Lance Mannion

Twice-Told Tales, received opinion, and the pernicious influence of The West Wing: Reality-based non thinking. Part Three.

Here’s Part Three. One more part to follow.  Part One is here.  Part Two here.

Backing up here to get a running start at catching up with where I left off at the end of Part One.

Generally, people don’t argue the facts. Or with the facts or to get at the facts. We don’t even argue ideas. We argue in favor or our opinions. We champion what we already believe, and it’s usually the case that we believe something because it confirms something else we need to believe, usually that “I’m right to think what I think and live as I live.”

Read a blogger or a pundit approvingly citing a “new study” and you’re probably reading a sentence that should have been written more honestly as “Here’s a study that proves everything I already know about how the world works is right, so there!”

Or to put it another way. We’re in the habit of believing what we need to believe in order to justify what we want to do.

But beyond that, an awful lot of what we know we know we don’t really know. There isn’t even anything there to know. It’s just something we think. It’s something we picked up somewhere and let stick in our heads, and we continue to think it only because we’ve never thought about it since we first thought it---we haven’t bothered to re-submit it to any tests against the facts---or because it’s convenient to think it. It’s as I just said. It confirms something else we know we know.

I just finished reading Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--from 9/11 to Abbottabad by Peter Bergen. It’s a pretty good book, well-written, informative, factual, or at least I trust that it is factual. Bergen has a good reputation as a journalist. His previous books on al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were well-received and, as far as I know, haven’t been shown up as bunk. And Manhunt tracks with other things I’ve read on the subject, including Mark Bowden’s The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden, which I read just before starting Manhunt.

So, I was reading along with interest, trusting I was getting the facts, enjoying the book as history, journalism, and an adventure story, when I ran headlong into this, Bergen’s explanation for why a Democratic President seemed as aggressive and determined about the use of force as only Republican Presidents are supposed to be:

Perhaps [President Obama’s] views on national security had to do with when he came of age. Obama was the first major American politician in decades whose views about national security weren’t deeply informed by what he did or didn’t do in Vietnam. Too young to have served in Vietnam as the senators John McCain and John Kerry did, he was also too young to have avoided service in Vietnam as Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush had. For Obama, Vietnam was a nonissue, and it is possible this fact contributed to his greater use to his willingness to use military power in comparison to an older generation of Democrats. It took Clinton two years to intervene in Bosnia, which was on the verge of genocide, whereas it took Obama only a week or so to intervene in Libya in the spring of 2011, when dictator Moammar Gadhafi threatening large-scale massacres of his own population.

At first glance, this might come across as plausible but commonplace. After all, we know that not just liberals but the U.S. Military high command was traumatized by the war in Southeast Asia. “No More Vietnams” became not just a rallying cry for antiwar protesters. It became part of the basis of our foreign policy. It is, essentially, the Powell Doctrine.

But two things pulled me up short here.

A flash of memory and a longstanding prejudice.

Here’s the prejudice:  Any use of events or issues from the 1960s to explain anything, including events and issues from the 1960s, is pure shinola.

I’m not about to defend that.  I don’t recommend it.  I’m not apologizing for it either.  It’s just one of those things I think without thinking.  What matters is that it made me stop reading and start arguing.

What are you saying, Bergen?  Shadows of Vietnam were why it took Bill Clinton two years to send troops into Bosnia?

We know that, do we?

How do we know?

That’s when the memory kicked in.

Here’s what I remembered. The Bosnian Civil War began in 1991.

Bill Clinton inherited our policy in Bosnia from George Herbert Walker Bush.

And Bush’s policy was based on several factors, including that, unlike his son, the first President Bush wasn’t keen to wage one war on top of another---he didn’t want to commit U.S. troops and resources to another war so soon after the Gulf War--- but mainly on Bosnia’s being seen as a Europe’s problem and it’s being up to the Europeans to solve it. The Europeans were saying so themselves.  The UN was brought in, but NATO was to stay out of it, so that we’d stay out of it, so that the Russians would stay out of it. It wasn’t Vietnam that was weighing on people’s minds.  It was World War III.

That’s what I remember.  Not what I know. I know what Bill Clinton says decided his approach to Bosnia, because I looked it up in his autobiography:

My own options were constrained by the dug-in positions when I took office. For instance, I was reluctant to go along with Senator Dole in unilaterally lifting the arms embargo, for fear of weakening the United Nations (though we later did so in effect by declining to enforce it). I also didn’t want to divide the NATO alliance by unilaterally bombing Serb military positions, especially since there were European, but no American soldiers on the ground with the UN mission. And I didn’t want to send American troops there, putting them in harm’s way under a UN mandate I thought was bound to fail.

Sounds to me as though Clinton wanted to send in our troops right away and that what took two years was not his having to exorcise any ghosts of Vietnam that might have haunted him but his having to untangle the diplomatic knots created before he took office. Once that was taken care of and Bosnia became a NATO operation, we went right in.

What’s more, a few years later, when Kosovo was on the brink of genocide, the only thing that slowed Clinton’s decision to send our bombers into the air was resistance from the Republicans who controlled Congress.  By this point, all the GOP cared about was running Clinton out of town.

As for Vietnam being a nonissue for President Obama, that may or may not be so.  What is so is that his administration’s military strategy in Libya was modeled on Clinton’s success over Kosovo.

It’s a theme of Bowden’s The Finish, in which Bowden is generally admiring of the President’s decision-making in dealing with al Qaeda and going after bin Laden, that he’s been able to act more forcefully because he has more  and better forces at his command.  Vietnam has nothing to do with it, not because the President came of age that much later but because he became President after technological and tactical advances had improved the reliability and effectiveness of drones and special ops to the deadly degree they’ve now achieved. When President Clinton went after Osama bin Laden he had to throw cruise missiles at him and hope that bin Laden didn’t see them coming and was still in the general vicinity when they arrived.  President Obama had the option of sending a single, small drone that would have fired a pencil-sized missile to kill bin Laden.  He chose not to because there’d have then been no body left to prove to the world that we’d gotten him.  When President Carter ordered the attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran, the military practically had to invent the kind of commando unit that has since evolved into the Seals and Delta Force.  On the night Seal Team Six went into Abbottabad, about a dozen similar missions were underway in Afghanistan, Waziristan, and Yemen.

However the Vietnam War might have shaped their characters and thinking, the fact seems to be that both President Clinton’s and President Obama’s approaches to using military force were mainly based on the diplomatic and military exigencies of the specific moments when they had to make their decisions. 

My point isn’t that Bergen doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s that here it doesn’t appear he’s talking about what he knows. He’s writing about something he thinks and passing it along as if it’s something he knows.

It happens. And if it happens to someone like Bergen, a meticulous, diligent, professional journalist of long practice and experience, it could happen to anyone. It does happen to anyone.  It happens to anyone who writes and argues for a living.  Most political analysis, op-ed writing, and blogging is a matter of passing along thoughts as if they are facts.  It’s a hazard of the job.  The writing’s often done in a rush.  We have deadlines.  We have other commitments. We have colds, backaches, stomach bugs, ulcers, mosquito bites, the flu.  There isn’t time to check and re-check every little fact.  Maybe we do a quick google. Maybe we run down to the library or reach over to the bookshelf to pull down one book, scan the index, skim a chapter or two. Maybe we do the most unreliable thing of all and ask a colleague or a friend, “Hey, does this sound right to you?”  Mainly, though, we rely on our memories of stored facts.  And we pride ourselves on our memories. “I have a head for the facts,” we brag to ourselves.  “If it’s in here,” we say, mentally tapping our foreheads, “It’s in there for a reason.”  The reason being that smart guys and gals like us wouldn’t bother to remember it---wouldn’t bother to know it---if it wasn’t true.

To the consternation, chagrin, and infuriation of the Washington Press Corps, one of the goods the rise of blogging did was spread news that critics of political journalism had been trying to get across for decades---there’s a narrative. Journalists don’t go out and uncover stories as much as they go out and cover the story they’ve already told themselves over lunch or at parties or while passing time on the campaign bus. And that story is concocted out of a shared store of memories of past campaign narratives, skimmed articles and books, retold conversations with “reliable” sources, lessons drawn from high school and college history and political science classes twenty, thirty, and forty years in the past now, shopworn anecdotes, received opinions, badly digested polls, gossip, the plots of movies and television shows, alcohol-fueled flashes of insight, untested and unthought-through theorizations and sudden inspirations by people who haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in a week, facts everybody knows---a fact being something everybody on hand knows to be a fact without having to check it with Siri---the occasional, actual fact, and even some intelligent and original reporting uninfluenced by the narrative.

It doesn’t matter how smart, how skeptical, how diligent, how intellectually disciplined any individual reporters are. For almost all of them, including the best, their chief research tool is some explicit or implicit variation of the question, “Does this sound about right to you?”

Naturally, members of the press corps have not been happy to have had this pointed out. Naturally, many denizens of the blogosphere have been more than happy to do the pointing out.

But bloggers concoct their own narratives too and out of the same sort of gumbo of shared memories and “facts”.  (Don’t get me started on the influence of The West Wing on the the left side of the bandwidth’s understanding of how politics works.) We like to think we’re dealing in facts, that even when we’re just giving an opinion, we’ve got the facts to back us up. But, really, when it comes down to it, we’re just telling stories.  

This isn’t because we’re just as bad as the Beltway Insiders.  It’s because we’re just as human.

This is how human beings think.

People don’t naturally or easily think in carefully constructed debating points or in bar graphs or mathematical proofs.  We think in stories.  And when we debate, discuss, argue, or exchange ideas, we exchange stories, although sometimes we do it at the top of our lungs or through clenched teeth.

We may have facts to back ourselves up, numbers, math, science. But we don’t usually use them.  Instead, we tell stories about there being these facts.  We tell stories about how other people have gathered and interpreted them.  And these stories aren’t even stories we’ve created ourselves.  They’re stories we’ve been told, almost always by people who were told them by others who were told…you get the idea.

The personal narratives that make up out thinking are made up of twice-told tales and received opinions.

We didn’t think a lot of what we think we think.  We just heard it someplace.

Many people will read Manhunt and not even have that paragraph register.  It registered with me because of my prejudice.  But others will take it in without a second thought, because they already know it, know what I mean?  Others will read it and it will lodge in their brain because it tracks with something they know from somewhere else or because it confirms one of their prejudices.  And others will read it and nod and file it away in a mental drawer because, well, Peter Bergen put it in his book and he wouldn’t have put it in there if it wasn’t true, would he?

And at some point, somewhere, these facts will be passed along, in an op-ed, in another book, in a blog post, in an argument in a bar.  Bill Clinton was skittish about using force because of his draft dodging youth during the Vietnam War.  Barack Obama has no qualms about it because his cohort of late Baby Boomers was spared having to worry about the war.

Now here’s the thing.

I’m fairly certain that Bergen is passing along an opinion up in that paragraph. And I’m willing to bet it’s not his opinion.  I mean that it’s not original with him.  It’s something he heard somewhere. After all, it’s based on something I’ve heard somewhere.  We’ve all heard it.  Many times.   I’m not certain he doesn’t know that’s what he’s doing.  He opens with a seemingly cautionary “perhaps,” but that might be hedging. Still, he may have sources that back him up, interviews with President Clinton or President Obama or with people close to them who know to what degree Vietnam figured in their decisions.  I’m surprised he doesn’t list Clinton’s autobiography in his bibliography, but how smart am I to trust a politician to give a straight-forward, non-self-serving version of any event in his career?

I know, because he’s said it many times, that Clinton still feels guilty over his failure to intervene in Rwanda.  It could be that in describing how he handled Bosnia he’s implicitly excusing how he didn’t handle Rwanda.  He could be trying to polish his legacy by balancing off a failure with a success.  And if Vietnam did figure in his thinking as a drag on his willingness to use force, how certain is it he would know it?  Perhaps he was not conscious of it and still wasn’t when he sat down to write My Life.

And then that paragraph of Bergen’s seems to be contradicted by points Mark Bowden makes in The Finish, but, although, like I said, a reason I trust the overall factuality of Manhunt is that it tracks with the story as Bowden tells it in The Finish, a reason I trust what’s in The Finish is that I had the story confirmed by having immediately followed up reading it with Manhunt.

And another reason I trust what’s in The Finish is that I read and enjoyed and trusted other books by Bowden.  Black Hawk Down.  Killing Pablo.  The Best Game Ever.  And that last one I trusted because it expanded upon a story I already knew from a comic strip I read in Boy’s Life when I was around eight or nine.

So I don’t trust Bergen on this. But I can’t trust Clinton either.  And I probably shouldn’t trust Bowden as much as I do.  In short, I don’t know enough to know Bergen is wrong.  I only know enough to make think he might be.

It’s possible Bergen doesn’t know what he’s talking about.  But it’s even more possible that I don’t either.

Possible?

Probable.

But this is what marks me as a card-carrying member of the Reality-based Community and helps pay my dues.

A healthy dose of self-skepticism and a, I hope, cheerful willingness to be proven wrong.

End of Part Three.  Part Four on the way.  Yes, there’s going to be a Part Four. But that should be it.  I appreciate your putting up with this.  I’ve had a logjam of posts in my head and I need to write my through this to unjam it.

I don’t know nuthin about nuthin

Washington Crossing the Delaware by Larry Rivers (1953). Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

Every day I learn I don’t know anything even when I’m in the middle of learning something new.

Yesterday I learned about the painter Larry Rivers.

Now I feel like I know too much about him.

But I didn’t learn about him only from that Vanity Fair article.  I was reading Robert Sullivan’s My American Revolution, an enjoyable, John McPhee style exploration of the landscapes of New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania where the main action of the War for Independence was concentrated. Sullivan looks at what’s there now, tells about what was there then, and chronicles what happened in between.  For the chapter I read last night, he visited the spot on the Delaware River where Washington and his troops pushed off from to begin their assault on Trenton.  Sullivan writes about the copy of Emanuel Leutze’s iconic painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware displayed in the museum there and about the yearly re-enactment of the crossing and in between he writes about Rivers and his painting Washington Crossing the Delaware, which I’d never seen or even heard of.

So I googled.

Googling turned up the Vanity Fair article.

But it also turned up this.

So I read this:

Now that our hero has come back to us
in his white pants and we know his nose
trembling like a flag under fire,
we see the calm cold river is supporting
our forces, the beautiful history.

To be more revolutionary than a nun
is our desire, to be secular and intimate
as, when sighting a redcoat, you smile
and pull the trigger. Anxieties
and animosities, flaming and feeding

on theoretical considerations and
the jealous spiritualities of the abstract
the robot? they're smoke, billows above
the physical event. They have burned up.
See how free we are! as a nation of persons.

Dear father of our country, so alive
you must have lied incessantly to be
immediate, here are your bones crossed
on my breast like a rusty flintlock,
a pirate's flag, bravely specific

and ever so light in the misty glare
of a crossing by water in winter to a shore
other than that the bridge reaches for.
Don't shoot until, the white of freedom glinting
on your gun barrel, you see the general fear.

And that was the second poem by Frank O’Hara I read yesterday. I read the first much earlier in the day, while noodling about the internet, reading stuff that had nothing to do with Larry Rivers, George Washington, or even Frank O’Hara.

The first O’Hara poem was also about painting.

It’s called “Why I Am Not a Painter.”

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES

Frank O’Hara I did know about.

But I didn’t recall having read either of those poems.

And I didn’t know he was considered a brilliant art critic or that he worked at the Museum of Modern Art or that he was friends with Larry Rivers (which, how could I, since I didn’t know Larry Rivers was there to be friends with).

So I learned a lot of stuff yesterday.

About Larry Rivers. About Frank O’Hara. About George Washington. About the American Revolution. About the New York School. About hanging out at the Cedar Tavern in the 1950s and about how drinking there was different from drinking at the White Horse Tavern.

Mostly, though, like I said, that I don’t know anything.

The facts we know we know aren’t all the facts there are to know. Sometimes they’re not even facts: Reality-based non-thinking, Part One.

On my last post, Silent Cal and That Old-time Republican Religion, I led off with:

Right Wingers are in the habit of believing whatever they need to believe to justify whatever it is they want to do.

The left is hardly immune from this.

Among the temptations besetting us members of the Reality-based Community is the temptation to believe that because we respect the facts we have got those facts.

And we do. Some of them, some of us, some of the time.  But we need to remember that along with the facts we have got other things.

Biases.

Preconceptions.

Prejudices.  Vanities. Bad memories.

Hopes. Dreams. Illusions. Passions and desires.

All these things get in the way of our seeing the world for what it really is and tend to lead us into believing it’s what we wish it to be.  They lead us into ignoring the facts we have or that there are there for us to obtain.  They lead us into selectively choosing facts to support our version of reality.  They lead us into misinterpreting and even misrepresenting facts.  They lead us into thinking that things that aren’t facts are. 

You remember how in the last few weeks before the election half the Village Press Corps went to war against the New York Times’ Nate Silver because he had the geeky arrogance to insist that the numbers---the facts on hand---tended to show that what was happening in the world at large was very different than what was going on in the world as journalists and pundits were describing it to themselves and each other at the backs of the campaign busses and around the lunch tables of their favorite DC watering holes.  Liberals and Democrats all along the left coast of Blogtopia [Editor’s note: credit as always to skippy] rallied around Silver.  But it didn’t require much cynicism to see that many of Silver’s stalwarts were only on his side because in his version of the world the President was on his way to winning re-election.  They trusted Silver’s math because it proved what they wanted it to prove not because they’d tested it themselves and found it worked.  Most of them couldn’t have begun to do the math themselves.

They didn’t have the facts.

They had faith.

I should say we, because I’m talking about myself as well.

We know math works, but that doesn’t mean we know how to do it ourselves.  We have faith, though, that people like Silver who do it for a living know what they’re doing.  When they show us their results, we trust that they didn’t forget to carry a 1 or misplace a decimal point and we trust that if they did goof up other people who can do the math will pipe right up to correct the error.

Something else we have. Trust.

We trust in the experts or at least trust that there is such a thing as expertise.  We trust the professionals. We trust the scientists, mathematicians, historians, doctors, and engineers.

We have favorites. Favorite writers, favorite teachers, favorite journalists, pundits, analysts, and bloggers.

We trust that they are smart and know what they’re talking about because we trust ourselves to recognize smart people to trust.

We assume that their opinions are based on facts and their interpretation of those faces is correct, and then we take a perilous leap.

We accept their interpretations and opinions as facts.

We have friends.  Smart friends. They wouldn’t be our friends if they weren’t smart, right? So we trust that when they tell us about something they know, it has a basis in fact. We have relatives and coworkers, and some of them are smart and we trust what they tell us and some of them are idiots and we know to distrust everything they try to tell us, even when all they’re telling us is the time of day.

Our intellectual relationship with reality is filtered and buffered.  Our knowledge of the facts is often, at best, second-hand, more often third, fourth, and fifth-hand.

Generally, people don’t argue the facts.  Or with the facts or to get at the facts.  We don’t even argue ideas.  We argue in favor or our opinions. We champion what we already believe, and it’s usually the case that we believe something because it confirms something else we need to believe, usually that “I’m right to think what I think and live as I live.”

Read a blogger or a pundit approvingly citing a “new study” and you’re probably reading a sentence that should have been written more honestly as “Here’s a study that proves everything I already know about how the world works, so there!”

Or to put it another way. We’re in the habit of believing what we need to believe in order to justify what we want to do.

But beyond that, an awful lot of what we know we know we don’t really know.  There isn’t even anything there to know.  It’s just something we think. It’s something we picked up somewhere and let stick in our heads, and we continue to think it only because we haven’t thought about it since we first thought it---we’ve never bothered to re-submit it to any tests against the facts---or because it’s convenient to think it.  It’s as I just said. It confirms something else we know we know.

I just finished reading Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--from 9/11 to Abbottabad by Peter Bergen.  It’s a pretty good book, well-written, informative, factual, or at least I trust that it is factual.  Bergen has a good reputation as a journalist.  His previous books on al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were well-received and, as far as I know, haven’t been shown up as bunk. And Manhunt tracks with other things I’ve read on the subject, including Mark Bowden’s The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden, which I read just before starting Manhunt.

So, I was reading along with interest, trusting I was getting the facts, enjoying the book as history, journalism, and an adventure story, when I ran headlong into this, Bergen’s explanation for why a Democratic President seemed as aggressive and determined about the use of force as only Republican Presidents are supposed to be:

Perhaps [President Obama’s] views on national security had to do with when he came of age. Obama was the first major American politician in decades whose views about national security weren’t deeply informed by what he did or didn’t do in Vietnam.  Too young to have served in Vietnam as the senators John McCain and John Kerry did, he was also too young to have avoided service in Vietnam as Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush had.  For Obama, Vietnam was a nonissue, and it is possible this fact contributed to his greater use to his willingness to use military power in comparison to an older generation of Democrats.  It took Clinton two years to intervene in Bosnia, which was on the verge of genocide, whereas it took Obama only a week or so to intervene in Libya in the spring of 2011, when dictator Moammar Gadhafi threatening large-scale massacres of his own population.

Two things pulled me up short here.

A flash of memory and a longstanding prejudice.

End of Part One. Part Two is here.

Saint Silent Cal and that Old-time Republican Religion

Revised and updated. Tuesday morning, March 5, 2013.

Calvin Coolidge, 30th President of the United States, looking as though he’s on the verge of doing something he’s not remembered for doing much of while in office, smiling. Photo of Coolidge with four men of the Osage nation after the signing of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 courtesy of Wikipedia.

Right Wingers are in the habit of believing whatever they need to believe to justify whatever it is they want to do.

You don’t need me to tell you this, but this is why their attitudes towards science, medicine, history, economics, military and foreign policy, religion, politics, and, well, just about everything, are…flexible.

They are convinced that the world as they see it inside their heads matches the world as it exists everywhere else, including inside other people’s heads, and if they think it, it must be so.

When we liberals flatter ourselves that we belong to the reality-based community, we aren’t claiming---or we shouldn’t all be claiming---that we base our thinking on facts and facts alone and that we have those facts at our fingertips and can explain global warming or qualitative easement or the evolution of the constitutional debates over the Second Amendment or whatever off the tops of our eggheads. Truth is, most of us don’t know the facts and we can’t do the math ourselves. But we accept that the facts are out there, that the math does work, and the world as it exists inside our heads and the world as it actually is can be very different worlds indeed. Reality as we conceive it to be, wish it would be, and are maybe even striving to make it be is not necessarily as the facts show it to be. What it comes down to is that we work from the assumption that there are a lot of people who are smarter than we are, who can do the math and have a better grasp of what’s really going on because their job and their vocation is to study the world as it really is and we’d better take their research into account when we’re trying to figure out how to order and run the country, from deciding what and how to teach our children in school to dealing with a slumping economy to confronting global climate change.

But Right Wing Republicanism, which is basically the only brand of Republicanism left, has become like a religion and it takes its cues from the Fundamentalist brand of religion practiced by most of its base. Right Wing Christians believe in a purely personal relationship with Jesus and Right Wing Republicans believe in a purely personal relationship with reality.

Not surprisingly the two often amount to the same thing.

Things are as I believe them to be because Jesus tells me so.

Trouble arises when reality and belief collide. When this happens to liberals, we (most of us), adjust our thinking to accord with reality. Or we try, at any rate. Right Wingers adjust reality.

Considering how much Right Wingers believe that directly contradicts reality as revealed by the known facts as opposed to what is revealed to them by the God inside their heads, they have to adjust constantly. Must get exhausting. There must be times when they feel too tired to manage any more denial, dark nights of the conservative soul when they are tempted to give in and say, You know, up may really be up and down may really be down, the sky is blue, and the earth probably does go around the sun.  No wonder so many of them rely on their media outlets---FoxNews, Rush and other blabbermouths of hate speech radio---and their preachers to pat them on the heads and reassure them that it’s all right, there is no reality but that which they choose to believe in on any given day.

Believe it or not, though, and I’m sure there are facts and figures and the math to back this up, there are Right Wingers who aren’t content to be ditto-heads. They have enough residual respect for education that they accept that facts do matter and that those facts are more likely to be found in books than in the spoutings and shoutings of TV and radio personalities or they are at least aware that other people are impressed when you can tell them “I read this in a book…” So they buy and read books.

Lots and lots of books. Only the biggest blockheads among them are satisfied quoting chapter and verse from Atlas Shrugged. Problem is, despite their good intentions and intellectual pretensions, they’re still Right Wingers in the habit of believing whatever they need to believe in order to justify whatever they want to do, and if you just go wandering off into a library or a Barnes and Noble and willy-nilly start plucking books off the shelves because you like the cover or are intrigued by the title or have heard of the author or, God forbid, read a review in the New York Times, and are otherwise careless or reckless in your reading, odds are at some point you’re going to read something suggesting the reality you need to believe in isn’t reality at all and that might cause you to wonder if what you want to do, which you’ve justified by the exigencies of your alternative reality, may not be a wise or a productive or a moral thing to do.

So, the elders and inquisitors of the church have sanctioned an industry devoted to publishing books that detail and describe alternative realities. The most obvious, and most obviously aimed at the simple-minded, are the ones pushing an alternative political reality in which liberals are doing what Right Wingers are doing in this reality. But there are alternative economics. Alternative science. Alternative religion---somebody needs to show that when Jesus said those things about selling everything to follow him and storing up treasures on earth and rich men and needles’ eyes he meant “Make your bundle fast and let me tell you how!” and when he said suffer the little children to come unto him he meant our children, everybody else’s children can just go suff!

And then there are the alternative histories.

This one is very important since one of the biggest embarrassments conservatives face is that they have been on the wrong side of American history since the Mayflower dropped anchor. How comforting to know that there is another version of American history in which that is not how things went.

One of the popular Right Wing alternative historians is Amity Shlaes, who is not by training, trade, or calling an historian at all. She’s a diligent and dedicated propagandist. Her signature work to date is The Forgotten Man, a “history” of the Depression that proves the New Deal didn’t work by treating the New Deal as a coherent program designed from the get-go to end the Depression, which Shlaes reduces to simply a problem of massive underemployment and depressed stock prices, in short order, and since the Depression hadn’t ended by the conclusion of FDR’s first term and in fact (and here Shlaes resorts to actual facts, although very carefully cherry-picked ones) unemployment went up in 1938 and stocks stubbornly refused to rise to their pre-Crash highs, the New Deal failed. [Editor’s note: See update below.]

Just for the record, the New Deal wasn’t a program designed to reduce unemployment. It was a whole bunch of experiments and ad hoc and catch-as-catch-can measures put together in haste in order to save the country from complete economic and political collapse. The New Deal became more programmatic as time went on as it was seen what worked and what didn’t and why, but that took until most of the way through FDR’s second term, which brings us to this.

When some conservative tries to tell you the New Deal didn’t end the Depression, World War II did, point out that our war effort was the ultimate New Deal project, run by New Dealers guided by what they had learned from putting the New Deal together and getting it working over the past decade.

But back to Shlaes.

As I mentioned, Right Wing Republicanism has become like a religion, and you can’t have a church without a communion of saints. Ronald Reagan is the rock upon which they’ve built their church, but he’s looking a little lonely in his shrines, not least because the facts of this reality are catching up to his reputation. More saints and martyrs to the cause are needed to distract the skeptical and give doubters reassurance that there’s more to the faith than Reagan-worship. To this end, Shlaes has now moved from writing alternative history to hagiography.

She has just published a biography promoting the canonization of Calvin Coolidge.

Turns out the President usually thought of as the dullest, coldest, least interesting man to hold the office in the 20^th Century was a political genius. His genius being in knowing how to keep the government out of the way of rich men out to make a buck.

Throughout the past Presidential campaign, I harped on my reason for fearing and loathing Mitt Romney more than I’d feared or loathed any other Republican who ran for President in my lifetime. Romney, I wrote again and again, was the first person to run for President who believed that the whole purpose of life was the accumulation of wealth. He saw and valued people solely as economic units, including himself, and judged them by how much they contributed to the accumulation of wealth. As far as he was concerned, people were owners or they were employees and from the point of view of the owners employees are either resources to be exploited or costs to be controlled, either things or abstractions, but no matter which still entries on a spreadsheet that must show a profit’s being made.

People, seen like that, are a problem. Not a nice notion on its own but antithetical to a democratic society. Mitt, I meant to imply, as I railed, ranted, and raved, was the first Presidential candidate who was running against democracy.

Maybe I should have given more thought to Silent Cal.

In the reality I grew up in, Coolidge was a minor figure, an accidental President defined by who he was not, the Presidents on either side of him on the classroom walls, Harding and Hoover, famous for doing nothing that made other Presidents great, posing in cowboy hats and Indian war bonnets without cracking a grin, counting the days until he was out of office, assiduously paying no attention as the Roaring 20s roared their way towards Black Tuesday.  The great restraint Shlaes presents as his cardinal virtue I understood as a form of moral turpitude. He couldn’t be bothered to care.

But it’s Shlaes’ mission to make us take to our hearts the budget-cutting, tax-cutting, deregulating Coolidge, this embodiment of austerity in all its meanings and applications, this skinflint, this cheap-tipper, this money-obsessed, frigid fogey about whom it can easily be surmised that when he pissed he pissed congealed ice, as a saint and a hero and a political role-model for our time.

Reviewing Shlaes’ book in the New York Times, Jacob Heilbrunn, author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, cautions not to be dismissive of Coolidge himself, whom he calls “a more astute politician than the easy scorn of his contemporaries suggested”. But Helibrunn sums up Shlaes overall thesis as “flapdoodle.”

What makes Coolidge a fascinating character, however, aren’t his bromidic phrases and vapid homilies, designed to reassure a public unsettled by rapid social and economic change; or his loyalty to his vivacious wife, Grace; or his taciturnity or any of his other personal qualities. Rather, it is that he represented the right’s first sweeping counterrevolution against liberal Republicans in a battle that continues down to the present. What Shlaes’s biography underscores is the fantastic tenacity with which the party still adheres to the ossified pre-New-Deal-era economic doctrines enunciated by Silent Cal…

No, Coolidge was not single-handedly culpable for the economic calamity of the 1930s. But neither can he be safely extracted from the ruin that followed his presidency. Quite the contrary. Coolidge was the pre-­eminent cheerleader for the economic nostrums that led to the crash. His opposition to regulation allowed Wall Street and the banks to engage in rampant speculation and insider trading, practices that were not curbed until Joseph Kennedy was appointed head of the new Securities and Exchange Commission by Franklin Roose­velt to ban the very practices he himself had employed. So deep was Coolidge’s antipathy to any form of government action that he even viewed his gifted secretary of commerce and successor Herbert Hoover with a measure of contempt, calling him the “wonder boy” because he fell into the progressive Republican camp.

Another by the way here.  Now they don’t like Hoover either and not because of his failure to deal swiftly with the Depression.  Back in the 80s there was an attempt by conservative historians---and back then there were some conservative historians. Conservative scientists too.---to rehabilitate Hoover’s reputation.  But that attempt turned up the fact that, despite his stubborn resistance to act progressively as President when faced with the Depression, mostly because he couldn’t bring himself to imagine just how bad things were and how much worse they were getting, over the course of a long and successful career in business and public service he showed himself to be more of a progressive than a good church-sanctified Republican is allowed to be.  So he’s been excommunicated for the same sins as Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, thinking that government might be an effective tool for making people’s lives better.

Back to Heilbrunn, Coolidge, and Shlaes. Heilbrunn concludes his review of Shlaes hagiography with this:

With yet another tribute about to appear — “Why Coolidge Matters,” by the former Claremont Institute fellow Charles C. Johnson, will be published in March — Coolidge will surely continue to enjoy a comeback on the right. Yet his actual record shows that he was an extraordinarily blinkered and foolish and complacent leader, no less than George W. Bush before the stock market plummeted in 2008. The bogus nostrums that Coolidge touted have directly led either to enormous deficits during the Reagan era or to outright catastrophe during the Bush era. Shlaes never stops to ponder the abundant literature chafing at and exposing the conformity and avarice of the Roaring Twenties, but the prosperity offered by Calvinism has always proved as elusive as the promise of the green light that Jay Gatsby watches at the end of Daisy’s dock. Conservatives may be intent on excavating a hero, but Coolidge is no model for the present. He is a bleak omen from the past.

The current Republican Religion divides, not neatly, into three sects, united by the paranoid belief that liberalism is the Whore of Babylon intent on taking away their freedom. 

There are the Tea Party crazies, whom it would be better to call Right Wing Reactionaries.  These are the self-flagellants out to protect their freedom to cut off their noses to spite their faces as long as it means those people won’t benefit from any good the government might try to do.

There are the Right Wing Fundamentalist Christians who want the freedom to hate whomever they feel God tells them to hate and to deny themselves and all the rest of us any joy we might find in life outside a church pew.

Then there are the Right Wing Corporatists.  These are the orthodox and establishmentarians of the Party.  They aren’t the loudest and they don’t get the attention they deserve, but they run things because they have the money.  And that’s what they’re about.  Money and the freedom to rake it up by the sack-full.  They want the freedom to make as much money as they can any way they can without having to give a damn about anybody else.

And they might be the least reality-based of the three.

All three believe that world works by magic.  The Right Wing Reactionaries believe that all the benefits of a living in a liberal society are just there to enjoy without their having to pay taxes to maintain them.  The Fundamentalists believe God is among us right now, working his will, arranging things to work out for the best according to His divine plan.  But the corporatists believe that if we’d just let the greediest, most selfish, most rapacious, and most ruthless among us do whatever they want to make a buck, a just, ordered, secure, and prosperous society will inevitably result and thrive to the benefit of all.

The Republican Party was founded as an anti-slavery party, of course, but it was also, and not incidentally, a pro-labor and pro-farmer party as well.  In northeastern cities, the white working class, who were mostly Democrats, tended to fear the prospect of freed blacks as a threat to their jobs and wages.  But in the west (which included that part of the country we now think of as the Midwest), working men and women and small farmers saw slavery itself as a threat.  Not only couldn’t they compete with slaves when it came to wages, people understood that anyone depraved enough to find a moral justification for enslaving black people wouldn’t have to stretch their thinking much to find a justification for enslaving white people too.  But still the protecting and privileging of wealth and the promotion of the owner class as the nation’s natural ruling elite were a part of the party’s DNA from the beginning.  East Coast capitalists and industrialists joined right up, some motivated by their heartfelt hatred of slavery, some by self-interest, many by both, but as a group they began to throw their weight around from the get-go.  Wasn’t long before they were running the whole show.  And it wasn’t long after that before a rivalry began between those of the elite who thought having lots of money obligated you to take care of people who had very little and those who thought having money obligated you only to making more money.

We know which faction won out.

Took them about a hundred and twenty years.

But they’ve pretty much run the Theodore Roosevelts, the Eisenhowers, the George Romneys, and the George Herbert Walker Bushes out of the party.  The corporatist wing is a church of latter day little Mitts.

It’s way, way, way too early to waste time speculating on who will be either party’s nominee in 2016.  But I’m willing to bet that the Republicans won’t be nominating Chris Christie, for a variety of reasons, one of the chief ones being that in his response to Hurricane Sandy he showed that he thinks that government exists to make people’s lives better, a heresy that will cost him the favor of the bishops of the corporatist wing of the church.

Whoever gets the Republican nomination, though, will be a true believer.  He or she will try to portray themselves as a second-coming of Ronald Reagan, of course, but what will really send the white smoke billowing up the chimney is if the supplicant has demonstrated a habit of fervent prayer before the shrine of the newly canonized Saint Calvin the Silent.

_________________________

Updated to better reflect the history of this reality:  I’ve oversimplified Shlaes’ attempt to rewrite the history of the New Deal in The Forgotten Man.  Eric Rauchway, an actual historian, does the necessary in-depth and reality-based analysis and debunking in this article for Dissent, New Deal Denialism.

Some tortured thoughts on Zero Dark Thirty

Jessica Chastain as Maya, the dedicated past the point of obsession CIA analyst whose emphasis on spy-craft over torture guides her in directing the hunt for Usama bin Laden in Kathryn Bigelow’s not, as far as I could see, pro-torture movie, Zero Dark Thirty.

Major spoilers coming!

Finally saw Zero Dark Thirty Sunday.  No review yet, but as the title of the post says, I’ve got a few thoughts.

First is, Wow!  Kathryn Bigelow knows how to make a movie!

Second, she didn’t make a pro-torture movie.

At least, I didn’t see a pro-torture movie.

I went in afraid that’s what I was going to see.  An awful lot of critics and pundits I respect, along with several United States Senators and some highly experienced veterans of the intelligence field, reported that they saw a pro-torture movie.

Like I said, I didn’t.

Neither did Mrs M.

What we saw was so much not a pro-torture movie, in fact, that I wondered if all those critics and pundits had actually seen a different movie.

I wondered if Bigelow, stung by the criticism, had re-cut the film since its initial release.

Doesn’t appear she did.

What I think then is that either I need to go back and see it again to find out what I missed or those critics and pundits missed a significant fact about Zero Dark Thirty themselves.

It’s a movie.

I don’t mean that as in It’s just a movie.

I mean that a movie is a story told through pictures and those pundits and critics weren’t looking closely enough at the pictures Bigelow was putting together to tell her story.

And I suspect it’s because they were too distracted listening for speeches that were never delivered.

There are no big anti-torture speeches in Zero Dark Thirty.

There is a background shot of President Obama on 60 Minutes explaining why he’s banned torture as an interrogation technique. I thought it was a key image.

But more to the point there are no pro-torture pictures.

There are no pictures showing torture working.

All the pictures add up to the message that torture did not work.

It’s shown not to work.  It’s shown to fail, horrifyingly and spectacularly, again and again and again.

All of the torture scenes are confined to the first act of the film.  Almost all the torture is conducted by Maya’s superior, Dan.  In the longest and most horrific torture scene, Dan isn’t demanding a name.  He wants a day of the week!  Dan isn’t after Usama bin Laden. Dan is after information that will help stop impending terrorist attacks.

He doesn’t get it.

Almost immediately after comes a scene of a spectacularly bloody terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia.

There are four major and successful terrorist attacks in the first act.

Saudi Arabia. London. Islamabad. Camp Chapman in Afghanistan where Maya’s friend and colleague Jessica is killed.

All the torture ends with the beginning of Act Two.

So do the successful terrorist attacks.

The second act is when the hunt for bin Laden begins in earnest, because now it’s Maya’s show.

Zero Dark Thirty isn’t about how we got bin Laden or how the President got him or how the Navy Seals got him.

It’s about how Maya got him.

Dan has gone home.  Jessica is dead.  The CIA station chief is about to be recalled.  Maya is pretty much on her own now and that means she gets to do things her way.

Her way is to play traditional spy games.

Intelligence gathering.

Detective work.

Asset manipulation.

In short, tradecraft.

Bigelow puts it up on the screen in big letters.

Maya's hunt for bin Laden starts really rolling with the serendipitous discovery of a file that’s found because people are going back through old intelligence from lines of investigation that got sidetracked by the fixation on torture to prove Iraq had WMD and ties to al-Qaeda.

Bigelow doesn’t flat out remind us, but she expects us to remember that getting bin Laden was never a priority for the Bush Administration.

Going to war with Iraq was.

Missing the file---misplacing it, actually---is explained as “human error.”  That’s a euphemism for “criminal negligence.”

From here on out, the work Maya and the team she directs is all surveillance and information gathering and old-fashioned legwork.  Her team tracks down a lead and then follows his SUV to bin Laden’s compound.

When he hears that the compound’s been identified, President Obama’s National Security Advisor wants proof that bin Laden is there before recommending any action to the President.  Dan is on hand to regret that he can’t “interrogate” any detainees.  Maya is certain bin Laden’s there, but her superiors don’t know how they can prove it.  Ok, says the President’s man, prove it’s not anybody else. 

Maya and her colleagues go to work again, gathering more intelligence, chasing more leads, doing research, employing tradecraft to eliminate possibilities to the point that it just has to be bin Laden hiding out there.

Act Three is the assault by the Seals.

So it goes like this:

Act One:  Torture doesn’t work.

Act Two: Let’s try it Maya’s way.

Act Three: Maya’s way works.

At any rate, that’s how it went in the movie I saw.

But I don’t get how those pundits and critics saw a different movie, except, like I said, that it’s as a I suspect.  They didn’t see the movie Bigelow made because they were too mad at her for not making the explicitly and didactically anti-torture movie they wanted to hear.

The scene critics accusing Bigelow of making Zero Dark Thirty pro-torture or at least insufficiently anti-torture tend to point to as their evidence is the one in which Dan and Maya trick a prisoner into finally giving up some information.  Their point is that the trick seems to depend on the prisoner’s having been tortured and so indirectly torture is shown to have helped lead to bin Laden.  But they’re missing the story again.  This is Maya’s story and the trick is her idea!  Dan has no ideas except to drag the prisoner back for another round of beatings and humiliations and near-drownings. Maya is changing the approach and in the process beginning her move towards taking over the manhunt on her terms which is to reject torture and emphasize “tradecraft.”

Maya does try her hand at torture, sort of. Basically, she authorizes an underling to give a prisoner the old third degree. But it’s half-hearted and ineffective and, if I’m remembering right, she doesn’t try it again.

Some people have complained that in the scenes of Maya studying the images of tortured prisoners on her computer monitors she doesn’t express her disgust and revulsion.  I think her disgust and revulsion are written all over her face but along with her dedication, her diligence, and her focus---we’re seeing an intelligent mind at work trying to glean as much information as she can from what she has to work with.  Her focus at the moment is on getting bin Laden, not on making the case for us that torture is wrong.  But to complain about this is to miss that Maya is not the only one looking at those images.

We’re seeing them too.

And what we’re seeing is bound to remind us of Abu Ghraib and nobody except the likes of Rush Limbaugh is not going to be disgusted by that, and I think it’s a safe bet that Bigelow did not make Zero Dark Thirty to please Rush Limbaugh.

Writing for the New York Review of Books, Steve Coll complains that the torture scenes are insufficiently repulsive---They sure repulsed me, but maybe Coll has a stronger stomach.---and they’re journalistically inaccurate because Dan uses techniques that weren’t used by the professional torturers at black sites but by the out of control amateurs at Abu Ghraib.  Well, yes.  But that’s sort of a big clue right there.

Coll also makes this point:

The film’s Ammar is depicted as a doomed man who will spend his entire life behind bars without resort to lawyers or justice. In an early interrogation scene, Maya pulls off her black mask before entering to face the prisoner because Dan assures her that Ammar will never be free to menace her. We are invited to appreciate Ammar’s subjugation.

That seems like a woeful mis-seeing of that scene to me.

First of all, if Bigelow is inviting us to appreciate his subjugation, she must think we enjoyed watching him subjugated, that we want to go back into the interrogation room along with Dan and Maya, and that we’ll get satisfaction from watching the whole thing replayed and also that we expect thqt this time Dan will get his answers.

I think you have to have been still out in the lobby buying popcorn during the initial interrogation scene to think Bigelow meant anything other than for us to be disgusted and sickened by the torture.  If we were invited to appreciate anything, it’s Ammar’s pain and fear.  We’re intended to sympathize with him in that he’s a fellow human being in terrible distress.

And we’re expected to see from the start that Dan is going about things all wrong, morally and practically.

But the scene outside when Maya takes off the mask is about Dan emotionally blackmailing her into going back in with him.  He tells her there’s no shame if she chooses not to, but of course there is.  He’ll report back to Langley that she’s not tough enough for the job if she doesn’t go back in.  She’ll be recalled right then and there and, as the movie plays out, we see that if that had happened, bin Laden would not have been found.

The point here isn’t torture, yea or nay?  It’s Maya, hooray!

If anything, it’s not that Zero Dark Thirty is insufficiently anti-torture, it’s that it may be a little too pro-Maya.

It might be that I need to see it again.  I wouldn’t mind.  In fact, I would very much like to, not just to see if I mis-saw it, but because it is a very, very good movie.

But I can’t help it.  I can’t help thinking that those who saw it as pro-torture missed the story. They weren’t watching for a story.  They wanted a sermon or at least an op-ed piece.  But Bigelow wasn’t interested in moralizing.  She worked from the assumption that her audience would be made up of grown-ups who wouldn’t need to be told torture is wrong and who’d know how to watch a movie.

________________________

Definitely read:

All of Coll’s post at NYRB, ‘Disturbing’ & Misleading.

Also, though: Mark Bowden at the Atlantic, ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Is Not Pro-Torture and bontemps2012 at Daily Kos, Cheney's Folly: Zero-Dark-Thirty Depicts How Torture Cost Us 7 Years in the Hunt for UBL.

Paperback Writer: Richard Nixon as the object of their affections

Thomas Mallon's historical novel, Watergate, is now out in paperback, so I'm re-posting my review from last June.  

His mother was a saint. About to be former President Richard M. Nixon delivering his farewell address to his staff, August 9, 1974. His daughter Julie and her husband David Eisenhower are to his immediate right.  His wife Pat and his other daughter Tricia and her husband Ed Cox are far off to his left.  Author Thomas Mallon has put that large empty space between Nixon and his wife to symbolic and psychological work in his novel Watergate.

In his compelling, believable, and surprisingly romantic and tender-hearted new novel, Watergate, Thomas Mallon tells the story of how that third-rate burglary led to the resignation of the 37th President of the United States through the eyes of characters who can't tell us what is going on.  His main male characters are too distracted and his main female characters have no direct involvement with the break-in, the cover-up, or the political machinations and investigations that follow.  The news comes to them as it did to the country, in snatches and echoes.  They have pieces of a puzzle they each avoid putting together.  None of the three wants to know the truth about the man they are devoted to, Richard M. Nixon.

The historical events we know as Watergate make their way into their thoughts like week old news from far away cities, registering but not immediately affecting their thinking or their feelings.  The unfolding truth hangs at the backs of their minds, nagging at them from there, sometimes consciously ignored but unconsciously directing their decisions, sometimes dealt with intellectually but then having no influence on their actions---they pursue their own courses in spite of what they know is happening around them.

This is a useful narrative strategy.  No one at the Committee to Re-Elect or at the Washington Post or in the Special Prosecutor’s office or on the Senate Watergate Committee was paying much attention to Nixon’s wife, his secretary Rose Mary Woods, or his friend and surrogate mother-figure, Alice Longworth, the eighty-nine year old daughter of Theodore Roosevelt.  This allows Mallon to tell his story through moments that if they did occur were not taped, televised, or written into diaries, official records, trial transcripts,  or reporters' notebooks.  It's not just that there are things that can't be checked against the historical record.  They can't be checked against the most comprehensive and obsessive memory. If you’re old enough and had been paying attention at the time, you'll be surprised by how much you do remember.  There's enough Watergate lore, important and trivia pursuit level, to jog memories loose. But still things are done, things are said that won’t prompt a That didn’t happen or a That couldn’t have happened as much as an Is that made up or did I just forget about it?

So Mallon has given himself lots of room to make things up, to invent dialog, to read minds and attribute thoughts and motivations, to fiddle with chronologies and leave out narratively inconvenient facts, to “see” things that probably weren’t there and not bother with things that were, and imagine scenes and situations and even create and insert wholly fictional characters, some with invented names and backstories but many with the names and biographies of real people.  And among the things he’s made up are a plausibly mundane explanation for the infamous eighteen and a half minute gap and a lover for Mrs Nixon.

You read that right.

Mallon has Pat cheating on Dick.

He leaves open the possibility that the affair was purely platonic and it’s been over for several years when the book begins but it's clear that it was deeply romantic and that Pat was and still is in love.

Ok.  First the men:

Fred LaRue, a lawyer and consultant at the Committee to Re-Elect and the bagman who delivered bribe money to the Watergate burglars after they were caught to keep them quiet, is distracted by personal and romantic problems and, anyway, his voluntary and unofficial position and duties at the CREP are so nebulous that no one not even himself knows just what he’s supposed to be doing there and in fact his nominal bosses often seemed to forget about him for long stretches of time. When they remembered him, they didn’t tell him things because they assumed he already knew them.  When the cover-up starts collapsing and the indictments start coming down, he's left half looking forward to being hauled in by the prosecutors so he can figure out from their questions where he fits into the whole scheme.

Howard Hunt, the former CIA agent turned novelist turned Plumber who supervised the break-in, is a romantic and a fabulist who starts off having a hard time distinguishing between his real life and the fantasy life he's concocted for himself in his spy novels and is then unhinged by a personal tragedy.

And Elliott Richardson, the Attorney General who was lionized for resigning rather than firing Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, although he has a pretty good idea of what happened and just how deep into it the President is, doesn’t let himself think much about the details.  He’s focused on how he can use events to advance his career, which he sees as leading him to the Republican nomination for President in 1976.

It’s one of Mallon’s dark jokes that the man who came out of the scandal with a shining reputation for honesty and probity is an even more cynical and calculating political animal than Richard Nixon himself.

Which brings us to Nixon.

One of the things Mallon does not invent is an answer to the question What did the President know and when did he know it?

The only person who could ever have answered that was Nixon and he was never going to do that and his fictional counterpart doesn’t do it here.

Throughout Watergate, Nixon is always seen in company with people he can't confide in or alone where he refuses to confide in himself---he won't let himself think honestly about what happened. He deflects, rationalizes, explains things away, rehearsing in his head the story he wants everyone else to believe and testing it by how completely he can sell it to himself. With Mallon's Nixon, his first dupe is always himself.

The women are more clear-eyed and able to be more honest with themselves and about themselves. To a point. The point being where too much honesty would break their hearts.

Alice Roosevelt Longworth is the most clear-eyed and the expression brutally frank may have been coined with her in mind. But she's removed from key events by her age and by being only a friend of the Nixons, although a friend who can make quasi-secret visits to the White House whenever she likes and feels up to it.  But her affection for Nixon is based on what he did to help her with a family tragedy almost twenty years ago that she still can't bear to think about.  She knows he's in trouble. She has a pretty good idea of how he got himself in that trouble.  She knows him well enough to guess how he's likely making it worse for himself. I don’t mean she knows the specific details of the dirty tricks and the step by step path of the cover up.  But she knows how his mind works and understands that self- destruction is wired into him. She has what it takes to figure it all out for herself (and therefore for the readers of the novel) just from what she sees on television or reads in the papers or overhears at dinner parties.  The trouble is that if she lets herself think about Nixon too long she ends up having to thing about what happened back then and she's determined to avoid that.

And she's old.  She tires out quickly.  And while she's far from senile, her mind isn't as sharp as it used to be.  When she lets her thoughts turn towards the past, they often turn towards the very distant past, and the President she winds up thinking about, when it's not her cousin Eleanor's husband, is her father.

Rose Woods decided a long time ago that she was going to accommodate certain aspects of her boss' personality and ignore what she couldn't accommodate, which is how she manages not to blame him for hiring people she can’t stand, like H.R. Haldeman, who were clearly hired for the reasons she can’t stand them.  It’s also how she can transcribe the tapes without actually hearing what's on them or, more to the point, hearing what they reveal about Richard Nixon.

Rose is a great character, a tough cookie and a creampuff, a realist and a romantic, nobody's fool but her own, with a passion for dancing and a longstanding habit of attaching herself to unobtainable men, of which  her boss is only the most obvious.  Rose lost the love of her life in World War II but she has steadfastly remained faithful to his memory not by perpetual morning but by searching out and then embracing, cheerfully and vivaciously, pieces of her understandably idealized fallen soldier in those unobtainable men.  For instance, she is smitten by Alexander Haig the second he comes on the scene as Haldeman's replacement as chief of staff because he’s the kind of career officer and gentleman she imagines her lost Billy would have been had he survived the war.  She doesn't delude herself into thinking that any of these men are Billy or could qualify as his replacement. She has just found a way to continue to love him by loving the pieces of him she finds in these men.

But this means she tends to see men in pieces.  And that goes for her boss. She doesn’t see what’s right before her eyes because she only sees the pieces of him that are like Billy, which means she only sees the best in him. And not seeing the worst in him or even what's just not the best means not seeing Watergate for what it was, the ultimate expression of Nixon's instinct for self-destruction. She thinks of the scandal as something being done to him and not something he might have brought on himself.

Pat Nixon has carefully and determinedly created spaces, psychological and physical, into which she can retreat and politics cant follow her.  And she expects---needs---her husband to respect those spaces and to know when not leave her alone inside them and to not bring politics in with him when he does enter.  Of course Nixon being Nixon, one of Pat's great frustrations is that he keeps forgetting what's expected of him.  He's constantly blundering in when he's not wanted and dragging politics in with him.

Pat has another reason for maintaining these spaces besides as refuges for her peace of mind.  Within them she can protect her memories of one of the happiest times in her life, the years in New York City before Nixon became President and she was having that affair with a lawyer who numbered among his attractions being entirely without political ambitions.  She also needs the spaces to keep open the possibility of reviving the affair.

Pat's affair is the most effective, affecting, and believable part of the novel.  Not believable in the limited and literal sense of being something that might actually have happened. Believable in the sense that it feels true to life while you're reading it.  The real Pat Nixon didn’t do this but this woman if she was real would have and would have felt and thought the same way.  Pat's affair is the big reminder that Watergate is fiction, both by calling attention to the fact that Mallon has license to invent and to the skill by which the invention is accomplished---history, even the best narrative type, can’t be as well written.

Seeing Pat Nixon as a woman in love means seeing her as someone different than the stiff, pinched, and worrisomely too thin figure in the now very old photographs and news clips. It means seeing her as a character and that means seeing her the way we tend to see characters in books, which for most readers is as looking like people they know from real life or movies and television. I saw her looking like Michelle Pfeiffer, believe it or not. Pfeiffer’'s getting to be the right age and with a well-sprayed bouffant and a good Republican cloth coat...

I also saw Tom Hanks as Nixon.

The point is not to see them as the real Nixons, because they aren't and aren't meant to be.

They are Nixons that might have been.

  As I said, Mallon’s decision to tell the story of Watergate through the eyes of people who don’t know the whole story because they weren’t really part of it is useful to him as a storyteller because he’s free---free-er---to make things up.  But it’s good for us as readers because it keeps Watergate from turning into a political melodrama and from being a too historical a historical novel.  Shades of Alan Drury and Gore Vidal cross the page throughout Watergate, but Mallon doesn’t share Drury's and Vidal's romantized and aggrandizing views of politics or politicians. Mallon gives us ordinary human beings to care about instead of heroes and villains to root for or against.

Norman Rockwell painted the history out of Nixon by not showing the qualities that made Nixon his own worst enemy.  He painted Nixon as he might have been, if he’d been a happier, more contented, more secure man, or as he might have been on his best days when all his demons were safely at bay.

Mallon doesn't paint all the history out of Nixon to create his Nixon. He leaves out the meanness or, rather, doesn’t bring it on stage.  We never see this RN at a Nixonian worst.  We do however see him at his weakest and it's a very Nixonian weakest and as with the real Nixon almost more unattractive than his worst.  The way Mallon's Nixon is most like the real Nixon is in his bottomless capacity for self -pity. But what we also see is how this Nixon might have been on his best days and how he might have enough best days that people who were close to him would believe that the real Nixon was that Nixon and therefore be inclined to ignore or forgive him at his worst and indulge him at his weakest.  This is a Nixon you can easily imagine good people loving.

There's a limit to the inventing Mallon can do and stay within the bounds of the kind of realistic and broadly accurate historical fiction he’s made his reputation writing.  He can’t change any of his main characters’ fates.  We know that Pat Nixon didn’t leave her husband for another man. We know Rosemary Woods didn’t quit. There wasn't much Alice Longworth could have done that would have made its way into the history books, unless she turned out to be Deep Throat and Mallon never raises that possibility as even a joke.  But that doesn’t mean Watergate isn’t suspenseful.

The suspense is provided in two ways.  The first is by Mallon's trick of keeping the big historical events offstage from where they can act as reminders of what it was like as the story unfolded and nobody knew how bad things would be or how they would end---a remembered suspense.  The other is by making us take these characters so much to heart that we worry about how they will deal with their disappointment and heartbreak when they finally learn the truth about what kind of man they've devoted themselves to and dread the moment when they learn it.

Mallon has us almost rooting for Nixon to get away with it, even hoping that he didn't do it, in order to have these good women's feelings spared.

Photo courtesy Richard Nixon Presidential Library via Wikipedia.

Watergate: A Novel by Thomas Mallon, published by Vintage, available from Amazon in paperback as well as in hardcover and for kindle.

Please, Mr Blankfein, may I retire now?

Goldman Sachs’ CEO Lloyd Blankfein is worried you might get to retire.

BLANKFEIN (In an interview with Scott Pelley of CBS News): You’re going to have to undoubtedly do something to lower people’s expectations — the entitlements and what people think that they’re going to get, because it’s not going to — they’re not going to get it.

PELLEY: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid?

BLANKFEIN: You can look at history of these things, and Social Security wasn’t devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career. …

Exactly! The world is full of 45 year old retirees planning to loaf about until they’re 75!

Let’s deal with this quickly. Most people start working at least part-time in their teens.  A great many of us are on the job full time by the time we’re 20, and those are the ones of us most likely to need every penny of Social Security we can get when we finally do stop working in our late 60s, after 40 or more years of not being the CEOs of federally bailed out financial corporations. And last I checked, average life expectancy in the United States hasn’t reached 95. So we’re talking about, at the lucky outside, 15 years of retirement after, for many of us, spending close to our whole adult lifetime kicking into the fund.

Some of those 15 years are not going to be spent in the best of health.

Blankfein would like to see it whittled down to, well, probably, 0. He’s a Work Until You Drop advocate if I ever heard one.

I get a kick out of people who would have screamed Socialism! till they were hoarse at the time talking about what Social Security was originally designed to do as if they know what FDR intended and think we need to honor those intentions.

What Social Security was originally designed to do was get itself passed by Congress.

Ostensibly and initially it was intended to keep little old widder ladies from starving to death.

Even that modest goal was opposed by the Lloyd Blankfeins of the day.

But the larger plan was to put a program in place to be built on and expanded so that---and here was the crazy idea---nobody would have to work until they dropped or else face a cold and hungry and penurious old age.

The idea was that none of us should have to ask permission from the likes of Lloyd Blankfein to live past the age when we can push a mop or swing a shovel or load a truck, sew a stitch, drive a rivet, sweat pipe, bag groceries, flip burgers, gut fish, make beds, haul trash, dig coal, pick lettuce, or clean other people’s houses and raise their kids.

The idea was that it wasn’t the natural order of things that most people should break their backs, break their hearts, and have their spirits broken working all their lives to make a few people rich.

The idea was that there ought to be more to life than toil and sorrow and that at some point everybody should be able to lay down their tools and enjoy a few years of rest in comfort and security before they die.

When plutocrats like Blankfein say we can’t afford a system like Social Security was really designed to become, they mean:

I don’t want to pay for other people’s comfort and security. I don’t want to pay for it!  I don’t want to see it! In fact, I don’t really want them to have either!

They should be grateful they have work to do until they drop.

Life is about winning and losing, and the winners should enjoy feeling like winners, and an important part of that feeling is knowing that the losers know they have lost!

________________________

Via ThinkProgress. Read Pat Garofalo’s whole post.

“The best bad idea we have.”

Lost in the bazaar:  Ben Affleck as CIA operative Tony Mendez leads the six American diplomats he’s come to rescue down a street in Tehran during the Iranian Hostage Crisis in Argo, an Affleck-directed political thriller based on an actual covert mission that involved putting a fake movie into pretended production and having the diplomats pose as members of a Canadian film crew scouting locations for their non-existent Star Wars rip-off.

If you sit still when the lights come on and the credits start to roll at the end of Argo---which you should do because 1. It’s a good movie and you should be sitting all the way through it anyway and 2. These days filmmakers are in the habit of opening up audience-rewarding Easter eggs during and after the credits of their movies and you should still be kicking yourself if you didn’t wait until the very, very last credit of The Avengers---you’ll see how proud Argo’s director and star Ben Affleck is of his movie’s visual historical accuracy. And you can’t blame him.

Affleck juxtaposes scenes from Argo with pictures of the real people and events that show how closely he’s captured the look and feel and sense of those long, terrible 444 days from November 1979 until January 1981 when Iranian revolutionaries held fifty-two American diplomats hostage within the seized U.S. embassy in Tehran and with them our national pride and, I’d argue, our collective mental balance.

It’s not just that many of the key players are the spitting images of their real-life counterparts (with one notable exception).  That’s the easy part.  It’s that the movie’s recreations of the scenes outside and inside the embassy and in the streets of Tehran more than look like the pictures on TV and in newspapers and magazines at the time---they have the same energy and evoke the same sense of something terrible, terrifying, and tragic happening right before our eyes and the same sense of frustration and helplessness that follows that godawful despairing realization that There’s nothing we can do!

If you’re old enough to remember the Hostage Crisis, though, you won’t need the pictures at the end to tell you how exactly Affleck and his cinematographer and designers got that right.  You’ll have felt it right from the start.

That’s one of the very good things about Argo but it’s not the best thing.  It makes the best things possible.  If Affleck had been content with historical evocations, Argo would be a simple costume drama with blocky polyesters and bad facial hair choices in place of bustles and stovepipe hats.

Of course, the history doesn’t just drive the plot. The history is the plot. But it also provides Argo with its look, its feel, its mood, and one of its important themes.

On November 4, 1979, as the crowds of Iranian protesters and militants stormed the embassy, six members of the station slipped out the back and found sanctuary at the home of the Canadian ambassador and his wife, who hid them out for three months until the situation became dire and untenable.  The Canadians were recalling the ambassador.  The Iranians were on the hunt.  There was nowhere else safe for them to hide.  The fear back in Washington was that if they were caught they’d be treated as spies but if the U.S. tried to rescue them, the Iranians would take revenge on the fifty-two hostages at the embassy.

CIA agent Tony Mendez (played by Affleck), who specialized in sneaking operatives, assets, and defectors out from under the noses of hostile governments, was tasked with developing a plan to get the six out.  Inspired by his son’s love of Star Wars and Planet of the Apes, he came up with the idea of passing the six off as members of a Canadian film crew scouting desert locations for a science-fiction movie.

In real life the movie was called Lord of Light for which an actual script existed, based on the novel by Roger Zelazny.  In Argo the movie is a Star Wars rip-off called…Argo.  In order to fool any Iranians who might go looking for physical evidence that a movie is in production, Mendez makes a side-trip to Hollywood where with the help of an Oscar-winning make-up artist named John Chambers (a real person played by a lookalike John Goodman) and Lester Siegel, an irascible producer with a World War II secret service background and a patriotic streak that he forgot he had (Alan Arkin playing a composite of four actual people), he sets up a phony production company, secures “financing”, and generates public relations campaign that results in puff pieces in the trades.

As evocative of the period as it is, it’s just as evocative of the movies of the period, particularly the political thrillers like Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men.

Affleck and his director of photography Rodrigo Prieto have given Argo the gloomy and gritty texture of those films, conjuring up the same look and feel of a society that had given up on itself, of a world literally crumbling from neglect---summed up by an anachronistic shot of the iconic Hollywood sign falling to pieces, which really had happened, although by the time of the Hostage Crisis it had been put back together.  and nobody seemed interested in putting it back together---the same mood of reasonable paranoia, the same sense of people taking shelter in lonely, little groups, hiding out from an almost sourceless menace. Mendez’s apartment in Virginia, his hotel room in Tehran, the kitchen of the Canadian Ambassador’s house reminded me of Faye Dunaway’s basement apartment in Three Days of the Condor and Jane Alexander’s character’s sister’s house in All the President’s Men.  And I couldn’t help thinking of President Carter looking lost and alone in his self-imposed imprisonment in the White House.  Throughout the movie, Carter is mostly seen on television sets in the background in real news footage, looking shrunken, isolated, trapped, and ignored.  In those ‘70s political thrillers, the threat comes from a secret source inside the government, if not from the government itself. In Argo, the government is as threatened and baffled as everyone else.

I feel like I’m making Argo sound unremittingly grim and didactic as well.  It’s neither.  It’s not exactly light-hearted but it is full of humor and not all of it of the gallows kind.  The movie has a satirical edge, although the edge is of a blade fingered behind the back rather than drawn and pointed.  Its targets are Hollywood, of course, but the government, politics, bureaucracy, and the spy game come in for it and, to a darker and more circumspect degree, so does the Iranian Revolution, which produced its own absurd bureaucracies and brand of politicians.

But in all cases the humors arises not from the institutions or systems being satirized but from the people who make them up. Argo’s Hollywood is a collection of lunatics among whom eccentrics like Chambers and Siegel connive to thrive and survive.  Mendez, Chambers, and Siegel have no trouble setting up their phony production company.  The easy joke would be that that’s because one way or another everybody in the business is a phony and the whole industry depends on all these phonies pretending not to notice each other’s phoniness. But in Argo it’s more the case of everyone being too caught up in their own problems to pay close attention to what others are up to.  It turns out to be a similar case among the Iranians, with the difference being that people’s individual problems are often matters of life and death.  Revolutionary Iran is a scary place even for revolutionaries.  But Mendez’s plan depends on individual Iranians having too much else to worry about besides whether or not he might be a spy.

Affleck takes the view that no matter how dire the circumstances get, people will be people and that means that they’re often ridiculous. We’re funny that way.  But it’s one of the things that makes us strong and resilient. We just can’t take it all in.  Our egos and vanities and misperceptions get in the way.  Our best defense is that we aren’t aware enough to realize how much trouble we’re in.  It’s a likable trait, even admirable in its way, and it’s the root of our commonality.  Before we’re anything else, an American spy or an Iranian revolutionary, we are ourselves. We just can’t help it.

To illustrate this point, Affleck fills Argo with characters being themselves despite themselves. All of them, from the leads and supports, and cameos to the nameless bureaucrats and spies in Washington and at Langley, to the bit players, stagehands, suits, and hangers-on in Hollywood, to the Iranian citizens, soldiers, shopkeepers, low-level government officials, and airport workers, are given dialog, even if only a line or two, or a shot in a scene that reveals them as distinct individuals with feelings and thoughts that transcend their function in the plot.

The odd exceptions are the six diplomats Mendez is trying to rescue who are differentiated mainly by their their hairstyles and shirt collar widths.  One of the six is given more lines and screen time than any of the others but for the most part he’s the spokesmen for their collective fears, doubts, and regrets.  Except for one scene, and it’s a redeeming exception, he doesn’t speak for himself or, rather, he doesn’t speak as a particular self we get to know and understand on his own terms.  I’m guessing Affleck and his screenwriter, Chris Terrio, were being tactful and taking into consideration the feelings of the of the real people all of whom are still alive and probably still haunted by their ordeal and Affleck may have been too careful about not seeming to exploit it or them they wouldn’t like to see it or them for dramatic effect.

But while this weakness may be deliberate and understandable, it’s all the more glaring because of how vividly almost all the other characters in the movie are portrayed.

Argo is an ensemble piece.  Affleck is undoubtedly the star and his character is the hero, but although it’s a star’s part, it requires him not to do a star turn.  The job he’s given himself is to be the calm center around which the craziness swirls.  He builds a sheltered space where we can stand with him and watch and think along with him.  In fact, much of his performance is watching and thinking.  The showier work is left to others, with Goodman and Arkin getting the best of it and having the most obvious fun.

As Chambers and Siegel, they make a dueling but amusingly complementary pair of cynics.  Different types of cynics.  Chambers is the good-natured, forgiving type, amused by other people’s foolishness but grateful for it because it allows him to lead his two lives as artist and spy.  Goodman plays him with an almost permanent grin as if he’s on the brink of bursting into a hearty laugh that will give away the whole game. Siegel is a cynic of the self-loathing kind whose disdain for humanity in general begins with disdain for himself in particular.  Siegel has himself convinced that he’s not doing anything worthwhile with his life. It’s a feeling leftover from his glory days an intelligence officer in World War II.  Making movies, even award-winning ones, just doesn’t compare to fighting Nazis.  But like most movie cynics he’s a closet romantic and an idealist and, while profanely and grumpily expressing reluctance, he jumps at the chance to get back to meaningful work.  Since he’s played by Alan Arkin, however, he’s even grumpier and more profane in his idealism than in his cynicism.

Bryan Cranston and Chris Messina, as Mendez’s immediate superior at the CIA and the agent in charge of operations in the control room at Langley, have almost as much to do as Affleck in roles that allow them to be more active and show more range than the star’s own.  Bob Gunton as Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Philip Baker Hall in an uncredited appearance as Vance’s unnamed deputy who almost certainly is meant to be Warren Christopher have one brief scene together that apart from its effectiveness in its own right serves up one of the best Muppet jokes ever not made by the Muppets themselves.  Richard Kind turns up as a shark of a Hollywood agent who is almost a match in cynicism and irascibility for Arkin’s Siegel. Adrienne Barbeau turns up an a fiery cameo as one of Siegel’s ex-wives.  Zeljko Ivanek and Keith Szarabajka bluster and storm as State Department officials and capture the frustration and desperate need to do something, anything, but what? that gripped not just the administration but much of the entire country.

Compelling in quieter roles are Kyle Chandler as Carter’s Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan, Victor Garber and Page Leong as Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor and his wife Pat, Sheila Vand as their young Iranian housekeeper Sahar whose loyalties are a mystery even to herself, Ali Saam as a member of the Revolutionary guard who comes calling at the Canadian embassy and tests Sahar’s loyalties, and Hooshang Tooze as the Deputy Minister of Islamic Guidance who is probably something more than the simple bureaucrat he presents himself to Mendez as being.

The last three along with other actors playing Iranians of all sorts and conditions are important to Affleck’s determination to individualize the Iranians and make us see the Revolution through their eyes and not as the angry mobs we saw on TV at the time.  This doesn’t mean that he wants us to sympathize with the revolution.  The Iranians are shown as dangerous and implacable enemies of the United States, which, although Affleck doesn’t shy away from our transgressions and mistakes and crimes in the Middle East, is still us to the Iranians them.  But sorting out the good guys from the bad guys isn’t the issue. and the question of who’s right and who’s wrong---or who’s more right or less wrong---is irrelevant because it’s irrelevant to the characters in the movie.  They can’t do anything about it and figuring out an answer won’t help them solve their problem at the moment.

Which brings me back to the way Affleck uses history in Argo.

Affleck and Terrio grant themselves a good deal of dramatic license, naturally. It wouldn’t be a Hollywood movie without the filmmakers taking liberties with the facts.  And Argo is a movie, a thriller not a docudrama.  But Affleck never lets us forget the reality behind his story.  As I said, it does more than drive the plot.  It gives Argo its mood and its tension.  And it’s vital thematically. 

Affleck lets us know from the beginning and keeps reminding us that we’re not to expect a sense of triumph if Mendez pulls this off.  At best we’ll feel relieved.  Then he keeps the pressure on so that intensely that relief, if it comes, will be enough.  We’re not allowed to see the operation as a potential surrogate victory over the Iranians or even a moral one.  This is a job that has to be done for its own sake.  It will have no effect on the larger crisis except in that if the mission fails it might make things worse.

There are times when there really isn’t anything we can do.  There are problems that can’t be solved.  There are situations where even someone as powerful as the President of the United States has no control.  Under those circumstances, when success isn’t an option, despair and surrender are temptations that must still be resisted.  The best thing we can do is do our jobs, to exercise what little control we have in the little sphere in which we still have it, and instead of holing up by ourselves, reach out to those nearest whom we can help.  We have to take care of each other.

“I’ve never left anyone behind,” Mendez tells the six people he’s come to rescue.

He’s not boasting. He’s not merely trying to be encouraging.  He’s stating a simple fact.  This is his job, to make sure no one gets left behind.

That’s all our jobs.

No matter what else, we’re here to make sure none of us gets left behind.

Argo, directed by Ben Affleck, screenplay by Chris Terrio, based on a Wired article by Joshuah Bearman.  Starring Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston, John Goodman, Alan Arkin, Victor Garber, Kyle Chandler, and Chris Messina.  Rated R. Now in theaters.

Decent, but not too decent

The Democratic Presidential Ticket…for the moment.  The Democratic nominee for President, George McGovern (right) and his Vice Presidential pick, Thomas Eagleton, at the 1972 convention. Less than three weeks later, McGovern would be looking for Eagleton’s replacement, a story told in Joshua M. Glasser’s sobering and cautionary The Eighteen-Day Running Mate: McGovern, Eagleton, and a Campaign in Crisis.

If you were voting in the New York Democratic Presidential primary in 1972, you didn’t vote for your preferred candidate. You voted for a slate of delegates from your Congressional district pledged to that candidate. That year Pop Mannion headed a slate of seven potential delegates pledged to George McGovern.  The other slate on the ballot was headed by the boss of the Albany political machine, Dan O’Connell, and included six other stalwarts of the Democratic establishment, and they were all pledged to…Uncommitted.

Uncommitted won in a walk.

They never did commit.  Not to McGovern, at any rate. At the Democratic convention, McGovern carried the New York delegation but not unanimously.  In the end, if I’m remembering it right, seven New York delegates voted for Scoop Jackson.

Twelve years later, I’m in grad school in Iowa, and George McGovern is running for President again, mainly as a protest candidate trying to get his fellow Democrats to focus on issues dear to his heart, like hunger and poverty.  He came to the University to speak and when he finished I chased after him because I wanted to tell him about Pop’s quixotic support for him back in ‘72.

I caught up with him in a stairwell, much to the bemusement of the two aides with him, and introduced myself.  McGovern himself seemed a little wary.  I guess he wasn’t used to people wanting to talk to him---his was a very lonely campaign that year---but he stopped and let me shake his hand and I started to tell him in a rush what I wanted to tell him, how Pop had been a fervent supporter and how his slate had been beaten by Uncommitted.

“Where was that?” McGovern asked.

“Albany, New York.”

He looked thoughtful for a second then said, “That was O’Connell and his people, right?”

I was taken aback.  I didn’t expect him to even know about what went on in the politics of upstate New York, let alone remember it a dozen years later.  But of course he remembered.  And it wasn’t the sting of defeat still smarting that kept the memories fresh.  It was that the consummate politician that he was remembered because as a consummate politician he knew that he always had to keep count.

It was also that those seven Uncommitteds represented one of McGovern’s several big problems in 1972.  Old-school Democratic establishment types didn’t like or trust him.  Not just because he was the candidate of “amnesty, abortion, and acid.” And ten points to anyone who knows the ironic source of that characterization.  But because his reforms of the Party’s nominating process were muscling them out in favor of women and minorities and younger, more liberal Democrats of all sorts and conditions.

And that, as Joshua M Glasser lays out the story in The Eighteen-Day Running Mate: McGovern, Eagleton, and a Campaign in Crisis, helps explain how McGovern wound up with Thomas Eagleton as his running mate coming out of the convention and why it took as long as it did for McGovern to dump him after the news began to come out about Eagleton’s history of depression and the electroshock therapy he underwent to treat it, a decision McGovern turned out not to be too decent to make.

It was politics, plain and simple.

In the days after McGovern’s death on October 21, many of the news stories eulogizing him emphasized his great and undeniable decency to the point, though, of asserting that he may have been too decent for contemporary American politics.

As the son of another decent man who was also a consummate politician (and, never mind the loss in the primary, a mostly winning one), I object to that characterization.  It implies that there is something fundamentally indecent about being a successful politician or that McGovern somehow managed to be successful in spite of himself or that he was not a successful politician.  Obviously, in the fall 1972, he wasn’t.  Before that?  Even one campaign after that?

George McGovern, a liberal Democrat, got himself elected Congressman from the very Republican and conservative state of South Dakota.  He did that by building the Democratic Party in South Dakota, practically from scratch and single-handed.  He got himself re-elected by beating back a challenge from a popular former governor.  He lost in is his first try for the Senate, but then won the seat in 1962.  He got himself re-elected in 1968 and re-elected again in 1974, only two years after South Dakota, along with forty-nine other states, had rejected its native son for President in a landslide of historic magnitude.  He lost his Senate seat in 1980, a casualty of the Reagan sweep, and except for that symbolic run for President in 1984, was done with running for political office for the many years of life he had left to him.  But that’s still a lot of political success for someone too decent for politics, and the point is that the people of South Dakota not send him to Washington for two terms in the House of Representatives and three in the United States Senate because they thought he was a decent guy.

They thought he was a decent guy who would get the job done for them.

They expected that he would represent their interests and wishes and be a skilled enough politician to get legislation passed and money allocated that would advance those interests and realize those wishes. And McGovern was glad to represent them.  But South Dakota was a farming and ranching state and identified itself, accordingly, as rural, small town, Western, and, befitting a state of independent businessmen---ranchers, farmers, and the owners of the businesses that served them---and Republicans, pro business and therefore anti-union.  Unions were big city, Eastern, anti-business, Democratic, and corrupt and corrupting.  To represent South Dakota, McGovern had to be strongly pro-agriculture, which was easy, and, not anti-union, at least not aggressively so, but not the friend of labor most establishment Democrats were at the time. He kept his distance from labor leaders and when he saw union interests conflicting with the interests of his constituents he voted for the latter and against the former.

Naturally, union leaders and their friends and allies among party establishment types like the Uncommitted slate from Albany did not look kindly on McGovern’s candidacy.  But McGovern needed union support, union money, union workboots on the ground, union votes.  And that’s how he came to pick Eagleton.

McGovern’s ideal running mate was Ted Kennedy. Polls showed that McGovern’s best odds in the general election were with Kennedy on the ticket.  But Kennedy turned him down, repeatedly.  Glasser doesn’t go deeply into Kennedy’s reasons. He relays what Kennedy told McGovern: He’d promised the family that as the last surviving brother he would stay out of Presidential politics.  And he points out that it was only three years after Chappaquiddick, which was probably a big reason Kennedy chose not to run for President himself.  But it’s also likely that Kennedy had sized up McGovern’s chances against Nixon and decided to keep himself untainted by being part of a losing team for his own eventual run in ‘76 or ‘80. McGovern had others in mind, he barely knew Eagleton, despite having served with him in the Senate for three years.  But the others turned him down too, and so did the obvious choices among McGovern’s top rivals for the nomination, Hubert Humphrey and Ed Muskie. Meanwhile, his staff was looking around for someone who could appeal to the same constituencies as Kennedy.  Someone pro-labor and someone labor was pro in return.  Someone young.  Someone Catholic.

The was the junior senator from Missouri. Tom Eagleton.

And…Eagleton was a product of the St Louis Democratic machine.

He wasn’t well-known outside Missouri, but Party bosses inside the state could vouch for him to Party bosses in other states.

Among the more interesting sections of The Eighteen-day Running Mate are the ones devoted to Eagleton’s swift rise in Missouri politics through a mixture of hard work, talent, family connections, and the skill and the willingness to play the game without becoming beholden to the wrong the people.  Eagleton was every bit the politician as McGovern.  He may not have been quite as decent a guy.

But before getting into anything else: The Eighteen-Day Running Mate is a cautionary tale for anyone nostalgic for the days when conventions decided who’d be the Parties’ nominees.  McGovern arrived in Miami in ‘72 well ahead of his rivals (who included, besides Humphrey and Muskie, Scoop Jackson and George Wallace.  That was also the year Shirley Chisholm ran.) in the delegate count but still short of the number he needed to win the nomination.  McGovern and his staff had to work desperately hard to to round up the extra votes and just as hard to keep ones they had in hand from straying.  Deals had to me made and unmade. Promises were exchanged, favors called in.  Without having any of the obvious and popular favorites to offer, the Vice-Presidential pick became part of the wheeling and dealing, which made it difficult for McGovern’s people to identify and settle on a candidate. With the first roll call vote looming, they were scrambling and when Eagleton was finally offered the spot and accepted, they were left with very little time to vett him.  In the end, they may have done even less due diligence than John McCain did when choosing Sarah Palin.  “Vetting” amounted to little more than Frank Mankiewicz, McGovern’s political director, calling up Eagleton at his hotel in Miami and asking a few perfunctory questions that Eagleton later distilled as, “Any skeletons in your closet?” and more or less taking Eagleton’s word for it when he said there weren’t.

Eagleton wasn’t lying. Not in his own mind, at any rate.  He just did not believe his having suffered from what he considered separate and isolated bouts of depression—as though depression was like the flu and something he was susceptible to---in the past but not anymore---as far as he was concerned, he was cured---and having been treated with intensive electro-shock therapy as skeletons.  He believed it was nobody’s business but his own.

Eagleton was rushed to the nomination pretty much on his own say-so that he was fit for the job.

The Eighteen-Day Running Mate is not an insider account of the 1972 Presidential campaign in the vein of Game Change or Theodore White’s The Making of the President series.  It’s a straight-forward, sober---and sobering---history of how a particular set of professional politicians tried to do their jobs during a period of crisis for them, not a gossipy account of how the game is played.  There is no gossip.  What could have been treated as gossip is only included because in this case the personal is inseparable from the political.  And the most personal was the source of the political problem: the state of Tom Eagleton’s mental health.

People in 1972 knew that Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill both suffered from serious depression.  But would they have judged that Eagleton deserved the same understanding and benefit of the doubt as a Lincoln or a Churchill?  Put that way, it doesn’t seem likely, does it?  And it didn’t seem likely to McGovern’s advisors.  But what was more worrisome than the depression itself and the possibility that it might recur if Vice-President Eagleton became President Eagleton was how it had been treated.

Electroshock did not have the best public image.

It was barbaric.

It was the tool of mad scientists and torturers.

It was a method of last resort used only on the craziest of crazy people.

It didn’t work.

So it was thought people thought.

Which was ironic because electroshock therapy represented a more advanced or at least advancing view of mental illness, which was to see it as an illness with definite physical symptoms if not causes that could be treated medically.  In the East, where Freud reigned supreme, mental illnesses---defined mainly as neuroses of various sorts---were assumed to be mental and their causes were assumed to be traumas to the psyche that had to be revealed by probing into a patient’s subconscious and unconscious under the guidance of a therapist who helped the patient talk his or her way around mental blocks and defenses to the root of the problem and, it was to be hoped, that would allow the patient to get control of the neurotic symptoms if not actually result in a cure.  Talk therapy was fashionable.  Anybody who was anybody saw a shrink, including, for a time when he was Vice President, Richard Nixon, a fact that wasn’t generally known but wasn’t exactly a state secret either.  But it was more than a fashion.  It was the method.

Contrary ideas had to go west, then, for a hearing.  And many of the doctors and neuroscientists willing to listen were gathered in the teaching hospitals of the Midwest, like the ones where Eagleton sought help.  His doctors didn’t see electroshock as an extreme measure.  They saw it as an effective alternative to to the psychotropic drugs available at the time, of which there were few that worked and all of them had debilitating side effects. His doctors would have advised electroshock in almost the same way they’d have advised an operation to remove a tumor.  Eagleton would have had good reason to think that having had electroshock was nothing to be ashamed of (which isn’t to say he didn’t worry about what voters might think. He kept not only his treatment but his episodes of depression secret from voters back home.) and good reason to think it had worked, that he was cured.  In the several years between his last treatment and McGovern’s offering him a place on the ticket, he hadn’t suffered any more episodes.

He had good reason to think that because it was behind him it had no bearing on whether or not he was qualified to be Vice President of the United States.

He didn’t have good reason to think everybody else agreed with him, and he knew it, and although he didn’t feel he was lying to Mankiewicz when he said their were no skeletons rattling in his closet, good Catholic boy that he was, he must have known it was a Jesuit’s truth.  He may not have been lying, but he was being deceptive, and when it came out, as it did in a hurry, McGovern had good reason for feeling he’d been deceived.

Glasser manages to be detailed and informative on the perceptions of mental illness and its treatment in the 1950s, ‘60s, and early ‘70s without losing his narrative thread.  The Eighteen-Day Running Mate is ultimately a dual political biography and portrait of two basically decent and well-intentioned but ambitious and determined men not being seen at their best. Glasser works hard at remaining objective---truly objective, not political journalist “Astronomers say the earth revolves around the sun, though some disagree objective.” He reports what as far as he's been able to determine actually happened, while withholding judgment...until judgment is called for.

Eagleton comes off as the more flawed and less admirable man, vain, dissembling (with himself as much as with anyone else), self-absorbed, selfish, and often immature. He seems to have had a habit of presenting himself in speeches as if he was talking about some other Tom Eagleton, a plucky, put-upon kid brother to himself he loved and admired and felt sorry for.

But Glasser seems more forgiving of Eagleton's flaws than of McGovern's, perhaps because he recognizes that McGovern was the better man and, as people are inclined to do with better men and women, expects more of him.

McGovern, as Glasser sees him, could be vain and self-deceptive in his own right. He was a decent man, but his problem wasn't that he was too decent for politics. His problem was that he was too proud of his reputation for decency for his own political good. He would hold off making a pragmatic political decision until he'd persuaded himself that it was the morally correct decision and he didn't blame himself for mistakes and failures if he could find a way to blame someone else for letting him down by not doing the decent thing as he saw it. He was compassionate and sympathetic towards Eagleton. His daughter Terry suffered from severe depression and, Glasser suggests, McGovern felt that giving up on Eagleton would be like giving up on Terry, something he would never do. He knew right away he needed to cut Eagleton loose and he had good grounds to do it. However Eagleton had convinced himself that he hadn't technically lied to Mankiewicz, he had in fact been deliberately deceptive.

But McGovern put it off in the hope that Eagleton would make the decision for him by doing the decent thing and withdrawing from the ticket. When Eagleton didn't and even began maneuvering to make it impossible foe McGovern to get rid of him, McGovern grew angry and resentful, but he still delayed in no small part in order to protect his image and his self-regard. When Eagleton finally got the push, instead of getting credit for patience and understanding, McGovern had created the impression that he was weak, indecisive, ultimately untrustworthy, and most damaging of all, exactly what cynics suspected, a posturing and self-serving hypocrite.

All these years later, it's probably impossible to know how much of an effect those eighteen days had on voters' perceptions of McGovern and on the election. Polling wasn't what it was to become and contemporary political reporting is unreliable because, as Timothy Crouse would soon reveal in The Boys on the Bus, the political press corps was well on its way to becoming what it is now, if it wasn't always what it is now, cynical, trivia-minded, horserace obsessed, easily  distracted and bored, self-referential, convinced that what they gossiped about over lunch was what the American people were thinking about and caring about, and just plain not all that smart when it came to covering the issues at stake in a Presidential election. My own very unreliable recollection is that McGovern wasn't hurt as much by the fiasco with Eagleton as by the pathetic farce that followed as McGovern went begging for a credible replacement and was turned down by all and sundry until the Kennedys took pity on him and gave him Sargent Shriver.

But Glasser’s not all that concerned with questions along those lines, except in how they figured in the thinking of McGovern, Eagleton, and their advisors in the moment as they struggled to work their way through the mess they were in.  In fact, the larger campaign and the issues at stake and what took place on the political and national and international scenes before the convention and after Eagleton's departure from the ticket are mostly left unexamined or only cursorily so.

As a result, Richard Nixon makes only a cameo appearance, Watergate gets barely  a mention, the war in Vietnam is hardly discussed except as an issue that was important to McGovern personally and politically, and the cultural and political upheavals of the late '60s and early '70s that gave the impetus to McGovern's candidacy and were to a great measure its whole reason for being and which made it so alien and such a threat to Nixon’s Silent Majority---the anti-war movement and the rise of identity politics among women, African Americans, Hispanics, and gays---are kept offstage, sometimes reported on but never coming openly into view.

But this is because Glasser needs to keep his focus narrow to keep it sharp.

Glasser assumes his readers know, probably all too well, what else was going on around the very specific set of events that are his subject. The job he's given himself in The Eighteen-Day Running Mate is to tell a particular story that is interesting and dramatic in its own right apart from its place in a larger history of those or these times. Whatever lessons there are to draw from this, whatever connections there are to be made to events then or now Glaser leaves up to us.

So…

In political science’s Department of How Many Angels Can Dance on the Head of a Pin, students and scholars debate just how much influence a Presidential candidate’s choice of running mate have on the election.

I remember being glad and feeling…reassured when Bill Clinton picked Al Gore. To me, it said Clinton was serious about being President. It wasn’t just the economy, stupid. He was thinking about the national security and the environment and how to get get things done in Washington where Gore, although it’s hard to believe now, was highly regarded, something like the Democrats’ Paul Ryan, except he actually knew what he was saying.  And I always considered Gore’s choice of a running mate a mistake. Joe Lieberman might have corralled the ticket some votes in Florida (not enough, as it turned out), but he was already a notorious quisling, having given aid and comfort to the Republicans during the Impeachment Crisis by being the only Democratic Senator to publicly condemn the President for his affair with Monica Lewinsky and he did it on the Senate floor.  Gore, I thought, had picked Lieberman as a signal that he was his own man and had cut himself free from Bill Clinton, which, as far as I was concerned, meant he was cutting himself free from a major reason I was voting for him, to continue what Bill Clinton had started.  John Kerry’s choice of John Edwards left me cold, but I was never much impressed by Edwards.  That’s not 20-20 hindsight.  Ask Pop Mannion. Once, when I was visiting the old homestead shortly after the Republican justices on the Supreme Court stole the 2000 election for George W. Bush, Pop and I were speculating on who the Democrats could run in 2004 who’d have a chance against Bush. Pop asked me what I thought about Edwards and I said he reminded me too much of a television evangelist.  But when Kerry picked him, I figured the points in Edwards’ favor were that he was young, Southern, and working class and he was meant to balance out Kerry’s elitist, New England, not exactly hip anymore image.  But when Barack Obama tapped Joe Biden I was genuinely perplexed.  Here, though, is where I made my bloomer, and it was the same bloomer I made when thinking about the other VP choices. I thought the object was always and mainly to impress me in my ill-fitting guise as an average voter or, at least, an average Democratic voter.

It’s still a question how much Sarah Palin hurt John McCain in 2008.  I think the prevailing wisdom is settling on the idea that the damage was actually more of the shooting himself in his own foot variety.  By rushing to pick someone who turned out to be so obviously and frighteningly unfit for any political office, let alone the one that put her next in line for President, without any serious attempt to vett her, McCain showed himself up as rash, reckless, thoughtless, and so desperate to be President he was willing to foist this idiot and lunatic on the nation.  But here’s the thing.  That idea began to develop after McCain had already shown himself up as rash, reckless, thoughtless, and desperate when the economy collapsed in mid-September.  When it became clear what a horror show Palin was---and thank you, Tina Fey, because the political press corps was smitten and took years to become truly unsmitten---it confirmed what people were concluding about McCain based on his own behavior.  But for a few weeks after the Republican convention, Palin helped McCain by firing up the base and keeping attention off of him, until he called it back himself.  And I believe she continued to be a help right up until the election because she kept the base from abandoning him.

This is the insight I gained from The Eighteen-Day Running Mate.  In trying to figure out the effect of a candidate’s choice of running mate on the election, first look at which constituency or constituencies within the candidate’s own party the choice was made to win over.  I’m not sure it’s been all sorted out in McCain’s choice of Palin.  At the time, it was assumed by the Political Press Corps---and said by some inside the campaign---that the hope was that a woman on the ticket would appeal to women in general and disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters in particular.  If that was the reason, then Palin was bad for McCain from the start, because women did not like her.   If the idea was that her supposed maverickyness complemented and highlighted his reputation as a maverick, then that didn’t work out quite they way it was expected.  But if she was there to whip up enthusiasm for the ticket among the Right Wing rank and file, then she definitely did her job.

When Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan, Democrats couldn’t contain their glee.  They believed that Ryan’s reputation as a ruthless Social Darwinist intent on destroying Medicare and, eventually, Social Security---that is, that people knew and despised Ryan as, in Charles Pierce’s immortal words, a zombie-eyed granny-starver---would sink Mitt with just about any constituency you could name.  But they forgot to name three within the Republican Party.

Christian Right. The Tea Party Right. And the Corporatist Right.

All three got Mitt’s message. 

The general voting public probably takes note of the VP pick but then folds him or her into their image of the guy at the top of the ticket.  For good, ill, or nil, he or she becomes part of the Presidential candidate’s identity. It’s just that Mitt Romney has turned out to be pretty adept at avoiding having an identity.  He’s been more of his own logo for the brand of Super Save the Nation Oil (With All New Secret Ingredients) he’s selling. Most voters, I suspect, have forgotten Paul Ryan’s part of the mix.

But those three core constituencies hear Mitt’s real sales pitch loud and clear:

“Don’t worry about what I did back when I was governor of Massachusetts or things I had to say and have to say to appear moderate in order to fool the Lamestream Media.  When I’m President, you will have my attention and my gratitude. I will owe you. And Paul Ryan will be there to make sure I pay you back.”

And that, the second part of it, with different and better intentions, is very similar to the message George McGovern meant to send to core Democratic constituencies with his choice of Thomas Eagleton:

“When I’m President, you will have my attention and my gratitude. I will owe you. And Tom Eagleton will be there to make sure I pay you back.” 

As Glasser makes clear in The Eighteen-Day Running Mate, it was politics, pure and simple, and not decency, that dictated that message. The Eighteen-Day Running Mate is a riveting and enlightening account of how it happened that the message never had a chance to get delivered.

And, tragically, decency had little to do with that either.

The Eighteen-Day Running Mate: McGovern, Eagleton, and a Campaign in Crisis by Joshua M. Glasser, publshed by Yale University Press.  Available in hardback and for kindle from Amazon.

Top photo courtesy of Yale Books.  Bottom photo courtesy of the Nixon Library.

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Related Mannion Re-run: Richard Nixon as the object of their affection, my review of Thomas Mallon’s novel Watergate.

Also: Is Decency in Politics Always Doomed? by Rick Perlstein and George McGovern: Too Decent to be President by digby.

As American as apple pie, deep dish pizza, and gangsters: politics the Chicago Way

 

Chicago Mayor Big Bill Thompson, the central figure in Gary Krist’s sometimes rollicking, sometimes chilling, always informative chronicle of a very bad couple of weeks in the history of Chicago, City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster that Gave Birth to Modern Chicago, out and about in the city he ran for his own fun and profit, circa 1919.

Of all the words the people who hate President Obama use to call him an “other”, to avoid the word they really want to use but that they know ought to stick in their throats, to demonize and delegitimize and denigrate him, and to justify their contempt and their fury at a black man’s holding the office of President of their country---Kenyan, Socialist, Marxist, fascist, terrorist’s pal---the word they use least often is the one that actually had a measure of truth behind it.

Chicago.Not that they don’t use it.  It just gets less emphasis because it doesn’t carry quite the same force of anger and vituperation.  It doesn’t imply his otherness as much as those other words.  There is a racist tinge to it.  Chicago is a city and cities are where they live.  But mainly cities are where Democrats live and vote, early and often and even after they’re dead.  Cities are where Democrats run the show for their own personal gain. Cities are corrupt, city politicians are corrupt, and no city and no city’s politicians are more corrupt than Chicago.

That’s the rap on the Windy City, which supposedly got its nickname not from the winds blasting in from Lake Michigan but from the longwinded politicians fanning the town with their hot air, and it’s thanks to Mayor Richard J. Daley, the Boss, that this reputation was engraved on the living public’s imagination.  Tying the word Chicago to Barack Obama is tying him to the Daley Machine, and that’s enough to give even good Democrats a pause or two.  The President did learn the political trade in Chicago.  The Daley Machine was broken by the time young Barry Obama arrived in town to take up work as a community organizer, and the truly relevant figure in his political biography is Harold Washington not Richard Daley, but he has close ties to the living Daleys, close enough to have made one, William, his chief of staff for a while, a blessedly short while. (See? What did I say about even good Democrats?) And then, of course, there’s Rahm.

So there are reasons Chicago ought to work as a smear against the President and you’d think the Right would hit with it harder.  The problem is that it doesn’t otherize him to the degree they want to otherize him.  In fact, just the opposite.

Chicago isn’t just the Daleys.  It’s the Cubs. It’s the White Sox. It’s the Bears. It’s Michael Jordan!  It’s deep dish pizza.  It’s sweet home to the Blues Brothers and his kind of town to Sinatra.  It’s Mrs O’Leary’s cow, who did not cause the fire, but never mind. It’s Carl Sandburg’s city of the big shoulders, hog butcher for the world, home of Carson’s Ribs, immortalized in an episode of M*A*S*H as Adam’s Ribs, for whose specialty characters would walk all the way in from Joliet on their knees in the snow.  It’s Al Capone and John Dillinger and the Roaring ‘20s, and what’s more American than our fascination with gangsters?

Baseball. Apple pie. Chevrolet. And…corrupt politicians.

They’re everywhere.  Southern small town pols are notorious. Northeastern suburbs have their fair share of corruption too.  There’s an upscale suburb close to us whose supervisor is being investigated for arson, the suspicion being that he arranged a fire to cover up evidence of a dozen instances of his robbing and bilking his constituents.  And he was re-elected with this going on.  By voters who knew he was robbing and bilking them.  But, what the heck, the roads get plowed…by the highway department run by his brother.  In towns and cities where things aren’t corrupt or aren’t as overtly corrupt, it’s because rival factions keep each other from laying sole hands on the spoils or powerful bosses make sure they have a say in every bribe and payoff and scam.  Things aren’t as wide-open as they once were, but it can still be the case that “honest” politicians are the ones who wait until after leaving office to collect their payoffs or the ones who are most subtle and least overtly greedy when they practice what the old-time Tammany boss George Washington Plunkitt defined as “honest graft,” getting rich off of public works projects that are actually necessary and good for their constituents. 

And Republicans as well as Democrats have been good at lining their pockets this way.  That’s what Daley did.  But he may not have been the most corrupt mayor of Chicago ever.  That distinction may belong to a Republican.  Willam Hale “Big Bill” Thompson.  Who was mayor when Al Capone ran the city’s underworld and a good deal of the rest of it, as well.

Capone was said to have three portraits hanging on his office wall. George Washington’s. Abraham Lincoln’s. And Big Bill Thompson’s.

The basis of Capone’s affection for Thompson was Prohibition.  Thompson opposed it, which didn’t make him a rarity among big city mayors at the time.  But unlike most of the others he didn’t even make a show of enforcing the law.  In fact, he promised to do the opposite.

“When I’m elected we will not only reopen places these people have closed,but we’ll open ten thousand new ones…. No copper will invade your home and fan your mattress for a hip flask.”

Once in office, he not only kept his promise, but he seems to have regarded Prohibition as a government program to supplement the incomes of cops, judges, and politicians, himself included.  Bribes and payoffs were a form of sales tax.

That was during Thompson's second go round as mayor. His first time through--- he served two terms between 1915 and 1923---he made his money and his reputation as a politician with his hand in the till the old -fashioned way, by straight-forward skimming, not scrupling, apparently, between honest and dishonest graft.  Thompson was a builder. We meet him in City of Scoundrels, Gary Krist’s engaging narrative history of twelve very bad days during Thompson’s second term, proudly presiding over the opening of the Monroe street drawbridge and Krist credits him with encouraging and initiating the developments and improvements, including Michigan Avenue's Miracle Mile, that made Chicago into the most architecturally advanced and inspiring cities in the United States. But he promised far more than he delivered, gave the go ahead and financing to projects that were never completed or in many cases never even started, with the money appropriated disappearing into many pockets including Thompson's own, and did not bother to check if the city could actually pay for any of it.

But during those twelve days that are the focus of City of Scoundrels, Thompson was too busy running his city to concentrate on profiting by it.

Running it?

Just trying to hold it together.

The trouble started during a heat wave in late July of 1919 with the very first Goodyear blimp crashing in flames on top a bank in the Loop. It continued with the disappearance of six-year old Janet Wilkinson and the citywide manhunt for who the police were sadly sure would turn out to be her molester and murderer. Then there was a transit strike, and then came five days of racial riots that left dozens dead, hundreds injured, and much of the South Side's African American neighborhoods burnt and looted.

Thompson was the son of well-to-do parents, a star athlete in high school who skipped college to go to work on ranches in Nebraska and Wyoming. By the time he became mayor, the only trace of the star athlete he’d been was how he’d gone to fat in the way many former linemen and heavyweight boxers do.  He liked to wear a Stetson to remind people he’d once been a real cowboy, but when he saddled up for parades and campaign appearances, the sympathy of the crowds was with the horse.  In those days there was still reason for Republicans to think of themselves as belonging to the Party of Lincoln, but the party was already divided between corporatists and money men, whom Thompson openly despised and defied, and progressives of the likes of Theodore Roosevelt brand, reformers, do-gooders, and good government types, and Thompson was not one of those either.  He was a populist who didn’t believe in good government or using government to do good.  He believed that it was a good…as long as it was useful.  At a time when Republicans tended to see immigrants and their children either as infections or as projects for improvement, Thompson saw them as people who needed jobs and good schools and safe streets.

Or maybe he just figured that the surest way to buy their votes was to give them jobs and good schools and safe streets.  Promise them those things, at least.

It didn’t hurt him with his Irish and German constituencies that he was an outspoken Wet and opposed Prohibition.  To his surprise and chagrin, it didn’t help him as much as he expected when he opposed America’s entry into the Great War in Europe.  It got him branded “Kaiser Bill” and there was concern (or hope, depending on how you felt about him) that accusations of a lack of patriotism would hurt him as he prepared to run for re-election in 1918.

But Thompson had another constituency he’d been cultivating while his political rivals, Democrats and Republicans, either ignored them or outright despised and dismissed them.

African Americans.

As an effect of the Great Migration that was bringing black people up from the South in search of jobs in Northern factories and some measure of escape from Jim Crow, Chicago had quickly growing African American population, whom Thompson courted with promises of jobs and public works projects in their neighborhoods, promises he often kept.  He appointed African Americans to important positions in his administration, as well.  And when he campaigned he was open in his appeals to black voters.  This was tricky politically for him.  Besides racial antagonisms, his black voters and his white ethnic voters were economic rivals.  White workers tended to be union members while black workers were generally non-union (often because they were excluded from the unions). He managed the trick well enough to get himself re-elected, but it became an even larger and more dangerous problem when the riots began.

As you would expect, the riots, which began when a group of black teenagers swimming in the lake crossed an imagined line in the water and a white thug threw a rock that knocked one of the swimmers unconscious causing him to slip under the water and drown, take up the largest sections of City of Scoundrels.  They went on for nearly a week, ranged over wide swaths of the city, caught thousands up in their violence, and caused Chicago’s second great fire.

The sections of City of Scoundrels covering the riots are harrowing and informative, especially if like me you didn’t know anything about this part of Chicago’s history.  But they aren’t the most entertaining sections.  Not that riots are entertainments or that nonfiction writing about riots and the attendant deaths and destruction ought to be entertaining in the way of writing about the Battle for Helm’s Deep.  But there’s no reason it shouldn’t entertain readers by engaging their sympathies and stirring their emotions.  It should be more than interesting.  It should excite our interest.  And the best way to do that, in nonfiction as well as fiction, is to give readers people to identify with and care about.  Krist does a fine job of laying out the terrain and explaining the situation as it unfolds and leading us through the confusion and tumult.  But there’s a distance in the presentation, as if we’re hearing about the riots from reporters who can’t get past the police cordons and are relaying what they’re being told by officials who are relaying what they’ve been told by other officials who are too busy trying to do their jobs to keep track exactly of what’s going on.  Effectively, the sections on the riots read like a summarization of an official report pieced together from second and third hand reports well after the fact.  The people involved appear more or less as statistics.  So and so was beaten. So and so shot. So and so’s house was burned down. So and so was arrested along with…The neighborhoods bearing the brunt of the violence are located more than describe and treated as scenes of crimes or accidents instead of places where people lived, worked, and died.

Most of Chicago’s African Americans lived in neighborhoods on the South Side in an area that taken together was known as the Black Belt, and that’s where the rioting was concentrated.  But we don’t get much of a sense of what it was like to live in the Black Belt under normal circumstances let alone during a nearly week long series of riots.  Krist presents the Black Belt more as an object of sociological and historical study than as a place alive and bustling at a particular point in time with its own particular culture and ways of doing business, enlivened by the comings and goings of particular people with their own particular interests, passions and concerns. We see the Black Belt from the outside, through the eyes of outsiders, white outsiders. Krist’s two main eyewitnesses to the riots are Carl Sandburg, who was working as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, and Sterling Morton, an heir to the Morton Salt fortune who was a lieutenant in the state militia that summer, and Sandburg’s reports from the scene are…reports, and Sterling, along with his unit and the rest of the militia sent to backup the police if the mayor called on them, spent the first several days waiting and then when the militia marched in at last, he was naturally more focused on the immediate dangers to him and his men than on gathering information about the people he was there to protect or round up. Morton viewed the Black Belt as a battleground not a part of his hometown. 

So we don’t get anyone speaking for the neighborhoods and the people who live there or speaking for themselves as people living in the neighborhood.  In fact, Chicago’s African American community has practically no voice of its own in the book.  The journalist and activist Ida B. Wells (whom Krist refers to throughout by her full legal name, Wells-Barnett) has a prominent role in City of Scoundrels, and she lived on the South Side and was active in helping victims during the riots, but Krist mostly has her speaking in her role as a public figure and rarely as a private citizen of a city coming down around her ears.  And in her public persona she often comes across as representing a party and community of one.

That’s a big chunk of the city to leave voiceless. And it gets at something I would have liked to have more of.  Characters.  City of Scoundrels is populated by many biographies but not enough characters, that is, we’re introduced to a lot people and get to know them through the facts of their lives, but we meet fewer people who speak for themselves and come off as having real lives off the page and in the process give us an intimate sense of what it was like to live in the city of Chicago a hundred years ago.

Two of the most alive characters, in that sense, are Thomas Fitzgerald, the suspect in Janet Wilkinson's abduction and murder---that's not a spoiler. From the beginning of her part of the book, there's not a doubt about what happened. The details are too familiar from the countless similar cases that make the news to this day. In newspaper interviews neighbors of the suspect and Janet's family sound depressingly like any you'd hear on Nancy Grace.---and a diary-keeping University of Chicago student who is the ingenue of City of Scoundrel's romantic subplot.

Twenty year old Emily Frankenstein (Yes. Really. Frankenstein. There’s more. Her doctor father was named Victor!) was the daughter of a prosperous Jewish family secretly engaged to a recently demobbed soldier her parents disapproved of because of his working class background and his growing interest in Christian Science. Emily wasn't comfortable with the Christian Science thing either, but she was convinced she could argue him out of it and improve him in other ways as well.

Emily's account of their courtship is lively, entertaining, and, for a twenty year old in love, psychologically astute. But, understandably, her focus is herself and her attention doesn't range far beyond her own front porch, and she was protected from the calamities and tragedies shaking the city by privilege and distance. We learn a lot from her about what it was like to be Emily Frankenstein. We don't get much of a picture of what it was like for Emily Frankenstein to be out and about in Chicago in the summer of 1919.

We get a much more detailed and illuminating picture of the daily life of the city and how ordinary people lived and worked and interacted in the sections on Janet Wilkerson's murder, since the investigation depended on tracing the comings and goings of Janet and her friends and family and their neighbors on the day of her disappearance.

The most vivid sections of City of Scoundrels, the ones with the most chills thrills, excitement, and, to me, news, are also ones in which Chicago and its people come to life, although, horrifyingly, in a number of cases, in the moments before they are burnt or crushed to death, and those are the sections dealing with the flaming crash of the airship The Wingfoot Express on top of Illinois Trust and Savings just as the bank was closing up for the day.

But it’s Big Bill Thompson who dominates the book, casting his hulking, cowboy-hatted shadow over every page. He was a colorful and amusing personality although not all that interesting a person. He doesn't seem to have left much of an account of himself or attracted the interest of any writers in a way that made them want to write seriously about him, the way Richard Daley would come to obsess Mike Royko.  Mostly Thompson inspired the broadest satire or the narrowest sort of demonization.  If there's a book out there like Royko's Boss or A.J Liebling's classic The Earl of Louisiana, Krist doesn’t make a lot of use of it.  The result is that Thompson doesn't have much of a voice in City of Scoundrels. We "hear" him mainly through his speeches and public pronouncements in which he tended to mix populist rabble rousing with patriotic bombast typical of the day and the professional politician's usual forms of boasting and self-flattery. Thompson doesn't come across as intellectually or emotionally engaged in any of the events Krist is chronicling, except in a reverse way during the riots when he was trying his damnedest not to be engaged---he couldn't figure out how to appear active and in charge without alienating his white and black voters. The police were overwhelmed. The governor had the state militia ready to march in. All he was waiting for was for Thompson to ask for the help.  But the governor was a political rival, and Thompson wanted his police department to get the credit for saving the city.

But people did write about him. He made news. And while. as he presented himself in public, he was all show and he seems to have had no friends or intimates of a literary bent who recorded his private thoughts and feelings, his enemies couldn't say enough about him. None of what they had to say was kind or even grudgingly complimentary. But what they did say and write (and you can imagine the most even-tempered of them writing much of what Krist quotes with red faces and clenched jaws) leaves no doubt that Thompson was very, very, very good at playing politics.

Few of his opponents and rivals came away from any dealings with Big Bill feeling they'd got the better of him. Often they came away feeling as dirty as they thought him. Nobody believed Thompson represented anyboby's best interests but his own. Nobody except the voters.  Which led to a number of his enemies among the Chicago and Illinois political and economic elite giving vent to the not always well-suppressed suspicion, held by many elitist reformers regardless of party, that the problem with democracy is that the little people get to thinking they run things.

It wasn't a difficult leap from thinking the mayor was corrupt to thinking the people who voted for him were corrupt.

Democracy, as practiced in Chicago under Big Bill Thompson, and in every city for that matter, was a system by which the poor and undeserving voted to give themselves unearned goods and services bought with rich and deserving men's money.

And there you have it, the roots of Mitt Romney' 47 %, of the fear and loathing and self-righteous indignation behind Republican legislatures passing laws designed to keep people, particularly city people, those people, from voting, of some of the small town and suburbanite Tea Party types’ feeling that their country has been stolen from them, of the corporatist Right's contempt for the Welfare state and democracy itself as forms of theft.

It can all be summed up in that one word. Chicago.

Big Bill's second stint as mayor lasted just one term. When Democrat Anton Cermak defeated him in 1931, the Chicago Tribune delivered Thompson's political eulogy:

For Chicago Thompson has meant filth, corruption, obscenity, idiocy and bankruptcy.... He has given the city an international reputation for moronic buffoonery, barbaric crime, triumphant hoodlumism, unchecked graft, and a dejected citizenship. He nearly ruined the property and completely destroyed the pride of the city. He made Chicago a byword for the collapse of American civilization. In his attempt to continue this he excelled himself as a liar and defamer of character.

Of course I believe that the President not even in spite of but because of the political lessons he learned in Chicago is no Big Bill Thompson, but still Thompson is a relevant figure in this year's election and that makes City of Scoundrels not just an interesting and entertaining book but a useful one for understanding some of what's still going on today.

City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster that Gave Birth to Modern Chicago by Gary Krist, published by Crown, available in hardback and for kindle from Amazon.

Not. A. President.

It's tough to run for president against an incumbent, even when the economy is in rough shape.

Your problem is that while you're out on the campaign trail promising voters what you will do as President months and months down the line to solve problems affecting their lives at the moment, your opponent is back at work in the White House busy solving those problems right now.

You may have good reasons to think he's not in fact solving them or not solving them as well as you would, but it's tricky to say that.  You don't want to sound like you’re rooting for the President to fail.

Which---be honest with yourself---at some  deep, ugly, ignoble level you are.

You can't help it. Your success depends on his failure or at least on his being perceived to be failing.

One of the smart things Bill Clinton did when he ran against George Herbert Walker Bush was to make the future the focus of the campaign. Don't stop thinking about tomorrow. Building a bridge to the the 21st Century. Grow the economy. A clunking phrase but an optimistic one. Growth is all about looking forward. Clinton wasn't asking voters to judge Bush on what he had done. What he had done yesterday wouldn't matter tomorrow, yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone.  Bush began to look like yesterday's President. Voters couldn’t help noticing that he was an old man of 66 and Clinton was 20 years younger. It helped Clinton that Bush in himself and in his achievements embodied an era that had ended on his watch.

Clinton was able to praise the President for what he had done, thank him for his service to the nation, and make the case that it was time for him to step aside.  He put Bush in the position of having to argue that the past mattered more than the future, a tough sell Bush himself didn't appear to buy.

Back in 1972, George McGovern's whole campaign was pretty much predicated on his promise to end the war in Vietnam. But then Nixon did that. Then he negotiated detente with the Soviet Union and opened up China. There were good reasons why he shouldn't have been reelected but replacing him with a peace candidate no longer seemed that urgent.  McGovern became the candidate from the past, running as if it was still 1968.

Mitt Romney has McGovern's problem. I'm not predicting he's as doomed to as resounding a defeat. But his campaign has been based---had been based---on one salient idea, that Barack Obama had failed to fix the economy.

What Mitt failed at was asking himself what he would do if what he was telling voters was the one big problem got fixed. 

Of course he didn't think it would get fixed.  He and the folks at Mitt Corp were convinced it couldn't be fixed by this President.  It could only be made worse. In fact they were banking on it to get worse.

Their Republican allies in Congress were working to make it worse.

Mitt was helped along in this line of thinking by the Village Press Corps which had itself convinced that President Obama couldn’t get re-elected unless the economy showed clear signs it was recovering and then constructed a definition of recovering that was pretty much recovered.  Things wouldn't be better until the economy was booming again or at least restored to where it was in August of 2008.

But Mitt appears not to have asked himself the bigger question. What would he do while the President was busy being the President?  Presidents have to do more than watch the nation’s bottom line. Suppose a crisis came along?  Suppose the eyes of the nation the eyes of the whole world were turned on the president of the United States? Suppose for days or even weeks on end nobody cares what you think or even remembers you exist?

If you've asked yourself this question, the correct answer is you be a good citizen, support the President, wait for the crisis to pass, then point out the mistakes or the things you feel he should have done differently.  But while you are waiting you don't have to stand there like a block of wood. You practice being President. You practice looking like a President. You practice sounding and acting like a President. Because if people do take their eyes of the actual President to look at you it will be to ask themselves what it would be like during a crisis to see you up there dealing with it.

But besides this requiring patience, tact, self-discipline, and a degree of humility, it requires you to have asked yourself the existential question, What will I be when I am President?

If the answer comes back, Boss of the World, give it up right there.

The question breaks down into a lot of smaller questions.  What do you plan to do when you’re President? How will you get it done? Who will you have to work with?  How will you get them to go along with you?  What if they don’t?  What if you can’t get done what you want to get done or all you want to get done?  What if there’s a crisis?  How would you handle this disaster, that sudden problem, the rise of those enemies, the loss of those allies?  How will you rally people to your side?  What is your side?  Your party’s or your country’s or the world’s?  How do you want people to see you as President? What do you want history to say about you?

Why do you want to be President anyway?

Mitt’s thoughtless, reckless, selfish behavior over the last few days suggest that he’s never asked himself any of these questions.

He didn’t wait.  He couldn’t wait. He couldn’t use the time to practice being President.  All he could do, all he could think to do, was promote himself at the expense of the nation’s interest.

Which is not what we look for Presidents to do.

What it appears to come down to is that Mitt has no idea what it means to be President.  He seems to think it’s a straight-forward managerial position, no different than running Bain or the Olympics (“Governor of Massachusetts? When was I ever governor of Massachusetts?”) and that the only qualification Mitt needs for the job or any job is that he be Mitt.

Not. A. President.

Updated already: Mike the Mad Biologist on the intellectual bubble in which Mitt Corp operates, How ‘Epistemic Closure’ Led to Romney’s Gaffe.

Updated again after careful reflection:  John Scalzi explains to Mitt why You Never Go Full McCain.

Photo of George H.W. Bush, Ross Perot, and Bill Clinton at one of their debates during the 1992 Presidential campaign courtesy of the BBC.

Ignoring the polls for reasons of mental and spiritual well-being

I don’t watch the daily polls and I don’t like anybody who does.

Ok.  I don’t like it when anybody does.  My Twitter feed is full of poll obsessives who alternately drive themselves nuts and launch themselves into states of giddy euphoria as they watch the polls go up and down. People seem to think that any minute now a new poll’s going to come along that will decide things once and for all right now so we can all relax and stop worrying about November.  I’ve actually unfollowed a number of people I like and admire as bloggers and twitterers because of their poll watching compulsions.  Months before an election I don’t need to know.  And I don’t need to spend the months before an election alternately driving myself nuts and launching myself into states of giddy euphoria over politics!  I’ve got too much else to make me crazy and even a few other and better reasons to be euphoric.

Plus, there’s some arrogance at work.

I don’t feel I need to watch the polls because I’ve predicted the outcome of every Presidential election since I was a kid long before the second Tuesday in November.  Every election has been decided in my mind by late spring.  The only one that fooled me a bit was 2000.  I thought Gore would win it a little more handily.

So I’ve been trying to ignore the polls, even when they’ve been good news for the President, which, the last few days, they certainly have been. 

That shouldn’t be a surprise.  Two things have been at work.  The first is that it’s been a theme of Mitt Romney’s life that the more people get to know him the less they like him.  It goes way back.  It’s the subtext of the bullying and assault of that kid in prep school.  Mitt was doing it to try to get the other students to like him.  I don’t know why he’s had this effect on people.  Probably lots of different reasons.  I used to like him.  Sort of.  When he ran against Ted Kennedy.  Massachusetts is kind of our second home state and I followed that race.  I didn’t want him to win.  But while I wouldn’t have voted for him against Ted I might have voted for him if he’d been running against some other Democrat.  Massachusetts has produced some pretty lousy Democrats and I don’t mean of the Republican-lite variety.  I mean corrupt, stupid, inept, or otherwise useless.  Mitt didn’t strike me as so bad next to some of them.  I didn’t like him as much when he was governor though.  I liked him less when he ran for President in 2008.  I couldn’t put my finger on why.  But this time out I positively loathe the guy and I can tell you why.  I have told you why, in about a dozen posts.  Boils down to this.  To him people are costs to be controlled.  He’s the first person to run for President on a major party line who believes human beings are a problem.

If that’s what people are picking up on, it’s no wonder nobody likes him.

And virtually nobody does.

That’s one thing that has been consistent in the polls.  People do not like him.  Even people who plan to vote for him.  This has been a point pundits and analysts in the Village media have studiously ignored, because they’ve been wedded to the idea that the President is doomed and if they included Mitt’s personal approval in their analyses they would be predicting that the American people are bent on putting a man they don’t like in the White House.

When has that ever happened?

Nope.  Liberals didn’t like Nixon.  Most people did.  My grandmother loved him.

But my feeling---and that’s all it is, my feeling, not a prediction---that the President is on his way to re-election isn’t just based on Mitt’s being unlikeable and his convention giving more people the opportunity to learn not to like him.

I also expected the President’s convention to be just that---the President’s convention. 

I expected that the more people saw of the President outside of the filter of Village Conventional Wisdom, the more they would remember that we don’t need a new President.  We already have a pretty good one.  I’m not talking about his effectiveness at getting this or that bill passed.  I’m talking about his ability to be the many things we need our Presidents to be, all of which add up to giving us confidence that he is in command.

And if you think being in command means being able to make political opponents drop to their knees and beg for mercy with just a frown, you have watched too many episodes of The West Wing.

Even George Washington couldn’t do that.

FDR couldn’t even do it to his political allies.

Being in command or, rather, giving the people confidence that the President is in command, means giving them the confidence that the day to day running of the country is being taken care of and that if something happens, if there’s a crisis, the President will act swiftly, decisively, and competently to put things back to right.  Again, this isn’t a matter of doing the right thing by anyone’s ideological lights or by Paul Krugman’s lights (bright and focused as they so often are).  It’s more a matter of the passengers trusting that when the car spins out on the ice the driver isn’t going to panic and steer us off a cliff.

And this has been the basis of my “predictions” of who is going to be President.  The guy who gives the impression of being the better driver wins.  The re-election of George W. Bush would seem to refute this, but there are always other factors at work as well, and one of them is that Americans tend to like their Presidents and it takes a lot of work on the part of one to make them dislike him.  Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter worked at it.

W. didn’t.  Well, he didn’t work at anything. But people still liked him until Katrina hit and he proved that he wasn’t in command, and then it was too late.

What happened at the Democratic Convention is that people were reminded that we have a President.  Bill Clinton tore Mitt Romney to pieces but after starting with the point that Barack Obama is Bill’s idea of a good President.  From there on, everything he said about Mitt was an implicit or explicit comparison between Mitt and the President.  And then, Thursday night, the President took the stage.

He didn’t come out as that hopey-changey guy from 2008.  He emphatically put that guy in the past.  He stood there as the President of the United States. 

And a lot of people’s hearts swelled with pride.

I think the debates will accelerate both these trends, that the more people see of Mitt the less they will like him and the more they see of the President the more they will accept it and like it that he is the President.

That’s what I think.  I’m not predicting.  I’m just saying what I think and why.  I think the President will be re-elected because he is the President.

The Village talk about the polls has been all about what a tight race it is, but the focus has been on the polls of likely voters and, for reasons of prudence, those polls have been based on a very strict and limiting definition of likely.  The talk, though, hasn’t been simply a matter of prudence.  It’s been colored by a number of assumptions.  One is that that even though the President has generally been up a few points even among likely voters, because his lead is within the margin of error, the error will correct in Mitt’s favor.  The other assumption is that the President is running against history.

Here’s the CW in a nutshell: “Obama’s in deep trouble because no modern President has won re-election with economic numbers as bad as the numbers the President has had to deal with.”

“Modern” means since World War II, so how many incumbent Presidents are we talking about?

Two.

Jimmy Carter and George Herbert Walker Bush.

I’m not including Gerald Ford because he’s a special case.

How many other un-elected Vice Presidents who became President because the sitting President resigned in disgrace and left town one step ahead of the law and who then pardoned that disgraced President ran for what wasn’t in fact re-election but election for the first time?

But here’s the thing.

They’re all special cases.

Jimmy Carter and George Herbert Walker Bush were running for re-election when the unemployment numbers were bad but not as bad as they are now, true.  But weren’t other things going on too?

Off the top of my head I can think of a few things that might have hurt Carter beside unemployment.

A thirteen percent inflation rate.

Lines at the gas stations.

Ayatollah Khomeini.

Ted Kennedy.

Ronald Reagan.

The world’s biggest, meanest, fastest-swimming rabbit.

My mother would add one more.

He stopped smiling.

I could write a whole post about how this all adds up to people having the sense that Carter wasn’t in command.  Maybe I will.  For now, though, the point is that it’s not just the economy, stupid.

By the way, the sign Carville put up in campaign headquarters was “The economy, stupid” not “It’s the economy”.  It was a reminder to anyone talking to the press to stay on message.  Keep the focus on the economy because that was President Bush’s main weakness.  Mitt Corp went off message.  Probably because they realized that the economy wasn’t going to be as much of a weakness for the President as they hoped it would be and panicked. But that’s yet another post.

So, that’s what I think has been happening.  I also think that as the election gets closer more people are going to move into the likely voter category and more of them will be people who plan to vote for the President.

But we’re still two months out.  All kinds of things can happen.  Even if the trend continues in the President’s favor he’s still going to need every vote he can get.

One more point.

It’s not enough that the President gets re-elected.

We need to take back the House and hold the Senate and I haven’t seen polls showing that either is guaranteed.

But then, like I said, I’m trying to ignore the polls.

A nation of of little would-be Mitts on the make

We were watching The Statue of Liberty, one of Ken Burns’ early documentaries, the other night, and one of Burns’ trademark secondary narrators was Vartan Gregorian, now the President of the Carnegie Corporation, at the time (1985) President of the New York Public Library, at various times before and in between a professor, dean, and president at a number of prestigious colleges and universities, all his life a Christian Armenian born in Iran, and since he was twenty-two, when he came here to study at Stanford University, a resident of the United States.  I presume that somewhere along the way he became an American citizen but his biography at Wikipedia doesn’t say when he did or even if he ever did.  Doesn’t matter.  The point is that the Statue of Liberty as the symbol of the United States as a nation of immigrants has a special meaning to him, and during the course of the film, in answer to a question we don’t hear asked but which is apparently along the lines of What is the greatest threat to individual liberty? he says:

Ignorance is the first threat to liberty.  The second is to treat ourselves as economic units rather than as spiritual beings.

Given the subject of the film and what he did with the liberty afforded him by his coming to America, which was to get a world-class college education and the devote his life as a scholar, thinker, and administrator to helping countless others get their educations, I took it that Gregorian was reacting to the idea that people immigrated to the United States just to make money and that the American Dream is simply to get rich.

I also thought, He’s predicting the rise of Mitt Romney! How’d he know?

But here’s the thing.  He wasn’t predicting the rise of Mitt Romney.  He was watching it.  Watching the rise of a thousand young Mitt-a-likes, at any rate.  Reagan was President.  Greed was good.  I Got Mine, You Get Yours and He Who Dies With the Most Toys Win were vying to replace E pluribus unum as the national motto.  Instead of Out of the many, one, we were becoming a nation of ones, Number Ones, each looking out for itself.

In Mitt Romney, Republicans have given us the first major Presidential nominee who sees the United States purely as an economic enterprise and all its citizens as economic units.

To him, America is all about success which as far as he seems to believe or care is synonymous with getting rich.  This makes him the ideal candidate for the Republican Party these days.  Never mind the Tea Party.  It’s still the corporatist party, the party of rich people infatuated with themselves as “wealth-creators", which is really their way of pointing out that they have bundles of it and you don’t.  The supposedly Christian party believes in nothing so strongly as storing up treasure on earth.  Everything else, every good in life, follows from that, from getting rich, from having the money to buy whatever you need and want.  And if you don’t have that money, you don’t get to have it, any of it, even if you desperately, desperately need it to keep yourself and your family healthy, sheltered, clothed, and fed.

That was the theme of the Republican Convention.  We Built It…We Own It.  (Clint finished the thought for them.)  Yesterday I said I wanted to turn a Mitt Snit into a meme.  His whole convention was a Mitt Snit.  Thousands of people got together to express their collective indignation at the President’s suggestion that they owed even a bit of their success to anybody or anything else especially government aid.  That they were holding this self-pity fest in a venue that government picked up 62 percent of the tab for while a hurricane was bearing down on them and if it hadn’t veered to the west and had struck Tampa they’d have been screaming for the Feds to come bail them out, literally and figuratively, were ironies entirely lost.  Speaker after speaker took to the podium to brag about their successes as self-starting, self-reliant, self-sufficient entrepreneurs, including, risibly, one whose business was started entirely with the help of government loans and survived on government contracts.

There were several messages behind this, not the least insistent of which was that the Republican Party is the party of hard-working, enterprising wealth-creators in contrast with the Democratic Party, the party of Welfare-dependent layabouts, slackers, moochers, and takers.  But it was also a come on for the lottery: Vote for Mitt, Vote Republican, and You Can Be Rich Too.   Ultimately, though, it was a reduction of the American Dream into a get rich quick scheme and it divided the nation into Those Who Have It and Those Who Don’t and since Those Who Don’t were invisible at the convention, the final message was that only Those Who Have It count.

The whole point of life is to make piles of dough and the United States exists mainly for the care and feeding of millionaires.

This was so blatant and so fundamentally not just un-American but inhuman that folks at The American Conservative noticed and were appalled.

Reacting to Paul Ryan’s speech, which besides the lies included his cramped, Ayn Randian-warped vision of America as a nation of predators, sharpers, and speculators eyeing the main chance, Scott Galupo wrote:

In Ryan’s intellectual bubble, there are job creators and entrepreneurs on one side and parasites on the other. There is no account of the vast gray expanse of janitors, waitresses, hotel front-desk clerks, nurses, highway maintenance workers, airport baggage handlers, and taxi drivers. They work hard, but at the end of the day, what can they be said to have “built”?

And Samuel Goldman, noting that “most Americans are not entrepreneurs or business owners” followed up with:

We heard a great deal last night about what a President Romney would do about America’s enemies, at least as John McCain and Condoleeza Rice understand them. We also heard something about Romney’s dedication to freedom, although without much explanation of what that means. But we heard almost nothing about what another Republican administration offers Americans who work jobs rather than “creating” them.

It’s part of the so-called American dream, as Sen. Paul put it, that “any among us can become the next Thomas Edison, the next Henry Ford, the next Ronald Reagan…” Another part is that those who don’t reach the towering heights of achievement can hope for stable lives that include a reasonable measure of comfort. Republicans once endorsed this rather modest ambition. Does anyone believe they care about it now?

A theme of the Burns documentary is that we are a nation of outcasts coming together to help each other make a place---a home---for ourselves in the world.  In his Wikipedia entry, Gregorian is quoted reflecting on the all help he got when he first arrived here:

In Palo Alto, an Armenian family adopted me for all Sunday meals and holidays. All of this reinforced my conviction that diasporas are not ghettos—rather they are connecting bridges to larger communities, be it Jewish, be it Irish, be it Chinese, Armenian, Indian, and so forth. I never realized that until then…

At the Republican Convention, the theme was that we don’t need bridges, literal or metaphorical, because there are no communities that need connecting.  We’re all on our own in a land of opportunists, each of us a little would-be Mitt on the make.

Read Goldman’s whole post at The American Conservative, We Are Not All Entrepreneurs.

Shake every hand, kiss every baby

Welcome to all of you coming over from Andrew Sullivan's place, and thank you very much to Andrew for sending you here. Comments are always welcome, but they're moderated, by me, and I'm going to be out and about all day so I may not get to yours until late. But I promise yours will get posted, although please check out my comment policy.

A sure-fire way to send Mitt Romney into a snit---and, by the way I hope to make that into a meme, A Mitt Snit---is to suggest that his family name, fortune, and connections had anything to do with his success.  He did it all on his own, gosh darn it, and how dare you suggest otherwise! You just hate success! Mitt's not the only rich guy prone to such snits. It's practically a fetish with certain rich assholes that we plebes accept they did it all on their own, with no help from anyone, especially not from the lowly likes of us.  This is not a new or particularly American type.  Josiah Bounderby---and to Brits his name says it all---a factory owner in Dickens' Hard Times gasses on and on through most of the novel about his self-made fortune, setting himself up for others as the example of self-reliance and hard work, only to have it revealed at the end that his poor, widowed mother had been supporting him for years before he struck it lucky.  Mitt Romney was born with many advantages. He made the most of those advantages by working hard and being smart. I happen to think what he did at Bain was the equivalent of captaining a pirate ship, but there's no denying that at least from the crew's point of view he was an intelligent and masterful skipper, and  it's not taking away from his intelligence or his skill to point out that he was given the boat.

He had advantages and those advantages gave him a head start in business and in politics where he was able to start near the top with the first office he tried for. You could even argue that after he lost he had to take a step backwards and settle for being governor. United States Senator is often the next step up from Governor for the majority of governors who have no shot at becoming President.

For anyone who wants to point out that Ted Kennedy had even greater advantages when he first ran for the Senate, yep, he sure did. But he acknowledged them. In fact, whatever you think of the Kennedys, you have to admire the way they've practically made Most People Weren't Born as Lucky as Us the family motto.

But because Mitt was able to start near the top, he was spared having to go through anything like this:

The South Dakota Democratic Party did not constitute much of a platform. Republicans captured 90 percent of state elections between  1889 and 1967. Still, McGovern did not lack for faith, idealism, and a sense of practicality. He saw that if he ever sought elected office he would need an organization behind him, taking it upon himself to build the requisite infrastructure. As one Democratic official noted, George McGovern was not so much rebuilding the Democratic Party in South Dakota as establishing the George McGovern Party. By 1956, after installing party chairmen in every county, McGovern deemed himself ready to run for Congress, targeting Harold Lovre of the First Congressional District, who was armed with four terms in the House and a track record of staggering margins of victory. But McGovern recognized and capitalized on two fundamental traits of the region's voters. first, South Dakotans demanded staunch anticommunist and pro-agriculture stances. The three pillars of the state's economy were corn, wheat, and cattle. Second, he understood that South Dakotans valued a sense of personal connection with their public officials, the perception of at least compassion for their conditions. In other words, the voters seemed to care more about the man than about his politics. As candidate, McGovern resolved to project the impression of principle, rootedness, and neighborly interest. Though naturally uncomfortable with the superficiality of the campaign handshake, McGovern eventually conceded that there was no better way of establishing that personal connection with voters. While Eleanor minded the campaign office with only one other volunteer, McGovern traversed the thirty-eight thousand square miles of South Dakota territory east of the Missouri River that composed the district, shaking hands with as many people as he could, at as many picnics and church dinners as possible. George Cunningham, the former President of the fledgling South Dakota Young Democrats who had recently finished army service, accompanied McGovern on his travels, and they sold campaign buttons at each stop to finance their journey to the next town on their itinerary.

That's from The Eighteen-Day Running Mate: McGovern, Eagleton, and a Campaign in Crisis by Joshua M. Glasser, a so far very interesting and well-reported book (I'm about two-thirds in), although I'd like to ask Glasser about his choice of phrasing there, "the superficiality of the campaign handshake." I don't think there's anything superficial about shaking hands with voters on the campaign trail. That's my point, in fact. A candidate better learn the habit of literally and sincerely reaching out to voters. McGovern apparently did. I'm not sure Mitt has.

That's how you win a down-ticket election. You get out there and you shake as many hands, kiss as many babies, ring as many doorbells as there are minutes in the day every day.  Ideally, before the campaign's over you'll have met every voter and asked them for their vote personally.  Of course the higher up the ladder, the larger the constituency, and the more that ideal becomes an impossibility. So you're forced to do a lot of it by proxy.  Instead of meeting voters one at a time, you meet them in crowds. Instead of showing up on their doorsteps, you show up on their TVs and computer screens and mobile devices. You spend more time with big donors than with small business owners. And what used to be a matter of just doing your job, going out to listen to constituents tell you their troubles and ask for your help, becomes a photo op.

If you worked your way up the political ladder, and you know what's good for you, you remember what the point was and you keep in mind who deserves your attention when you're out on the stump. And when you stop standing in front of the crowd and dive into it instead, all the old skills come back.

This is where Mitt's advantages turn into disadvantages.

Mitt never learned those skills.

Maybe I should say he's never had to practice them as much as most politicians.

He clearly doesn't know instinctively what to do when he has to deal with voters one to one. He's awkward and uncomfortable and prone to gaffes. I don't mean what the press corps would prefer to call gaffes, all his deliberate and calculated lies. I mean what happens when his apparently instinctive goofiness gets the better of him.  He says and does stupid things, like forgetting to thank the owners of a diner he's taken over and trashed for a photo op. In another mood, in another post, making a different point I'd probably say this is a sign that he's an arrogant elitist who can't be bothered to muster up ordinary sympathy for the Help.  And maybe it is or it's part of it.  But I don't know that it is or how much of it it is. I am, however, pretty sure that much of it is simply lack of practice.

Campaigning for the Senate and then for Governor, Mitt didn't have to shake as many hands, kiss as many babies, or ring as many doorbells as George McGovern had to in just his first campaign for Congress.

I'm not comparing Mitt to just McGovern or to Barack Obama or to the Kennedys. I'm comparing him to most other Republican politicians who worked their ways up from city council to state assembly to US Congress.

I noted it during the primaries. Mitt was running an elitist TV and photo op campaign, just as if it was the general election, while Rick Santorum was running as a democrat. Small d democrat. Mitt's implicit message was Vote for Me Because I'm a Leader! Santorum's was Please Vote for Me and I’ll Be Your Guy in the White House. It was ironic because the only truly democratic thing about him was the sweater vest, but he knew how to ask for votes.

When he ran for the Senate, Mitt gave Ted a scare, at first. He was able to do that because of his advantages. He arrived in town with money and a powerful name, and he didn't have to build a party organization for himself by himself.  It was there and eager to help him because he already had money and powerful name.  Of course, Ted had money and an even more powerful name. But he had something else, a different kind of advantage, one he had earned by making the most of the advantages he was born with--- a personal connection with the people of Massachusetts that went back thirty years. Thirty years of church suppers and union local picnics. Thirty years of shaking hands and kissing babies. If he hadn't shaken every voter's hand it was only because he hadn't gotten to the newest-born ones to kiss them yet. When Jack Kennedy first ran for Congress, he knew he wasn’t a natural at door-to-door, church picnic-to-church picnic politicking and that he needed to learn how to do it. He had a great teacher, a former mayor of Boston, his grandfather, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald.  Bobby like Mitt, was able to start nearer the top.  He wasn’t a natural either.  He learned a lot from running his brother’s campaign for President, but there was something else going on between Bobby and the voters, between Bobby and people, something that was in one way scary but in another way sublime. Whatever that was, it transcended ordinary politicking and required more---from him and out of him---than a talent for shaking hands and kissing babies.  Ted, however, was a natural.  When he was born, the first thing he did was shake the doctor's hand. Then he kissed all the other babies in the nursery.  Whenever he came home to campaign, it was like coming back to the old neighborhood to catch up with the old gang.  Americans love their royalty but they want their princes and princesses to be able to stand up at the pancake breakfast and lead the crowd in a rousing, off key rendition of Sweet Adeline, and not make it seem like they're doing it as a favor or just for the cameras.

This ain't easy.

It takes practice.

And discipline.

And patience.

And humility.

It's helpful if you're born with the right temperament and the talent, but it's a skill you can learn, a habit of mind and heart you can acquire.  You don't have to like it. But you have to mean it.

It hasn't come up as much this campaign, that I've seen, at any rate, but one of the Republicans' regular lines of attack on the President has been to call him a Chicago politician. They mean that he is corrupt, allied with thugs, willing to do anything to win. They mean he is a mirror image of themselves, of course. Whatever the Right says we're doing, they're doing. But the point is they're right about the importance of Obama’s roots in Chicago politics, just wrong about what that's meant.  Obama came up through the ranks shaking hands and kissing babies as a part of doing his job.  He's still very good at that part of doing his job as a democratic small d again politician. Maybe not in Bill Clinton's league, but who is?  Every now and then someone in the Village press corps will pipe up with the observation that Obama doesn't like people. I don't see it myself. What I suspect is that these Village pundits have intuited that the President doesn’t like a certain type of people, Village pundits.  Apparently he doesn’t enjoy the company of billionaire assholes either. Go figure. But whenever I see him out there shaking hands and kissing babies and asking people for their votes and listening to their troubles and complaints, it sure looks to me like he likes them. I don't know how deeply he enjoys it. But he means it.

You know who's even better at it?  Michelle.  I’m not sure how much she enjoys it either. But she really, really means it.

You won't catch her saying "You people." Her word for “you people” is "us."

Mitt went down to Louisiana over the weekend to get his picture taken looking concerned. That's what you do. The President is going down today to get his picture taken looking concerned. But there was a story that came out of Mitt's visit on HuffPo headlined Mitt To Flood Victim: “Go Home And Call 211.” It sounds like he blew her off, and many liberals in my Twitter feed were quick to tweet the link, presumably because they wanted to alert the world to what a heartless jerk Mitt can be.  But that means they didn't read the story.

Gasp! You mean people assume things about stories on the web without reading them, Lance?

Yes, I'm afraid it's true.

The flood victim had lost her house and didn’t know what to do.  It was graceless of Mitt to tell someone who’d just told him she’d lost her home to go home, but he didn't blow her off and she didn't feel blown off.  He was helping her by telling her the best way he knew for her to find help. What the story doesn't say is if he followed through the way he should have.  It would have been a little too dramatic if he'd whipped out his cell phone and called 211 himself right then and there. He could have turned to his aides and asked one of them to do it. But he was with Bobby Jindal. Jindal's the governor. Helping constituents is his job. Mitt should have handed the woman off to Jindal who should have handed her off to one of his aides who should have made the call and asked if the woman needed a ride and promised to have someone from the governor's office go out to her drowned neighborhood to see what needs to be done.

This wouldn't be in keeping with the GOP's current message---You're On Your Own!---but it would  have been reflexive on the part of most politicians, including many Republicans.  This is the job. It's self-serving, of course. But it's still what you're elected to do.   It's how it works.

At any rate, it's how it looked to me when I was growing up and watching Pop Mannion do it.

What I learned from watching Pop us that it ain't easy. It takes practice. And not everyone has what it takes to master it.  Me, for instance.  When I was young and could have taken advantage of my advantage---being Pop's son---I didn't have the patience, I didn't have the discipline, and I didn't have the humility. And I knew it. My sister Linda has all three. Which is why she has an office in the town hall Pop built.
___________________________

By the way, I’m assuming you’re going to follow the links and read the stories, but to save you the trouble of having to scroll back up, here they are again:

Cafe Owner After Hosting Romney Event: "I felt like it was a mocking"

Mitt Romney To Flood Victim: “Go Home And Call 211”.

The Private Navy of Captain Ernest Hemingway

Didn’t mention in my review of Hemingway’s Boat yesterday Islands in the Stream, even though it's the book Hemingway wrote about his beloved fishing boat, Pilar. It was based on Pilar’s fourteen months of service as a patrol boat on the lookout for German submarines hunting in the Caribbean during World War II and intended as another piece of the unfinished trilogy Hemingway struggled to write during the last decade of his life.  Hendrickson is more interested in Islands as a book about fatherhood, using it to glean insight into Hemingway’s relationships with his sons, and doesn’t spend much time on what actually went on aboard Pilar while she was out hunting U-boats.  He does mention how Martha Gellhorn thought Hemingway volunteered Pilar for this duty as an excuse to avoid having to join her in Europe where she was covering the war and all he was doing on his patrols was hosting a perpetual floating party. And it does sound as if it might have been better if Pilar’s military service had been the basis of a comic novel instead of a tragic one.  But Hendrickson points out that the danger Pilar was supposedly on the lookout for was real.  German subs routinely sneaked into shipping lanes close to American shores. The crew of Pilar caught sight of just one, and it was too far away to chase. But they could have had an encounter like this one off the coast of Nantucket:

On April 16, 1944, the U-550 torpedoed the gasoline tanker SS Pan Pennsylvania, which had lagged behind its protective convoy as it set out with 140,000 barrels of gasoline for Great Britain, according to the U.S. Coast Guard website and research by Mazraani.

The U-boat slipped under the doomed tanker to hide. But one of the tanker's three escorts, the USS Joyce, saw it on sonar and severely damaged it by dropping depth charges.

The Germans, forced to surface, manned their deck guns while another escort vessel, the USS Gandy, returned fire and rammed the U-boat. The third escort, the USS Peterson, then hit the U-boat with two more depth charges. The crew abandoned the submarine, but not before setting off explosions to scuttle it. The submarine hadn't been seen again until Monday.

Read the whole story, Explorers find downed U-Boat off Mass.

Photo courtesy of the U.S. Navy via AP via Yahoo.

Founding faces

"Conservation renews portraits of founding fathers"... also mothers. Abigail Adams' portrait is one of the paintings by Gilbert Stuart that have been cleaned up. From AP via Yahoo:

Stuart painted three portraits while Washington was sitting. One bust-length portrait he supposedly didn't like and rubbed out — but copied it several times before destroying it. One of Stuart's original copies is believed to be the "Vaughan-Sinclair" portrait that has been conserved, said portrait conservator Joanna Dunn.

She uses a mild solvent to remove the varnish with tiny cotton swabs to treat the paintings. Old restoration paint that no longer matches the original color also is removed. Damaged areas can be repaired with in-painting using a tiny brush filling in the losses of pigment to show the works as the artist intended. One of Stuart's paintings of his uncle, Capt. Joseph Anthony, has a severe tear Dunn is working to cover.

The most dramatic change as conservators demonstrate the process comes as the aged varnish is removed. The yellow layer has hidden Stuart's brushwork for decades since they came to the National Gallery of Art from private collections. The varnish also changes the color relationships in the paintings, making them look flatter.

"A painting is really like a trick of the eye," Dunn said. "It's a two-dimensional thing that's making it look three dimensional. So when you change those color relationships, you lose the depth of the painting."

Bright white collars have been restored, along with a glimmer of blue in John Adams' eyes and the details of Washington's face — the pink in his cheeks and his five o'clock shadow.

"Prior to cleaning, he was quite jaundice," Anderson said. "Now beautifully fresh, and you can see the life in his cheeks, the blood beneath his skin instead of just the yellow varnish. He has just emerged transformed by the treatment."

Read the whole AP story by Brett Zongker.

View a gallery of photos of the restoration in progress.

There’s also a video.

Thomas Mallon’s Nixon: Richard Nixon as the object of their affection

His mother was a saint. About to be former President Richard M. Nixon delivering his farewell address to his staff, August 9, 1974. His daughter Julie and her husband David Eisenhower are to his immediate right.  His wife Pat and his other daughter Tricia and her husband Ed Cox are far off to his left.  Author Thomas Mallon has put that large empty space between Nixon and his wife to symbolic and psychological work in his novel Watergate.

In his compelling, believable, and surprisingly romantic and tender-hearted new novel, Watergate, Thomas Mallon tells the story of how that third-rate burglary led to the resignation of the 37th President of the United States through the eyes of characters who can't tell us what is going on.  His main male characters are too distracted and his main female characters have no direct involvement with the break-in, the cover-up, or the political machinations and investigations that follow.  The news comes to them as it did to the country, in snatches and echoes.  They have pieces of a puzzle they each avoid putting together.  None of the three wants to know the truth about the man they are devoted to, Richard M. Nixon.

The historical events we know as Watergate make their way into their thoughts like week old news from far away cities, registering but not immediately affecting their thinking or their feelings.  The unfolding truth hangs at the backs of their minds, nagging at them from there, sometimes consciously ignored but unconsciously directing their decisions, sometimes dealt with intellectually but then having no influence on their actions---they pursue their own courses in spite of what they know is happening around them.

This is a useful narrative strategy.  No one at the Committee to Re-Elect or at the Washington Post or in the Special Prosecutor’s office or on the Senate Watergate Committee was paying much attention to Nixon’s wife, his secretary Rose Mary Woods, or his friend and surrogate mother-figure, Alice Longworth, the eighty-nine year old daughter of Theodore Roosevelt.  This allows Mallon to tell his story through moments that if they did occur were not taped, televised, or written into diaries, official records, trial transcripts,  or reporters' notebooks.  It's not just that there are things that can't be checked against the historical record.  They can't be checked against the most comprehensive and obsessive memory. If you’re old enough and had been paying attention at the time, you'll be surprised by how much you do remember.  There's enough Watergate lore, important and trivia pursuit level, to jog memories loose. But still things are done, things are said that won’t prompt a That didn’t happen or a That couldn’t have happened as much as an Is that made up or did I just forget about it? 

So Mallon has given himself lots of room to make things up, to invent dialog, to read minds and attribute thoughts and motivations, to fiddle with chronologies and leave out narratively inconvenient facts, to “see” things that probably weren’t there and not bother with things that were, and imagine scenes and situations and even create and insert wholly fictional characters, some with invented names and backstories but many with the names and biographies of real people.  And among the things he’s made up are a plausibly mundane explanation for the infamous eighteen and a half minute gap and a lover for Mrs Nixon.

You read that right.

Mallon has Pat cheating on Dick.

He leaves open the possibility that the affair was purely platonic and it’s been over for several years when the book begins but it's clear that it was deeply romantic and that Pat was and still is in love.

Ok.  First the men:

Fred LaRue, a lawyer and consultant at the Committee to Re-Elect and the bagman who delivered bribe money to the Watergate burglars after they were caught to keep them quiet, is distracted by personal and romantic problems and, anyway, his voluntary and unofficial position and duties at the CREP are so nebulous that no one not even himself knows just what he’s supposed to be doing there and in fact his nominal bosses often seemed to forget about him for long stretches of time. When they remembered him, they didn’t tell him things because they assumed he already knew them.  When the cover-up starts collapsing and the indictments start coming down, he's left half looking forward to being hauled in by the prosecutors so he can figure out from their questions where he fits into the whole scheme.

Howard Hunt, the former CIA agent turned novelist turned Plumber who supervised the break-in, is a romantic and a fabulist who starts off having a hard time distinguishing between his real life and the fantasy life he's concocted for himself in his spy novels and is then unhinged by a personal tragedy.

And Elliott Richardson, the Attorney General who was lionized for resigning rather than firing Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, although he has a pretty good idea of what happened and just how deep into it the President is, doesn’t let himself think much about the details.  He’s focused on how he can use events to advance his career, which he sees as leading him to the Republican nomination for President in 1976.

It’s one of Mallon’s dark jokes that the man who came out of the scandal with a shining reputation for honesty and probity is an even more cynical and calculating political animal than Richard Nixon himself.

Which brings us to Nixon.

One of the things Mallon does not invent is an answer to the question What did the President know and when did he know it?

The only person who could ever have answered that was Nixon and he was never going to do that and his fictional counterpart doesn’t do it here.

Throughout Watergate, Nixon is always seen in company with people he can't confide in or alone where he refuses to confide in himself---he won't let himself think honestly about what happened. He deflects, rationalizes, explains things away, rehearsing in his head the story he wants everyone else to believe and testing it by how completely he can sell it to himself. With Mallon's Nixon, his first dupe is always himself.

The women are more clear-eyed and able to be more honest with themselves and about themselves. To a point. The point being where too much honesty would break their hearts.

Alice Roosevelt Longworth is the most clear-eyed and the expression brutally frank may have been coined with her in mind. But she's removed from key events by her age and by being only a friend of the Nixons, although a friend who can make quasi-secret visits to the White House whenever she likes and feels up to it.  But her affection for Nixon is based on what he did to help her with a family tragedy almost twenty years ago that she still can't bear to think about.  She knows he's in trouble. She has a pretty good idea of how he got himself in that trouble.  She knows him well enough to guess how he's likely making it worse for himself. I don’t mean she knows the specific details of the dirty tricks and the step by step path of the cover up.  But she knows how his mind works and understands that self- destruction is wired into him. She has what it takes to figure it all out for herself (and therefore for the readers of the novel) just from what she sees on television or reads in the papers or overhears at dinner parties.  The trouble is that if she lets herself think about Nixon too long she ends up having to thing about what happened back then and she's determined to avoid that.

And she's old.  She tires out quickly.  And while she's far from senile, her mind isn't as sharp as it used to be.  When she lets her thoughts turn towards the past, they often turn towards the very distant past, and the President she winds up thinking about, when it's not her cousin Eleanor's husband, is her father.

Rose Woods decided a long time ago that she was going to accommodate certain aspects of her boss' personality and ignore what she couldn't accommodate, which is how she manages not to blame him for hiring people she can’t stand, like H.R. Haldeman, who were clearly hired for the reasons she can’t stand them.  It’s also how she can transcribe the tapes without actually hearing what's on them or, more to the point, hearing what they reveal about Richard Nixon.

Rose is a great character, a tough cookie and a creampuff, a realist and a romantic, nobody's fool but her own, with a passion for dancing and a longstanding habit of attaching herself to unobtainable men, of which  her boss is only the most obvious.  Rose lost the love of her life in World War II but she has steadfastly remained faithful to his memory not by perpetual morning but by searching out and then embracing, cheerfully and vivaciously, pieces of her understandably idealized fallen soldier in those unobtainable men.  For instance, she is smitten by Alexander Haig the second he comes on the scene as Haldeman's replacement as chief of staff because he’s the kind of career officer and gentleman she imagines her lost Billy would have been had he survived the war.  She doesn't delude herself into thinking that any of these men are Billy or could qualify as his replacement. She has just found a way to continue to love him by loving the pieces of him she finds in these men.

But this means she tends to see men in pieces.  And that goes for her boss. She doesn’t see what’s right before her eyes because she only sees the pieces of him that are like Billy, which means she only sees the best in him. And not seeing the worst in him or even what's just not the best means not seeing Watergate for what it was, the ultimate expression of Nixon's instinct for self-destruction. She thinks of the scandal as something being done to him and not something he might have brought on himself.

Pat Nixon has carefully and determinedly created spaces, psychological and physical, into which she can retreat and politics cant follow her.  And she expects---needs---her husband to respect those spaces and to know when not leave her alone inside them and to not bring politics in with him when he does enter.  Of course Nixon being Nixon, one of Pat's great frustrations is that he keeps forgetting what's expected of him.  He's constantly blundering in when he's not wanted and dragging politics in with him.

Pat has another reason for maintaining these spaces besides as refuges for her peace of mind.  Within them she can protect her memories of one of the happiest times in her life, the years in New York City before Nixon became President and she was having that affair with a lawyer who numbered among his attractions being entirely without political ambitions.  She also needs the spaces to keep open the possibility of reviving the affair.

Pat's affair is the most effective, affecting, and believable part of the novel.  Not believable in the limited and literal sense of being something that might actually have happened. Believable in the sense that it feels true to life while you're reading it.  The real Pat Nixon didn’t do this but this woman if she was real would have and would have felt and thought the same way.  Pat's affair is the big reminder that Watergate is fiction, both by calling attention to the fact that Mallon has license to invent and to the skill by which the invention is accomplished---history, even the best narrative type, can’t be as well written.

Seeing Pat Nixon as a woman in love means seeing her as someone different than the stiff, pinched, and worrisomely too thin figure in the now very old photographs and news clips. It means seeing her as a character and that means seeing her the way we tend to see characters in books, which for most readers is as looking like people they know from real life or movies and television. I saw her looking like Michelle Pfeiffer, believe it or not. Pfeiffer’'s getting to be the right age and with a well-sprayed bouffant and a good Republican cloth coat...

I also saw Tom Hanks as Nixon.

The point is not to see them as the real Nixons, because they aren't and aren't meant to be.

They are Nixons that might have been.

As I said, Mallon’s decision to tell the story of Watergate through the eyes of people who don’t know the whole story because they weren’t really part of it is useful to him as a storyteller because he’s free---free-er---to make things up.  But it’s good for us as readers because it keeps Watergate from turning into a political melodrama and from being a too historical a historical novel.  Shades of Alan Drury and Gore Vidal cross the page throughout Watergate, but Mallon doesn’t share Drury's and Vidal's romantized and aggrandizing views of politics or politicians. Mallon gives us ordinary human beings to care about instead of heroes and villains to root for or against.

Norman Rockwell painted the history out of Nixon by not showing the qualities that made Nixon his own worst enemy.  He painted Nixon as he might have been, if he’d been a happier, more contented, more secure man, or as he might have been on his best days when all his demons were safely at bay.

Mallon doesn't paint all the history out of Nixon to create his Nixon. He leaves out the meanness or, rather, doesn’t bring it on stage.  We never see this RN at a Nixonian worst.  We do however see him at his weakest and it's a very Nixonian weakest and as with the real Nixon almost more unattractive than his worst.  The way Mallon's Nixon is most like the real Nixon is in his bottomless capacity for self -pity. But what we also see is how this Nixon might have been on his best days and how he might have enough best days that people who were close to him would believe that the real Nixon was that Nixon and therefore be inclined to ignore or forgive him at his worst and indulge him at his weakest.  This is a Nixon you can easily imagine good people loving.

There's a limit to the inventing Mallon can do and stay within the bounds of the kind of realistic and broadly accurate historical fiction he’s made his reputation writing.  He can’t change any of his main characters’ fates.  We know that Pat Nixon didn’t leave her husband for another man. We know Rosemary Woods didn’t quit. There wasn't much Alice Longworth could have done that would have made its way into the history books, unless she turned out to be Deep Throat and Mallon never raises that possibility as even a joke.  But that doesn’t mean Watergate isn’t suspenseful.

The suspense is provided in two ways.  The first is by Mallon's trick of keeping the big historical events offstage from where they can act as reminders of what it was like as the story unfolded and nobody knew how bad things would be or how they would end---a remembered suspense.  The other is by making us take these characters so much to heart that we worry about how they will deal with their disappointment and heartbreak when they finally learn the truth about what kind of man they've devoted themselves to and dread the moment when they learn it.

Mallon has us almost rooting for Nixon to get away with it, even hoping that he didn't do it, in order to have these good women's feelings spared.

Photo courtesy Richard Nixon Presidential Library via Wikipedia.

Watergate, a novel by Thomas Mallon, published by Pantheon Books, available from Amazon in hardback and for kindle.

Norman Rockwell’s Nixon: Richard Nixon with the history painted out of him

This is by way of an introduction to my review of Thomas Mallon’s new novel, Watergate.  The review is here.

Richard M. Nixon, 37th President of the United States, painted by Norman Rockwell. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution.

Norman Rockwell painted conscious daydreams of life as it ought to be.  There's a gentle irony at work in these daydreams, a touch of self-mocking humor. The joke, told kindly and with affection, is Come on, we know life isn’t really like this.

Except of course when it is.

Sometimes it's exactly like this.

I've had Kurt Vonnegut on the brain lately. So I'm reminded of how Vonnegut liked to tell how his uncle thought it was important to notice when life was exactly like that. At such moments his uncle liked to say, “If this isn’t nice I don’t know what nice is.”  Rockwell painted---he'd have preferred "illustrated"---those moments. All his paintings---illustrations---might be subtitled If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what nice is.

And although the people and settings in his illustrations seem somehow old-fashioned, even the ones set in the times in which he was painting, he wasn’t portraying an idealized past. He was trying to capture a now that was already becoming a part of then.  His paintings are nostalgic for the present moment.  Rockwell's world is comic but that just means that the tragic is momentarily off stage.  What makes these moments special, worth stopping to notice and remark upon, is that they’re rare and they go by in a blink. They are bracketed by other moments, many other moments that aren't nice, moments of moments of heartbreak, disillusion, sorrow, and grief.  These nice moments lift us up out of the world that is really defined by those other moments. They are moments of escape from the sad past and the sure to be sad future.  They are moments out of time.

That makes them in a way ahistorical.

Consequently, these moments won’t bear the weight of too much history. The Homecoming G.I. is effective because we know what the soldier is coming home from.  But it collapses into banality if we dwell on what we know and what likely happened to him in the war.

There's almost nobody much more historically weighty than Richard Nixon.

Which may be why Rockwell's portrait of Nixon unnerves me.

To start with, it looks back at you, directly, almost impertinently, with a too interested, challenging, and amused gaze and the trace of a smile, as if he’s thinking, I've got you figured, kid. I know what you think you know about me, and let me tell you. What you think you know? That's not even the half of it.

Which is not like Nixon at all.

Nixon didn’t read people like that.  What he looked for in them was himself.  He didn't know what they were thinking.  He was afraid of what they might be thinking about him, which was what he was thinking about himself---that he was a fraud and a fool.

That's what's disconcerting.  This isn’t Nixon. It’s someone who looks almost exactly like him, but without the paranoia, without the self-doubt, and without the desperate need to please and the defensive anger used to mask it.  This is a more physically and psychologically robust man, stronger, more virile, a guy you can imagine having started as quarterback in college, worshipped for his on the field heroics, instead of a benchwarming scrub tolerated and grudgingly admired for his pluck, tenacity, and willingness to take a hit during practice. This is someone's big brother, not a permanently grieving little brother searching for surrogates for the big brother he lost when he was a kid.  This is a favorite son who grew up making his father proud and not bullied by him.

It's Nixon as he might have been, if he'd been able to let up on himself, if he could have relaxed inside his own skin, if he'd allowed himself to be proud if his accomplishments and left them to speak for themselves instead of always presenting them to the public as a bill people ought to pay by gushing over all the great things he'd done.

It's Nixon as he might have been on his best days, in his happiest moments. Nixon in a Rockwellian daydream.  Which is to say Nixon with the history painted out of him.

In his novel Watergate, Thomas Mallon doesn’t repaint Rockwell’s portrait of Nixon but he has painted some of the history out of him and consequently out of the story of the crime and scandal that brought about Nixon’s downfall.

The result is a story of a collection of fairly ordinary people whose lives are upended by the moral failure of the husband-father-boss-friend they'd had or thought they had good reason to trust and depend upon.  Happens all the time, in every city and town in America.

Mallon’s Watergate is a quintessentially American story, almost Rockwellian in its quintessence.   He’s set his novel in the moments Rockwell implied in his paintings by never painting them.  The moments of heartbreak, disillusion, grief, self-compromise, abandoned or thwarted hopes and dreams, pain, sorrow, anger, and grief that make the moments Rockwell did paint so wonderful and necessary.

To be continued.

Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes: All of history summed up in an uncashed check

The tall, skinny guy in the center, that’s Fidel Castro, with several of his lieutenants, in the Sierra Maestra at about the time he’d have been interviewed by the main character of William Kennedy’s latest novel, Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes.

Fidel Castro is a character.  Ernest Hemingway is a character.  Bing Crosby makes a cameo appearance.  Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King aren’t exactly characters but their offstage presence is felt so keenly, painfully, and poignantly by other characters that they might as well be characters.  Thinly disguised versions of Albany politicians and city movers and shakers and local celebrities that if you grew up in the area you’ll recognize pretty easily are characters.  Characters from other novels by William Kennedy are characters, which is no surprise, because Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes continues Kennedy’s Albany Cycle, his series of inter-related historical novels covering over a hundred years of local and national politics and now international politics as seen through the eyes of various Quinns, Daughertys, and Phelans.

And among all these famous and glamorous and to Kennedy fans well-established and beloved characters, there's George Quinn, an elderly low-level civil servant suffering from the onset of senile dementia who starts off his part of the novel just wanting to get a check cashed so he can buy himself a beer at his favorite bar and is stymied by two inconvenient facts.  The bar went out of business years ago and he doesn't have an account at the bank where he's trying to cash his check. George, it turns out, while not the main character is the most important one, thematically, that is.  And it's because his memory is not what it was.

It's become something weirdly magical, like a magician’s cabinet that throws open its drawers seemingly at random but revealing something grander than the merely pertinent---the symbolically illuminating.

Here. Look at these three apparently trivial snatches of conversation. The first is between George and his son and they're talking about why the housekeeper won't be coming today to look after George.  The second occurs when George bumps into an old political crony.  And in the third George turns on the old charm for a long ago flame whose name keeps escaping him.  In all three, George is the second one to speak.

"How are you feeling?" Quinn asked.

"I'm several flavors of excellent. How's yourself?"

"I'm tip-top but Ursula isn't coming today. She totaled her car and broke her arm. "

"Was she hurt?"

"She broke her arm."

"Ursula?"

"Yes."

"How did she do that?"

"She totaled her car."

"Was there much damage?"

"It was totaled."

"That doesn't sound good."

***

"What'd you think about Bobby Kennedy?"

"I voted for him. Patsy passed the word to cut him, but I voted for him. I'd vote for anybody named Kennedy."

"They shot him."

"Who shot him?"

"Some guy, I don't know who. But they caught him right away. He's probably a communist."

"Kennedy's not a communist."

"Get the paper, George. It's all in the paper. After midnight last night, out in L.A. He just won the primary and they shot him.”

"Who won the primary?"

"Bobby."

"They shot him because he won the primary?"

***

"Just don't say it anymore, okay? You understand? Don't say it or he'll throw you out. Roy can get very excited."

"Who's Roy?"

"The bartender. He said his name is George, but it isn't."

"Right. He's not George, I'm George."

"You certainly are. George Quinn."

"That's me. Will you be going dancing at Beauman's this evening?"

"You're still thinking about Beauman's."

"It's right up to snuff. King Jazz's orchestra. You can't beat it. I don't recall your name."

"Vivian. Vivian Sexton, George. You know me a hundred years."

George took off his hat and held out it out to her. "It's venerable to know you so long, Vivian," he said.

"You are such a gentleman," she said.

"I would be privileged to buy you a drink, Vivian. We could sit at that table over there. I'm on my way to the Club and I have to cash a check. The clock of life is wound but once and no man has the power to tell just where the hands will stop."

"That certainly is true, George, and it's a very poetic thing to say. I'd be glad to have a drink with you. "

George placed his hat over his heart and he asked her, "Will you kiss me now or will you wait?" And Vivian kissed him on the cheek.

Notice that in each of these exchanges there’s a logic to George’s non-sequiturs. His mind isn’t wandering in the usual sense of the phrase. His thoughts are taking the scenic route.  Also, his memory gets sharper and his thinking clearer as each conversation takes him deeper into the past.  This is how it goes with him as the story progresses. 

George's job as a character in Chango’s Beads is to remember.  It’s June, 1968.  Bobby Kennedy has just been shot and lies dying in a hospital in California.  In Albany, as in other cities across the country, people are filling up with anger, fear, and despair at more evidence the country is coming apart. An urge to violence is spreading.  In the capital of New York, the state Kennedy represents in the United States Senate and where therefore he is seen as one of their own, passions are running especially high.  The city’s black citizens are already seething from the murder of Martin Luther King only a few weeks before and now the whites (still mostly Irish Catholic) have a reason to feel equally aggrieved and angry.  And of course black and white are ready to take it out on one another.  Caught out on the streets in a city on the brink of full scale riot, George and Vivian are dragged from flashpoint to flashpoint by a politically active priest looking to help keep a lid on the things in the poor neighborhoods he's been ministering to while trying to find a safe place to stash his two elderly babes in the woods.  And as they go along, George’s memory is re-ignited by old haunts, old associations and he grows more lucid, more focused, and more talkative.  In his various occupations, which include bagman for the City’s numbers racket, he went everywhere and met everyone in Albany.  His array of jobs and many friendships introduced him to the rich and powerful, political, social, and criminal. 

The stories bubble out of George and other characters are inspired to tell their stories to fill in the gaps in George’s memory and Kennedy’s narrative.  Chango’s Beads becomes about those stories.  In a way it’s not a proper novel but a collection of short and not so short stories knit together by a plot that seems to have nothing to do with many of the stories.

As their memories are jogged and the stories pour out of them. they make connections between now and way back when or they show where the connections have been broken.  The past isn't past for George and his friends and through them Kennedy is making the point that it's not for us either.  The implication is clear.  The night Bobby Kennedy was shot is as much a part of our present as a night when he and Vivian were young and they rode a streetcar home from an amusement park or a day when Governor Al Smith sent him out to buy a newspaper or the time when George’s father, then a young journalist, interviewed President Ulysses S. Grant are a part of June 5, 1968 for George.

It’s June 1968 in Albany, New York, but it’s also March 1957 in Havana, Cuba, and another young newspaperman named Quinn has arrived on the island from Miami, looking to cover the building revolution.  Fidel Castro has gathered his guerrillas in the hills for his final moves against the dictator Fulgencio Batista.  But Quinn is also an aspiring novelist. We meet him as he’s wandering into the Floridita, one of Ernest Hemingway's two favorite bars in Havana, looking to meet his literary idol.  Which he does.  He also meets a magically beautiful art student, Cuban aristocrat, and closet revolutionary, Renata Suarez.  Under Papa's watchful and approving but also jealous and malicious eye, the two fall in love, although with Quinn falling faster, harder, and deeper.  The problem is that Renata already loves somebody else. Or two somebody elses. Possibly three.  One of those other somebodies is a rebel and the next day he helps lead an attack on Batista's palace, he and his men armed with machine guns Renata helped him smuggle into the city. The attack fails to get Batista.  Renata's lover is killed.  Batista’s troops go on a killing spree. Bloody violence erupts across the city. Dodging bullets, Quinn rushes to the museum where Renata works and carries her away to safety.

Not dramatic enough?

Over the next few days, they witness the assassination of one of Batista’s top henchmen in a nightclub lobby, Quinn helps Renata smuggle more guns, they get married in a Santeria ceremony---Renata believes in Voodoo. Chango, by the way, is a Santeria god, something of a trickster, and a notorious cheater of death---Quinn scores an interview with Castro, and Renata is brought in for interrogation by the police and, although the word hasn't yet been coined to describe what happens to her, disappeared.

But remember, it’s still June 1968.  George and Vivian and their priest protector are still lost in the city. For company now they have a drunk and drunk addict named Tremont, the son of a locally famous jazz pianist and singer who was with Bing Crosby the night he sang in George's living room thirty-two years ago and whose farewell concert George and Vivian attended before all hell broke loose around them. Tremont is on the run from the cops, having been implicated in a plot to assassinate the mayor, set up by an FBI informer attempting to discredit the Albany version of the Black Panthers.

It gets even more convoluted.

George's son, Dan Quinn, now a forty year old reporter for the Albany Times Union is also dashing about, covering the building violence, and in the process uncovering the plot to frame Tremont. Quinn goes to the mayor to warn him there may be an attempt on his life and tell him who will really be behind it.  The mayor, Alex Fitzgibbon, a smooth, refined Wasp politician who learned his trade at the knee of an old-style Irish boss, Patsy McCall (Erastus Corning and Dan O'Connell, to those of you who know Albany's political history) is the lover of Quinn's niece by marriage, Gloria, who's been staying with Quinn and his wife---yes, he found and married the enchanting Renata, but they haven’t lived all that happily ever after. Gloria is recovering after a suicide attempt brought on by her despair at Fitzgibbon's wife having discovered the affair.

Still not done, because it's 1957 again or still and we’re back in Cuba which we never really left and Quinn is interrupting his search for Renata to act as Hemingway's second in a duel with an American tourist Hemingway humiliated in the Floridita the night Quinn and Renata met and who has challenged the writer to pistols at twenty paces in a cemetery and, yes, this is comedy. The whole Albany Cycle is a comedy, in the classical sense, which means it's tragic at the same time. In Chango's Beads and the rest, history happens as tragedy and farce at the same time.  Hemingway and the tourist are meeting at dawn and Renata is in prison at the mercy of her torturer and Fidel is about to complete the Revolution that will lead to the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the poisoned cigars, the scheme to make his beard fall out, and, maybe, who can say, to Bobby Kennedy sprawled on the kitchen floor in the Ambassador Hotel and George and Vivian running from Molotov Cocktails in the streets of Albany while George sings songs that were popular when he was a boy and remembers the time he bought the governor a newspaper. All that history, past and yet to unfold, is tied up in that little moment and all our seemingly little moments.

Cuba shows up in Albany, knocking on Quinn's door in the form of Max Osbourne, Gloria’s father, Renata's brother in law, who was the editor who gave Quinn his job on the newspaper in Havana and also a part time spy for the CIA and is now on the run from gangsters from whom he stole money or failed to pay back money he owed, he's cagey about which. But he has a bag full of dough, hundreds of thousands of bucks he hopes to use to buy his way back into Cuba and Fidel’s favor and if Renata helps him out and even if she doesn't a big chunk of that money is hers and Quinn's and how ‘bout they come with him?

The past and the present, tragedy and farce, one and the same, and all of it radiates out from and circles back in on George Quinn not being able to remember the name of his bank.

Hemingway is a character but he's not a Hemingwayesque character, although, being Hemingway, he tries.  And Chango’s Beads is not a Hemingwayesque novel, even at its most romantic and violent.  Kennedy doesn't give into any temptation to write Hemingwayese.  Like his alter-ego, Daniel Quinn, Kennedy idolized Hemingway when he started out to be a writer, but he has long-since outgrown the anxieties of that influence.  Kennedy knows that he doesn’t have to make any loud Hemingwayesque noises for hi readers to hear echoes in their heads of To Have and Have Not, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Islands in the Stream, although it must have taken a strong effort of will not to have Hemingway point out to Renata that she has the same first name as the heroine of Across The River And Into The Trees .  I heard those echoes, but I heard louder echoes of Graham Greene---Our Man in Havana, of course, but also The Quiet American, The Comedians, and even Travels with My Aunt. Damon Ruynon’s voice reverberates too, in dialogs between George and his cronies from the old days and between Dan and his fellow reporters and his sources among the local cops.  Runyon was another of Kennedy’s early literary heroes.  As a kid he devoured Runyon’s syndicated newspaper columns and short stories.  He’s said that Runyon used to make him laugh three times within a single sentence.  But the main influence on Kennedy here is…William Kennedy.

At certain points, Chango’s Beads seems aware of itself as a novel and not just any sort of novel but a novel within the Albany Cycle.  In fact, Dan Quinn has been at work on his own Albany novels which sound an awful lot like Kennedy’s, which suggests that Quinn is in the process of writing himself into existence.  Kennedy is having some metafictional fun at his own expense here.  My favorite example is this:

“You think this will make a good book?”

“Your friend Tex, you mean?”

“Everything that’s happening, the whole megillah. Who’d believe what’s going on right this minute?  Tex, Roxy, Claudia, Roy Mason, Matt Daugherty, Bobby, riots, vigils, my wino friends, and maybe you and me thrown in for the hell of it.  There’s a lot of mystery and they’re all telling me to pay attention to them.”

“Sound like a panoramic newsreel.”

“That’s not worth writing. If I can’t find a focus the hell with everybody.  People like the title---The Slum Book---but they don’t like the subject.  Another protest book?  The woods are full of them.  I see heroes but editors see winos and bums.  Who wants to read about bums, especially bums in Albany?”

“They don’t know our bums.”

So fifteen years before Kennedy will publish it, Dan Quinn is writing Ironweed.

You don’t have to have read all or any of the previous novels in the Cycle---Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, Ironweed, Quinn's Book, Very Old Bones, The Flaming Corsage, Roscoe---to follow Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes.  You can start the cycle with it or with any of the others.  There’s no special order you need to follow because they’re all happening together all at once.

It’s March 1957 and Dan Quinn is climbing up into the Sierra Maestra to interview Fidel Castro and it’s June 1968 and George Quinn is having that ice cold beer he wanted and it’s November 2, 1938, All Soul’s Day, and Francis Phelan, ballplayer turned bum, is arriving at St Agnes’ Cemetery to dig graves to earn money for a place to flop for the night.

Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes, by William Kennedy, published by Viking, is available simultaneously in hardback and for kindle at Amazon.

Virtually flying after Amelia

KERHONKSON — The fate of Amelia Earhart is the last great mystery of aviation history.

Millions of dollars have been spent trying to find what remains of the plane in which she had hoped to circumnavigate the world — the plane that crashed somewhere near Howland Island in the Central Pacific Ocean 75 years ago.

And now, an Accord man has developed a tool that might enable intrepid armchair aviators to find an answer to that mystery themselves.

Jonathan Blair is a former National Geographic photographer who was aboard one of those million-dollar "search for Amelia" missions about 10 years ago.

Blair caught the Amelia bug. He read all the books written about the search — what he now laughingly calls his collection of "we didn't find her" books.

His reading and research led him to conclude there was "something goofy" about all the efforts to locate the wreckage of Earhart's Lockheed Electra L10E "Special," the plane in which she and navigator Fred Noonan crashed in July 1937.

"Everybody was looking in the same place, and no one had found her," Blair said.

What if, Blair wondered, instead of booking passage on one of those search efforts (typical fare: $50,000), he could instead book passage on a virtual duplicate of Earhart's plane?

Why couldn't he duplicate her flight path and make his own investigation?

Read all of Jeremiah Horrigan’s story, Accord man explores air mystery, at the Times Herald-Record.

Photo by Steve Borland.

Liberty from all

The quotable Dahlia Lithwick on the Right’s giant step backwards to 1804:

This morning in America’s highest court, freedom seems to be less about the absence of constraint than about the absence of shared responsibility, community, or real concern for those who don’t want anything so much as healthy children, or to be cared for when they are old. Until today, I couldn’t really understand why this case was framed as a discussion of “liberty.” This case isn’t so much about freedom from government-mandated broccoli or gyms. It’s about freedom from our obligations to one another, freedom from the modern world in which we live. It’s about the freedom to ignore the injured, walk away from those in peril, to never pick up the phone or eat food that’s been inspected. It’s about the freedom to be left alone.

Read the whole column, The Supreme Court’s Dark Vision of Freedom, at Slate.

Paperback Writer: The Floor of Heaven

Another of my favorite books from last year, The Floor of Heaven: A True Tale of the Last Frontier and the Yukon Gold Rush by Howard Blum, is now out in paperback.  Here’s my review, slightly revised, from May 2011:

A rip-roaring tale of high adventure featuring cowboys, Indians, outlaws, gunfights, robbery, murder, and million dollar gold strikes that all happens to be true. 

The boom town of Skagway, Alaska at the time of the Yukon Gold Rush.

Reading The Floor of Heaven: A True Tale of the Last Frontier and the Yukon Gold Rush by Howard Blum has given me a renewed respect for the HBO’s Deadwood.

The Floor of Heaven is a history of the gold rush as seen through the eyes of three men who were there, on to get rich digging for gold, one to get rich by stealing from men who were there to dig for gold, and one to track down and throw into jail men who got rich by stealing from the men who got rich digging for gold. 

The man who got rich by digging for gold was George Carmack, whose strike at Bonanza Creek set off the stampede to the Klondike.

The man who got rich by stealing was Jeff “Soapy” Smith, a gambler, con artist, violent thug, gang leader and criminal mastermind with ambitions to make himself a respectable citizen.  I’d call Smith a real-life Al Swearengen, except that Al Swearengen was a real-life Al Swearengen.

The third man was Charlie Siringo, a Pinkerton agent who became famous as “The Cowboy Detective,” although very little of his detective work over a long and successful career as a lawman involved any cowboying.

Quick summary:  In the mid-1890s, the three men head north to Alaska.  Siringo, who has a gift for undercover work, is out to solve the mysterious robbery at a gold mine.  Carmack, whose lifelong ambition is to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow his father wasted his life chasing, sets out as a prospector but comes close to settling for a life as an Indian chief.  And Smith, on the run from the law, sees in Alaska’s wide-open and virtually unpoliced frontier all kinds of opportunities for a man of his particular talents to make easy money. Eventually, the trio’s separate paths to adventure intersect, with guns drawn on all sides.

The Floor of Heaven is, as advertised above, a rip-roaring tale of high adventure featuring cowboys, Indians, outlaws, robbery, murder, and million dollar gold strikes told with verve, humor, and charm by Blum,a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, a former New York Times reporter twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and the author of other true tales of adventure and mystery, including the Edgar Award winning American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, and the Birth of Hollywood and The Brigade: An Epic Story of Vengeance, Salvation, and WWII.

The hero of The Floor of Heaven is Charlie Siringo.  This is partly due to the fact that Siringo was a heroic character.  But it’s also due to his having made a second career for himself as a writer of rip-roaring tales of high adventure that happened to be true and featured himself as the main character.  All three men, Siringo, Carmack, and Smith left copious written records of their lives, but Siringo wasn’t only the more talented writer, he was the more interesting human being, as well as the most decent.  All three were intelligent, brave, and energetic, but Carmack and Smith were emotional drifters; on the one hand they were ambitious, on the other they didn’t care.  They weren’t so much driven as pulled forward by their dreams, and when you get right down to it, their dreams, although grand in scale, were fairly trite and dull.  They wanted to get rich and without having to work hard to do it. Carmack did work hard, and it’s actually amazing how hard and how much he put himself through physically, but he didn’t expect to have to work hard for long.  Any day now, he was going to find the mother lode and then he’d be done with it.  Smith kept himself busy with schemes to get rich without doing any honest work, but while some criminals are fascinating in their criminality, Smith’s mind seems to have been mostly elsewhere.  He and Carmack lived in their dreams, so when Blum has to bring one or the other of them front and center in his narrative and we are made to see things happening from their points of view, there’s a certain fading of focus, a lack of clarity and immediacy.  Carmack and Smith just weren’t paying close enough attention.

Siringo, however, was all attention.  He wouldn’t have survived as an undercover detective otherwise.  He didn’t just see everything clearly, he took it all in, in detail, and if he couldn’t see its immediate importance, he filed it away as potentially useful.  The result is that he’s given Blum more to work with when the point of view shifts to Siringo’s.  But it’s also the case that he was a good-natured, outward-looking, and open-hearted human being.  He liked people, even the ones he was out to put in jail, and he was interested in what made them tick.  These are qualities that helped make him a good detective, but they also made him a livelier and more entertaining writer.  Plus, he led an adventurous and exciting life.  So it’s not surprising that things perk up mightily whenever Siringo takes over the story.

We meet him as a young cowboy, top hand on a cattle drive that has just rolled into Dodge and getting into a bar fight, that he loses, with the sometime lawman, sometime gambler Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp’s friend and first boss.  We follow him into the company of Pat Garrett and a target-shooting contest with Billy the Kid and from that adventure he and we move on to his courtship of the beautiful, dark-eyed Mamie Lloyd and his decision as a married man and new father to settle down and leave off riding the range for steady work as a small businessman.  He opens a cigar shop, that does well, an ice cream and oyster parlor, that does better, but he starts to grow restless.  Siringo was ambitious too, but not for money.  He wanted work that made the most of his talents and brains.  He was a successful shopkeeper but the work didn’t engage his full attention or need all his considerable energy.  He talked his way into a job with the Pinkerton Detective Agency, helped clean out their corrupted and incompetent Denver office, and took on his first undercover assignment, infiltrating a gang of outlaws in order to track down a murderer.  Then Mamie suddenly got sick and died and Siringo went into an emotional tailspin that he attempted to pull himself out of by taking an assignment in the far north.  He went undercover again to solve a series of robberies at a gold mine and it was while working this case that he first met up with George Carmack, whom he initially suspected of being in on the robberies.  But he figures out who the real robbers are, realizes they’ve already hightailed it, and sets out in pursuit, which requires him to become not so much a cowboy detective as a sailor detective.  He searches for the thieves up and down the coast of the Alaskan panhandle, plying the waters in an overloaded and less than seaworthy canoe.  Along the way he shoots it out with a whale.

Hand to God.

Eventually, he crosses paths again with Carmack and with Soapy Smith.

Blum has chosen to tell his story in the limited third person.  When the action shifts from one of the main characters to another, the point of view shifts too and we see things strictly through that character’s eyes.  Although he had plenty of other sources, his main sources were his three main characters and it appears that long stretches of his narrative are rewritings, paraphrases, and summaries of their writings.  It’s hard to say how good a writer Siringo was because Blum rarely quotes directly from his, or either of the other’s, writing, but it’s clear he knew how to structure a story and if he wasn’t a particularly introspective man he was a sharply observant one.  He understood that people told you a lot about themselves by gesture and habit as well as by word and, since he defined himself to himself by what he did more than by what he thought and felt and then redefined himself by writing about what he did, we get a pretty good sense of him as a person and of the people he dealt with.  I suspect that his impressions of George Carmack are more reliable than Carmack’s own impressions of himself.  But then Carmack seems to have been careful not to have formed any definitive impressions of himself.

Carmack left behind a voluminous personal correspondence and an autobiography (that went unpublished in his lifetime), but he had a habit of sentimentalizing, romanticizing, and idealizing his feelings.  He wasn’t just ambitious to be rich.  He dreamed of being a certain kind of rich and successful man, and in the letters he wrote as a young man he took pains to present himself as if he was steadily on his way to becoming that sort of man and---although, again, I can’t be sure because as I said Blum rarely gives us direct quotes---if in his autobiography he was more honest about what sort of young man he’d actually been, naive, often foolish, floundering, lost in his own dreams, he was still prone to romanticize and sentimentalize his adventures.  In short, Carmack doesn’t come across as the most reliable source on the subject of George Carmack.  And since he was something of a loner and inclined to keep an emotional distance between himself and other people---possibly because he was afraid that they're versions of reality would impinge on his dreams---he doesn’t come across as the most reliable source on the subject of the people he dealt with either, even those he most cared about.  Consequently, when other characters enter his sections of the story, they tend towards caricature and Carmack’s interactions with them play like the melodramas that were popular on the music hall stages of the period and that would soon provide the plots of countless silent movies and then talkies and then TV westerns, which is ironic since it was Siringo who wound up in Hollywood and whose exploits provided the plots for countless movies.

I have to point out that this isn’t actually a flaw in The Floor of Heaven.  In fact, it’s part of its charm.  It’s a reminder of how the reality of the Wild West, of which Alaska was the last frontier, blended with the legend and that the truth could be more outrageous and exciting than the fiction.  Plus, in a roundabout way it gives us insight into Carmack as a character that Carmack couldn’t relate honestly and directly about himself.

And, despite his self-romanticizing dreaminess, Carmack was smart and practical and perceptive in his way.  He knew what he was doing when it came to prospecting.  He could hunt and he could fish and he could use an ax and a saw. Blum relies on him to tell us how things got done on the Alaskan frontier and to show us what the place was like---big, beautiful, empty---how the land lay---not flat---how the weather was---generally cold---and how the people lived---on the edge.  Through him his eyes Blum shows us how to survive an Alaskan winter, how to build a snug cabin, how to catch a salmon, how a few men went about digging out a million dollar mine.   In one of the book’s most thrilling sequences, we follow Carmack up the dangerous mountain pass that was the  most direct route into Yukon from the American side and which over time as the rush sent thousands up the trail became lined with the bones and rotting carcasses of overworked pack animals and every step of the way marked a spot where someone who had tried the ascent ahead of you had collapsed in exhaustion, pain, or despair.  And if his life wasn’t as full of incident as Siringo’s, he had his share of adventures.

He started out in life as practically an indentured servant to his brother in law, tending sheep in the mountains of California.  During the long, lonely hours he consoled himself by composing bad poetry and dreaming of gold.  He joined the Marines to get away and the Marines sent him to Alaska.  Up there he determined that Alaska was where he was going to strike it rich, and as I said, although he was a dreamer and prone to losing himself inside his dreams, he was also practical and smart.  He decided that before he’d go stampeding out into the wilderness hunting for gold he’d learn how to survive out there first and he picked as his teachers the people that knew the place best, the Indians.  He ingratiated himself with the Tlingits who lived around his Marine camp and got to know them and their ways so well that he was more comfortable among them than among his fellow white men.  Later, on his second go-round in Alaska, after having deserted from the Marines, when his luck was running so bad that he temporarily gave up his dreams of finding gold, he lived with other Indians, a tribe of Tagish, who adopted him as one of their own.  He took and Indian wife, they had a child, he went on a vision quest (and had an actual vision), and tried to satisfy himself with ambitions of becoming a chief of the tribe.

Then one day his old dreams of gold returned.  He picked up his shovel and ax and pan again and set out.  Led by his instincts and trusting his knowledge gained from past experience, he wandered up a tributary of the Klondike River, dipped his pan in the running water, and came up with something shiny and yellow.  He named the creek Bonanza Creek and set to work.  It wasn’t long before he knew he had found it, the true mother lode.  Word got out, thousands headed for the Klondike, the gold rush was on, but Carmack was already a rich man and growing richer with each shovelful of dirt he dug.

That’s when he caught the attention of Soapy Smith.

Smith had come to Alaska because the once Wild West of the lower forty-eight had finally become to civilized to tolerate his presence.  He had run out of places to run to when too much law and order made it impossible for him to do business anymore.  He was an organizational genius, though, and in each new town where he’d set up shop, he’d quickly assemble a gang of thieves and thugs with a variety of criminal skills and talents, buy himself political influence, pocket a lawman or two or three, open up a saloon and a whorehouse, take control of a large share of the local gambling, and soon be at work fleecing all and sundry.  He repeated the pattern twice in Alaska and he was pretty much running the town of Skagway when George Carmack struck it lucky.

You can see what I mean about Smith being a real-life version of Deadwood’s Al Swearengen, and for all I know he really was like the character so brilliantly played by Ian McShane.  Smith must have been possessed of a dark intelligence and he was a dangerous man, capable of terrible violence when angered.  But it’s hard to say from Floor of Heaven what he was really like, which isn’t a failure of talent as a writer on Blum’s part.  Siringo and Carmack wrote enough and wrote well-enough to give Blum plenty of material to develop their points of view.  Smith didn’t write an autobiography.  He wrote many letters to his wife whom he kept out of the way back in Kansas, but there was a lot about himself and his life out west and up north he couldn’t tell her, partly out of fear that a letter might go astray and wind up in the hands of the law, but partly out of a game of pretend he and his wife were playing with each other.

Smith apparently dreamed of the day when he’d have earned enough money from his criminal enterprises that he could afford to go completely legit.  He longed to be a respectable and upstanding citizen and he and his wife often wrote to each other as if that day had already arrived.  The Jeff Smith who appears in many of the letters, then, is a fabrication and a rather banal and dull character to boot.  But what’s really disappointing about this phony is that he doesn’t know many of the details of Soapy Smith’s crimes and depredations and he wasn’t intimately acquainted with members of Soapy’s gang, which is too bad because it would have been interesting to have a peek into the individual personalities of men with names like Slim-Jim Foster, Old Man Tripp, the Moonfaced Kid, Fatty Green, Kid Jimmy Fresh, Yank Fewclothes, and Yeah Mow Hopkins.

Smith routinely made the papers, but the journalism of the times favored sensationalism over insight and facts were what reporters and editors needed them to be to fit their stories, if you can imagine that.  A character named Soapy Smith would make headlines, but neither journalists nor their readers cared how how closely that character resembled the real person it was based on.  The things he did were thrilling in that they stoked readers’ fears or inflamed their imaginations.  Why he did what he did was easy enough to explain.  He was a villain and a scoundrel.  What else did you need to know?

While Siringo’s and Carmack’s adventures would make a good movie or movies---and Floor of Heaven has been optioned by Fox 2000---the parts of the book focusing on Smith seem to be straight out of the movies, background and set up to Dodge City or Destry Rides Again, and rather than coming across as the main player in his own story, Smith often seems at a loss, going through the motions, while waiting for Errol Flynn or Jimmy Stewart to stride onto the scene and kick start the plot into motion.  Unfortunately, since this is history not the movies, the hero doesn’t appear  to confront the villain until the final act.

But it’s not just with Smith that Blum’s narrative strategy causes a problem.  As I said, Carmack, while observant and perceptive, was not particularly insightful, but Siringo, despite his talents as an observer and reporter of his own life, isn’t necessarily always reliable.  Smith, of course, couldn’t sign his own name without working a lie into it.  But Siringo wasn’t under any compunction to be a hundred percent truthful.  He was writing for an audience that wanted rip-roaring tales of adventure not introspective memoirs and they appreciated writers who didn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.  There’s reason to wonder if from time to time Siringo gave into the temptation to embellish, so it might have been helpful if Blum hadn’t been so wedded to the limited third person and allowed himself to break away now and again to quote outside sources that could have told us things Siringo and the others couldn’t have known or supported some of their more astonishing adventures.

There’s another problem in that I don’t know whom to blame when Blum’s writing starts to take on the flavor of the dime novels of the period.  I suspect that while he was trying to convey the sense of Siringo’s character as Siringo portrayed it himself Blum allowed himself to be infected by Siringo’s prose style.  Since Siringo was working within the conventions of the bestsellers of the day, he probably felt he had to make himself sound like what his readers thought a real cowboy sounded like.  The result is occasional eruptions of corniness that the writers of Gunsmoke would have been embarrassed to work into dialog for Festus.  People don’t think or feel or believe they have to do something as often as they are “of a mind” to do it.  They rarely guess, figure, conclude, decide, deduce, or reflect.  They “reckon”.  Siringo doesn’t reach for his gun or his pistol or his revolver or his weapon; it’s always his “Big Colt.”  Blum grows way too fond of this locution to the point that he might just as well have started calling the gun “Ol’ Betsy.”  In the course of just a few pages we read that someone has no “hankering” for gold and someone else wants no “truck” with Indians.  There’s “plumb foolishness” all about, folks who fall into conversation get to “jawing,” things cost “a pretty penny,” and fifty bars of gold weigh “near on” three hundred pounds.  You can’t help feeling that a durn tootin’ is going to “roll into town” any minute.  It never does, although durn makes its way onto a page by its lonesome and we are bushwacked by a tarnation.  I kept wishing for signs that along with all his other research Blum had read the works of two great writers from the period who happened to be in Alaska around the time as Carmack and Siringo and Smith and chronicled their own adventures, one in his fiction and one as a continuation of his nature writing, Jack London and John Muir. He also might have benefited from having episodes of  Deadwood  on in the background while he was writing.  All the wild and prodigious and wonderfully creative cursing on the show was there to disguise the fact that the characters all spoke their own unique and lyrical versions of great Nineteenth Century prose and poetry, proving week in and week out they were the contemporaries of Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane, and Henry James, whose works they might have read along with if not instead of the novels of Ned Buntline.  For a flavor of how people in the second half of the 19th Century actually thought and wrote, it would be better just to strip the c-words out of any of Al Swearengen’s speeches.

None of this amounts to a fatal flaw nor should it or will it get in the way of an overall enjoyment of the book.  It’s just a reminder of how rich and varied the literary history---fiction and non-fiction---of the West is.  Anyway, if I want to read John Muir or Jack London, I can read John Muir and Jack London.  As a matter of fact, I did.  I had a lot of fun re-reading  Klondike Tales and Travels in Alaska alongside The Floor of Heaven.  Blum’s book is a welcome addition to that section of my bookshelf.  A rip-roaring tale of high adventure that happens to be true and highly entertaining as well.

The Floor of Heaven: A True Tale of the Last Frontier and the Yukon Gold Rush by Howard Blum is available in paperback from Amazon and, yes, boys and girls, you can get it for your kindle.

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Excerpt. George Carmack climbs the Chilkoot Trail.

In the early morning, he woke up stiff and aching.  He came out of his ten, his boots crunching against the fresh layer of of ground frost, and for the first time he had a good look at the mountain he intended to climb that day.  The camp lay in a broad basin, and from this perspective the Chilkoot stood out from the surrounding peaks.  It seemed to rise higher and more steeply, and the sunlight glinted with harsh menace off the green-iced glaciers that fortified its walls.  It would be impossible to cross, George suddenly moaned to himself.  He’d barely taken a single step, but the muscles in his thighs and calves were still throbbing from yesterday’s ordeal.  Yet how could he dare to give up, to turn around and go back?  But would that be any less of an embarrassment than surrendering half-way up the mountain?  Or, worse, falling to his death, his body lost forever, shrouded each passing year by snow and more snow?

Then George saw the Indians hoisting their huge sacks---one hundred pounds each!---onto their backs.  And they Day brothers, too, had lit their cob pipes and were raring to head off.  George knew he could not be the only one to quit.  He was, he chastised himself, too close to his lifelong goal to give up.  So in a tremendous burst of will, he lifted his pack to his back, adjusted the leather shoulder straps, and joined the others.

It was four miles uphill to the summit, and George had not gotten far before it became clear to him that he was locked in a battle to the death:  Either he would cross the Chilkoot into the Canadian Yukon or he’d die trying.  Even if he didn’t have the heart, it was no longer possible to turn back.

The snow was thick underfoot.  Icy boulders as big as street cars needed to be traversed. The wind shrieked.  A mammoth overhanging glacier reflected the sunlight like a prism, dazzling hues of turquoise, sapphire, and rose bouncing off walls of sheer ice, blinding him, while the huge glacier itself seemed poised to come crashing down at any moment.  He sweated under his heavy coat.  His socks dripped rivulets of ice.  His pack ground down hard on his back as if he were carrying the broad trunk of one of the sturdy evergreens he’d only days before admired.  After two miles, the line of bone-weary men reached a flat-ledged slope.  The Indians lowered the packs from their backs.  It was a signal to rest.

George could now see the pass’s white-tipped summit.  It was tantalizingly close.  Nevertheless, he decided he could walk no father.

He was right. When the line moved forward for the final ascent, he found himself bent over, climbing in an awkward hunched fashion rather than walking upright.  A snow-covered rock slide blocked the trail, and the only way up the increasingly steep path was to pull himself over one icy boulder after another.  His legs were cramping.  His fingers were numb.  In his wet, slick boots, footholds were slippery and brief.  By the time he found the muscle and ingenuity and the will to get over the rock slide, all pride belonged to another life.  Crawling on all fours like a beaten animal, George reached the summit…

Photo of Skagway courtesy of the Virtual Museum of Canada.  Photo of Jefferson Smith and his gang courtesy of the Alaska State Library.  Photo of miners on the Chilkoot Trail via the National Park Service.

The mail must go through

I want one of these mail trucks.  I wonder if there are any left anywhere.

From a collection of photos from way, way back, some of them from about a hundred years back, in fact, of postal workers at work postaling, at mental_floss.

The awful continuing relevance of Sarah Palin

Ed Harris as John McCain and Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin in HBO’s Game Change, which premieres March 10.

Over at ThinkProgress, Alsyssa Rosenberg is speculating about why HBO’s adaptation of Game Change, John Heilmann and Mark Halperin’s book about the 2008 Presidential campaign, focuses on John McCain and Sarah Palin, a story she says:

…that’s both been done to death and is essentially irrelevant: Palin is a PR phenomenon and McCain will never be president. They’ve both returned from whence they came.

Meanwhile:

By contrast, the story of how President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton regarded each other in the buildup to and during the 2008 campaign, and how they came to be partners rather than enemies, is both directly relevant to ongoing events and a much richer story than that of John McCain’s taking a flyer on his VP selection.

Rosenberg thinks it might have been due to how hard it would have been to cast a compelling and convincing Barack Obama.  Could be.  Although, off hand, I think if they’d asked Denzel he’d have been glad to give it a shot.

My guess why Palin and McCain rather than Clinton and Obama?  Ratings.  Soap opera outdraws a civics lesson.

Also, Julianne Moore in a short skirt and boots vs Meredith Baxter in a pants suit.

Let’s leave aside the fact that by the time Sarah Palin prompted her first, “Sarah Who?” Hillary had been long out of the picture.  It would have been hard to do the whole book and it makes sense that the producers would have chosen to focus on the most crucial part of the election campaign---the election.

As a pure story, what went on in the McCain campaign is just far more dramatic and filmable.

It’s stunning on the face of it that Palin could have been placed that close to becoming President.  (Which, by the way, wasn’t really that close.  McCain picked her because he was desperate and he was desperate because he knew he was going to lose.)  It’s horrifying to realize just how unsuited she was for any public office, never mind the highest in the land.

But here’s the thing.  Last year, when the project was greenlighted, Sarah Palin wasn’t irrelevant.  Far from it.  There was still the real possibility that she would not only run for the Republican nomination but win it. Game Change could have been airing at about the time Palin was wrapping up the nomination.  All those supposed Not-Romneys who have come and gone, were really We Want Sarahs.  The Radical Right is deciding the nomination and she is still their darling or she would be if she hadn’t jilted them.  It’s astounding how quickly she made herself irrelevant to this election season.

And that fall from grace is part of a fascinating story.

It’s a story that might be better told in a novel, and it’s too bad Sinclair Lewis isn’t around to write it.

But here’s the other thing.  Sarah Palin will never be President, now.  But she is still relevant and will be relevant for a while longer (a short while, I hope), not in herself, but because of what she represents.

Liberals and the very few sane conservatives who are left can’t believe anyone could think Sarah Palin was fit to be President.  But no one was going to vote for her to be President.  They were going to vote for her to be their hero-queen.

She was their anger embodied.  Their bitterness, their hatreds, their resentments revenged.  She was to be their righteous rage let loose upon all those Others who made them feel afraid, insecure, cast aside, and irrelevant. 

They weren’t going to vote for her to govern the country.  They were going to vote for her to get even on their behalf.

They being mostly middle-aged white men and youngish white men feeling themselves slipping into premature obsolescence and impotence.

And they haven’t gone away.

And they’re not going to go away, not before November at any rate.  They’re in the process of deciding the Republican nomination and with it the Presidential election---even if Romney runs off Santorum, they’ve so crippled Mittens by making him pander to them, at the cost of his losing the independents and even more women, that they’ve effectively ensured the re-election of the Other they most fear, loathe, and despise.  But that’s the only good news.  They are still going to decide the make-up of the Senate, the House of Representatives, and a whole bunch of state houses and the insanity is going to continue and get worse wherever they win.

Sarah Palin is terribly, terrifyingly relevant to their story.

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To tell the truth, I don’t think I’d be interested in a TV movie about the Clinton and Obama campaigns. Two hours of scenes of Barack Obama strategizing with David Axelrod and David Plouffe alternating with scenes of Hillary Clinton strategizing with Mark Penn?  No, thanks.  I’m just relieved there isn’t one about John Edwards’.

As far as casting goes, I don’t know who’d have made as good an Obama as Moore is said to be a Palin and Harris a McCain.  But I get a real kick out of the fact that they cast Austin Pendleton as Joe Lieberman.

__________________

Morning update: Robert Reich doesn’t mention Palin in this post, As Santorum and Romney Battle for the Looney Right, the Rest of Us Should Not Gloat, but he’s making a similar point.  Palin herself may not be relevant to this election, but what she stands for most definitely is and that’s scary. (via Brad DeLong.)

A life spent doing anything but standing still and looking stupid

Inventor Hedy Lamarr at work at her other job, movie star.  While she was starring in movies like Samson and Delilah, Lamarr was also busy at her drafting table and makeshift lab in her Hollywood home, inventing such things as an improved stoplight, a tablet that dissolved in water turned the water into a cola-like soft drink, and an unjammable guidance system for torpedoes that became the basis for the technology behind satellite communication systems, GPS, cell phones, and broadband wireless networks, a story Richard Rhodes tells in his new book Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World.

Somewhere along the bandwidth as I surfed the web the other day, taking advantage of technology pioneered by the inventor Hedy Lamarr, I came across an article delivering the news that intelligent people aren’t all ugly.

Never thought they were.

But there was more to it.  Apparently, there’s a correlation between intelligence and attractiveness.  Good looking people are likely to be smart.

Now this one goes against the grain.  Actually, what I should say is that contradicts a stereotype, which is that the hunkier or more babe-alicious the dopier.  You know, dumb blondes and lunkheaded male model types.  This is easily refuted by the existence of certain movie stars and professional athletes.  On the other hand, the existence of certain other movie stars and professional athletes would seem to prove it.  Ironically, at least from the point of view of movie stars with brains, it’s the movies that push the stereotype, if only for the fun of turning it on its head with some version of the librarian taking off her glasses and letting down her hair or the nerd taking off his shirt to reveal a six-pack.  I don’t know anyone who applies it to real life.

I do know that there are plenty of men for whom intelligence in a woman is if not repulsive then a definite turn-off.  It doesn’t matter how objectively attractive she is, to these men a woman who reveals her intelligence without apology or self-deprecation is simply by definition as plain as a lab coat and sexy as a spreadsheet.

Hedy Lamarr, movie star, inventor, and in her day reckoned “the most beautiful woman in the world,” understood these men and knew how to deal with them.  The way to be beautiful, in real life and in front of a camera, she liked to say, was to “stand still and look stupid.”

What?  Oh, yeah.  You read that right.  Inventor.

The reason your neighbor in the next apartment can’t change the channel on your TV with his remote, the reason your cell phone receives calls intended for you and not any of the millions of other calls buzzing through the air around you, is frequency hopping, these days more commonly called spread spectrum technology.  And as I understand it---and there’s a good chance I don’t---that technology exists as a result of a guidance system for torpedoes Lamarr co-invented during World War II.

The story of Hedy Lamarr, Inventor, and of her invention is the subject of Richard Rhodes’ short but informative and lively new book, Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World.

Hedy invented as a hobby.  Since she made two or three movies a year, each one taking about a month to shoot, she had spare time to fill.  She didn’t drink and she didn’t like to party, so she took up inventing.  When she was a girl, her father, a Viennese banker, had encouraged her interest in how the world worked, taking walks with her and explaining the mechanics of the machines they encountered.  As a young woman, before she emigrated from Austria to the United States, she married a munitions manufacturer and listened in on the technical discussions he held with his Austrian and German military clients.  She also had a keen sense of the world’s large and small failings, some of which she decided she could fix.  In Hollywood she set up an inventor’s corner in the drawing room of her house, complete with a drafting table and lamp and all the necessary drafting tools.

In the early days of World War II, before the United States entered the war, Lamarr outraged and heartbroken by German U-Boat attacks on civilian ships, including two that was carrying children away from the dangers of the London Blitz to safe haven in Canada---in one of the attacks 77 children died---determined to invent something that would give the Allies an effective defense against the submarines.  She put her head together with that of the composer George Antheil, a polymathic friend who had an instinctive grasp of any field he put his hand in outside of music, and they came up with what they called their secret communication system for a radio-guided torpedo.

The idea for a remote-controlled torpedo wasn’t new.  What Lamarr and Antheil invented was a way to make the signal guiding the torpedo unjammable.

It worked like this:  Guiding a torpedo by radio was relatively easy and simple.  The problem was that the command signal followed a set path, that is, it ran along a particular frequency and if the enemy figured out what that frequency was he could send a signal back along it disrupting your signal.  But what if the enemy couldn’t figure it out because your signal wasn’t following the same path all the way?  What if your signal kept changing frequencies as it went?  What if that if and when the enemy detected it, it jumped to another frequency?  He wouldn’t even know where to begin to guess where it went.

Hedy’s idea was simple to state:  if a radio transmitter and receiver are synchronized to change their tuning simultaneously, hopping together randomly from frequency to frequency, then the radio signal passing between them cannot be jammed.  Hedy called this idea “hopping of frequencies,” a grammatically German translation of the German compound word Frequenzsprungverfahren, “frequency hopping process”---in colloquial English, “frequency hopping.”

Hedy Lamarr was born Hedwig Kiesler, the doted-upon only child of a Viennese banker and his wife, assimilated Jews, who indulged and encouraged their daughter in all her interests and enthusiasms, one of which was the theater and another movies.  She was confident, self-possessed, self-centered without seeming self-absorbed or selfish or self-infatuated.  Guilelessly opportunistic, when she saw a chance she went after it without scheming or guilt.  She could be defiant and rebellious, but in her defiance and rebellion she didn’t seem either defiant or rebellious.  She was determined but reasonable.  She was apparently able to get whatever she wanted out of people simply by asking them for it and then explaining why they should give it to her and how they were going to do it.  We must do this my way, because my way is the right way, let me tell you why.  Her confidence and high spirits carried the day, but she usually triumphed because, except in the case of her first marriage, she had excellent judgment and really did know what was best for her and for the people who had to depend on her.

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that when she decided to become an actress she simply walked out of her high school and into a theater and told the director he had just cast her in his play.  When she was offered a part in a movie filming in the mountains far from home, she took it and went without her mother who was her usual chaperone.  That movie turned out to be Ecstasy in which she now famously but then notoriously appears nude and orgasms spectacularly in a not all that subtle sex scene.  When her parents found out and threatened to die of shame, she explained to them that they needed to adopt a more detached attitude when it came to her acting and they came around almost immediately, although uneasily, to her professionally insouciant point of view.  She was seventeen, by the way.

Later, when the American movie mogul Louis B. Mayer came to Europe scouting for talent to bring back to Hollywood and became smitten with her, offering her a contract with the expected strings attached, she turned him down flat, then made friends with his wife whom she enlisted in helping to convince Mayer to make her another, better offer with no strings.

She was independent, self-reliant, ambitious, talented, and apparently destined for a brilliant career.  And then in what seems like a blink she gave it all up to get married at the age of nineteen to a millionaire arms manufacturer with very pragmatic and self-interested Nazi sympathies who fell madly in love with her in exactly the same way a collector of fine silver falls in love with a Paul Revere original tea pot.

Frederich Mandl was young but still thirteen years her senior.  He was successful and powerful, a commanding and charismatic figure, and by Lamarr’s account very sexy.  He was also a bully and tyrant and Lamarr should have seen what was coming.  To an extent, she did.  She resisted him at first, but then gave in all at once, to her almost immediate regret.

Mandl made a gilded cage out of their home and locked her in.

This part of her story has a happy ending. No spoiler there.  She was able to “escape” and maker her way to Hollywood.  How she freed herself from the marriage is something of a mystery of her own making.  Mandl never liked to talk about it.  Lamarr gave conflicting highly dramatic accounts, making her path to a divorce sound like a romantic and thrilling adventure straight out of the movies.  However much plotting and scheming and fleeing in the dead of night with just the clothes on her back it took and whether or not Lamarr was right to worry Mandl would come after her and drag her back and re-lock her in her cage, somewhere along the line she probably worked her usual magic, making him see that what she wanted was for the best and to give up and let her go. 

The important part as it relates to Hedy’s Folly, however, is that while she was married to Mandl she was privy to all the latest and secret developments in weapons manufacture.  By taking her own advice, Rhodes suggests, and “standing still and looking stupid” at dinner and cocktail parties, the temporarily Frau Mandl was able to listen in on the what should have been private conversations of engineers, scientists, weapons designers and inventors and absorb information and lessons she would later put to use in her own inventing career, particularly when she went to work on her torpedo guidance system.  She was essentially spying on the Nazi war machine and her beauty was her disguise.  These men probably took it as given that intelligence in a woman was inversely proportional to her looks and therefore a woman as gorgeous as Hedy could not be smart enough to understand what was being discussed and so they were free to talk about anything in front of her.

As a character, Lamarr comes alive vividly in the early chapters of the book where Rhodes can show her in action, which mainly means in defiance and rebellion against her parents, against the producers and directors who gave her her first parts on stage and in the movies, against L.B. Mayer when he thought he was bringing her to Hollywood while she was bringing herself, he was just the horse she’s riding in on, against her bully of a husband. 

But Rhodes is defining her in opposition and in contrast to other people.  We feel we know her, think we see her, because we know and can see her effect on others.

Once he gets her to California, though, she begins to go out of focus and, for long periods of time, drift right off camera.

Rhodes is the author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, one of the best narrative histories ever written, near the top of my list of indispensable books for understanding who we Americans are hand how we got this way.  Any ten pages of The Making of the Atomic Bomb is packed with more information, incident, character, and historical analysis than many whole books by other well-regarded nonfiction writers.  With that in mind, Hedy's Folly reads like a chapter or two, padded out, in book of wider scope. What I'm saying is that there's plenty of information, incident, and character in Hedy's Folly, but the history seems short-changed. It feels as though there’s a larger story to be told, it’s just not clear what that story is or how Hedy's folly fits in it.

That story may be the biography of Hedy Lamarr but that would be the biography of a movie star and Rhodes is happy to leave that one to someone else to tell. (Like Stephen Michael Shearer, whose Beautiful: The Life of Hedy Lamarr was published this past fall.) the trouble is that the story of Hedy Lamarr the inventor is the story of someone who worked mostly alone, mainly to please herself, and then didn't talk about it.  If she wrote letters about her life as an inventor or kept a diary or wrote a memoir, Rhodes doesn't appear to have had access to them.  Her autobiography was ghost written and she more or less disavowed it.  There are still people alive who knew her and would have lots to tell us about her, but it’s likely they knew the movie star.  They’d have seen her at work, but as an actress, not as an inventor.  Most of them probably didn't even know that she was an inventor or take her inventing seriously if they did, not seriously enough to quiz her deeply about the work and then write down what she told them or showed them.

The only everyday witnesses to her life as an inventor were her children, who were too young to understand what she was up to except making their homelife a little more fun and interesting than the lives of other kids they knew, and her co-inventor, George Antheil.

Antheil did write letters. copious letters and a lot of them, and he did write a memoir.  Bad Boy of Music.  The title tells you something, doesn’t it?  He was a sharp-eyed and intelligent observer, he wrote well, he had a scientific as well as an artistic mind and he could easily have become a biologist, a psychiatrist, a physicist, or an engineer.  He even wrote a very well-received and best selling mystery novel and could have gone the way of Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. 

He was just the partner you’d have wanted Lamarr to have if you hoped for an insightful and detailed portrait of her at work at her drafting table.  The trouble is that while Antheil was a keen observer of people, the person he was most interested in observing was himself.

And, Rhodes speculates, he was jealous and resentful when it came to his co-inventor.  She was beautiful, world-famous, and rich.  He may have felt things came too easily for her and to her, especially money.  Antheil was a critically acclaimed composer.  He was well-regarded among classical musicians and in Hollywood where he made a name for himself composing the scores for movies like The Plainsman, Angels Over Broadway, and In a Lonely Place.  He worked hard and he was regularly employed as a composer, teacher, and musician, but none of it paid him much money or enough money and he and his wife were constantly broke.  Inventing was just one iron he had in the fire and not the one he expected or even wanted to make his fortune.  When he did write about his work with Lamarr it was to make clear how important his contributions were, sometimes at Hedy’s expense.

Not that he should have been relegated to a supporting role.  He’s the leading man of this story.  But he’s a lead with no one to play off of.  His leading lady is often off screen, her actions and thoughts reported on but not dramatized for us to see.  Antheil was smart, resourceful, committed to his art, charming---too charming for his own good or rather for his wife’s continual happiness.  He philandered with brio.  He could have been the subject of a book of his own.  He was.  As I mentioned, he wrote a memoir and it was a bestseller.  But we miss her.

Hedy’s Folly is a primer on the nature of invention for layfolk.  Lone geniuses do go into their basement and garage labs and come out shouting Eureka or at least muttering, Son of a gun, it just might work.  Rarely, though, do they come out with a gizmo, dohicky, or thingamajig that is immediately applicable, practical, and marketable.  Most inventions are to a degree either improvements on others’ previous inventions or components that need to be put to work with components invented by others or improved on by others in order to be of any use.  When you’re looking at a new device or machine you’re usually looking at an assemblage of inventions.

Some of these inventions are, as I said, improvements, but some of them are the result of an inventor looking at another inventor’s invention and seeing applications and uses the original inventor did not see or could not make work and adapting it to a different purpose.  This is what happened with Lamarr and Antheil’s secret communication system.  They didn’t invent cell phones and Bluetooth and broadband internet connections.  Their work was adapted and reapplied by later inventors.  This is important to understand not in order to diminish their achievement but to appreciate it for both its creativity and importance after you learn that what they did invent was never actually put to use.

This is where you might think that powers-that-be or certain men among the powers-that-be didn’t take the work of an actress seriously.  That wasn’t the case.  The United States government was thrilled with Hedy’s invention.  But the Navy never got around to trying it out in their torpedoes because it had another, more pressing problem they had to solve first. Guiding torpedoes to their targets wasn’t the concern.  The problem was that once they got there, the torpedoes didn’t blow up.

Sixty percent of the Navy’s torpedoes were duds, Rhodes reports.  They’d strike their targets and then…nothing.  Well, they’d penetrate the hulls, but then…nothing.  Enemy ships would return to port with torpedoes sticking out of their iron plating like arrows.  Torpedoes set to detonate below a ship’s keel and scuttle it in one blow passed quietly underneath and kept going until they ran out of gas and sank.

While trying to deal with that, the Navy filed Lamarr and Antheil’s now classified patent away.  Seventeen years later, in 1959, the patent expired.  But spread spectrum technology remained a government secret well into the 1970s.  And this is where Hedy Lamarr’s part in the story of her own invention ends.

But secret doesn’t mean forgotten or ignored.

Enter a slew of other inventors, adapting and reapplying what Lamarr and Antheil meant to put to work sinking German and Japanese submarines.

As I said, Hedy’s Folly feels like a small part of a much larger story---because it is.  Rhodes only touches on that story here, but Hedy’s Folly is still an important and useful, not to mention enjoyable book, not least because it alerts us to the news that a movie star and a classical composer were unsung heroes in the effort to defeat the Nazis.  Hedy Lamarr’s life and work, onscreen and at her drawing table, are reminders that there’s much more to being beautiful than “standing still and looking stupid.”

Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, by Richard Rhodes, published by Doubleday, is available from Amazon in hardback and kindle editions.

Read an excerpt.