I agree with him that this raises a serious legal hurdle for the bill. Naturally, I have a few points to make in response. First, I’m not so sure that the motivating philosophy behind this bill—what Mr. Gordon guesses The New York Times might call “fundamental fairness”—is essentially a coded rationale for “doing as liberals please.” Tom Davis, the author of the bill in the House of Representatives, is a Republican who ran his party’s congressional campaign committee for three election cycles. He’s not exactly a Maureen Dowd liberal, and yet he defended the bill with rhetoric that almost makes the Times editorial look wimpy. He asked, “How can we fight to bring democracy to Baghdad and not do the same for D.C.?” The proposal’s lead sponsor in the Senate, Joe Lieberman, is neither a Democrat nor a Republican. Like Davis, however, he’s clearly not a left-winger. If there are people dodging constitutional issues here, it’s not because they’re succumbing to a vice of the left, much less trying to promote “everything that is wrong with modern liberalism.” It’s because they see the opening for what Mr. Gordon rightly terms “a classic political compromise,” and they are attempting to strike while the legislative iron is hot. Second, I am pretty unmoved by the assertion that “the fundamental law of the land” unambiguously bars a bill like this from taking effect. The history of constitutional law is filled with intellectually crafty interpretive shifts, authored by people of all ideological stripes. And few serious people would disagree that the Constitution’s practical meaning has evolved in important ways over the last few centuries. One of the simplest ways that the Constitution has changed has been through governmental decisions to ignore certain delicacies of nomenclature. A constitutional law professor of mine once pointed out that the Constitution only empowers the government to “coin” money, not to “print” it. Fortunately, we’ve decided that printing and coining are functionally the same thing, and thus avoided having to carry around duffle bags full of quarters when we go shopping. I’m not sure that I’d endorse a similar approach to dealing with the question of whether our nation’s capital is a “district” or a “state,” but it’s not unimaginable that a sympathetic Supreme Court could see fit to elide the difference in this case. (For a good discussion of the distinction between states and districts, see this video from The Colbert Report.) As Mr. Gordon points out, this kind of resolution would raise the question of why D.C. still wouldn’t have senators. But while Davis and Lieberman’s legislation may not be perfect, it should at least be recognized for calling attention to an issue that deserves more attention from the federal legislature. Their bill was blocked last evening (by yet another GOP-led filibuster, rather than what Republicans used to call a “fair up-or-down vote”), but I don’t think this will be the last we hear of this subject.
September 13, 2007
American Caesars Posted by Alexander Burns at 12:50 PM EST There’s a report in today’s Independent that Gen. David H. Petraeus, the man currently directing American forces in Iraq, “expressed long-term interest in running for the US presidency when he was stationed in Baghdad, according to a senior Iraqi official who knew him at that time.” This story follows a feature in Mother Jones earlier this week that reported: “Petraeus’s leadership qualities, combined with his role as the Bush administration’s last hope for saving face in Iraq, has set off speculation that the general could run for office some day—possibly the presidency, in 2012.” Whether Petraeus actually has any political ambitions, there are people who hope he does. Last week, the New York Sun published an editorial urging Petraeus to tell Congress that he needed its full support for the Iraq war, and that if he didn’t receive it he would resign and run for President. The Sun’s editorial, which I think could be charitably called insane, counseled an essentially Bonapartist course of action. If Petraeus had threatened Congress this week, it would have undermined America’s long tradition of subordinating the military to the elected, democratic branches of government. It would not, however, have been entirely without precedent. The episode in 1951 in which President Truman fired General MacArthur for insubordination, only to have MacArthur return to the United States to lead a public relations offensive against him, is well known. What’s less well known, however, is that MacArthur actually attempted the course the Sun prescribes for Petraeus. After the famous New York parade in his honor, which drew millions of viewers, MacArthur intended to drum up support for a presidential bid with a speaking tour in Texas and a campaign to draft himself for the White House. But when Gen. Omar Bradley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress that MacArthur’s desired strategy in Korea would have left Europe vulnerable and engaged the United States in “the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time and with the wrong enemy,” the so-called “American Caesar” found his political prospects fatally damaged. Niall Ferguson has called 1951 “perhaps the only moment in its history that the American Republic came close to meeting the fate of the Roman Republic.” And indeed, no military officer since MacArthur has tried to defy civilian power so brazenly. Even General Petraeus, who some believe is too close to the President to be trusted as an independent assessor of the Iraq war, doesn’t seem interested in attempting such a dangerous stunt as the Sun suggested. “Caesar Petraeus” has a catchy ring to it, but—for now at least—the general isn’t biting. It would be best for the country, and for the good name of the military, if things stayed that way.
September 4, 2007
George Romney’s Interview Posted by Alexander Burns at 03:35 PM EST Readers who enjoyed Joshua Zeitz’s feature today on George Romney’s ill-fated presidential campaign might be interested to see a video of the interview in which Romney blundered into his comment about “brainwashing.” It’s available here , where it was posted by the Boston Globe in connection with a serial profile of George Romney’s son, Mitt. One installment of that series focused on the relationship between the governors Romney and contains both a sympathetic portrait of the father and a studied analysis of the son. The video of Romney’s interview works better on some Internet browsers than on others, but for those who can watch it, it’s startling to see just how benign Romney’s remark was. It seems pretty obvious that he wasn’t using the word “brainwashing” in any literal sense. As Mr. Zeitz’s article indicates, that didn’t stop the press and the public from pulling the man’s campaign apart at the seams.
September 2, 2007
Larry Craig’s Antecedents V Posted by Alexander Burns at 03:10 PM EST At the risk of dwelling too long on soon-to-be-former Senator Craig’s misfortunes, there are a couple of points in John Steele Gordon’s latest post that I think deserve a little extra scrutiny. The first is Mr. Gordon’s conjecture that “the persistence of ‘tearoom trade,’ as the op-ed calls it, has a lot more to do with the erotic potential of the danger involved—the thrill of getting away with something so fraught with potential consequences—than with people who engage in such behavior simply being in denial.” There may be some truth to this assertion, but in Larry Craig’s case, as in Walter Jenkins’s, and in many others as well, there’s a more persuasive explanation. For men like Craig and Jenkins, even if they admit to themselves that they are not heterosexual, surreptitious, anonymous locations like public restrooms may be the only places they can find sexual partners without endangering their careers. As men who want to succeed in professions where being homosexual or bisexual is a great liability, they cannot meet prospective partners in bars or at parties where they could be noticed. According to this New York Times editorial, which describes Laud Humphreys’s research about the “tearoom trade,” men who “troll for sex in public places” were mostly “married; their houses were just a little bit nicer than most, their yards better kept. They were well educated, worked longer hours, tended to be active in the church and the community but, unexpectedly, were usually politically and socially conservative, and quite vocal about it.” In other words, they were men, like Craig and Jenkins, with a great deal to lose if their less conventional sexual preferences became public knowledge. They’re not thrill-seekers heading for the men’s room to risk getting exposed by the police, or by their neighbors, or on CNN. They’re people who, through some tragic set of decisions, ended up living double lives. Mr. Gordon also writes that “in fairness to” Senator Coleman and Governor Romney, who described Larry Craig’s behavior as “disgusting,” “what they found disgusting was not Larry Craig or his homosexuality per se but his behavior in a public restroom.” This is, at best, a distinction without a difference. What Larry Craig did in that men’s room was tap his right foot and end up in the middle of a police sting. The same Times article cited above describes how signals like Craig’s foot-tapping only lead to explicit sexual advances when they are answered by similar signals. If the police officer next to Craig hadn’t decided to goad him on, the senator’s behavior would have been limited to that tapping of his foot. I don’t really know why his congressional colleagues would find that action repellent. But of course, it’s not what Craig did in a restroom that McCain and Coleman find objectionable. It’s what he wanted to do, which was liaise with a man—perhaps in the restroom, but perhaps elsewhere. It is hard to see why this behavior should merit the adjective “disgusting,” especially when no such term was thrown at Sen. David Vitter after he admitted to hiring prostitutes, or when, in 2004, the D.C. police department had to visit then-Congressman Don Sherwood’s apartment to stop him from beating and throttling his mistress. Now, lest I give the wrong impression, my sympathy for Senator Craig, while substantial, is limited. If the man was guilty of anything, though, it wasn’t gross public indecency but rather gross public hypocrisy. Laura Mac Donald’s article today draws exactly the right lesson from this whole affair: “Let’s stop being so surprised when we discover that our public figures have their own complex sex lives, and start being more suspicious when they self-righteously denounce the sex lives of others.” If something good were to come of Senator Craig’s humiliation, it would be a greater sense of humility on the part of public figures who are all too ready to invade and judge Americans’ personal lives, and a greater degree of reluctance on the part of voters who are all too ready to help them. A final note, following up on my first post about this subject several days ago. Also in today’s New York Times is an op-ed by the documentarian Seth Randal and the Boise State University archivist Alan Virta about the 1955 gay sex scandal in Boise, Idaho. It’s a useful contribution to the ongoing discussion of Senator Craig’s rapid downfall, and a nuanced meditation on exactly what kind of progress has been made in the last 50 years.
August 30, 2007
Larry Craig’s Antecedents III Posted by Alexander Burns at 03:00 PM EST Thanks to John Steele Gordon for bringing up the Walter Jenkins case, in which one of President Johnson’s closest associates was arrested for disorderly conduct in a restroom in October 1964. There’s an interesting Time magazine article from that month, available here, that addresses the incident in some detail. The article is interesting not so much for its analysis of the Jenkins scandal as for its illustration of mainstream concerns about homosexuality in 1964. One of Time’s conclusions is that Jenkins, as a man of indeterminate sexual orientation, may have been a security risk. “Walter Jenkins could at any time have laid his hands on the most closely guarded secrets of the U.S., including the workings of the most advanced nuclear weapons,” the article observes. “The Jenkins case raised new doubts about the effectiveness of U.S. security agencies. Are the FBI and the Secret Service, recently rebuked by the Warren Commission for their sloppy work before the Kennedy assassination, once again guilty of grave inefficiency?” Journalists at Time were not the only observers who raised alarming questions about Jenkins’s trustworthiness. Mr. Gordon is right that Barry Goldwater conducted himself admirably in the aftermath of Jenkins’s arrest and chose not to make it a campaign issue. Goldwater’s running mate, William Miller of New York, was less forbearing. He told a group of Chicago businessmen: “If this type of man [Jenkins] had information vital to our survival, it could be compromised very quickly and very dangerously.” Miller’s line of thinking, which held that non-heterosexuals were more likely to betray the United States or handle its secrets carelessly, was not unusual at the time. But the attempt to make Jenkins’s indiscretion a campaign issue in this way was disgraceful all the same. There’s an editorial in today’s Los Angeles Times that compares Larry Craig’s scandal to Jenkins’s and concludes that men like Senator Craig are stuck in a less tolerant time. There’s been progress in the last several decades, David Ehrenstein writes, and “it’s up to the I’m-not-gay(s) to discover the real freedoms fought for and won by the people they so fiercely claim they’re not.” This is a good point, but one might also contrast Jenkins and Craig and draw some more discouraging conclusions. In 1964, Jenkins was called a security threat by members of the political establishment. Today, similar political actors are condemning Larry Craig as merely “disgusting” (see here and here). I guess this is a kind of progress, but it’s certainly not as much progress as one might have hoped for in 43 years.
August 30, 2007
Larry Craig’s Antecedents Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:50 AM EST Yesterday, Fred Allen posted here an item that had shown up on Andrew Sullivan’s blog. It was a humorous story told by Tallulah Bankhead and repeated on Tuesday in connection with the breaking scandal involving Senator Larry Craig. This wasn’t the only post on Sullivan’s site about the Craig affair. Jamie Kirchick, a guest-blogger who normally writes for The New Republic, posted yesterday about a 1955 incident that provides some useful historical background to the contemporary incident surrounding the Idaho legislator. I think it merits a link. “In the fall of 1955,” Kirchick writes, “12 men were arrested in Boise, Idaho for ‘infamous crimes against nature.’ Over a decade, it had been alleged, some of the city’s most prominent men operated an underworld gay prostitution ring with hundreds of teenage boys. . . . One of the more humane participants in this episode was the chief of the state’s Department of Mental Health, who, rather than advocate that the men face jail time, offered that, ‘One alternative might be to let them form their own society and be left alone.’” As Kirchick notes, the facts of this scandal turned out to be considerably less sensational than first reported, but it created an ugly atmosphere in Idaho all the same. It’s risky to play armchair psychologist for a public figure like Craig, but one imagines that, as a 10-year-old growing up in Washington County, the future senator might have heard something of the blowup in Boise. A lot of people are rushing to judge Craig’s private behavior and to find hypocrisy by comparing it with his public record. Their conclusions are largely reasonable, but I find it’s hard not to pity Craig a little, considering the spectacular intolerance he must have witnessed as a youth. The man didn’t grow up in the twenty-first century, and, to quote Kirchick again, it’s perfectly possible that “1955 has hung over Larry Craig all his life.” There’s also a decent comparison to be made between Craig’s problems and those of a different Western senator, dating to 1954. Lester Hunt, a Democratic senator from Wyoming, had run afoul of Joe McCarthy and the Senate’s Republican majority. He was up for reelection in 1954. Republican Senator Styles Bridges, wanting to grab the seat for the GOP, told Hunt that he should forget about his reelection bid, or else. The “or else” in this case referred to information about Hunt’s son getting busted for soliciting an undercover officer for sex, and the possibility that the incident could be widely publicized in his home state. Hunt acceded to Bridges’s demands and decided to retire. Then he killed himself on Capitol Hill. Larry Craig didn’t plead guilty to solicitation but rather to a much less serious, almost farcically silly charge. This being the case, one might expect that he’d dodge the kind of bullying Lester Hunt experienced half a century ago. But it’s notable that Senators John McCain and Norm Coleman have already called on Craig to resign, when neither made a similar demand upon David Vitter, who admitted to hiring prostitutes in June. There’s a hint of Styles Bridges in this double standard, and things are bound to get uglier.
August 27, 2007
Not Just Peace in Our Time Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:25 PM EST John Steele Gordon’s lead feature today, on the Kellogg-Briand Pact, makes an admirable effort to rescue the treaty’s reputation. It is very easy, in retrospect, to deride the agreement as a preposterously idealistic and doomed experiment. It certainly was one, but it’s a mistake to dismiss the treaty offhand. Even if the Kellogg-Briand Pact was a failure, the fact that it was ever enacted is notable and says a lot about the international atmosphere of the 1920s. Mr. Gordon’s article does a great job of probing some worthwhile questions about the agreement: Why was it enacted in the first place? Did it have any impact? Did its signers really think it would work? Readers should read the full article, but I would summarize its conclusions in the following way: When Japan and Germany manufactured attacks by their rivals to justify war, they did so “admitting the moral and legal force of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Before the pact, war had been nothing more than a way for sovereign states to carry on politics by other means. After Kellogg-Briand, it was a flat violation of international law, a fact that had consequences at the war crimes tribunals held after World War II in Nuremberg and elsewhere.” This point is worth considering. I think the influence of this treaty in promoting disapproval of offensive war could be overstated. Throughout history, warring parties have attempted to claim moral superiority over their rivals by posing as victims. The U.S. government under James Polk, for example, seized on a bogus reason for war with Mexico in 1846. The firefight that Polk treated as a reason for war may or may not have taken place on American soil, and the Mexican troops who opened fire on U.S. forces might have been perfectly within their rights to do so. Polk’s real concern, of course, was territorial expansion, and this murky incident served his interests well. Countries and individuals with aggressive aims have always found it advantageous to present their actions as defensive. The trend didn’t start with imperial Japan. All the same, I believe Mr. Gordon is right that the Kellogg-Briand pact helped produce a world in which offensive war is even more frowned upon. At the very least, by promoting the fairly new concept of international law the treaty set a precedent for treaties to follow. The notion of an international criminal court, for example, has its roots in the same interwar idealism as the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Incidentally, an interesting side effect to our having attached such stigma to offensive war is that now even wars that are actually fought for defensive reasons are suspected of being offensive wars in disguise. There are plenty of people, in the United States and abroad, who believe that 9/11 may have been an inside job designed to provide the Bush administration with justification for an oil war in Afghanistan. The idea is mad, but at least part of its appeal comes from the fact that, were we ever to have a government misguided enough to launch an elective war in Western Asia, it would surely need to cook up some defensive rationale for that war. Hopefully, we’ll never see such a crazy scheme in practice. Oh, wait . . .
August 26, 2007
The True Story Behind September Dawn Posted by Alexander Burns at 12:15 AM EST A controversial new movie opened this week. September Dawn is a retelling of the story of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the 1857 incident in which Mormon settlers killed over a hundred Americans bound for California. I had been planning to see the film, as the episode it recounts is a pretty fascinating and disturbing tale of the nineteenth-century American West. Then word came out in the New York Times that it’s an overwrought melodrama built around a weak, contrived love story. I imagine that judgment might be a little harsh, but suffice it to say I’m not tripping over myself to reach a theater near me. In assessing September Dawn, The New York Times mostly focuses on the cinematic and narrative qualities of the film, rather than closely examining the accuracy of its historical information. This might seem like a dodge, but after reading Roger Ebert’s review of the same movie, the Times’s restraint looks admirable. Ebert’s review is a mishmash of political statements, speculations about the filmmakers’ motives, and incoherent meditations on the nature of religious strife. After declaring that the movie must either be an allegory about 9/11 or a hit job on the Mormon presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Ebert comes uncomfortably close to saying that it is socially irresponsible to depict the Mountain Meadows Massacre. “There isn’t anything to be gained in telling the story in this way,” Ebert writes. “It generates bad feelings on all sides, and, at a time when Mormons are at pains to explain they are Christians, underlines the way that these Mormons consider all Christians to be ‘gentiles.’” The problem with what Ebert writes is that, regardless of the very real challenges contemporary Mormons might face, the Mountain Meadows Massacre actually was an appalling product of paranoia and militant religious separatism. Finding a place for Mormons in the expanding United States was no insignificant challenge for the young republic, and the Mountain Meadows Massacre was profoundly disruptive to that process. I don’t know whether September Dawn tells this story in an acceptable or unacceptable way. But even the nicest Hollywood gloss couldn’t take the ugliness out of this episode, the known details of which have actually gotten worse as time has gone by. This is all a longwinded way of saying that, while critics are bound to consider this film in the context of present-day politics and may, like Ebert, shy away from the most unpleasant facts of the events of September 11, 1857, viewers might want to give those facts another look. Fortunately, one can do so without leaving this website. I recommend the articles here, here, here, and here—at least for starters.
August 23, 2007
Eisenhower’s Reputation III Posted by Alexander Burns at 08:05 PM EST Fred Smoler and John Steele Gordon have been discussing Dwight Eisenhower’s reputation. It’s a good discussion to have, as Eisenhower remains relatively difficult to judge. Mr. Smoler does a first-rate job of laying out the man’s virtues and failings. On the one hand, historians should appreciate his “enormous tact in coalition warfare . . . the moral splendor of the letter he wrote in anticipation of a failure on D-day, his caution during the Cold War.” On the other hand, one ought not understate the problematic nature of his relationships with Joseph McCarthy and powerful segregationists. An interesting footnote to this discussion is that Eisenhower may be the only man to have served as President who actually adjusted his behavior based on a poll ranking the American Presidents. Ike campaigned energetically in the 1962 midterm elections after Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., released a survey ranking him twenty-second among the Presidents. At the time, John Kennedy told Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “It’s all your father’s poll. Eisenhower has been going along for years, basking in the glow of applause he has always had. Then he saw that poll and realized how he stood before the cold eye of history—way below Truman; even below Hoover. Now he’s mad to save his reputation.” Eisenhower himself, as the younger Schlesinger described it in a 1997 article, blasted the 1962 poll for conflating “an individual’s strength of dedication with oratorical bombast; determination, with public repetition of a catchy phrase; achievement, with the exaggerated use of the vertical pronoun.” I agree with Fred Smoler that much of Eisenhower’s “rise in public estimation . . . came from his seeming to have been a do-nothing but to have been followed by do-somethings who often did something dangerous.” In the midst of the growing enthusiasm for the Eisenhower Presidency, however, it’s important to remember that this apparent do-nothingness actually had consequences for the country. John Steele Gordon is probably right that Eisenhower sometimes presented himself as verbally unclear “because he wanted to be unclear, not because he was incapable of clarity.” But I’m not sure the most useful lesson to take away from this is that Eisenhower fooled a lot of gullible liberals and college professors. When then-Senator Kennedy campaigned for President in 1960, he consistently faulted the Eisenhower administration for allowing the country to slip into a state of torpor. A famous refrain of his campaign was the exhortation to “get this country moving again.” In his fourth debate with Richard Nixon, Kennedy argued, “We haven’t met our problems in the United States, because we haven’t had a moving economy.” He also exclaimed: “We’re not moving ahead in education the way we should.” Even Nixon had to adopt some of this vocabulary, declaring in an October 25, 1960, speech: “We want to see this country move forward. We want to see it move forward, because it will never grow old.” There’s a reason why this rhetoric was appealing to voters in 1960. Fairly or unfairly, many Americans felt dissatisfied with the modest goals and humdrum, inoffensive tone of the Eisenhower White House. Eisenhower’s Presidency featured shrewd—Nixon called it “devious”—management, focused on quietly strengthening America’s hand abroad. His administration did not demonstrate strong, inspiring moral leadership of the variety that garners applause from both historians and the general public. I don’t really think it’s right to blame Americans for not thinking Eisenhower was a genius masquerading as a simpleton. We’re not all writers in search of a counterintuitive thesis, and, after all, sometimes a person who acts bumbling or senile is really just bumbling or senile. Eisenhower wasn’t either, but if he cultivated a benign, geriatric image, then his weakened reputation was in large part a consequence of his own choosing.
August 23, 2007
Assessing the Marshall Plan Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:25 PM EST There’s an article in this week’s New Yorker by Niall Ferguson that is nominally a review of Greg Behrman’s new book, The Most Noble Adventure: The Marshall Plan and the Time When America Helped Save Europe. While it does discuss the quality of Behrman’s work, in generally favorable terms, Ferguson’s piece also functions as an independent consideration of the Marshall Plan’s historical impact. As a historian of the global economy, Ferguson seems qualified to judge the post–World War II plan for aiding liberated Europe. The Harvard professor is indeed effective at rendering the financial scale of the initiative: “The total amount disbursed under the Marshall Plan was equivalent to roughly 5.4 per cent of U.S. gross national product in the year of Marshall’s speech. . . . A Marshall plan announced today would therefore be worth closer to seven hundred and forty billion dollars.” I’m sure that was not a difficult calculation for Ferguson to make, but it’s an impressive and illustrative sum all the same. Ferguson is clearly an admirer of the Marshall Plan—at least of its spirit, if not of all its details. In framing his own judgment of the aid program, however, he indulges in the kind of counterfactual speculation that’s almost sure to diminish its reputation. At the time of Marshall’s speech announcing the proposal, Ferguson writes, one member of the House of Representatives asked, “What would it cost not to aid Europe?” “That remains the key question,” Ferguson continues. “If there had been no Marshall Plan, would Western Europe’s economies have failed to recover from the postwar crisis? It would seem not.” His argument proceeds by asking and answering a series of more specific questions, such as: “If there had been no Marshall Plan, would Stalin have brought some or all of Western Europe into the Soviet imperium? Again, no; the principal deterrent to Stalin was not American dollars but American firepower.” This is a rather frustrating and not entirely persuasive method of argument. Ferguson scrutinizes the Marshall Plan by acting as though its proponents expected it to single-handedly win the Cold War. His questions are leading, and they set unrealistic expectations for a foreign-aid program that was an important but not solitary instrument of American international policy. Using a similar rhetorical method, one could ask about another Cold War program: How important was the creation of the Peace Corps, really? Could America have succeeded in promoting democracy and fighting tyranny without it? I think it’s fairly obvious that, yes, we could have, but that conclusion lacks a certain subtlety. Perhaps more problematically, Ferguson fails to imagine the wider consequences of a hypothetical postwar America prioritizing budgetary parsimony over vigorous international engagement. It’s good to challenge widely accepted versions of history, and questioning the success of the Marshall Plan is a worthy task. A number of Ferguson’s conclusions, in the end, are good ones, with this as the most convincing: “The Marshall Plan was . . . to West Europeans struggling to make ends meet . . . the most visible manifestation of American good will—and a mirror image of the Soviet policy of mulcting Eastern Europe. This, more than its macroeconomic impact, explains its endurance in the popular imagination.” However, the practice of counterfactual and counterintuitive assertion through which Ferguson reaches this conclusion is less than perfectly sound. Imaginging alternative historical outcomes is an interesting and challenging exercise, but it’s not always a reliable way to approach truth.
August 19, 2007
Warren G. Harding and Barack Obama Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:20 PM EST A friend of mine recently e-mailed me a column from Massachusetts’s Worcester Telegram & Gazette with the arresting title: “Barack Obama Might Not Be First Black President.” Factually, this headline sounds true—if Obama doesn’t start outrunning Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries, he may never reach the presidency. The point of the Telegram & Gazette article, though, was not to speculate about the possible failure of the Illinois senator’s campaign. Its claim is stranger than that. “Barack Obama is campaigning to be the first man with African blood to become president of the United States,” the author writes. “It is a noteworthy aspiration. But even if he is successful, will he be the first to fit that description? Probably not.”
The article goes on to argue that Obama will have been preempted by Warren G. Harding, who “is widely credited with having a Negro ancestor, probably a great-grandmother.” Leaving aside the bizarre use of the term “Negro,” this assertion seems to kind of miss the point. Warren Harding never identified himself as a black man, and neither did many other people classify him as such. The leading spreader of the rumors about Harding’s ancestry, in fact, was a source no more reliable than the virulently racist professor William Estabrook Chancellor, who “held that Mr. Harding’s nomination was part of a plot to establish Negro domination over the United States.” American Heritage ran an article that dealt with several odd aspects of Mr. Harding’s career, including his antagonistic relationship with Chancellor, in 1963. I think it does a better job of laying out the murky areas of Harding’s life story than the column linked to above.
It’s illustrative of a weird (and widespread) view of race that this Worcester paper would bring up Harding as a possible forerunner to Obama. The idea that one drop of African-American blood, so to speak, would have made Harding as much a black President as Obama is profoundly misguided. I doubt this is what the author of the Telegram & Gazette article intended to say with this piece, but his column plays into that notion all the same. The false equivalency it creates between Harding’s experience, possibly having had one black great-grandparent, and Obama’s, as a quite obviously biracial man, is almost as ugly as the questions about whether Obama is “black enough” to win over African-American voters. The column also makes one wonder at what point in the process of history-making people start treating rumors as facts. There is, so far as I know, no conclusive evidence that Harding had any black ancestors. So are we left to go on the word of a long-dead white supremacist? Harding equivocated on the possibility of his having multiracial ancestry, but this, combined with Mr. Chancellor’s screeds, hardly seems like evidence enough to reach a worthwhile conclusion. And in any case, it seems like questionable methodology to stake one’s argument on the claims of a delusional propagandist. When a Jewish person is nominated for the Presidency, can we expect to see similar articles suggesting that FDR was actually the first Jewish President, as some anti-Roosevelt propaganda had it? I hope not, and I think it’s unlikely, but apparently it can’t be ruled out.
August 17, 2007
White (House) Wedding Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:25 AM EST From the White House this week comes the news that one of the President’s daughters, Jenna Bush, is engaged. Ms. Bush will be marrying Henry Hager, a former White House intern and Bush campaign worker four years her senior. The President’s daughter has received no small share of grief from the press during her father’s time in the White House, and this hasn’t exactly stopped with the wedding announcement. The Washington Post, for example, takes care to remember Laura Bush’s description of Mr. Hager in February 2005: “This is not a serious boyfriend.” Then again, it’s probably not right to blame the Post for dredging up that quote—after all, the First Lady was the one who offered it on national television. The Post also speculates on whether a Bush wedding would take place at the White House: “Jenna would be the first presidential daughter to wed at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. since Tricia Nixon married Ed Cox in 1971. Glamorous, sure, but the smart money is on Texas or Maine—the White House just isn’t the place Jenna considers home.” It’s true that Ms. Bush would be the first presidential daughter to marry at the White House in 36 years. Hers would not be the first wedding to take place there in that interval, however. In 1994 Hillary Clinton’s brother, Tony Rodham, was married to Nicole Boxer, the daughter of California Sen. Barbara Boxer, in an event at the White House. Perhaps Jenna Bush will avoid a fully presidential wedding because of the unlucky precedent Rodham and Boxer set: The couple divorced in 2001. The history of White House weddings is a mixed one. When Cox and Nixon married in 1971, it was indeed a glamorous affair that brought favorable coverage to the First Family. The couple remains married, with a son, and Cox briefly ran for the U.S. Senate in New York last year. The White House wedding most deserving of fame is surely the only one with a President as the groom: In 1886, Grover Cleveland married Frances Folsom in a ceremony there. The wedding was not untouched by scandal. Folsom was 27 years younger than the President and was the daughter of one of his former law partners. Folsom and the President seemed an ungainly match, not least of all because of the rumors of a shady personal life that dogged Cleveland’s first national election campaign. Despite this shaky start, Frances Folsom Cleveland ended up as a successful first lady and gave birth to two little Clevelands in the White House. I wonder, if the Bushes decide against a White House wedding, whether it might not be in part in order to avoid comparisons with one that took place almost exactly 40 years ago. In 1967 Lynda Bird Johnson wed there, marrying the Marine Corps veteran and Bronze Star recipient Charles Robb. A newsreel about the event is available here. In the midst of an unpopular war, and as his own popularity gradually disintegrated, Lyndon Johnson’s daughter married a dashing example of the best the military had to offer. As her father struggles with a Johnson-like predicament, Bush’s daughter is engaged to a former aide to Karl Rove, who is also the son of a tobacco lobbyist and GOP apparatchik. (John H. Hager, coincidentally, served as Virginia’s lieutenant governor in the 1990s, while Chuck Robb was its junior senator.) There’s something appropriate about that contrast, but I doubt it’s one the President would want to highlight.
August 17, 2007
Winston Churchill and Islamic Nationalism Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:40 AM EST On August 15, Fred Smoler noted the anniversaries of V-J Day and the partition of India and Pakistan. He linked to a New York Times piece “noting India had begun teaching some of its own political controversies in its schools and suggesting that this is a sign of India’s new wealth, confidence, and political maturity.” He added that readers who “may be newly accustomed to hearing that non-Western societies do not value democracy when it can possibly be suspected of having been imposed on them by another culture” might look to India for a more complex example of democratic development. I couldn’t agree more. I recently read another, similarly substantial reflection on the partition of India and Pakistan in The New Yorker. As is the frequent custom of publications like The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, Pankaj Mishra’s essay considers the legacy of partition through a review of current literature on the subject. Mishra describes some of the contours of contemporary scholarly thought, not least interestingly of thought on Winston Churchill’s destructive role in the history of the Asian subcontinent. Read the article for the full details, but there’s one argument that struck me as especially noteworthy. “As late as 1940, Winston Churchill hoped that Hindu-Muslim antagonism would remain ‘a bulwark of British rule in India,’“ Mishra writes. In his desire to keep India a possession of the crown, Churchill supported the Muslim separatist factions at odds with independence advocates like Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. This was, history has shown, a risky maneuver. The consequence, according to Mishra and the historian Alex von Tunzelmann, was that Churchill was “instrumental in creating the world’s first modern Islamic state.” At a moment when Churchill is an inspirational icon for the most enthusiastic proponents of a literal war on radical Islam, this is a historical irony worth noting. Mishra observes that it might be unfair to tar Churchill with the sins of the current state of Pakistan, especially since the founders of Pakistan were hardly Al Qaeda–style Islamists. It would be quite a stretch to blame Churchill for the terrorist refuge that northern Pakistan has become. But it wouldn’t be contrived at all to take this as a lesson in the unpredictable and contingent nature of international history. A dear friend of mine once had a history professor shout, at her seminar: “It’s all about contingency, you ----heads!” Mishra puts the point more elegantly, but in a manner no harder to understand. It’s not as easy to plan the future of men and states as some would like to believe, and the history of India and Pakistan is a good reminder of that.
August 14, 2007
The Seinfeld Encyclopedia Posted by Alexander Burns at 03:05 PM EST Fred Allen mentions that he is a Yankees fan. I can’t say I share that particular preference, but there are specific Yankees I’ve liked. One of them was Phil Rizzuto, although I only knew him as an announcer. Rizzuto died today at the age of 89. The New York Times has a good obituary here. An odd coincidence about Rizzuto’s death is that it makes him the second popular culture figure featured on Seinfeld to die this week. In a popular episode in the show’s eighth season, Jason Alexander’s character, George Costanza, is given a keychain replica of Phil Rizzuto’s head. When he squeezes it, it says, “Holy cow!” When the keychain accidentally gets buried in a paved-over pothole, George is distraught. And every time someone drives over that patch of asphalt, the keychain blurts out its recorded message. Sadly, I haven’t been able to find a YouTube video of this episode, but the script is available online. Earlier this week, Merv Griffin, the successful game show and talk show host, died at 82. I was too young to watch any of his shows when he was hosting them, but I learned a thing or two about him by watching NBC’s greatest sitcom. During that show’s ninth season, the character Cosmo Kramer finds the old set of The Merv Griffin Show thrown out on the street. He takes it back to his apartment, puts it back together, and hosts his own version of the show. His friends are less than totally thrilled about this, and the project doesn’t last long. Some clips from the episode are, much to my amusement, posted on YouTube. All this has made me realize just how effectively Seinfeld took in the popular culture of its day. Phil Rizzuto and Merv Griffin are some of the first Seinfeld-noted figures to pass away, at least that I’ve been aware of. But in the future, Seinfeld’s cultural encyclopedia will help shape the memories of other celebrities—George Steinbrenner, Rudy Giuliani, Raquel Welch, Keith Hernandez, Marisa Tomei, and many more. At least, as long as the show still has fans.
August 12, 2007
From Richard Nixon to Barry Bonds Posted by Alexander Burns at 12:50 PM EST Yesterday Joshua Zeitz noted that this blog had overlooked the anniversary of Richard Nixon’s departure from the White House, and he offered some thoughts on the occasion. In the same spirit of playing catch-up, I’ll note that there was another event in the last week, of greater public note, that went unmentioned on this site. On August 7, Barry Bonds, of the San Francisco Giants, hit the 756th home run of his career, breaking Hank Aaron’s longstanding record of 755. Bonds is among the most controversial people in professional sports today and has been accused of steroid use, perjury, and probably other offenses of which this writer is unaware. Whether his home run record has any legitimacy is a subject that sports fans are now debating. Whatever consensus they finally reach will have implications for the game known as America’s pastime. I’m curious whether there are any baseball fans among my fellow blog contributors, and, if so, what they think about the Bonds dilemma. I’m also interested to see what thoughts, if any, may arise in the discussion section of this site. For whatever it’s worth, it’s the opinion of this casual and intermittent baseball fan that Bonds’s record has some value but isn’t really equivalent to Aaron’s achievement. It’s well known that steroids have warped the great records of baseball, and I don’t think it would be exactly right to say that what Bonds has accomplished was as great a feat as what Aaron did, given the extra help Bonds probably had. At the same time, unless you’re willing to toss out all the top records from the last decade or so, it seems a little unsporting to single out Bonds for special disdain. Obviously that’s a pretty inconclusive, on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand kind of opinion, but I haven’t really found a more satisfactory view on the whole affair. Bonds has his defenders: “Bonds is the greatest hitter to ever play, steroids or no.” And he has his detractors: “Barry Bonds broke this record . . . by cheating and defrauding the good name of baseball.” It’s not at all clear to me which of these assessments is more appropriate, so naturally I’m floating somewhere in between. The most impressive reaction to Bonds’s record-breaking, not coincidentally, has been from the man whose record he topped. “No asterisk,” Aaron told reporters in response to a question about whether Bonds’s record should be qualified with a footnote. He said elsewhere, “I have been privileged to hold this record for 33 years. I move over now.” What class. Whether one wants an asterisk next to Bonds’s name or not, it’s impossible not to admire Aaron’s dignified reaction.
August 2, 2007
Elizabeth I Returns III Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:05 AM EST I am glad Mr. Gordon shares my enthusiasm for Elizabeth: The Golden Age. I also enjoyed Mrs. Brown, though I agree that it’s not exactly “the stuff of which apotheoses are made.” That said, neither is Warm Springs, the HBO film about FDR, featuring Kenneth Branagh. But that has more to do with the biographical moment the filmmakers chose to portray than the qualities and achievements of their subject. A tiny quibble with Mr. Gordon’s post—“As far as I know,” he writes, “G&S never referred directly to Queen Victoria. No fools they.” In one of my favorite moments in The Pirates of Penzance, Gilbert and Sullivan actually do mention Queen Victoria, and to great comic effect. It’s toward the end of the play, when those dastardly pirates are, at last, apprehended. The sergeant tells the Pirate King, “We charge you to surrender, in the name of Queen Victoria!” Much to the audience’s surprise, the King replies, “We yield at once, most humbly; for, with all our faults, we love our Queen.” “Yes, yes,” the police echo. “With all their faults, they love their Queen.” I imagine the authors of this pithy scene did, too.
August 1, 2007
Elizabeth I Returns Posted by Alexander Burns at 07:45 PM EST In my post last weekend about the movie Hairspray, I neglected to mention something that might be of interest to readers of AmericanHeritage.com. John Steele Gordon, by utter coincidence, has given me a perfect opportunity to correct this omission. Mr. Gordon wrote yesterday about Elizabeth I, who is “forever enshrined as the apotheosis of English monarchs, clear-eyed assessments be damned.” I’m not sure what Gilbert and Sullivan would think of this, not to mention Queen Victoria herself, but that’s entirely beside the point. Mr. Gordon quotes Elizabeth’s 1588 speech to her troops at Tilbury, in which she announced: “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too.” My fellow blog contributor asks whether Shakespeare could have written better words. I haven’t the faintest idea, but I doubt that any playwright or filmmaker could turn this speech into a more dramatic scene than the one already preserved in popular memory. At least I would doubt that, had I not seen, last Saturday, a preview for Elizabeth: The Golden Age, the Working Titles Films sequel to Cate Blanchett’s magnificent 1998 film, Elizabeth. In The Golden Age, Blanchett returns as the queen, Geoffrey Rush is back as Sir Francis Walsingham, and Clive Owen appears for the first time as Walter Raleigh. I expect this film, like Elizabeth, will take its fair share of creative liberties with history. But I also expect it will be a damned good film. One doesn’t see very many brand-new high-quality movies about history—or, at least, about history before 1900—and this looks like it might be a welcome contribution to the genre. I might end up disappointed – but watch the preview for yourself, and see if you don’t end up with similarly high expectations.
July 31, 2007
Another Great Rightist VIII Posted by Alexander Burns at 01:55 PM EST I’ve spent a few days now—or, at least, parts of them—organizing some further thoughts on the subject of Presidential greatness. John Steele Gordon concluded last week’s exchange on this subject with some perceptive observations. Though I disagree with his statement that Churchill, de Gaulle, and Reagan were not really men of the right, he does an excellent job of sketching out some of the character traits that helped these men secure the lasting good will of their countrymen. Optimism, eloquence, nationalism, and emotional openness are certainly qualities that characterize the most popular political leaders. One of Mr. Gordon’s points nagged at me all weekend, though, and that’s his prediction that the public will never absorb the information that undermines depictions of Reagan as the winner of the Cold War. It would be unsettling to think that the American people are incapable of a clear-eyed assessment of their Presidents. This may be the case, but I’ve been looking over some data on the Americans’ recollections of their Presidents, and I’m not so confident that Reagan’s aura of greatness will last. There are a couple predictable patterns that affect public perception of former Presidents, and right now I think they’re skewing the feedback on Ronald Reagan. First, Presidents almost invariably gain standing with the public after leaving office. I chalk this up to a combination of nostalgia—that is, bad memories fading and good ones sticking around—and Americans’ habitual attitude of skepticism toward whoever occupies the Oval Office at any given moment. George H. W. Bush received a smaller percentage of the vote in 1992 than any incumbent President since Taft. Five months into his Presidency, only 27 percent of Americans said his performance was “excellent or above average.” In a 2002 Gallup poll, however, a whopping 69 percent said they approved of his performance in retrospect. That’s a pretty impressive improvement for someone who didn’t do anything all that extraordinary in the decade immediately following his Presidency. Or maybe it’s not impressive at all; that’s just the bump that ex-Presidents get. This is especially helpful to articulate and personable leaders, who are better at manufacturing good memories. Second, it seems crude to say this, but ex-Presidents always get more popular when they die. In a January 2006 Zogby poll, 17 percent of Americans said Gerald Ford was a “great or near great” President. Exactly a year later, that number had almost doubled to 31 percent. No new facts about the Ford administration had emerged, but Ford had passed away on the day after Christmas in 2006. If Malvolio was correct in Twelfth Night, and some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have it thrust upon them, then recently deceased Presidents tend to fall into the last of those three groups. Reagan certainly benefits from these two phenomena. His reputation has also been enhanced by one of the factors that enlarged John Kennedy’s: His political party regards him as its last truly successful President. Just three of the Presidents since 1932 consistently break 50 percent in general survey assessments of Presidential greatness—Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Reagan. Roosevelt is usually at the top of these polls, with Kennedy topping him occasionally and Reagan trailing a little behind. It’s no accident that the thirty-fifth and fortieth Presidents keep taking the silver and bronze medals. Major Democrats, and some Republicans as well, invoke the memory of John Kennedy constantly. Just last week, the Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen wrote an article for The New Republic asking, “Is Obama the Next JFK?” Across the aisle, Reagan is the ex-presidential model of choice. As Carl Cannon recently observed, President Bush is so unpopular that “the GOP characters seeking to replace him in 2009 are coping with the current political environment by closing their eyes and pretending they are succeeding Ronald Reagan.” With a parade of candidates and pundits perpetually touting their achievements, it’s no wonder that the public rates Kennedy and Reagan so highly. None of these grade-inflating phenomena will last. As the people who actually experienced the Reagan Presidency constitute a smaller and smaller proportion of the overall American populace, feelings of nostalgia and posthumous sympathy will fade. And if one makes the possibly risky assumption that at some point or another there will be another competent Republican President, Reagan’s stock with the public will fall further. I don’t know where he’ll end up in 50 years, but if I had to speculate I’d probably venture a guess that he’ll be ranked alongside George H. W. Bush, his “kinder and gentler” successor. I expect Kennedy’s catastrophic death will preserve his reputation a little longer, but I’d guess that he’ll end up placing closer to Truman than to Roosevelt. In Mr. Gordon’s post last Friday, he wrote, “Nuance is for historians, not the people.” Maybe so, maybe not. But in the long run, “the people” don’t diverge so much from historians in their rankings of the Presidents. Once the noise of state funerals fades and the pining of wistful op-ed columnists subsides, that’s when Americans really figure out who their great Presidents are.
July 31, 2007
Department of Useless Presidential Trivia II Posted by Alexander Burns at 01:00 PM EST I’ll add one or two quick observations to Joshua Zeitz’s post this morning. There is at least one additional scenario in 2008 that would pit two natives of the same state against each other in the presidential election, and it’s a good deal more likely than a Gore versus Thompson contest. If Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani are nominated by their respective parties—a fair, if not at all certain prospect at this point—you would end up with the subway series of presidential elections. As Mr. Zeitz notes, there has not been a home-state throwdown of this variety since 1944, when a different pair of New Yorkers fought for the Presidency. (Arguably, the 1992 election should qualify, since Ross Perot and George Bush were both Texans, albeit of different sorts.) It would be funny and maybe even appropriate if Clinton and Giuliani were the next two candidates to contest the same home state. For New Yorkers like myself, this outcome would be sweet recompense for the fact that our state hasn’t produced a presidential nominee since Thomas Dewey. The closest we’ve come to the Oval Office in the last 60 years has been with the brief Vice Presidency of Nelson Rockefeller, and the vice-presidential candidacies of Bill Miller, Geraldine Ferraro, and Jack Kemp. An even sweeter and more entertaining scenario that could play out, and that would, to my knowledge, be truly unprecedented, might actually pit three candidates from the same state against one another in an Empire State battle royale. If Mayor Michael Bloomberg runs as a third-party candidate against Clinton and Giuliani, the whole country will be resentfully singing “New York, New York” all through 2008. The winner of that contest would be anyone’s guess.
July 30, 2007
American Ceremony II Posted by Alexander Burns at 12:25 PM EST I liked John Steele Gordon’s post this morning about Americans’ approach to ceremony. Informality has long been a distinguishing feature of American public life. The etiquette that instructs citizens to address their head of state as “Mr. President” rather than something grander sets a pretty clear standard from the top down. Such pompous customs as we’ve had have often been worn away over time by democratic impulses. One example of such a custom was Harvard University’s longstanding tradition of escorting the governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to commencement each year with an armed, mounted honor guard. The guard members came from the Massachusetts ceremonial militia, the National Lancers. Clad in crimson and carrying pikes, these escorts chauffeured governors to commencement from the age of John Winthrop to the more recent days of Francis Sargent. For centuries, the governor rode a carriage from the gold-domed capitol building to Harvard Yard; with the invention of the automobile, governors began traveling in stately open cars. In 1963 Governor Endicott Peabody went for a retro look and brought back the horse and carriage for his trip. The fashion didn’t catch–perhaps because one needs a name like “Endicott Peabody” to pull it off. The tradition came to an end some time in the 1970s, when, as I understand it, a liberal Democratic governor decided that he didn’t need the adornment of an honor guard. In fact, he preferred mass transit to any more elaborate means of conveyance. The governor’s name was Michael Dukakis. Subsequent governors may have been tempted to resurrect the practice. I suspect Bill Weld, the scion of a venerable Harvard family, might have found the idea alluring. The trouble is, when a custom like this is disestablished in a populist, magnanimous-seeming gesture, it’s hard to revive it without looking like a prig. And of course, it’s worth noting that Dukakis was right about the benefits of mass transit. Anyone who tries driving from Memorial Church in Cambridge to Beacon Hill at rush hour will find themselves wishing they had taken the subway. It might be an easier drive if you’re surrounded by pike-wielding bodyguards, but few of us could ever know that luxury.
July 29, 2007
Hairspray Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:20 PM EST I went to see Hairspray last night, and I can’t remember the last time I left a movie feeling so good. I’ve never seen the show or the original movie, so I can’t say how this version compares. In terms of film criticism, I think A. O. Scott hits it right on the nose. “‘Hairspray’ is fundamentally a story about being young,” Scott writes, “about the triumph of youth culture, about the optimistic, possibly dated belief that the future will improve on the present—and its heart is very much with its teenage heroes and the fresh-faced actors who play them.” In celebrating the ebullience of young people, however, the film doesn’t fall into the predictable story line of a teen comedy. This movie isn’t Can’t Hardly Wait. Hairspray is a refreshingly unjaded celebration of the 1960s, highlighting the most uplifting, liberating aspects of that decade rather than its overplayed excesses. Changing fashions, newly popular kinds of music and dancing, and civil rights activism are woven together in a bright, upbeat story without a bit of meanness in it. It’s easy to condemn the 1950s as soulless, stifled, and segregated—as easy as it is to hate the ’60s for being chaotic and libertine. Hairspray doesn’t do this, and so it avoids turning into a heavy-handed, self-important work of politics. Even the bad guys in this movie—I use the word “guys” loosely, as Michelle Pfeiffer is the villain—are objects of cartoonish satire rather than real disdain. You’d have to be awfully humorless to take issue with the film’s portrayal of history. An additional charm of the movie is its positive portrayal of television. In Hairspray, television in general, and The Corny Collins Show in particular, is an instrument of social inclusiveness. It’s there, under the supervision of a good-hearted host with a sparkling smile, that black people, white people, fat people, and thin people come together to have fun. In the background, there is the specter of a dour-looking network executive. For the purposes of Hairspray’s main characters, this man might as well not exist. There’s something silly about the supreme importance of television in the film; obviously, integrating The Corny Collins Show is not an achievement like integrating Little Rock Central High School. But the movie’s makers know this, and that’s not a statement they’re trying to make. In our own time, when the networks’ idea of a good show is a nasty British music producer trashing ordinary people on live TV, Hairspray’s version of television has more than a little appeal.
July 27, 2007
Another Great Rightist VI Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:45 PM EST Fred Allen is right that many Americans remember Reagan as the winner of the Cold War. There’s plenty of evidence to complicate that perception of history, but it may be that popular memory hasn’t yet absorbed it. Going back to look at the specifics of the poll that selected Reagan (incidentally, it was run by the Discovery Channel, not the History Channel, as I first wrote), I think there may actually be a simpler explanation for his victory than anything I, Mr. Smoler, and Mr. Allen have suggested. In the final round of voting, the list of contenders had been narrowed down to Reagan, Lincoln, Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Martin Luther King, Jr. A traditional liberal voting in this contest would have been hard-pressed to decide between voting for Lincoln and King. Enthusiasts of pre-twentieth-century American history might have had a difficult time choosing between Lincoln, Washington, and Franklin. Meanwhile, Reagan would have had a compact, reliable base of support among conservative viewers most familiar with the recent past. By this rubric, you would have had Reagan winning the most votes, with Lincoln coming in second by picking up support from some of the liberals and some of the history buffs. King, Franklin, and Washington would have finished in the last three spots. Indeed, this is how the votes came out: Reagan (24 percent), followed by Lincoln (23.5), then King (19.7), then Washington (17.7), then Franklin (14.4). So maybe the American public, more broadly, might have preferred the winner of a traditional war—Lincoln or Washington—but couldn’t quite decide which one. If only Discovery had taken the contest to a runoff.
July 27, 2007
“Communist” China Posted by Alexander Burns at 01:45 PM EST It’s not easy for me to admit it, but I enjoy watching Lou Dobbs’s show. I might be alone on this blog in this respect. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not sympathetic to the man’s politics. If I don’t watch too often, or for too long a period of time, I find him hilarious. He always sounds like he’s auditioning for a TV movie about Father Coughlin. The language he uses is so over-the-top and inflammatory, I often wonder if he realizes that he sounds like the propaganda chief of a Third World dictator. When immigration reform failed last month, Dobbs called it “a glorious victory for the American people.” Replace “American” with “Iraqi” and you’re in the idiom of Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf. Of course, what’s not funny about Dobbs’s show is that he has plenty of viewers who take him seriously. The last time I watched Lou Dobbs Tonight, a few weeks ago, I was startled by a term the host used. Going back to look at transcripts of his broadcast, I see that he uses it rather frequently; for some reason, I’d never noticed it before. In a segment about regulation of imported commodities, Dobbs made reference to “Communist China.” That’s strange, I thought, for him to be using such anachronistic vocabulary. It wasn’t really surprising, as Dobbs presents himself as the table-thumping defender of middle-class capitalism. On Lou Dobbs’s list of favorite things, I’d guess Communism ranks somewhere between Mexicans and Michael Moore. All the same, it was weird to hear a twenty-first-century TV personality using a term that went out of fashion some time ago. Just when did calling China “Communist” go out of fashion? I didn’t know, so I did a little research. The product is the graph below. Searching The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times for the terms “Communist China” and “Red China,” I made up a little chart that attempts to illustrate the popularity of those terms over time. The results illustrate an obvious trend.
Over the 60-year period between 1946 and 2006, these four major newspapers were most likely to include the terms “Communist China” or “Red China” during periods of tension between the United States and the People’s Republic. Looking at the graph, you see a spike in use of these terms after Mao’s seizure of power and during the Korean War. There’s another spike in the mid- to late 1950s, around when you would’ve had the various crises in the Taiwan Straits. Unsurprisingly, the terms climbed to the heights of their popularity in the late 1960s, during the escalation of the war in Vietnam and the Cultural Revolution.There’s a steep drop-off with the beginning of the 1970s. It starts a little before 1970, but it really takes off come 1972. I hesitate to read too much into this graph, but it does look like the practice of calling China “Communist” or “Red” fell into obscurity around the time of Nixon’s visit to Beijing. If the dwindling use of this vocabulary is any indication of Americans’ feelings toward the Chinese, it should further confirm that ’72 was a turning point for Sino-American relations. Even during the 1980s, when anti-Communism was at the front and center of U.S. foreign affairs, China managed to escape these unfriendly labels. The terms still crop up a few dozen times each year (with “Communist China” far more common), but a good number of these appearances come in book reviews, where authors employ them only in historical contexts. Lou Dobbs is making an effort at bringing “Communist China” back into style, but it isn’t catching on outside his six o’clock broadcast. His job ought to get even harder as China’s status as a Communist state grows more ambiguous.
July 26, 2007
Another Great Rightist III Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:35 PM EST Thanks to Fred Smoler for his thoughtful response to my musings on greatness polls. I particularly appreciate his insights on de Gaulle; I was not aware of some of the complexities of his place in French memory. Upon reflection, it probably makes more sense to classify de Gaulle as a nationalist first and a rightist second. I think it’s safe to say the same of Adenauer and Churchill, although it’s also true that virtually anyone looks moderate or liberal in comparison with Nazis. As much as he stood up for liberal values in opposing Hitler, Churchill was pretty reactionary when it came to Ireland and the empire, and he failed to champion the postwar social programs that Britons wanted. Mr. Smoler is right that Churchill was no “simple rightist,” but I’d assert that a rightist he was, all the same. On Reagan, I couldn’t agree more with Mr. Smoler’s analysis. One sentence in Mr. Smoler’s paragraph on Reagan spurs a further thought. I try to stick to the rule that one shouldn’t attempt to draw conclusions from bad data, and these polls are certainly bad data. But as I’ve already broken this rule, I’ll go a little further. Mr. Smoler writes, “For most of our history, Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln were thought our greatest Presidents, and I do not rate very high Reagan’s chance at keeping the top slot in memory.” I think this is true, and I would not expect many of these rankings to be the same in 50 years—so maybe these surveys tell us more about the times we live in than about the way nostalgia works, in general. Even with the complications Mr. Smoler points out, there’s at least the semblance of a pattern that people today are reminiscing about right-of-center nationalists from the recent past. I suggested in my last post that this had to do with a popular yearning for “supposedly more straightforward times.” Mr. Smoler’s observation that most of these “greatest” men—all of them but Salazar and Reagan—were accomplished anti-Nazis, seems to confirm this. If there’s one international conflict remembered for its moral clarity, World War II is it. In the midst of our comparatively muddled struggle with Islamic extremism, one inclines toward sympathy with this nostalgia. To reiterate, it’s likely foolish to draw any serious conclusions from these polls. But if we’re ever fortunate enough to live in generally peaceful times, I wonder whether we would find people choosing Martin Luther King, William Shakespeare, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Louis Pasteur, and Johannes Gutenberg as their “greatest” forebears.
July 26, 2007
Another Great Rightist Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:35 AM EST The New York Times had an interesting story yesterday about a contest to name “the greatest Portuguese who ever lived.” The contest was held by the Portuguese television station RTP, and it allowed people to vote on their nation’s greatest son by telephone, much as winners are chosen on American Idol. This unscientific survey became controversial when the man who came out on top was António de Oliveira Salazar, the fascist dictator who ran Portugal from 1932 until 1968. He beat out Vasco da Gama and Henry the Navigator, among others. Some are interpreting this as a sign of Portugal’s increasing frustration with its second-tier status in the European Union. “Today,” the Times writes, “Portugal is the poorest country in Western Europe, and its recent history is marred by corruption scandals.” When it became a democracy in the 1970s, Portugal hoped for better fortunes than these. Similar nostalgia for autocracy has shown up in other frustrated states, like Russia. In 2003, a fifth of Russians remembered Stalin as “wise and humane,” and 31 percent said they’d take him as their leader. It’s not far-fetched to posit a connection between such sentiments and the disappointments of the Putin and Yeltsin presidencies. One thing that seems funny about Salazar’s performance in this survey, though, is that it fits in well with a growing trend in “greatest person” contests: Rightists almost always win. Churchill topped a 2002 survey that selected the 100 greatest Britons. De Gaulle was France’s choice for the leadoff slot, beating Napoleon and Marie Curie. Konrad Adenauer won out in Germany. In a History Channel survey, Americans picked Reagan as the first among equals. There are obviously differences between the kinds of rightism that these men represented, and it would be asinine to dump both Churchill and Salazar in any narrower ideological bracket. But the pattern is nevertheless striking: there are no men of the left topping these lists—except in Canada, where the welfare-state pioneer Tommy Douglas was designated that country’s “greatest.” It goes without saying that these greatness surveys are totally ridiculous. In Britain’s, Princess Diana beat Isaac Newton, and David Beckham edged out Charles Dickens. The pattern of winners might teach us something all the same. The conclusion I might draw is that right-of-center leaders from the recent past are generally the best focal points for popular nostalgia. Whatever their differences as leaders, Reagan, Salazar, Churchill, Adenauer, and de Gaulle are all remembered for their belligerent, can-do nationalism. This attitude may not always have produced the best policies, but it has allowed these men to live in popular memory as representations of supposedly more straightforward times. I’m not sure if that signals something good or bad about how memory works. I do know that if I lived in Portugal, I’d be disappointed.
July 24, 2007
Confidential Sources Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:50 AM EST Last week I had the dubious privilege of attending a breakfast with Robert Novak, the septuagenarian journalist who writes the second-longest running column in America. He has a new memoir out, The Prince of Darkness, about his 50-year career in Washington. I can’t say I was planning to buy the book. I’m not a particular fan of Novak, and political memoirs are often just 500-page vehicles for justifying mistakes and settling old grievances. But at this event free copies of Novak’s book were in abundance, so I thought, what the heck, why not see what the old curmudgeon has to say? I started paging through the introduction as I waited for the Q&A with Novak to begin. Once Novak started talking, it didn’t take too long for me to learn what the book’s big, controversial revelation was, outside of its account of the Valerie Plame affair. Novak blows many of his confidential sources from over the years, and most notable among them is the anonymous senator who told him, in April of 1972, that “the people don’t known [George] McGovern is for amnesty, abortion and legalization of pot. Once middle America—Catholic middle America, in particular—finds this out, he’s dead.” Novak kept the identity of this quote’s author a secret for 35 years, even amid speculation that he had invented the comment for his own partisan purposes. In The Prince of Darkness,
Novak reveals that his source was the late Sen. Thomas Eagleton, who was briefly McGovern’s running mate in 1972. There’s an irony to this revelation. Eagleton is remembered mostly as the guy McGovern ditched when the going got tough, after revelations that the Missouri legislator had undergone psychiatric treatment in the past. It adds an odd twist to the story to learn that before McGovern ever humiliated his running mate, Eagleton had knifed his Senate colleague by way of Bob Novak’s column. What’s controversial about Novak’s new disclosure, however, is that he revealed Eagleton as his source in spite of the senator’s repeated instructions not to do so. Novak claims that Eagleton’s death released him from their confidentiality agreement and that the two of them will have to settle up in heaven (or, he added at breakfast, perhaps somewhere else). But his assumption that such an agreement ends at death is not a widely accepted one, and one has to question the ethics of publishing such surprising information about Eagleton when the man cannot defend himself. The whole affair makes me wonder how much information historians lose to confidentiality agreements like this one. The Eagleton-McGovern affair is ultimately a detail point in the 1972 election, but the identities of some of Novak’s other blown sources may, at some point, be valuable to historians. And Novak is not even one of the country’s most conscientious journalists. Wouldn’t it be useful for historians to know, for example, who Dana Priest’s sources were for the now-famous Washington Post story on secret CIA prisons? Wouldn’t a full portrait of the last seven years include information about which officials were dissenting from (dare I say undermining?) the President’s policies? And imagine how frustrated some would have been if Woodward and Bernstein had died before Mark Felt, and the identity of Deep Throat had never been resolved. Maybe in the future some journalists will decide to help out historians by revealing their sources in a more delicate way than Novak. Maybe journalists could put records of their research, including records of anonymous sources, in university libraries with instructions that they not be opened for 50 years. That way, their data can be preserved for the use of history scholars in a way that avoids Novak’s sensationalism. On the other hand, maybe the way things are now is the way they’ve got to be, in order to protect valuable, anonymous whistleblowers—people who might be worried about disclosing their identity even after half a century. Perhaps historians should continue to accept journalists’ confidential sources as unknowable. Either resolution is imperfect and unsatisfying. I wonder what my fellow bloggers think of Novak’s disclosures, and about how long a confidentiality agreement should last.
July 14, 2007
How Not to Debate Iraq IV Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:00 PM EST Thanks to John Steele Gordon for his substantive and succinct reply to my post. The articles he links to provide good evidence that there has been some measured military progress in Iraq. I have agreed with this assertion before, although I’m not still not sure how much these articles do to demonstrate that our forces are making progress toward some satisfactory, conclusive outcome. It’s also a bit troubling that General Petraeus himself has acknowledged that a counterinsurgency of the kind we’re pursuing has tended to take closer to a decade than a year, which would place large-scale American forces in Iraq much longer than originally projected. Whether that’s acceptable or not is a subject for another debate. For the moment, since exchanges like these generally have natural lifespans that it is best not to exceed, I’ll simply add that I appreciate Mr. Gordon’s willingness to address his original question, and to participate in another of the somewhat contentious but entirely civil and instructive exchanges that he and I have had in recent months. I’m slightly disappointed with Mr. Zeitz’s prickly response to my post. My aim was not to “coach [him] on the proper way to discuss Iraq.” It was to steer the discussion back toward a subject that’s not only interesting to me, but that’s actually connected to the nominal discussion topic: “How Goes the War?” and that’s also been addressed less frequently on this blog than Mr. Zeitz’s objections to Mr. Gordon’s rhetoric. I’ll reiterate that I sympathize with Mr. Zeitz’s objections, but I will point out that readers interested in those objections can find them here, here, here, here, and many other places as well. I’ve always found that good evidence is the best response to a debating partner one finds occasionally disrespectful, and it’s worth observing that when I presented some and requested that Mr. Gordon do the same, he did so without complaint. Fred Smoler’s post this afternoon is a deft and serious treatment of the situation in Iraq, and, frankly, I’d be surprised if anyone can do better. Thus, I’ll join Joshua Zeitz in asking: “How about that political realignment question?”
July 13, 2007
How Not to Debate Iraq Posted by Alexander Burns at 06:00 PM EST An offhand comment in one of my posts, asserting that the Iraq war “continues to fail,” has sparked a larger discussion about the state of the war. Or, at least, it’s a discussion that’s nominally about the state of the war. John Steele Gordon initiated the discussion with this question, challenging my characterization of the war: “Is that the case as of today, July 11, 2007, or have things begun to change for the better in Iraq at long last?” Since Mr. Gordon asked that question, there have been a few attempts to answer it, including one by me. Unfortunately, most of the words composed in response to this prompt have not come close to offering a substantive reply, and, on the whole, constitute a great lesson in how not to debate Iraq. Mr. Gordon and Mr. Zeitz have done what a lot of pundits do these days, which is turn an objective, fact-based question about the Iraq war into a contest for civic virtue between liberals and conservatives. Mr. Gordon, the author of the initial question, has answered it by criticizing Harry Reid, The New York Times, the “mainstream media,” liberals, Cindy Sheehan and Mary-Jo Cooney, and Maureen
Dowd (for offenses, I suppose, distinct from those of The New York Times in general). He has made some spirited moral arguments: that withdrawal is equal to defeat, that defeat empowers the “enemies of civilization,” that empowering those evildoers will lead to another Darfur, that our losses in Iraq are a fairly small price to pay for averting such genocide, and that ending American involvement in Iraq is like applying euthanasia prematurely. The evidence he has presented in answer to his own query, however, is limited to a single op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Gordon’s arguments would be germane to a conversation about whether it would be desirable to succeed in Iraq, or about whether a hypothetical victory there would be worth the sacrifices Americans have made. But while I sympathize with some of what Mr. Gordon has to say, almost none of it is useful in determining whether the war effort is actually moving toward eventual success. For his part, Joshua Zeitz has responded to John Steele Gordon’s post in a manner to which I am also sympathetic, but which seems a little misguided. Mr. Zeitz chides Mr. Gordon for “impugn[ing] the motives of those with whom he disagrees,” and he is right to do so. But Mr. Zeitz does a disservice to his own antiwar views by engaging this element of Mr. Gordon’s post. The question that should determine the future of America’s Iraq policy is the one Mr. Gordon first asked, and that’s where any serious conversation should focus. To restate the question neutrally: Are our forces in Iraq closer to a victory now than they were four months ago? It’s good of Joshua Zeitz to stick up for Cindy Sheehan, Jim Webb, and the editorial board of The New York Times, but the reputations of those parties have very little to do with answering that question. It’s a mistake to treat the debate over Iraq as some kind of proxy for a larger struggle between left and right. The only people who benefit from that kind of discussion are those trying to dodge the question of our progress on the ground. So, with a few days having elapsed since my post and Mr. Gordon’s question, and with the first round of assessments on the President’s “surge” having been reported, let me re-ask the question: How much progress are we making in Iraq? According to the benchmarks set by Congress and the President, not very much. President Bush has said that our troops and allies in Iraq have made “satisfactory” progress toward 8 of the 18 benchmarks. This less than 50 percent success rate would result in a failing grade for the “surge” even if the President weren’t practicing grade inflation. Distressingly, the results of the “surge” policy have actually been even less impressive than that, as analysts note here, here, and here. While our soldiers have achieved some successes fighting insurgents, they haven’t been able to reduce sectarian violence in a lasting way, and their victories have not been matched by any political or organizational breakthroughs by the Iraqi government. These disappointing facts do not resolve the matter of what the United States should do next in Iraq, and Americans of all political inclinations should consider that question with open minds. But looking at the facts as of July 13, 2007, there is really no way around the sad truth that the war “continues to fail.”
July 12, 2007
How Goes the War? III Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:35 AM EST I look forward to John Steele Gordon's response to my post on party realignment. In the meantime, I will offer a few thoughts in response to his post on the war in Iraq. First, I have to take slight issue with his use of Kimberly Kagan’s Wall Street Journal editorial as evidence that the President’s “surge” policy is working. Ms. Kagan is the wife of Fred Kagan, one of the principal authors of that policy. If concerns about media bias are going to enter into a discussion of the Iraq war, one might begin by asking why The Wall Street Journal doesn’t identify her as such. This isn’t, incidentally, the first time that a conservative media outlet has obscured the family ties of certain surge proponents, as Andrew Sullivan notes here. As far as the substance of Kagan’s piece is concerned, the author claims that U.S. forces are fighting insurgents more aggressively, and with greater success, than before the surge. She also says that this is “creating an opportunity for Iraq’s leaders to negotiate a political settlement. These negotiations are underway. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is attempting to form a political coalition with Amar al-Hakim and Kurdish political leaders, but excluding Moqtada al-Sadr, and has invited Sunnis to participate. He has confronted Moqtada al-Sadr for promoting illegal militia activity, and has actively prompted this so-called Iraqi nationalist to leave for Iran for the second time since January.” If Kagan is correct, and the surge is poised to crush the Iraqi insurgency and make way for a political settlement, I will be tremendously relieved. Though, by my assessment, the Iraq war has been, and continues to be, a dismal failure, I would like nothing more than absolute victory. The moral issues Thomas Friedman raised in his article yesterday are also very troubling, and the prospect of a genocide following an American withdrawal is awful to contemplate. One of the reasons I supported Sen. Joe Lieberman’s reelection was that I felt his opponents didn’t fully appreciate just what withdrawal from Iraq might mean. The approach to Iraq, though, that collects scraps of good news and begs, “Give it another six months,” has its limits. As does Colin Powell’s folksy axiom: “You break it, you bought it.” At some point, you have to look at the criteria you’ve set for success and judge the mission by those criteria, outside evidence notwithstanding. By the expectations the Bush administration initially put forth for the Iraq war—an easy invasion, followed by an easy, swift, cheap reconstruction financed by oil revenues—the war has been an undeniable failure. Even looking past that, though, and accepting the surge as a reality, the war continues to fail. There is scant mention in Kimberly Kagan’s sunny editorial of the benchmarks by which President Bush actually agreed to judge the surge (see here), and the White House is barely bothering to deny reports that the July 15 assessment of these benchmarks promises little good news. It’s great that fighting has subsided in Ramadi, and the tidbits of good news that Kagan cites sound encouraging. But while we in the United States are scavenging for good news, a working political system still eludes Iraq’s leaders, and most of the country’s major political questions, related to oil, elections, representation, and regional autonomy, remain unresolved. We can quibble over whether “failure” is the right word to use for this situation. There’s little evidence, however, that “success” is a term that might apply. Blaming the media for the public’s plummeting support for the war is a very weak method of misdirection, especially since it was the media’s enchantment with stunts like the President’s USS Lincoln landing that allowed the war to go forward unchallenged for so long. Similarly, I find it hard to believe that Mr. Gordon is still clinging to the canard that the American media lost Vietnam. Whether our adventure in Vietnam was a complete failure by 1973, I suppose people can debate. There’s nothing to indicate that victory was anywhere in sight. And with that year seeing even a reelected, thoroughly hawkish President Nixon pushing for honorable defeat by way of the Paris Peace Accords, it’s hard to believe that the Sulzbergers were to blame for American withdrawal. That kind of thinking is usually confined to this hysterical set.
July 10, 2007
Party Like It’s 1999 Posted by Alexander Burns at 05:05 PM EST Joshua Zeitz’s post, “The Second Party System,” reviews some of the domestic political debates of the first half of the nineteenth century and provides a useful reminder, along with John Steele Gordon’s front-page piece, that slavery was not the only subject that interested America’s early generations of legislators. Mr. Zeitz invites his fellow blog contributors to respond to the following question: Will “the Iraq War, the big-spending conservatism of the Bush administration, the utopian ideology of the neoconservatives (utopianism being more often associated with the left), and the debates over abortion, gay rights, and immigration . . . bring about a realignment” in the American party system? This is an enormous question, so I’ll get right down to it, and I hope I won’t be the only blogger to do so. If I were a betting man, I’d bet that the party system won’t realign under the next President, but that it will change substantially within familiar parameters. At the risk of sounding like Pat Buchanan, I think Bush-style “compassionate conservatism” will be out, and the 1990s Republicanism of men like South Carolina’s Jim DeMint and Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan will be back in style. If you block out the static of the presidential race for a minute and focus instead on Congress, it’s clear that the Republican Party’s young leaders are, for the most part, uninterested in big-government conservatism. Their agenda emphasizes spending reductions, border security, and judicial appointments. As the war in Iraq continues to fail, Senate Republicans are less determined than ever to maintain America’s force deployment abroad. George Will, on “This Week,” recently observed that the Senate GOP seems scheduled to bolt the President’s foreign policy in September. Though the Weekly Standard crowd might not like to admit it, there’d be very little appetite among Republicans in Congress for any additional nation-building. Democrats don’t seem poised for an ideological transformation either. Watching Democratic presidential debates and observing the day-to-day operations of their legislative majorities, their big issues seem to be energy, healthcare, and ending the war. Some of their interests–chiefly, energy–are relatively newfound, but they aren’t inconsistent with the party’s more established issue positions on subjects such as the environment. Hot-button social issues are slyly sidelined with moderate-sounding policy proposals: proposing civil unions to avoid debate on gay marriage, proposing legislation to reduce unwanted pregnancies to dodge confrontation on Roe. Some of the actors, like Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama, are new, but the script is pretty familiar. The party is notably more unified than it was just a few years ago, and its political leaders are obviously more competent. Democrats also seem poised to make big inroads with Latino voters, which will strengthen their hand as they try to implement their agenda. But while some unpredictable legislators, like Virginia’s Jim Webb and Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, may mix things up a bit, nobody’s about to alter the basic framework of that agenda. So are we headed for a reprise of the 1990s, full of gridlock on budgeting and social policy and opportunistic posturing in foreign affairs? Maybe, and if Hillary Clinton or Rudy Giuliani is elected President, I’d wager that we are. 9/11 would add an additional political football, but, on the whole, I guess we’d see a lot of the same debates we’ve already seen on “Crossfire.” Alternatively, though, I think it’s possible that a comparatively untarnished, fair-minded, and prudent President, maybe Obama or Mitt Romney, might approach old political conflicts with the lessons of the ‘90s in mind, and produce different results. Maybe Republican leaders less cynical than Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole would acknowledge that healthcare and climate change present real problems, and enter into good-faith negotiations with Democratic legislators on a market-based compromise. Or maybe Democrats with more humility and self-control than Bill Clinton could reach out to ostracized big-government Republicans, like Michael Gerson, and partner with socially conscious evangelicals to revive and revise the welfare state. These kinds of reforms might really upset the political status quo. And slow generational change will incrementally alter the public debate on issues like gay marriage, which young people just don’t care about. I’ll wait eagerly for the day when big legislation or demographic change produces new partisan battle lines. Until then, as Donald Rumsfeld might say, you approach reforms with the parties you have.
July 7, 2007
The Questionably Quotable Quaker III Posted by Alexander Burns at 07:35 PM EST Like Fred Schwarz, I spent part of my Independence Day watching 1776. I confess that I found the movie charming, in a hokey way. It’s not West Side Story, but then, it’s also not Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and for a movie featuring Ben Franklin in a kickline it never reaches the heights of unpleasantness that it might. I appreciate John Steele Gordon’s point about the difference between film and stage musicals: the former seem strange when they’re stylized; the latter have to be stylized in order to be successful. My own reflection on the film, maybe a less profound one, concerns the fate of minor historical figures in movies like this one. I was surprised to see John Adams represented so favorably, given his reputation as something of a curmudgeon, but in the end I realized that shows such as 1776 have to please their audiences with upbeat portrayals of familiar figures. In a cast of characters that includes perhaps half a dozen recognizable names, it wouldn’t do to demonize or embarrass the few figures people know offhand. Instead, it’s the footnote-in-history types who end up as villains or clowns. In 1776, Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee comes off as a total buffoon, answering his fellow founders’ every query with supposedly hilarious puns on his last name: “Certain-LEE!” or something to that effect. I don’t know enough about Lee to assess his intelligence, but I think it’s safe to presume he wasn’t quite such an ass as this. Similar treatment befalls Delaware’s Thomas McKean, an apparently one-dimensional, hopelessly belligerent Scot, and Rhode Island’s Samuel Hopkins, depicted as a perpetually soused lowlife who frequently needs to use the bathroom. Obviously these are constraints of the genre: a two-hour musical or film cannot give nuanced and full portrayals of every second-tier member of the Continental Congress. But among the motivations for public figures to seek greatness, the hope of avoiding future humiliation on the stage might rank higher than it does.
July 5, 2007
White Knights Posted by Alexander Burns at 08:15 PM EST During the last month, this blog has hosted several exchanges concerning the American Presidency and the proper limits of its power. Over the course of these exchanges, a string of Presidents have been criticized for exercising their authority inappropriately. Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan were among this group. Fred Smoler has remarked in the past on the tendency, among some writers, to tear down the reputations of public figures after they have died. There’s probably a little of that impulse in play here, with “imperial” Presidencies being discussed and disapproved of on the basis of their most shameful hours alone. One can go too far in disparaging the accomplishments of past leaders, and it can be problematic to let a handful of reprehensible actions define a whole Presidency. One can also go too far in praising old Presidents, though, especially if one praises them imprecisely. I noticed a recent cover of Time magazine featuring the story “What We Can Learn From J.F.K.” This caught my attention because it reminded me of an April cover story in National Journal, “Learning from Ike.” These two articles consider the foreign policies of the thirty-fourth and thirty-fifth Presidents. Both are capably written and both contain some solid historical information. Despite the differences between the leaders they consider, both draw similar conclusions. According to the authors of these articles, these Presidents were laudable for advancing American interests while recognizing the boundaries of American power. National Journal praises Eisenhower’s “cold-blooded” realism in foreign policy, which led him to make what biologists call “threat gestures” against China, even as he was forcing the British and French to jettison the Suez. The key to such divergent policies was Eisenhower’s conviction that immediate circumstances, rather than ideology, should drive a nation’s actions. In a realist foreign policy program, says this piece, “we manage evil. We minimize, mitigate, and manipulate evil. But efforts to pre-emptively eliminate evil are prone to end in overreaction and destabilization, with consequences that are often worse than the original problem.” Of the lessons Eisenhower might teach us, this is not necessarily a bad one to learn, that sometimes an imperfect status quo is better than a chaotic policy shift. Time emphasizes similar aspects of the Kennedy Presidency. “The United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient,” the authors quote Kennedy saying in 1961, “We cannot impose our will on the other 94 percent of mankind [and] we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity. . . . There cannot be an American solution to every world problem.” The attitude expressed by these words, says Ted Sorensen, would have produced a policy of détente with the Soviet Union a decade early, if Kennedy had not been killed. Because of Kennedy’s nuanced outlook on foreign affairs, and his refusal to treat the Soviets as irreconcilable and unambiguous foes, this article speculates that he and Khrushchev might have partnered to maintain an acceptable, peaceful global situation. Kennedy’s public positions on Communism were expressed in very tough language—but his uncompromising toughness did not extend too far beyond word choice. Instead, his comfort with complexity and distrust of military force guided him down an altogether more moderate course as President. Or so we’re told. These two articles draw some interesting conclusions about Kennedy and Eisenhower, but I’d suggest that they actually tell us more about the times we’re living in than about the Presidencies they consider. There appears to be a concerted search afoot these days to find historical models for the productive use of American power. In the midst of Iraq’s unending frustrations, and, I think it’s worth adding, little more than a decade after our disastrous inaction in Rwanda and unconscionable shilly-shallying over the Balkans, writers are looking toward the beginning of the Cold War for examples of successful, forceful, and temperate Presidents. On the left, there’s been a rediscovery of Harry Truman by writers like Peter Beinart. In some sectors of the right, there’s been a resurgence of Churchill worship, as well as a newfound interest in once-damned figures like Joseph McCarthy It’s in the context of this larger review of history that this pair of articles has emerged, and it’s in the spirit of a search for foreign policy heroes that they’ve chosen to consider Eisenhower and Kennedy. The trouble is, some important questions go unasked in order to find good historical lessons. On Eisenhower, one might question just how successful his “reptilian” realism was. Did we really get the best possible settlement in Korea? Was the government that emerged in the South truly the most effective one American influence could produce? Was it a good idea to topple Third World leaders like Mossadegh and Lumumba, or to creep furtively around Southeast Asia, unsure whether we had more to fear from angering Indonesia’s Sukarno or from leaving him unsupervised? On Kennedy’s administration: Was Kennedy clever or careless to make big promises (“bear any burden”) that he had no intention of keeping, but that his successor would treat with extreme gravity? Was JFK really so temperate, or did he have a more ruthless, unrestrained side, evidenced in his use of covert assassinations in South Vietnam? And furthermore, is it really honest to say he would have ended our involvement in Vietnam and manufactured détente, or is this a fiction of enduringly loyal former aides? These are only a few of the complications one hits in the process of beatifying either Kennedy or his predecessor. There are accomplishments to admire in the foreign policies of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. But the actions both men took abroad resist easy simplification under the label of “realism” or “keeping the peace.” It’s too easy to find a President from the past and, as the blogger Matthew Yglesias has alleged of Truman-boosters, use him as an icon for “a foreign policy that’s not too hot and also not too cold.” The trouble with this approach is that no modern President has been hot at all the right times and cold at all the right times, and the search for a prudential middle course on foreign policy can’t be quickly resolved by the leaders of the past. To pretend that it can leaves Americans waiting for a white knight who won’t come.
July 2, 2007
More on Imperial Presidencies II Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:40 AM EST Joshua Zeitz’s post this morning raises some concerns about so-called imperial Presidencies, and also places recent events concerning the Office of the Vice President in a broader historical context. He cites both John Kennedy and Richard Nixon as examples of Presidents who sometimes overstepped the bounds of propriety and legality in their use of presidential powers. Dick Cheney’s more immediate use of “unchecked executive authority” is especially troublesome to Mr. Zeitz. His basic point: “There’s a distinction to be drawn between an enhanced executive branch—one with the flexibility to respond to national security threats—and an imperial Presidency that knowingly flouts the law, administrative codes, and the Constitution.” I’d generally concur, but with a few points of clarification and elaboration. The first is the observation that Vice President Cheney’s escapades over the last six-and-a-half years have been alarming, but that I’m not sure they really fall in line with the earlier examples of Kennedy and Nixon. The key difference, of course, is that while those old rivals of 1960 both overstepped the bounds of their authority, the authority they exercised was still the highest in the land. Cheney, on the other hand, is using a basically ornamental office as that of a pluripotent minister without portfolio. In my judgment, the most surprising and disconcerting information that emerged from last week’s Washington Post series, “Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency,” was the fact that Cheney has occasionally employed his vice presidential prerogatives to undermine President Bush’s agenda. In 2003, he helped scupper one of Bush’s favorite tax initiatives in order to advance one of his own. More subtly, but also more insidiously, he has been a master of promoting policy ideas, like coercive interrogation, without identifying himself as their author. If George Bush is an imperial President, I’m not sure what that makes Dick Cheney. But the notion that the Vice President has a set of powers totally distinct from those of the President is incompatible with the American tradition of a unitary executive. Indeed, it’s hard for me to think of George Bush as a truly imperial President, given that he’s apparently unable to rein in his own sidekick. Looking at the White House’s official statements from last week concerning Cheney’s assertion that he’s not a member of the executive branch, it is notable just how little the President’s office actually tried to stick up for the V.P. One wonders whether President Bush is a little tired of putting up with the most inconveniently meddling Vice President since John Calhoun. Given the apparent cleavages within the executive branch, it seems to me that the Bush administration has been less effective at unleashing the powers of the imperial Presidency, as previously exercised by Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, et al., than it has been at destroying Washington’s customary mechanisms of balancing authority. Compliant Republican congressional caucuses have neutered the governmental processes that would normally check someone like Cheney. President Bush’s much-vaunted respect for personal loyalty has left characters like Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales in office long beyond the point when any earlier President would have canned them for being incompetent or politically inconvenient. The consequence of this has not necessarily been a hugely empowered Oval Office, à la Kennedy and Nixon, but rather an executive branch whose members (even reluctant ones like Cheney) aren’t effectively accountable to anyone, including the President. The second point I’d make in response to Mr. Zeitz is that while his distinction between muscular and extralegal presidential action is intellectually sound, I am not convinced that this categorical division plays out in practice. In his post, he notes the executive excesses of Kennedy, Nixon, and Bush. By even a conservative assessment, one would have to add Lyndon Johnson, with his lying, fiat-based approach to war making, and Ronald Reagan, with his patently illegal clandestine policies in Latin America and Western Asia, to any list of inappropriately overbearing Presidents. Even if one stops there and doesn’t try to indict any other leaders, that means half the White House occupants in the last 50 years have abused the office while reaching for imperial security powers. Those who have not, including Ford, Carter, and Clinton, have largely been unremarkable and unassertive leaders and have hesitated to engage in anything resembling imperial behavior. Given this moderately strong correlation, I wonder whether there isn’t reason to suggest that even necessary expansions of presidential power are, to some extent, corrupting. I’m inclined to agree with Fred Smoler that it’s good for Presidents to have a wide range of options open to them when it comes to the use of force. I’m also pretty convinced, though, that the abuses that usually attend such presidential prerogatives are inescapable. They are necessary failings that Americans must accept if we want a flexible and extremely powerful President. Reasonable people can disagree as to whether this is a good tradeoff, but it is in any case part of a dilemma that has long resisted any satisfactory resolution.
July 1, 2007
From Superman to Übermensch Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:35 PM EST When the upcoming United Artists film Valkyrie was announced a few months back, I was thrilled. The subject matter, Claus von Stauffenberg’s plot to kill Hitler, has long struck me as the kind of cloak-and-dagger episode ripe for cinematic interpretation. Valkyrie’s director, Bryan Singer, has distinguished himself in recent years as one of the better architects of big-budget pictures, including The Usual Suspects, X-Men, and Superman Returns. There probably aren’t more than a few people capable of turning this fairly obscure bit of history into a major motion picture, but Singer is certainly one of them. But according to Saturday’s New York Times, he may have a bit of trouble doing so, thanks to his leading man’s religion, and larger disputes about the ownership of the past. Germany’s ministry of defense has been making things difficult for Singer and his crew, denying them filming permits at important locations like the site of Stauffenberg’s execution. The internal dynamics of the ministry’s decisions are a little unclear, but the basic gist of it seems to be that Tom Cruise is not exactly the person German central casting would have chosen to play Stauffenberg. Stauffenberg’s son, Berthold Graf von Stauffenberg, also opposes Cruise’s casting, and tells the Times why in no uncertain terms: “Scientology is a totalitarian ideology. The fact that an avowed Scientologist like Mr. Cruise is supposed to play the victim of a totalitarian regime is purely sick.” The opinion of Stauffenberg fils is expected to be influential with the government officials who will ultimately decide how to treat Singer’s project. This budding standoff over filming rights could be a good case study for a debate on religious freedom. One could discuss whether it is legitimate for Germans to object to Tom Cruise’s casting on the basis of his religion, since they feel his religion embodies politically objectionable ideas. More interesting, though, and more relevant to the subject of this blog, are the questions this situation raises about the artistic representation of history, and about who can rightly try to control that representation. Is it acceptable for the German government to influence Singer’s film in the interests of protecting Stauffenberg’s status as a national hero? How seriously should Valkyrie’s director take Berthold Graf von Stauffenberg’s objections to his casting choices? Should his preferences, as Colonel Stauffenberg’s son, be treated with special sensitivity? Speaking instinctively, my answers to these questions would probably be no, not very much, and no, in that order. While I would personally love to see Tom Cruise booted from this project and replaced by a more talented actor (say, Clive Owen), a director portraying a historical figure of Stauffenberg’s stature has a larger obligation than the one to the character’s family, or even to his country. If Singer thinks Tom Cruise is the actor most able to truthfully portray his protagonist, and the man most capable of participating in an effective assessment of Stauffenberg’s place in history, that should be his decision to make. If Cruise’s acting skills fall short, or if his religious affiliation compromises his effectiveness as an artist, there’s an easy solution to the problem: Make another movie. This whole affair sort of reminds me of the 2003 controversy over CBS’s miniseries The Reagans, in which James Brolin, Barbra Streisand’s husband, was selected to play the Gipper. Conservative outcry over the casting choice, as well as other aspects of the series, led Viacom to relegate it to the premium cable netherworld of Showtime. The objections people raised back in 2003 are similar in some ways to the ones being raised in Germany now: The hero of this film is a national icon, the actor’s beliefs make him unsuitable for the role, the script might compromise this person’s revered place in history, etc. But with Stauffenberg, as with Reagan, these objections are self-defeating. If Stauffenberg, like Reagan, is such a cherished national figure, couldn’t he hypothetically withstand one mediocre portrayal? And in a free country like the United States, or present-day Germany, wouldn’t it be a better demonstration of anti-totalitarianism to support artists you find distasteful, while also producing other art more in line with your own tastes? I hope Valkyrie is a worthwhile movie—but if it isn’t, I expect I won’t have to wait more than a decade or two for a better version.
June 27, 2007
Duke University and the Scottsboro Boys II Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:30 AM EST Like Joshua Zeitz, I enjoyed Mr. Gordon’s op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. I don’t regularly read the Journal’s editorial page, so it was much to my surprise that I found an item by a fellow AmericanHeritage.com contributor on one of the half-dozen days this year that I’ve done so. I have a question, though, for Messrs. Gordon and Zeitz. I’m instinctively persuaded by the argument that the Duke Lacrosse case, like the Scottsboro case, was driven at least in part by race. I think the comparison between the two cases can be overstated—there shouldn’t be, for example, an implied argument that affluent whites are as discriminated against today as poor blacks were 80 years ago—but Mr. Gordon’s piece doesn’t really fall into that trap. I also find it believable that the Duke faculty, as well as members of the national media, joined in a “rush to judgment that was racist at its heart.” Beyond my gut sense that this is plausible, however, I’m curious where I might look for evidence of such racism. I’ll admit that I try my hardest to block out the hysterical yammering of Nancy Grace and journalists like her, so I’m probably not as tuned in to this case as the average American. This being the case, what would I say if I wanted to convince somebody that the media and faculty would have reacted differently if the exotic dancer in the case had been white?
June 27, 2007
Re: “Sucker MC’s” Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:15 AM EST Fred Schwarz’s post “Sucker MC’s,” responds to Fred Smoler’s review of a new novel by Michael Chabon. Mr. Schwarz takes on a couple of Mr. Smoler’s assertions, namely that alternative history has lacked writers “of the first rank,” and that writers can effectively be organized into ranks at all. After discoursing on his personal dislike for the works of Ian McEwan, Mr. Schwarz concludes: “Will Chabon make the cut 40 years from now? At this point it’s a matter of guesswork. And—a different question—is [Philip K.] Dick not only major but ‘of the first rank’? Here, as with Chabon and McEwan and every other writer, past and present, it’s simply a matter of opinion.” At least part of this observation is well worth considering. As much as it is an engrossing and challenging activity to review new books, it is important to remain humble in one’s judgments. The overconfident literary critic risks ending up in the same academic dustbin as the self-satisfied reviewer who (quoting from Macbeth) called one of William Faulkner’s greatest works “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Yet at the same time as Mr. Schwarz is right to counsel a certain degree of restraint and humility in literary criticism, I balk at his assertion that the literary value of “every . . . writer, past and present” is “simply a matter of opinion.” This is a pretty sweeping thesis, and it’s arrived at a bit too hastily. Calling the evaluation of novels entirely subjective, and utterly without objective criteria, can be a serious proposition—or it can be the refuge of a fairly unreflective reader. I’m not saying that Mr. Schwarz’s argument falls into the latter category, but I do think it’s worth considering a couple of his points a little more closely. First: Ian McEwan. I tend to agree with Mr. Schwarz that McEwan’s work has been overrated. I thought Atonement was quite good, especially insofar as it attempted to portray tragedy and memory in the context of modern medicine. But having since read a number of McEwan’s other works, it’s clear to me that the man has shortcomings as a writer. He often relies on gimmicks—implausible or unsatisfying narrative twists grounded in complex biology—to give his novels gravitas; and Saturday’s allegory and parallelism were disappointingly obvious for a writer of McEwan’s technical capabilities. Looking at Mr. Schwarz’s assessment of McEwan, though, I’m not sure it’s really fair to the author. Citing a couple of phrases from the novelist’s latest, Schwarz writes: “To me, these sentences are no more impressive than saying, ‘I bought a hot dog and ate it.’ Does this make me a snob? No, I just don’t like Ian McEwan.” That’s okay, but it’s hard for me to see how this is a serious and respectful assessment of McEwan’s work; these words express a blunt, negative preference, not a studied judgment. It’s not totally unlike saying, “Thomas Jefferson was a bad man and I just don’t like him.” That would be a fine, emotional reaction to express, but it would be a reaction without intellectual or scholarly value. There is admittedly a lot of disagreement about what constitutes good literature, and even more about what constitutes great literature. But the fact that there can be multiple assessments of a single work—say, Atonement–doesn’t have to mean that all critical judgments are necessarily useless and slapdash. In his controversial essay “An Elegy for the Canon,” Yale’s Harold Bloom asks his readers to consider where humans got the idea to create “literary work that the world would not willingly let die.” The essay, and Bloom’s criticism in general, is unrelenting in its confidence that some literary works are, indeed, better than others. The criteria Bloom uses to judge them are broad but useful. Novels and poems that are cliché or unoriginal in subject or style, or created for a practical or political purpose, or tritely psychoanalytical, or wholly specific to a single identity group, are quickly thrown aside. Works that transcend cultural boundaries, endure over time, and demonstrate extreme aesthetic sophistication are candidates for greatness. This is, of course, only an incomplete list of Bloom’s demands upon writers. Bloom’s is not the only system by which criticism can be guided, but it’s a good example of an approach to judging literature that is more intellectually rigorous than the easy pronouncement of likes and dislikes. It’s a scholarly approach, that is, that forces readers to reflect on why some literature is of lasting force and why some is forgotten as soon as CVS gets a new shipment from Harlequin. We can still go into any decent bookstore and buy a copy of Tristram Shandy or Finnegan’s Wake, and the explanation for this is more complex than the preferences of the average reader. Bloom’s essay, despite its flaws, at least has the virtue of explaining why respected English professors teach Dante instead of Dan Brown, and Jane Austen instead of Danielle Steel.
June 25, 2007
Ages and Angels Posted by Alexander Burns at 05:35 PM EST David Rapp’s cleverly titled homepage article today, “Land of Lincoln: How He Belongs to the Ages,” reviews a book by the Weekly Standard editor Andrew Ferguson about Abraham Lincoln’s place in American culture. I say the title of the piece is clever because I assume it refers to the famous words pronounced on Lincoln’s deathbed by War Secretary Edwin Stanton: “Now he belongs to the ages.” A famously short and elegant epitaph for the fallen President. Inan essay published in The New Yorker last month, the writer Adam Gopnik analyzes and complicates the place of Stanton’s words in American historical memory. Using Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals as a touchstone for a wider survey of Lincoln literature, Gopnik notes that there are two schools of thought regarding Stanton’s comments on his President’s death. According to a serious minority of historians, Lincoln’s bearded war minister actually said, “Now he belongs to the angels.” This alternative account comes originally from the records of Cpl. James Tanner, a war veteran and double amputee, who was present at Lincoln’s bedside and took down Stanton’s words as he heard them. This may not seem a very significant factual dispute, but Gopnik reads larger implications, some of them political, into the whole affair. He notes, for example, that the conservative James Swanson uses the word “angels,” whereas Goodwin, “a famous liberal,” sticks with “ages.” As Gopnik presents the disagreement, it’s symptomatic of a wider dispute between those who see Lincoln as a humanist hero, whose greatness comes from the recognition of his fellow men, and those who view the sixteenth President as, first and foremost, a “figure of Christian nobility,” favored and ultimately judged by God. Gopnik’s essay is compelling in composition and wide-ranging in focus. I wonder, though, whether his introductory emphasis on Stanton’s most famous words doesn’t miss the point a little bit. The disagreement among historians about just what, exactly, Stanton said that night is an interesting bit of trivia, and it’s a good case study in how historians use different kinds of historical evidence. I’d contend, though, that it doesn’t necessarily make sense to force Stanton’s hastily chosen words to summarize Lincoln’s place in history. If one sets aside some of the symbolic significance of his language, the difference between “ages” and “angels” is not that dramatic. Whichever noun Stanton chose that morning, his six-word declaration—“Now he belongs to the [insert word here]”—represents a spare, unsatisfying attempt to express comforting sentiments amidst unthinkable grief. When his peers looked to him for emotional leadership, this is the tone and extent of the emotion Stanton was able to express. If the job of historians is to reconstruct and interpret the past, as truthfully and unobtrusively as possible, perhaps it would be best to conclude that this is all we know, and all we need to know.
June 20, 2007
More on Humility and History Posted by Alexander Burns at 05:00 PM EST Back in January I wrote a post, “Humility and History,” that chided Barack Obama for promoting comparisons between himself and Abraham Lincoln a little too openly. Reacting to a couple of self-important comments by his campaign, and to his decision to announce his campaign in Springfield, Illinois, I wrote: “While Obama might be a promising candidate, he’s hardly earned the right to claim Lincoln’s mantle, and it comes off as awfully arrogant when he and his surrogates try to do so.” Five months later, there’s another presidential candidate who’s fashioning himself after a historically significant leader, and he’s doing it a little more gracefully than Obama. According to one ex-Reagan aide backing him, this contender, “like Ronald Reagan, is a man of tremendous substance. There is a sense in the party that none of the candidates is quite ‘it.’” Whatever that “it” might be, there are an awful lot of Republicans anxiously hoping that this supposedly Reagan-like figure will bring “it” to an otherwise uninspiring field of men vying for their party’s nomination. This man, former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson, recognizes this yearning among the GOP faithful and is coyly trying to walk in the footsteps of the fortieth President. Unlike Obama, Thompson hasn’t, to my knowledge, compared himself with a revered former President. In fact, at an event in Missouri he refused when an audience member asked him if he would. But while Thompson hasn’t publicized historical comparisons as openly as Obama, he’s clearly chased them all the same. This week, he flew to London to deliver a speech to the Policy Exchange think thank and meet with former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. There’s no real reason for Thompson to do this—Thatcher is hardly an influential figure in American politics, and Policy Exchange has little transatlantic influence—except to court further comparisons to Thatcher’s old friend Reagan. His speech at Policy Exchange was nothing surprising, mostly full of the platitudinous slogans that make up campaign speeches (Thomas Dewey’s “Our future lies ahead,” surely remains among the greatest.) It was an evidently sincere call for deeper cooperation between the United States and England, and it ended with an anecdote about Winston Churchill that sounded almost like a veiled apology for recent American blunders. My attention was caught by a few phrases: First, when Thompson denounced America’s “evil” enemies, I wondered whether it was an intentional allusion to Reagan’s 1982 speech to Parliament, discussed here last week. Second, when he sang the praises of the Anglo-American leadership duos “of Churchill and Roosevelt, of Thatcher and Reagan, and Blair and Bush,” it seemed like he was inviting his audience to add a fourth pairing: Thompson and Cameron. These rhetorical turns alone are not especially meaningful, but they accentuate the overall theatricality of Thompson’s trip to Britain. Posing for photographs with Baroness Thatcher, drumming up enthusiasm for Britain and America’s “special relationship,” castigating America’s foes in unambiguous and even simplistic terms—for a candidate whose observers are already likening him to Ronald Reagan, these are actions bound to yield further flattering comparisons. Like any good actor, Thompson knows the difference between telling his audience something and showing them the same thing. Obama’s campaign has employed historical analogy with little finesse, pompously telling his fans that their favored candidate is like Lincoln. The Thompson campaign is deploying a similarly pompous historical analogy, but, more cleverly, they are doing so by orchestrating suggestive, Reaganesque events. This method of exploiting historical memory seems more than a little disingenuous—Thompson’s, “What, me Reagan?” lines are particularly insincere—but it’s also more than a little clever. I expect, though, that it will backfire when Thompson finds that he’s created unbearably high expectations for himself.
June 16, 2007
Amnesty Now and Then III Posted by Alexander Burns at 05:30 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes in mild disagreement with Joshua Zeitz’s post “Amnesty Now and Then.” Mr. Gordon writes, “Joshua Zeitz’s linkage between a pardon for Richard Nixon and a pardon for Scooter Libby, and between some form of what I will call amnesty . . . for draft dodgers then and illegal aliens now, is a bit strained.” While endorsing the analogy between draft evaders and illegal immigrants, Mr. Gordon argues that the pardon of Richard Nixon and the pardon of Scooter Libby have relatively little in common. I don’t think this necessarily gets at the heart of Joshua Zeitz’s point—that Bush, like Ford, might do well to adopt a broadly forgiving approach to policymaking—but it’s a fair point all the same. I can’t say I agree with Mr. Gordon’s description of the Libby trial; Libby’s crime was actually not “practicing politics in Washington, D.C.,” but rather lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as an intellectually honest National Review contributor notes here. But let’s not rehash that debate again so soon. Mr. Gordon’s assessment of the Libby trial is actually less problematic, as far as I’m concerned, than his reading of the current struggle over immigration reform. In articulating his nominal point—agreeing in part, and disagreeing in part, with Mr. Zeitz—Mr. Gordon offers an extended analysis of the barriers to the passage of the Kennedy-McCain bill. This is an undeniably important policy debate, and it concerns one of the few areas of legislation where President Bush might actually be able to accomplish something before the end of his term. As an explanation of why the President has so far failed to achieve anything substantive, Mr. Gordon’s description of recent events falls short. As Mr. Gordon sees it, the main obstacles to immigration reform are not the rightist Republican senators who voted in droves against ending the debate on the bill but rather the Democratic leaders in the Senate. Mr. Gordon asserts that the “villains” of the immigration debate are Harry Reid and “his political Svengali, Senator Chuck Schumer,” who are “both . . . far more interested in political advantage than in solving the nation’s problems. If the country’s immigration problems have to continue to fester so that these two can deny an achievement to President Bush, so be it.” This is a strange account of the Senate’s clash over immigration. If Harry Reid wanted to prevent the passage of S.1348, he could simply have decided not to bring the bill to the floor, or have delayed its consideration while proposing, say, a censure resolution against Alberto Gonzales that would have sucked up all of Congress’s attention. Instead of doing either of these things, though, Reid brought the bill to the floor and withdrew it only when its Republican opponents proved so implacable as to prevent what Mitch McConnell might call “a fair up-or-down-vote.” Chuck Schumer’s record of action on this bill is similarly upstanding: He voted for cloture on S.1348 at each and every opportunity. Schumer is a shrewd and ruthless political operator, to be sure, but these are hardly the actions of a man determined to undermine the President’s immigration agenda. No, anyone who looks at the record of votes on the immigration bill can see where its most serious opposition lies, and that is with the Republican caucus. And what’s more, I don’t think it’s really true that, as Mr. Gordon suggests, President Bush has done all he can to win Republican support for immigration reform. “He was up on Capitol Hill this week lobbying GOP senators,” Mr. Gordon writes, “and is willing to spend his fast-dwindling store of political capital on it. His rhetoric on the bill has been unusually strong as well. I’m not sure what more he can do.” It’s true that the President sympathizes strongly with the aims of the Kennedy-McCain bill, and he has spoken out in its favor. But if the President is serious about winning significant bipartisan support for its passage, he should be willing to take on its Republican opponents more aggressively, rather than just pleading for their cooperation. He could threaten to withhold his services as a fundraiser for Republican candidates who won’t give the immigration bill a fair shake. One such candidate might be Jefferson Sessions, the diminutive senator from Alabama who is one of the bill’s top Senate opponents. He has a fundraising dinner scheduled with President Bush on June 21. I wonder how Sessions would react if Bush suddenly realized he had to wash his hair that night. In the same vein, last Wednesday, June 13, Bush appeared at a fundraiser for Republican congressional candidates that raised $15.4 million. Can you imagine how those congressional candidates would have responded if the White House had postponed the President’s appearance at the dinner indefinitely, due to Bush’s need to focus on passing immigration reform? Of course, these thoughts will remain purely speculative. The President won’t threaten Jeff Sessions, nor will he withhold one ounce of his fundraising capacity from other xenophobic congressional candidates. Mr. Gordon suggests that Harry Reid is “widely perceived as being a partisan first and a senator second.” I’d suggest that the President’s kid-gloves approach to negotiating with Senate Republicans shows that his priorities are at least as partisan as those of his opposition. Blame rests with a lot of different parties for the stalling of S.1348, and some of those parties are Democrats. But Mr. Gordon’s breakdown of that blame is decidedly one-sided, and its factual basis is tenuous at best. If this bill ever passes, it won’t be because Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer break under pressure but because the Republican caucus decides that immigration reform is an idea whose time has come.
June 14, 2007
No Captain Von Trapp Posted by Alexander Burns at 06:15 PM EST Kurt Waldheim is dead today at the age of 88. He died of heart failure, not from Waldheimer’s disease, an illness-according to a joke from the 1980s-in which you have trouble remembering that you were once a Nazi. Waldheim has to go down as one of the most successfully mendacious world leaders of the last quarter-century. As a hundred obituaries will soon describe, Waldheim served two terms as secretary-general of the United Nations and then, in 1986, won election as president of his native Austria. He accomplished the latter feat despite the inconveniently timed revelation that he’d spent several years in the 1940s as a Nazi storm trooper. When the Austrian magazine Profil first leveled the allegations against Waldheim, he rejected them entirely, but as information gradually trickled out, it became impossible for his denials to continue. It came out that Waldheim had joined a Nazi student group as early as age 20 and had, as a member of the Sturmabteilung, been attached to a division that committed atrocities in Greece and the Balkans. Looking back at Waldheim’s evolving reaction to the world’s discoveries about his past, it’s quite striking how defensive and unapologetic he was. Asked, on “60 Minutes,” why he omitted the fact of his military service from his 1985 autobiography, In the Eye of the Storm, Waldheim replied, “Out of almost 400 pages only 15 deal with my background as a child and youth.” Fair enough. With space constraints like those, it’s easy to see how a minor episode like signing up with the Nazis could get edited out. During the same television appearance, Waldheim also offered a slippery apology, as he put it, to “those of my American friends who felt misled that I left out part of my curriculum vitae.” I’m not sure whether that apology sounds more condescending or insincere, but there’s at least a little of each sentiment in there. Later, when the world learned that Waldheim had earned the Zvonimir combat medal from Nazi-run Croatia, the former diplomat gave a really pitiable, high school excuse. Yes, he said, I won the medal, but so did basically everyone in my unit! Thanks to a combination of good damage control by Waldheim’s campaign and a swelling of defensive, nationalist sentiment among Austrian voters, Waldheim won the Austrian presidency with 53.9 percent of the vote. In a way, though, this was just the beginning of his troubles. Both the American and Soviet ambassadors to Austria failed to attend his inauguration, and the United States put Waldheim on a “watch list” that prevented him from setting foot on American soil. In an attempt to clear his name of war-crimes accusations, Waldheim cooperated with a panel of historians that investigated his World War II service. But while no damning evidence of war crimes emerged, no smoking gun for some Belgian prosecutor to seize upon, the investigation also confirmed a series of inconvenient facts about Waldheim’s military career, corroborating the widespread perception that the Austrian leader was no Captain von Trapp. Waldheim’s name will probably not be especially well remembered; his tenure at the UN was undistinguished and his presidency never truly recovered from the scandal with which it began. His life story, though, is a reminder of just how inescapable the past can be–Waldheim succeeded in escaping his own past, but only for so long. It’s also troubling evidence that Austria still has a ways to go in order to fully come to terms with its role in the Second World War. It’s not really true that those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it, but it’s hard to see how a country that advances figures like Waldheim and Jörg Haider has tried to understand history at all.
June 13, 2007
More Normandy II Posted by Alexander Burns at 05:15 PM EST Fred Smoler’s post yesterday, “More Normandy,” added some interesting thoughts to our exchange about World War II and the uses of historical analogy. Mr. Smoler summarizes my argument–that the deterioration of American efforts in Iraq followed an increase and led to a decrease in heavy-handed historical analogy from both pro-war Americans and anti-war Europeans–and remarks that it is “a very logical and initially persuasive speculation,” but one that he does not necessarily agree with. Mr. Smoler suggests that anti-American sentiment in France actually did not increase in the run-up to the Iraq war, which it presumably would have in a situation where American arrogance was provoking caustic French editorials comparing the U.S. to Nazi Germany. I’m not sure in which information Mr. Smoler is grounding his assessment of French anti-Americanism, but I’m familiar with at least one or two sources that support a different set of conclusions. In March of 2003, during the last weeks of the run-up to war, the Pew Center conducted a survey of European attitudes toward the United States and the results were grim. In France, just 31 percent of respondents reported having a positive view of the United States, compared with 63 percent who did in 2002. To be precise about what that statistic means, it may not exactly indicate a doubling of anti-American sentiment, but it does show a halving of pro-American sentiment. The drop-off in France was not as precipitous as it was in Germany (61 percent in 2002 to 25 percent in 2003) or Russia (61 percent in 2002 to 28 percent in 2003), but it’s pretty good evidence of a decline in American standing there. Additionally, over a longer time period, from April of 2002 to March of 2004, French support for an independent European foreign policy grew by 15 percent. I think Mr. Smoler is probably right, in a sense, that anti-Americanism did not increase in France after “the burst of American France-baiting in the run-up to the war”–that is to say, I don’t think the French started resenting American foreign policy because some Americans said mean things about them. I do think, though, that these data show movement away from sympathy with the United States coinciding with America’s unrelenting preparations for war. I doubt that overblown, Rumsfeldian historical analogy, and the corresponding venom from Le Monde, set this Franco-American schism in motion, but these rhetorical exchanges were at least the proverbial smoke that signaled a more dangerous fire. None of this, incidentally, clashes with the point Mr. Smoler makes in the third paragraph of his post, that “it is mostly increasing U.S. power and apparent hyper-modernity that provokes apprehension and animosity . . . When the threat of American hegemony looks most acute, any rival of America’s may look good, and Chirac sought to bring in the Chinese as French allies against the U.S. When the Americans begin to falter, a second look at the prospect of Chinese hegemony may have made that alternative seem less appealing.” Indeed, this argument meshes nicely with the one I’ve made above, regarding the relationship between war preparations, rhetoric, and Franco-American animosity. And it also helps explain why someone like Nicolas Sarkozy, who might once have been rejected as an American fifth-columnist, a twenty-first-century Pétain, just moved in to the Palais d’Élysée.
June 12, 2007
On Evil Empires Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:50 AM EST In his front-page feature today, John Steele Gordon notes the anniversary of one of Ronald Reagan’s greatest performances–his speech at the Berlin Wall. Mr. Gordon says at the start of his piece that Reagan’s speech is still a good read and an important primary source from recent history. Mr. Gordon proceeds to give a good overview of the Berlin Wall’s history, its place in the divided German nation, and its educational value as a case study of the Cold War. Mr. Gordon alludes briefly to another case study in Cold War history that nicely illustrates the balancing act of international politics. He writes: “Reagan called the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire’ in 1983, rhetoric that would have been impossible a few years earlier and that caused much tut-tutting on the left.” Reagan’s speech, in which he first referred to the U.S.S.R. as an “evil empire,” was a controversial one delivered to the National Association of
Evangelicals. The year before, in a speech to Britain’s House of Commons, Reagan had already begun experimenting with the language that he used with such flair in 1983. In a short sequence of rhetorical questions, Reagan had asked Parliament, “Must civilization perish in a hail of fiery atoms? Must freedom wither in a quiet, deadening accommodation with totalitarian evil?” It was obvious to his listeners to which “totalitarian evil” Reagan was referring. Reagan remains famous for his uncompromising stand against Soviet Communism. But what makes these strident speeches useful as illustrations of Cold War power politics is the extent to which they clashed with Reagan’s actual policies. Today, no one could get away with calling the fortieth President soft on Communism. In the year he coined the term “evil empire,” however, that was not the case. A September 18, 1983, column by David Broder, “The Right is Really Sore at Reagan . . . ,” highlighted conservatives’ disapproval of Reagan’s temperate response to the Soviet downing of Korean Air Flight 007. Activist organs like the Paul Weyrich’s Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, Howard Phillips’s Conservative Caucus, and Richard Viguerie’s Conservative Digest blasted the President for his thoroughly un-militant reaction. Though Reagan called the Soviets’ attack “an act of barbarism,” his punitive response consisted mostly of a few gestures, like closing a couple of Aeroflot facilities in the United States. Activists like Weyrich believed that, by electing Reagan, they had installed a President who would be a tireless crusader against Communism, willing to go to almost Hobbesian lengths in order to advance the cause of capitalist democracy. And so they had. But Reagan, and the men who advised him, understood that rhetoric like the “evil empire” speech would be most effective when matched up with more measured, deliberate actions. For all the concern about his admitted belief in an impending apocalypse, Reagan did not actually want a nuclear war.
By berating and intimidating his Russian counterparts with fierce, even reckless rhetoric (which angered the left), but simultaneously showing them that the door to negotiated reform was open (angering the right), Reagan helped lay the groundwork for the substantive breakthroughs of the late 1980s.
June 8, 2007
Normandy and Anti-Americanism Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:00 AM EST I appreciated Fred Smoler’s reflections on his visit to Normandy in June of 2004 for the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day. I can only imagine what a moving experience that must have been. In his post, Mr. Smoler effectively unpacks and dismantles some of the European editorial criticism of the United States’s war in Iraq. Specifically, he rebuts the charge that the United States is essentially an occupier, an invader, and a supporter of fascism, less like the force Eisenhower led on June 6, 1944, than the one he fought against. Mr. Smoler also notes the relative lack of anti-American criticism visible on this week’s D-Day anniversary: “This year, no one is making noise about how we are betraying our legacy, nor, for that matter, about the legacy itself.” If I’m not misreading him, I take it that Mr. Smoler sees this situation as a mixed bag. On the one hand, no one is unfairly deriding the United States; on the other, few are remembering its greatest hours, either. Again, if I’m reading his sentiments correctly, I sympathize. A few days ago, in a post about John Kennedy’s ninetieth birthday, I wrote that the occasion wasn’t “especially significant this time around just because it includes a round number.” Unfortunately, when it comes to remembering events like those of June 6, the roundness of anniversary years is all too pivotal in determining how strong our memories are. On Mr. Smoler’s final point, I’d like to briefly put forward some thoughts aimed at explaining the relative dearth of anti-American criticism related to the D-Day anniversary this year. In addition to the fact that the anniversary has been observed less widely, in general, I’d suggest two other explanations, both related to the use and abuse of historical memory. The first is that, while critics of American policy are apparently less willing, this week, to twist the stories of World War II in order to assail the United States, so are boosters of American policy more timid in their creative employment of the same stories. In 2004, Le Monde editorialists were not the only ones misusing the history of the Second World War. At the Republican National Convention, Rudy Giuliani likened George Bush to Winston Churchill, and in an interview with “Good Morning America,” Dick Cheney seemed to liken himself to FDR while answering a question about the relationship between military service and presidential leadership. What’s more, at least as early as 2002, Donald Rumsfeld was likening the Bush administration’s global attitude to that of Churchill in 1938 and implying, less than subtly, that its liberal critics had more in common with the hapless Neville Chamberlain. Whatever you think of the President and his policies, such historical analogies seem a little imprudent. Casting one’s own, highly contested policy decisions in the stark moral terms of the Second World War is a recipe for brewing resentment among one’s opponents. It almost invites comparisons of equal and opposite absurdity, such as the one in Le Monde. This doesn’t excuse the French paper’s anti-American sentiments, but it does put them in the context of a trans-Atlantic exchange of simplistic historical analogy. Since then, as the situation in Iraq has continued to worsen, the Churchill/FDR talk here in the United States has become far less strident. And, in a kind of mutual disarmament, Europeans seem less bent on linking the current American administration to the Third Reich. The second point I’d like to make on this subject, and more briefly, is that the D-Day anniversary has also inspired less reflection on World War II and less related name-calling because a more apt historical analogy has developed for the Iraq war: Vietnam. These days, when people talk about Iraq, they are far more likely to refer to the Tet Offensive than the Normandy invasion. Even supporters of the war have fallen into this habit, with David Petraeus winning plaudits for his competence in the form of comparisons not to Eisenhower, but to Creighton Abrams. I tend to think this analogy is also imperfect (the consequences of defeat in Iraq are, for example, far worse than the consequences of defeat in Vietnam) but it’s something of an improvement.
June 7, 2007
Presidential Longevity II Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:00 AM EST Two days ago, John Steele Gordon made a post, “Presidential Longevity,” that got me thinking. His entry raises an intriguing thesis, that the drop-off in Presidential life spans during the nineteenth century was a byproduct of industrialization and population growth, and that the elongation of the life spans of late twentieth-century Presidents was principally the result of modern medical advances. There can be no doubt about the second point. As Mr. Gordon observes, Ronald Reagan would likely have perished at John Hinckley’s hand if the doctors at George Washington University Hospital had been using the same methods that their medical predecessors used as they tried to save William McKinley from another assassin’s bullet, 80 years earlier. Additionally, even some recent Presidents who lived more briefly lived far longer than they would have a hundred years before. Without the advice and care of modern physicians, Lyndon Johnson might have died from a heart attack before ever reaching the Oval Office. Dwight Eisenhower might have died there from one of his own. On the question of the short-lived leaders of the nineteenth century, the evidence is considerably murkier, and resists simple conclusions. Looking down a list of presidential life spans, there is indeed a long stretch of shorter-lived Presidents between Martin Van Buren and Herbert Hoover. But can the cleanliness (or lack thereof) of their times effectively explain this? I doubt it. If you look beyond the birth and death dates of the individuals concerned, it is clear that many of them died early for reasons unrelated to changes in America’s living conditions. William Henry Harrison, for example, the first President after Van Buren, fell ill of pneumonia after riding through the bitterly cold streets of Washington at his inauguration. He was 68. Franklin Pierce, who only lived to 64, died from liver problems related to alcoholism. Benjamin Harrison, like the earlier President Harrison, succumbed to pneumonia in the wintertime at age 67. Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley were all shot (at 56, 49, and 58, respectively). Furthermore, with patterns like these, it matters an awful lot how one arranges the numbers. Mr. Gordon sees a pattern in the lives of Presidents from John Adams to Calvin Coolidge, excluding James Buchanan. But what happens if one includes George Washington, who died at 67? Or what if one adds in Vice Presidents, including Hannibal Hamlin, who lived to 81, and the amazingly durable Levi Morton, who died at 96? Mr. Gordon asks, “what accounts for the fact that four of the first six Presidents lived to be 80 or more?” But one could just as easily ask, what accounts for the fact that only two of the five Presidents who served between 1932 and 1968 reached the age of 65? There are easy answers to the question, but they are rooted in individual circumstances rather than sweeping trends. Mr. Gordon suggests that “[w]ith so small a sample [of people], of course, it could be mere coincidence” that presidential life spans appear to change over time as he describes. This suggestion seems like the right one. A few early Presidents were unusually long-lived, most of their successors varied in life span within a predictable range, and a few recent Presidents have benefited from important developments in medicine. Beyond that, time and chance happeneth to them all.
June 3, 2007
From Jamestown to Jerusalem Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:50 PM EST Yesterday I enjoyed reading this weekend’s homepage feature, a piece by Jon Grinspan about the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem. Mr. Grinspan traces an interesting story of Americans abroad and makes an alluring case for visiting the hotel. The first sentence of the piece caught my eye: “Few people associate Jerusalem with American history.” For the last 60 years of the American-Israeli relationship, this has been becoming less and less true, as the focus of U.S. foreign policy has repeatedly turned toward the various struggles and peace processes in Israel. Yet Mr. Grinspan is undoubtedly right that most people do not think of Jerusalem, and indeed the Mideast more broadly, as a central part of American history—at least until around 1948. There’s one historian, though, who sees things rather differently. A fellow at Jerusalem’s Salem Center, and a former visiting professor at two Ivy League universities, Michael Oren recently published an expansive history of American involvement in Western Asia, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present. Released this year to positive if slightly mixed reviews, Oren’s history traces the relationship between the United States and the Middle East back to long before the United Nations recommended the partition of Palestine. Oren’s history features early American explorers, like John Ledyard, who reported with unease that “the Arab language has no word for ‘liberty.’” It includes New England missionaries attempting religious and civic education in the Middle East, and in the process founding the Syrian Protestant College, now the American University of Beirut. Christopher Hitchens explored some of the early actions of the American government in that region in his brief book on Thomas Jefferson. Oren’s work, approximately 700 pages long, is a far more thorough survey. In a recent post on this blog regarding the twentieth-century relationship between America and Israel, Joshua Zeitz wrote that the Six-Day War has been seriously misinterpreted as a spur for the rightward migration of American Jews. This episode, writes Mr. Zeitz, “laid the foundation of an inaccurate but still resonant charge that blames American Jews for so many of the world’s woes, even as it fundamentally misreads American Jewish political culture.” For those who believe America’s present-day engagement in Middle Eastern affairs is largely a product of Jewish influence, and for those who are interested in the history of American foreign relations more generally, Oren’s scholarly work, including Power, Faith, and Fantasy, is a useful contribution.
June 3, 2007
Thank You for Smoking Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:00 AM EST Last week Fred Schwarz posted about the Motion Picture Association of America’s new restrictions on the portrayal of smoking on screen. In his post, Mr. Schwarz quoted a National Review article that turns on its head the idea that smoking in films causes smoking off screen by making the habit seem fashionable. Instead, this article argues that “people [smoke] in movies because it’s cool.” I don’t think I totally buy this, or at least I don’t buy that there’s not a connection between behavior in movies and behavior out of them. An often cited example of imitated on-screen behavior is Macaulay Culkin’s arm-pumping victory motion in Home Alone, usually accompanied by a hissed, “Yesss,” which took elementary schools by storm at approximately the same time I was learning to read. If one movie could so quickly popularize this silly action, I don’t see why a similar thing couldn’t happen with the far more ubiquitous cinematic activity of smoking. A second point in Mr. Schwarz's post, and one I find totally convincing, is that the main dramatic function of smoking on screen is to “inject some movement . . . into what otherwise would be a static scene of talking heads: ‘It draws attention inexorably to the smoker and away from whatever mediocre dialogue he or she is forced to say.’” Incidentally, cigarettes, cigars, lighters, and other smoking items are also among the only accessories male characters can carry with them. James Bond could not have disguised a microfilm reader inside a purse. Instead, a cigarette case and lighter had to suffice. Today, admittedly, there are iPods, cell phones, and PDAs as well, options Sean Connery and Roger Moore would never have considered. What will replace smoking, if the MPAA regulations have the desired effect? Mr. Schwarz suggests drinking, rock/paper/scissors, dance motions, or knitting. I’d like to add another option, perhaps slightly more serious, to this list: eating. A popular piece of trivia about the 2001 version of Ocean’s Eleven is that Brad Pitt’s character is constantly eating. According to the Internet Movie Database, “This was because the whole gang (his character in particular) would be so busy that they’d rarely be able to eat.” Accidental though this character choice may have been, it strikes me as appropriate that nervous eating would replace smoking as the American film character’s casual habit of choice. I believe the sentiment was best expressed by Christopher Buckley in his novel Thank You For Smoking, in which his main character is a successful tobacco lobbyist. At one point the lobbyist, Nick Naylor, goes into an ice cream parlor and reflects on the irony that his country judges smoking so harshly while devouring such a decadent (and, might I add, delicious) dessert.
June 2, 2007
Paranoia, Bias, and Outspokenness Posted by Alexander Burns at 05:10 PM EST Of the less history-based discussion topics on this blog, media bias has to rank among the most popular. I think I’ve made it clear on previous occasions that I tend to think the whole subject is wildly overblown, and that any media bias that exists is mostly toward the sensational. As much as I might hope, however, the issue isn’t going away any time soon, and part of the reason for that is people like Laura Ingraham. As Talking Points Memo already noted this morning, there was a rather bizarre confrontation yesterday on CNN’s American Morning. Ingraham was discussing the Senate’s current immigration reform proposal with CNN host John Roberts. Ingraham, who dislikes the White House–backed plan, suggested that President Bush might be alienating right-wingers with this plan with the expectation that “he’s going to be saved by the liberal elites at CNN.” When Roberts balked at his guest’s comment, Ingraham got snippy: “By the way, John, how did you introduce me for this segment before the break? ‘The outspoken Laura Ingraham.’ Do you guys introduce liberal commentators that way? I’m going to check.” This is, needless to say, strange behavior from someone who is, by all accounts, exceedingly and literally outspoken. It’s symptomatic of an attitude that’s epidemic among some conservatives, who believe that sneaky, left-wing media barons are somewhere plotting to destroy them, in between rounds of croquet with Ted Kennedy and karaoke with Barbara Streisand. Perhaps more useful than what Ingraham’s outburst indicates about conservatives and the media, however, is the reflection that it inspires about the word in question. Taking Laura Ingraham’s question all too seriously, I wondered: Okay, who do our news sources describe as “outspoken”? A brief search of CNN’s website yields a curious list. In the last month, CNN has used the word to refer to a wide array of characters, including Chuck Hagel, Gore Vidal, Nicolas Sarkozy, Alexander Litvinenko, and Marie Osmond. Not exactly a who’s who of the conservative movement. Fox’s website seems at first to present a somewhat more coherent list of “outspoken” people: Theresa Heinz Kerry, Cindy Sheehan, John Murtha, Jimmy Carter, et al. At the same time, though, this network still uses the label loosely, also tagging conservatives Sam Brownback and Tom Tancredo and non-politicians Lance Armstrong and José Mourinho. There’s not much of a pattern that emerges from either of these networks, so perhaps the best-supported conclusion one can draw is that television commentators use the label with little method or deliberation. For organizations that aspire to some degree of neutrality, outspokenness is not a value-laden quality. For other media outlets, though, like the liberal Nation magazine and the conservative Weekly Standard, outspokenness seems to be a positively commendable quality. In The Nation, the word is almost entirely reserved for references to admired figures to the left of center: Sen. Jim Webb, Lieberman foe Ned Lamont, Rep. Jim McGovern, comedian Lewis Black, Harvard president Drew Faust, and more. Last February in The Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol published an editorial imploring Republicans to show “a little more courage and outspokenness” in defending the Iraq war. Far from value-neutral description, outspokenness is treated as an admired attribute among those who have agendas to promote.
May 31, 2007
Kennedy at 90 Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:15 PM EST Two days ago, on May 29, a few news sources, including the Boston Globe and the New York Sun, noted the ninetieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s birth. It’s a meaningless occasion, in some respects. Kennedy’s birthday comes every year, and it isn’t especially significant this time around just because it includes a round number. Just months after Gerald Ford’s death, however, Kennedy’s birthday inspires an unsettling reflection: If the thirty-fifth President were alive today, he would be younger than Ford was when he died last December. And he would have been 87 years old in 2004, when Ronald Reagan died at the age of 93. It reminds one of just how young Kennedy was in 1960 to consider that he was six years younger than Reagan, who would not even hold public office until six years later, and who would not win the presidency for another two decades. Kennedy’s birthday is also a sobering reminder of the role that contingency plays in history. Since his death, more than a few have considered how America might be different, had he not been assassinated. In 2003, for the anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination, the historian Nigel Hamilton responded to this question with an alternative timeline for the last 40 years, published in The New York Times. Hamilton’s piece was pretty far-fetched, including such events as the 1969 appointment of Martin Luther King, Jr., as Vice President, the conviction of O. J. Simpson, and a triumphant visit to Hawaii for the fiftieth anniversary of World War II’s end—by President Colin Powell. Despite its sillier qualities, Hamilton’s alternative history usefully emphasizes the historical influence of chance events like the assassination. And, with a more measured approach, it’s not so hard to imagine a meaningfully different twentieth century, absent the Kennedy assassination. If Kennedy had lived, perhaps he, instead of Jimmy Carter, might have been the globetrotting President to win the Nobel Prize some 20 years after leaving office. It might have been he, rather than Lyndon Johnson, who rammed through the most important civil rights legislation of the century. At the same time, however, Kennedy might be more vigorously indicted for his slow approach to civil rights during his Senate service and first presidential term. It might also have been Kennedy, rather than his successor, who ended up stuck with the responsibility for war in Southeast Asia. It’s hard to pin down exactly how we might think of Kennedy if a bullet hadn’t found him so young. It’s almost certain, though, that a good part of his golden memory comes from his early death. In 1996, Professor Michael Nelson of Rhodes College published an article comparing Kennedy with the classical hero Achilles. “Achilles’ appeal,” Nelson wrote, “may be traced to his beauty, valor, might, striving, and individuality, all overlaid by the early, violent nature of his death.” Bringing his point home, Nelson continued: “The inconvenient presence of a 70-year-old Achilles almost certainly would have dimmed the lustre of his majestic youth.” As Nelson suggests, perhaps the same is true of Kennedy. Still, there’s something unavoidably sad about a President who, as his youngest brother said in 1999, “had every gift but length of years.”
May 31, 2007
FDR's Electoral Margins II Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:55 AM EST I’m struck by the election returns that John Steele Gordon provides in his latest post. I was aware of the general arc of Roosevelt’s presidential campaigns, but I had never actually looked at the popular vote totals. One interesting characteristic of these numbers, as Mr. Gordon points out, is how they reflect the decline in America’s voting population as a result of the war. Another is the relative stability of Roosevelt’s vote totals over time. His lowest total was 22.8 million in 1932; his highest 27.8 in 1936. These results, along with the other two, are grouped tightly around his average electoral pull of approximately 25.9 million votes. In other words, over four presidential elections, his returns showed remarkably little variation compared with those of Presidents since. (Consider, in contrast, the difference of 10 million votes between Reagan’s returns in 1980 and 1984, and the almost identical drop-off between George H. W. Bush’s performances in 1988 and 1992.) Judging from these returns, if Franklin Roosevelt had not persuaded a single additional person to vote for him after 1932 but had managed to keep his existing voter base intact, he still would have triumphed over his opponents in three subsequent elections. This isn’t a tremendously clever observation; you could say something similar about any candidate winning in a massive electoral landslide. Yet, there’s something significant about the fact that FDR at his worst outperformed all of his Republican opponents at their best. In light of this, I think Fred Smoler’s point, which Mr. Gordon echoes, holds: Newspapers could not bring down Roosevelt, no matter how bilious their headlines. I suppose I’d agree with Mr. Gordon that this is partly due to the fact that in ’36, ’40, and ’44, most “everyone ‘knew’ Roosevelt and knew what they thought about him.” The facts about Roosevelt, however, changed during that time period. He took controversial stances (court-packing, expanding involvement in Europe, etc.) that could have dislodged many more voters and might have caused more Americans to seriously reconsider just how well they “knew” the man in the White House. It was a unique accomplishment for the President to move the country as far as he did without incurring a greater backlash from his base of urban ethnics and racial minorities, white Southerners, and union members. It would take many more words than a blog post contains to fully analyze and explain Roosevelt’s electoral successes. A good bit of it has to be attributed to his inborn political talent. His ability to phrase controversial policy proposals in accessible, folksy language (analogizing the lend-lease program to lending a neighbor a garden hose when his house is on fire, for example) is perhaps the best example of this. Roosevelt also mastered the skill of pacing himself, of not pushing for too much change, too quickly. As Doris Kearns Goodwin has related in No Ordinary Time, her husband’s deliberately slow speed frustrated Eleanor Roosevelt when it came to issues like desegregating the armed forces. On issues like involvement in World War II, though, this gradual pacing helped preserve the President’s political coalition. 1932 was an unmitigated disaster for Republicans, but it’s not necessarily the case that the three remaining elections had to be similarly crushing. Thus, a second cause I’d suggest for Roosevelt’s consistent success would be the repeated failure of the Republicans to present a compelling and well defined alternative to the Democrats, and to engage Roosevelt in his areas of greatest vulnerability. In 1940, for example, Republicans nominated Wendell Willkie, who refused to drum up the nation’s spirit of anti-interventionism until the last weeks of his campaign. Charles Peters, in his snappy little volume Five Days in Philadelphia, has suggested that Willkie’s restrained campaign saved Roosevelt’s agenda but doomed his party’s fortunes at the ballot box. This seems a reasonable assessment. There are many lessons to learn from the example of Franklin Roosevelt, and the mechanics of maintaining a national coalition is not the least of them. Except, debatably, for Ronald Reagan, no other leader has built a similarly stable and durable political alliance since Roosevelt’s death. In this case, the numbers do not lie.
May 15, 2007
Writing About Buckley Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:50 PM EST Joshua Zeitz’s front-page feature today reviews a new biography of William F. Buckley, Jr. The verdict from Mr. Zeitz is disappointing: The book is “too much an appreciation, rather than a critical study of a man whose influence on American political thought has run both wide and deep.” For those interested in Buckley’s career, and especially the earliest part of it, I recommend a glance at the final chapters of Sam Tanenhaus’s 1997 biography of Whittaker Chambers. It contains a brief but vivid portrait of Buckley. He comes across as a phenomenally gifted young thinker, determined to cleanse the American right of kooks and bigots and make it into a movement worth leading. “He is something special,” Chambers tells his wife, Esther, after a meeting with Buckley. “He was born, not made, and not many like that are born in any time.” Tanenhaus also notes the “glamour and style, the heedless joy of privileged youth,” that Buckley brought to conservatism. He and his wife, Patricia Taylor Buckley, “a Vancouver heiress as tall and striking as her husband,” helped produce an atmosphere in which, for the first time in a long time, it seemed like conservatism did not have to be the exclusive domain of grouchy old men like Robert Taft. Buckley was also a flamethrower, willing even to sabotage the Republican Presidency of Dwight Eisenhower in order to advance his more staunchly rightist cause. Obviously, the 40-page conclusion of another man’s biography does not do justice to Buckley, nor does it render him in the intensely critical light he deserves. However, readers like Mr. Zeitz and myself, who believe this figure “deserves a first-rate biography,” may not have long to wait. Tanenhaus is at work on another volume that promises to reproduce the success of Whittaker Chambers. This time, his subject is William F. Buckley, Jr..
May 13, 2007
Gloria Steinem’s Friends Posted by Alexander Burns at 08:20 PM EST John Steele Gordon and Joshua Zeitz have been discussing feminism, Bill Clinton, and Monica Lewinsky. Again, without any desire to interrupt, I think a minor bit of outside evidence might be useful. Messrs. Zeitz and Gordon are debating, in part, whether “Gloria Steinem et al.” treated Bill Clinton better than he deserved because he was a Democrat, and whether a “moderate Republican (like Bob Packwood)” would have been allowed to get away with such behavior. To add my two cents, I think Clinton’s behavior should have elicited a much more censorious response from leading feminists. My aim in posting, however, is not to hold forth about that man’s personal improprieties. Instead, I’d like to offer a little evidence that Gloria Steinem is somewhat more politically unpredictable than Mr. Gordon suggests. The Clinton scandal was not the only affair of the 1990s in which Steinem was offered the chance to comment on the sexual ethics of a Democratic politician. At the beginning of the decade, long before anyone ever knew the name of Monica Lewinsky, Democratic Senator Chuck Robb of Virginia, the son-in-law of Lyndon Johnson, was caught in a liaison with a much younger woman—a onetime Miss Virginia, as a matter of fact. This was surprising at the time, since Robb had long been viewed as an upstanding veteran and a “conservative, stodgy, almost boring family man.” In response to the revelations about his personal life, Robb, like Clinton, split hairs over the details of his affair. In the face of evidence that he had engaged in some sex acts with the former beauty queen, Tai Collins, Robb denied having committed adultery because he had never had sexual intercourse with a woman other than his wife. Despite Robb’s status as a Democrat in good standing, Gloria Steinem thought his explanations were too clever by half. “People do care very deeply about our leaders telling the truth,” she told the Washington Post in an interview during Robb’s 1994 reelection campaign. “By Robb’s logic in this case, it’s kind of like saying if he’d had oral sex with another man, he wouldn’t be homosexual.” While Steinem did not accuse Robb of committing sexual harassment or taking advantage of a younger woman (Collins was 30 at the time their affair began), she did make it obvious that she considered the senator a dissembler and a hypocrite. A secondary note is that Steinem may be, as Mr. Gordon and Mr. Zeitz agree, a staunch Democrat, but she has not always hewed so close to the party line. In 1980, an op-ed columnist criticized Steinem’s decision to raise funds through a NARAL mailing list for “a candidate for the U.S. Senate who had voted for the neutron bomb, for recision of their ERA votes by states that had already ratified, for arms sales to Chile, against public financing of Congressional campaigns and against hospital cost containment.” With a phrase that now seems ironic, the columnist continued: “Of course, the candidate is Sen. Bob Packwood of Oregon.” Before the scandal that unraveled his Senate career, Packwood was known for his pro-choice views and his easy relationships with liberals like Steinem. Together, Packwood and Steinem fought Henry Hyde’s eponymous anti-abortion legislation. It was in an act of principle that Steinem pivoted to oppose Packwood. And it may have been a result of the enduring antagonism between her and Congressman Hyde, who returned to prominence as Bill Clinton’s tormentor, that prevented her from turning similarly on the forty-second President.
May 13, 2007
Gary Hart VII Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:50 AM EST I have no desire to interrupt the exchange unfolding between Joshua Zeitz and John Steele Gordon. Just briefly, though, I’d like to respond to Mr. Gordon’s earlier post in which he writes that he is “interested . . . that neither Mr. Burns nor Mr. Smoler mentioned the 800-pound gorilla of American sex scandals, the Monica Lewinsky uproar.” I left it out of my post because I’m not sure it really serves as evidence of the kind of hypocrisy that I was arguing merits intrusion into a politician’s private life. There’s probably an argument to be made that Clinton’s behavior constituted hypocrisy. For example, it takes a certain degree of gumption to champion welfare reform designed to encourage responsible family behavior, while simultaneously wrecking your own family. That’s a more difficult case to make, though, than the one against Steve LaTourette. In his post, Mr. Gordon also says he doubts that “some latter-day combination of William Allen White, Edward R. Murrow, and Walter Lippmann could have brought himself to suppress” the Lewinsky story. Maybe so, maybe not. On the tail end of the Clinton impeachment affair, it actually came out that one mediocre reporter, no Murrow or Lippmann he, had been sitting on a hugely salacious story that arguably merited reporting even more than the Lewinsky news. Lloyd Grove, the author of the Washington Post’s gossip column, had known for some time about a rumored affair between House Speaker New Gingrich and a much younger aide, Callista Bisek. If one believes that the press ought to expose hypocrisy, then it would seem hard to justify keeping it secret that Bill Clinton’s most enthusiastic antagonist was carrying on an extramarital tryst of his own. Grove has never explained his decision in a terribly plausible way. The news of Gingrich’s affair came out, regardless of Grove’s discretion, and Callista Bisek is now what some former Gingrich staffers call “Wife No. 3.” If Gingrich decides to make his own bid for President, I suspect we’ll be hearing much more about this whole history. And if the former speaker expects everything to turn out well, he should talk to Gary Hart.
May 10, 2007
Gary Hart II Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:30 AM EST Like Fred Smoler, I appreciated John Steele Gordon’s feature article on Gary Hart on Tuesday. Hart has distinguished himself in the last couple of decades as one of the relatively few men who continue to think productively about policy after leaving public office. Most of them tend to follow the example of Paul Laxalt or Dale Bumpers, both elected with Hart in 1974, who retired into comfortable lives of consulting and cushy legal work. Hart, whose life is doubtless just as comfortable, has stayed active in the realm of politics and public debate and earned a graduate degree from Oxford in 2001. One reader has noted this in the comments section of this website. It’s remarkable that a motivated and pretty thoughtful person like Hart could have let his presidential aspirations founder on such a stupid mistake. Also, like Fred Smoler, I think it would be nice if the press would be a little more reluctant to pry into the “legal aspects of [the] consensual sexual lives” of public figures. At the same time, I’m not sure I’d agree that “a politician’s sexual life is none of my business, any more than mine is of a politician’s.” I’d argue that there are some situations in which a public figure’s sex life is fair game for journalists. When a politician sets himself up as an advocate of moral virtues or family values, but leads a life that’s inconsistent with his own ethical prescriptions, it should be legitimate for journalists to challenge him. Recent history provides many examples of such hypocrisy. Congressman Steve LaTourette, for example, voted for the Defense of Marriage Act and then divorced his wife for a staffer he’d been sleeping with. This is hardly a vital matter of public concern, but if the press has a right to reveal insincerity and duplicitousness, then LaTourette’s sex life has to be in bounds. More recently, Representative Harold Ford lost a Senate election last November in which he presented himself as a Democrat with traditional social values. When it came out that he had partied at the Playboy mansion, Ford’s campaign unraveled fast. I find it hard to pity him. Investigations of a person’s private life can, of course, become too invasive. But we live in a time when public personalities have to lay open their private lives, and regrettable though that may be, I doubt that it’s possible to turn back the proverbial clock. The best and most realistic hope for the future is that reporters will focus on outing hypocrites, rather than on embarrassing basically decent but flawed people. Some good men will suffer, but if a few more two-faced politicians, like former Congressman Mark Foley or former Kentucky Governor Paul Patton, are made to answer for their errant ways, I’m not sure their constituents will be the worse off for it.
May 3, 2007
The People Who Shape Our World Posted by Alexander Burns at 05:20 PM EST It’s that special time of the year again, and Matt Drudge is hysterical. Time has unveiled its list of the “100 men and women whose power, talent or moral example is transforming the world.” Drudge is stunned that George Bush didn’t make the cut. Late last year, there was a discussion on this blog about the Atlantic Monthly’s list of the 100 most influential people in American history. Time’s list is a rather different affair and, in some ways, no less silly. To Time’s credit, some of the entries are rather more creative than they have been in previous years. A few of them inspire further reflections on my and Mr. Gordon’s exchange of the last few days. The first entry in the list’s “Leaders & Revolutionaries” category is Queen Elizabeth II. On a list that does not include the President of the United States, the inclusion of this ceremonial head of state struck me, at first, as fairly laughable. The blurb that accompanies the Queen’s name is somewhat illuminating. The author of Elizabeth’s profile, Catherine Mayer, writes that “the secret of the Queen’s success” is that “she understands the need for reforms, such as slimming the costs of her family to the taxpayer and opening her accounts to public scrutiny, but she has never compromised her identity.” In all fairness to Her Majesty, it is important to acknowledge that her recent reign has indeed seen considerably greater fiscal responsibility from the royal family, despite the still-massive public expenditures on their behalf. If she were not tarred by the sins of her children (and their spouses), I might find her easier to admire. More startling to me, though, than the Queen’s inclusion on this list, was the blurb written for another person’s entry. This remarkable woman, writes guest contributor Nelson Mandela, “overcame almost every obstacle that a person might face. She is an icon to people all over the world because of her commitment to help those who have faced similar obstacles.” Powerful praise indeed, coming from Nelson Mandela. You’d almost think, with his talk of overcoming all conceivable obstacles, that he was describing a female version of himself. So, who is this woman? Some political icon, perhaps? Another Third World leader who rose above her country’s turmoil to promote peace and prosperity? Someone, perhaps, like Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the president of Liberia? No, Mandela’s high praise is reserved for someone who may come closer than any American to playing the part of Queen: Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey’s charitable work is laudable, and to include her among a list of today’s most influential Americans is probably a good idea. At the same time, there’s something that strikes me as distasteful about a democratic revolutionary and transformative global figure like Mandela inclining his head before this monarch of daytime television. This is certainly a useful reminder that, when one trades in a ceremonial head of state, like Elizabeth Windsor, for a wholly elected one, like George Bush, the search for national idols does not cease. It just turns toward places like Hollywood, and toward institutions like Harpo Productions.
May 3, 2007
Presidents and Monarchs II Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:10 AM EST Despite our continued and intractable disagreement, I don’t mind carrying on my conversation with John Steele Gordon about monarchies and Presidents. Mr. Gordon writes of his exchange with me: “On this subject, I think partially with my heart; he, it seems, only with his brain.” Maybe so, but if one is going to do some thinking, the brain doesn’t seem like a bad organ to use. Naturally, a little sentimentality is understandable in dealing with an institution like the monarchy. To quote Mr. Gordon, though: “A few points.” First, it’s not entirely true that “Buckingham Palace is not maintained with public monies, but with the gate receipts of people who pay to see the various royal palaces.” Last summer, due to a tight budget and expanding costs, the managers of Buckingham Palace had to appeal directly to the state for help with funding. Alan Reid, the Queen’s accountant, told the Times of London: “We are being squeezed by our water, gas and electricity bills, which last year were £2.1 million . . . leaving less for essential maintenance work at a time when the building industry is subject to higher than average inflation.” This request for additional funding came, by the way, on top of a previous annual grant of fifteen million pounds for royal palaces. Furthermore, it seems that not all of this money comes from gate receipts. Reid, at the time, explained that raising entrance fees was not an acceptable way of meeting the Queen’s revenue needs, as the monarch should not be “over-commercialised.” I’ll add, at this point, that I’m not an expert on Britain’s budget, so if I have, for whatever reason, misunderstood the funding of royal properties, I’d be grateful to Mr. Gordon for some hard information showing me where I’ve gone astray. Otherwise, it looks like Buckingham really is a “private residence paid for with public monies.” I’m not entirely unsympathetic to Mr. Gordon’s argument that I should be “a little more forgiving” of royal family members, “as perfection is hard to come by. Both princes and Presidents are made of the same stuff, human clay, and therefore equally miserable sinners.” This might be true. I suppose my point is, few people expect absolutely flawless personal conduct from a President, whereas it’s essentially the only thing that someone expects from a twenty-first-century Western European monarch. Fortunately for some Presidents, poor personal conduct or failure to “embody the nation’s spirit” can be balanced out by deft policy formulation and excellent governing skills. These days, a monarch—perhaps, one day, King Charles III—has no such alternative route to success. If citizens have to go through the exercise of pretending a leader is “Dei Gratia Regina,” they have a right to expect a record of truly exemplary comportment from that person. There’s really nothing else they can ask for. In the end, though, I’m not sure I agree with Mr. Gordon that there’s not much heart in my position. I have little patience for the monarchy, but I don’t think the alternative is necessarily so dry and unromantic. While Mr. Gordon disparages the office of prime minister as one for a “worn-out bureaucrat (the usual occupant of the office of head of state in a parliamentary government),” I’d argue that there is more than a little glory in the succession of leaders from Walpole to the Pitts, to Wellington and Peel, running straight down to Thatcher and Blair. Maybe they haven’t ruled by the grace of God, but if they’ve done their jobs well, ruling by the grace of elections will do for me.
May 2, 2007
Citizen Kane and Prince Charles IV Posted by Alexander Burns at 12:30 PM EST Well, it seems that John Steele Gordon and I agree on at least one thing: Gangs of New York was dreadful. Mr. Gordon makes a good point about Buckingham Palace: It “would be maintained in splendor whether a monarch or a President was living there.” I suppose it might just be a democratic (small d) hobbyhorse of mine, but I’d simply find the maintenance of such a massive palace more palatable if the residents were chosen by a process other than hereditary succession. I certainly don’t think it would be wasteful to maintain a historically significant building like Buckingham Palace if it were maintained as a public historical site. My objection, and my sense that its upkeep is wasteful, is grounded in the fact that Buckingham is a private residence paid for with public monies. More broadly, though, I think there’s at least a slight tension in Mr. Gordon’s discussion of the monarchy. On the one hand, he writes that royal heirs “could argue that they, like everyone else, did not get to choose their parents and therefore shouldn’t have to behave any better than everyone else.” On the other hand, Mr. Gordon says that a monarch is “someone with 1,200 years of the nation’s history in his or her veins . . . with all the very real if atavistic magnetism and charisma of a genuine monarch.” It seems to me that the royal family can either be embodiments of their nation’s spirit or flawed, philandering elites—but not both. An heir cannot really live a reckless life until the age of 50 and then expect to be viewed as a serious moral leader upon taking the throne. It also seems to me, sadly, that the younger generations of royals have decisively made the choice for vice. There’s also, I’ll add, something slightly unpersuasive about the argument that the civil list is a tolerable expense because it “amounts to about 11 pence per British subject per year.” This kind of argument is all too often deployed in order to avoid a substantive debate about public expenditures. I don’t mean to rap Mr. Gordon for this particular offense, since he actually is discussing the pros and cons of spending money on the royal family. The idea, though, that a large public expense can be reduced to a tiny per capita value is problematic. In the early 1990s, for example, defenders of the National Endowment for the Arts opposed cuts to the program by arguing that it cost each American only 64 cents. Arguing, in 2000, for large-scale Third World debt relief, Jeffrey Sachs touted a proposal that would require only 60 cents annually from each U.S. citizen, for only four years. I’m sympathetic to both Sachs and the NEA, but, obviously, tiny expenses like these eventually add up. The important question is not whether every citizen would willingly pay 50 cents or 95 or 12 to support a particular program, but, rather, whether the money should be spent at all. In the end, I suspect that Mr. Gordon and I have something of an irreconcilable difference of preference here. I don’t expect to persuade him that the royal family is useless, nor, I imagine, does he expect to convince me that my somewhat reactionary democratic impulse is a bad one. As has been the case before, though, this difference has led to a very productive conversation, and I thank him for that.
May 1, 2007
Citizen Kane and Prince Charles II Posted by Alexander Burns at 01:45 PM EST Thanks to John Steele Gordon for pointing out my unclear wording. Undoubtedly, I should have written: “I suppose, by Bragg’s preferences, the producers of Citizen Kane should still be liable to the estate of William Randolph Hearst for possible distortions of the man’s character.” In any case, though, I intended this comment as a figure of speech. The producers of Citizen Kane, Orson Welles and RKO Radio Pictures, are no longer in any position to be sued. Alternatively, I could have said something like, “By Bragg’s preferences, the producers of Gangs of New York should be liable to the estate of William Marcy Tweed.” Except, I’d be quite flabbergasted if Tweed ever had an active estate. As for the British royal family, Mr. Gordon is probably right that “their improprieties and moral behavior” have not been “any worse than that of millions of other British families who do not have to live their lives in goldfish bowls.” Of course, those millions of other British families are in no way charged with providing moral leadership for the country. It seems to me that the only way to really justify the continued existence of the Civil List is for the monarchy to provide an instructive, ornamental example of traditional British values. Even then, though, public financial support of the monarchy still seems pretty wasteful. Mr. Gordon and I had a good exchange a while back about American politicians and their decorating expenditures. The wastefulness of the Clintons’ White House redecoration, which we both deplored, was insignificant compared to the millions of pounds poured down the drain each year keeping up Buckingham Palace and Balmoral Castle. In the previously mentioned series House of Cards, there’s a character who, despite his loathing of the king (Kitchen), admits that the monarchy saves Britons from “having to elect some godawful President.” Like Mr. Gordon, I’d choose Prince Charles as my leader over Edward VIII, but, frankly, I’d rather have a President.
April 30, 2007
Foyle’s War and Michael Kitchen Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:40 AM EST I enjoyed Fred Smoler’s post this morning on Foyle’s War. I haven’t seen the series, but I am a great fan of its leading actor, Michael Kitchen. His face has been seen only infrequently by American audiences, except perhaps during the actor’s appearance in the James Bond film Goldeneye. I’ll admit that’s where I first encountered him. Reading over Mr. Smoler’s post, it occurred to me that Kitchen has made a rather successful career out of satirizing the British upper crust. In Foyle’s War he may do so only indirectly, as a detective who encounters sacrifice-averse elites. In another, earlier BBC series, however, Kitchen did so more directly and controversially. House of Cards, a BBC trilogy aired during the early 1990s, traces the rise of a fictional Conservative leader, Francis Urquhart, through the ranks of the House of Commons. The first portion of the trilogy, from which the entire series takes its name, was produced as a hypothetical rendering of the leadership contest after Margaret Thatcher’s retirement. In a remarkable instance of life imitating art, the original airing of the series coincided with the Michael Heseltine’s first challenge to Thatcher’s leadership—much, I imagine, to the surprise and joy of the House of Cards producers. Kitchen does not appear in the series until its second installment, “To Play the King,” in which he portrays a newly installed monarch struggling in his role as head of state. I’m not aware of much controversy surrounding Foyle’s War, although that may be a result of my own ignorance. But Kitchen’s portrayal of the unnamed, fictional king created something of a stir due to the character’s uncomfortable similarities to Prince Charles. In addition to having a slim, glamorous, blonde ex-wife, and an overweight, scandal-plagued former sister-in-law, Kitchen’s character also speaks in the same halting, wavering tones as the Prince of Wales. There are veiled suggestions that the king has had improper relationships with other men, as well as with prostitutes. While the impropriety and moral decay of the British royal family was already on full display in the early 1990s, some felt this sly impugning of Charles’s character was too much to tolerate. One Evening Standard contributor, Melvyn Bragg, declared, “If we have a flat portrayal of an historical figure then evidence is needed for any accusations which seek to smear him.” Calling on the show’s author, Michael Dobbs, to eliminate a few offensive lines, Bragg explained, “It is the gratuitousness of the matter which triggers the obstinate question—are you allowed to take any shot you want at a target which you know is simply not going to respond?” Britain’s free speech laws are famously different from those in the United States. Here, Hustler Magazine v. Falwell has stated that public figures cannot sue for emotional distress, or other such offenses, against those who satire them. The more curious of Bragg’s assertions, though, is that it is offensive to portray any historical figure, or even a fictionalized counterpart of a historical figure, in terms not wholly supported by fact. I suppose, by Bragg’s preferences, the producers of Citizen Kane should be liable to the estate of William Randolph Hearst for possible distortions of the man’s character. Maybe Bragg meant, “a living historical figure,” but, in any case, I can’t imagine how unbearably dry such a version of popular culture would be. I’m sure that I’m grateful to Michael Kitchen for offering an enjoyable alternative.
April 17, 2007
Reacting to Tragedy Posted by Alexander Burns at 12:30 PM EST Fred Allen has written, briefly and eloquently, that in the wake of the Blacksburg tragedy, “History . . . stands silent with the rest of us at this moment.” Would that this were true, that the rest of us really were silent. But it seems that the inevitable finger-pointing has already begun. On his nightly program yesterday, Alan Colmes was not alone in demanding answers to questions like, “Why was there a two-hour lapse in between shootings? Why weren’t students notified earlier of the danger?” As Colmes’s cohost, Sean Hannity, commented, “There are a lot of questions being raised tonight about the security issue.” Cable news hosts were not the only people chattering about Blacksburg last night. Presidential candidates also began reacting to the day’s events, with Senator John McCain declaring, “We have to look at what happened here, but it doesn’t change my views on the Second Amendment.” As if anyone could possibly care, on a day like yesterday, what John McCain thinks about guns. There should certainly be a full investigation into what happened at Blacksburg. We should seek to answer all the relevant questions about campus security, mental health treatment, and the distribution and availability of guns. For the time being, though, there are professionals dealing with the immediate aftermath of the shooting. The rest of us, including politicians and pundits, might think about letting these professionals do their work and, in the meantime, making use of today as a time to mourn. History, as Fred Allen says, provides no easy advice for dealing with calamities like the one at Virginia Tech. I’d suggest that history does offer some examples for national leaders trying to remark on such a tragedy. Robert Kennedy’s unscripted reaction to the news of Martin Luther King’s death remains, I think, the best example of this. I know it has been on my mind today. On the day after Blacksburg, we might reflect on Kennedy's mournful quotation from Aeschylus: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
April 15, 2007
Andrew Roberts III Posted by Alexander Burns at 04:55 PM EST I enjoyed reading Fred Smoler’s response to The New Republic’s article on Andrew Roberts. His point about Hari’s personal attack on Roberts’s family origins is particularly well taken. I’m not sure “what sort of person abuses anyone for metaphorically stinking of the frying oil,” but I’m certain it’s not a person I’d like to spend much time with. Mr. Smoler takes issue with a few comments in my previous post on the subject and suggests that Johann Hari is not necessarily the reliable critic I take him to be. I’m not as acquainted with Hari’s work as Mr. Smoler apparently is, so I’ll defer to his experience. I’m not entirely comfortable, though, with the suggestion that Hari, a former Iraq war supporter, is “trying to cleanse himself of charges of initial thought crimes by burnishing his anti-imperialist credentials.” If Hari’s aim was to exonerate himself in the eyes of liberals, he’d have been rather foolish to take to the pages of The New Republic, the nominal editor of which, Martin Peretz, is about as reviled on the left as Dick Cheney. As Mr. Smoler correctly guesses, I have joined him in the practice of writing about Andrew Roberts without fully reading his latest work. I have glanced at A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, but I have not read it in its entirety. To be perfectly honest, I’m not particularly eager to do so. Hari’s review might be rather mean-spirited, but, as I previously wrote, that doesn’t mean its criticisms can be dismissed out of hand. For example, a “recurring theme in Roberts’s work,” according to Hari, is “that nationalist sentiments can be successfully crushed with massive violence.” With the example of the Amritsar massacre in hand, Hari argues that this is a very simpleminded view of the way violence works, highlighting how “Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru—men who had been constitutionalists with some residual loyalty to the Empire—abandoned their position following Amritsar, reasoning that, if the British were going to gun down women and children, there was no point in taking the reformist route.” This is a persuasive argument that there’s a certain degree of myopia in Roberts’s approach to history. Not having read Roberts’s book, I won’t say that it’s worthless. But having read Hari’s review, with its bits of compelling criticism, like this one, I think I’ll spend my reading hours elsewhere, perhaps on works that deal with empire in a more intellectually challenging way. Fred Smoler writes that “if you compare the British Empire to almost any of the others—to the Aztecs, the Romanovs, the Persian or Chinese empires (in both cases, up to the present day), the Belgians, and so on down the line, I think the Brits are flattered by the comparison.” I’d agree with this statement, but I’d also say, and I imagine Mr. Smoler would agree, that such comparisons are not always the most instructive ways of getting at truth. Yes, one might say, the Communist government under Castro seems bad, but consider the alternatives of Stalinist Russia, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and present-day North Korea. True, but it seems that one might be missing a more nuanced point. I’m not tripping over myself to jump on board with Caroline Elkins, but I generally prefer works of history that are challenging, subtle, and humble in their scholarly approach. For that, I guess I’ll have to eschew both Andrew Roberts and Johann Hari.
April 13, 2007
Andrew Roberts Posted by Alexander Burns at 03:45 PM EST There’s a disturbing article in today’s web edition of The New Republic. Unfortunately, it’s a subscribers-only feature, but I think it’s worth highlighting all the same. The piece is called “Bush’s Imperial Historian,” and it focuses on the career of Andrew Roberts, whose work Fred Smoler discussed here last month. Like the Jacob Weisberg review that Mr. Smoler disliked, the article is written in a fairly derisive tone. Unlike the Weisberg piece, I think this one raises important, larger criticisms of Roberts’s work. Roberts’s historical worldview, according to the writer, Johann Hari, is deeply compromised by his love of empire and the British aristocratic tradition. As a result, Roberts tends to play it fast and loose with facts when it will allow him to tell a better story. From downplaying the negative consequences of the Amritsar massacre in India to totally ignoring the IRA backlash against British internment policy in Northern Ireland, Roberts is clearly not averse to staggering historical revisionism. Hari, à la Weisberg, crosses the line from criticizing Roberts to mocking him, calling him a “fifth-rate Rudyard Kipling.” His substantive objections to Roberts’s work should still be taken seriously. I’d actually say the same of Weisberg’s original review. I certainly agree with Fred Smoler that Weisberg’s tone is problematic. The points that he makes, and that Mr. Smoler discusses, would have been much more palatable if their common criticism of Roberts, that he is a historian with little patience for nuance, had been stated more directly. Toward the end of Weisberg’s review, there is what seems to me to be a particularly salient criticism of Robert’s work: “Roberts is as sloppy as he is snobbish. . . . The San Francisco earthquake did considerably more than $400,000 in damage. Virginia Woolf, who drowned herself in 1941, did not write for Encounter, which began publication in 1953. The Proposition 13 Tax Revolt took place in the 1970s, not the 1980s—an important distinction because it presaged Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. Michael Milken was not a ‘takeover arbitrageur,’ whatever that is. Roberts cannot know that there were 500 registered lobbyists in Washington during World War II because lobbyists weren’t forced to register until 1946. Gregg Easterbrook is not the editor of The New Republic. ‘No man gets left behind’ is a line from the film Black Hawk Down, not the motto of the U.S. Army Rangers; their actual motto is ‘Rangers Lead the Way.’” The New Republic commented on the Weisberg piece around the same time as Mr. Smoler, and compared this paragraph to Jamie Lee Curtis’s tirade, directed at Kevin Kline, in A Fish Called Wanda (“Aristotle was not Belgian!”). Cute comparisons aside, though, it’s a very grave failing for a historian to be as untroubled by factual inaccuracy as Roberts evidently is. Even if one ignores his personal failings, such as a shocking association with South Africa’s ultra-rightist Springbok Club, it’s hard to ignore such obvious shortcomings.
April 12, 2007
Professors Gone Wild Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:55 PM EST Some weeks ago there was a discussion on this blog about the political inclinations of the American academy. Sparked by an article by Michael Barone, the discussion got pretty contentious. Reflecting on that debate, and on some new developments since then, I’m struck by a point that I wish I’d made at the time. One of the problems with Michael Barone’s portrait of the American academy, which might have been useful to consider back in March, is the academy’s supposed homogeneity. As Barone depicts American universities, one might think that they are relatively unanimous in their political leanings, and that left-wing professors form a more or less united front against traditional Anglo-American values. This is obviously not the case. I am sure Barone would gladly acknowledge this, though, and my point in raising this observation is not to celebrate the intellectual heterogeneity of the American university system. The news that inspired this observation is certainly not worth celebrating. Indeed, the larger observation that I’m motivated to make is that American academics cannot possibly be directing their full energies into radicalizing our nation’s youth, since much of that potential energy is occupied in personal, internecine academic feuds. One such feud is covered in today’s New York Times. “If the longstanding fight between two professors, Alan Dershowitz and Norman Finkelstein, was under the jurisdiction of family court a judge could issue restraining orders and forbid inflammatory statements,” Patricia Cohen’s article begins. “But, alas, this nasty and zealously pursued feud is taking place in scholarly precincts, so each protagonist is continuing his campaign, unhampered, to destroy the other’s professional reputation and career.” As previously reported by the Harvard Crimson, Professor Finkelstein’s bid for tenure at DePaul University has run into trouble, as DePaul College’s dean defied a faculty recommendation and decided to oppose Finkelstein’s appointment. According to Finkelstein, Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz has waged a campaign to oppose his promotion. Dershowitz has essentially admitted to doing so. The Times article contains more detailed information about the history of the feud between these two men, and about the specific controversy surrounding Finkelstein’s tenure review. At the heart of the matter is a long series of exchanges over Israel policy and anti-Semitism, in which Dershowitz has tended to take a staunchly pro-Israel position, and Finkelstein has accused Dershowitz of dissembling in order to advance his political agenda. The striking thing about this feud is just how little it has to do with real scholarship, and the extent to which it must distract these professors from more serious academic work. Each of these men has apparently poured hours of energy into producing personal attacks on the other (“The 10 Stupidest Things Finkelstein Has Said,” for example, or “Should Alan Dershowitz Target Himself for Assassination?”), and posting them on their respective Internet sites. Regardless of which man’s perspective one prefers, it’s hard not to see such sniping as childish. Criticizing Finkelstein’s work, Dershowitz told The New York Times: “There’s no scholarship there.” Actually, this criticism could characterize the entire Dershowitz-Finkelstein controversy. In cases like this, academics seem to act less like “tenured radicals” than like tenured children. It would be tremendously unfair to take the Dershowitz-Finkelstein controversy as a typical one, or as one that effectively depicts the state of academia. Most academics that I’ve encountered have been serious, conscientious, private people. From the facts of this case, though, it doesn’t seem unjust to conclude that some of America’s most politically outspoken professors are more concerned with lambasting each other than with brainwashing college students. If Alan Dershowitz and Norman Finkelstein spent a little less time attacking their personal adversaries, and a little more time teaching and writing, it might not allay Mr. Barone’s distrust. But it would surely be better for their students, their colleagues, and the country.
March 19, 2007
Who Blames America First? VI Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:40 PM EST I have a few more comments in response to John Steele Gordon’s latest post, unrelated to those that Joshua Zeitz has already offered. First, in response to my entry this afternoon, Mr. Gordon writes: “Mr. Burns quotes several people of the Looney Tunes religious right blaming Hurricane Katrina on God’s wrath over New Orleans’s sinful ways. . . . I don’t think such nonsense is what I and Barone were talking about. The Jerry Falwell types, finding sin in everything and ascribing everything bad that happens to the wages thereof, have been around since God turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt.” Taken individually, I agree with each sentence of Mr. Gordon’s comments, as quoted above. He and Mr. Barone were not talking about cultural conservatives in their blog entries, and religious radicals have, indeed, been around forever. My point is that the nominally Christian right is hardly ever lumped in with the loosely defined “blame America first” crowd, even though they seem to blame Americans for some of the twenty-first century’s worst domestic catastrophes. In a way, Jerry Falwell and Ward Churchill (of “little Eichmann” fame), have rather similar views of where 9/11 came from. Both see it as a kind of punishment for America’s past sins; they just emphasize the importance of different sins. I was not criticizing Mr. Gordon’s post but rather Mr. Barone’s, which was carelessly reasoned and underinclusive in its focus. Furthermore, Mr. Gordon has dumped Jerry Falwell and co. into the same “Looney Tunes” dustbin where he deposited Pat Buchanan a few days ago. I certainly agree with him that these miscreants belong in such an undignified category. But it’s a mistake to dismiss these men as insignificant just because they’re so far from the political center. Falwell and Buchanan still exercise influence on certain segments of the population. Witness, in the former’s case, Senator McCain’s backtracking on his 2000 campaign criticism of Falwell, Robertson, et al. In the case of Mr. Buchanan, his latest book, State of Emergency, has an Amazon.com sales rank of 6,763. In comparison, Noam Chomsky’s latest, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy, is ranked at 12,783. The latter is probably a good example of the kind of academic disliked by Mr. Barone, but if Amazon is any guide, his following is rather less impressive than the supposedly marginal Buchanan’s. On a different subject, I’d add that at least one of Mr. Gordon’s examples of frivolous, America-blaming academic debates seems flawed. In the case of the “Who lost China?” discussion, I don’t think it’s entirely clear that the question is ridiculous. Mr. Gordon is right that the Communist takeover in China would have happened even with a historical all-star team in charge of the State Department. It’s not at all obvious, though, that the emerging Chinese state had to be as hostile to the United States and as close to the Soviet Union as it was. If “losing China” means losing it not just to Communism but to the Soviet sphere of influence, the debate over how that came to pass is still one worth having. With the international situation being what it is, we might end up learning something very useful.
March 19, 2007
Who Blames America First? II Posted by Alexander Burns at 01:05 PM EST I read the same Michael Barone column as John Steele Gordon did this morning, and I am only slightly disappointed that Joshua Zeitz managed to respond to it first. I thought Mr. Barone’s column was profoundly bizarre. As a college student, enrolled at the so-called Kremlin on the Charles, I expect I would remember being “bombarded with denunciations” of anything. I can’t recall the last time one of my professors denounced a historical figure or field of study. My experience is obviously only anecdotal evidence, but, as Mr. Zeitz has already pointed out, “Barone’s article is without evidence” altogether. The more disappointing thing about Mr. Barone’s column, in my mind, is his practice of what good statisticians call case exclusion. He has focused entirely on an elusive group of liberals who detest different subgroups of American society. Mr. Zeitz has named a few right-wingers who have condemned American social practices. I’d like to add a couple more instructive examples that conform to Mr. Barone’s description of people who “always blame America—or the parts of America they don’t like—first.” About a year and a half ago, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast of the United States. The devastating impact of the storm is now legendary. Within days of the disaster, accusing fingers were pointing at different responsible and irresponsible parties. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, FEMA Director Michael Brown, and President George Bush all found themselves taking harsh criticism, most of it deserved. A few right-wing Christian groups had other perpetrators in mind. A group called Columbia Christians for Life observed: “Louisiana has 10 child-murder-by-abortion centers, and five are in New Orleans.” The group also pointed out that the hurricane’s image supposedly resembled the shape of a fetus. This was taken as persuasive evidence that Katrina was intended to purge and purify Louisiana of abortionists. Another leader within the religious right exulted: “This act of God destroyed a wicked city. . . . New Orleans was a city that had its doors wide open to the public celebration of sin.” More famously, and in a similar vein, were comments by the Reverend Jerry Falwell just days after the 9/11 attacks. Appearing on The 700 Club, Fallwell declared: “The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’” Never mind Al Qaeda. Our real problem is the Human Rights Campaign! Talk about blaming America “or the parts of America [you] don’t like—first.” Barone may be right that there are well-educated people who are excessively critical of the United States and its British allies. But what about the conservatives who see America as not just wrong but actually deserving of God’s wrath? To me, they’re rather more deserving of scorn than a college professor who detests American military power. One final note. It is ironic that Mr. Barone chose Adam Hochschild’s Breaking the Chains as an example of a right-headed history of English-speaking peoples. Hochschild is a graduate of the same degree-granting program in which I am currently studying. He helped found Mother Jones magazine and he currently teaches at Berkeley. He is also the author of King Leopold’s Ghost, a celebrated and disturbing account of Belgium’s conquest of the Congo. As a writer, he’s hardly uncritical of the Western European and American tradition. I wonder if Barone has read Hochschild’s wider oeuvre, or just the parts that celebrate his heritage.
March 15, 2007
More on 24 Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:55 PM EST As a fellow 24 fan, I was excited to read Fred Smoler’s post yesterday, “24 and the Politics of Popular Culture.” He writes about a recent New Yorker piece on the show and asks: “Is 24 a ‘rightist’ show? While everything [New Yorker writer Jane] Mayer says about 24’s depiction of torture is true, the series has other recurring themes. In most of 24’s seasons the terrorists are abetted, without their knowledge, by highly placed members of the American government who control sections of the national security apparatus, are represented in the cabinet, and are attempting to panic the public into supporting authoritarian rule.” Mr. Smoler’s is a question that I have contemplated as well. I agree with his argument that it’s too easy to caricature the show’s politics. At the same time, I’d add that the New Yorker article actually goes a long way toward clarifying just what those politics are. Toward the end of the article, Jane Mayer gives a quick rundown of producer Joel Surnow’s political views: dislikes welfare, resents liberal courts, likes Reagan, hates Carter, etc. Then Mayer adds: “Surnow is critical of the way the war in Iraq has been conducted. An ‘isolationist’ with ‘no faith in nation-building,’ he thinks that ‘we could have been out of this thing three years ago.’” Surnow’s political profile is clearly that of a rightist, but his views on foreign affairs are distinctly out of step with those of the Bush administration. Surnow believes, according to Mayer, that we ought to have replaced Saddam Hussein with “some other monster who’s going to keep these people in line.” Where neoconservative Republicans and liberal internationalists alike favor an expanded international role for the United States, Surnow apparently would prefer a more self-interested and coldly amoral foreign policy. This makes sense, in the context of Mr. Smoler’s description of the show. On the one hand, 24 presents the United States as a nation under siege by terrorists, requiring all possible means of self-defense in order to beat back the barbarians at the gates. On the other hand, the show depicts an America profoundly threatened by the machinations of big business, the arms industry, and irrationally militaristic government officials. This rendering of the United States may not be in line with the conservatism of George W. Bush, but it is a conservative rendition all the same. On March 3, Mr. Smoler discussed the influence of Gerald P. Nye’s Senate Munitions Committee on another piece of popular culture, The Plainsman. In 24, it appears that Nye’s fears about belligerent businesses have been resurrected. I’m not sure what Nye would have thought about torture, but I imagine he’d be very sympathetic to Surnow’s warnings about government conspiracies and the profit motive for war. 24 tries hard to mix up the standard political labels of the present day. In the third season, for example, an incumbent Democratic president loses the endorsement of the AFL-CIO to his Republican challenger. In real life, that’s about as likely as a successful recombinant DNA experiment of the type Mr. Smoler’s post mentions. Despite the show’s best efforts to evade ideological labels, however, Surnow’s views come through all the same, and I think “rightist” is a safe label to apply to them. It certainly isn’t the rightism of Paul Wolfowitz, but it is an awful lot like that of Pat Buchanan. Unlike Pat Buchanan, though, 24 sure is fun to watch.
March 11, 2007
The Libby Verdict VII Posted by Alexander Burns at 03:00 PM EST I’m hoping this post can act as a kind of concluding note, since this exchange has gone on for half a week now and has moved rather far afield from the initial topic of discussion, the Libby verdict. I’ve enjoyed this conversation, so let’s see if I can’t sum up my side of things in an evenhanded fashion. I think Mr. Gordon and I aren’t really disagreeing on much at this point, but we’re debating slightly different topics. It seems to me that Mr. Gordon is arguing about the powers and rights of the executive, whereas I’m more focused on the appropriate times and ways for the executive to exercise his prerogatives. On a purely legal level, Mr. Gordon’s approach is surely the more appropriate one. In the realm of politics, though, there are plenty of traditional constraints on the executive that don’t come from the law. One of those constraints, relevant to the discussion at hand, is the tradition of consulting with home-state senators before making U.S. attorney appointments. President Bush was not bound to do this by law, but he did it out of respect for the Senate. Indeed, it was due to the urgings of Illinois Sen. Peter Fitzgerald that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald (no relation) was nominated for his day job as a U.S. attorney. To return to Mr. Gordon’s point, of course the President “can delegate as he pleases on the day after inauguration” and on every other day as well, but there are times when legally acceptable delegation disrupts the proper workings of the government, and thus undermines the national interest. I suspect we have an intractable disagreement on when these times would be. Second, Mr. Gordon writes: “I wonder if Mr. Burns isn’t begging the question here. To fire a U.S. attorney in order solely to impede a lawful investigation would be tantamount to an obstruction of justice, and no such thing has been shown, merely asserted.” I don’t believe I am begging the question. Something is not legally an obstruction of justice just because, on a moral level, it is “tantamount to an obstruction of justice,” and it’s not realistic to expect a case such as this one to result in such a charge. Mr. Gordon is right that the full evidence of this case has yet to emerge. From where I’m standing, though, the circumstantial evidence and the emerging testimony looks pretty grim. I’m not sure why President Bush “would invite so much additional trouble for so little possible gain,” but I think it’s worth noting that the man spent nearly all of his Presidency with a docile and cooperative Congress. The rigorous oversight we’re seeing now is a new development to which this White House is unaccustomed. Finally, Mr. Gordon writes that he is “happy to agree” that the Patriot Act should not have been abused politically, “provided Mr. Burns will agree that the Senate minority should not misuse Senate rules to prevent a timely up-or-down vote on presidential nominees.” The linkage between these two issues seems pretty weak to me, since U.S. attorneys have not been the focus of any controversy regarding Senate filibusters. In general I’d agree that the President’s nominees deserve votes in the Senate, just as the legislative majority’s bills generally deserve conclusive consideration by the full legislative body. I’m not so sure, though, that it’s a “misuse” of Senate rules for the minority to make the majority’s life difficult. Indeed, the Senate has historically been a much more collegial body than the House for the very reason that 60 votes are needed to get anything done. It’s only relatively recently, with the deepening acrimony of both houses of Congress, that the 60-vote threshold has become a source of total dysfunction.
March 9, 2007
The Libby Verdict V Posted by Alexander Burns at 01:45 PM EST I find John Steele Gordon’s latest post largely agreeable. When I wrote that I “understand why conservatives resent [Lawrence Walsh’s] investigation,” I was referring to the politically timed indictments that he mentions. Mr. Gordon’s proposal for a semiautonomous Office of Governmental Integrity within the Justice Department is not at all a bad one. There are such offices in many state justice departments—albeit not tailored exactly to Mr. Gordon’s suggestions—and they have done good work in the past. On the question of the fired U.S. attorneys, Mr. Gordon writes: “I’m not sure what is suspicious here. U.S. attorneys are not protected by civil service regulations. . . . The President can fire them for cause or for political reasons or because he does not like their taste in neckties.” This may be the case, but I think it’s a pretty well established principle that a prosecutor should not be fired for prosecuting the President’s political allies. The White House can legitimately fire a U.S. attorney in order to give another lawyer prosecutorial experience, but most of these latest firings in this case were not justified in that way. I also think Mr. Gordon somewhat oversimplifies the question of when and how U.S. attorneys have customarily been replaced. Mr. Gordon writes: “President Clinton fired every single U.S. attorney in the country (with the exception of Michael Chertoff in New Jersey, for whom Senator Bill Bradley interceded) as soon as he entered the White House. Why? To replace them with political allies, of course.” The replacement of U.S. attorneys at the beginning of a president’s term is partly political, certainly, but it also has to do with the President’s right to delegate his authority as he pleases. Because all the power in the executive branch flows from the office of the President, it is up to the President to decide which agents should be able to exercise that power. No one would suggest that a President should need specific cause to replace the cabinet or sub-cabinet of his predecessor. Similarly, there’s no reason why a President shouldn’t be able to delegate his legal powers to people of his choice. There are appropriate times and places for such delegation to take place, though, and I think it would be generally accepted that the middle of a second term, during politically sensitive investigations, would not be the right moment. Back to the case at hand. Even for the firings that were not intended to impede investigations, there is something highly suspicious about the conduct of the executive branch. In a little-known provision of the Patriot Act, the President was granted the authority to install U.S. attorneys indefinitely and without Senate approval, in the case of a security emergency. The Senate can eventually confirm his appointments, but there is no definite term of service—as there used to be—for an interim U.S. attorney. It was through this provision that the White House installed J. Timothy Griffin as U.S. attorney for Arkansas. I’m not sure what’s going on in Little Rock these days, but I’m pretty sure there’s no emergency of the kind anticipated by the Patriot Act. Again, Mr. Gordon is correct that U.S. attorneys can legitimately be appointed and replaced for political reasons. I hope he’ll agree, though, that a national security law should not be misused in such a political fashion.
March 8, 2007
The Libby Verdict III Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:50 PM EST I’d like to further discuss the final contention in John Steele Gordon’s last post, regarding the position of the special prosecutor. Mr. Gordon writes that it is “unequivocally clear . . . that appointing special prosecutors to handle politically sensitive cases is the worst idea to arise out of American democracy since Prohibition.” I assume Mr. Gordon is being slightly hyperbolic here, but his main point is a serious one and, I think, one deserving of additional consideration. I certainly won’t disagree that the special prosecutor position, as currently defined and performed, is flawed, and that the last two decades provide ample evidence of this. I don’t think Lawrence Walsh was an unmitigated disaster on the scale of Kenneth Starr, but I can understand why conservatives resent his investigation. Starr, for his part, was surely one of the most loathsome and irresponsible men of the 1990s. I have limited sympathy for administrations that appoint special prosecutors and then find their investigations inconvenient. But it’s also understandable that someone like Clinton would find it difficult to fire even someone like Starr, when the latter would not hesitate to evoke the specter of Archibald Cox, Richard Nixon, and the Saturday Night Massacre. Still, while it’s clear that the special prosecutor is not a perfect investigatory mechanism, doing away with it altogether might be a worse option. First, an administration is never forced to appoint a special prosecutor; it does so when an internal conflict of interest requires an independent investigation to occur. If government is to retain its legitimacy in the eyes of the public, there has to be some such mechanism in place when the executive branch cannot be trusted to investigate itself. Even if special prosecutors tend to run imperfect investigations, I would fear the political consequences of these investigations being supervised by people like John Ashcroft or Janet Reno. Would any conservative believe that Whitewater was aboveboard if the Clinton Justice Department had been responsible for that conclusion? And would any liberals believe that Richard Armitage was the only leaker in the Plame case if Ashcroft had been the investigating officer? A second point in defense of special prosecutors is that an adequately Machiavellian administration, finding itself under politically undesirable scrutiny, actually can fire investigators who are less protected than a special prosecutor. I cannot think of better proof of this fact than this week’s congressional hearings on the suspicious dismissals of eight United States attorneys. As the hearings have made clear, a whole team of federal prosecutors have recently lost their jobs due to political considerations. Carol Lam, the U.S. attorney in San Diego, was fired after investigating the corruption scandal around former Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham. David Iglesias, the U.S. attorney for New Mexico, ended up unemployed when he failed to comply with politically motivated requests from Rep. Heather Wilson and Sen. Pete Domenici. The U.S. attorney for Maryland, who found himself under pressure to lay off an investigation into associates of then-Gov. Robert Ehrlich, also fell victim to a purge from above. Not all the fired U.S. attorneys lost their jobs for such defensive reasons. Some, like Arkansas’s Bud Cummins, seem to have been removed simply to make room for someone new—someone like J. Timothy Griffin, who, with a few years of prosecutorial experience, could someday run for high office as a Republican. Because the executive branch, operating under the Patriot Act, has broad discretion in overseeing the criminal justice system, there is little that can be done to redress the grievances of the eight ousted prosecutors. In this circumstance, Congress is doing its best to expose the excesses of the executive, but it cannot restore these attorneys to their offices. I still agree with Mr. Gordon that the special prosecutor is a flawed mechanism of oversight. But since the name and memory of Archibald Cox are evidently not enough to keep justice apolitical, I tend to worry more about politicians interfering with the work of prosecutors than about prosecutors interfering in the political process. Michael Barone, no left-winger he, commented yesterday [Correction: It turns out that the blog posting at www.usnews.com was misattributed to Michael Barone and was actually written by Bonnie Erb] that “what’s going on in Washington is not sufficiently removed from the routine doings of a tawdry Third World dictatorship to give any American comfort.” I’m somewhat comforted by the notion that, in an extreme circumstance, a special prosecutor could be appointed to investigate potentially tyrannical malfeasance. If his investigation ends up being overzealous, that may be a price worth paying.
March 7, 2007
Eager Deavers Posted by Alexander Burns at 06:10 PM EST Given the discussion that’s occurred on this blog regarding the Valerie Wilson/Lewis Libby affair, it seems appropriate to comment on the guilty verdict issued against Libby yesterday afternoon. The whole CIA leak investigation has taken an excruciatingly long time—it was well over a year ago that Patrick Fitzgerald announced his indictment against Libby—and this verdict is welcome as a kind of short-term closure. There will be appeals, of course, and Libby’s Legal Defense Trust has already announced a new fundraising push for the next round of litigation. Trial watchers on the left have sometimes compared this to the Watergate investigation, Vice President Cheney to Nixon, and Libby to Howard Hunt, Bob Haldeman, or Charles Colson. I think it’s fair to say, though, that the charges against Libby and the allegations of misconduct on the part of the Vice President’s office really do not measure up to the wrongdoings of Watergate. If they did, I trust Mr. Fitzgerald would have issued additional indictments accordingly. As it is, his investigation has been declared inactive. There’s also far less public awareness of the Libby prosecution than there was of Watergate, and less consensus on its advisability. By the time Nixon resigned, mainstream Republicans had abandoned him. Today the White House and its allies can still defensibly maintain their support for the Vice President’s downed aide. It seems to me that a far better analogue for the Libby scandal would be the prosecution of Ronald Reagan’s former deputy chief of staff, Michael Deaver, during the twilight years of the Reagan administration. Deaver, after leaving the White House, became a powerful lobbyist. Throughout his time in the West Wing, he had been dogged by accusations of influence peddling and self-interested political horse-trading. William Safire alleged multiple times that Deaver’s actions in the White House were at least partly motivated by the aide’s desire to set up a cushy gig for himself after leaving Reagan’s side. When Deaver’s post–White House activities were investigated by Congress and a federal prosecutor, he ended up being charged with multiple counts of perjury. Like Libby, he was not charged with an additional criminal offense. His conviction on three counts of lying under oath, however, was enough to complete his fall from grace. Lewis Libby’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for later this spring. Given that his offenses can carry a sentence of up to 30 years, I am curious to see whether his judge follows the example of Deaver’s. In Deaver’s case, the defense lawyers convinced the court that the Reagan aide’s alcoholism had hampered his testimony on the stand. Consequently Deaver avoided prison time altogether, escaping with a $100,000 fine and 1,500 hours of community service. Some saw this as an appropriately light punishment for an inoffensive transgression. Some even saw it as excessive, given that Deaver was not charged with an active crime, and only with lying about apparently legal, albeit unethical, actions. Still others, though, saw Deaver’s light sentence as an insult to the idea of public ethics and to the system of criminal justice. The reasoning went that unless unethical actions carried stiff punishments, which could function as deterrents, Washington would continue to be populated by hordes of eager potential Deavers. Thirty years would clearly be an excessive sentence for Libby, but I hope Judge Walton, in sentencing Libby, does not totally repeat the reasoning of the court that sentenced Deaver. Even if perjury was Libby’s only offense, such carelessness, evasiveness, and arrogance should carry a stiff price for the country’s most powerful government agents. “Eager Libbys” doesn’t have quite the same ring as “Eager Deavers.” But if the former Cheney aide escapes with a slap on the wrist, a new generation of imprudent presidential aides might deserve his name as a title.
March 6, 2007
What’s In a Gene? Posted by Alexander Burns at 05:00 PM EST The last few weeks have been good ones for genealogists. Every now and then, genealogy makes headlines with the story of some public figure’s unknown past, or of the secrets genes reveal about a long-dead historical personage. In recent years, many of these stories have related to the revelation of unknown Jewish descent: Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Sen. John Kerry, Gen. Wesley Clark, and, most recently, Sen. George Allen discovered that their recent ancestors include Jews. Since the middle of February, however, a whole spate of genealogical information has hit the front pages. I wonder whether any of it is significant. First, and perhaps most widely reported, was the story of the Reverend Al Sharpton’s family tree, which apparently grew quite close to that of the late Senator Strom Thurmond. Sharpton’s ancestors, it seems, were owned by relatives of the Thurmond family. Sharpton said this discovery was “probably the most shocking thing” he’s ever learned. I find that statement questionable, given that Sharpton has asserted for years that his ancestry might include slaves. Nevertheless, it’s an unpredictable connection that genealogists unveiled, and, for Sharpton, no doubt a meaningful one. Next, the genealogist William Addams Reitwiesner unveiled research into the genealogy of another black political leader. According to Reitwiesner, one of Barack Obama’s ancestors, George Washington Overall, owned slaves. This seems, at first, rather more shocking than the Sharpton story. The man who may be the first black President, descended from slave owners? Obama, however, has long acknowledged that family rumors hold that his ancestry is linked to that of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. Compared to that legend, descent from an ordinary slave owner seems altogether unsurprising. Finally, it was reported last Wednesday that geneticists at the University of Leicester have uncovered evidence suggesting that Thomas Jefferson may have had Jewish ancestry. As The New York Times reported, “Jefferson’s Y chromosome belongs to the branch designated K2, which is quite rare” and relatively common among Middle Eastern and Jewish peoples. Though Jefferson’s Jewish ancestor would have been quite far removed in time from the third President, it’s an ironic turn of events that Madeleine Albright’s first predecessor at the State Department also had hidden Jewish heritage. All of this is interesting. But in a historical sense is any of it significant? Should we understand Sharpton, or Obama, or Jefferson differently because of their genes? For the first two men, I think the answer is unambiguously no, as the results of studying their genealogy only serves to sharpen their preexisting images. For Sharpton, discovering that his ancestors were owned by Thurmond’s is almost appropriate, as it almost seems to confirm the polar opposition between the worldviews of these two men. For Obama, finding proof that his ancestors owned slaves helps enhance his cherished image as a walking, talking embodiment of modern American diversity. Indeed his spokesman said as much: “It is a true measure of progress that the descendant of a slave owner would come to marry a student from Kenya and produce a son who would grow up to be a candidate for President of the United States.” What about Jefferson? Do we learn anything new about this founding father from this discovery about his genes? I tend to think not, since Jefferson himself was unaware of any Jewish ancestry he might have had. Unless we cling to an outdated notion of racial determinism, we can hardly reinterpret Jefferson based on the ancestry of his Y chromosome. We might consider this as still more evidence of racial mixing among early Americans. In Jefferson’s case, we really don’t need any further proof of this. But we might further reconsider whatever allegiance we still have to the notion that America was founded solely by “the stock of the Puritans.” And in one individual’s case, former Senator Allen might reconsider what it means to be a “common-sense Jeffersonian conservative.”
March 2, 2007
Hair Force One Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:05 AM EST At the beginning of this week, John Steele Gordon and I had an instructive exchange about presidential decorating and the periodic renovation of the White House. In part of this exchange, reference was made to President Clinton’s having gotten a “legendary” haircut in Los Angeles International Airport, supposedly shutting down the transit hub in the process. As several commenters have pointed out, this story turns out to be, well, legendary—or, to put it more simply, false. Though I have little affection for the forty-second president, this seems like an error worth correcting. On May 20, 1993, the Washington Post reported that President Clinton had held up numerous LAX flights in order to get a $200 trim from the posh stylist Cristophe. Supposedly a few flights were held up for 10 minutes, at least one was delayed by nearly a half hour, and one was forced to circle in the air for a good 17 minutes, all so that the newly inaugurated President could taste the life of a movie star. Though the White House denied that any delays had occurred, this story spread, moving from the Post’s gossip column to the front pages of other national papers. How humiliating for an administration only five months old, to have the President caught acting so recklessly. Or so it seemed. Fortunately for the Clinton Administration, and unfortunately for the Washington Post, the report was debunked in a little over a month. At the end of June Newsday reported that, based on the records of the commercial airlines and the FAA, the Post’s story was wrong. Air Force One caused no delays at LAX. President Clinton did get an overpriced haircut, which may have been embarrassing on its own, but he didn’t inconvenience any ordinary travelers in order to do so. The gossip had been published in error, and the media had run away with the story. In the end, it was not President Clinton who had behaved recklessly, but the press. We’ve talked a lot about media bias on this blog, and we’ve tended to focus on ideological bias. The greatest bias within the news media, however, is not at all ideological or partisan. It is toward the sensational and the outrageous. News outlets—and now, blogs—tend to report on stories like the LAX affair enthusiastically and, if the stories turn out to be wrong, retract them quietly and with little contrition. In July of 1993 the Washington Post ombudsman, Joann Byrd, chided her paper for doing just this. Beyond this reproach, however, the Post suffered little. Instead, the Clintons had to bear the brunt of the paper’s error. Apparently they still do.
February 27, 2007
Decorators-in-Chief III Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:00 AM EST John Steele Gordon addresses the question of presidential decor and points out that we owe a debt to Jacqueline Kennedy for making the White House the majestic building it is today. He also mentions the White House’s long history of shoddy treatment at the hands of earlier Presidents and points out that Mary Todd Lincoln ended up outspending the Clintons in her efforts to restore the seat of American executive power. I’d like to continue discussing this last point, regarding the Lincolns’ redecoration. Mr. Gordon is surely right that “the nation had other calls on its treasury” when Mary Lincoln decided to refurbish the White House. In fairness to Mrs. Lincoln, her redecorating was rather less selfish than the Clintons’ (or the Reagans’). Rather than just redecorating the presidential residence, Mrs. Lincoln refurbished the entirety of the White House. Furthermore, in 1861 the White House was a much more public place than it is today. One of the reasons that Lincoln had to spend so much money to improve the building was that it hosted many more uninvited guests than one might imagine. Doris Kearns Goodwin describes this in her recent work, Team of Rivals: “The White House family quarters were confined to the west end of the second floor. . . . The rest of the mansion was largely open to the public. . . . [Secretary of State William] Seward reported to his wife, ‘the grounds, halls, stairways, closets’ were overrun with hundreds of people, standing in long winding lines and waving their letters of introduction in desperate hope of securing a job.” One can hardly imagine a similar scene in any recent White House. Like Mr. Gordon, Goodwin acknowledges that the wartime footing of the nation left Mrs. Lincoln’s renovations open to criticism as frivolous expenses. The outcome of the renovations was widely applauded, though, and the public response to mansion’s new appearance was one of pride. In a time when the White House was both a symbol of national dignity and a landmark that the public could enjoy, cosmetic expenditures might have seemed rather more forgivable. I imagine (though I don’t know) that the secretary of war would have felt differently.
February 26, 2007
A Historian at the Helm Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:35 PM EST It has always been characteristic of the news media to focus on the scandalous, embarrassing, and tragic. As Fred Smoler wrote a while back, many reporters tend to live by the maxim “If it bleeds, it leads.” It was consequently unsurprising to me that there was relatively little media coverage of Harvard University’s decision, earlier this month, to name the historian Drew Gilpin Faust as its new president. When I say “relatively little” coverage, I mean relative to the national frenzies that broke out intermittently over the last two years as then–Harvard President Lawrence Summers stumbled his way into early retirement. In contrast, the naming of Faust as president-designate was noted in a number of news stories, most of which focused on her gender and the university’s apparent retreat from Summers-style leadership. This is unfortunate, as Faust is a more intriguing character, and the calculus of her appointment seems more complicated, than most articles suggested. First, it is significant that Faust, currently the dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, is a historian. A few weeks before her appointment, I spoke to a former Summers aide about the presidential search and asked who he expected would be the next president. He said he wasn’t sure who, specifically, the search committee would choose, but confessed he expected it to be a scientist. Harvard has not had a scientist as president since James Conant vacated the office in 1953. While this is a source of understandable frustration to the science faculty, it is a good thing for the rest of the university that this streak will continue. These days, it is awfully easy to act as though anyone studying something non-utilitarian is wasting her time. It is fortunate that Faust, a distinguished scholar of Civil War history, will not bring such narrow intellectual values to University Hall. It is unfortunate that virtually none of the discussion of Faust’s appointment, even on campus, has taken her scholarship into consideration. There’s been fairly vigorous debate here over whether she is well suited to the job of president, but so far as I have seen, few commentators have seen fit to seriously consider the content of her academic work. I’ve only had time to read a few of her papers, but from what I have seen her work is both thorough and provocative. Her writing on the Civil War is, admittedly, more in the realm of social and cultural history than of military or political history. It does not appear, though, to be as soft or insubstantial as cultural history can be. In a 2001 essay in The Journal of Southern History, Faust examined how the Civil War “violated prevailing assumptions about life’s proper end—about who should die, when and where, and under what circumstances.” The subject may be a little vaguer than, say, the second day’s events at Gettysburg, but the primary evidence Faust musters is extensive, and the historical content of the work is serious. My deepest reservation about Faust’s appointment is that it is undoubtedly a safe choice for the university. She is unlikely to cause unnecessary controversy, like Summers, but she also seems less likely to risk ruffling faculty feathers, as Summers did and as other possible presidential choices, like Law School Dean Elena Kagan, might have done. My unease in this area is somewhat calmed by the willingness to provoke that is evident in some of her earlier scholarship, such as a 1990 paper in which she asserted: “It may well have been because of its women that the South lost the Civil War.” It may not be surprising for a feminist professor to focus on the historical contributions of women, but it is a bolder task altogether to so overtly assail the tightly held cultural assumptions about Southern culture and womanhood. The president of Harvard is treated as an international academic leader. I hope Faust brings the same originality and iconoclasm to that role that she has brought to her historical scholarship.
February 26, 2007
Decorators-in-Chief Posted by Alexander Burns at 12:10 PM EST There is a heated controversy unfolding up here in snowy Massachusetts regarding the personal expenditures of Governor Deval Patrick. Inaugurated last month, Patrick is the first Democratic governor of this state since Michael Dukakis. He is only the second African-American governor ever elected in the United States. He was elected after running an insurgent, liberal primary bid against two better-known candidates and then dispatching the extremely well financed incumbent lieutenant governor in the general election. Patrick is apparently just as prone to amateur mistakes as other new executives. It seems that he has been spending an awful lot of money on private perks, like $12,000 drapes for his office and a $72,000-a-year private secretary for his wife, who is a partner at Boston’s biggest law firm. In the midst of a media firestorm, Patrick backed off of these expenses, agreeing to cover the cost of drapes himself and paying, out of pocket, for the difference in price between his new Cadillac and the previous governor’s car, a Crown Victoria. He also apologized for his poor judgment, although obviously without enthusiasm. The media’s furor has not totally subsided, though, as yesterday’s edition of the Boston Herald bore a caustic editorial from the conservative firebrand Howie Carr, titled “Draped in Controversy, Is It Curtains for Deval?” As one would expect, Patrick is not the first newly elected politician to stumble over such expenditures as these. When Bill Clinton was elected President, he and the First Lady planned a $400,000 renovation of the presidential quarters in the White House. To make matters worse, they hired an unknown decorator from Arkansas named Kaki Hockersmith to oversee the renovation. Given the decorator’s obscurity, newspapers remarked at the time, “the big price tag seems surprising.” Like so many questionable things they did in office, the Clintons got away with this. But the public wasn’t happy about it. The Clintons’ predecessors in the White House, the Bushes, were not terribly interested in redecorating, but the Reagans most certainly were. The fortieth First Family, however, approached the task of redecoration rather differently from the Clintons (and Patricks). They set up a private fund under the supervision of Nancy Reagan’s chief of staff, Peter McCoy, to pay for alterations to the presidential residence and raised nearly $400,000 for the project. During a one-month period in early 1981, 167 donors contributed $375,529 for the White House remodeling, which McCoy claimed “was designed to re-establish the dwelling, the edifice,” and would benefit future presidential couples as well as the Reagans. The Reagans’ approach was not without its own problems. The private fund, while allowing the Reagans to refurbish their living quarters without using taxpayer money, also provided a convenient way for wealthy Americans to give indirect personal gifts to the President. While McCoy asserted that the project was intended to benefit the White House, and not just the Reagans, it was clear who the fund’s most immediate beneficiaries would be. Furthermore, the names of McCoy’s 167 donors were not made public, which led to complaints about a lack of transparency. If political executives want to redecorate their living and work spaces, they obviously have to negotiate a tricky set of public interests in order to do so. Reading over the Deval Patrick affair, I have to wonder why more leaders can’t, in this regard, be a little more like George H. W. and Barbara Bush—and leave the decorating to the next guy.
February 22, 2007
Greatness at the Pentagon? Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:45 PM EST During Joshua Zeitz and John Steele Gordon’s recent discussion of the Confederate flag and the South Carolina primary, my attention was caught by a comment by that primary’s most famous victim, John McCain. A few days ago, speaking in the Palmetto State, Senator McCain declared that Donald Rumsfeld “will go down in history as one of the worst secretaries of defense in history.” Redundant phrasing aside, McCain’s comment got me thinking: If Rumsfeld may be remembered as one of the Pentagon’s worst leaders, who should be remembered as its best? Unlike other cabinet positions, the office of defense secretary lacks a modern historical figure to define the way the job ought to be conducted. The Treasury Department has had exemplary leaders like C. Douglas Dillon and Robert Rubin. State Department officials can look up to figures like John Foster Dulles and Dean Rusk. Men like Nicholas Katzenbach and Eliot Richardson can serve as the very models for a modern attorney general. Who, among America’s defense secretaries, can claim to occupy a similar role in the national memory? This is not merely a rhetorical question; I am genuinely curious as to what answers my fellow bloggers might offer. I suppose the place to begin would be by defining the criteria by which one judges a secretary of defense. Presumably, they must include capability at managing the Pentagon bureaucracy, skill in obtaining funds on Capitol Hill, success at overseeing the military during violent conflict, and wisdom in advising the President. Clearly, a great defense secretary should have some combination of these accomplishments, along with a healthy dose of personal character. Looking down the list of Pentagon leaders, however, I fail to see one who is widely recognized for having achieved this. Surely George Marshall was a great man, but his tenure at the Pentagon was relatively insignificant. Robert McNamara was a technocrat and administrator extraordinaire—but he oversaw Vietnam. Caspar Weinberger was a temperate, deft manager who helped conduct some successful military operations. But then, one recalls, there’s Iran-Contra. It’s worth noting that AmericanHeritage.com took an online poll on this subject some time ago. Weinberger came out way ahead.
February 19, 2007
The Tawdry Tale of Robert Hanssen Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:45 PM EST Over the weekend I went to see the movie Breach. Based on the story of FBI traitor Robert Hanssen, Breach is part of a series of films this year that are beginning to revive the spy movie as a genre. I went in with low expectations, as I am no great fan of Ryan Philippe, the leading man. I came away impressed and disturbed. Like The Good Shepherd, another of this year’s much-heralded spy movies, Breach deals with the fairly recent institutional history of the American intelligence establishment. Robert Hanssen was arrested in the winter of 2001, but his career as a double agent stretched back to 1985. Working simultaneously for the United States and the Soviet and Russian intelligence services, Hanssen became the most damaging traitor in American history. Perhaps because he worked for the FBI, rather than the more enigmatic CIA, Hanssen’s name has never become as famous as that of Aldrich Ames. But the damage he did to his country was at least as significant. Also like The Good Shepherd, Breach makes some revisions to the historical record in order to present a compelling story. Most notably, the movie’s portrait of Hanssen is rather more sympathetic than the man deserves. The ever-capable Chris Cooper depicts Hanssen as a deeply disturbed man who is the victim of his own perversions. His actions don’t come across as malevolent or evil. When he gives state secrets to the Russians, one is tempted to judge his betrayal by the same terms that one judges a binge-drinking alcoholic. He’s clearly doing something terrible—but can he really help himself? The actual history of Hanssen’s arrest and trial shows that he was (and is) a psychologically unstable man. But Hanssen has also demonstrated a self-awareness and level of conscious intent that indicate he’s something more than just a madman. Hanssen compromised some of his country’s most stunning secrets, such as information about America’s missile arsenal and the ways in which it might respond to a nuclear attack. As detailed by the Washington Post, Hanssen did all this not merely for monetary gain but also for the personal satisfaction of becoming a great traitor. To an extent that Breach does not detail, Hanssen was determined to go down in history as a master spy—a far more cerebral, influential, and sexually perverse James Bond. This revision of history is understandable, since the resulting image of Hanssen is much more interesting for its moral ambiguity. Less understandable is Breach’s omission of one vital element of the effort to capture Hanssen. At the end of the film, the FBI and particularly the young do-gooder Philippe come off quite well. They appear to have worked hard to plug a terrible leak, and in so doing helped protect their country and salvage their own careers. What Breach does not depict is the help the FBI got from at least one source inside the Russian intelligence agencies. What ultimately brought down America’s worst traitor was, ironically, another traitor, not just conscientious investigative work by the FBI. In a film that seeks to illustrate some of the ambiguities of espionage, this is a surprising oversight. For a spy movie, though, these are relatively mild alterations of history. The Good Shepherd received even warmer critical appraisal than Breach, despite portraying the Bay of Pigs fiasco as, essentially, a New Haven sex scandal gone crazy. Even considering its creative liberties, Breach is a valuable portrait of the recent past and a chilling reminder of the challenges of counterintelligence. [Editor’s note: Allen Barra’s AmericanHeritage.com review of Breach can be found here.]
February 18, 2007
History of the Zogby Poll Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:45 PM EST As I see the Zogby poll has become a point of contention in this weekend’s Zeitz-Gordon debate, I thought it would be worth referring interested readers to a 2004 New Yorker profile of John Zogby and his organization. John Steele Gordon asserts that Zogby’s polls are compromised by the pollster’s dislike for President Bush. Josh Zeitz asks for evidence of the poll’s bias. I know pollsters who distrust Zogby, but because of his experimental methodology rather than any partisan slant. Much of Zogby’s polling is done on the Internet, which remains a relatively untested ground for public opinion surveys. When you poll over e-mail or using text messages, you risk repeating the mistakes of the famous 1936 Literary Digest poll. As The New Yorker details, that survey faltered because it chose its sample “primarily from automobile registries and telephone books.” This produced a sample skewed toward the affluent and resulted in an embarrassingly erroneous prediction for the presidential election. When you poll on the Internet, it seems likely that you skew your sample toward people who own computers and who regularly go online. This skew probably isn’t half as bad as that of the Literary Digest poll, but Zogby is nevertheless sailing in uncharted waters. More relevant to the immediate debate on this blog, though, is an observation in the New Yorker article about earlier attitudes toward the Zogby poll. Although Zogby’s chief pollster clearly leans to the left, he has not always been seen as a liberal zealot. According to The New Yorker, “Zogby finds it one of the odder twists in his career that he has been adopted by Republicans. Because he predicted correctly in 1996 that Clinton would win by a far smaller margin than most polls were forecasting, many on the right decided that here, finally, was a pollster who saw things the way they were. He was hired by the conservative New York Post, and appeared on Fox News programs and the Christian Broadcasting network. Rush Limbaugh praised him.” People like good news and they like the bearers of good news. The recent history of Zogby’s organization is proof enough of that. His poll used to furnish Republicans with encouraging predictions (Lazio neck-and-neck with Clinton!). Predictably, Zogby has fallen out of favor with the right as the results of his polling have become less encouraging to them.
February 17, 2007
Stand By Your Man? Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:35 AM EST I’m enjoying the ongoing discussion of Don Young’s botched attempt at presidential quotation. As John Steele Gordon points out, there are countless examples of politicians and public figures tripping up on misremembered, misattributed, or just plain invented quotations from history. There has to be a special category of criticism, though, reserved for public figures who misquote or misrepresent their own past remarks. On Friday, John McCain launched his new campaign website, featuring a promotional video titled “Stand Up.” The tone of the video and the site are a little strange; the soundtrack to “Stand Up” sounds like it was taken from 24. All the same, I was struck by the clip at the end of McCain’s video that features him making a speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention. In that speech, McCain closed passionately, declaring: “Keep that faith. Keep your courage. Stick together. Stay strong. Do not yield. Do not flinch. Stand up. Stand with our President and fight. We’re Americans. We’re Americans, and we’ll never surrender.” The clip on his site features the same strongly worded portion of his address, but absent a crucial portion: “Stand with our President and fight.” It seems like a lot has changed in a couple of years. Given what Don Young thinks of elected officials who don’t support the President, McCain might want to avoid the congressman from Alaska.
February 15, 2007
Church, State, and a Changing Nation Posted by Alexander Burns at 05:10 PM EST There is an intriguing article in today’s London Times concerning the shifting demographics of the United Kingdom. Apparently, due to huge and consistent immigration over recent years, the Catholic Church is poised to overshadow the Church of England as the most significant religious institution in the U.K. The changing face of Britain has lately been the subject of public discussion, but most of that discussion has focused on the nation’s growing Muslim population. Meanwhile, practicing Catholics, immigrating to the U.K. from places like Poland, have swelled in number. According to the Times, “Average Sunday attendance of both [the Catholic Church and the Church of England] stood even at nearly one million in 2005 . . . but the attendance at Mass is expected to soar.” The Times points out that this trend, if it continues, will result in the first eclipse of the Anglican church since the Protestant Reformation nearly half a millennium ago. The Church has not lived free from danger during its long existence. But this new demographic challenge to the already declining Church of England seems like a more trying test of the institution than, for example, any of James II’s crypto-Catholic legislation. While baptized Anglicans still vastly outnumber Catholics, only a paltry fraction of Anglicans actually attend Church. In a nation like Britain, which lacks American-style separation of church and state, the relegation of practicing Anglicans to minority status raises serious questions about the relationship between the national government and the national church. Elizabeth II serves as the head of both the British state and the Church of England. Is it appropriate for a nation to have a monarch who also serves as its spiritual leader, when the faith she leads constitutes only a minority of true believers? More broadly, since the Church of England is a creation of the state, shouldn’t its function be reconsidered as the composition of the nation changes? And, as a professor of mine recently pointed out, since Prince Charles is so excited about multiculturalism and world religions, can’t we anticipate a further decline of the church’s historic primacy, even before accounting for demographics? Finally, today is the fifty-fifth anniversary of the death of Elizabeth Windsor’s father, King George VI. Is it possible that his daughter will be the last monarch to lead the Church of England? It’s not at all clear what the answers to these questions are. They do raise interesting and worthwhile considerations, though, about traditions, demographics, and national identity. They’re also helpful reminders of the kinds of questions Americans don’t have to worry about, thanks to the First Amendment.
February 14, 2007
The Governor Goes to War II Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:25 AM EST In October 2004 an Atlantic Monthly profile of then–New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer noted that the crusading lawyer kept a portrait of Theodore Roosevelt in his office. This portrait was taken as a useful token of Spitzer’s personality and ambition. It signified his identification with one of New York’s best-known governors, noted for his aggressive and confrontational political style. It also suggested the boundlessness of Spitzer’s ambition. If there was any doubt that his aspirations extended beyond the statehouse in Albany, the portrait removed it. Considering the recent developments of Spitzer’s second month in office, detailed by John Steele Gordon, it occurs to me that Spitzer’s relationship to TR may be taking on a new significance. In addition to sharing some of TR’s political style, Spitzer now seems to face some of the same challenges in governing that Roosevelt confronted. Spitzer faces a legislature that, as Mr. Gordon noted, does practically nothing to represent the interests of New York voters. It is controlled by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a New York City Democrat, and Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, a Republican from Rensselaer County. If Spitzer hopes to accomplish real reform in Albany, he’ll eventually need to take out both of these men. Bruno already seems close to falling—his majority has narrowed to two votes and a Spitzer-allied Democrat seems poised to take over. With Lieutenant Governor David Paterson, the former Senate minority leader, by his side, Spitzer should soon see substantial cooperation from the legislature’s upper chamber. Speaker Silver and his cadre in the Assembly will be Spitzer’s more tenacious adversaries, and this is where the parallel with TR begins to show. After the first congressional elections of Roosevelt’s Presidency, the House elevated Joe Cannon, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, to the office of speaker. In the Senate, Rhode Island Republican Nelson Aldrich led his party. Cannon in particular wielded huge influence, since he was not only speaker, but also, simultaneously, chairman of the House Rules Committee. Both he and Aldrich were members of Roosevelt’s party, but both were resistant to the kinds of reforms the President hoped to implement. During his time in the White House, Roosevelt actually dealt with these men fairly gingerly, maintaining friendly relations with Cannon even while locking horns on issues of policy. After leaving office, however, Roosevelt found himself frustrated by the continued power of the GOP’s congressional leadership. Then, during the first Congress of Taft’s Presidency, Roosevelt lent some support to a group of younger, progressive members of Congress determined to overthrow the speaker. The so-called “insurgents” in the House, led by members like George Norris, removed Cannon from his position as Rules Committee chair and instituted a seniority system, which promoted members based on their terms of service. This replaced the previous method of committee assignments and promotions, which placed sole appointment power with the speaker. Soon thereafter, Democrats seized control of the House in the 1910 midterm elections and expelled Cannon from the speaker’s office altogether. A century later, Governor Spitzer finds himself similarly opposed by a legislative leader of his own party as he pushes for reform. He is presented with a decision either to moderate his own agenda or to fight to the death against this anti-reformist leadership. If he hopes to succeed as governor, Spitzer will surely have to end by taking down the speaker. Unlike Roosevelt, Spitzer seems to have recognized and accepted this early on. And unlike Cannon, Speaker Silver has decided to start the fight.
February 13, 2007
Primary Envy II Posted by Alexander Burns at 12:50 PM EST I share some of Julie Fenster’s frustration with the presidential nominating process. As a New Yorker, I am unlikely to have much say in selecting either of the major-party nominees in 2008. I am not hugely concerned about this, since I think Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina have recently tended to choose the best candidate, at least where my party is concerned (Kerry over Dean, Gore over Bradley). And when these early states have not clearly fallen behind a consensus candidate, other states have been able to weigh in on the process. In 1992, for example, the New York primary ended up being a somewhat significant contest between Bill Clinton and Jerry Brown. Looking further back, in 1984 Gary Hart ended up viewing California’s comparatively late primary as a potential last stand. I also think there’s an argument for concentrating disproportionate nominating power in smaller, more rural states, since larger states like New York, California, Illinois, and Texas can ensure that their interests are represented through the huge amount of campaign money that comes out of zip codes like 10023 and 90210. This may not give much personal influence to people like me and, perhaps, Ms Fenster. But it does mean that the interests of, say, Hollywood, are unlikely to be overlooked as easily as those of the farming industry would be, were Iowa cut out of the nominating process. At the end of the day, however, I have to agree that the presidential nominating process needs reform, if only because it has become so concentrated at the front end of election years. We’re headed toward a setup in 2008 whereby early primaries will come in such quick succession that any serious candidate will need a major win in January or early February in order to stay viable. Some states, like Illinois and New York, may attempt to take advantage of this arrangement by moving up their primaries in order to boost home-state candidates. There is some reason for optimism, though. Recently, as reported by Political Wire and Stateline.org, a division of the Pew Research Center, the National Association of Secretaries of State “has dusted off its proposal to divide states into regions—the East, South, Midwest, and West—and hold four primaries, each a month apart, between March and June. All states in a region would schedule their primaries on the same day. The order of the contests would rotate every presidential election year.” This suggestion bears some resemblance to Mr. Gordon’s idea for holding six or eight regional primaries, with one coming every two weeks. At a glance, I think the Gordon plan is probably superior. To divide the United States into only four big regions lumps a lot of unlike states together. Why should West Virginia hold its primary on the same day as Maine, as the NASS proposal would have it? And why should residents of Detroit, Michigan, and Fredonia, Kansas, end up voting as a bloc? With more regional subdivisions, you’d probably end up with a more coherent and effectively reformed process. Regardless of specifics, though, the idea of regional primaries is a good one, and one I hope to see gaining greater support in the near future. I’m not sure I want to have to answer phone calls from all 10 or so Democratic presidential candidates—but I know I don’t like the idea of all those calls going to Nashua and Charleston.
January 24, 2007
Humility and History Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:10 AM EST Amidst the flurry of news surrounding the State of the Union Address and Hillary Clinton’s announcement of her presidential candidacy, I’m going to be unconventional and talk about an event that’s practically ancient history: Barack Obama’s declaration of candidacy last week.
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