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Roundup: Talking About History

This is where we excerpt articles about history that appear in the media. Among the subjects included on this page are: anniversaries of historical events, legacies of presidents, cutting-edge research, and historical disputes.

James Hershberg: Reagan Should Not be Given Credit for Defeating the Soviet Union--It's More Complicated than that

James Hershberg, associate professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University, in the Wash Post (June 27, 2004):

... Ronald Reagan's policies surely contributed to the dissolution of the Kremlin's empire, culminating in the 1989 anti-communist revolutions in Eastern Europe and the breakup of the Soviet Union two years later. But for the media and Reagan's hagiographers to give the 40th president all the credit is like saying a late-inning relief pitcher had "won" a baseball game without mentioning the starting pitcher, the closer or the teammates who scored the runs that gave the team its lead.

Historians abhor the idea of attributing a vast, complex phenomenon to a single cause. No one person brought down the Soviet Union, but if I had to choose the one who mattered most, that person would not be Reagan, most of whose policies fit comfortably in the Cold War tradition of containment followed dutifully by presidents from Truman to Carter.

Rather, the historical wild card was Mikhail Gorbachev, who followed a well-worn path up the ladder of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union -- and then turned out to be a radical reformer. Influenced by Nikita Khrushchev's short-lived "thaw" in the 1950s, Gorbachev grasped long before Reagan's election that the stultifying Soviet system required renovation. Gorbachev also committed the heresy of abandoning the aim of world revolution and the class struggle in international affairs in favor of amorphous, but much nicer, "universal human values." Above all, he refused to use the massive armed forces at his disposal to retain his party's grip on captive nations in Eastern Europe, restive nationalist republics or Russia itself -- something his predecessors Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko might have readily done had they not conked out first.

But Gorbachev cannot claim all the credit, either. The factors that doomed the Soviet Union were largely innate, not external. In his seminal 1947 "X" article in Foreign Affairs, George F. Kennan argued "that Soviet power, like the capitalist world of its conception, bears within it the seeds of its own decay, and that the sprouting of these seeds is well advanced." In early 1950, despite anxiety over the first Soviet atomic explosion, the communist victory in China and the rise of McCarthyism, Harvard University President James B. Conant predicted that by 1980 the Soviets' "absurdities and static system would cause them to grind to a stop." He wasn't far off.

Reagan essentially followed a bipartisan legacy of containment. Sure, he offered arms to anti-communist insurgencies in the Third World and fervently articulated his beliefs in freedom and democracy, but so had other presidents. In the crunch, Reagan was (understandably) no more willing to risk World War III by directly challenging Kremlin repression in Central Europe than his predecessors had been. For all the claims of clandestine aid to the banned Solidarity movement in Poland, Reagan's reaction -- rhetoric, sympathy and half-hearted sanctions -- to the Warsaw regime's imposition of martial law in December 1981 was no less tepid than Eisenhower's to Soviets' violent suppression of revolts in East Germany (1953) and Hungary (1956), Kennedy's to the construction of the Berlin Wall (1961), or Johnson's to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968).

"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" -- Reagan's iconic 1987 challenge in Berlin -- made a nice sound bite. But however stirring his words, Europeans living under communist rule knew from bitter experience that neither the American cavalry nor American presidential rhetoric was going to liberate them....

Reagan admirers assert that the 1980s U.S. military buildup bankrupted the Kremlin. "By building our defenses -- rather than unleashing aggression -- Ronald Reagan brought down the Soviet Union," former Republican senator and presidential candidate Bob Dole declared in the New York Times. Politburo minutes indicate a genuine (albeit unfounded) concern about the "Star Wars" missile defense program, and sharper Soviet leaders grasped the growing disparity between the military and technological sophistication of the West, especially the United States, and that of the U.S.S.R. This intensified Gorbachev's desire to ease Cold War enmity, gain greater access to Western goods and know-how, and reallocate resources from the military to the civilian economy.

But Gorbachev also saw the absurdity of a nuclear arms race that, by the mid-1980s, had led the superpowers to hoard more than 70,000 warheads. He understood that he could make appealing offers to jump-start talks -- allowing on-site inspections or trading away intermediate range missiles -- without sacrificing the Soviet nuclear deterrent.

Thus the 1980s arms race did not cause the Kremlin's collapse. The Soviet economy was rotting from within for many other reasons. The Kremlin's warped priorities -- maintaining a cumbersome military machine while its economy and living standards lagged behind the West's -- helped implode the Soviet empire. But those priorities had been set for decades. The turning point was not Reagan's rise but Stalin's chutzpah after World War II. With his country devastated, the vozhd (boss) opted to seek nuclear weapons ("on a Russian scale") and coequal superpower status. From then on, the military consumed the "best and brightest" of Soviet science and distorted the economy.

The focus on the military also shortchanges the role that soft power played in the Soviet realm's demise. The trillions of dollars the West spent on weapons and containment ultimately proved less significant than aspects of Western life that had nothing to do with government policies -- music, movies, fashion (blue jeans!), consumer goods, "Coca-Colonization," and the prospect of a freer, tastier and more affluent life....

Posted on Wednesday, June 30, 2004 at 11:05 AM | Comments (2) | Top

Keith Windschuttle: The Misguided Emphasis on Social History and Oppressed Groups

Keith Windschuttle, in the Sydney Line (June 2004):

... [I]n the writing and teaching of history today, the views that are in the ascendancy are those that support a skepticism about the pursuit of objectivity and truth, and those that want to replace political and military history and their focus on great men, with social history and its focus on minority or disadvantaged groups.

I want to argue today that the direction history is now taking is a big mistake.

I'll start with the postmodernist view of historical truth and quote one of its advocates, the Manning Clark Professor of History at the Australian National University, Anne Curthoys, who has written:

Many academics in the humanities and social sciences … now reject … the notion that one can objectively know the facts. The processes of knowing, and the production of an object that is known, are seen as intertwined. Many take this even further, and argue that knowledge is entirely an effect of power, that we can no longer have any concept of truth at all.

There are two things wrong with this view. First, if we can no longer have any concept of truth, that is, if there are no truths, then the statement "there are no truths" cannot itself be true. It is an obvious self-contradiction. Second, this is a silly thing to say because we have very good knowledge not only about some things that happened in history but many thousands, perhaps even millions of things. For instance, we know all the names of all the leaders of all the nations for at least the past two hundred years and most of the leaders for many centuries before that as well. We know for certain the historical fact that John Howard has been Prime Minister of Australia since 1996 and that John Curtin was Australia's Prime Minister for most of World War II. We have the same degree of certainty about a great many of the events of history. For example, the statement: "The United States and its allies defeated the Japanese in World War II" is true. It is not a statement about which there can be any doubt at all. The Japanese not only signed a surrender in 1945 but the world would not be the way it is today if this statement wasn't true. Moreover, this is not a statement that is dependent upon some particular cultural vantage point. It is true in American culture, Australian culture, Japanese culture, indeed in every culture on the planet. There is nothing relative about historical truths of this kind.

Let me now turn to the rise of social history and use as an example the National Museum of Australia, which opened in 2001. It was always going to be a museum of history but in the debates over what its contents should be, the view that won out was that it should be a museum of social history. One of its most influential documents argued:

The impact of postmodernism has meant that … triumphalist stories of national progress are no longer intellectually tenable. Many museum practitioners now see their work as a critical practice, committed to drawing out the ways in which constructions of race, class and gender (and sometimes sexuality and age) have shaped national histories.

The result is that most of the people celebrated in the museum's exhibits are those who fit within the categories of "interest group" politics, that is, the politics of feminism, gay liberation, radical environmentalism, and the politics of Aborigines and ethnic groups. The white males who established Australia's political, legal and educational institutions and those who played major roles in building our economy barely rate a mention. The museum has a big electronic map showing the historical spread of introduced pests like rabbits, foxes and prickly pear. But there is no map of the spread of farming, grazing, mining or industry. One of the museum's exhibits celebrates a man who designs dresses for the Gay Mardi Gras in Sydney. Others include environmental activists, anti-nuclear campaigners and the trade unionists who vandalised Parliament House during a riot in 1996. Responding to criticism that the nation had better heroes than these to commemorate, the director took a relativist position: "Heroism," she said, "is in the eye of the beholder."

There are very good reasons, however, why history once paid only a small degree of attention to many of the groups the museum now celebrates, and why it focused so much attention on Anglo-Celts of the male sex. To show why their society took the form it did and how it responded to its major challenges, historians once invoked causes of a political, military, economic and legal nature. Most of the now favoured sexual and ethnic identity groups played only small roles in this account. This was because for most of the time most of these people were not causally effective: they were the objects rather than the agents of history; they were on the receiving end of major historical events, not their instigators.

Now, none of this is meant to argue that you cannot write acceptable histories of women or ethnic groups. It is perfectly legitimate, for instance, to write an account of the history of the domestic activities of Australian women in the First World War, even though those women had little impact on the outcome. Similarly, ethnic histories are obviously important to members of those ethnic groups and there is nothing inherently unscholarly about producing them. However, for a national history or a national museum obliged to tell a national story, the social history approach has serious drawbacks....

Posted on Tuesday, June 29, 2004 at 7:01 AM | Comments (2) | Top

Columnist: The Inquisition Wasn't So Bad

"Oswald Spengler," the pseudonym of a columnist, in Asia Times (June 22, 2004):

For serious devotees of torture, Washington's embarrassment about Abu Ghraib paled beside the Vatican's defense last week of the Spanish Inquisition. It turns out, reported church officials at a June 15 press conference, that the Spanish Inquisition burnt at the stake less than 1% of the 125,000 accused heretics brought before it. On the strength of this statistic they qualified Pope John Paul II's previous apology for the Inquisition. "A request for forgiveness can only refer to facts that are true and objectively recognized. One does not ask forgiveness for some impressions widely held by public opinion, which contain more myth than reality," said Cardinal Georges Cottier.

Catholic publicists in possession of these data have been campaigning to rescue the Inquisition's good name from the besmirchment of Protestant propaganda. Wrote Prof Thomas F Madden of St Louis University in October 2003: "The Spanish people loved their Inquisition. That is why it lasted for so long."

Silly as he sounds, Prof Madden is quite right. In fact, I have been defending the Spanish Inquisition for years, most recently in a comment on March 16, 2004 (Spain's elections show why radical Islam can win). People do nasty things not because they are negligent or bloody-minded, but rather because they cannot avoid doing them. That is why we call such things tragic. Spain's inquisitors were not the horror-movie sadists of popular myth, but sad little functionaries seeking to prevent the sort of religious war that plagued Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. Not the boorish Germans but rather the agile Latins first opened the Pandora's Box of religious reform. If we accept that Spain's Inquisition was tragic rather than arbitrary, we must - I believe - also reach the conclusion that Christianity can flourish only on the American model. Neither Catholic empire nor the Protestant nation-state could do anything except destroy itself. But this is to get ahead of the story; we have only just tugged at the loose thread.

Before it burned heretics, the Spanish Inquisition burned books. Only one leaf remains of Bonifacio Ferrer's 1478 Spanish translation of the Bible, for the Inquisition hunted down every copy printed. Bible reading, they knew led to Protestantism, and Protestantism led to religious war.

Then the Inquisition hunted down Jews, for Jews knew Hebrew, and might teach it to Protestants who then might translate the Bible (which happened in Luther's Germany). As the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it, the Inquisition sought to prevent the "Judaizing of all of Spain", that is, the spread of Protestantism, and thus persuaded the Catholic monarchs to expel the Jews in 1492.

Was the Spanish Inquisition wrong? On the contrary. Religious war devastated France during the 16th century, and during the 17th century reduced the population of Germany by more than half. England's Civil War shed less blood, but left its business unfinished. Cavalier and Roundhead diehards emigrated respectively to Virginia and Massachusetts, sowing the seeds of America's devastating Civil War 200 years later (see David Hackett Fischer’s 1989 book Albion’s Seed).

Not until 1936 did the lid blow off, and Spain fought a long-delayed religious war between Catholicism and Atheism, in which the firing squad claimed more than a fifth of the estimated half-million violent deaths. The Spanish Civil War reduced a formerly martial nation to the feckless, infertile hedonists of today whose only claim to fame is the world's lowest birthrate. It was not always so.

Thanks to the Inquisition, the likes of Luther and Calvin got all the credit for the Reformation, but there is reason to believe that given a chance, the Spanish variant would have been far more intrepid. ...

With right the Vatican may defend the record of the Spanish Inquisition, but it alters not a jot or tittle of the awful sentence - oblivion - that history has passed upon European Christianity.

Posted on Tuesday, June 29, 2004 at 6:36 AM | Comments (1) | Top

Edmund Morris: Final Take on Ronald Reagan

Edmund Morris, in the New Yorker (June 28, 2004):

There they lie in their guttered drawers, projecting from the rosewood desk I had specially made for them: four yards of cards, each eight inches wide, five inches tall, most of them with his initials handwritten, headline style, in the top left-hand corner, from “rr’s birth zodiac—feb. 6, 1911” to “rr dies of pneumonia—june 5, 2004.” In between these two extremes, some eighteen thousand cards document whatever I was able to find out about thirty-four thousand of Ronald Reagan’s days. Which leaves sixteen thousand days unaccounted for. Lost leaves. “The leavings of a life,” as D. H. Lawrence might say.

I once planned to show Reagan this card file, just to see him react as drawer after drawer rolled out yard by yard, green tabs demarcating his years, yellow tabs his careers, blue tabs his triumphs and disappointments. He could have looked down, as it were, on the topography of his biography, and seen the shoe salesman’s son moving from town to town across northern Illinois, in the teens of the last century; the adolescent achieving some sort of stability at Dixon High School in 1924; the Eureka College student and summer lifeguard through 1933; then, successively—each divider spaced farther from the next, as he grew in worldly importance—the Des Moines sportscaster and ardent New Dealer; the Hollywood film star; the cavalry officer and Air Corps adjutant; the postwar union leader and anti-Communist; the television host and corporate spokesman for General Electric; the governor of California, 1967-75; the twice-defeated, ultimately successful candidate for his party’s Presidential nomination; and, last, the septuagenarian statesman, so prodigiously carded that the nine tabs “1981” through “1989” stand isolated like stumps in snow.

He never visited my study, however, and on reflection I am glad he did not, because he might have been disturbed to see how far he had come in nearly eighty years, and how few more cards he was likely to generate after leaving the White House. Besides, I would have had to keep my forearm over a file more than a foot long, practically bristling with tabs descriptive of “rr the man.” Now that the man is no more, and subject to the soft focus of sentimental recall, a riffle through some of these tabs might help restore his image in all its color and complexity.


The first subsection deals with Ronald Reagan’s body. In 1988, at seventy-seven years of age, the President stood six feet one and weighed a hundred and ninety pounds, none of it flab. He boasted that any punch aimed at his abdomen would be jarringly repulsed. After a lifetime of working out with wheels and bars, he had broadened his chest to a formidably walled cavern forty-four inches in circumference. He was a natural athlete, with a peculiarly graceful Algonquin gait that brought him into rooms almost soundlessly. No matter how fast he moved (that big body could turn on a dime), he was always balanced.

One recalls how elegantly he choreographed Mikhail Gorbachev up the steps at the 1985 Geneva summit: an arabesque of dark blue flowing around awkward gray. Reagan loved to swim, ride, and foxtrot. (Doris Day remembers him as “the only man I ever knew who really liked to dance.”) Eleven weeks after nearly dying in the assassination attempt of 1981, he climbed onto the springboard at the Camp David swimming pool and threw a perfect half pike before anybody could protest.

Gorbachev once remarked on Reagan’s “balance” to me in an interview. But he used the Russian word ravnovesie in its wider sense, of psychological equilibrium. The President’s poised body and smooth yet inexorable motion telegraphed a larger force that came of a lifetime of no self-doubt (except for two years of despair in 1948-49, after Jane Wyman, his first wife, left him for boring her). Reagan redux did not care whom he bored, as long as nobody tried to stop him. His famous anecdotes, recounted with a speed and economy that were the verbal equivalent of balance, were persuasive on the first, and even the fourth, telling. But when you heard them for the fourteenth, or the fortieth, time, always with exactly the same inflections and chuckles and glances, you realized that he was a bore in the sense that a combine harvester is boring: its only purpose is to bear down upon and thresh whatever grain lies in its path. Reagan used homilies to harvest people....

Posted on Tuesday, June 29, 2004 at 4:53 AM | Comments (0) | Top

New Film on Cole Porter, 'De-Lovely': Hollywood's Take on Sartorial History

From the Washington Post (June 25 2004):

Back in the days when it was socially important to keep up appearances -- of a happy marriage, a happy home, being happy-go-lucky -- everyone, it seemed, looked smashing. Before the now common public confessional, one's peccadilloes were swept under the rug and unorthodox behavior was engaged in discreetly. People worked hard to present a perfect veneer. Fashion was complicit in constructing that facade.

In the new movie "De-Lovely," about the life of composer Cole Porter and his wife, Linda, clothes serve as an apt metaphor for impossibly perfect glamour hiding complicated, troubled souls. In the film, which opens July 2, the Porters cut dashing figures on the social circuit. Yet their smooth, glib surface camouflages a private life that is painful and rocky. Cole Porter is gay, but he nevertheless marries Linda and creates -- for a time -- a happy home that holds the promise of children. Linda understands that Cole is gay, but the marriage satisfies them both in ways that are not sexual. Marriage offers them companionship, support, love and purpose.

Any cinematic tale needs drama, however, and the Porters oblige. He becomes increasingly indiscreet in his affairs. She becomes frustrated that the delicate balance of their lives is being destroyed. She has a miscarriage. He becomes a drunk. But all the while, they look splendid.

Costume designer Janty Yates crafted the look of the Porters as played by Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd. She turned to the designer Giorgio Armani for help. Although the film focuses on the years from the 1920s to the 1960s, the fashions are rooted in the '30s and '40s, decades when everyone looked particularly swell. This is a film that gives elegance as much importance as historical accuracy. And although Armani has contributed to a host of recent films such as "Shaft" and "Hannibal," not since "The Untouchables" in 1987 has a film benefited so profoundly from his aesthetic.

" 'The Untouchables' was the first period film I worked on and it taught me that I am really not a costume designer. I can only work on projects which lend themselves to my aesthetic. . . . Though the film was set during Prohibition, the look was my interpretation of what the style of the time was," Armani says in an e-mail. "The same can be said of 'De-Lovely,' a film where the action spans the '20s, '30s and '40s. I love this period of fashion -- it was a time when people really dressed up in an elegant manner. However, I am not a fashion historian, nor am I interested in re-creating the past. Instead, I have done outfits which have the spirit of elegance of the time, but are updated with modern touches."

Yates, who worked with Armani on "Hannibal," was responsible for striking a balance between what was appropriate for the time and what is pleasing to modern eyes. For example, many of Linda Porter's evening clothes were pulled directly from the Armani archives and used with only subtle changes.

"Mr. Armani nearly always makes his evening wear in a slipper satin silk, so because of that we were halfway there. He cuts on the bias, so we were three-quarters there," Yates says in a telephone interview. "In a couple of dresses, he took out the zipper and put in buttons and took out elastic and put in ribbon."

Both of the Porters had a distinctive style, and for once, the gentleman's fashion sense is not overshadowed by the woman's. He was a theatrical dresser, almost always wearing a suit and never dressing down. "Cole Porter always had a flower in his lapel. He would always, always go for a fresh flower and would go after an unusual flower. We were always looking for purple flowers and dark green flowers," Yates says.

Armani tailored all of Kline's clothing. This was a period when even the most dissolute man would button himself up in an extravagant suit. And even when Porter's shadowy dalliances were becoming more reckless, he sartorially presented himself as composed, controlled and confident. There is a scene in which Porter wears a white suit as he prepares to depart from Venice. He looks supremely elegant. Yet is there a man alive today who can wear a white suit and not look as though he should be an airport lounge singer? During a rehearsal for one of his musicals, Porter sits cross-legged on the floor in a beautifully cut gray suit with a red flower in his lapel. Are there still men who can simultaneously be so relaxed while dressed up?

The '30s, says Armani, was "an era of great tailoring." The clothes were in service to the wearer....

Posted on Friday, June 25, 2004 at 9:30 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Dick Cheney Wants Declassification of Some U.S. Intelligence in Defense of Iraq-Qaeda Connection

Stephen F. Hayes, in the Weekly Standard (June 24 2004):

VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY said yesterday that suggestions the former Iraqi regime did not have a relationship with al Qaeda are "not accurate," and said he would like to see the U.S. government declassify some of the intelligence that supports Bush administration claims about an Iraq-al Qaeda connection.

"I think we should declassify as much as we can," Cheney said in a wide-ranging, 45 minute interview in the vice president's residence at the Naval Observatory in Washington. Cheney said the desire to make public some of the intelligence about Iraq and al Qaeda must be balanced against the need to protect sources and methods. "There is always the temptation to respond to the pressures of the moment by putting as much stuff out there as possible. But you don't want to do so in a way that is damaging to our capacity to collect information in the future." The call for declassification of material relating to the Iraq-al Qaeda connection has come from a variety of sources, including this magazine and the New York Times editorial page.

Cheney's comments come as some Democrats have stepped up their criticism of the Bush administration and its case for war in Iraq. House Democrats filed to the floor of that chamber in recent days to denounce the administration for misleading Americans on Iraq. Numerous top Democrats-including party chairman Terry McAuliffe and Senate majority leader Tom Daschle-attended the U.S. premiere of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, a film that accuses the Bush administration of lying to take the nation to war. Former Vice President Al Gore is set to give a speech today at Georgetown University's Law Center focusing on the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship and accusing the Bush administration of using "dishonesty as an essential part of their policy process."

While Cheney was less aggressive in his comments on the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship yesterday than he was in his criticism of news accounts last week about the September 11 Commission staff statements, he did not back down from his central argument: it is "not accurate" to suggest that there was no relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.

"I think it is important to the public that there be a dialogue to make sure to make a distinction" between potential Iraqi involvement in the 9/11 attacks and a more general Iraq-al Qaeda connection, Cheney said. "On the question of whether or not there was Iraqi participation and support for what al Qaeda did in attacking the United States on 9/11," he continued, "we've never been able to prove that, we've been unable to confirm it. The second proposition is between Iraq and al Qaeda and Iraqi intelligence services over a longer period of time and there [we] have said yes there was, and we have been able to confirm that...."

Posted on Friday, June 25, 2004 at 8:56 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Does the Koran Promote Anti-Semitism?

From Frontpagemag.com (June 25 2004):

Does Islam’s holy book promote anti-Semitism? To discuss this issue with us today, Frontpage Symposium has assembled a distinguished panel:

Prof. Khaleel Mohammed, Assistant Professor at the Department of Religious Studies at San Diego State University. Bat Ye’or, the author of three major books on dhimmis, jihad, and dhimmitude (www.dhimmitude.org and www.dhimmi.org). On May 1, 1997-- after the publication of The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam. from Jihad to Dhimmitude (1996) -- she testified at a Hearing of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs on 'Religious Persecution in the Middle East' ("An Historical Overview of the Persecution of Christians under Islam. PAST IS PROLOGUE: The Challenge of Islamism Today"). Her latest study is Islam and Dhimmitude. Where Civilizations Collide (2002); see “Eurabia: The Road to Munich.” National Review Online, October 9, 2002; "European Fears of the Gathering Jihad." FPM, Feb. 21 2003.

and

Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch and the author of Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Regnery Publishing), and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter Books).

FP: Prof. Khaleel Mohammed, Bat Ye’or and Robert Spencer welcome to Frontpage Symposium.

Prof. Khaleel Mohammed, you are on the record for maintaining that the Qur'an respects the Jews. Yet isn’t it clear that the Qur’an attributes so many negative characteristics to them, like “falsehood" (Sura 3:71) and “distortion” (Sura 4:46)? Among other things, the Qur’an teaches that the Jews have been cursed by Allah, as well as by David and Jesus. (Sura 2:61/58, Sura 5:78/82) And Allah was so disgusted with Jews that he transformed them into apes and pigs. (Sura 5:60/65, 2:65 and 7:166). What conclusions is a faithful Muslim supposed to reach here?

Mohammed: That is a rather simple question to answer if one takes principles of exegesis into consideration. First of all, the Qur’an has to be explained in totality rather than by isolated verses. Secondly, we have to remember that the Judaism of Muhammad's time was not a monolithic construct -- as it is not even up to today.

The Qur'an respects certain groups of Jews, and seems to think certain other groups (of Jews) are not observing Judaism. In fact, many scholars, among them Goitein, Lazarus-Yafeh, feel that the Qur’anic positions often reflect disputes between Jewish groups. Others such as Menachem Kister et al have shown that the Jewish tradition(s) tremendously influenced Islam, and as such a lot of the imagery of the Qur’an is based on Judaic paradigms. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that many Jewish oral traditions have not reached us, but a familiarity with them is assumed in the Qur’an.

Thirdly, the aspect of the Qur'an "picking" on certain groups of Jews is not something peculiar to Islam--every new religion establishes its "correctness" by pointing out the perceived problems of older established religions. Judaism, according to the Torah, talks of the older religions and other peoples in horrible terms, and we have the story of the Moabites as a single example. Christianity does the same, with Jesus likening his own people to swine and dogs (Matthew 7:6, 2 Peter 2:22 ).

Fourthly, the Qur'an is primarily an oral document, put together in a way unlike a scriptural text. And so, unlike a book, wherein there must be cohesion between a page and its preceding and subsequent pages, this is not an elemental aspect of the Qur’an. It jumps from topic to topic, and one set of verses can cover several topics...the connection between the topics requires familiarity with the contents of the entire document, which is why memorization is such a cherished prerequisite for exegesis. Having outlined these few basics, let us take each part of the question

How can I say that the Qur’an respects the Jews: let us examine: Q2:47, Q2:62, Q3:33, 5:20: those verses certainly do respect the Jews, in fact, telling them that they are entitled to the kingdom of heaven. The Qur’an refers to the Torah as a book of light (Q5:44)--and the foregoing are only a few examples of the respect of Judaism and its Scripture.

On the issue of falsehood, such as in Q3:71: based on what I have explained, how can we say that this is for ALL Jews? And is the Qur’an saying something that Jews did not say about themselves? Let us examine Jeremiah 8:8, Deut 31:29. The Qur'an was quite familiar with these charges made by Jewish groups against each other, and simply used the arguments. For distortion, as in Q4:46, the same argument applies. The discussions in the Talmud often focus on how words are to be construed...so again, this is not something peculiar to the Qur’an.

On the aspect of the Jews being cursed by Allah: Once again, not ALL, but those who committed certain transgressions. Throughout the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, do we not find such references to those whom God can and does curse? Does Jewish tradition not teach that the reason why the Jews have suffered so much is because they have transgressed against the covenant? Are there not Jews who teach--whether rightly or wrongly is besides the point--that even the Shoah is because of God's displeasure with them? And according the Christian testament did Jesus not address words of rejection and anger towards the Jews? And if Jesus, a Jew could do this, I don't think we can argue if David could.

Allah turning Jews into apes and swine. Let us examine the phraseology of the verses that are referred to in the question:

5:60: This is in polemic, simply addressed to those who were making fun of Islamic beliefs. The story of God transforming those with whom he is angry is a well-known motif in midrashic work: check tractate sanhedrin in the Babylonian Talmud wherein some of those who attempted to build the tower of Babel were transformed into apes. While I have not come across a mention of transformation to swine, I would hazard a guess by saying that given that with which the pig is associated in Judaism, it could have been an oral tradition known to Arab Judaism. Leviticus Rabbah 13:5 puts the pig as the example of hypocrisy: it looks kosher by outward appearance, but its actions are not kosher (it does not chew the cud). Considering the date of redaction of this document--circa 5th century--as well as the Matthew7:6 verse presented earlier, the pig image for those who disobey seem part of the general area concept rather than just Qur'anic.

On the verses in 2:65 and 7:166, the structure of the verses clearly show Jewish provenance: "And you know well those who transgressed among you on the matter of the Sabbath...: Muslims do not observe a Sabbath, and so those being addressed are clearly Jews. Next it says "you know well" showing that the Q is presupposing knowledge of a tradition known to the Jews. Also, it says "those who transgressed among you" showing not ALL transgressed...and so the verse is an indictment not of all Jews, but of those who violated the Sabbath. 7:166 elucidates the nature of the transgression: that of netting fish on a Saturday.

The Sambatyon narratives in Jewish lore add credence to the provenance that I have suggested: Jewish oral tradition. Let us not forget that the importation of Jewish lore was so well-accepted among Muslims that a specific genre of literature was coined for this "isra'iliyaat"--and only later did this literature become frowned upon. As Kister has shown, it was accepted among early exegetes. And the medieval Muslim historian, Ibn Khaldun, has stated in his Muqaddimah, that when the pre-Islamic Arabs wanted to know anything about the past, they went to the Jews. Q 21:7, 16:43 seems to support this. When we see charges in the Qur'an that identifies certain Jews therefore, in many cases we have to examine Jewish sources for provenance.

All of this being said, I am aware that many Muslim preachers use the verses in a manner that is totally wrong, demonizing all Jews. And I have offended some of those preachers by pointing out that one of Muhammad's wives was Jewish--safiyyah bint Huyayy--and if Muslims are to believe the Jews are descended from apes and swine, then Muhammad was married to a descendant of such creatures. Of course this is unacceptable to Muslim sensibilities.

You asked about a faithful Muslim and what conclusion s/he is supposed to reach from these verses: your choice of wording is significant, and points the problem out. "faithful" is often seen as a substitute for "discerning"...the average faithful Muslim will follow the imam's interpretation--which is generally influenced by current anti-Jewish polemic, or by medieval exegesis which bought into demonization of Jews as an entire group. A discerning Muslim will hopefully see the verses in context the way I have.

Spencer: It was kind of Professor Khaleel Muhammad to remind us of the principles of interpretation and exegesis of sacred texts. It is indeed true that “the Qur’an has to be explained in totality rather than by isolated verses.” Unfortunately, using this standard, many influential Muslim authorities would regard his conclusions here as almost entirely erroneous.

While there may be some Muslims who view the Qur’an’s statements about Jews the same way Professor Muhammad does here, they are not at this point mounting an effective refutation of the radical interpretation, which draws on numerous traditional sources. Conversely, however, radical exegetes would have little trouble poking holes in Professor Muhammad’s analysis -- a fact with sobering consequences for Israel and the world at large....

Posted on Friday, June 25, 2004 at 8:27 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Pigeons Lead Restorationists to Major Art Find

From the New York Times (June 24 2004):

Pigeons fluttering through a hole in the ceiling of a Spanish cathedral led an art restoration team to discover a hidden Renaissance fresco of winged angels that had been covered by a false ceiling for more than 300 years.

The team had been working on the baroque dome of the cathedral in Valencia for more than a month, removing gray paint and fending off birds flying in and out of the hole, Valencia's regional government said Thursday.

Underneath, the experts had been hoping to find Renaissance artwork cited in centuries-old cathedral records, although they feared it might be ruined. Their stroke of serendipity came Tuesday when they were drawn to the hole by the pigeons and their cooing.

One of the team leaders, Javier Catala, stuck a digital camera inside, shot blindly and came back with partial but spectacular images of a well-preserved fresco believed to be more than 26 feet in diameter.

The photos show parts of four winged angels against a starry blue background, all surrounded by gold-leaf trim.

The baroque ceiling turned out to be a false one that masked a fresco completed by Italian painters Francesco Pagano and Paolo de San Leocadio in 1481. They were hired by papal envoy Rodrigo Borja, a Spaniard who went on to become Pope Alexander VI.

The space between the ceiling and the fresco was 32 inches at its widest point, providing plenty of room for a bird's nest.

The duo of Italian artists served as official Vatican painters throughout Alexander VI's papacy and before that when he was archbishop of Valencia, doing other paintings in churches in the southeast Spanish region.

The fresco is important because it's one of the earliest examples of Italian Renaissance art being imported to Spain, said Fernando Lopez, an art historian who works at the Valencia government's main library.

It is also remarkable because the fresco technique -- watercolors painted on wet plaster -- was rare in Spain then and this one is in such good shape, Lopez said....

Posted on Friday, June 25, 2004 at 7:58 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Film Historian Discusses New Trends in Political Documentaries

From NPR's 'Talk of the Nation' (June 24 2004):

NEAL CONAN, host: Let's talk now with Michael Renov. Most people's idea of a documentary is more like "Control Room," one that lets the events unfold. But according to Michael Renov, that style is actually a relatively new phenomena in documentary film. He's associate dean of the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California, author of a new about the history of documentaries called "The Subject of Documentary." He joins us from his office in Los Angeles. Thanks very much for being with us today.

Professor MICHAEL RENOV (University of Southern California): A pleasure.

CONAN: Some argue that Michael Moore's film "Fahrenheit 9/11" is not a true documentary. I understand you haven't had a chance to see it yet, but if we assume it's more or less along the lines of the techniques that we saw in Michael Moore's earlier movies, what would you say to that?

Prof. RENOV: The work of Michael Moore fits into a pretty long history of documentary filmmaking which takes an advocacy position that really attempts to be persuasive, has a very strong point of view, an attitude towards the material. There's nothing terribly groundbreaking about his approach.

CONAN: Of making himself as the star?

Prof. RENOV: Well, that may be somewhat of a difference, in terms of the persuasive filmmaking style that includes the filmmaker. He's, by no means, the first.

CONAN: Mm-hmm.

Prof. RENOV: But this is something that's probably been more prevalent in the last, say, 20, 25 years at least.

CONAN: What might be another example of it?

Prof. RENOV: Well, there's someone named Jon Alpert, who, for a long time, has made--since the early '70s, so I'm guessing about 30 years now, and for a while worked--his work was shown on the "Today" show in the '80s, but has been very consistent with making films, videotapes that were about breaking issues around the world. And he was very much a part of them. He shot them himself.

CONAN: Mm-hmm.

Prof. RENOV: Unlike Michael Moore, he was the camera person and you could hear him speaking from behind the camera. So that's one example.

CONAN: So what are the examples of the other kinds of documentaries you're talking about, the kinds of films that prevailed--What?--40 years ago?

Prof. RENOV: Well, just on this point of films that may be about the political process, or the American political process, the sort of groundbreaking, the milestone film is a film called "Primary" that was made in 1960, which was the beginning really of direct cinema, or sometimes called cinema verite. But that attempts to let events unfold before the camera without the use of interviews or voiceovers, but that--the interest is in letting things unfold before the viewer so that the spectator is able to more or less make up his or own mind about what happens. And that...

CONAN: Frederick Wiseman uses that technique.

Prof. RENOV: Frederick Wiseman, who came along in 1967, has been making films ever since, is probably the best example, yeah.

CONAN: Mm-hmm.

Prof. RENOV: And so with Wiseman films--since lots of people have seen his films--you're never going to hear Wiseman's voice. You may get a sense of his point of view towards the material, but you'll have to watch closely, and inferences will be very important. There still be editing that will help to make you a little bit clearer on what his relationship towards the subject matter is by virtue of his choices, his selections. But you're not going to really have Wiseman himself front and center. And Moore chooses to put himself in the middle of things, very often.

CONAN: Mm-hmm. Let's get a listener involved. And Anina(ph) joins us from Portland, Oregon....

Posted on Friday, June 25, 2004 at 7:47 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Clinton Takes On Louis Freeh and Karl Rove

From NPR's 'Morning Edition'(June 24 2004):

Former President Bill Clinton is reopening many of the bruising political debates of the last decade as he promotes his best-selling book, "My Life." The memoir is part confessional, part policy seminar and part political payback. Mr. Clinton sat down for an interview in New York this week with NPR senior correspondent Juan Williams.

JUAN WILLIAMS reporting:

It's no surprise that the former president is bitter towards prosecutor Kenneth Starr. The independent counsel's investigation of Clinton's sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky led to the president's impeachment. More surprising is Clinton's harsh take on former FBI Director Louis Freeh. Clinton appointed Freeh, but the president says that when the FBI chief ran into difficulty, Freeh turned on him.

Former President BILL CLINTON: Pure politics. Once he got in trouble with the Olympic bomber, when they lost some assets in a drug bust, they had the problems with the FBI lab and the press was killing him and the Republicans in Congress were killing him and they blamed him. And I really do think he woke up one day and said there's only one sure way I can get the Washington press and the Republicans off my back and that's if I take a hostile position towards the White House, and he did, and sure enough, next day it was gone. They never said a word about any of those problems again.

WILLIAMS: Would you have been able to fire Louis Freeh? Would you have been more involved if it hadn't been for things like travelgate and Monica Lewinsky? Because if you fired him then, people would have said it might have been political retaliation.

Mr. CLINTON: Well, they certainly would have. But, you know, the travelgate thing was a fraud. But long before the Lewinsky incident, Starr had the FBI looking into my private life. The Washington Post ran a big story on it about how many agents they had, and it was unbelievable. They could have been doing something else that might arguably have had more to do with American security.

WILLIAMS: So you couldn't fire Freeh at that point?

Mr. CLINTON: As long as we were getting cooperation at the highest levels of the FBI on a day-to-day basis on the terrorism issues, I thought that it was more trouble than it was worth.

WILLIAMS: Louis Freeh, the former FBI director who's now in the credit card industry, declined to respond to the president's version of events. I then asked the president about the scandal that haunts his legacy.

You said on "60 Minutes" that you regarded the scandal with Monica Lewinsky and the subsequent impeachment and the trial all as, quote, "a badge of honor," but...

Mr. CLINTON: That's not what I said.

WILLIAMS: What did you say?

Mr. CLINTON: I said that I was responsible for what I had done wrong, both as a person and a president, throughout my whole life and I took responsibility for it, but that the impeachment was illegitimate. Every reasonable historian, constitutional authority, lawyer and prosecutor knew that it was illegitimate. So did Newt Gingrich, and he had already told Hillary they would never do it. Then he said they were going to do it because they could. And I specifically point out a column that Bob Healey, Robert Healey had written in the Boston Globe about how Tip O'Neill could have impeached Ronald Reagan because it came out that he knew about and approved Iran-Contra, which was clearly illegal. And Tip O'Neill didn't do that because there's some things we Democrats don't do just because we can. And he didn't want to put the country through it. So the Republican position is if we impeached him, even if our reasons were invalid, no matter how illegitimate it was, it's still a black mark on him. We did it and might makes right. So what I tried to do is to draw a distinction between my personal mistakes, which I very much regretted, and my willingness, indeed eagerness, to fight impeachment, which I am proud of. But I never said that I wore the mistakes I had made as a badge of honor.

WILLIAMS: One of the joys of your presidency was triangulation, your ability to bridge left and right in this country. But one of the legacies of your time in office is a highly polarized electorate. What can the Democrats do now? I mean, you know, after you left the Democrats have lost the Senate, the House, the White House.

Mr. CLINTON: Yeah, but let me say, first of all, we would have made major, major gains in 2002 but for 9/11. We had a 23-point advantage among undecided voters going into the 2002 elections. That's why Karl Rove made the 2002 election a referendum on the homeland security bill, which was, I think, one of the greatest con jobs ever pulled off on the American people. Basically he was against the bill for eight months, then they decided they're for it and they put a couple of poison pills so it can't pass by Election Day. And 24 hours after they changed their position, if you hadn't changed yours, you know, you've threatened the American security. I mean it was a total hot dog deal. But anyway, they wanted to polarize the electorate along any logical lines. One of the reasons that I was so--such a polarizing figure is I won. Because they really thought they had discovered this little formula that would always beat Democrats. You know, we were weak on defense, we never met a tax we didn't like, we never met a program we didn't love, we, you know, couldn't be trusted to take care of the country, all that kind of stuff. So the more our approach worked, the madder they got and the more they had to go after me personally....

Posted on Friday, June 25, 2004 at 7:30 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Old South Restoration Project Draws Ire of Historians

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (June 25, 2004):

Gwinnett County (Georgia) spent $242,000 restoring the 1840s Yellow River Post Office and nearby slave quarters, but some historians now suggest the historic integrity of the buildings has been compromised.

Richard Laub, director of the heritage preservation program at Georgia State University, said the structures, which were completed in November, may create "a false sense of history" because modern materials and techniques were used.

"It looks like they threw a lot of money at the project, but they made it look new; they lost a lot of the authenticity of the structures," Laub said. "I'm glad the county did make some overtures to historic preservation, so it's not a total negative. But the way they carried the project out is not up to preservation standards."

Laub also serves as chairman of the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation awards committee.

Historic preservationist Tommy Hart Jones, who surveyed the post office and slave quarters for the county in 1998 as a private consultant, said he was dismayed that the county had moved the wooden post office about 60 feet and replaced much of the siding on the two buildings.

"It's all wrong," Jones said. "I was extremely disappointed. They dismantled [the post office] and moved it. They ruined the historic value of that building by moving it. I almost cried when I heard that."

County officials say the work falls within recognized preservation guidelines. The county-hired architect, David Novack, even applied to the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation for an excellence in preservation award for post office and slave quarters, but the application was rejected.

Bill Lunceford, development manager for Gwinnett County parks and recreation, said the county followed Secretary of the Interior guidelines in overseeing the restoration.

"It was falling down," he said. "We had two old structures on the verge of disappearing, and we restored them as historically as possible. They were on the verge of becoming a pile of boards. The guidelines are not black and white."

But Laub said even with the loose guidelines, the restoration effort doesn't pass muster.

The 1840s post office was immortalized in the books "In Care of Yellow River" and "Weep Not for Me, Dear Mother," collections of letters written by Eli P. Landers, a Confederate private in the Civil War. The wooden post office building, located near Lilburn, doubled as a general store and served as the heart of the surrounding community. The slave quarters building was one of the few surviving structures of its kind, if not the only one, in Gwinnett County.

Developer Scott Hudgens gave the buildings to the county in 1996. The post office and slave quarters were placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1989. They were renovated last year as part of a multiphase project to make the site a living history museum.

But the county has had to revise its plans since adjoining property it had hoped to acquire started being developed. The buildings remain vacant. The county plans to show the buildings to groups.

Last year the county moved the post office, originally set in a bend of Five Forks Trickum Road, because someday much of the road will be widened or straightened. The county has dedicated money from the 2001 sales tax for straightening the road between Ronald Reagan Parkway and Killian Hill Road, but county transportation officials couldn't say yet whether that portion of the road would be straightened.

Dale Jaeger, a consultant who helped draft the master plan for the restoration effort, said there weren't good options if Five Forks Trickum Road was to be widened or straightened there. There are historic buildings on both sides of the road, she said, and if one had to be moved, it made sense to move the post office while it was being dismantled.

Laub said material that should have been saved was replaced by inferior modern material....

Posted on Friday, June 25, 2004 at 6:59 AM | Comments (0) | Top

PBS'S 'Rebels and Redcoats': Revisionist History?

From the New York Times (June 23 2004):

Since Sept. 11, television has done a decent job of explaining why they hate us. Tonight PBS reveals why they have always hated us. "Rebels and Redcoats: How Britain lost America" is a wickedly revisionist view of the American Revolution, a "Fahrenheit 1776."

When American soldiers are fighting Iraqi insurgents under a besieged banner of freedom and democracy, some viewers may not relish a re-examination of the Stamp Act and Yorktown from the point of view of the British Crown. And certainly the narrator, the British military historian Richard Holmes, gets a bit carried away in the heat of battle re-enactment. "Unsportingly," he says, "the Americans were picking off British officers who were easily identifiable by their scarlet rather than their faded red uniforms."

But the two-part documentary, being shown tonight and next Wednesday, is an engaging upside-down look at a period of American history that few Americans ever question. It may not be exactly fair — the British bias is blatant — but it is fairly accurate. Mostly, it gives viewers a sense of the world's more jaundiced view of a revolution that Americans cherish as a triumph of democracy and human rights. And a little like Michael Moore's polemical films, the documentary delivers its most striking indictments not in the facts but in the sly visual juxtapositions.

Mr. Holmes begins by taking viewers on a tour of Boston, a city that in the 1770's was a boom town and, in his words, a "tax-free haven." (He points out that colonists there paid 50 percent of the taxes paid by their English compatriots back home.)

Dressed for American success in a Ralph Lauren dress shirt and driving a red Mustang convertible, he avoids the quaint cobbled side streets of Cambridge and Beacon Hill, preferring a flashy backdrop of shops, fast food outlets and even a dip inside the Boston Stock Exchange. Against that display of modern consumerism, Mr. Holmes describes 18th-century Boston as a city "full of people on the make," some, he says, who "felt their freedom to make money and get rich was being restricted."

British troops are portrayed with sympathy. After the battle of Concord, British soldiers stumble on the body of a dying comrade, scalped, his ears and other parts cut off in what Mr. Holmes describes as "the first atrocity of the war."

John Hancock is described as a rich merchant and smuggler, which is a bit of British overstatement. Margaret Kemble, the American-born wife of Thomas Gage, the British commander of North America, is believed by many historians to have been a rebel spy. Here she is a saucy temptress whose act of "personal betrayal" looks as much like adultery as espionage.

Mr. Holmes tries to explain the rebels' point of view, but a British sensibility dominates. "Rebels and Redcoats" relies on costumed re-enactments of battles and key historic moments and also on the vivid narration of the bald and bespectacled Mr. Holmes, who gamely tramps through swamps, forests and fields, and travels in an amphibious vessel, a bus, a jeep and even, by the time he reaches the pivotal battle of Cowpens in South Carolina, astride a white horse. (As British losses pile up, Mr. Holmes reveals his true allegiance, trading Ralph Lauren shirts for a Barbour jacket.)

The program does not raise new issues but follows the more politically correct interpretation of history found in books like Joy Hakim's multivolume textbook, "A History of Us," that so irritate many conservatives and others.

Mr. Holmes underlines the revolution's moral failure to end slavery and explains that the Proclamation Line of 1763, which was intended to prevent colonists from seizing territory beyond the Appalachians, was created by the British partly to protect Indian populations from land-hungry frontiersmen.

Mr. Holmes spends quite a bit of time on David George, a slave who joined the British side to gain his freedom, and even attends a Sunday service in the Silver Bluffs, Ga., church that George founded. He is openly contemptuous of slave-owning freedom fighters, saying of George Washington that "the father of American liberty was only for freedom if it did not apply to his black brethren or slaves..."

Posted on Friday, June 25, 2004 at 3:54 AM | Comments (2) | Top

State Department Releases Revised Version of 2003 "Patterns of Global Terrorism"

From the Federal News Service (June 22, 2004):

HEADLINE: SPECIAL STATE DEPARTMENT BRIEFING

PARTICIPANTS: SECRETARY OF STATE COLIN POWELL; COFER BLACK, COORDINATOR FOR COUNTERTERRORISM; JOHN BRENNAN, DIRECTOR OF THE TERRORISM THREAT INTEGRATION CENTER

SEC. POWELL: Well, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Sorry I'm a few minutes late....

I'm here today to brief you on the corrections that we have made to our "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report for 2003.

Let me start out with an observation about the report. The report is mostly a narrative document which goes through patterns and trends of terrorist activities in countries throughout the world and what progress those countries have made and what the pattern looks like within that country.

On balance, it is a good report. The narrative is sound, and we're not changing any of the narrative.

Shortly after the report was issued in late April, it came to our attention, principally through the efforts of Congressman Henry Waxman and his staff, that they saw data errors in some of the tables that were in the report and some of the trends that were divined from those data tables. When I asked my staff about it and we began looking into it, we discovered that Congressman Waxman and his staff was correct; there were errors.

For the past two weeks now, we have had a major effort under way within the State Department and within the Terrorist Threat Information Center, the center which accumulates this data, a new organization created last year, an independent organization that reports directly to the director of Central Intelligence. And in earlier years it was accumulated in a different manner within the CIA.

But the Terrorist Threat Information Center, the TTIC, and my staff have been hard at work for the past two weeks to get to the bottom of the data error, determine what corrections were appropriate, and to make those corrections so we could show those corrections to the American people.

The State Department and the TTIC and, of course, all of us in the administration and the president, take seriously our responsibility to provide the Congress and the American people with the best information and analysis available, and therefore, I welcome this opportunity to correct the record.

The results of our review, which will be spelled out to you in greater detail in a moment or two, shows that from 2002 to 2003, using the rules that have been in place to analyze incidents and categorize them one way or another, the number of incidents, as categorized by our system, went up from 198 in 2002 to a corrected number in 2003, that will be explained to you momentarily, of 208, a slight rise in the overall number of incidents, both what are called significant events or significant incidents, and non-significant incidents that arrive at this total.

But the numbers don't tell the full story, the number of incidents. You also have to look at the number of individuals who were killed or injured as a result of these terrorist attacks. And as we look at those numbers we find that the number of killed going from 2002 to 2003 has dropped on an annual basis, but the number of injured has gone up quite a bit, and you'll see that in a moment. Why? In some cases, a particular instance gives rise to more casualties than another instance, and so you can't expect a direct correlation between number of incidents and number of casualties. But we also found computational and accounting errors as we went through the data over the last several weeks, and that also will be explained to you in a moment.

Our effort is to put out the most accurate information we can. And as we go forward from this position, I think as a result of the last two weeks' work, we have identified how we have to do this in the future in order to make sure that we don't run into this kind of problem again....

Posted on Thursday, June 24, 2004 at 2:30 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Historians Disappointed in Court's Sealing of Helmut Kohl's 'Secret Police' Files

From the Wall Street Journal (June 24 2004):

A federal court ruled Wednesday that files compiled by the East German secret police on former Chancellor Helmut Kohl must remain largely sealed, handing Kohl a boost in a years-long legal battle.

Kohl has long argued that wiretaps used by the Stasi to spy on him were illegally obtained and that he deserves protection from damage to his "human dignity." He took the case to the Federal Administrative Court after a Berlin court ruled last year that the files could be released.

The federal court ruled that the files could be released to media "only with the consent of the person affected," except in cases where the information contained is publicly available. Files containing personal information can be released only for research purposes, on condition "that they not fall into the wrong hands or be published," it said.

The decision means that "the Stasi files on former Chancellor Helmut Kohl must remain largely sealed in future," the court said in its ruling.

Marianne Birthler, the head of the agency overseeing the Stasi archives, has fought Kohl's attempts since 2000 to keep his records private, saying that public figures must be informed on queries to view their files and have a chance to lodge a complaint, but that the former leader could not be exempt from laws applying to others.

Journalists and historians had asked to see Kohl's Stasi file, which Kohl himself has viewed, prompting speculation that they could shed light on a party financing scandal that tainted Kohl and his conservative party.

Kohl claims that the Stasi notes are bound to be full of phony information....

Posted on Thursday, June 24, 2004 at 11:02 AM | Comments (0) | Top

James McPherson Talks About the New York Times's Coverage of the Civil War

From NPR’s ‘Fresh Air’ (June 22 2004):

TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

On April 15th, 1861, the (technical difficulties). With the start of the Civil War, newspapers became more important than ever. A new book called "The Most Fearful Ordeal" collects The New York Times' newspaper coverage of that war. It not only gives us an idea of how the battles were described in their own time, it shows the state of journalism in that year (technical difficulties). He's a professor of history at Princeton University and the author of several books about the Civil War, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Battle Cry of Freedom." Here's a short reading from the beginning of George Smalley's report on the Battle of Antietam which was written for the New York Tribune and was also published in The Times. Smalley was actually a volunteer aide for one of the generals at the battle.

Mr. JAMES McPHERSON (Author): 'Fierce and desperate battle between 200,000 men has raged since daylight, yet night closes on an uncertain field. It is the greatest fight since Waterloo, all over the field contested with an obstinacy equal even to Waterloo. If not wholly a victory tonight, I believe it is the prelude to a victory tomorrow. But what can be foretold of the future of a fight in which from five in the morning till seven at night the best troops of the continent have fought without decisive results?'

GROSS: It wasn't easy for George Smalley to get his copy from the battlefield to the newspaper. James McPherson told me how Smalley did it.

Mr. McPHERSON: And when it was over, he went to Frederick, Maryland, hoping that he could telegraph his report on what he saw to the Tribune. But the lines were tied up and he couldn't get through, and so he hired a locomotive to take him to Baltimore. He tried to get through from Baltimore and couldn't get through, so he took a train from Baltimore all the way to New York, stayed up all night long and all the next day writing his article while he was riding on the train and got into New York on the morning of the 19th and, exhausted, hadn't slept for probably more than 48 hours, turned in his article. And the Tribune published it on the 20th, and it is generally regarded as--and it's several thousand words, it's five or 6,000 words. It's generally regarded as the best example of Civil War reporting and maybe one of the best from the 19th century.

GROSS: What was the importance of newspapers for Americans during the Civil War?

Mr. McPHERSON: Newspapers were really the only medium of communication for civilians in the Civil War. It's the only way they could find out immediately what was happening in the war. The telegraph had been invented about 15 years before the war and during the 1850s, just about every part of the country was wired so that reporters could send in information from considerable distances to newspapers and the War Department in Washington could get reports from far-flung Army commanders and then give that information to the newspapers so that, unlike any previous war where there had not been telegraphic dispatches, people in Boston or New York or Chicago could read about military operations, great battles that had taken place just a day or two before.

GROSS: News reports are often called the first draft of history. You point out in your notes in this book that the news reports were sometimes wrong. What was an example of that?

Mr. McPHERSON: There was a tendency--and this was true of all newspapers on both sides in the war, especially in their first reports of a particular battle--to exaggerate the success of their own side, to minimize the casualties of their own side and to maximize the casualties of the other side, a little bit like the body count statistics that many of us can remember from the Vietnam War and that we're actually seeing again sometimes in Iraq.

A good example of that is the second battle of Bull Run which was one of the most humiliating Union defeats at the end of August of 1862. And the initial reports sent in by the special correspondent of The New York Times talking about the Confederates in this battle writes, 'They are in a country utterly barren of supplies and have been too busy to forage for them if the country did afford them. The rations they carried with them must be exhausted, and the opinion, therefore, begins to be suggested as probable in well-informed circles that today's battle'--the battle was even then going on--'or at least tomorrow's must exhaust their resources and compel either a surrender or a hasty retreat.'

Well, a Northern reader reading that story would assume that the Confederates were on their last legs, that this was going to be a great Union victory. But then two or three days later, the news comes that, in fact, it was a great Confederate victory and it's the Northerners who are beating a hasty retreat. So here is a story that raises hopes high only, when the truth finally comes in, to dash them all the more severely.

GROSS: Since the treatment of prisoners has been such a big news story in the news from Iraq, I thought I'd ask you to read a paragraph that was from a news item in July of 1861. And this is about the treatment of the wounded Union soldiers by rebels who captured them. And would you read this paragraph for us on page 84?

Mr. McPHERSON: I surely will. 'The treatment of our wounded by the rebels is reported as having been brutal to the last degree. Several soldiers assert that they saw them repeatedly draw their knives and cut the throats of our men as they lay upon the ground. Others stabbed them with their bayonets and inflicted every conceivable indignity upon them. In charging up the hill on the Warrenton road, they set fire to the house used as a hospital for our men, some of whom escaped the flames by getting through the windows. A Massachusetts man passing a wounded rebel stopped and gave him water but had not gone five rods when he saw him trying to stab another wounded man lying by his side. Such brutality would disgrace savages.'

Let me say about that that atrocity stories like this were fairly common on both sides in the early months of the war, when the war was a novelty, when the level of demonization of the enemy was at its highest. As the war went on and as it became clear that these early stories were quite exaggerated, there were far fewer atrocity stories. People were more realistic about that. And while the treatment of POWs on both sides in the war certainly left a lot to be desired and there was a high mortality rate among prisoners, that was more often a consequence of disease and neglect rather than deliberate atrocities.

This reporter in this story is reporting what he's been told. For example, 'several soldiers assert that they saw them repeatedly draw their knives and cut the throats of our men.' He's not necessarily reporting what he saw himself. What's important about it, though, I think is that when people in the North read this, they believed it; at least, at first they believed it. I think they became more skeptical and even cynical about reports as the war went on, but it did a lot to mold Northern opinion and, for that matter, similar stories in the Southern press to mold Southern opinion in the early months of the war and probably, I think, had something to do with making this war more and more bitter, violent, more and more thorough as it went on. The Civil War started out as a war merely to suppress an insurrection, a kind of police action. And as time went on and as casualties on both sides mounted and as the stakes for both sides grew larger and larger, the war became far more bitter, far more violent, far higher number of casualties. And I think these early atrocity stories probably had something to do with that....

Posted on Thursday, June 24, 2004 at 10:29 AM | Comments (0) | Top

New-York Historical Society Broadens Mission, Stirs Debate

From the New York Times (June 23 2004):

The New-York Historical Society, with a newly hired president and a conservative financier emerging as a board power, is shifting its focus from the city to more national concerns, stirring the objections of some historians and staff members.

Reflecting its new direction, the society has canceled an exhibition marking the centennial of Times Square and scaled back others with a local focus. It is mounting a $5 million exhibition on Alexander Hamilton, the most expensive in the history of the 200-year-old society, officials said.

The Hamilton exhibition, whose curator is Richard Brookhiser, a senior editor at the conservative National Review magazine, will be used for private receptions during this summer's Republican National Convention before opening to the public in September.

This shift in emphasis appears to signal the ascendance on the society's board of Richard Gilder, a stockbroker and a leading fund-raiser for Republican and conservative causes, who became a trustee a year ago.

It also seems to close off all possibility of the society's merger with the Museum of the City of New York, a long-contemplated move for two institutions that have struggled to attract visitors and revenue.

"If we were to focus on New York City, then we should merge," Mr. Gilder said in an interview yesterday. "But there is a whole different mission for each of us."

Mr. Gilder, an avid collector of historical documents, whose holdings are on on permanent loan to the society, was one of three society trustees who together have contributed $2 million of $3 million raised so far for the Hamilton exhibition.

"There was nothing wrong," Mr. Gilder said, with the shows that have been canceled or scaled back. "They just weren't really in the mainstream of American history. We want to focus on bigger things. We want to bring American history into every family."

Louise Mirrer, who became president of the society on June 1 after serving as executive vice chancellor of the City University of New York, said, "Hamilton is both the quintessential New Yorker and also absolutely emblematic of the direction this institution is moving in."

To coincide with the Hamilton exhibition's opening to the public on Sept. 10, the society plans to wrap the facade of its building at Central Park West and 77th Street in a huge $10 bill — the one bearing Hamilton's face. It will also set up a temporary cafe celebrating the country's founding fathers.

Mr. Gilder has been a major donor to conservative causes and candidates since the 1980's. He is on the board of the Club for Growth, a principal fund-raising engine of the conservative movement, and is chairman emeritus of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group....

Posted on Wednesday, June 23, 2004 at 9:26 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Terry Eastland: Independent Counsel Law Was Bad Idea

Terry Eastland, in the Weekly Standard (June 23 2004):

Bill Clinton's book release is giving him more chances to take shots at the man who spent five years investigating him, Kenneth Starr. Starr resigned in 1999. That same year the independent counsel law, under whose authority he worked, was allowed to expire.

Whatever you may think about the charges that Starr was asked to probe, or about the investigations themselves, the demise of the independent counsel law was a welcome event. The law had proved a classic case of reform gone awry, and when the time came to legislate its extension in 1999, few in Congress were willing to speak on its behalf.

Congress first passed the law in 1978, with fresh memories of Watergate and President Nixon's firing of the special prosecutor he had named to conduct the probe, Archibald Cox. Cox wanted tapes of the president's conversations with aides--tapes, the world would later learn, that implicated him in the cover-up of a so-called "third-rate burglary" of Democratic offices in the Watergate complex.

President Nixon declined to hand the tapes over, but Cox won a court order directing him to do so. When the president refused to comply, Cox announced that he would seek to have the president held in contempt. President Nixon then ordered his dismissal.

To many in Congress, the firing taught that outside prosecutors needed enough independence from an administration so that they could truly probe charges of misconduct. The independent counsel law took the appointment power away from the executive and lodged it in a special court even as it also sharply limited the president's authority to remove the prosecutor.

Those provisions contemplated a more relentless pursuit of executive malfeasance than had been seen before in our politics.

During the law's 21 years, the Justice Department conducted more than 40 preliminary investigations of alleged misconduct and concluded that at least 20 charges merited "further investigation" by a court-appointed counsel. A number of individuals were indicted and some convicted. And Bill Clinton became the subject of an extraordinary impeachment referral sent to the House of Representatives by Starr....

Posted on Wednesday, June 23, 2004 at 7:28 AM | Comments (0) | Top

The Ku Klux Klan

From the Daily Telegraph (Sydney, Australia) June 23, 2004:

Like a scene from a nightmare, horsemen dressed in long white sheets and conical hats launched a reign of terror in the southern states of the US in the years immediately after the Civil War.

To newly emancipated slaves, the night riders represented the ghosts of Confederate dead, risen from their battlefield graves to take up arms again. From its early, primitive beginnings, few groups have generated such fascination, terror and mystery as the Ku Klux Klan. Dedicated to violence, bigotry, political intrigue and manipulation, the Klan encouraged Americans to protect themselves from those deemed to be "unacceptable". Falling into that category were blacks, Jews and Catholics.

The Klan also preached against "dope, bootlegging, graft, nightclubs and road houses, violation of the Sabbath, unfair business dealings and sex and scandalous behaviour". The fact that many of its key members broke several or all of those rules was responsible for the ebb and flow of Klan membership over the decades.

By the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was a political force to be reckoned with, boasting a membership of between three and four million. By the end of the decade it was almost defunct, ripped asunder not by its dedication to lynchings and vigilantism but by political corruption and a series of financial and sexual scandals involving its leadership. Yet the Klan managed to rise again, as it had on a number of occasions dating from the organisation's founding in the township of Pulaski, Tennessee, near the border with Alabama, in 1866.

It began as little more than a joke, a fraternal gathering by six university students who had served as officers in the Confederate army in what is still regarded in the southern states as the "war of northern aggression".

Embittered by the Union victory, the group wore disguises and galloped around the town at night, like later generations of bored young men in their cars. They were surprised to learn their appearances caused fear, particularly among former slaves, and took advantage of the fears and superstitions of the black population.

By April, 1867, the Klan had become organised for the first time, with its own language and commands. The flowing white sheets, white face masks and conical hats made of cardboard became part of the official uniform. General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a famed Confederate cavalry leader, became leader of the group and was known as the Grand Wizard.

The name Ku Klux Klan was taken from kuklos, the Greek word for circle, an ancient symbol of unity. The word Klan was added purely for alliteration. The Klan was divided into realms, dominions, provinces and dens, led by grand dragons, titans, giants and cyclopses.

Government reconstruction policies -- which aimed to extend the rights of southern blacks -- pushed hundreds of resentful war veterans into the Klan, which soon began to institute a policy of violence in opposition to the new social order. For the next two years, Klansmen tortured and killed blacks and sympathetic whites alike.

Former slaves were obvious targets but the Klan also harassed, intimidated and sometimes killed northern teachers, judges and politicians. But because of the violence, prominent citizens who had joined the Klan began to drop out.

In 1869, Forrest resigned as grand wizard and disbanded the Klan but it rose again in 1915, mainly as a small-town rural mix of bigotry and narrow-mindedness. William J. Simmonds, a former religious minister, reorganised it after seeing the film Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith's silent film classic, which depicted Klansmen as heroic saviours of old southern society.

When it opened in Atlanta, Simmonds published a recruiting advertisement for the Klan alongside an ad for the film. It immediately drew new members from the ranks of those frightened by the new influx of immigrants into the US, many Jews and Catholics among them.

The Klan craved respectability. By the early 1920s, Klansmen were elected to positions of political power in Texas, Oklahoma, Indiana, Oregon and Maine. In 1924, 40,000 hooded members marched through the streets of Washington DC during the Democratic National Convention.

The Klan embraced modern advertising techniques, drawing attention to itself by searchlights illuminating white-robed horsemen and aircraft flying overhead bearing a fiery cross.

By now it was so influential that many politicians, including senators, congressmen, governors and judges, signed up. In Atlanta, Klansmen ran the police, the law courts and the city council. Coca-Cola, Atlanta's largest company, soon to become an American icon, paid for advertisements in Klan publications.

It is said that President Warren G. Harding took his membership oath inside the White House. A young Harry S. Truman, later to become president, was among the new recruits, although he resigned shortly afterwards in disgust at the Klan's anti-Catholic bias.

As the Klan grew, so did its violence and many were repelled by the anomaly of a group supposedly dedicated to law and order taking part in lynchings and other anti-social activities.

By 1930, membership collapsed, while many of its leaders succumbed to the age-old weaknesses of greed, lust and drink. It was disbanded in 1944.

The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s led to a revival of Klan-type organisations, which attacked blacks and civil-rights workers. Pressure was put on blacks not to vote. In Mississippi in 1960, 42per cent of the population was black but only 2per cent was registered to vote, so the Klan's tactics had a degree of success....

Posted on Tuesday, June 22, 2004 at 4:52 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Was Utah the First Home of the Aztecs?

From the San Diego Union Tribune (June 22 2004):

The mythical homeland of Mexico's Aztecs – an island known as Aztlan – has eluded historians for centuries, and the quest to find it has become shrouded in political spin and scholarly speculation.

Like the lost Atlantis and Camelot, Aztlan may or may not have existed, but fervent believers have sought it from the desert of Utah to a mangrove swamp in western Mexico.

Academics agree that the Aztecs, a warlike tribe with a passion for human sacrifice, wandered the badlands of central Mexico for years before founding what is now Mexico City around 1325 and then forging the greatest empire of the ancient Americas.

But the original habitat of the people whose history and symbols are still invoked by modern Mexico remains a mystery.

Aztec legend says little about Aztlan, apart from that it was a small island on a lake inhabited by herons north of Mexico City. If it is ever found, archeologists do not expect to discover much in the way of treasure or ruins there.

The small western state of Nayarit, long neglected by the federal government, declared itself the "cradle of the Mexicans" in the early 1990s based on an old theory that the marshy island of Mexcaltitan was in fact Aztlan.

Little stirs on the mosquito-infested islet nestled in a salt water lagoon on the Pacific coast.

An expected tourism boom to the state has mostly failed to materialize and the islanders still scratch a living from fishing for shrimp and lobsters.

"No serious archeological study has ever been done in Mexcaltitan," said Jesus Jauregui, an expert in western Mexico at the National Institute of Anthropology and History.

"Aztlan is a mythical place, not a historical one," he said.

SPEAKING SAME TONGUE

Try telling that to the growing number of Mexican immigrants in the United States for whom the idea that Aztlan was in Utah or Colorado has become a matter of doctrine.

"Mexican Americans are very interested in it because it gives them identity as an ethnic group," said Armando Solorzano, ethnic studies professor at the University of Utah.

He said that if the Aztecs indeed came from what is now the western United States, as some linguistic studies suggest, then the millions of mostly illegal Mexican migrants there could argue that they are not just undocumented workers but descendants of the original inhabitants who have come home....

Posted on Tuesday, June 22, 2004 at 4:09 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Baltimore's Little-Known Immigration History

From the Washington Post (June 18 2004):

NOT EVERY immigrant coming to America sailed past the Statue of Liberty. For many Europeans making the voyage in the 18th and 19th centuries, coming to America meant landing in or near Fell's Point in Baltimore.

But that city's role in "the peopling of America" is not widely known, says immigration historian Melanie Shell-Weiss. So the Baltimore Immigration Project, a group of interested citizens, business people and academics, is trying to "correct this hole in the story," according to Shell-Weiss, a postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins University.

One of its first efforts to publicize Baltimore's historic role is an immigration walking tour of Fell's Point, a joint project that the group developed with the Fell's Point Preservation Society. My husband and I, with our three daughters, ages 5, 7 and 9, took the two-hour tour last month and spent a delightful day walking, eating, shopping and water-taxiing around Fell's Point and the Inner Harbor. The tour may have been a bit too advanced for my younger girls, but they enjoyed walking around and hearing the personal stories. My 9-year-old understood the subject matter much better, and most children 10 and older will probably have studied some form of immigration and can put the facts in even greater context.

Tours are led by either a historian or costumed "historic figure." Our tour guide, Denise Whitman, an antiques storeowner and associate director of the Preservation Society, took on the accent and corset of Bridget O'Malley, an Irish indentured servant from the 1770s. While much of the historical information that she explained was beyond my daughters' understanding, she did an admirable job of drawing them in with props and vignettes they could relate to. The first thing Bridget did was hand us all freshly cut leaves of apple mint, horehound and lemon balm herbs from the Preservation Society's Colonial garden. She explained that many of the immigrants came in steerage class, under horrible conditions, so they didn't smell too good. The girls sniffed their herbs throughout the walk. Bridget explained that the land now called Fell's Point was actually purchased by shipbuilder William Fell from Lord Baltimore about 1730. Several street names in the neighborhood, including Ann, Aliceanna and Bond, were named after members of the Fell family.

Since the buildings on the tour are not in chronological order, the snippets of history Bridget presented came across a bit jumbled. A useful immigration timeline from the Baltimore Immigration Project's Web site (www.immigrationbaltimore.org) helped put it all in perspective for me afterward.

According to the Baltimore Immigration Project, more than 2 million immigrants landed in Baltimore from 1754 through the outbreak of World War I. Most came from Germany, Ireland and Eastern Europe. Since there was no direct steamship service from Mediterranean ports, most Southern Europeans came to Baltimore via other American cities....

Posted on Tuesday, June 22, 2004 at 12:58 PM | Comments (0) | Top

A 'Treasure-House' of Computer History in Minneapolis

Graeme Philipson, The Age (Melbourne) June 22 2004:

Computer history is carefully stored at a US university.

I am writing this in the reading room of the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota, perched above the Mississippi River in the suburbs of Minneapolis. The institute, founded in 1977, is one of the few organisations in the world devoted to the history of the computer industry and information technology.

Over the past 25 years the institute has collected an archive of more than 600 cubic metres of documents on the history of computing. I have come to Minneapolis to visit this fine collection. It contains the private papers of many of the pioneers of the computer industry and a lot of internal company records. These include the entire corporate archives of Burroughs, one of the two companies that merged to form Unisys in 1987.

There are hundreds of thousands of brochures, reports, market research analyses and other documents either not available elsewhere or scattered piecemeal. It is a treasure-house of IT history unrivalled in the world.

The institute's director is Arthur Norberg, one of the best-known and most respected historians of science and technology. He was the institute's first full-time director, from 1981 to 1993, and returned to the post in 1999. He is also a professor at the university, where he holds the chair in the history of technology.

"The institute is much more than just a library," Norberg explains. "We are also involved in teaching people about the history of computing, and in training them to do research in the subject. We have had many graduate and post-doctoral students at the facility. We also use our research project to help uncover more archival material. We often don't know what's out there until one of our researchers starts digging. They will come across references to companies that we didn't even know existed."

The institute collects much more than documents. It has a collection of more than 150,000 pictures, brochures, films and other illustrative material. It also maintains an extensive oral history program that aims to capture some of the reasons computer companies made the decisions they did.

"We can tell what companies did from the published record," says Norberg, "but we often can't tell why or how. By interviewing some of the people involved in those decisions, we can grasp how the decision-making process worked."

The professor is very proud of the institute's collection and how it has grown over the years. It is open to the public but is not a lending library. The collection is housed in the Elmer L. Andersen Library, a purpose-built archiving establishment with more than 8000 square metres of storage in caverns drilled out of sandstone. Built five years ago and named after a state governor, the library houses several other special collections.

These include the Children's Literature Research Institute, which is one of the world's most extensive collections of children's books and information about their authors; the Immigration History Research Institute; the Social Welfare History archives; and the Givens Collection of African-American history. It also houses one of the world's largest collections of Sherlock Holmes material.

Professor Norberg took me into the storage area, 20 metres below ground, where the temperature and humidity are kept at the optimum levels for document storage.

Henry Ford said "History is bunk". History is not bunk. We can understand computing technology, and where it will take us, if we understand where it has come from....

Posted on Tuesday, June 22, 2004 at 7:00 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Remembering Ancient Greece's Contributions

Troy Lennon, in the Courier Mail (Queensland, Australia) June 22 2004:

When people think of Greece they often think of the ancient civilisation that built the Parthenon, created many of the sciences and established the original Olympic Games. There are many reminders of the age when Greece was possibly the most advanced civilisation on Earth. It was at the height of Ancient Greek civilisation that we saw some of the first serious attempts to understand science and the world without reference to magic or gods. The Ancient Greeks made some major contributions to modern society, many of which have spread to the entire world.

Democracy

The word democracy was coined by the ancient Greeks from the words demos, meaning people, and kratos, meaning rule. Even though forms of shared power had existed in many forms before, particularly in small farming communities, it was the Greek city states that recognised people - as long as they were not slaves or women - as citizens and gave them the right to vote on how the state was run. This was possible mostly because their populations rarely exceeded 10,000 people (although some estimates say some had as many as 60,000) and slaves and women were excluded. The relatively small numbers allowed voting and tallying the votes to take place quickly.

Even though the exclusions limited the number of people who actually had a say to as little as a third of the population, it was still a more open system than that of the tyrants who had previously ruled Greece.

This form of politics originated at Athens, which held assemblies every nine days that citizens were allowed to attend. These meetings were organised by a committee elected by all citizens. Those present could take part in debates and vote on laws and decisions to be made by a government chosen by the elected committee. This assembly also elected leaders of the military. They voted by a show of hands, which meant that voters could be intimidated by more powerful personalities in the assembly. They could also vote to send a citizen into exile, which was done by scratching the name into a broken piece of pottery (many of which still survive).

Despite the fact there were so many people eligible to take part, many citizens lived too far away to attend each assembly. In Athens, 6000 people had to attend for decisions to be valid. Of those, only a handful of the most influential and powerful men would speak.

Ancient Greek democracy lasted only briefly but it inspired later systems.

Scientists and Philosophers

Some of the greatest minds of all time were born in ancient Greece or were strongly influenced by great Greek thinkers. While some, like the Athenian Socrates (circa 470-399BC), were born in the great Greek city states and took part in some important events in Greek history, others like Thales of Mitylene (circa 624-545BC) came from outposts of the Greek empire but were greatly influenced by the Greek intellectual climate and in turn influenced others.

Although he produced no written works, Socrates is credited with developing important philosophical concepts, including the process of inductive reasoning. He would conduct discourses with others, drawing them out on a particular subject and then destroying their argument through logic. His student, Plato, would further develop his ideas and, in turn, influence the Macedonian-born Aristotle, whose ideas on logical reasoning owed much to Socrates.

Thales made the first recorded attempts to understand the elements without reference to gods or mythical powers. Even though some of these ideas were wrong, he started others on the quest to find the right answers. Thales also made observations of the skies and believed that heavenly objects followed physical rules that could be determined through mathematics.

Thales was a great influence on Pythagoras, from whom we inherited many of our basic geometrical and mathematical concepts and principles and ideas of rational philosophy.

Archimedes (circa 290-211 BC), although born in Syracuse in what is now Sicily, was ostensibly a Greek thinker. He made some of the most profound discoveries in the fields of mathematics, physics and engineering. These included knowledge about the displacement of water and the upward force of water (Archimedes' Principle). He is also credited with many inventions, including the Archimedes Screw, an ingeniously simple pump that uses a screw mechanism....

Posted on Tuesday, June 22, 2004 at 6:56 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Toture Policy Was Far Different in Vietnam

John Stuart Blackton, in the Washington Post (June 21 2004):

The Justice Department has advised the White House that President Bush (and those who follow his orders) may contravene treaties, U.S. law and international law under the broad doctrine of "necessity."

This advice contrasts sharply with that of an earlier White House, under Lyndon Johnson, during the Vietnam War. In that war, the decision was made to employ the full powers of the commander in chief to buttress and reinforce the Geneva Conventions and the criminal sanctions under the U.S. Code that followed from these conventions. Attorney General John Ashcroft and others in the administration have suggested that the recent disclosures about abuses at Abu Ghraib prison are simply a reflection of the universal "hard side" of war. It was ever thus and will forever be is the implication. Yet the record of the U.S. military in Vietnam, not our most glorious military undertaking, suggests otherwise.

Far more attention was paid in Vietnam than in Iraq to ensuring an environment in which every American combatant understood the basic rules of the Geneva Conventions. These principles were part of universal military training, reinforced by the chain of command in the field and largely, although certainly not universally, adhered to by the troops.

The International Red Cross sought assurances in December 1964 from the U.S. and Vietnamese governments that their armed forces were abiding by the Geneva Conventions. These requests prompted a policy review that led the U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam to appoint a joint U.S.-Vietnamese military committee in September 1965 to work out details on the application of the Geneva Conventions in Vietnam. Every draftee and volunteer was given, during basic training, mandatory instruction in the principles of the conventions. Soldiers were tested on that training, and the results were recorded in their personnel jackets. This training was repeated at successive stages, and all soldiers arriving in Vietnam received orientation in the Geneva Conventions during their initial processing.

Every soldier also received a plastic pocket card bearing the signature of our commander in chief, Lyndon Baines Johnson. It was headed "The Enemy in Your Hands" and summarized the conventions in simple, clear language. Item No. 3, "MISTREATMENT OF ANY CAPTIVE IS A CRIMINAL OFFENSE. EVERY SOLDIER IS PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ENEMY IN HIS HANDS," was followed by this unambiguous guidance: "It is both dishonorable and foolish to mistreat a captive. It is also a punishable offense. Not even a beaten enemy will surrender if he knows his captors will torture or kill him. He will resist and make his capture more costly. Fair treatment of captives encourages the enemy to surrender."

A program of instruction for all U.S. and Vietnamese military units was established in Vietnam to teach the basic rules for handling prisoners. Regulations were promulgated instructing U.S. units and advisers to identify and keep records of all captives turned over to the Vietnamese, including specifying to whom the captives were transferred.

The signed order from President Johnson in our pockets was a critical element of accountability and personal responsibility. In the event that any of us might be instructed to treat prisoners in an inhumane manner, we were in a position to recognize and refuse an unlawful order that contravened a signed direct order from the president....

Posted on Monday, June 21, 2004 at 10:56 AM | Comments (0) | Top

How Does Mediaeval History Relate to Today's Terrorism?

From the Straits Times (Singapore) June 21 2004:

The battle of ideas is a major front in the war on terrorism. Images on Arab satellite television vie with sound-bites on United States cable news. But at a deeper level, the battle is also over history.

Addressing US Air Force graduates on June 2, US President George W. Bush recalled a historic message received by Allied soldiers during World War II. US General Dwight Eisenhower's Great Crusade speech had rallied Allied forces to the liberation of Europe. Although President Bush quoted General Eisenhower's D-Day address, he diplomatically omitted his phrase 'Great Crusade'. These words would only have played into the hands of militant Islamists. After all, Osama bin Laden's preferred title for Al-Qaeda is the 'World Islamic Front for holy war against Jews and Crusaders'.

How and why has an episode in mediaeval history become so important in today's war on terrorism? For elements of the ummah, the worldwide community of Muslims, Europe's Crusades in the Middle East over 900 years ago remain an open wound. Launched by Pope Urban II in a speech in 1095, the Crusades marked the West's first invasion of the Islamic heartlands. Stretching over two centuries, the Crusades shaped relations between Islam and the West. And they continue to do so, far beyond their original boundaries.

Soon after Sept 11, Osama extended the term Crusaders to include Australians in East Timor. His rhetoric distorted history and geography. But it struck a chord with South-east Asian Islamists. Imam Samudra, the operational chief of the October 2002 Bali bombings, screamed out 'Crusaders!' when confronted by his victims' relatives.

NEW SHAPINGS

IRONICALLY, modern Muslim perceptions of the Crusades were shaped by Western history books. The 19th century Syrian Christian intellectuals translated these books and produced the Arabic terms 'al-hurub al-salibiyya' (Crusader wars) or 'al-salibiyyun' (Crusaders).

Another pivotal moment in the process was when the 19th century Ottoman Sultan and Sunni Caliph Abdulhamid II called his territory's seizure by Western powers a 'new Crusade'. The Ottoman Empire's collapse and the subsequent carve-up of the Middle East fuelled Muslim fears of total Western domination.

The rise of political Islam and the establishment of Israel stoked the historical analogies. Egyptian Islamist ideologue Sayyid Qutb reinforced the modern militant view of the Crusades. Writing of 'the Crusader spirit that runs in the blood of all Occidentals', he tied it to the 'financial influence of the Jews of the United States', 'English ambition' and 'Anglo-Saxon guile'.

After his execution by Egyptian authorities, his equally radical brother Muhammad Qutb fleshed out this radical application of crusading history. Exiled from his native Egypt, he worked as a university professor in Jeddah, counting Osama as one of his students.

Even relatively moderate writers and historians recognised the polemical value of the Crusades for mobilising Muslim consciousness.

During the first Gulf War, an Egyptian hero of the 1973 war with Israel wrote a best-seller calling the conflict the 'Eighth Christian Crusade'. And during the Balkan wars in the 1990s, Orthodox Christian Serbs announced a crusade against Islam in Europe. Predictably, this played into the hands of radical Islamists. But it did not hurt the militant cause that mainstream Saudi schoolbooks had described a new sulubbiya (crusaderism) a generation before Osama used the term....

Posted on Monday, June 21, 2004 at 9:33 AM | Comments (0) | Top

New Slave Diary

From the New York Times (June 20 2004):

In the summer of 2002, an elderly woman named Gladys Watt walked into the Historical Society in Greenwich, Conn., with a weathered leather-bound notebook. The notebook had belonged to her neighbor, Lydia Turnage Connolly, who died in 1984 at the age of 99. When Mrs. Connolly moved into a nursing home in the early 1980's, she asked her friend to keep her things.

Mrs. Watt had known her neighbor for years, but had not known that Mrs. Connolly was black, the daughter of a former Alabama slave, Wallace Turnage, who at some point in the late 19th century wrote an account of his years in slavery and his escape. (Mrs. Connolly never told her neighbors that she was black, instead describing herself as "Portugee.")

Her father's notebook, along with another recently surfaced narrative by a former Virginia slave, John Washington, is being studied by a Yale historian, David W. Blight, who plans to publish both in the next few years. Professor Blight says that there are only a half-dozen or so narratives by former slaves recounting their self-emancipation in such detail, and that these two provide an unusually vivid and emotionally powerful account of life under slavery and the road to freedom. Excerpts follow. •

Mr. Turnage begins his account in the third person, in an almost classical tone that suggests it was intended to be read by future historians.

Wallace Turnage's apology for his book. My book is a sketch of my life or adventures and persecutions which I went through from 1860 to 1865. I do not mean to speak disparagingly of those who sold me, nor of those who bought me. Though I seen a hard time, it had an attendency to make a man of me.

It is not all of the details of my hard ships, but merely a sketch of that which I think would be most interesting to those who shall approve my book. I could say more of the South and of its fertile soil, but I don't think it is necessary.

I will also beg my reader to excuse my ungrammatical and desultory biography because my kind reader can see that I have been deprived of an education, and what knowledge I have to present this biography to you, I learnt during that time and since I escapted the clutches of those who held me in slavery.

Mr. Turnage describes the first of several times he was sold, probably at the age of 14. The buyer, Hector Davis, is listed as a slave trader in an 1852 directory in Richmond, Va. From the narrative and genealogical research, it appears that Mr. Turnage's father was Sylvester Brown Turnage, whose family had owned his mother. Morehead City is on the North Carolina coast.

In the year of 1860, I was carried to Richmond, V.A. and sold to a man by the name of Hector Davis. Now I could not rightly be sold until all of the people's children I belonged to were of age, so the oldest one got married, so she was allowed to draw her part, though after she had drawned me she was not to sell me out of the family, for her Brother was my father. For all of that she and her Husband made a plot with one Mr. Reuben Wallace to take me to Richmond and sell me. So they told me that they was going to take me to More head City to nurse and I could come to see my Mother when I wanted to. so I thought that was very nice and I consented to go, thinking all of the while, that I was going to More Head City to nurse. but I was greatly mistaken. So instead of going to Morehead city, I was carried to Richmond and was sold to Mr. Hector Davis. He gave nine hundred and fifty dollars for me. I was kept then as his auction and office boy. so I lived in Richmond some time, taking people from the jail to the dressing room and from the dressing room to the auction room.

John Washington tells of learning to read and of seeing slaves being sold to plantations in states south of Virginia, where he spent all of his years in slavery.

At about 4 years of age Mother learned me the alphabet from the "New York Primer" I was kept at my lessons an hour or Two each night by my mother: My first Great Sorrow was caused by seeing one morning, a number of "Plantation Hands," formed into lone line, with little Bundles straped to their backs, Men Women, and children. and all marched off to be Sold South away from all that was near and dear to them. Parents, wives husbands and children; all separated one from another perhaps never to meet again on earth. I shall never forget the weeping that morning amoung those that were left behind each one Expecting to go next....

Posted on Sunday, June 20, 2004 at 10:14 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Gettysburg: What If Gen. Stuart, Lee's Scout, Had Arrived in Time for the First Day of Battle?

From the Washington Post (June 20, 2004):

Historians have often cited the Battle of Gettysburg, July 1-3, 1863, as the turning point of the Civil War. Historians and history buffs remain perplexed by this question: What if Gen. Robert E. Lee's chief scout, Maj. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart, and his 4,500 cavalrymen had arrived on time for the first day of battle, rather than tired and on the afternoon of the second day? Would Stuart's presence have assured a Confederate victory?

The story behind his tardy arrival begins at the Fauquier County village of Rector's Crossroads (now Atoka) on June 22, 1863, and ends at the Loudoun County ford across the Potomac River called Rowser's (or Rowzie's) on June 27.

On June 22, Stuart received a directive from Lee, whose more than 80,000 troops were trekking north in the Shenandoah Valley or had already crossed the Potomac River. Lee told Stuart to send three of his five cavalry brigades across the Potomac to guard the right (east) flank of Lee's army. Lee did not suggest a crossing point.

As Union forces were about to traverse the Potomac in central and western Loudoun, Stuart was faced with two options: to cross the river west of the Blue Ridge, a two-day march from Salem (now Marshall), where most of Stuart's cavalrymen rested, or to cross in eastern Loudoun or western Fairfax County.

The latter route was longer and meant that Stuart's forces would risk encountering Union forces that were massing for their Potomac crossings nearly everywhere in Loudoun, northern Prince William County and western Fairfax.

Stuart could not afford a major engagement with them. His forces were far outnumbered, and his horsemen had just fought a four-day cavalry battle from Aldie to Upperville. That had given Lee's forces time to move northward in the Shenandoah Valley without being harassed by Union forces.

On June 23, Lee sent Stuart a second order that was ambiguous. One paragraph stated, "I think you had better withdraw this side [in the Shenandoah Valley] of the mountain [Blue Ridge] to-morrow night, cross at Shepherdstown next day, and move over to Fredericktown," meaning Frederick, Md.

But the last paragraph stated, "You will, however, be able to judge whether you can pass around their army without hindrance, doing them the damage you can, and cross the river east of the mountains."

Stuart was sleeping under a tree in the pouring rain at Rector's Crossroads, protected by a slicker, when his adjutant, Maj. Henry B. McClellan, woke him and read Lee's second order. In his 1885 book, "I Rode With Jeb Stuart: The Life and Campaigns of Major General J.E.B. Stuart," McClellan wrote: "The order was committed to my charge for the night and Stuart was soon asleep."

Such inaction on Stuart's part was unlike his take-charge attitude earlier in the war. But during the Aldie-to-Upperville actions, McClellan wrote that Stuart "personally participated in it but little, remaining, however, in close observation of the field. I asked the reason for this unusual proceeding, and he replied that he had given all necessary instructions to his brigade commanders, and he wished them to feel the responsibility resting upon them, and to gain whatever honor the field might bring...."

Posted on Sunday, June 20, 2004 at 9:55 AM | Comments (0) | Top

The Agnew Archives

From the Washington Post (June 20 2004):

Spiro T. Agnew's monkey skin cape haunts its keepers.

A gift to the vice president of the United States from the president of Kenya in 1971, the cape now rests folded in a long yellow box at the University of Maryland archives, along with an unusual assortment of other objects from Agnew's political life.

There's a painting of Agnew that archivists refer to as "beaver teeth," because of the woody hue the artist chose for his subject's incisors. It hangs next to another portrait of the former vice president made entirely of tiny bird feathers -- a gift from Suharto, the former president of Indonesia. Then there's the painting of Agnew as a circus clown with orange hair and a cocked top hat.

An inflatable Agnew punching bag, a set of "S-T-A" branding irons and a plaque from the 1972 "Salute to Ted Agnew Night," featuring special guest Frank Sinatra and master of ceremonies Bob Hope, are also entombed in the 10-by-17-foot storage room at the university's Hornbake Library in College Park. More generic, though equally curious, are the Asian folding screen that lights up when plugged in, a miniature Apollo rocket and a bronze Buddha statute.

Less explicable are the ornate wooden structures that archivists suspect might be African birthing chairs and a small wooden box that is covered with some sort of animal pelt and contains a single golf ball.

Jennie Levine, who oversees this area of the archives, says she prefers wading through the diaries of 19th-century women. But she and others entrusted with the Agnew collection have a special relationship with the memorabilia of the former Maryland governor and disgraced vice president. Few outside the staff have ever seen it. Rumor has it that earlier archivists would wear the cape while going about their work cataloguing and organizing other items in their care.

"A conservationist who came in suspected it was treated with DDT," said Levine. "So we don't put it on."

Over the course of his political career, Agnew amassed closets full of mementos, gifts, and commemorative items. What value he might have imagined they'd have for future generations is anyone's guess.

But high-level public officials can be spared such decisions as what to keep and what to pitch. Just leave it for someone else to sort though. That is just what Agnew did.

His items landed at the archives in 1974 and in several other shipments before he died in 1996. The objects arrived in boxes along with his papers, which are now one of the archives' most important collections.

Researchers dig through the documents for insight into Richard M. Nixon's vice president, who resigned in 1973 after pleading no contest to tax evasion charges stemming from bribes he allegedly took while governor of Maryland. But so far, no one has mined any of the other memorabilia that might offer a different kind of portrait of the man....

Posted on Sunday, June 20, 2004 at 9:52 AM | Comments (0) | Top

The Return of King Arthur

From the Washington Post (June 20 2004):

Love and lust, friendship and betrayal, action and romance, heroes and villains, right and might -- all are parts of the legend of King Arthur.

And the History Channel adds the element of mystery as it tries to determine the truth behind the legend in "Quest for King Arthur." The special debuts on Sunday at 9 p.m. and is narrated by Patrick Stewart.

Was the legend ever true? Were the heroes ever real? These are just two of the many questions investigated by the two-hour program, which was filmed in England and uses reenactments of battles and other events to delve into what's history and what's myth.

In its sleuthing, the documentary also uses maps, art, historic writings, and interviews with experts who discuss archaeology and medieval warfare as well as history and literature.

"Quest for King Arthur" began about two years ago in a brainstorming session, said Beth Dietrich Segarra, vice president of historical programming for the channel and executive producer of the program.

"We were trying to think of topics that are known by a lot of the population -- but maybe they don't know the whole story," she said.

"One topic that came up was King Arthur. There are schools that believe he was a real person, but did Arthur really exist? Was there a king who united England? There were a number of men who kind of fit a profile that could give little bits and pieces of the legend."

Christopher A. Snyder, chair of the history and politics department at Marymount University in Arlington and a consultant for "Quest," said he thinks a strength of the documentary is that it begins by telling the story of Arthur and Camelot.

"It gives respect to the literature and looks at how history influenced that literature," said Snyder, who also has authored "The World of King Arthur" and "The Britons."

Snyder said he got interested in the topic "not in any highbrow way" but by playing "Dungeons and Dragons" in his youth.

"It was a creative way to put yourself in another world," he said....

Posted on Sunday, June 20, 2004 at 9:50 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Presidential Reunions

From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (June 20, 2004):

Of all the stirring images from this month's farewell and funeral for Ronald Reagan, none may be more enduring than this: five presidents, bent into church pews, in prayer for one of their own.

The death of a president is always a poignant moment. It is the rare time in our civic life when remembrance trumps recrimination, when reflection and reconciliation prevail. It is a reminder, too, of the special burden of the presidency, and of how the 43 men who have shared that burden have shared a special bond as well.

Presidential reunions are rare, coming only at the opening of presidential libraries and at funerals. One of the most striking glimpses of the Kennedy years comes from a picture taken at the funeral of House Speaker Sam Rayburn. Crammed into a North Texas church were three presidents (Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy) plus a man who, on another day in Texas in another year, would become president himself (Lyndon B. Johnson). One of the most affecting images of the Reagan years came at Andrews Air Force Base in 1981 shortly after the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. There, in the twilight gloam, were three presidents entering the familiar silver-and-blue aircraft for the trip to the Cairo funeral: Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter.

Earlier that evening, remembers Fred Upton, then a young White House aide, President Reagan met solemnly with Nixon, Ford and Carter, and he remembers Reagan ushering the three to the South Portico for the brief helicopter ride to the presidential aircraft. It was, he says, the first time four presidents were ever captured in the same picture.

"These men -- the former presidents -- are a symbol of the country's past but also a symbol of its unity," says Upton, now in his ninth term as a Republican congressman from Michigan. "They've beaten each other up, but when they get together you see that they all, in their own way, put the country first."

The sad gathering in Washington National Cathedral this month was, along with the funeral of President Nixon, one of the rare times that five presidents have ever been seen together. That's testimony to longer lives and shorter stays in the White House; Clinton and Reagan, for example, were the only two-term presidents besides Eisenhower in the second half of the last century....

Posted on Sunday, June 20, 2004 at 9:42 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Centuries-Old Knowledge of Church Sex Abuse

From the Los Angeles Times (June 20 2004):

Facing an estimated 800 sexual-abuse lawsuits in California, Roman Catholic officials have argued that the church learned only in recent years that it had a widespread problem with priests molesting children.

A report in February by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, for example, said Cardinal Roger M. Mahony and other bishops didn't realize until 1985 that sexual abuse by clergy was "more than a matter of tragic but isolated incidents."

But a North Carolina priest and two former monks who live in Southern California say they have scoured ancient Vatican records and forgotten Latin texts to show just the opposite: that the church has recognized the problem of abuse by priests for at least 1,700 years and has failed to address it successfully.

"The contention that the present scandal is isolated to this era is completely debunked by the Roman Catholic Church's own documents," concluded Father Thomas P. Doyle and former monks Richard Sipe and Patrick Wall in their 375-page report, "Canonical History of Clerical Sexual Abuse." The authors finished the report last month and are looking for a publisher.

Doyle, now a retired military chaplain, co-wrote a seminal report to U.S. bishops in 1985, warning of problems with abusive priests. Sipe counseled hundreds of abusive priests before he left the clergy. Wall, who heard molestation cases against priests when he served on the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis tribunal council, now works for a plaintiff's attorney.

Church defenders, pointing out that the three authors are allied with or paid by lawyers representing molestation plaintiffs, charge that the report is a ploy to strengthen their hand in court.

"Follow the money," said Peter Michael Callahan, an attorney representing the Diocese of Orange. "What's their motivation? They are professional witnesses who have a position to sell. It's not exactly impartial scholarship."

But the three men say the documents prove that the Catholic Church has known for centuries about molesters in its ranks and has no excuse for failing to take the danger to children seriously until scandal engulfed the church in 2002.

For example, in the 4th century, St. Basil of Caesarea set up a detailed system of punishment to deal with clerics at his monastery who molested boys. Perpetrators were to be flogged and put in chains for six months; they were never again allowed unsupervised interaction with minors.

In the 13th century, Pope Gregory IX added to church law a declaration that sexual abuse demanded expulsion from the priesthood and that perpetrators would be turned over to secular authorities.

"Canonical History" lists 58 high-level documents dealing with sexual misconduct of the clergy -- from books by saints to papal decrees to declarations by church councils -- as evidence....

Posted on Sunday, June 20, 2004 at 9:37 AM | Comments (0) | Top

What Class of '94 Learned from Reagan

Newt Gingrich, in the Weekly Standard (June 28 2004):

RONALD REAGAN'S legacy as a party builder has gotten short shrift. The Republicans were able to win a majority in the House in 1994 for the first time in 40 years, and then keep that majority in 1996 for the first time since 1928, because we were close students of Reagan. When House Republicans stood on the Capitol steps in 1994 and announced our Contract With America, we were standing on President Reagan's shoulders. This is not merely a nice phrase. It was true in the issues highlighted, in voter appeal, and in the actual staging of the event.

The issues in the Contract With America were almost entirely derived from Ronald Reagan's speeches dating back into the 1960s. Welfare reform--look at Governor Reagan in 1970 at the National Governors' Conference as the start of a 26-year effort that culminated when President Clinton (having vetoed welfare reform twice) finally signed the welfare reform bill in 1996. Balanced budgets--a thousand Reagan speeches said they were desirable. Tax cuts--they had been the centerpiece of Reagan's economic policies. Stronger defense--again, a key goal of the 1980 Reagan campaign.

The possibility of a Republican majority was a direct result of Reagan's success. In 1974 only 18 percent of the country identified themselves as Republicans. Some people actually talked about the danger of the party's disappearing. Six short years later, Ronald Reagan not only won the election by a surprising margin but also carried the Republicans into control of the Senate and helped them pick up 33 seats in the House. Thanks to the rise of Reagan Democrats and their conversion into Republicans, by 1994 we had enough candidates and enough potential voters to be competitive for the first time since the Great Depression.

And the Capitol steps event itself was modeled on a similar Reagan event. In 1980, Guy VanderJagt, Bill Brock, and I approached Governor Reagan and his campaign about hosting an event in which every federal candidate in the Republican party would be given an opportunity to stand with him on key issues. The result was that in late September every House and Senate candidate stood with Reagan in a national event and made news back home explaining how they agreed with the Reagan platform and disagreed with the liberal platform. The result was a stunning upset as six new Republican senators were elected by a combined margin of less than 75,000 votes. The 1994 Contract ceremony on the Capitol steps was drawn directly from that 1980 experience....

Posted on Saturday, June 19, 2004 at 12:53 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Reagan and Higher Education

from the Chronicle of Higher Education (June 18 2004):

Ronald Wilson Reagan, the 40th president of the United States, who was buried last week, had an often-adversarial relationship with higher education, both as president and as governor of California.

To achieve one of his major goals as president -- the reduction of federal spending -- Mr. Reagan proposed numerous cutbacks in funds for colleges, although most of his proposals were rejected by Congress, and he abandoned the effort late in his presidency.

The Reagan era also saw the publication of a major federal report that criticized the state of American education; the first significant efforts to crack down on abuses in student-aid programs, especially at for-profit colleges; conflicts between government secrecy during the cold war and the free exchange of scientific ideas; a foreign invasion conducted in part to rescue American medical students; and the beginning of the culture wars that would roil many college campuses for years to come.

"Reagan saw his role as a preacher, but not necessarily as a policy leader or implementer," says Dick M. Carpenter II, an assistant professor of educational leadership at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, who has studied Mr. Reagan's impact on education. "Reagan was not as disastrous or as significant as people think he was."

Mr. Carpenter does credit Mr. Reagan with prompting governors to play a more active role in education. "He believed in pushing education issues back down to the states."

As governor of California, Mr. Reagan played a very active role, battling both student radicals and the state's higher-education establishment.

During his gubernatorial campaign in 1966, Mr. Reagan criticized the University of California's handling of student protests of the Vietnam War. Upon taking office, he cut the university's budget by 10 percent. Three weeks later, the university's Board of Regents voted to remove the system's president, Clark Kerr, who had refused to crack down on the protests at Berkeley.

When one meeting of the regents was disrupted by protesters, the governor, an exofficio regent, was overheard telling his fellow members of the board: "The regents must take over this university. Our asses are to the wall."

He later posted National Guard troops on the Berkeley campus after a demonstration in which one person died in clashes with police officers....

Posted on Saturday, June 19, 2004 at 12:41 PM | Comments (0) | Top

A History of Cursing

From the Wall Street Journal (June 16 2004):

No one can prove whether our earliest ancestors swore, but it's dang likely.

Linguists have traced some of Americans' favorite four-letter words to the 11th century. Over the next 600 years, many other profane terms were incorporated into the lower-class vernacular of most languages. By 1785, an English scholar, Captain Francis Grose, had enough material to assemble a Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. According to Grose, "fusty luggs" referred to a "sluttish woman," and a man's sexual organ was known as a "plug tail." Women's breasts were variously referred to as "apple dumplin' shop" and "Cupid's kettle drums." An exclamation of surprise was "zounds!"; a foolish fellow a "nincumpoop."

Immigrants brought their oaths to America. In the country's early years, most cussing involved religious, rather than sexual, taboos. Taking the Lord's name in vain was a sin, but throughout the ages people coined substitutes considered slightly less blasphemous: As early as 1743 came "golly" and "gosh," and later "ye gods," "by George" and "doggone." Similarly, "Jiminy" began substituting for Jesus in the 1830s, followed by "Jiminy Crickets," "gee whillikins" and "jeez." "Shucks," "sugar," "heck" and "Sam Hill" served other rhetorical purposes.

With westward expansion came a golden age of cussing. By the mid-19th century, wrote Geoffrey Hughes in his 1991 book, "Swearing," "particularly as a result of the opening of the West, American speech had started to acquire its own colorful slang and devil-may-care raciness."

Indeed, in Deadwood, S.D., the setting for HBO's tangy series about a crude frontier outpost in 1876, the characters, both men and women, rarely get three words out of their mouths without using what's euphemistically referred to as the "Oedipal polysyllable." The surly saloon owner, aptly named Al Swearengen, is particularly obscene, turning any four-letter word or its variation into nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and exclamations. While the curses sound oddly modern, an HBO spokeswoman says the show's executive producer, David Milch, researched the period and place extensively, and claims the language is authentic.

Others agree that the virtual anarchy of many Western communities nullified the taboos of Eastern cities and the old country. On the far side of the Mississippi, observed the Baltimore editor H. L. Mencken, "a wild and lawless development of the language went on." Writing about Montana mining towns, Thomas J. Dimsdale, a 19th-century professor and editor, noted, "The most fruitful source of quarrel and bloodshed is the all-pervading custom of using strong language." Mark Twain, who was equally shocked and thrilled by the blasphemy of riverboat captains, announced that "when it comes to pure ornamental cursing, the American is gifted above the sons of men."

Yet like most writers of his time, Twain sanitized his characters' dialogue. A real Huckleberry Finn, a lower-class teenage runaway, would likely have had a dirtier mouth than the fictional character does, suggests John J. McCarthy, a linguistics professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Most 19th-century journalism and fiction was cleaned up, either by omitting words, using dashes or substituting euphemisms like "pshaw!" or "land's sake!"

That's why it is almost impossible to know with certainty how much cursing ordinary Americans did before voices were recorded. Some written records -- trial and court-martial transcripts and diaries, for example -- give hints about Americans' vocabulary. But since many people, especially in the lower classes, were illiterate, most discourse in places like Deadwood evaporated as quickly as it was uttered....

Posted on Saturday, June 19, 2004 at 11:35 AM | Comments (0) | Top

NPR Discussion: Clinton's Memoirs

National Public Radio (June 18 2004):

ANCHORS: STEVE INSKEEP

REPORTERS: JUAN WILLIAMS

STEVE INSKEEP, host:

Here in the United States, former President Bill Clinton releases his memoirs next week after years of anticipation and a carefully controlled publicity campaign. Publisher Alfred A. Knopf has kept the book away from reviewers and controlled the release of advance information--all part of an effort to build up anticipation for the book itself. Here's NPR senior correspondent Juan Williams.

JUAN WILLIAMS reporting:

The book is titled "My Life," but anyone who remembers the years 1992 to 2000 knows that President Clinton's life set the beat for much of the nation's political and cultural arguments. The former president has written his version of those years and his political upbringing in a 957-page tome that will be released as the clock strikes 12:01 AM Tuesday.

Unidentified Man: Please join me in welcoming President William Jefferson Clinton.

WILLIAMS: Clinton, who was paid a $10 million advance, began doing publicity for the book at the National Booksellers Convention in Chicago.

Former President BILL CLINTON (United States): Wow! You have to be careful treating me that way. You'll have me thinking I'm president again.

WILLIAMS: At the convention, Clinton said the book is not meant to be a history text, but a personal intimate recounting.

Mr. CLINTON: I want people to understand what it is like to be president, and I've tried to describe that in ways so that you'll at least see how it looked to me. You know, a lot of presidential memoirs, they say, are dull and self-serving. I hope mine is interesting and self-serving.

WILLIAMS: The orchestrated media blitz begins today with the first of five audio excerpts carefully selected by the publisher that will air on radio stations owned by Infinity Broadcasting. President Clinton has already taped an interview for Sunday night on CBS' "60 Minutes." Clinton said he regards his impeachment as a, quote, "badge of honor" because it was, quote, "illegitimate," end quote. And the former president lambasts congressional Republicans and independent prosecutor Ken Star for a, quote, "abuse of power." Clinton said his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky was, quote, "morally indefensible" and led to a year of intense family counseling before his wife agreed to stay in the marriage. Clinton has also done an interview with Time magazine that will be on newsstands Monday. That night stores will stay open to sell the book at midnight in a strategy reminiscent of the drama leading up to the release of the "Harry Potter" books. And he'll also appear on "The Oprah Winfrey Show."

Mr. PAUL BOGARDS (Executive Director of Publicity, Alfred A. Knopf): There isn't really a model. We've clearly entered a new paradigm here.

WILLIAMS: Paul Bogards is executive director of publicity for Alfred A. Knopf, the company publishing the president's book. Bogards says the first printing of the book is a record for Knopf of 1.5 million books, and plans are already under way for a second printing. Bogards says he doesn't think the book's price will deter buyers.

Mr. BOGARDS: David McCullough's book on John Adams was a 35-dollar price point book. There have been a lot of big best-sellers that carried that price point. What people are concerned with is content and the strength of a work. That's what we're selling. We're selling a very good book, a memoir of a life and a presidency.

WILLIAMS: Stephen Hess, a presidential historian at The Brookings Institution, says there's some question about the historical value of the memoir.

Mr. STEPHEN HESS (The Brookings Institution): People are going to learn some things. Will they be disappointed? I'd bet my mortgage on that. Or in--the Nixon book sure didn't help us understand Watergate, and I'm betting that we're going to have the same experience again....

Posted on Saturday, June 19, 2004 at 10:05 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Reagan Allied Pro-Life Catholics and Protestants

Michael McGough, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (June 14, 2004):

...Reagan was raised in his mother's Protestant faith rather than in the Catholicism of his father. What, one wonders, would his mother have thought about a funeral for her son at which an Irish tenor sang "Ave Maria" as well as "Amazing Grace"?

Of course, it would be too much to credit Ronald Reagan with a convergence in forms of worship that began even before the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s. As the church historian Owen Chadwick points out in "The Christian Church in the Cold War," after World War II both Protestants and Catholics "altered their way of worship, radically and almost simultaneously, and the result was to make Protestants feel more at home in Catholic worship and Catholics feel more at home in Protestant worship."

Reagan may or may not have won the Cold War, but he had nothing to do with the innovation of the folk Mass or the willingness of Protestant ministers (including the pastor who presided at Reagan's sunset burial) to wear vestments once disdained by Reformers as the "rags of popery."

But Reagan was connected to one interesting (and to liberal Catholics ominous) offshoot of the ecumenical movement: an alliance between conservative Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants. The original point of connection was the anti-abortion movement, which Reagan championed. When pro-life Catholics found common cause with pro-life evangelical Protestants in the 1970s and 1980s, they didn't ask: "What are we doing here among these psalm singers?" They knew what they were doing -- closing ranks against the "culture of death."

In 1994 this arguably tactical alliance produced a manifesto titled "Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium." The authors and original endorsers included psalm singers and papists alike. On the evangelical side were the Rev. Pat Robertson, Charles Colson and Dr. Bill Bright of the Campus Crusade for Christ; Catholic signers included George Weigel and two future cardinals, Bishop Francis George and the Jesuit theologian Avery Dulles.

For the signatories, this aggregation was necessitated not just by a common faith in basic Christian beliefs but also by a need to oppose "relativism, anti-intellectualism and nihilism" and the erosion of the "privileged and foundational" role of religion in America's legal order.

If that language sounds familiar, it is because it could come from the speeches of George W. Bush, an Episcopalian-turned-evangelical- Methodist who, of course, delivered the climactic eulogy at Reagan's funeral. ...

Posted on Friday, June 18, 2004 at 7:14 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Alger Hiss: The Cold War Figure He Won't Slip Queitly Away

Michael Ollove, in the Balt Sun (June 13, 2004):

Alger Hiss won't go away.

No matter that his conviction was more than half a century in the past. That the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union have vanished. That Hiss himself -- traitor or martyr -- is nearly eight years dead. Somehow, some way, Alger Hiss manages to slip back into the public conversation.

So here he is again, this time as sideshow in the debate over the Bush administration's nomination of Allen Weinstein as the new national archivist, the executive who oversees preservation and access to historic government records.

The fight involves issues far removed from whether Hiss, the debonair, Baltimore-born diplomat and New Dealer, was really a spy in the employ of the Soviets, as Weinstein has written. But it nonetheless has brought out old Hiss antagonists, including Weinstein and The Nation magazine, the publication most steadfast in defense of Hiss.

"In the Hiss case, emotions still do run high," said John Earl Haynes, a historian at the Library of Congress who is convinced that Hiss was a Soviet spy.

The nomination of Weinstein, a historian of Soviet espionage, has aroused critics who say his practice of withholding access to his own research materials violates the norms of scholarship. Many of them suspect the Bush administration has championed Weinstein as the next archivist because he will reliably keep certain government records closed....

Posted on Friday, June 18, 2004 at 7:09 AM | Comments (0) | Top

New Study: The Personality Traits of Successful Presidents

Steve Rubenzer, in the Boston Globe (June 13, 2004):

Harry Truman said that being dumb was just about the worst thing for a president. Was he right? Or are there other personality traits that can predict the success of the occupant of the White House?

We recently examined the personalities of all 43 presidents; we asked 120 authors of presidential biographies to complete personality assessments of the men they studied. These ratings were correlated with assessments of presidential greatness by historians. Using our data, University of Minnesota professor Deniz Ones, an expert on the relationship of personality to job performance, identified nine personal qualities that can be counted on to determine presidential success.

* Rated intelligence. We asked our raters how bright they perceived the various presidents to be. Those who received high ratings, like Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson performed better than those rated as less gifted, like Warren G. Harding. There are exceptions: Andrew Jackson was the greatest president of his age, yet he ranked low on intellectual giftedness. So, ironically, did Harry Truman, who was rated in the lower third.

* Assertiveness, or the capacity to influence through one's presence and ideas, is the most important indicator of presidential success. Presidents are an assertive group, and on average, they score higher than eight of 10 typical Americans. Better presidents like the Roosevelts, Wilson, and Jackson score higher than average chief executives. Truman is the only successful president who was less assertive than his peers. Low scorers include Warren G. Harding, William Howard Taft, and Calvin Coolidge.

* Positive emotions. A president's optimism and enthusiasm are important indicators for job performance. They're also important for getting elected. High spirited presidents like the Roosevelts, Bill Clinton, and John F. Kennedy are typically more successful. The more reserved presidents, like John Quincy Adams, Herbert Hoover, and Richard Nixon, had less successful presidencies. But here, again, there are exceptions: George Washington was the only truly successful chief executive who scored low on this scale.....

For the most part, the same traits that make good presidents also tend to make successful CEOs, but there are two exceptions. Low straightforwardness has not been identified as a desirable quality in business leaders, nor has tender-mindedness. It may be that the job of president differs from other executive roles because of the diversity of the constituency and the scale of the stage.

Posted on Friday, June 18, 2004 at 7:05 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Why the World Forgot the Greatest NYC Disaster Before 9-11

Philip Dray, an historian and co-producer, with Hank Linhart, the chairperson of media arts at Pratt Institutue, of "Fearful Visitation: New York's Great Steamboat Fire of 1904"; in Newsday (June 15, 2004):

A city still determining how best to memorialize the terror attacks of 9/11 may find special meaning in today's 100th anniversary observance of the worst previous disaster in New York City's history: the burning of the steamboat General Slocum in the East River on June 15, 1904, which killed 1,021 people.

The Slocum tragedy challenged the city's ability to adequately respond to an emergency, decimated the Lower East Side's German-American community, and brought an outpouring of public grief and several official inquiries. Yet by the end of the 20th century the incident had been almost entirely forgotten.

Examining why the Slocum has faded from consciousness forces us to ponder the way history works - the reasons we remember some things, but not others. Proportionate to the city's population, the tragedy was actually of greater magnitude than the attack on the World Trade Center. Almost all the victims on the General Slocum came from one tightly knit ethnic neighborhood, Kleindeutschland; those who died at the World Trade Center hailed from all over the region, indeed from all over the world. So the pain of the Slocum fire and its aftermath was felt far more locally.

Nonetheless, notes historian Kenneth Jackson, "Just as the people at the World Trade Center were innocent victims who took a hit for us all, I think in some ways so did the passengers on the General Slocum."

The steamboat, carrying mostly women and children on a Sunday school picnic, had none of the glamor or hubris of the Titanic, the "unsinkable" ship that sank in April 1912. It also lacked the kind of social and political context that has made memorable New York's other great catastrophic fire, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of March 1911. Like the Slocum, the Triangle fire was blamed on corporate negligence and callousness, and the dead, similarly, were mostly young immigrant women. But the Triangle fire, where far fewer perished than aboard the Slocum, is remembered for stirring public outrage over unsafe factory conditions.

Certainly another cause of the Slocum's slippage from memory was the anti-German sentiment that swept New York at the time of the First World War. When, as Slocum historian Edward O'Donnell has said, Germans became "unsympathetic characters," many German Americans acted to hasten their assimilation into American society. The surnames adorning shop awnings along Avenue A - once known as "Deutsch Broadway" - were quickly anglicized. This bias would of course only deepen with the coming of the Second World War.

The size and density of New York City, and the competitive nature of life here, has often kept residents focused on the future, not the past. And because the Slocum tragedy was so devastating to one specific community, it may have simply been too painful to call to mind. Many of the residents of Kleindeutschland moved away. Although a survivors' association carried on for several decades, its numbers gradually dwindled until, by the late 1970s, the only monument to the victims in Manhattan, a small obelisk in Tompkins Square Park, was filthy with neglect and almost indecipherable....

Posted on Friday, June 18, 2004 at 6:51 AM | Comments (0) | Top

The Palestinians Are Rewriting History

Ahron Bregman, the author of Israel's Wars: A History Since 1947, in Newsday (June 16, 2004):

...Mixing facts and fiction and rewriting the history of the Holy Land is part of the Palestinians' struggle against Israel and part of their negotiating tactics. In fact, quite recently, during the July 2000 Camp David summit, Arafat, who during the summit failed to put on the table a single constructive plan for peace, did come up with an interesting suggestion. U.S. envoy Dennis Ross, who was present when Arafat spoke, explained that Arafat "did offer one new idea, which was that the Temple didn't stand in Jerusalem but in Nablus."

But Arab and Palestinian propaganda does not stop there, for it goes on to challenge not only Jewish and Israeli rights to the ancient parts of Palestine but also to the more modern parts of it. Thus, in school textbooks and other publications it is often claimed that the land of modern Israel was in fact "stolen" from the Arabs and that the Palestinians were effectively "robbed" by the Jews. This, of course, is nonsense. In my book " Israel's War: A History Since 1947," I put it this way: "The Jews did not...'rob' the Arabs or 'steal' their land, but rather they bought it from them. As for the Arab aristocracy of landowners who had sold the land to the Jews, they did so voluntarily and with open eyes."

Although Palestinians have legitimate grievances, there is absolutely no historical basis to their claims - some of which are utterly ridiculous - that Palestine is exclusively theirs and that the Jews "stole" their land. For the truth is that Jews have always lived in Palestine - as indeed did my family - and Jewish settlers did not, as it is often claimed by Arabs, seize land, but rather they bought it. Critics and foes of Israel should recollect that the state of Israel was established by the Jews on Jewish and legitimately purchased land. And it was blessed by the United Nations and recognized by nations of the world, most notably the United States....

Posted on Friday, June 18, 2004 at 6:39 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Put Reagan on the Dime?

Bill Adair, in the St. Petersburg Times (June 14, 2004):

After a week of tributes and eulogies to President Ronald Reagan, his admirers plan to move quickly with a proposal to put his face on coins or currency.

Putting Reagan on the $10 or $20 bill has the strongest backing right now. But that could prompt an unusual battle pitting Reaganites against supporters of Andrew Jackson, the populist president on the $20, or against the fans of Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father on the $10 who has had a resurgence in popularity.

On Capitol Hill last week, there were discussions of dollar-bill musical chairs: Reagan to the $10, Hamilton to the $50, while Ulysses Grant, the face on the $50, would be eliminated. That approach is based on the belief that Grant doesn't have as much lobbying clout in the nation's capital as Jackson or Hamilton.

Others would like Reagan on a coin.

Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Chumuckla, introduced a bill to put him on the half-dollar, although Reagan would displace John F. Kennedy, a move that might prompt an outcry from Democrats.

And then there's a compromise approach: put Reagan on half the dimes, leaving Franklin Roosevelt on the other half.

No matter what strategy congressional leaders choose, it's likely they will move quickly to take advantage of the warm feelings about Reagan prompted by last week's funerals and televised tributes.

"There's a lot of momentum to do something like this," said Rep. Dave Weldon, R-Melbourne, a co-sponsor of one of the dime proposals.

Supporters say Reagan deserves the honor because of his accomplishments battling communism and keeping peace in the world.

Miller said Reagan "won the Cold War without (firing) a shot" and "was truly the original compassionate conservative."

Grover Norquist, the chairman of the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, which promotes tributes and memorials to Reagan, calls him "the greatest president of the 20th century."

But some people balk at the idea of honoring him so quickly and say there already are many buildings and roads honoring him.

"I think it's premature, this rush to put his face on everything," said historian Robert Dallek. "I think you really need to allow 25 or 50 or even 100 years go by."...


Posted on Friday, June 18, 2004 at 6:31 AM | Comments (0) | Top

So Reagan's Policies Harmed Blacks?

Larry Elder, a libertarian talk show host, in frontpagemag.com (June 18, 2004):

"Ronald Reagan 'tortured' blacks."

One Sunday morning, as I drove to my local tennis court to play a match, I heard a black radio commentator give that assessment of the now late, great 40th president. Imagine my conflict. After all, here I am, about to selfishly work on my backhand, while having allowed Reagan to busy himself by "torturing" members of my race.

The Reagan-hated-blacks routine resurfaced during the week of his memorial services and tributes. This indictment includes the following charges: he cut social spending; he showed his latent racism by supporting Bob Jones University; he gave a states' rights speech in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were killed; he "insulted" the lone black member of his Cabinet; he opposed race-based preferences; he again demonstrated racial insensitivity by pursuing a policy of "constructive engagement" with the apartheid regime of South Africa; he attempted to fire the black female chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

Myth: Reagan cut social spending

Not according to the Congressional Research Service. Federal spending for social programs increased from $344.3 billion in 1981 to $412 billion in 1989, a 19.7 percent increase using 1982 dollars. As a percentage of Gross National Product, social spending during Reagan's two terms averaged 1.73 percent. By contrast, during the Carter years, social spending, as a percentage of GNP, averaged 1.65 percent.

Myth: Reagan showed his racism by supporting Bob Jones University.

The Reagan administration initially argued that, despite Bob Jones University's policy against interracial dating, the university still deserved its tax-exempt status. Reagan promptly reversed his position, and asked Congress to pass a bill prohibiting tax-exempt status for segregated schools.

Myth: Reagan signaled his racism by giving a campaign speech in Philadelphia, Miss.

Does it matter that when Reagan left Philadelphia, Miss., he traveled to New York to give a speech before the Urban League, a major civil rights organization? Some did, indeed, interpret Reagan's speech in Philadelphia, Miss., as a signal to anti-black Southerners. According to Lou Cannon, author of "Ronald Reagan: The Presidential Portfolio," the "states' rights speech" so bothered Nancy Reagan that she pushed for a shakeup in Reagan's campaign to avoid any other such missteps. Not exactly segregation then, segregation today, segregation tomorrow.

Myth: Reagan insulted a black member of his Cabinet.

At a meeting of black mayors, Reagan did, indeed, fail to recognize his own HUD secretary, mistakenly referring to him as "Mr. Mayor." Well, send in the bigot patrol.

Myth: Reagan opposed race-based preferences.

Yes, and so do most Republicans. And, for what it's worth, Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam opposes race-based preferences. Back in 1963, Whitney Young, former head of the Urban League, proposed a sort of Marshall Plan for blacks. But a member of his board objected to what he called "the heart of it -- the business of employing Negroes (because they are Negroes)."

Myth: Reagan supported the apartheid regime of South Africa.

Reagan pursued a policy of "constructive engagement." According to the Journal of Modern African Studies, Great Britain, "This policy held that quiet diplomacy, contact with oppositionist bodies, application of fair employment practices under the Sullivan Principles by American companies operating in South Africa, assistance programs to train Africans, and public statements endorsing reform would do more to undermine apartheid than would confrontational measures, including sanctions and disinvestment."

Myth: Reagan attempted to fire the black female head of the Civil Rights Commission.

Reagan did, indeed, attempt to fire Mary Frances Berry. And why not? She supports race-based preferences, set-asides and so-called "disparate impact laws," all of which Reagan opposed. Berry successfully sued to keep her job, and she remains head of the Civil Rights Commission today. (By the way, when President George W. Bush attempted to appoint a black man to the commission, Peter Kirsanow, Mary Frances Berry filed suit to prevent Kirsanow from joining the commission. She unsuccessfully argued that the current occupant on the board still had several years left in her term.)

So, how did blacks fare under Ronald Reagan?

From the end of 1982 to 1989, black unemployment dropped 9 percentage points (from 20.4 percent to 11.4 percent), while white unemployment dropped by only 4 percentage points. Black household income went up 84 percent from 1980 to 1990, versus a white household income increase of 68 percent. The number of black-owned businesses increased from 308,000 in 1982 to 424,000 in 1987, a 38 percent rise versus a 14 percent increase in the total number of firms in the United States. Receipts by black-owned firms more than doubled, from $9.6 billion to $19.8 billion.

If this is "torture," more, please -- and a side of fries.

Posted on Friday, June 18, 2004 at 6:03 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Lynne Cheney: Loves History (But also Loves the No Child Left Behind Act, which Ignores History)

Kathleen Kennedy Manzo, in Education Week (June 16, 2004):

... While [Lynne V.] Cheney’s professional record has covered a broad range of social and cultural issues, it is her work in the area of history education that has earned her a reputation for speaking her mind. That work has won her some measure of admiration, even among those who do not subscribe to her views. But it has also drawn the most criticism.

"Her emphasis on history/social studies education has clearly left its mark," said Jesus Garcia, the president-elect of the National Council for the Social Studies, an organization that has clashed with Mrs. Cheney over the group’s advocacy of an integrated, thematic approach to teaching the subject. "Unfortunately, she has a more conservative agenda … that doesn’t allow other perspectives. She’s been extremely divisive."

She began to make that mark with a monograph in 1987, written while she was at the helm of the NEH, that pointed to a lack of historical knowledge among the nation’s high school students, which she blamed on schools and teachers.

A few years later, Mrs. Cheney, who has a doctorate in 19th-century British literature, announced plans to develop voluntary national history standards.

A month before the standards were to be unveiled in late 1994, Mrs. Cheney, who had left her NEH post with the change to a Democratic administration the year before, wrote a scathing critique of the document on The Wall Street Journal’s opinion page under the headline "The End of History."

The piece led to independent reviews of the document. Supporters of the standards effort, however, charged that Mrs. Cheney’s appraisal was misleading, and that critical content she had accused the writers of ignoring, such as references to George Washington and the U.S. Constitution, were indeed featured throughout the three volumes.

The standards committee made some minor revisions before releasing the document nationally, although none of Mrs. Cheney’s complaints had significant influence on the final product, according to Gary B. Nash, who headed the standards effort with his colleague at the National Center for History in the Schools, Charlotte Crabtree. Mr. Nash said the charges in Mrs. Cheney’s opinion piece came as a surprise, given her involvement in various stages of the standards-writing process.

"Lynne Cheney and I never disagreed on the importance of history," Mr. Nash said. "But she certainly touched off a firestorm about the standards. … Now, 10 years later, I can say that the standards accomplished the goal" of providing a sound framework for history education nationwide.

The overall standards effort is ultimately credited with having a broad influence on history and social studies education. It has served as a model for many state standards documents.

Nearly a decade later, Mrs. Cheney is still embroiled in the history debate. She and other scholars have called for an end to the social studies movement, which they argue undermines the teaching of history.

President Bush’s "We the People" initiative to strengthen history education has helped further that effort, Mrs. Cheney said in a response by e-mail to questions from Education Week. She declined to be interviewed in person.

But some critics ask how Mrs. Cheney can tout so enthusiastically the No Child Left Behind law when her passion, history, is being pushed aside in the curriculum, they say. As schools focus more on math and reading, the subjects that the law requires students to be tested in, many teachers are finding less time for other subjects. ("Troubled High School Narrows Courses," this issue.)

"The stress on reading and math is at the expense of teaching children their country’s heritage," said Mr. Garcia, a social studies education professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. "Today, as opposed to 10 years ago, we don’t have more history in the curriculum because overall it’s being squeezed out."

Mrs. Cheney has not answered those concerns directly. But in an e-mailed response to a question on that point, she wrote: "I think we often overlook the fact that reading is a skill that can be practiced and perfected on all kinds of content.

"There are," she continued, "terrific books about history being written for even the littlest kids and that time students spend with them can benefit both reading skills and historical knowledge."

Posted on Friday, June 18, 2004 at 3:33 AM | Comments (1) | Top

New Collection Re-evaluates Presidents

David J. Foster, in the News Gleaner (June 17 2004):

Even the most buoyant Reagan booster must have watched last week's revisionism in disbelief.

While conservatives have long listed President Reagan among the near great presidents, for restoring the country's faith itself while pushing Communism into the ash heap of history, suddenly former foes, like Ted Kennedy and John Kerry, could be heard praising Reagan for his optimism and breaking the Soviet's stranglehold on Eastern Europe.

History will be the final judge, and, as it has for so many of out chief executives, you can expect more revisionism. Look no further than James Taranto and Leonard Leo's new book "Presidential Leadership" (Free Press/Wall Street Journal Books)

Released, coincidently, just days before Reagan's death, this collection of essays examines our chief executives through new, usual prisms.

Conservative Judge Robert Bork questions the economic effectiveness of liberal icon Franklin Roosevelt, while Teddy Roosevelt's audacity is celebrated by (who else?) brash U.S. Sen. John McCain.

Humorist Chris Buckley confirms the ineptitude of James Buchanan: "It's probably just as well that James Buchanan was our only bachelor president. There are no descendants bracing every morning on opening the papers to find another headline announcing 'Buchanan Once Again Rated Worst President in History.'"

New impressions

John F. Kennedy: Though JFK is rightfully praised as a Cold Warrior, notes speechwriter Peggy Noonan, she believes he was motivated by the fear that he and the nation would be perceived as weak.

"But what did he think of Communism?" she writers. "What did he think of capitalism?" On these questions he lacked a bold vision. Kennedy, she argues, represented the hedonistic side the Greatest Generation. He used heavy drugs to cope with debilitating pain and illnesses, and was a sexual libertine, making him closer to the boomers than his contemporaries. In short, he was as much a Rat Packer as his cronies Frank Sinatra and Peter Lawford.

Warren Harding: Harding and Buchanan often spar for the title of Worst President. Harding is blamed for not predicting the coming depression and he's blasted for Interior Secretary Albert Fall illegally selling favors, a scandal that did not implicate Harding. Jeremy Rabkin, a professor of government at Cornell University, urges a more balanced view. Harding cut taxes and spending to below pre-war levels, and ignited an economic boom. And after assuming the presidency, he freed the socialists and labor leaders imprisoned under Woodrow Wilson during the 1919 Red Scare....

Posted on Thursday, June 17, 2004 at 3:45 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Centennial: James Joyce's Bloomsday

Stephen Schwartz, in the Weekly Standard (June 16 2004):

NELSON ROCKEFELLER is alleged to have described the artwork of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, famously difficult classics painted shortly after the Second World War, as "free-enterprise painting." And there, in microcosm, we find the conundrum that has bedeviled certain conservative intellectuals for several generations: What should one think about modernism--particularly high modernism, the works of people like Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, from the first half of the twentieth century? There remains about them an air of the bizarre they seemed to have when they first appeared, and besides, American conservatives tend to be philistine in their judgment of literature and art.

The curious thing is that a great many modernist artists and writers were never political leftists at all. D.H. Lawrence, for example, believed in many peculiar things, but none of them look like radical egalitarianism. And several other modernists who started out as political radicals broke with the Left, particularly in Eastern Europe, where the phenomenon of anti-Communist modernism became markedly visible. In fact, the Communist regimes hated high modernism, precisely because they agreed with Rockefeller in seeing it as an expression of free enterprise in the arts (or "decadence," as they preferred to call it). Karl B. Radek--a Polish Bolshevik who, if he weren't real, only James Joyce could have invented--once having surrendered to Stalinist aesthetics, derided Joyce's Ulysses as "a camera focused through a microscope on a worm-infested dunghill."

It didn't do Radek much good, as Stalin had him murdered anyway. But the natural alliance of business entrepreneurship and cultural experiment becomes obvious when we consider the centennial of Bloomsday--the hundredth anniversary of June 16, 1904, the single day in which the action of Joyce's Ulysses takes place.

Ulysses recounts twenty-four hours in the life of Dublin, with each chapter paralleling an episode in the Odyssey. It begins just outside the city, in a Martello tower, where Stephen Dedalus, the autobiographical hero of Joyce's earlier Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, begins the day with his co-tenants: "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan" and an English Celtophile named Haines. Dedalus proceeds to the village of Dalkey, near Dublin, where he serves as an English instructor in a boys' school. There he is subjected to a tirade against the Jews, which anticipates a major thread in the book: his companionship with Leopold Bloom.

Stephen then wanders along a beach, contemplating the psychic difficulties of his life. Meanwhile, Bloom cooks breakfast for his wife Molly, before proceeding to a butcher shop where he buys a pork kidney and reads, in a newspaper, a plea for support for Zionist colonies in Palestine. Bloom continues across Dublin, meditating on the spectacle before him. After attending the funeral of an acquaintance, Paddy Dignam, Bloom at last meets Dedalus, in the office of the Freeman's Journal....

Posted on Thursday, June 17, 2004 at 7:47 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Eric Alterman: Remembering What Reagan Did in Guatemala

Eric Alterman, on his blog (June 16, 2004):

Remember how loveable and optimistic Ronald Reagan was? Remember how he did nothing but make us feel good about ourselves and restore respect for America; our moral values and our position of leadership in the world? I was reading the galley pages of When Presidents Lie yesterday and came across this episode. Funny how it didn’t make it into any of the SCLM coverage last week. Tim? Chris? I’m here for you guys if you need it. Footnotes are free:

U.S. leaders from Eisenhower and Dulles through Nixon, Ford and Kissinger ignored the regime’s brutality in deference to its anti-Communism. But the Carter administration complicated its position by denouncing the regime’s human rights record, ultimately leading Guatemala to reject U.S. aid as inexcusable interference in its internal affairs. By 1982, during the Reagan administration, the killing appeared to be reaching a kind of gruesome climax. Under the dictatorship of General Efrain Rios Montt, a born-again evangelical Christian, the army massacred as many as 15,000 Indians on the suspicion that they had cooperated with, or might offer aid to, anti-government guerrillas. Entire villages were leveled to aid the counterinsurgency and countless peasants were forcibly relocated to aid the counterinsurgency. At one point, as many as 40,000 survivors tried to find refuge in Mexico, Army helicopters strafed the camps. It was at this propitious moment that President Reagan took the opportunity to congratulate Rios Montt for his dedication to democracy, adding that he had been getting “a bum rap” from U.S. liberals in Congress and the media. Moreover, in the midst of this killing rampage, the U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala, Frederic Chapin announced, “The killings have stopped…. The Guatemalan government has come out of the darkness and into the light.” In fact, the number of civilians killed by death squads doubled to roughly 220 a month by late 1983. In a secret report to his superiors, Chapin decried the “horrible human rights realities in Guatemala,” and argued that a consistent policy demanded that either the U.S. “overlook the record and emphasize the strategic concept or we can pursue a higher moral path.” The Reagan administration ignored his advice. Though Congress would not authorize additional aid, U.S. funds still reached Rios Montt through Israel and Taiwan, in addition to the still-secret amounts available via the CIA. Following an election in 1985, the U.S. embassy publicly declared that the “final step in the re-establishment of democracy in Guatemala” had taken place," and accordingly restored all of its aid moneys.

Posted on Thursday, June 17, 2004 at 7:32 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Patrick Buchanan: Taking Aim at the So-Called Great Presidents

Patrick Buchanan, in his column (June 16, 2004):

With the passing of President Reagan, historians, scholars and journalists have again taken to rating our presidents.

Invariably, greatness is ascribed to only three: Washington, Lincoln and FDR. Which reveals as much about American historians, scholars and journalists as it does about American presidents.

Certainly, Washington is our greatest president, the father of our country and the captain who set our course. But Lincoln is great only if one believes that preventing South Carolina, Georgia and the Gulf states from peacefully seceding justified the suspension of the Constitution, a dictatorship, 600,000 dead and a resort to a total war that ravaged the South for generations.

As for FDR, he was the greatest politician of the 20th century. But why call a president great whose government was honeycombed with spies and traitors, and whose war diplomacy lead to the loss of 10 Christian countries of Eastern Europe to a Muscovite despot whose terrorist regime was the greatest enemy of human freedom in modern history?

FDR restored the nation`s confidence in his first term and won a 46-state landslide to a second. But by 1937, the Depression was back and we were rescued only by the vast expenditures of World War II into which, even admirers now admit, FDR lied his country. The man talked peace as he plotted war.

None of the historians, scholars or journalists rate Reagan a great president. Yet his leadership led to the peaceful liberation of a hundred million children and grandchildren of the people FDR sold down the river at Teheran and Yalta, as well as of the 300 million people of the Soviet Union.

And why are Wilson and Truman always listed among the "near great" presidents?

While our entry into World War I ensured Allied victory, Wilson brought home from Versailles a vindictive peace that betrayed his principles, his 14 Points and his solemn word to the German government when it agreed to an armistice. That treaty tore Germany apart and led directly to Hitler and a horrific war of revenge 20 years later. Moreover, Wilson`s stubborn refusal to accept any compromise language to protect U.S. sovereignty led to Senate rejection of both his treaty and the League of Nations. Why, then, is this obdurate man "near great"?

As for Truman, he dropped two atom bombs on defenseless cities, sent back 2 million Russian dissidents and POWs to his "Uncle Joe," death and the Gulag, offered to send the USS Missouri to Russia to bring Stalin over to give him equal time to answer Churchill`s "Iron Curtain" speech, lost China to communism, fired Gen. MacArthur for demanding victory in Korea, presided over a corrupt administration, left us mired down in a "no-win war" and left office with 23 percent approval.

What is near great about that? Why is Eisenhower, who ended the Korean War in six months, restored America`s military might and presided over eight years of secure peace not the greater man?...

Posted on Thursday, June 17, 2004 at 7:02 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Presidential Memoirs Usually Fall Flat

Mark Perry, a vice president of Jefferson Waterman International, a Washington lobbying firm, and author of Grant and Twain: The Story of a Friendship That Changed America; in the Alameda Times-Star (June 15, 2004):

James Buchanan, the first president to write his memoirs, could have used a ghostwriter. Published in 1866, the book is as forgettable as his presidency. It sold poorly, although the case could be made that in the months after the Civil War ended, Americans were intent on forgetting the crises of the past. But "Mr. Buchanan's Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion" didn't help itself -- it is ponderous, defensive and, worst of all, apologetic. Buchanan's poor reputation -- as an indecisive leader at a time when the country was headed for a split -- has been recently rehabilitated by historians, who argue that he was simply trying to steer the nation clear of conflict. But the public of Buchanan's day was unforgiving.

HERBERT HOOVER had a similar problem. Though he was a man of enormous goodwill, the 31st president was blamed for the Great Depression -- or, at least, for not doing enough to ameliorate its consequences. His post-presidential career did not enhance his reputation: He opposed the New Deal and argued against American intervention in World War II. The result was predictable: When "The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover" appeared in 1951, few seemed to care. The work was an off-putting three volumes, the last of which contained charts and numbers and offered a detailed analysis of the failures of Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration -- which had, of course, lifted the nation out of the Depression. The book sank like a stone.

Buchanan and Hoover were typical of so many presidents in the first 150 years of the republic who decided to write memoirs. For the most part, failed ones needed to explain their actions; successful ones didn't. George Washington retired to Mount Vernon and kept silent; Thomas Jefferson returned to Monticello and wrote letters; and Andrew Jackson went home to the Hermitage, where he struggled to pay his son's debts. The one exception to this early rule was Teddy Roosevelt. An explorer, naturalist, politician, soldier and writer, Roosevelt was a strong president and an unforgettable man. But he, too, wrote a forgettable memoir.

"Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography" lacks the man's vibrancy and reads like a series of predictable moralisms devoid of the biting insights that characterized his public pronouncements. It didn't do well and failed to impress the critics.

But it wasn't until Harry Truman that the idea that only failed presidents needed to write memoirs, to explain their failures, was fully laid to rest. Truman, surely a successful president, was intent on providing some judicious insights into his own time. (He also needed the money.) Nevertheless, the resulting two volumes of "Memoirs of Harry S. Truman: Years of Trial and Hope," lack the toughness Truman brought to his presidency.

The same can be said of Lyndon Johnson's "The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963-1969." The man whom historian Doris Kearns Goodwin called "perhaps the greatest storyteller of his age" simply could not reach out to an audience through the written word. It showed in his memoirs, which are dull, labored and superficial.

No one disappointed more than Richard Nixon, whose "RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon" was viewed as his last chance to tell the truth about Watergate. It was not that Nixon failed to be Nixon: It was that he succeeded. "RN," first published in 1978, is a dissembling work, in which the president attempted to deflect criticism from himself by blaming others for Watergate and fumed endlessly over his loss in 1960, which was apparently still eating at him. And the book was a major publishing letdown: It sold 262,000 copies, when the publisher had hoped it would sell millions.

Gerald Ford (helped along by ghostwriters) and Jimmy Carter (who avows that he wrote his book himself) likewise penned ultimately unsatisfying accounts of their presidencies. The prose of "A Time to Heal: The Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford" flows effortlessly along, but the book is nothing more than a laundry list of events and Ford's reactions to them. Jimmy Carter's personal beliefs, on the other hand, come through clearly in "Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President," though the last pages of the book, describing the all-important final days of his presidency (the Iran hostage crisis and his loss to Reagan) seem hurried.

We shouldn't be too disappointed by these judgments: Presidents are politicians, after all, not memoirists. Even so, there is one notable exception amid the field of mediocrities -- the most popular and widely read memoir by a president, written by Ulysses S. Grant.

When he published Grant's "Memoirs" in 1885, Mark Twain, who was astonished at the sophistication of the writing, compared it to Caesar's "Commentaries." Grant's book is a stunning piece of literature, made all the better by the fact that he wisely focused his attention on the Civil War and not on his presidency. Written in 13 months, the work is entirely Grant's own. And Grant did not write either to retrieve his reputation or to gain public office, but, like Truman, to stave off bankruptcy. But where Truman failed, Grant succeeded. With Twain urging him on, he struggled through the pain and exhaustion of his battle with throat cancer to finish the work just days before his death.

Posted on Tuesday, June 15, 2004 at 8:16 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Richard Norton Smith: Reagan's Legacy

Richard Norton Smith, in the Chicago Trib (June 11, 2004):

Of course he was controversial, even polarizing, a chief executive whose policies will be debated for decades to come. But that only proves how much he mattered.

Ronald Reagan was a man of paradoxes: a New Deal liberal turned Goldwater conservative. In a final paradox, this man who has been largely invisible for a decade, and who left the stage of national politics 15 years ago, seems to loom larger with each passing year--and not just in the party he remade in his own image, but across the political spectrum. Just as Tony Blair's New Labor party is a backhanded compliment to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's enterprising revolution in England, so the New Democrats personified by President Bill Clinton testify to the enduring consensus that Reagan bequeathed successors of both parties. Certainly, Clinton's 1996 declaration that the "era of big government is over" would never have been spoken but for Ronald Reagan.

The only professional actor to occupy the Oval Office, Reagan forged an enduring bond with millions of voters who respected the authenticity of his convictions, even when they disagreed with the specifics of his policies. The oldest of America's presidents, Reagan infused the nation's highest office, and the political movement that bears his name, with a very youthful sense of possibility. This was no small achievement. Before Reagan, U.S. conservatives invited caricature as overfed men in batwing collars and little old ladies in tennis shoes who were sorely troubled by the prospect of fluoridated water. Reagan changed all that. His conservatism was not only optimistic, it was futuristic. One sensed that he couldn't wait to get to the 21st Century to see what bold applications of American genius would validate his faith in free markets and untrammeled individualism.

It's not hard to trace the origins of his sunny outlook. Growing up in the Illinois towns of Tampico and Dixon, Reagan imbibed from his mother, Nelle, a fundamentalist belief that everything happened according to God's plan. Nelle Reagan planted in her son a sense of personal destiny that, unleavened by humor, might easily be confused with the messianic. For Reagan, humor offered perspective and relief. It entertained allies as it disarmed opponents. He enjoyed nothing more than telling Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev stories, including one originally told by Gorbachev on himself.

Picture an interminable line outside a Moscow food store, a not unusual occurrence in the arthritic Soviet economy of the 1980s. After patiently enduring hours on his feet, one man snapped. "It's all Gorbachev's fault," he declared. "I'm going to shoot Gorbachev." With that, he hastened off to the Kremlin. Twenty-four hours pass; the line has barely moved. As the putative assassin reappears to take his place in the line, someone shouts, "Did you shoot Gorbachev?"

"No," came the reply. "The line was twice as long."...

Posted on Tuesday, June 15, 2004 at 8:09 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Jude Wanniski: Why Harding Was a Great President

Jude Wanniski, Reagan economics advisor, on his website (June 13, 2004):

All weekend I've been watching journalists debating whether Ronald Reagan was "one of the greatest" Presidents or just a "great" President, with a few votes for him being just average. I've already voted in this space for Reagan being the best president of the century, for reasons I stated last week. What disturbs me is seeing the reports that historians believe Warren G. Harding was a failed president, one of the handful of truly "bad" Presidents. This only goes to show that it really does take a long distance between a presidency and an accurate assessment of a president's worth, in one direction or another. If it were not for Harding, we would never have had a Reagan presidency. He was far, far more instrumental in leading to Reagan's election in 1980 than was Barry Goldwater, whose chief contribution to America's greatness was being so awful an exponent of conservative principles that hardly anyone voted for him in 1964, the year of his candidacy and the LBJ landslide.

What got me going today is a piece in the Washington Post by Lewis Gould, author of "Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans" (Random House) and professor emeritus of American history at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr.Gould's piece was not focused on Harding, but hmentioned it in sufficiently disparaging terms that I immediately e-mailed him to this effect:

Dear Professor Gould:

I read your Sunday WashPost piece rating Ronald Reagan and respectfully disagree on your methodology, especially as concerns Harding's presidency.

In another 50 years, Harding will look much better than he does today. His most sensational move was to name Andrew Mellon, the Pittsburgh banker, Treasury Secretary, which is why the Twenties roared. Mellon was the best Treasury Secretary after Alexander Hamilton. Harding's second great move (which preceded his Mellon pick) was to name Calvin Coolidge his running mate. Coolidge is derided because he didn't advocate Big Government, but he was Reagan's hero. RR was in high school in the Coolidge years, when Coolidge best expressed the ideas of low tax rates producing greater tax revenues than high tax rates. It was Mellon who inspired the JFK tax cuts of 1964 and the Reagan Revolution that followed. The only reason Harding is reviled by today's historians is that he MUST be entombed along with Hoover (and Coolidge) in order to elevate FDR.

You historians use "Teapot Dome" of the Harding years -- a rinky-dink scandal by today's standards -- to demean Harding, who had nothing to do with the scandal itself. It is the same twisted perspective that leads you to run down the Grant administration. Grant had nothing to do with the scandals in his administration and should be given ten times the credit for getting the country back on the gold standard after the turbulence of the Civil War greenback era. Conservatives don't realize they are being snookered by liberal historians.

Franklin Roosevelt was not the greatest president of the 20th century because after his 1932 election he made matters worse in domestic and foreign policy. He took the country off the gold standard and raised taxes on top of Hoover's. He was re-elected in 1936 by such a wide margin because the GOP/Landon were still trying to defend Hoover -- the worst president in U.S. history, with nothing to his credit but the Great Depression and the World War that followed. FDR gets plaudits for cleaning up the mess he helped create. Reagan created no mess, but cleaned up the mess he inherited from Nixon, Ford and Jimmy Carter. Nixon at least had China to his credit, so he must rank above Hoover. Way above. As for Harding and Coolidge, we should thank our lucky stars the voters of 1920 and 1924 put them in charge. Their stewardship was key to the education of young Ronald Reagan, the best president of the 20th century. By far.

JudeW

Posted on Tuesday, June 15, 2004 at 7:32 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Fred Kaplan: Reagan Was Responsible for the Rise of Osama bin Laden

Fred Kaplan, in Slate (June 10, 2004):

Earlier this week, I cited recently declassified documents to show that Ronald Reagan did indeed play a major role in ending the Cold War. Now it's time to note that a similar set of documents shows that Reagan also played a major role in bringing on the terrorist war that followed—specifically, in abetting the rise of Osama Bin Laden.

Once again, the story concerns the fascinating relationship between Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Gorbachev took the helm as the reform-minded general-secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March 1985. Within months, he had decided privately to pull Soviet troops out of Afghanistan. One of his predecessors, Leonid Brezhnev,* had invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and the move was proving a disaster. Tens of thousands of Soviet troops had died; military morale was crumbling; popular protest—unheard of, till then, in Communist Russia—was rising. Part of the Soviet failure in Afghanistan was due to the fact that the Reagan administration was feeding billions of dollars in arms to Afghanistan's Islamic resistance. Reagan and, even more, his intensely ideological CIA director, William Casey, saw the battle for Afghanistan as a titanic struggle in the war between Eastern tyranny and Western freedom. (Jimmy Carter and his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, had started assisting the resistance, but with not nearly the same largess or ambition.)

At a Politburo meeting of Nov. 13, 1986, Gorbachev laid his position on the table: The war wasn't working; it had to be stopped:

People ask: "What are we doing there?" Will we be there endlessly? Or should we end this war? ... The strategic objective is to finish the war in one, maximum two years, and withdraw the troops. We have set a clear goal: Help speed up the process, so we have a friendly neutral country, and get out of there.

In early December, Gorbachev summoned President Najibullah, the puppet leader of Afghanistan, to give him the news: The Soviet troops would be leaving within 18 months; after that, he was on his own.

Two months later, on Feb. 23, 1987, Gorbachev assured the Politburo that the troops wouldn't leave right away. He first had to foster a stable environment for the reigning government and to maintain a credible image with India, the Soviet Union's main ally in the region. The exit strategy, he said, would be a negotiated deal with Washington: The Soviets pull out troops; the Americans stop their arms shipments to the rebels.

However, within days, Gorbachev learned to his surprise that Reagan had no interest in such a deal. In a conversation on Feb. 27 with Italy's foreign minister, Giulio Andreotti, Gorbachev said, "We have information from very reliable sources … that the United States has set itself the goal of obstructing a settlement by any means," in order "to present the Soviet Union in a bad light." If this information is true, Gorbachev continued, the matter of a withdrawal "takes on a different light."

Without U.S. cooperation, Gorbachev couldn't proceed with his plans to withdraw. Instead, he allowed his military commanders to escalate the conflict. In April, Soviet troops, supported by bombers and helicopters, attacked a new compound of Islamic fighters along the mountain passes of Jaji, near the Pakistani border. The leader of those fighters, many of them Arab volunteers, was Osama Bin Laden....

Posted on Monday, June 14, 2004 at 11:37 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Lewis Gould: Reagan May or May Not Appear as Heroic in the Future as He Does Right Now

Lewis Gould, in the Wash Post (June 13, 2004):

... For Reagan partisans, the motives [for celebrating his life and administration this past week] are obvious. This will be their last chance to make the case for their hero's greatness before a national audience. The same team that stage-managed Reagan's most famous moments in office choreographed last week's "legacy-building event," as one former official was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as calling it, from handing out 50,000 American flags to bystanders to timing the seaside sunset backdrop for the late president's interment. For the media, sensitive always to the charge that they are too liberal, the Reagan obsequies provided a superb opportunity to demonstrate fairness, or perhaps latent conservative sympathies, by showing that cable channel and network anchors could also envision a fifth face on Mount Rushmore or a new visage in place of Alexander Hamilton's on the $10 bill.

Among the general public, the outpouring of affection for Reagan may be more a snapshot of our collective frame of mind than a judgment on his presidency. With the nation bogged down in Iraq, deeply divided over cultural and political preferences, and anxious about the economic future, people need a history that reassures and comforts. What better time to summon up a figure from the past who is remembered for his good humor, optimism, common values and an ability to steer clear of foreign conflicts that he might not win? Whether that is an accurate or complete portrayal of Reagan doesn't matter. By mourning him for these attributes, Americans are making a statement about what they want now. The act of grief is not necessarily for him but for the loss of the ideas he has come to represent.

Though Reagan has been out of office for 15 years, historical writing about him is not yet based on scholarly inquiry that has explored the presidency and its record in depth. Major biographers such as Lou Cannon and Edmund Morris have offered their interpretations of Reagan's enigmatic character and his performance in the Oval Office. Monographs have begun to appear along with collections of documents and speeches Reagan gave in the 1970s and the letters he exchanged with a variety of correspondents. Perhaps because of the decline of political history as a discipline or because of difficulties with mastering the extensive primary sources on Reagan and his time, we don't yet have any satisfying, wide-ranging examinations of the 40th president and his two terms. These gaps underscore the opportunity that Reagan's advocates seem to sense to etch their historical judgment into the national mind.

The stakes are high for Reagan's reputation, because enough time has passed for a generation of younger Americans to have grown up with only a vague sense of what made him so controversial in his day. For those approaching 30, who were in their mid-teens or younger when Reagan gave way to George H.W. Bush in January 1989, the "Great Communicator" is a historical figure speedily receding into the past. Those who will be entering college this year were born in 1986, as Reagan's second term was winding down. Making the episodes of the Reagan years come alive for that new cadre of undergraduates will not be easy. Nothing is quite so dead for young people as the stale disputes of a vanished era, even one that was, in human terms, not so long ago. What was PATCO anyway, or Gramm-Latta, or Iran-contra?

The additional problem for those who are endeavoring to fix in stone the image of Reagan as a flawless exemplar of a golden age of conservatism is that seemingly secondary episodes and controversies can rise up unexpectedly to confound their best-laid plans. Who would have guessed when Franklin D. Roosevelt died that his alleged failure to stem the Holocaust would become one of the issues defining his place in history? Or that Judith Campbell Exner would come to symbolize the Kennedy presidency as much as the Cuban missile crisis did? On the other hand, who would have conceived in 1961 that Dwight Eisenhower would rise in the popular estimation because of his farewell address on the military-industrial complex and eventually be regarded as an excellent, though "hidden-hand," president?

To see the ruthless effect of unchecked and unanticipated historical revisionism, look at the fate that befell Kennedy's image in the decades after his death in 1963. For a few years, the "Camelot" theme bestowed on his presidency by his widow a week after the assassination informed writing about him. Then, as scholars probed Kennedy's tangled and often sordid personal life, uncovered the less savory aspects of his Cold War plots to topple Fidel Castro and asked tough questions about his record on civil rights, his place in history eroded. To much of the public he remains a national hero, in part because of his glamour and suspended youth. Even after the balanced assessments of such perceptive biographers as Herbert Parmet and Robert Dallek, however, Kennedy seems unlikely to regain, among historians, the mythic status he acquired 40 years ago at Dallas.

For Reagan, one point of potential vulnerability is Lebanon and the bombing of the Marine barracks in 1983. Withdrawing American troops after the death of 241 Marines seemed politically prudent in light of public opinion wary of involvement in that volatile region. Yet in the Middle East, some terrorists concluded that the United States would wilt in a crisis. If the war against terrorism drags on, this episode could acquire greater significance and alter the note of triumph that has dominated the past week. Success in the Cold War, which seemed so pivotal after Reagan left office, could come to be seen as something that was likely to have occurred in due course anyway. Victory or defeat in Iraq could also influence the way Reagan's presidency is evaluated. A protracted national debate over "Who Lost Iraq?" would detract from the historical Ronald Reagan, whose administration furnished military equipment and intelligence to Saddam Hussein....

Posted on Monday, June 14, 2004 at 7:35 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Edmund Morris on Reagan's Passing

From the CBS Morning News (June 7, 2004):

HANNAH STORM: As Ronald Reagan's biographer, Edmund Morris spent more than 14 years researching and writing about the president's life. Morris had access to personal letters and diaries and conducted multiple interviews with family and friends, as well as the president himself as he wrote the book, "Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan."

Edmund Morris, good morning.

Mr. EDMUND MORRIS (Author, "Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan"): Good morning.

STORM: You said so many other people that you talked to eventually admitted to you, 'I could never figure him out.' Why was President Reagan in many respects an enigma?

Mr. MORRIS: Well, it's a paradox between his enchanting public persona, that loveable quality which you can feel just looking at photographs, and his aloof, quiet, private personality. Behind you, this picture of him at his ranch, where I spent time with him, and that was the real Ronald Reagan: the monosyllabic, deeply thoughtful person; quite unlike the--the charismatic public personality we associate with.

STORM: Why did people constantly underestimate him?

Mr. MORRIS: He made something of a career out of being underestimated. He was a very bright man with infallible instincts and it suited him if East Coast intellectuals thought that he was uncultured and slow. He was actually a very fast man, particularly in his youth, and nobody had more infallible instincts than he did.

STORM: How did the assassination attempt in 1981--did that affect him? Certainly, physically, but--but what about otherwise?

Mr. MORRIS: Yes. It slowed down that fastness I was talking about. If you see clips of Reagan when he was in his early 60s, as governor of California, he was a rapid person, fast talking, fast thinking, fast acting. The assassination attempt slowed him down quite a lot. He became fatalistic, much more devout. He was con--he was quite convinced that God had spared him to lead the United States back to self-respect. He became more thoughtful and more contemplative.

STORM: What was it about his personalty that allowed Gorbachev to meet halfway, that fostered a sense of communication and cooperation, rather than distrust as they worked together to end the Cold War?

Mr. MORRIS: It was his self certainty that was so obvious when they first met at Geneva. We were all in the US delegation rather afraid that Gorby was famously aggressive, the new, younger Soviet leader was gonna make mincemeat of the president. But Reagan actually dominated him from the start.

STORM: He was also dubbed the 'Teflon president,' and something as serious that impinged on his credibility and his popularity like the Iran-Contra scandal, was something that in the end didn't stick. Why not?

Mr. MORRIS: Well, his--its--his inclinations were basically decent and I think this was the ingredient of his charm. Even when he was mired in political difficulties, one somehow knew that he was positive and benevolent and wanted the best for America.

STORM: He was also dubbed the 'great communicator,' for good reason. What was the high point, maybe the seminal moment in his leadership?

Mr. MORRIS: In my opinion, his greatest speech, which is rather forgotten these days, was at Bergen-Belsen in May of 1985. It's the only time I've seen Reagan in public being truly moved by articulating the Holocaust, and it's an unforgettably eloquent speech.

STORM: Could you describe him in two adjectives?

Mr. MORRIS: Dignity and gentlemanliness. All the years I spent in Washington, he's the only gentleman I met.

STORM: Edmund Morris, thank you so much for your insights this morning.

Mr. MORRIS: Thank you.

Posted on Monday, June 14, 2004 at 7:22 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Gorbachev: No One Won the Cold War, We All Lost

Robert G. Kaiser, recounting an interview with Mikhail Gorbachev following Reagan's funeral; in the Wash Post (June 11, 2004):

... Gorbachev brusquely dismissed the suggestion that Reagan had intimidated either him or the Soviet Union, or forced them to make concessions. Was it accurate to say that Reagan won the Cold War? "That's not serious," Gorbachev said, using the same words several times. "I think we all lost the Cold War, particularly the Soviet Union. We each lost $10 trillion," he said, referring to the money Russians and Americans spent on an arms race that lasted more than four decades. "We only won when the Cold War ended."

By Gorbachev's account, it was his early successes on the world stage that convinced the Americans that they had to deal with him and to match his fervor for arms control and other agreements that could reduce East-West tensions. "We had an intelligence report from Washington in 1987," he said, "reporting on a meeting of the National Security Council." Senior U.S. officials had concluded that Gorbachev's "growing credibility and prestige did not serve the interests of the United States" and had to be countered. A desire in Washington not to let him make too good an impression on the world did more to promote subsequent Soviet-American agreements than any American intimidation, he said. "They wanted to look good in terms of making peace and achieving arms control," he said of the Reagan administration.

The changes he wrought in the Soviet Union, from ending much of the official censorship to sweeping political and economic reforms, were undertaken not because of any foreign pressure or concern, Gorbachev said, but because Russia was dying under the weight of the Stalinist system. "The country was being stifled by the lack of freedom," he said. "We were increasingly behind the West, which . . . was achieving a new technological era, a new kind of productivity. . . . And I was ashamed for my country -- perhaps the country with the richest resources on Earth, and we couldn't provide toothpaste for our people."...

Did Reagan's success in his first term, and the huge build-up of military power that he persuaded Congress to finance, affect the decision of the Soviet Politburo to choose a young and vigorous new leader in 1985 -- someone who could, in effect, stand up to Reagan? "No, I think there was really no connection," he replied, chuckling. He said he was chosen for purely internal reasons that had nothing to do with the United States.

"All that talk that somehow Reagan's arms race forced Gorbachev to look for some arms reductions, etc., that's not serious. The Soviet Union could have withstood any arms race. The Soviet Union could have actually decided not to build more weapons, because the weapons we had were more than enough."

The big change was in Washington, Gorbachev said. "When he [Reagan] was elected to a second term, he, and especially the people close to him, began to think about how he would complete his second term -- by producing more and more nuclear weapons . . . and conducting 'special operations' around the world, etc. etc."

The Soviet leadership, Gorbachev said, evidently referring to himself, concluded that instead, Reagan would "want to go down in history as a peacemaker" and would work with Moscow to do so. "A particularly positive influence on him -- more than anyone else -- was Nancy Reagan," Gorbachev said. "She deserves a lot of credit for that."

Once Reagan decided to try to make peace, he found an eager partner in Moscow, Gorbachev said. "The new Soviet leadership wanted to transform the country, to modernize the country, and we needed stability, we needed cooperation with other countries. . . . And we both knew what kind of weapons we each had. There were mountains of nuclear weapons. A war could start not because of a political decision, but just because of some technical failure. . . .

"A lot of forces on both sides had an interest in prolonging the arms race," Gorbachev added, including military-industrial lobbies on both sides. His predecessors in Moscow had concluded that continuing the race was the only way they could achieve security for the Soviet Union.

But by his new calculation in 1985, the situation was ripe for change. He and his comrades concluded that it was really inconceivable that anyone in the White House actually wanted to blow up the Soviet Union, just as they ruled out the possibility of ever deliberately trying to destroy the United States. So it would make more sense "to find ways to cooperate."...

Posted on Saturday, June 12, 2004 at 5:49 AM | Comments (0) | Top

John Lewis Gaddis: Reagan Was No Lightweight

John Lewis Gaddis, in a lecture at George Washington University (April 2004):

The principal point of which I wish to persuade you may come as something of a surprise: it is that Ronald Reagan – not his advisers, but Reagan himself – deserves to be ranked alongside Kennan, Nitze, Eisenhower, Dulles, Rostow, Nixon and Kissinger as a serious strategist of containment. Indeed, I will go beyond that to argue that Reagan succeeded, where they all failed, to achieve a workable synthesis of symmetrical and asymmetrical containment – drawing upon the strengths of each approach while avoiding their weaknesses – and that it was that accomplishment, together with the accession to power of Mikhail Gorbachev, that brought the Cold War to an end.

For years intellectuals, journalists, political opponents, and especially academics derided Reagan as a telegenic lightweight, too simple-minded to know what containment had been about, much less to have constructive ideas about how to ensure its success. It certainly is true that Reagan relied more on instincts than on systematic study in shaping his positions. Those instincts, derived from his Midwestern upbringing, his experiences in Hollywood, and an occasional tendency to conflate movies with reality, included an unshakable belief in democracy and capitalism, an abhorrence of communism, an impatience with compromise in what he regarded as a contest between good and evil, and – very significantly – a deep fear that the Cold War might end in a nuclear holocaust, thereby confirming the Biblical prophecy of Armageddon. This was, to say the least, an unorthodox preparation for the presidency. When combined with the fact that Reagan took office as the oldest elected chief executive – he turned 70 shortly after his inauguration – it seemed reasonable to expect an amiable geriatric who would for the most part follow the lead of his own advisers.

That view turned out to be wrong on several counts. First, it overlooked the skill with which Reagan had managed his pre-presidential career: it was no small matter to have shifted the Republican Party to the right while centrist Republican presidents – Nixon and Ford – were occupying the White House. Second, it failed to take into account Reagan’s artful artlessness: his habit of appearing to know less than his critics did, of seeming to be adrift even as he proceeded quietly toward destinations he himself had chosen. Third, and most important, it neglected what Reagan himself had said in several hundred radio scripts and speech drafts prepared between 1975 and 1980: these almost daily commentaries, composed in longhand on legal pads without the assistance of speechwriters, provided a more voluminous record of positions taken on national and international issues than had been available for any other modern presidential aspirant. They put forward no comprehensive strategy for ending the Cold War. That would emerge only gradually, in response to what happened after Reagan entered the White House. These broadcasts and speeches did, however, contain most of the ideas that lay behind that strategy – and they establish that the ideas came mostly from Reagan himself.

Third, and most important, it neglected what Reagan himself had said in several hundred radio scripts and speech drafts prepared between 1975 and 1980: these almost daily commentaries, composed in longhand on legal pads without the assistance of speechwriters, provided a more voluminous record of positions taken on national and international issues than had been available for any other modern presidential aspirant. They put forward no comprehensive strategy for ending the Cold War. That would emerge only gradually, in response to what happened after Reagan entered the White House. These broadcasts and speeches did, however, contain most of the ideas that lay behind that strategy – and they establish that the ideas came mostly from Reagan himself.

The most striking one was optimism: faith in the ability of the United States to compete successfully within the international system. You would have to go back to FDR in 1933 to find a president who entered office with comparable self-confidence in the face of bleak prospects. Like Roosevelt, Reagan believed that the nation was stronger than it realized, that time was on its side, and that these facts could be conveyed, through rhetoric, style, and bearing, to the American people. “[I]t is important every once and a while to remind ourselves of our accomplishments,” he told his radio audience in 1976, “lest we let someone talk us into throwing out the baby with the bathwater. . . [T]he system has never let us down – we’ve let the system down now & then because we’re only human.”

It followed from this that the Soviet Union was weaker than it appeared to be, and that time was not on its side. Reagan had insisted as early as 1975 that communism was “a temporary aberration which will one day disappear from the earth because it is contrary to human nature.” This too was an unusual posture for an incoming president. The fundamental premise of containment had always been that the United States was acting defensively against an adversary that was on the offensive, and was likely to continue on that path for the foreseeable future. Now, just at the moment at which the U.S.S.R. had achieved parity and seemed to be pushing for superiority in strategic weaponry, Reagan rejected that premise, raising the prospect of regaining and indefinitely sustaining American preeminence.

He did so by assuming expandable resources on the part of the United States, a view consistent with NSC 68, which Reagan read and discussed on the air shortly after it was declassified in 1975. He concluded, as he later recalled, that “capitalism had given us a powerful weapon in our battle against Communism – money. The Russians could never win the arms race; we could outspend them forever.” Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was denying its people “all kinds of consumer products” in its quest for military supremacy. “We could have an unexpected ally,” he noted in 1977, “if citizen Ivan is becoming discontented enough to start talking back.” After becoming president, Reagan quickly became convinced, on the basis of intelligence reports, that the Soviet economy “was a basket case, partly because of massive spending on armaments. . . . I wondered how we as a nation could use these cracks in the Soviet system to accelerate the process of collapse.”

The Soviet Union was also vulnerable, Reagan insisted, within the realm of ideas. Despite his support for the Committee on the Present Danger, founded in 1976 to warn of the Soviet military buildup, Reagan never accepted its assumption that armaments alone could make the U.S.S.R. a viable competitor for the United States. Moscow’s failure to respect human rights, he maintained, was a serious weakness, even in a military super-power. Although Reagan had opposed the Helsinki Conference, which he regarded – shortsightedly – as having ratified Soviet control over Eastern Europe, by 1979 he was acknowledging that “something [is] going on behind the Iron Curtain that we’ve been ignoring and [that offers] hope for all mankind. . . . [A] little less détente . . . and more encouragement to the dissidents might be worth a lot of armored divisions.”

Mutual Assured Destruction, however, had to go. Unlike all previous presidents dating back to Kennedy, Reagan refused to accept the proposition that a nuclear balance of terror could ever lead to a stable international system: it was, he later recalled, “the craziest thing I ever heard of.” The SALT process, geared as it was toward reinforcing MAD, was flawed because it did nothing to reverse reliance on nuclear weapons or to diminish the risks that their continued existence in such vast numbers entailed. “I have repeatedly stated that I would be willing to negotiate an honest, verifiable reduction in nuclear weapons . . . to the point that neither of us represented a threat to the other,” Reagan wrote in a 1980 speech draft. “I cannot, however, agree to a treaty – specifically the Salt II treaty, which, in effect, legitimizes a nuclear arms buildup.”

The problem with détente, then, was not that it had encouraged negotiations with the U.S.S.R., but rather that it had done so without enlisting American strengths: the idea had been to “seek agreements just for the sake of having an agreement.” But “if we have the will & the determination to build a deterrent capability . . . we can have real peace. . . . [T]he men in the Kremlin could in the face of such determination decide that true arms limitation makes sense.” In Reagan’s view, then, rejecting détente was the way to reduce the danger of nuclear war and move toward a negotiated settlement of Cold War differences.

Such a settlement would require, however, a fundamental change in the nature of the Soviet Union itself. That had been the long-term objective of containment since Kennan first articulated that strategy; but as the nuclear danger had grown, the American interest in trying to reform the U.S.S.R. had receded – at least until the Carter administration made the promotion of human rights there one of its chief priorities. Carter, however, had sought to change the Soviet Union while preserving détente, an impossible task in retrospect because one could hardly challenge a state’s internal makeup while simultaneously soliciting its cooperation within the international arena. For Reagan, reforming the Soviet Union required the abandonment of détente. “Our foreign policy should be to show by example the greatness of our system and the strength of American ideals,” he wrote in August 1980. “[W]e would like nothing better than to see the Russian people living in freedom & dignity instead of being trapped in a backwash of history as they are.”

Reagan was, then, no lightweight. He came into office with a clear set of ideas, developed for the most part on his own, on how to salvage the strategy of containment by returning to its original objective: that of convincing Soviet leaders, as Kennan had written in 1947, “that the true glory of Russian national effort can find its expression only in peaceful and friendly association with other peoples and not in attempts to subjugate and dominate those peoples.” He would do this, not by acknowledging the current Soviet regime’s legitimacy, but by challenging it; not by seeking parity in the arms race but by regaining superiority; not by compromising on the issue of human rights but by capitalizing on it as a weapon more powerful than anything that existed in the military arsenals of either side. “The Reagan I observed may have been no master of detail,” Soviet ambassador Dobrynin later observed, “but he had a clear sense of what he wanted.”

Posted on Friday, June 11, 2004 at 7:37 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Rick Perlstein: Reagan the Divider

Rick Perlstein, in Salon (June 7, 2004):

... It is a quirk of American culture that each generation of nonconservatives sees the right-wingers of its own generation as the scary ones, then chooses to remember the right-wingers of the last generation as sort of cuddly. In 1964, observers horrified by Barry Goldwater pined for the sensible Robert Taft, the conservative leader of the 1950s. When Reagan was president, liberals spoke fondly of sweet old Goldwater.

Nowadays, as we grapple with the malevolence of President Bush, it's Reagan we remember as the sensible one. At the risk of speaking ill of the dead, let memory at least acknowledge that there was much about Reagan that was not so sensible.

Again and again as president, Reagan let it slip that he concurred with fundamentalists' belief that the world would end in a fiery Armageddon. This did not hurt him politically. The kind of people offended by such talk had already largely abandoned the Republican Party. Those attracted by it -- evangelicals who had gone overwhelmingly for fellow evangelical Jimmy Carter in 1976 -- adopted Reagan, and his conservative Republicanism, as their own, and they never looked back. And in the eschatology of Cold War America, Christian apocalyptic thinking had everything to do with the assumption that the Armageddon would be a nuclear one, a confrontation with the anti-Christ bailiwick Russia, which Reagan identified in a March 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals as the "Evil Empire."

No wonder that when, in November 1983, NATO launched a war games exercise code-named Able Archer, the Soviet Union misread its intentions as offensive and put its nuclear forces on alert, and the world came closer to ending than it ever had before.

It took this near miss -- and not, certainly, the largest mass demonstration in American history, the million people who gathered in Central Park in 1982 to demonstrate for a nuclear freeze (another moment you probably won't read about in all the Reagan eulogies) -- to get Reagan thinking seriously about negotiating an arms control agreement with the Soviet Union. To his enormous credit.

But he never did make a similar peace with the "welfare queens" he fabricated out of whole cloth to push his anti-compassionate conservatism. Nor with the African Americans he insulted by launching his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were slaughtered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964. Nor with the Berkeley students demonstrating in a closed-off plaza whom he ordered tear-gassed by helicopter in 1969.

Nor, last but not least, with the tens of thousands of AIDS corpses whose disease he did not even deign to publicly acknowledge until 1987.

As the eulogies come down the pike, don't let conservatives, once again, win the ideological struggle to determine mainstream discourse. Remember Reagan; respect him. But don't let them make you revere him. He was a divider, not a uniter.

Posted on Friday, June 11, 2004 at 6:49 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Paul Krugman: The Reagan Economics Legend

Paul Krugman, in the NYT (June 11, 2004):

In the movie "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," a reporter defends prettifying history: "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." That principle has informed many of this week's Reagan retrospectives. But let's not be bullied into accepting the right-wing legend about Reaganomics.

Here's a sample version of the legend: according to a recent article in The Washington Times, Ronald Reagan "crushed inflation along with left-wing Keynesian economics and launched the longest economic expansion in U.S. history." Actually, the 1982-90 economic expansion ranks third, after 1991-2001 and 1961-69 — but even that comparison overstates the degree of real economic success.

The secret of the long climb after 1982 was the economic plunge that preceded it. By the end of 1982 the U.S. economy was deeply depressed, with the worst unemployment rate since the Great Depression. So there was plenty of room to grow before the economy returned to anything like full employment.

The depressed economy in 1982 also explains "Morning in America," the economic boom of 1983 and 1984. You see, rapid growth is normal when an economy is bouncing back from a deep slump. (Last year, Argentina's economy grew more than 8 percent.)

And the economic expansion under President Reagan did not validate his economic doctrine. His supply-side advisers didn't promise a one-time growth spurt as the economy emerged from recession; they promised, but failed to deliver, a sustained acceleration in economic growth.

Inflation did come down sharply on Mr. Reagan's watch: it was running at 12 percent when he took office, but was only 4.5 percent when he left. But this victory came at a heavy price. For much of the Reagan era, the economy suffered from very high unemployment. Despite the rapid growth of 1983 and 1984, over the whole of the Reagan administration the unemployment rate averaged a very uncomfortable 7.5 percent.

In other words, it all played out just as "left-wing Keynesian economics" predicted.

In the late 1970's most economists believed that eliminating the high inflation then prevailing in the United States would require inflicting a lot of pain: the economy would have to go through an extended period of high unemployment and depressed output. Once the inflation had been wrung out of the system, the unemployment rate could go back down. And that's exactly what happened. In fact, it's instructive to put a graph showing the actual track of unemployment and inflation during the 1980's next to a figure from a 1978-vintage textbook showing a hypothetical disinflation scenario; the two look almost identical.

Ronald Reagan didn't decide to inflict that pain. The architect of America's great disinflation was Paul Volcker, the Fed chairman. In fact, Mr. Volcker began the process in 1979, when he adopted the tight monetary policy that caused that record unemployment rate. He was also mainly responsible for the recovery that followed: it was his decision to loosen up on the money supply in the summer of 1982 that set the stage for the rebound a few months later.

There was, in short, nothing magical about the Reagan economy. ...

Posted on Friday, June 11, 2004 at 5:21 AM | Comments (0) | Top

John Patrick Diggins: Reagan Wasn't a Neocon

John Patrick Diggins, in the NYT (June 11, 2004):

Almost everywhere in the press one reads that President Bush sounds an awful lot like Ronald Reagan. Commentators and politicians alike have drawn the comparison between Mr. Bush's "muscular" foreign policy and the Reagan doctrine. However macho and aggressive Mr. Bush's foreign policy may be, when it came to the Soviet Union, Mr. Reagan's was anything but.

In 1985, Mr. Reagan sent a long handwritten letter to Mikhail Gorbachev assuring him that he was prepared "to cooperate in any reasonable way to facilitate such a withdrawal" of the Soviets from Afghanistan. "Neither of us," he added, "wants to see offensive weapons, particularly weapons of mass destruction, deployed in space." Mr. Reagan eagerly sought to work with Mr. Gorbachev to rid the world of such weapons and to help the Soviet Union effect peaceful change in Eastern Europe.

This offer was far from the position taken by the neoconservative advisers who now serve under Mr. Bush. Twenty years ago in the Reagan White House, they saw no possibility for such change, and indeed many of them subscribed to the theory of "totalitarianism" as unchangeable and irreversible. Mr. Reagan was also informed that the Soviet Union was preparing for a possible pre-emptive attack on the United States. This alarmist position was taken by Team B, formed in response to the more prudently analytical position of the C.I.A. and then composed of several members of the present Bush administration. The team was headed by Richard Pipes, the Russian historian at Harvard, whose stance was summed up in the title of one of his articles: "Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War."

Not only did the neocons oppose Mr. Reagan's efforts at rapprochement, they also argued against engaging in personal diplomacy with Soviet leaders. Advisers like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld, now steering our foreign policy, held that America must escalate to achieve "nuclear dominance" and that we could only deal from a "strategy of strength." Mr. Reagan believed in a strong military, but to reassure the Soviet Union that America had no aggressive intentions, he reminded Leonid Brezhnev of just the opposite. From 1945 to 1949, the United States was the sole possessor of the atomic bomb, and yet, Mr. Reagan emphasized to Mr. Brezhnev, no threat was made to use the bomb to win concessions from the Soviet Union....

Posted on Friday, June 11, 2004 at 5:15 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Fred Kaplan: Reagan's Real Role in Ending the Cold War

Fred Kaplan, in Slate (June 9, 2004):

So, did Ronald Reagan bring on the end of the Cold War? Well, yes. Recently declassified documents leave no doubt about the matter. But how did he accomplish it? Through hostile rhetoric and a massive arms buildup, which the Soviets knew they couldn't match, as Reagan's conservative champions contend? Or through a second-term conversion to detente and disarmament, as some liberal historians, including Slate's David Greenberg, argue?

This is an uncomfortable position for an opinion columnist (and occasional Cold War historian) to take, but it turns out that both views have their merits; neither position by itself gets at the truth. Reagan the well-known superhawk and Reagan the lesser-known nuclear abolitionist are both responsible for the end of that era—along with his vital collaborator Mikhail Gorbachev. The Gorbachev factor—too often overlooked in this week of Reagan-hagiography—was crucial. If Yuri Andropov's kidneys hadn't given out, or if Konstantin Chernenko had lived a few years longer, Reagan's bluster and passion would have come to naught; the Cold War would probably have raged on for years; indeed, Reagan's rhetoric and actions might have aggravated tensions.

Still, at some point, some Kremlin leader would have had to mount a major reassessment of the situation. The Soviet system was dysfunctional; its empire was collapsing; the cupboard was bare. And Reagan's surging military budgets, without question, brought this internal crisis to a head.

Here was Gorbachev speaking at a session of the Politburo in October 1986, days before he traveled to Reykjavik, Iceland to offer Reagan a groundbreaking disarmament plan, including a 50 percent reduction in nuclear arsenals. If he didn't propose these cuts, Gorbachev told his colleagues:

[W]e will be pulled into an arms race that is beyond our capabilities, and we will lose it because we are at the limit of our capabilities. … If the new round [of an arms race] begins, the pressures on our economy will be unbelievable.

This was not a sudden development. Three years later, in a November 1989 phone conversation with Egon Krenz, the general secretary of the East German Communist Party, Gorbachev recalled when he first became a member of the Politburo and some of its members wanted to look at the state budget: "But Andropov said, 'Do not get in there, it is not your business.' Now we know why he said so. It was not a budget, but hell knows what." The precise effect of Reagan's "Star Wars" speech—his high-profile and insanely impractical plan to build an antimissile "shield"—is hard to gauge. On the one hand, documents reveal that Gorbachev asked Yevgeny Velikhov, his chief science adviser, to evaluate whether Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, as it was formally called, would pose a threat. Velikhov replied that the project was fanciful and that the Soviets could build countermeasures—or deploy additional offensive missiles to saturate the Star Wars system—much more cheaply than the United States could construct additional defenses. However, at the same time, perhaps succumbing to pressure from his own military-industrial complex, Velikhov advised that it might be a good idea to build more missiles, just in case.

This analysis may have calmed Gorbachev a bit, but not entirely. At a Politburo meeting in March 1986, Gorbachev said, "Maybe we should just stop being afraid of the SDI! Of course, we cannot be indifferent to this dangerous program. But [the Americans] are betting precisely on the fact that the USSR is afraid of the SDI. … That is why they are putting pressure on us—to exhaust us."

If somebody says, "Maybe we should stop being afraid of the bogeyman," it usually means he is afraid of the bogeyman. It's pretty clear that in the spring of 1986 Gorbachev and all those around with him were at least a little afraid of the SDI bogeyman.

The next month, April '86, brought the Chernobyl disaster, which, among other things, made Gorbachev realize that information had to circulate more openly (the beginnings of glasnost) and made him think that the ultimate enemy may be nukes themselves.

He didn't realize it, but Reagan viewed nukes the same way. Samuel Wells, a Cold War historian at the Woodrow Wilson Center, who has examined all the relevant documents, put it this way in a phone conversation: "His staff, for all of the first term and most of the second, kept this out of the press, but Reagan was terribly, deeply opposed to nuclear weapons—he thought they were immoral."...

Click here for the fill article.

Posted on Friday, June 11, 2004 at 5:00 AM | Comments (1) | Top

The Letter the Council on Foreign Relations Refused to Publish (Re: L'Affaire Pinochet)

On June 5, 2004 the NYT reported: "The chief Latin American expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, the nation's pre-eminent foreign policy club, has quit as a protest, accusing the council of stifling debate on American intervention in Chile during the 1970's as a result of pressure from former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger." The expert, Kenneth Maxwell, says he resigned after the Council refused to publish his response to a letter criticizing his review of Peter Kornbluh's The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. Kornbluh says he was also prevented from responding in print. Below is the letter Kornbluh asked the Council to publish.

Maxwell's main claim was that the the United States government could have prevented the carbombing of Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C. in 1976. The assassination was ordered by Pinochet's repressive government as part of a vigorous campaign to stamp out dissent.

The first account of the controversy was published by the Nation on June 3, 2004. On June 10 the National Security Archive published declassified documents that support Maxwell's claim that the U.S. knew in advance of attempts to kill dissidents and could have interceded to stop it.

To the Editor:

The refusal by Foreign Affairs to print Kenneth Maxwell's response to William D. Rogers letter ("Crisis Prevention," March/April 2004 issue) is not only unjust to Maxwell but, more importantly, to the truth regarding an egregious act of international terrorism that took place on the streets of Washington D.C. As the authors of two books that document what Henry Kissinger's office knew and what it did and didn't do about the network of Southern Cone secret police operatives known as Operation Condor, we believe that the Rogers letter should not be allowed to stand uncorrected.

The focus of the Rogers letter is on the September 21, 1976, car-bombing on Massachusetts Avenue, carried out by agents of Gen. Pinochet's DINA, that took the life of former Chilean Ambassador Orlando Letelier and his American colleague, Ronni Karpen Moffitt. Rogers dismisses Maxwell's assertion that "this was a tragedy that might have been prevented" and scoffs: "by whom, one might ask?"

The answer is that it could have been prevented by Secretary of State Kissinger's office and by the CIA, both of which had advance intelligence on Operation Condor assassination plots. The declassified CIA and State Department records are absolutely clear on this point. The CIA obtained concrete intelligence in early June 1976-months before the Letelier-Moffitt assassination took place, that Southern Cone military intelligence officials were coordinating their repression against perceived enemies in Latin America and abroad, and that their operations included international assassinations. The documents show that on July 30, 1976, a CIA briefer told Assistant Secretary Harry Shlaudeman about "disturbing developments" in the "operational attitudes" of an organization codenamed Operation Condor.

The intelligence reports cited by Shlaudeman did not indicate the Condor plans involved the United States. But we now know that such reports existed: both the CIA and the State Department received reports from the U.S. Embassy in Paraguay that two Chilean agents, using false passports and false identities had requested visas to travel from Asuncion to Washington D.C. in late July. In addition, the CIA has acknowledged in a letter that it learned of a threat by Uruguay to kill U.S. Congressman Edward Koch in reprisal for his legislative efforts to cut off military aid to that country. The threat, made by an officer now known to have been a Condor operative, was also received in late July, around the same time the CIA was developing its intelligence conclusions about Condor.

The declassified record shows that Secretary of Kissinger was briefed on Condor and its "murder operations" on August 5, 1976, in a 14-page report from Shlaudeman. "Internationally, the Latin generals look like our guys," Shlaudeman cautioned. "We are especially identified with Chile. It cannot do us any good."

Shlaudeman and his two deputies, William Luers and Hewson Ryan, recommended action. Over the course of three weeks, they drafted a cautiously worded demarche, approved by Kissinger, in which he instructed the U.S. ambassadors in the Southern Cone countries to meet with the respective heads of state about Condor. He instructed them to express "our deep concern" about "rumors" of "plans for the assassination of subversives, politicians and prominent figures both within the national borders of certain Southern Cone countries and abroad."

This cable was dated August 23, 1976-four full weeks prior to the bombing that killed Letelier and Moffitt. In effect, Kissinger's warning placed the Condor regimes on notice that the United States had detected their assassination plans and wanted them stopped. It is reasonable to conclude that if the demarche had been delivered to Chile, the Pinochet regime would have aborted the assassination mission that was already underway.

In his first letter published in the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Rogers asserts that "Kissinger's warning was delivered in robust fashion to the Argentine president-there are cables to prove it…and probably to Pinochet's underlings in Santiago." That is incorrect. In fact, there are no such cables.

In the all important case of the Pinochet regime, which sponsored the plot to kill Letelier, we have a cable dated August 24 from U.S. Ambassador Popper advising against talking to Pinochet because he "might well take as an insult any inference that he was connected with such assassination plots." Popper requested approval for an alternative plan: to send the CIA station chief to talk to the head of the Chilean secret police. Although there is an August 30 document indicating that Shlaudeman favored Popper's approach, Popper received no reply, at least not until after the assassination. This lack of reply is confirmed by available documents and by interviews with those involved. One official, Deputy Chief of Mission Thomas Boyatt said he has a distinct memory that no reply was received.

Boyatt had no explanation for this failure of communication: "This says Shlaudeman has decided by August 30 not to go to Pinochet. So what's the big secret? Why couldn't we be put into action [the next day]. And I don't know the answer to that….But going to [DINA chief] Contreras [the next day] would have made a difference, I think. Or at least it might have."

In the case of Argentina, there are two memoranda [Document 10 and Document 11] chronicling a conversation that occurred on September 21, between Ambassador Robert Hill and General Jorge Videla. These cables indicate a general discussion of human rights took place but make no mention of Condor or of the serious U.S. concerns about reports of international assassination plans. How could it be that the ambassador ignored specific instructions from Secretary of State Kissinger?

The answer seems to lie in a secret cable sent by Shlaudeman from Costa Rica to his deputy in D.C. William Luers, on September 20-the day before the Hill/Videla meeting and the car bombing. The one-paragraph cable is titled "Operation Condor" and is marked for relevance to Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. Shlaudeman states: "You can simply instruct the Ambassadors to take no further action, noting that there have been no reports in some weeks indicating an intention to activate the Condor scheme."

Maxwell suggests that the timing of this cable, sent only eighteen hours before Letelier's car was blown up in downtown Washington, was "a cruel coincidence." No one argues that the cable indicates complicity by any U.S. official in Letelier's death; Rogers' inference to that effect is absurd and a red herring. The point is not that the assassination might have been prevented at that late hour. The importance of the cable is that it is documented evidence that an initiative to counter terrorism had been aborted before it was ever carried out. Thirteen days after the assassination Shlaudeman belatedly sent his approval to Ambassador Popper's suggestion that the CIA station chief present the Condor demarche directly to DINA's Contreras instead of to Pinochet. We believe that this cable raises the question of whether those involved may have been attempting to cover up their failure to act on the Condor threat prior to the assassination.

The paper trail is clear: the State Department and the CIA had enough intelligence to take concrete steps to thwart Condor assassination planning. Those steps were initiated but never implemented. Shlaudeman's deputy, Hewson Ryan, would later acknowledge in an oral history interview that the State Department was "remiss" in its handling of the case. "We knew fairly early on that the governments of the Southern Cone countries were planning, or at least talking about, some assassinations abroad in the summer of 1976. … Whether if we had gone in, we might have prevented this, I don't know," he stated in reference to the Letelier-Moffitt bombing. "But we didn't."

At a time when our nation is once again examining whether there was enough intelligence to detect and deter the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it is imperative that this earlier act of terrorism be understood for the lessons it holds, rather than distorted by commission or omission. To do anything less would be to dishonor two people whose deaths might have been prevented.

Peter Kornbluh
Author-The Pinochet File

John Dinges
Author-The Condor Years

Posted on Friday, June 11, 2004 at 4:31 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Reagan Needed Gorby to Succeed in Ending the Cold War

Marshall Goldman, in the Boston Globe (June 8, 2004):

IF THERE WAS EVER AN ODD COUPLE IN WORLD AFFAIRS, IT WAS RONALD REAGAN AND MIKHAIL GORBACHEV. WHEN THEY FIRST MET IN GENEVA IN NOVEMBER 1985, THE WORLD HELD ITS BREATH. COULD THEY EVEN BE CIVIL TO EACH OTHER?

There was President Reagan, one of the most unabashed proponents of capitalism and democracy and critic of the evil empire of the Soviet Union. As for General Secretary Gorbachev, he was one of the most dedicated believers in Communist Party ideology and an outspoken opponent of NATO and the capitalist world. Yet within five years, together they brought an end to the Cold War and became friends and welcome heroes in each other's capitals.

At the time, particularly during the first few years of Reagan's presidency, it was hard to believe that there could be any such result. Reagan made clear his contempt for the Soviet Union and all that it stood for.

To him, the Soviet Union was evil incarnate. There was no doubt in his mind that the Soviets were intent on dominating Western Europe just as they dominated Eastern Europe and as they were trying to do in Afghanistan. He announced early on that he would not stand by idly and allow the Soviet Union to continue its expansion. But to do this, the United States would have to take some important and costly steps.

In his view, the United States had fallen behind the Soviet Union in military terms. It was foolhardy, he declared, to negotiate with the Soviets until the United States could match them as equals. This meant a major arms buildup, the installation of Pershing II missiles in Germany, and the creation of a "Star Wars" missile defense system.

In Soviet eyes, this was a serious threat not only because the Soviet Union could not afford such a race but because if the "Star Wars" system could succeed in intercepting incoming Soviet missiles, the United States would feel free to attack the Soviets and they would be unable to retaliate. This would bring an end to the whole system of mutually assured destruction. Neither country would dare attack the other because it would be destroyed in retaliation. With a "Star Wars" system, the United States could do as it pleased without fear of such a Soviet response.

It may well have been the case that "Star Wars" would never have worked, but the Soviets could not be sure. What they did know is that Reagan had been heard off microphone saying that he was about to bomb the Kremlin. To them this was no joke. Yuri Andropov, the general secretary from 198384 and the former head of the KGB, decided to call Reagan's bluff and suspended all arms control discussions. My Soviet friends have confessed that they firmly anticipated a preemptive nuclear strike from the United States. In their minds, we were close to nuclear war....

Posted on Thursday, June 10, 2004 at 8:45 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Reagan's Response to Terrorism Was Uneven

Scott Shane, in the Baltimore Sun (June 8, 2004):

The presidency of Ronald Reagan is widely credited with a muscular, assertive foreign policy that contributed to the downfall of the Soviet Union.

But his response to a wave of terrorism in the early and mid-1980s - when there were far more terrorist attacks worldwide than in recent years - was far less consistent, historians and terrorism experts say.

Reagan's reaction to the bloodiest anti-American attacks of the era - bombings in Lebanon in 1983 - was to withdraw American forces, an act that Osama bin Laden later pointed to as an example of American cowardice.

But Reagan acted with decisive military force against Libya in 1986 when that country was linked to the bombing of a German discotheque frequented by American soldiers.

On the whole, Reagan's legacy in taking on terrorism "is a mixed bag," said Steven R. David, professor of political science at the Johns Hopkins University: "He certainly talked tough, and occasionally he acted."

But pulling troops out of Beirut "probably gave encouragement to terrorists to believe that if you hurt America badly enough, we will withdraw," David said.

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, on American soil were so cataclysmic as to obscure the earlier terrorism.

But the Reagan years saw a surge of bombings around the world that were more numerous and more diverse in motivation and targets than those in recent years, said Robert B. Oakley, who served as the State Department's counterterrorism coordinator from 1984 to 1986.

In addition to Mideast-related terrorism, much of it sponsored by the governments of Syria, Iraq, Iran and Libya, there were European groups such as Italy's Red Brigades and violent separatist movements in Northern Ireland and the Basque country of Spain, Oakley noted.

Between 1982 and 1988, according to the State Department, international terrorist attacks numbered from 487 to 665 per year. By comparison, between 1997 and 2003, attacks worldwide ranged between a high of 426 in 2000 and a low of 190 last year.

"A lot of Americans were killed, but it was overseas," Oakley said. "So it didn't get the same attention."

The other critical difference, David said, was that in the earlier era the Cold War fight against communism was the overriding priority.

A case in point: the Iran-contra affair of 1985-1986, in which the United States secretly sold arms to Iran and diverted the proceeds to anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua. Iran was known to be a sponsor of terrorist bombings and kidnappings, but the two-fold goal of the scheme was to appease the Iranians and support the Nicaraguan contras.

By Oakley's account, the Reagan administration only gradually came to understand the threat posed by Hezbollah terrorists seeking to drive U.S. troops out of Lebanon, just as later the Clinton and Bush administrations only slowly appreciated the scale of the danger from al-Qaida.

The first major anti-American attack in Beirut came on April 18, 1983, when a pickup truck loaded with explosives rammed the U.S. Embassy and killed 63 people, including 17 Americans, eight of whom worked for the CIA.

Then, on Oct. 23, 1983, a suicide bomber crashed a 5-ton Mercedes truck loaded with 5,000 pounds of explosives into the U.S. Marine barracks at Beirut International Airport. The blast killed 241 Marines and injured more than 100 others.

The victims were among 1,800 Marines deployed to Lebanon to help separate warring factions.

At first, Reagan vowed to find and punish those responsible and rebuffed calls to pull out.

"Those who directed this atrocity must be dealt justice, and they will be," he said four days after the attack, adding: "Let me ask those who say we should get out of Lebanon: If we were to leave Lebanon now, what message would that send to those who foment instability and terrorism?"

Four months later, Reagan ordered what was called the "redeployment" of U.S. troops to ships offshore. "We're not bugging out; we're just going to a little more defensible position," he said at the time.

The Marine mission had become extremely unpopular with Congress and the public after the attack, said Loch K. Johnson, a University of Georgia political scientist.

"It seemed to me it was the right thing to do. I don't think it was a symbol of cowardice," Johnson said. "But bin Laden saw it otherwise."

Posted on Thursday, June 10, 2004 at 8:42 AM | Comments (0) | Top

New Research: Shipwrecks in the Supposedly "Dark Ages" Indicate Existence of a Consumer Revolution

Dalya Alberge, in the London Times (June 9, 2004):

RESEARCH has overturned centuries-old theories that the Dark Ages came soon after the turbulent decline of the Roman Empire in the 4th century AD.

Sean Kingsley, a British archaeologist, has drawn up a new map of 222 shipwrecks dating from the 4th to 10th centuries AD, which shows the emergence of a consumer revolution with an epicentre in the Holy Land.

The conclusions are dramatic, he said: "Rather than dying a quick death following the supposed decline of the Roman Empire, the Mediterranean Sea became a springboard for remarkably vibrant commercial trade."

Dr Kingsley, Visiting Fellow at the Research Centre for Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at the University of Reading, said that the division of the Late Roman Empire between Rome and Constantinople created a multitude of bustling new markets as the backwaters of the eastern Mediterranean became vibrant sea lanes. Some 92 of the 222 shipwrecks as far afield as Italy, Sardinia, Israel and Eritrea have come to light in the past 12 years. They had been transporting wine, oil, fish and prefabricated churches -marble slabs complete with sculpted capitals and staircases.

He said: "Our new master map of Mediterranean shipwrecks testifies to centuries-old globalisation. Once the shackles of Rome were cast off, Eastern merchants jumped into this vacuum to eagerly sell produce how and wher-ever they saw fit; the cat could now have the cream. Rather than an impoverished society scraping a living off simple farming, a highly sophisticated consumer society evolved, more like Thatcher's Britain than some Third World state."

Having researched shipwrecks off Israel and the Mediterranean for 15 years, he concludes that the tonnes of pottery, glass and marble excavated reflect the huge volume of traffic that continued to ply the Mediterranean. He mentioned a 6th-century ship found off the coast of southern France which had an 18,000 litre (3,600-gallon) cargo of North African and Eastern wine and oil amphorae, and a 9th-century vessel found near south-west Turkey with 1,200 wine amphorae from eastern Crimea.

The evidence, he said, challenges Edward Gibbon's 18th-century epic masterpiece, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which has influenced generations of scholars into believing that the sacking of Rome by the Goths in AD 410 ushered in the Dark Ages. Historians have assumed that, after three centuries of political, religious and economic stability, the Roman Empire entered a storm in the late 4th century AD, Dr Kingsley said.

Monumental city landscapes fragmented, environmental crises such as the bubonic plague of AD 541 wiped out up to one third of the Mediterranean's population and, from the 4th to the 8th centuries, winds of change blew new peoples on to the political map: Abbasids, Avars, Byzantines, Goths, Lombards, Umayyads and Venetians. Dr Kingsley said that, for the early archaeologist, Rome symbolised the zenith of cultural achievement, an epic civilisation bursting with monumental architecture and the finest art: "The Later Roman Empire, by contrast, was a grubby era lacking in finesse and unworthy of study. Consequently, early archaeologists usually hacked these upper archaeological levels away without record, eager to reach the eternal treasures of the Roman age." He added: "Despite the web of catastrophe and strain that beset the world of Late Antiquity, it was a testimony to the human spirit that maritime trade found a way not only to survive, but to thrive." His latest research will be published in Barbarian Seas -Late Rome to Islam on June 14, as part of an encyclopaedia of underwater archaeology.

Posted on Thursday, June 10, 2004 at 8:35 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Reagan's Legacy of Debt

Loren Steffy, in the Houston Chronicle (June 9, 2004):

DON'T be surprised if Ronald Reagan's death inspires members of Congress to try once again to put his face on the dime, replacing Franklin Roosevelt.

Hard currency, though, isn't the best place for Reagan's likeness.

A credit card would be a more fitting homage.

Reagan reshaped our popular view of economics, and with it, our view of debt. He transformed us from the world's largest creditor to its largest debtor.

His vision is still with us. It lives on in the $ 1.7 trillion in tax cuts enacted by the current administration, in the record deficits that have surpassed Reagan's own and in the feel-good projections that the country's finances will sort themselves out in about 10 years and everything will be OK.

Reagan's policies sparked an unprecedented economic expansion, but it came at a price. We got so enamored with the prosperity, we forgot the meter was running.

Reagan didn't invent the buy now, pay later approach to public policy, of course. In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson ladled on social programs like Medicare and food stamps while at the same time paying to wage war in Vietnam, all without raising taxes. That ignited inflation in the 1970s and left the economy vulnerable to spikes in oil prices.

And it was precisely that economic malaise that Americans elected Reagan to combat. He told us we could have it all: lower taxes, a stronger defense and less government to get in the way of the free market.

Even better, he said it would all pay for itself and we'd all be better off. It was like a diet that promised we could eat ourselves thin.

The architect of Reagan's economic policy, David Stockman, later said in his memoirs that Reagan's early budgets got past Congress because they included optimistic revenue forecasts that Reagan aides knew wouldn't come true and proposed spending cuts they knew would never happen.

The combination of tax cuts and bloated military spending overwhelmed the savings in gutted domestic programs that were supposed to soak up the difference.

The deficit ballooned to $ 290.4 billion in 1992 from $ 74 billion in 1980, and during Reagan's eight years in office, interest payments on the pile of debt he amassed soared to $ 169 billion from $ 69 billion, further sapping government revenue.

To be sure, Reagan had economic victories. He pushed through some of the most sweeping tax reforms in U.S. history in 1986. During his tenure, inflation was brought under control. He took free-market capitalism to the world, which has transformed governments and economies on a global scale.

Many historians credit his military buildup as the crescendo of the Cold War. The Soviet Union, an economically inferior adversary, simply couldn't keep pace and essentially went bankrupt. He found an economic alternative to full scale nuclear war.

His most enduring legacy, though, was the deficit, which he hated yet allowed to triple during his administration.

"Reaganomics" offered a new way to look at the economy: Deficits don't matter. Tax cuts for the wealthy will stimulate the economy, and the rebound, when it gets here, will pay for everything.

It didn't work quite that way.

Reagan gave us the economic equivalent of the dine and dash.

He ordered us all a big meal, we ate heartily, and then he walked the check and left his vice president and the American people to pay it.

The question is, did we learn anything?

Last year, the deficit surged to $ 375 billion, more than double the previous year and a sharp reversal from the $ 127 billion surplus in 2001. The $ 1.7 trillion tax cuts, combined with the recession and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacts have sparked the biggest reduction in government revenue in a half century.

Posted on Thursday, June 10, 2004 at 8:09 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Fred Greenstein: Reagan's Style of Politics and Governing

Fred Greenstein, in the Political Science Quarterly and reprinted by TomPaine.com (2000):

Ronald Reagan presents an interpretative puzzle. Although he was innocent of much that went on in his own presidency, he managed to be a powerful force in his times. Early in his first term, Reagan presided over a fundamental reorientation of his nation's domestic policies, and in his second term, he played a critical part in the peaceful termination of a global conflict that threatened the survival of humankind. It is a challenge to arrive at an understanding of the man, as well as of his political accomplishments. Like his early political idol Franklin D. Roosevelt, Reagan had impressive social skills but was distant as a human being, denying even his closest associates access to his inner self.

REAGAN THROUGH THE PRISM OF FICTION

In 1985, Edmund Morris was afforded a unique perspective from which to take the measure of this elusive figure. Reagan and several of his aides had been entranced by Morris's The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the young TR. Reagan's staff invited Morris to become their boss's authorized biographer. Morris accepted, set up shop in the White House, and met regularly with Reagan. He attended Reagan's public appearances and sat in on many of his official meetings, although he was excluded from national security deliberations.

To Morris's distress, he found little new to say about his protagonist. His interviews with the highly private Reagan proved to be singularly unrevealing. Moreover, by the time he was ready to write his book, Reagan's life and political career had been thoroughly explored by others. Even before Morris began his project, Reagan had been the subject of a perceptive 1982 biography by Washington Post reporter Lou Cannon, who devoted much of his journalistic career to covering Reagan in California and Washington. In 1987, Garry Wills published a contextually rich book on Reagan's background and personal qualities. In 1991, two more important volumes came out, a detailed history of the Reagan presidency by Cannon and a comprehensive account of Reagan's role in the events that spelled the end of the Cold War by Don Oberdorfer.

Morris's solution to his predicament is by now well known. After an extended battle with writer's block, he arrived at a way to write Reagan's biography that is, if nothing else, original. Morris casts his book as the memoir of a fictional contemporary of Reagan's, who has observed him in Illinois as a young man and in California as a movie actor, conservative political activist, and governor of the state. That memoir-writer is an altered version of Morris himself. The actual Morris was born in Kenya in 1940; the invented Morris was born in Chicago in 1912, the year after Reagan's birth. In addition to his fictionally aged self, Morris populates his book with no fewer than nine made-up members of the Morris family, including a 1960s University of California student radical, who provides a highly selective account of Reagan's governorship.

Morris's book is an intellectual embarrassment. It blurs fact with fiction, substitutes effusion for rigorous analysis, and is riddled with errors. It also is seriously incomplete, especially in its treatment of the aspect of Reagan's experience to which Morris might have been expected to have the most to add -- his White House years. A mere nine of the book's thirty-seven chapters are devoted to the Reagan presidency. Of these, Morris allocates only one to the entirety of 1987 and 1988. These are the years of the two final Reagan-Gorbachev summit conferences, which produced the first arms reduction agreements in the history of the Cold War.

Another indication of the book's incompleteness is its failure to mention Robert Bork, whose 1987 nomination to the Supreme Court was rejected by the Senate in one of the most heated controversies of the Reagan presidency. Also ignored are Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, and Anthony M. Kennedy, all of whom Reagan succeeded in appointing to the Court, and William H. Rehnquist, whom he elevated to chief justice. Yet there are over one hundred entries in the book's index for members of Morris's make-believe family. More could be said about the deficiencies of this idiosyncratic work, but the interested reader can use the Internet to consult the many, mostly critical, reviews of it that appeared following its publication in October 1999.

A FACTUAL RONALD REAGAN

The real Ronald Reagan can be characterized without resort to novelistic techniques. He was born on February 6, 1911, in Tampico, Illinois, a small town sixty miles west of Chicago, and raised in the somewhat larger nearby town of Dixon. His father was an ebullient salesman with the gift of gab and a drinking problem. Reagan's deeply religious mother taught her children to think of their father's alcoholism as an illness. He emerged from childhood with a sunny disposition as well as a number of traits that are common in children of alcoholics, including discomfort with conflict, distance in personal relationships, and a tendency to put a rosy gloss on harsh realities.

Perhaps because of the attraction of fantasy to those who have had painful formative experiences, Reagan developed an early ambition to become an actor. He took part in dramatics in high school and college and found employment as a sportscaster after college. (He specialized in embellishing the teletype's bare-bones accounts of games with imagined descriptions of ballpark atmospherics.) On a 1937 trip to California, Reagan was signed to a contract by Warner Brothers. During his time in Hollywood, he performed in fifty-three films, earning a reputation as reliable and able professional. He also was active in the Screen Actor's Guild, serving as its president during the postwar controversies over alleged communist infiltration of the film industry, and leading it in collective bargaining negotiations.

In the 1950s, Reagan's film career began to wind down, and he secured a position as a public spokesman for the General Electric Company. In the course of a decade spent addressing corporate audiences, Reagan underwent a political conversion from liberalism to conservatism. In 1962, he brought his party affiliation in line with his new convictions, registering as a Republican. In 1964, Reagan suddenly became one of his party's leading figures after delivering a phenomenally successful fund-raising appeal in support of the party's presidential candidate, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona.

Between 1967 and 1975, Reagan served two terms as governor of California. During his time in Sacramento, he instituted a variety of conservative programs, but he also proved open to compromise, going along with the Democrats to institute the largest tax increase in California history. Despite his much publicized conflicts with student protestors, the funding of the University of California doubled during Reagan's governorship. In 1976, Reagan competed with President Gerald Ford for the Republican presidential nomination and was narrowly defeated. In 1980, he again sought his party's nomination, won it, and went on to become the first two-term president since Eisenhower.

AN UNORTHODOX POLITICAL STYLE

Reagan's political style was shaped by his enthusiasm for FDR, for whom he voted four times; his experience as a labor leader; and his background as an actor. He took Roosevelt's use of the presidential pulpit as the prototype for his own political leadership. His union leadership helped mold his bargaining skills. Hollywood prepared him to take part in the staged public events that were a central feature of his governorship and presidency, and his screen persona as an affable middle American was the basis of his political personality as a citizen-politician bent on restoring the nation to its traditional values.

Reagan's presidential performance illustrates the shortcomings of attempts to classify presidents in terms of whether they are active or passive in their stances toward their responsibilities. As the spokesman-in-chief and principal negotiator of his presidency, Reagan was unsparing in his efforts. He also was not only his presidency's star performer but also its producer, setting the tone and direction of its policies.

But when it came to the inner workings of his presidency, Reagan was the antithesis of a hands-on leader. Examples abound. His first-term treasury secretary, Donald Regan, relates that during his four years as the Reagan administration's chief financial officer, Reagan never sought him out for a one-to-one discussion. His White House aide, Michael Deaver, reports that at a reception for city executives, Reagan mistook his secretary of housing and urban development for a mayor. His budget director, David Stockman, notes that during the maneuvering that led to the enactment of the 1981 tax and budget cuts, Reagan was uninformed about the particulars of his program and allowed himself to be misled by his advisers.

Reagan's former domestic policy adviser Martin Anderson has provided an analysis of Reagan's leadership style that helps explain how he could have had such a great impact despite his hands-off manner. To begin with, his strong general convictions enabled him to set his administration's priorities. Yet he was tactically flexible, readily adjusting to political opposition and changed circumstances. He also had impressive negotiating skills, an ability to make decisions easily, and a readiness to afford his subordinates wide control of the programs they administered.

Reagan's openness to delegation was a source of weakness, as well as strength, Anderson notes. His practice was to make decisions on the basis of the options his aides presented to him, neither questioning the choices given to them nor seeking to shape them. When those aides were competent and responsible, matters tended to go well. But when they were deficient, the results could be disastrous. Both possibilities are illustrated in three major developments of the Reagan presidency: the tax and spending cuts of 1981, the Iran-contra affair, and the politics of the end of the Cold War.

THE REAGAN STYLE IN ACTION

Transforming Domestic Priorities

In his first eight months in the White House, Reagan presided over a display of political effectiveness that will be studied for years to come. By the summer of 1981, Reagan and his associates had persuaded Congress to institute the greatest change in government priorities since the New Deal. One of the principal sources of Reagan's success was the caliber of his staff. Included were budget director Stockman, who had a keen strategic sense and a Talmudic knowledge of the federal budget; White House chief of staff, James Baker III, who was one of the most accomplished Washington operators of his time; Edwin Meese III, Reagan's emissary to the Republican Right; and Michael Deaver, the choreographer of the news-making events that kept Reagan's program at the forefront of national attention.

Reagan himself was crucial for his program's success. He was a masterful public enunciator of his program. He even turned the March 1981 attempt on his life to political advantage, marking the end of his convalescence with a stirring defense of his legislative proposals before a joint session of Congress. He was also consistently prepared to make his communication skills available for tactical purposes, winning the votes of swing legislators by stimulating voters to contact them before key roll calls. The upshot of such efforts was the passage of a pair of measures that reduced the next year's domestic spending by $35.2 billion, while slashing taxes by 25 percent over the next three years. Whatever their substantive merits, Reagan's 1981 economic enactments were a political accomplishment of the highest order.

Iran-Contra

Reagan's second term began with a number of modest-seeming staff changes. Meese became attorney general and Deaver left the government. Baker and Treasury Secretary Donald Regan informed Reagan that they would like to swap positions. He gave them his blessing, raising no questions about the possible consequences of the change, which proved to be huge. Donald Regan was an ex-marine, a hard-driving former CEO of Merrill Lynch, and a practitioner of top-down management. In contrast to his predecessor, James Baker III, Regan was neither a Washington insider nor politically skilled.

Regan restructured the White House along hierarchical lines, putting himself in charge of all matters relating to the president. In focusing on the top of the White House pyramid, however, Regan was insufficiently attentive its base. In the second year of his tenure as chief of staff, a scandal of major proportions broke out at the lower levels of the White House. Its perpetrators were Lt. Colonel Oliver North, an obscure functionary on the National Security Council staff, and Vice Admiral John Poindexter, the fourth of Reagan's six national security advisers.

Poindexter and North were discovered to have been engaged in the covert sale of arms to the revolutionary regime of Iran. Their hope was to persuade Iran to intervene with a group of Islamic militants who were holding a number of Americans hostage in Lebanon. Before long, it also emerged that North and Poindexter had secretly diverted the profits from the arms sales and used them to provide aid to the guerrillas who were seeking to overthrow the left-leaning government of Nicaragua. In so doing they ignored legislation barring the nation's intelligence agencies from aiding the Central American rebels. They also contravened two major policies of the president they served, violating the precept that one never negotiates with terrorists and abetting a regime the Reagan administration was seeking to isolate.

The Iran-contra revelations broke in November 1986. At that point, Reagan was riding high -- his approval level had exceeded 60 percent in the previous fifteen successive Gallup soundings. The following month, it plunged to 47 percent, remaining in that anemic range for most of the next year. The year of 1987 was not a total loss in that it was marked by the Washington summit between Reagan and Gorbachev. Nonetheless, it marked a period in which the "Great Communicator" was less than successful at controlling the nation's policy agenda.

Cold War Endgame

In the developments that spelled the end of the Cold War, Reagan relied heavily on one of the most dedicated and able public servants of his time, Secretary of State George Shultz. Reagan and his associates were by no means solely responsible for the end of the Cold War. They were dependent on the efforts of Mikhail Gorbachev to reform the Soviet Union and find a peaceful modus vivendi with the West, and Gorbachev in turn was motivated by the disastrous state of the Soviet economy.

Nevertheless, Reagan played a critical part in the dramatic improvement in relations between the United States and the Soviet Union between 1985 and 1989. Spurred by an abhorrence of nuclear weapons that was not widely known at the time, Reagan concluded that it would be possible for the United States to find a modus vivendi with Gorbachev's Soviet Union. His efforts were advanced by his ingratiating manner and skill as a negotiator. They also were furthered by his confidence in his own views, which were unshaken by the insistence of many of his aides that the Soviet Union had not changed its spots.

As the long-time Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, has observed, Reagan's conciliatory policies toward the Soviet Union enabled Gorbachev to forge ahead in his domestic and international initiatives. "If Reagan had stuck to his hard-line policies in 1985 and 1986," Dobrynin commented, "Gorbachev would have been accused by the rest of the Politburo of giving everything away to a fellow who does not want to negotiate. We would have been forced to tighten our belts and spend even more on defense."

A REAGAN BALANCE SHEET

What can we conclude about Reagan's strengths and weaknesses as political leader? His greatest liability clearly was in the realm of cognition. This was a chief executive who never grasped the logic of nuclear deterrence and genuinely believed that it would be possible to produce an invulnerable space shield. It also was a president whose inattention to particulars left him at the mercy of his subordinates.

Yet there was more to Reagan's intellect than met the eye. In attempting to identify that "more," Lou Cannon has drawn on the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner's notion of multiple intelligences. Cannon concludes that while Reagan was not well endowed with logical abilities, he was gifted at interpersonal relations and the use of verbal and body language, traits that are more common in actors than politicians, but that Reagan turned to good political effect.

The emotional qualities of presidents are also of central importance for their performance. Reagan's leadership suffered from a discomfort with face-to-face disagreement that limited his ability to profit from vigorous debate on the part of his advisers. However, he showed no sign of the highly disruptive passions that doomed the presidency of Richard Nixon or the defective impulse control that led Bill Clinton down the path to impeachment. Despite having been the son of an alcoholic, Reagan projected a sense of self-assurance that enhanced his political effectiveness. He also was confident in his own perceptions, feeling free to ignore his conservative base, when he sensed that the United States could do business with Gorbachev.

Reagan's most obvious political asset was his ability as a public communicator. In this he is in a small class of oratorically gifted twentieth century presidents that includes Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and, intermittently, Bill Clinton. Reagan also excelled in the acts of face-to-face communication and bonhomie that add to a president's ability to sell his program to other policy makers.

Also on the positive side of the ledger was the firmness of Reagan's convictions. No one could mistake his opposition to big government, high tax rates, and the Soviet Union -- until Gorbachev changed the Soviet reality. As George Shultz has observed, Reagan's convictions provided a beacon for his administration and others in the political community: "Maybe you didn't agree with him and maybe you did. But there it was. What you saw was what you got."

Throughout his political career Reagan was advantaged by the tendency of others to dismiss him as a "mere" actor. A striking example of his native political gifts has been provided by Douglas Dillon, former secretary of the treasury under Kennedy and Johnson. In the mid-1970s, Dillon served with Reagan on a Ford administration task force charged with reevaluating the CIA's mission in the wake of its use for domestic political espionage by the Nixon administration.

In its early meetings, the task force became stalemated, with some of its members favoring a largely uncurbed CIA and others wanting to place severe curbs on the agency. Reagan, who had missed the group's initial sessions, spent a portion of the first meeting he attended listening to the debate. He then picked up a pen, began writing, and read off a compromise wording, asking the proponents of the polar positions if they could accept his formula. They agreed that they could, thus ending the impasse.

As Dillon's report shows, Reagan was far more than a political front man. He was a politically skilled chief executive whose talents were insufficiently recognized because he was cut from a different cloth than most of those who rise to the nation's highest office.

This article was first published by the Political Science Quarterly.

Posted on Thursday, June 10, 2004 at 8:05 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Where Reagan Ranks in a New Poll by Conservative Historians

James Taranto, in the WSJ (June 10, 2004):

Ronald Reagan has had a hard time getting his due from scholars. In 1996 Arthur Schlesinger Jr. conducted a poll of historians asking them to rank the presidents, and Mr. Reagan came in 25th out of 39, putting him in the "low average" category. The Gipper had done only slightly better in a Siena College survey two years earlier, finishing 20th out of 41--below Bill Clinton (16th), who had been in office less than two years, and well below Lyndon B. Johnson (13th). It's hard to agree that the president who won the Cold War was less successful than the one who escalated the Vietnam War.

The flaw in these studies is obvious. Because academics tend to be far to the left of the general population, conservative presidents, especially recent ones, usually get short shrift. (A C-Span survey in 1999, which included "professional presidential experts" as well as historians, did rank Mr. Reagan 11th.)

Public opinion polls tell a different story. In February 2001 Gallup asked Americans who was the greatest president in history. Mr. Reagan finished first, with 18%....

In 2000 the Federalist Society came up with a way to remedy the flaws in both types of surveys. It asked 78 scholars in history, law and politics to rate the presidents on a five-point scale. "We tried to choose approximately equal numbers of scholars who lean to the left and to the right," explains Northwestern University's James Lindgren, who analyzed the data. "Another way to express this is that we sought to mirror what scholarly opinion might be on the counterfactual assumption that the academy was politically representative of the society in which we live and work."

Mr. Lindgren averaged the ratings for each of the 39 presidents (George W. Bush was not yet elected, and William Henry Harrison and James Garfield were omitted because they died shortly after taking office) and divided them into six categories: great, near great, above average, average, below average and failure. The results appeared in November 2000 on OpinionJournal.com and have just been published as a Wall Street Journal book, "Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House," which also includes an essay on each president and several thematic chapters on presidential leadership. (For excerpts, click here.) Some highlights:

• Three presidents made the cut as "great": George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. They are the top three finishers in most surveys of scholars.

• Eight presidents were judged "near great," including Mr. Reagan, who finished eighth. Among them only James K. Polk (10th) served just one term.

• Among recent presidents, only Mr. Reagan ranked as "near great." JFK (18th) and LBJ (17th) were "above average," George H.W. Bush (21st) and Bill Clinton (24th) "average," and Richard Nixon (33rd), Gerald Ford (28th) and Jimmy Carter (30th) "below average."

• Mr. Clinton was the most controversial president--that is, the scholars' rankings of him diverged more sharply than for anyone else. Woodrow Wilson, who finished 11th overall, was the second most controversial president, but the next three were all among the post-1960 group: Mr. Reagan, Nixon and LBJ.

• Four presidents rated as failures: Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, Warren Harding and James Buchanan. Buchanan finished dead last.

The new survey can be found in James Taranto, co-editor, with Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, of residential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House.

Posted on Thursday, June 10, 2004 at 7:07 AM | Comments (1) | Top

Liberia: 2 New Books Lay Out Its Complex History of Ties to the U.S.

Jennifer Jacobson, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (June 11, 2004) (subscribers only):

As rebel forces closed in on Liberia's former president, Charles Taylor, last summer, most newspaper accounts gave Americans in-depth coverage of the fighting -- and only a single sentence or so as to why they should care.

Reporters in Monrovia briefly noted that the United States had historical ties to Liberia dating back to 1822, when the U.S. government and freed American slaves founded the West African nation and named its capital city after the American president James Monroe. Few reporters, however, attempted to explain the complex history of that relationship.

That complicated knot of history is at the center of two new books: Claude A. Clegg III's The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia (University of North Carolina Press) and Ibrahim Sundiata's Brothers and Strangers: Black Zion, Black Slavery, 1914-1940 (Duke University Press). Taken together, these works lay out crucial interactions between America and Liberia in the African nation's first 118 years. In many cases, the interactions led to bitterness and disillusionment. Both Mr. Clegg and Mr. Sundiata reveal how cherished myths about Africa and America ran aground on the shoals of political and cultural realities.

Mr. Clegg, a professor of history at Indiana University at Bloomington, traces the journeys of black North Carolinians who settled in Liberia during its first seven decades as a nation, while Mr. Sundiata, a professor of history and African and Afro-American studies at Brandeis University, details the stirrings, trials, and eventual collapse of Marcus Garvey's African emigration movement in the early 20th century.

The two narratives observe the history of the U.S.-Liberia relationship with a keen eye. But in the light of last summer's conclusion to a 14-year civil war, the authors point to lessons for the future as well. Because of the global campaign against terrorism being waged by the United States, that relationship may once again take on a significance not seen since the days of the cold war. Mr. Sundiata is among those who argue that the United States would be remiss not to stabilize Liberia and engage its help in the post-September 11 world, as it once did to counter the Soviet threat.

In his introduction, Mr. Sundiata points out significant parallels between the violence and chaos of 2003 and that which existed in Liberia in early 1933, when its greatest natural resource, rubber, was a key concern for American national security.

"Seventy years ago, in the name of human rights, a Republican administration stood on the verge of using military force to secure a material deemed essential to national defense," writes Mr. Sundiata. "Today, amid the slaughter of thousands, another Republican administration is timorous of all but token involvement. Interventions proceed, but perceived national interests have shifted. This is the most cautionary part of the tale."

That is a tale that many Americans would rather not hear. Against the tide of public interest, however, Mr. Clegg and Mr. Sundiata have written books that highlight U.S. indifference to a country it has for the most part deserted....

Posted on Thursday, June 10, 2004 at 6:57 AM | Comments (0) | Top

David Corn: Reagan Supported Dictators ... As Long as They Said They Opposed Communists

David Corn, in tompaine.com (June 9, 2004):

Aren't we mature enough as a democracy to memorialize our leaders with clear eyes? While the nation mourns one of its most popular presidents, it must be truthful in assessing his leadership. The very resolve being celebrated on op-ed pages across the country also led Reagan to ignore and sometimes sanction the brutality being committed in the name of fighting the "evil empire."

I have a vision. On the day that the remains of Ronald Reagan are transported from the US Capitol to the National Cathedral for the funeral services, the hearse will pass 800 black crosses.

Each cross will represent one of the men, women and children who were killed by the Salvadoran military in the village of El Mozote in December 1981. Each would be a reminder that the dead man now celebrated in the media as a lover of freedom and democracy oversaw a foreign policy that empowered and enabled murderous brutes and thugs in the name of anti-Sovietism. Many innocents in other lands paid dearly for Reagan's crusade.

Throughout his presidency, Reagan made nice with dictators - no matter how nefarious - as long as they parroted his opposition to communism. As soon as he entered the White House, his administration tried to normalize relations with Augosto Pinochet, the dictator of Chile, who was responsible for a bloody coup that overthrew a democratically elected (but socialist) government. The Reaganites also cozied up to the fascistic and anti-Semitic junta of Argentina, which tortured, slaughtered and disappeared its political opponents. And don't forget Reagan's attempt to woo Saddam Hussein, even after it was known that Hussein had used chemical weapons. (Reagan assigned this task to Donald Rumsfeld.)

Reagan may have pushed for democracy and human rights in the Soviet bloc, but he cared little for these values elsewhere. He dramatically urged the destruction of the Berlin Wall and supported the Solidarity movement in Poland. But he sent money and assistance to regimes that repressed and murdered their people. While visiting Ferdinand Marcos, the Filipino dictator, Reagan's vice president, George H.W. Bush, toasted Marcos' "adherence to democratic principles." People lost their freedom or died because Reagan and his lieutenants could not see beyond their ideological blinders and cut deals with miscreants who shared their anti-Moscow mantra. Not only did Reagan embolden torturers and murders, the CIA, following his order to support the contra rebels in Nicaragua (who were trying to oust the socialist Sandinistas), worked with suspected drug traffickers. Who said so? Not conspiracy-theory nuts, but the inspector general of the CIA. Years after the contra war, the agency's IG produced two reports that conceded the CIA had enlisted the assistance of alleged drug-runners. At the same time Nancy Reagan was preaching "Just Say No" to drugs. ...

Posted on Thursday, June 10, 2004 at 4:43 AM | Comments (0) | Top

The Bush and Reagan Families ... Not Really Very Close

Elisabeth Bumiller, in the NYT (June 9, 2004):

... Although [both the Bush and Reagan families are] ... offering nothing but tribute to the other during this week of Reagan nostalgia, over the past quarter-century the relationship between the families has been strained for periods by political ambition, social resentment and a lack of chemistry between two formidable first ladies....

When asked in an interview with Tom Brokaw the other day about his best memory of Mr. Reagan, the president came up with a public rather than a private moment. "I'd just gotten out of college in '68, and I went to a Reagan rally in Jacksonville, Fla.," he told Mr. Brokaw, recalling that Mr. Reagan had "electrified the crowd" and that there had been something "unbelievably charismatic about him."

The intense personal emotions came from Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush, one of Hollywood, the other from the blue-blooded precincts of the East Coast. Both were fiercely protective of their husbands.

"Bush and Reagan had a very amiable relationship, and he had access to anything Reagan had, but Mrs. Bush felt she had been slighted by Mrs. Reagan," said one former Reagan adviser who knows both families.

The Reagans, who moved in a circle of old Hollywood friends but were still an intensely private couple, never had the Bushes in for dinner in the private quarters of the White House, Republicans recalled.

"It's hard being second lady," said a person who worked for both the Reagans and the elder Bushes. "And Barbara Bush did a hell of a good job at it. She stayed back and was deferential. But what I've found is that the wives of political people have long memories. They tend not to forget."

The relationship between the families dates from the 1980 campaign, when Mr. Reagan and George H. W. Bush were political rivals running for the Republican presidential nomination. Mr. Bush accused Mr. Reagan of promoting "voodoo economics," a charge that so angered Mr. Reagan that he later did not want Mr. Bush on the ticket with him. But when a plan for a "co-presidency" with former President Gerald R. Ford fell apart at the party convention, Mr. Reagan and his aides turned to Mr. Bush as one of the only men left standing, according to accounts from Richard V. Allen and other Reagan advisers at the time.

Once in the White House, Mr. Bush established himself as the deferential second fiddle who rarely disagreed directly with the boss - at least once even to the exasperation of Mrs. Reagan. In her autobiography, "My Turn," Mrs. Reagan recalled Mr. Bush's telling her that Donald Regan, Mr. Reagan's chief of staff, should be fired. Mrs. Reagan then recounts this scene:

"I agree with you," I said, "and I wish you'd tell my husband. I can't be the only one who's saying this to him."

"Nancy," he said, "that's not my role."

"That's exactly your role," I replied.

Mrs. Reagan then concludes, "But as far as I know, George Bush never spoke to Ronnie about Don Regan."

 

Posted on Thursday, June 10, 2004 at 4:06 AM | Comments (0) | Top

NYT: Those Reagan Deficits

David E. Rosenbaum, in the NYT (June 10, 2004):

... In his 1980 campaign, Mr. Reagan promised to reduce taxes, increase military spending and balance the budget mostly by eliminating waste, fraud and abuse in the government.

The first two promises were achieved in his first term. In 1981, Congress approved a 25 percent reduction in income taxes and an increase of at least one-third in the military budget.

But while some government programs were eliminated and nonmilitry spending was reduced modestly, those steps were much too feeble to offset the lower revenues and additional military expenses.

The federal deficit grew to $208 billion in the 1983 fiscal year, Mr. Reagan's second budget year, from $79 billion in the 1981 fiscal year, the last year the government operated under a budget prepared by President Jimmy Carter. As a percentage of the national economy, the deficit in 1983 was 6 percent, the highest ever, up from 2.6 percent in 1981.

The large deficits were antithetical to Mr. Reagan's view of himself as a fiscal conservative, and he never seemed completely reconciled to them. He signed tax increases later in his first term that repealed more than one-third of the 1981 tax cuts. But the lesson the Republicans in power today took from the Reagan experience was that they could disregard deficits. President Bush's first treasury secretary, Paul H. O'Neill, reported in his book, "The Price of Loyalty," that at a crucial budget meeting, Vice President Dick Cheney brushed off a question about the deficit by saying, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter."

Representative Jim Nussle, Republican of Iowa, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, said he did not agree that deficits were unimportant. But he said the "basic playbook" on budget and taxes was written by Mr. Reagan, and "that is the playbook I follow today."

Another lesson the current administration took from the Reagan years is that it can be politically advantageous to publish budgets with numbers that are less than fully honest.

Under Mr. Reagan, said Robert D. Reischauer, the economist who was director of the Congressional Budget Office from 1987 to 1995, the Office of Management and Budget "ceased to be viewed as an objective estimator of budget numbers." That is also the case today, Mr. Reischauer said.

The budgets prepared by David A. Stockman, Mr. Reagan's first budget director, adopted what was called a "rosy scenario" - impossibly optimistic predictions about future growth, inflation and interest rates. They also included what was called the "magic asterisk" - a gimmick that allowed for the budgeting of unspecified, and never intended, spending cuts.

Both techniques allowed the budgets that were submitted by the White House to Congress in January or February to show lower deficits than what was probable.

Mr. Bush has taken a different tack, but the result has been the same: an unrealistic budget. The budget Mr. Bush submitted in February projected a deficit of $521 billion, perhaps $100 billion higher than what economists are now estimating. As the election approaches, the administration may be able to forecast a lower deficit than was assumed in February and proclaim that the deficit is being brought under control.

The administration's budget also does not take account of the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But while the Reagan budget policies have survived into the Bush administration, one of the main aspects of his tax policy went by the boards long ago.

In 1985 and 1986, Mr. Reagan pushed through Congress a complete overhaul of the federal income tax system, the most sweeping changes in the tax code and one of the most important pieces of legislation since World War II.

The underlying principle of the measure was that tax rates should be set as low as possible and the tax base made as broad as possible by eliminating deductions, credits and other tax breaks.

With the enactment of the legislation, the top tax rate was lowered to 33 percent from 70 percent when Mr. Reagan took office. And scores of tax preferences were abolished, ranging from the deduction for state sales taxes paid by individuals to the investment tax credit for manufacturers to tax shelters for investors in commercial real estate.

The bill was heralded by economists and tax policy experts across the political spectrum.

But what the academic authorities loved, the politicians quickly spurned as soon as Mr. Reagan left office....

Posted on Thursday, June 10, 2004 at 3:59 AM | Comments (0) | Top

LBJ's Presidential Tapes ... Excerpts Published in the Atlantic About JFK's Death

Max Holland, in the Atlantic (June 2004):

In July of 1973, six months after the death of Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Atlantic published an article by a journalist and former Johnson speechwriter named Leo Janos. "The Last Days of the President," about LBJ in retirement, was elegiac in tone and fact, save for one dissonant paragraph—in which Johnson volunteered his opinion that President John F. Kennedy's assassination had been the result of a conspiracy organized from Cuba. "I never believed that [Lee Harvey] Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he pulled the trigger," he explained to Janos. Johnson thought such a conspiracy had formed in retaliation for U.S. plots to assassinate Fidel Castro; he had found after taking office that the government "had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean."

Johnson's assertion generated just a ripple of attention at the time, ten years after the assassination. Conspiracy theories about the assassination had become a cottage industry, and the fact that even a former President believed in one was interesting, but only mildly so. Then, too, Kennedy's mythic stature left no room for an allegation of this nature, and Johnson's well-known penchant for exaggeration worked against him. Besides, it was easy to discount the views of a President whose term had given rise to the phrase "credibility gap." After his bitterly divisive years in office the public wanted none of Johnson's regrets, reminiscences, or revelations.

Johnson's remark was dismissed until 1975, when an extraordinary series of events, ignited by the Watergate break-in, culminated in the baring of the Central Intelligence Agency's darkest secrets—including the fact that it had indeed tried during the early 1960s to assassinate Fidel Castro. Still, the story behind Johnson's indiscretion to Janos has never been adequately understood or explained. Surely Johnson appreciated the likely consequences if his words were taken at face value. They could be devastating to the government and the nation to which he had devoted the greater portion of his life. To answer the question of why Johnson spoke out is to understand how he himself saw his presidency.

It is possible to reconstruct the story only because Johnson secretly recorded many of his telephone conversations. Without these recordings—history with the bark off—vital information would be altogether missing. Not one of the millions of documents in the Johnson Library reveals the President's own thoughts soon after hearing what was then a rumor about CIA plots against Castro; only the recordings do. It is virtually an article of faith among historians that the war in Vietnam was the overwhelming reason the President left office a worn, bitter, and disillusioned man. But the assassination-related tapes paint a more nuanced picture—one in which Johnson's view of the assassination weighed as heavily on him as the war.

Click here to continue reading this article.

Posted on Wednesday, June 9, 2004 at 8:04 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Walter Russell Mead: Reagan's Role in Ending the Cold War

Walter Russell Mead, in Wash Post Book World (Nov. 24, 2002):

In 1990, former President Ronald Reagan visited the birthplace of the Solidarity movement in Gdansk, Poland. As 7,000 people stood to cheer Reagan in heavy rain and hail, a priest presented him with a sword for, as the priest said, "helping us to chop off the head of communism." This story comes from Peter Schweizer's ambitious Reagan's War, a book that tries to show that Reagan deserved that sword.

Schweizer argues that Reagan was a hard-nosed, ideologically convinced anti-communist whose entire public life was shaped by a determination to rid the world of this great evil. He saw his presidency as an opportunity to shift the United States out of detente and containment policies into a new and much tougher confrontation with its Cold War adversary. Reagan's hard line against the Soviets was politically unpopular, and as his poll numbers plummeted -- and as opponents in Europe and elsewhere staged massive anti-Reagan, pro-nuclear-freeze marches -- waffling advisers urged him to moderate his stance.

Reagan stuck it out. Economic sanctions against the Jaruzelski military regime in Poland cost the Soviets hundreds of millions; blocking a second pipeline for Soviet gas to the West cost them billions more. Limiting commercial credits, blocking the Soviet Union's access to advanced Western technology, forcing it to send extra arms shipments to Cuba and keeping the Red Army bogged down in Afghanistan cost further billions. Psychological warfare kept the Soviets off-balance even as Reagan's pressure on Soviet clients in the Third World drained Moscow's resources and sapped its will. Last but not least, Reagan's defenders argue that his massive military buildup, capped by the missile defense system that derisive critics called "Star Wars," forced the Soviet Union down the path of reform and retrenchment that culminated in the breakup of the empire and the fall of the Berlin Wall....

Most readers will be convinced by Schweizer's evidence that Reagan's policy in the White House reflected deeply held and long-nurtured beliefs that, in many cases, dated back to the Truman administration. Schweizer's picture of a passionately committed, deeply engaged president doggedly focusing on a few key policy initiatives toward the superpower rival is also convincing. Reagan may not have known the names of all the members of his cabinet, but he knew what he wanted to do to the Soviet Union, and he kept a vigilant eye on those charged with implementing his strategy.

Schweizer would also like to persuade us that Reagan's strategy worked -- more precisely, that the Soviet Union fell when it did because Reagan shifted U.S. policy from the long, dreary failure of containment to the kind of aggressive rollback that conservatives like himself had advocated from the Cold War's beginning. Here the ground is less firm. The Soviet crash was a complex series of events; historians may never reach consensus about why the Soviet empire fell. After all, they still argue about Rome.

Some of the implications of Schweizer's argument look less than plausible. If Jimmy Carter had managed to get re-elected in 1980, would the Soviet Union still be standing? Or if Reagan had been elected president in 1976, would the USSR have fallen four years earlier? For that matter, if Barry Goldwater, Reagan's choice in 1964 and a supporter of a tougher policy toward the Soviets, had defeated Lyndon Johnson, would the Soviets have given up the Cold War by 1973?

But even if Schweizer's most ambitious claims cannot quite be sustained, this is still a fascinating, well-written, useful and important look at one of the three or four most important American political leaders of the 20th century. No serious assessment of the 40th president of the United States can ignore the central importance of anti-communism in his career; after Schweizer, none will.

Posted on Wednesday, June 9, 2004 at 6:28 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Robert Parry: Reagan Didn't End the Cold War

Robert Parry, in consortiumnews.com (June 7, 2004):

The U.S. news media’s reaction to Ronald Reagan’s death is putting on display what has happened to American public debate in the years since Reagan’s political rise in the late 1970s: a near-total collapse of serious analytical thinking at the national level.

Across the U.S. television dial and in major American newspapers, the commentary is fawning almost in a Pravda-like way, far beyond the normal reticence against speaking ill of the dead. Left-of-center commentators compete with conservatives to hail Reagan’s supposedly genial style and his alleged role in “winning the Cold War.” The Washington Post’s front-page headline – “Ronald Reagan Dies” – was in giant type more fitting the Moon Landing.

Yet absent from the media commentary was the one fundamental debate that must be held before any reasonable assessment can be made of Ronald Reagan and his Presidency: How, why and when was the Cold War “won”? If, for instance, the United States was already on the verge of victory over a foundering Soviet Union in the early-to-mid-1970s, as some analysts believe, then Reagan’s true historic role may not have been “winning” the Cold War, but helping to extend it.

If the Soviet Union was already in rapid decline, rather than in the ascendancy that Reagan believed, then the massive U.S. military build-up in the 1980s was not decisive; it was excessive. The terrible bloodshed in Central America and Africa, including death squad activities by U.S. clients, was not some necessary evil; it was a war crime aided and abetted by the Reagan administration.

That debate, however, has never been engaged, except by Reagan acolytes who chose to glorify Reagan’s role in “winning the Cold War” rather than examining the assumptions that guided his policies in the 1970s and 1980s. Although it’s largely forgotten now, Reagan’s rise within the Republican Party was as a challenge to the “détente” strategies pursued by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger – before the Watergate scandal forced Nixon from office – and later by Gerald Ford. Détente was, in effect, an effort to ease the Cold War to an end, much as finally occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Cold Warriors Nixon and Kissinger – along with much of the U.S. intelligence community – had recognized the systemic weaknesses of the Soviet system, which was falling desperately behind the West in technology and in the ability to produce consumer goods desired by the peoples of Eastern Europe. One only needed to look at night-time satellite photos to see the disparity between the glittering city lights of North America, Western Europe and parts of Asia compared to the darkness across the Soviet bloc.

Under this analysis of Soviet weakness, the 1970s was the time for the West to accept victory and begin transitioning the Soviet Union out of its failed economic model. Not only could that approach have hastened the emergence of a new generation of Russian reformers, it would have allowed world leaders to pull back from the edge of nuclear confrontation. Third World civil wars also could have been addressed as local conflicts, not East-West tests of strength.

But American conservatives – and a new group of neoconservatives who would become the ideological backbone of the Reagan administration – saw the situation differently. They insisted that the Soviet Union was on the rise militarily with plans to surround the United States and eventually conquer it by attacking through the “soft underbelly” of Central America.

In 1976, then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush gave an important boost to this apocalyptic vision by allowing a group of conservative analysts, including a young Paul Wolfowitz, inside the CIA’s analytical division. The group, known as “Team B,” was permitted to review highly classified U.S. intelligence on the Soviet Union. Not surprisingly, Team B came up with conclusions matching its members’ preconceptions, that the CIA had underestimated the Soviet military ascendancy and its plans to gain world domination.

Along with the Team B analysis came the theories of academic Jeane Kirkpatrick, who made a name for herself with an analysis that differentiated between “authoritarian” and “totalitarian” governments. In Kirkpatrick’s theory, right-wing “authoritarian” governments were preferable to left-wing “communist” governments because authoritarian governments could evolve toward democracy while communist governments couldn’t.

These two factors – the Team B take on the military rise of the Soviet bloc and the Kirkpatrick Doctrine’s view of immutable communist regimes – guided Reagan’s foreign policy. Reagan relied on these analyses to justify both his massive U.S. military build-up in the 1980s (which put the U.S. government deeply into debt) and his support for right-wing regimes that engaged in blood baths against their opponents (especially across Latin America).

As far back as the late 1970s, for instance, Reagan defended the Argentine military junta while it was engaged in the use of state terror and was “disappearing” tens of thousands of dissidents. Those tactics included barbaric acts such as cutting babies out of pregnant women so the mothers could then be executed while the babies were given to the murderers. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Argentina's Dapper State Terrorist."]

In the 1980s in Guatemala, Reagan aided military regimes that waged scorched-earth campaigns against rural peasants, including genocide against Indian populations. Reagan personally attacked the human rights reports describing atrocities inflicted on hundreds of Mayan villages. On Dec. 4, 1982, after meeting with Guatemalan dictator Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, Reagan hailed the general as "totally dedicated to democracy" and asserted that Rios Montt's government was "getting a bum rap." [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Reagan & Guatemala's Death Files."]

Tens of thousands more people died at the hands of right-wing security forces in El Salvador and Honduras, while in Nicaragua, Reagan funneled support to the contras, who behaved like a kind of death-squad-in-waiting, committing widespread atrocities against Nicaraguan civilians while funding some operations with cocaine trafficking to the United States. [For details, see Robert Parry's Lost History.]

It followed, after all, that if the Soviet Union were on the verge of world conquest and if that would mean permanent slavery, then desperate measures were required. But the problem with the Team B analysis and the Kirkpatrick Doctrine was that both were wrong.

The evidence is now clear that by the 1970s, the Soviet Union was in sharp decline both economically and militarily. Rather than some grandiose strategy for world conquest, Moscow was in a largely defensive posture, trying to hold in line countries near its borders, such as Eastern Europe and Afghanistan. The Helsinki Accords for human rights also were putting the Soviet Union under greater pressure as dissident movements, such as Poland’s Solidarity, took shape within Moscow’s sphere of influence. [For more on the doctored intelligence of the Reagan-Bush era, see Consortiumnews.com's "Lost in the Politicization Swamp."]...

Posted on Wednesday, June 9, 2004 at 6:16 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Now Conservatives Have Ranked the Presidents ... It's No Schlesinger List

From a website promoting the sale of Presidential Leadership (Free Press, June 2004), by James Taranto, Leonard Leo and William J. Bennett:

Rankings of presidential performances are common, and usually irritating: liberal academics love to place Ronald Reagan near the bottom and the likes of Slick Willie near the top. But now editors from two stalwart conservative organizations -- the Wall Street Journal and the Federalist Society -- have put together Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and Worst in the White House.

This is the first examination of presidential performance that includes a significant number of conservatives in the group of judges. Each president receives a ranking, and the rankings are refreshingly free of the worn-out liberal biases that mar most similar studies. Ronald Reagan ranks as "Near Great" and eighth best president of all time. Nobel laureate and "great ex-President" Jimmy Carter? Below average - just one notch above outright "Failure."

James Taranto of the Journal and Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society include essays on each president, plus several broader thematic essays on presidential leadership. The authors include such conservative luminaries as Victor Davis Hanson, Peggy Noonan, Robert Bork, Paul Johnson, Edwin Meese, Christopher Buckley, Kenneth Starr, Lynne Cheney, Theodore Olson, Richard Brookhiser and many more.

A few highlights of Presidential Leadership:

  • Paul Johnson on Bill Clinton: "The printed record of his doings, misdoings and omissions is unarguably deplorable from start to finish"

  • Bush I: his "presidency was defined by the core values he brought to the White House: honesty, decency, and a commitment to do the right thing" -- Pete DuPont

  • How Ronald Reagan set out, according to Harvey Mansfield, to renew the nation that "Roosevelt and his successors had corrupted by rendering the American people too dependent on government"

  • Jimmy Carter: how he undercut his own human rights rhetoric by behaving obsequiously in the presence of bloodthirsty dictators

  • A thought-provoking analysis of the Watergate scandal from Kenneth Starr

  • Richard Brookhiser: Why George Washington still deserves his status as America's greatest president

  • ?"There is a cowardly imbecile at the head of the government . . . Disgust with our government is universal" -- today's media on George W. Bush? No, Civil War-era newspapers on Abraham Lincoln!

  • Dwight D. Eisenhower: why few men have been as well-prepared for the presidency as he was

  • Andrew Johnson: how his presidency reveals problems with the contemporary understanding of American politics

  • Peggy Noonan on JFK's fundamental weakness: "Kennedy never seemed to believe in anything"

  • Robert Bork on the Left's greatest hero, FDR: "Viewed objectively, Roosevelt's performance during the Depression was not impressive"

  • Herbert Hoover: why, although "most scholars have chosen to remember the gibes" about him, he "deserves better from history"

  • Why historians consistently -- and wrongly -- underrate Ronald Reagan's hero, Calvin Coolidge

  • John DiIulio, Jr., on why Chester Alan Arthur is one of our most underrated presidents ‚ Woodrow Wilson: spectacular achievements in domestic policy, spectacular failures in foreign policy -- and lasting influence in both spheres

  • John McCain on Theodore Roosevelt: when he became our youngest president at age 42, he had already "lived a life so crowded with variety and activity and accomplishment that it would have exhausted most modern-day Americans long before our fortieth birthday"

  • The early president whom every succeeding president has tried to imitate

  • Thomas Jefferson: why he did not want to be remembered as a president, but as the author of the Declaration of Independence

  • The one-term Republican president who, despite being overwhelmingly defeated for reelection, was actually quite effective and made the nation stronger

  • The little-remembered president who was the principal creator of the Democratic party - although the Democrats prefer to pretend that Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson did the deed

  • The president who, despite being remembered today chiefly for his involvement in a scandal, was actually one of the most morally upright men ever to hold the office

  • Franklin Pierce: how, although no president may have been able to avert the Civil War, he "did his best to bring it on"

  • Zachary Taylor: how his disastrous tenure led to the nation's abandonment of political solutions and headlong rush into Civil War

  • The first failed Democratic president to do what most Democratic presidents did thereafter: write a book blaming everything on the Republicans

  • The forgotten president who brilliantly oversaw a complex balance of military, diplomatic and domestic affairs during a period in which the fate of North America was decided

  • Weekly Standard publisher Terry Eastland on why the authors of the Federalist Papers would have been pleased with Harry Truman

  • JFK's legacy according to Peggy Noonan: "President Kennedy did not mean to, but he ushered in the age of political weirdness, the age when it became a cliché that to be a president you had to be media-savvy, compelling, stylish"

  • Plus: Robert P. George on presidential leadership and the judiciary, Robert L. Bartley on presidential leadership and economic policy, Victor Davis Hanson on presidential leadership in wartime, and more

You may not agree with all the judgments these experts make. Robert Dallek writes of LBJ's calamitous Great Society that it "included more constructive measures that continue to serve the national well-being to this day." Bill Clinton's presidency is rated as average -- a far cry from the over-hyped estimation of his army of hagiographers, but still not the hefty heaping of opprobrium that the Slick One deserves.

Nevertheless, Presidential Leadership contains a solidly conservative perspective that acts as a healthy corrective to the dreary lockstep of liberal historians. Combining statistical information with an all-star team of writers, this is a lively, provocative book that is at once a solid reference and an engagingly readable collection.

Posted on Wednesday, June 9, 2004 at 4:44 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Paul Krugman: About Reagan's Tax Cuts

Paul Krugman, in the NYT (June 8, 2004):

Over the course of this week we'll be hearing a lot about Ronald Reagan, much of it false. A number of news sources have already proclaimed Mr. Reagan the most popular president of modern times. In fact, though Mr. Reagan was very popular in 1984 and 1985, he spent the latter part of his presidency under the shadow of the Iran-Contra scandal. Bill Clinton had a slightly higher average Gallup approval rating, and a much higher rating during his last two years in office.

We're also sure to hear that Mr. Reagan presided over an unmatched economic boom. Again, not true: the economy grew slightly faster under President Clinton, and, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, the after-tax income of a typical family, adjusted for inflation, rose more than twice as much from 1992 to 2000 as it did from 1980 to 1988.

But Ronald Reagan does hold a special place in the annals of tax policy, and not just as the patron saint of tax cuts. To his credit, he was more pragmatic and responsible than that; he followed his huge 1981 tax cut with two large tax increases. In fact, no peacetime president has raised taxes so much on so many people. This is not a criticism: the tale of those increases tells you a lot about what was right with President Reagan's leadership, and what's wrong with the leadership of George W. Bush.

The first Reagan tax increase came in 1982. By then it was clear that the budget projections used to justify the 1981 tax cut were wildly optimistic. In response, Mr. Reagan agreed to a sharp rollback of corporate tax cuts, and a smaller rollback of individual income tax cuts. Over all, the 1982 tax increase undid about a third of the 1981 cut; as a share of G.D.P., the increase was substantially larger than Mr. Clinton's 1993 tax increase.

The contrast with President Bush is obvious. President Reagan, confronted with evidence that his tax cuts were fiscally irresponsible, changed course. President Bush, confronted with similar evidence, has pushed for even more tax cuts.

Mr. Reagan's second tax increase was also motivated by a sense of responsibility — or at least that's the way it seemed at the time. I'm referring to the Social Security Reform Act of 1983, which followed the recommendations of a commission led by Alan Greenspan. Its key provision was an increase in the payroll tax that pays for Social Security and Medicare hospital insurance.

For many middle- and low-income families, this tax increase more than undid any gains from Mr. Reagan's income tax cuts. In 1980, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, middle-income families with children paid 8.2 percent of their income in income taxes, and 9.5 percent in payroll taxes. By 1988 the income tax share was down to 6.6 percent — but the payroll tax share was up to 11.8 percent, and the combined burden was up, not down.


Posted on Tuesday, June 8, 2004 at 5:53 PM | Comments (1) | Top

William Blum: Reagan Didn't End the Cold War

William Blum, the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, in Counterpunch (June 7, 2004):

Ronald Reagan's biggest crimes were the bloody military actions to suppress social and political change in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Afghanistan, but I'd like to deal here with the media's gushing about Reagan's supposed role in ending the cold war. In actuality, he prolonged it. Here is something I wrote for my book Killing Hope.

It has become conventional wisdom that it was the relentlessly tough anti-communist policies of the Reagan Administration, with its heated-up arms race, that led to the collapse and reformation of the Soviet Union and its satellites. American history books may have already begun to chisel this thesis into marble. The Tories in Great Britain say that Margaret Thatcher and her unflinching policies contributed to the miracle as well. The East Germans were believers too.

When Ronald Reagan visited East Berlin, the people there cheered him and thanked him "for his role in liberating the East". Even many leftist analysts, particularly those of a conspiracy bent, are believers. But this view is not universally held; nor should it be. Long the leading Soviet expert on the United States, Georgi Arbatov, head of the Moscow-based Institute for the Study of the U.S.A. and Canada, wrote his memoirs in 1992. A Los Angeles Times book review by Robert Scheer summed up a portion of it:

Arbatov understood all too well the failings of Soviet totalitarianism in comparison to the economy and politics of the West. It is clear from this candid and nuanced memoir that the movement for change had been developing steadily inside the highest corridors of power ever since the death of Stalin. Arbatov not only provides considerable evidence for the controversial notion that this change would have come about without foreign pressure, he insists that the U.S. military buildup during the Reagan years actually impeded this development.

George F. Kennan agrees. The former US ambassador to the Soviet Union, and father of the theory of "containment" of the same country, asserts that "the suggestion that any United States administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous domestic political upheaval in another great country on another side of the globe is simply childish." He contends that the extreme militarization of American policy strengthened hard-liners in the Soviet Union. "Thus the general effect of Cold War extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union."

Though the arms-race spending undoubtedly damaged the fabric of the Soviet civilian economy and society even more than it did in the United States, this had been going on for 40 years by the time Mikhail Gorbachev came to power without the slightest hint of impending doom. Gorbachev's close adviser, Aleksandr Yakovlev, when asked whether the Reagan administration's higher military spending, combined with its "Evil Empire" rhetoric, forced the Soviet Union into a more conciliatory position, responded:

It played no role. None. I can tell you that with the fullest responsibility. Gorbachev and I were ready for changes in our policy regardless of whether the American president was Reagan, or Kennedy, or someone even more liberal. It was clear that our military spending was enormous and we had to reduce it....

Posted on Tuesday, June 8, 2004 at 3:36 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Slate: Reagan Wasn't Half as Conservative as He Seemed

Timothy Noah, in Slate (June 7, 2004):

I've registered as a Republican exactly once in my life. The year was 1980, and Ronald Reagan, who died today at the age of 93, was seeking the GOP nomination for president. Teddy Kennedy was challenging President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination, and in Massachusetts, where I then lived, Kennedy was certain to win the primary. Better to cast my vote where it could do some good—in favor of John Anderson, who at that point was running as a Republican, and who seemed the only candidate capable of denying Reagan the nomination. Reagan was dangerous. He wanted to eliminate vast portions of the government indiscriminately, and he wanted to commit the military to ill-considered interventions abroad.

I couldn't have been more wrong. As an antigovernment crusader and as a warmonger, Reagan turned out to be all bark and no bite. In his first inaugural address, Reagan said:

It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the Federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the Federal Government and those reserved to the States or to the people.

But that didn't happen. As Michael Kinsley has observed, after Reagan's two terms spending by the federal government was one quarter higher, factoring out inflation, than when he got there; the federal civilian workforce had increased from 2.8 million to 3 million; and federal spending, as a share of Gross Domestic Product, had decreased by one percentage point to 21.2 percent. "If Ronald Reagan and his 'Reaganauts' could only slow down the growth of government spending, not reverse it or eliminate wasteful programs, what hope is there for any other conservative president?," complained the conservative Heritage Foundation soon after Reagan left office. The only major government agency Reagan managed to eliminate was the Civil Aeronautics Board, which didn't have much to do after the Carter administration deregulated the airline industry. Fittingly, the Ronald Reagan Building on Pennsylvania Ave., completed ten years after Reagan left office, today houses 5,000 government employees and is the largest government building in Washington.

Posted on Monday, June 7, 2004 at 10:31 AM | Comments (0) | Top

D.M. Giangreco: What Happened on D-Day

D.M. Giangreco and Kathryn Moore, in the Kansas City Star (June 6, 2004):

The storm had been building for more than two years. Some 3,600,000 Allied soldiers, sailors and airmen had assembled in England for the sole purpose of destroying the Nazi tyranny of Adolf Hitler which had engulfed nearly all Europe. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, described the force as “a great human spring, coiled for the moment when its energy would be released and it would vault the English Channel.” Defending Hitler’s “Atlantic Wall” were 850,000 German troops including nine of the dreaded panzer (armored) divisions.

Sixty years ago today, 170,000 men penetrated the German defenses at Normandy, France, in the greatest amphibious invasion ever mounted: D-D AY , June 6, 1944. War and the inexorable passage of time has taken many of them from us, but the survivors remember well the fear and exhilaration, terror and even humor of the day that sealed the fate of Nazi Germany.

Throughout the ports, staging areas and airfields of Britain, the men pondered what awaited them. Staff Sergeant Charles Klein was thankful that his 5th Ranger Battalion “had a good chaplain,” and still recalls the spiritual message he gave before the Rangers disembarked: “Tomorrow is a big day. We’re going to engage the enemy this time and all the games are over. And all your praying will be over too. Tomorrow, I do all the praying. If I catch anybody kneeling down on the beach and praying within reach of my foot, he’s going to get a boot from me.”

The main Allied force was to approach the coast at night during a break in the seasonally bad weather, then launch a dawn attack. Paratroopers in transport aircraft streaming over the invasion fleet to make the initial assault found that “the full moon lit up everything,” said Sergeant Tom McCarthy from the 82nd Airborne Division. “As we flew over, I looked down and I saw the armada in the Channel. There were ships and ships and ships. You thought about how big it was, and reality began to sink in. As the mainland began to show up, it appeared like a dark spot against the horizon.”

“The unfortunate thing was that full moon,” maintained McCarthy. “When we jumped, it was like daylight. I said some Hail Mary’s, some SOBs, some more Hail Mary’s and hoped that ground showed up pretty soon. I looked right down at two guys banging away at me and one of them put a crease across my left temple. I don’t know whether he scared me or made me mad, but I knew I was all right. I got out of the chute, moved into the high grass just in time. They came searching for me, and I let them search. When they got about 10 feet away, I fed them a grenade.”

Paratroopers and Germans frequently bumped into each other in the dark, and survival often depended on who got off the first shot. A small group from the 101st Airborne Division was walking a country road when something caught Private Bill True’s eye: “I glanced out into the field and a German soldier was just aiming his pistol at one of the guys up the line. That was the first time I had a really clear picture of what I was shooting at. There was the enemy. Thinking about it later, I was impressed with how good my training had been because it was the most automatic thing to bring my rifle to my shoulder --- taking the safety off as I brought it up --- and squeezing the trigger as calmly as on a firing range.”

After a sharp fire fight, Corporal Wally Parr of the British 6th Airborne Division ran into, not more Germans, but frightened French civilians. “We started to go past a house when we heard a noise,” said Parr. “We walked over, looked and found a woman with two children.. We said, ‘Go inside. Go inside. Liberation.’ The mother never said a word but just stared up at me.” Parr feared that a grenade could be flung into their midst at any moment. “I was shouting ‘Liberation. Go inside. Allez. Allez.’ Then I reached in my pocket, and the older of the two children took a bar of chocolate.” ...

Click here to read more.

Posted on Monday, June 7, 2004 at 8:11 AM | Comments (0) | Top

David Corn: 66 (Unflattering) Things About Ronald Reagan

David Corn, in his blog; a rpt. of an article he published in the Nation in 1998 (June 6, 2004):

The firing of the air traffic controllers, winnable nuclear war, recallable nuclear missiles, trees that cause pollution, Elliott Abrams lying to Congress, ketchup as a vegetable, colluding with Guatemalan thugs, pardons for F.B.I. lawbreakers, voodoo economics, budget deficits, toasts to Ferdinand Marcos, public housing cutbacks, redbaiting the nuclear freeze movement, James Watt.

Getting cozy with Argentine fascist generals, tax credits for segregated schools, disinformation campaigns, “homeless by choice,” Manuel Noriega, falling wages, the HUD scandal, air raids on Libya, “constructive engagement” with apartheid South Africa, United States Information Agency blacklists of liberal speakers, attacks on OSHA and workplace safety, the invasion of Grenada, assassination manuals, Nancy’s astrologer.

Drug tests, lie detector tests, Fawn Hall, female appointees (8 percent), mining harbors, the S&L scandal, 239 dead U.S. troops in Beirut, Al Haig “in control,” silence on AIDS, food-stamp reductions, Debategate, White House shredding, Jonas Savimbi, tax cuts for the rich, “mistakes were made.”

Michael Deaver’s conviction for influence peddling, Lyn Nofziger’s conviction for influence peddling, Caspar Weinberger’s five-count indictment, Ed Meese ("You don’t have many suspects who are innocent of a crime"), Donald Regan (women don’t “understand throw-weights"), education cuts, massacres in El Salvador.
“The bombing begins in five minutes,” $640 Pentagon toilet seats, African- American judicial appointees (1.9 percent), Reader’s Digest, C.I.A.-sponsored car-bombing in Lebanon (more than eighty civilians killed), 200 officials accused of wrongdoing, William Casey, Iran/contra.

“Facts are stupid things,” three-by-five cards, the MX missile, Bitburg, S.D.I., Robert Bork, naps, Teflon.

Posted on Sunday, June 6, 2004 at 2:08 PM | Comments (1) | Top

A Frenchman's View of the Meaning of D-Day

Andre Glucksman, in the WSJ (June 4, 2004):

... It wasn't until the middle of the 1970s that a President of the Federal Republic clearly and distinctly admitted that Germany had been "liberated" rather than "invaded" at the end of the Second World War. It was to display the crucial difference between these two words that people -- both close to me and foreign -- gave their lives in Lyon, Omaha beach, and Stalingrad....

The right of people to be liberated from extreme despotism -- the right to D-Day -- overcomes the usual respect for borders and the age-old principle of sovereignty. In regards to the universal declaration of human rights, and with our knowledge of totalitarianism, the essential right of the people to self-determination must not guarantee nor imply a right of the rulers to dispose of their people. The landing in Normandy justifies the recent interventions in Kosovo, in Afghanistan and in Iraq, even without Security Council authorization. For one decisive reason: the original legitimacy that presided over the creation of the U.N. prevails in authority over the ordinary jurisprudence of the institutions that have stemmed from it. Furthermore, the recent 10th anniversary of the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda lets no one forget the terrible fiascos committed by the U.N. And not least that its boss, Kofi Annan, pleads, in vain, for a radical reform of international institutions and legislation.

Can the United States still claim a right of interference, baptized in the bloodshed to liberate Europe? Yes. Despite the ignominies committed in Iraqi prisons; morally unbearable, politically counterproductive and strategically absurd, for which they bear the entire responsibility? Yes. Because as at its worst as at its best, the United States remains a democracy. And the most exemplary one. The only one to my knowledge that, in the midst of war, does not censure the publication of crimes committed by its soldiers. The only one where the press and the television reveal within a few weeks the scope of the wrongs, and freely scrutinizes the consequences from the disaster. The only one where Congressional committees summon a president, secretaries, generals, heads of secret services, and interrogate them unabashed and without restrictions.

Let me remind here that France, so generous at giving lessons, has not in forty years indicted, judged or condemned a single one of the soldiers who committed torture during the Algeria war. It was only in the year 2000 that the so-called "events" (1954-61) were officially called a "war" by parliament. It was 50 years after the game was over, in 1995, that the President admitted the Republic's responsibility for what occurred between 1940 and 1945. And to this day, 10 years after the events, and in contrast to Belgium, the U.N., and Washington, our country still refuses, from left to right wing, to grant any apologies to the Tutsis who suffered through genocide. This is what elevates us, the French, to moral heights inaccessible to those dunces, the Yankees, afflicted with an insolent press, a questioning Senate and rulers obliged to open-up their files and explain themselves in real time.

Elsewhere, listen to the difference, silence rules. April 2004. First video: systematic torture, eyes plucked out, presumed fighters dismembered, pyramids of bodies. Second video: the deliberate execution of a mother with her five children (ages one to seven) around Chatoi (Chechnya). Two testimonies filmed by Russian soldiers sickened by the accomplishments of their comrades. One newspaper in Moscow, the Novaya Gazeta alone, publishes the pictures. Not a wave. Silence on the radio, silence on TV, silence in the justice system, not a word from the military and the political hierarchy, the world stays mute. George W. Bush is greeted by protests, Vladimir Putin like a brother.

To this day, the American citizen is alone to dare scrutinize, judge and condemn on the spot the deeds committed in his name. America isn't populated with angels, but it remains the leading nation fighting for the defense of human rights, because more than anywhere else it gives itself the means to reveal and hence to condemn their violation. Human rights measure our capacity to resist the inhuman, resist the evil that faces us, and the devil we carry within.

Posted on Friday, June 4, 2004 at 6:34 AM | Comments (0) | Top

WSJ: The Real Lessons of WW II

Editorial, in the WSJ (June 4, 2004):

This Sunday, Gerhard Schroeder will become the first German Chancellor to take part in a D-Day ceremony. It will mark the final chapter of the liberation of Europe that began 60 years ago and only belatedly reached Eastern Europe.

Mr. Schroeder's participation isn't completely uncontroversial. Some Allied war veterans are furious and a few refuse to take part in the celebrations.

We have to respect the feelings of those who risked their lives to storm the beaches of Normandy and who saw so many of their comrades killed by Germans. But for most Americans and Europeans, the participation of Chancellor Schroeder now comes quite naturally. Germany has become a free and democratic country and the post-war generation can't be held accountable for the sins of their fathers.

In order to attend these celebrations, Germans didn't only have to overcome the resentments of their former enemies, but they also had to defeat their own ghosts. It took a long time before the country came to terms with what the Allied victory meant for them.

That victory was "no cause for celebration," said German President Walter Scheel in 1975. While he acknowledged that it marked the liberation from a "terrible yoke," he added it also marked the day the German fatherland fell, "the fatherland which we all loved." A lot has changed since then and Mr. Schroeder can now unequivocally say that June 6 has "become a symbol for the fight for freedom, democracy and human rights."

Of course, this year's celebration doesn't take place in a political vacuum; the war in Iraq is on everyone's mind. Mr. Schroeder refuses to see any parallels between America's past fight to rid the world from the evil of fascism and disposing the butcher of Baghdad.

"Germany owes it to its history . . . to stress the alternative to war." Here, Mr. Schroeder errs. The kind of militant pacifism that many Germans have taken away as their lesson from fascism did not defeat the Nazis. It took the largest armada the world had ever seen, almost 7,000 ships, to take the Normandy beaches. Sometimes there is no alternative to war, and appeasement only invites greater calamity at the end.

Simply pointing to the human suffering to call a war unjust is not good enough. At Omaha beach, American casualties on the first day were so high (3,000 dead and wounded) that General Omar Bradley considered for a moment abandoning the operation. And as a result of the fierce resistance of the German Wehrmacht and SS units within French cities, about 14,000 civilians were killed in the Normandy operation between June and August 1944. Are we to conclude that these deplorable deaths render Operation Overlord unjustified in retrospect?

The next time Mr. Schroeder calls for a speedy transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqi people and a quick departure of American troops, he should remember that his own country didn't form a government until four years after the end of the war. Even to this day, American troops are stationed in Germany, protecting his freedom as well.

Simply following the French lead, as Mr. Schroeder has been doing, doesn't qualify yet as an independent foreign policy. Mr. Schroeder will have to do better if he is to gain the permanent seat on the Security Council he so forcefully seeks.

Posted on Friday, June 4, 2004 at 6:28 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Hudson Bay Blankets--Used to Infect Indians with Smallpox?

Rita Trichur, in the Montreal Gazette (May 25, 2004):

For most Canadians, the Hudson's Bay blanket is a symbol of Canadian identity; a cherished emblem of the fur trade representing exploration, wilderness survival and the birth of a nation.

But as the Hudson's Bay Co. relaunches its historic multi-stripped blanket as part of a new Hbc Signature collection, a provocative Canadian art exhibit touring the country is suggesting the icon is tainted by controversy.

Artist Marianne Corless says while the blanket is steeped with national pride for the Canadian mainstream, some aboriginals view it as a grim reminder of the smallpox epidemic that ravaged their communities during the 1700s and 1800s - a dark consequence of the fur trade glossed over by history books but smouldering in native consciousness.

"It is not something that is really well known," Corless said in an interview from Victoria, adding some natives believe infected Bay blankets helped spread the epidemic.

"Disease in general played such a major role in reshaping the population of the country."

Her multimedia art exhibit, titled Further - currently showing at the eyelevel gallery in Halifax - is a blunt critique of European colonialism and the fur trade.

Wall hangings featuring five Bay blankets and explore themes of exploitation, disease and death.

In Blanket 1, a Bay blanket is transformed into a diseased Canadian flag. Hung striped side down, its central feature is a large maple leaf infected and bleeding with smallpox pustules.

Corless acknowledges the image is "violent."

"I was trying to determine for myself what it meant to be a Canadian, to have this as part of our history," Corless said, noting the Bay, established in 1670, was instrumental in exploring and settling Canada.

"It (history) is coming back a little more now to the forefront because the Bay is starting to use that again in their modern-day marketing," she said.

That corporate branding strategy includes a new Hbc Signature collection that relaunches the "heritage" blanket with a "modern edge."

While it is still sold as a blanket - its price ranging from $200-$400 - its distinctive green, red, yellow and indigo stripes also sport new clothing, outerwear, luggage and accessories.

Historically, however, the Bay blanket was a "principal" commodity traded by Europeans for native fur pelts such as beaver.

Made in England and transported by boat across the Atlantic, the wool blanket's history dates back to 1780....

Posted on Thursday, June 3, 2004 at 11:59 AM | Comments (1) | Top

D-Day--As Kids Remember It (Prepare Yourself)

Chris Hasting and Julie Henry, in the Sunday Telegraph (London) (May 30, 2004):

IT IS 1899 and Denzel Washington, the American president, orders Anne Frank and her troops to storm the beaches of Nazi-occupied New Zealand.

This may not be how you remember D-Day but for a worrying number of Britain's children this is the confused scenario they associate with the events of June 6, 1944.

A survey of 1,309 pupils aged between 10 and 14 and from 24 different schools found alarming levels of ignorance about the invasion of Normandy 60 years ago.

Only 28 per cent of primary and secondary pupils who sat the Sunday Telegraph quiz last week were able to say that D-Day, involving the largest invasion force ever mounted, was the start of the Allied liberation of occupied western Europe.

Many of them could only say that it was something to do with the Second World War - though 26 per cent were flummoxed by even that fact. Some thought it took place in the First World War, or was the day war broke out, the Blitz and even Remembrance Sunday.

"It's a day when everyone remembers the dead who fought," said a 14-year-old girl at a north Devon secondary school. Only 16 per cent of 918 participating primary school children had the answer right. One 10-year-old in a Northamptonshire school thought it was the day the "Americans came to rescue the English". Another thought D-Day involved "the invasion of Portsmouth". Various dates for the assault were 1066, 1776, 1899 and 1948.

Children also had great difficulty in naming Britain's war-time prime minister. Less than half of the overall sample and only 39 per cent of primary school children correctly identified him as Winston Churchill; a significant number opted for Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair.

Seventeen per cent of the sample and only 38 per cent of secondary school children identified Franklin D Roosevelt as the then President of the United States. Other candidates offered by both age groups were Denzel Washington (the Oscar-winning actor), George Washington, John F Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln and George W Bush. Some said simply: "George Bush's dad."

Ignorance about the Allied leaders, however, contrasted sharply with knowledge about Adolf Hitler. Overall, 71 per cent of the sample and 64 per cent of primary school children were able correctly to name the Nazi leader. Only one in three could identify the broad location of D-Day, with a number saying that it happened in New Zealand, Skegness or Germany.

Thirteen per cent could name two of the beaches involved, and only 10 per cent of the sample knew that Dwight D Eisenhower was the Supreme Allied Commander. Others thought that the invasion was led by Anne Frank, Private Ryan (the eponymous hero of the Steven Spielberg D-Day epic), or Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, Eisenhower's deputy....

Posted on Thursday, June 3, 2004 at 11:37 AM | Comments (2) | Top

The 18th Century Spanish Sailor Everybody's Ignored--Until Now

John Noble Wilford, in the NYT (June 1, 2004):

Capt. James Cook needs no introduction. Son of the commonest soil of Yorkshire, he rose to command three voyages that opened European minds to the wide world of the Pacific Ocean and epitomized maritime exploration in the 18th-century Enlightenment. Even his cruel death, in 1779, only magnified his heroic reputation.

Then there is Alejandro Malaspina, Spain's answer to Cook and a brave, intelligent explorer in his own right. He led a five-year scientific expedition, in 1789-94, that charted the western coast of the Americas and traversed the Pacific as far as the Philippines, with a side trip to China.

Yet Malaspina might as well have sailed off the edge of the earth, so forgotten have he and his achievements been in the annals of exploration over the last two centuries. He was without honor even in his own country. On his return to Spain, he ran aground on the shoals of domestic politics and was thrown in prison, his journals suppressed and his name virtually stricken from Spanish history.

Now, finally, Malaspina is being rescued from oblivion. A comprehensive edition of his journals was published by the Naval Museum in Madrid in 1990, and English translations -- ''The Malaspina Expedition, 1789-1794'' -- are being issued by the Hakluyt Society, a London organization that publishes accounts of geographical discovery. The second volume was introduced in April at a symposium here at the John Carter Brown Library. The final English volume is to be published at the end of the year.

Scholars at the symposium said the publications would restore to history an overlooked chapter in the scientific exploration of the Enlightenment. They expect a proliferation of studies of Malaspina and Spain's role in what had been viewed as a largely British and French endeavor.

''This is the beginning of a Malaspina industry,'' said Dr. Norman Fiering, director of the library, an independent research institution at Brown University.

Dr. John B. Hattendorf, a professor of maritime history at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., explained that Malaspina's voyage ''made very little impact at the time because of his political problems'' and had been neglected since because of the lack of published documentation. Only a few specialists, he said, have known anything about the Spanish mariner....

Posted on Thursday, June 3, 2004 at 11:20 AM | Comments (0) | Top

The Commemoration of D-Day Forgot One War Veterans' Group: Indians

David Yeagley, adjunct professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Liberal Studies, in frontpagemag.com (June 1, 2004):

I’m still an American Indian patriot. Even after watching CNN’s 90 minute program featuring the May 29 dedications of the new National WWII Memorial in Washington, D.C., I still love this country, more than ever.

No, I didn’t hear one mention of the American Indian. No one acknowledged themore than 190,000 living American Indian veterans, who represent nearly one out of every ten Indians. I didn’t hear any praise for the unique contribution Indians have made in all war efforts of the twentieth century.

I heard instead repeated praise of black, Hispanic, and Japanese Americans and their contributions to the war effort, and American society in general.

Indeed, the featured musical moment of the program, was given to a black female, Denyse Graves, mezzo soprano opera singer. They could have chosen Barbara McAllister, a tall Cherokee mezzo, who is older but well-known in New York opera circles.

Barry Black, the black chaplain of the U.S. Senate, gave the benediction. Apparently there no longer any living descendents of the “white” Sons of the Revolution who can pray; no, Black’s skin gave him special authority. Barry Black didn’t mention the name Jesus Christ. Would that name have blurred his image?

After the program, Paula Zahn interviewed Martha S. Putney, a black female historian. Putney talked about black female contributions to the war effort. Paula apparently didn’t know Indian women veterans exist.

One got the impression that blacks now constitute the core definition of what it means to be an American. Somehow, they have become the quintessential carrier of American values. The memorial service was like an ethnic pride parade in Washington, another Million Man March.

But what is the image of blacks – at least as expressed by so-called black “leaders” – in this country? The demagogues proclaim the message: “America wronged me. You need to make it right. You need to put me on a pedestal, along with the greatest heroes of ‘white’ American history.” The image of blacks is a complaint, a cry for “equality.” It is a plea for acceptance, and an expression of utter dependency.

This isn’t patriotism.

So, what is the Indian image? Before white liberals distorted it into another version of “I’ve been wronged” and added new images of casino corruption, vice, and greed, the Indian image used to be about bravery, self-sacrifice, and independence. The great Indian warrior never needed “equality,” applause or acceptance.

Maybe CNN still regards the Indian like that; they certainly offered none.

After the CNN program, I realized, as never before, the American Indian is not part of the modern media image of America. The National WWII Memorial program proved that. The Indian warrior image is out – even at such moment, at such a memorial service for soldiers. Blacks, “Hispanics,” and Japanese are America’s new warriors now; the media says so.

For me to call myself an American Indian patriot is a real stretch at times like this. How can I love the country so much, when it insults me in return, and instead honors people who never won anything in battle against the American Indian?

It’s simple: America is the most grand and beautiful country in the world – and it’s built on Indian land. I instinctively claim America as my own. Never mind media images: the foreigner’s society that developed here is like an adopted son, that’s all. He washed ashore here as a lost infant. We Indians raised him. He grew into the mightiest of the earth. As an Indian, can’t I be proud?

But for me to love America, I must overlook the Indian holocaust. I must “wink” at the horrors of yesterday. To have a positive outlook on life, I must immediately forgive my enemies today. This I must do, like no other race in America must do. American Indians were destroyed on our own land, in our own home. More is required of us, spiritually, than of any other people.

Indians must be superior. Just the basic feeling of loving America requires a miraculous transcendence of other races. If we do not achieve this, we consign ourselves to abject tragedy and disquietude. We are Ghost Dancers, forever.

Perhaps I should be grateful that CNN and the program planners did not include the Indian. That doesn’t just mean that Indians are excluded, or that America simply can’t manage its collective guilt toward the Indian. It might mean that America has an unspoken feeling that Indians really are superior. We are on a higher plane. We are unmentioned because we are not seen in the nether regions where the media dwell.

Posted on Thursday, June 3, 2004 at 9:49 AM | Comments (2) | Top

The Myth of Tiananmen Square

Bao Tong, former director of the Office of Political Reform of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, was the highest party official imprisoned for opposing the Tiananmen Square crackdown, in the WSJ (June 1, 2004):

It's fashionable in some quarters today to argue that China owes its present prosperity, at least in part, to the Tiananmen crackdown. That the supposed threat to social stability posed by the pro-democracy protests in 1989 had to be crushed before China could experience the economic growth of the past 15 years.

That's a dangerous myth, propagated primarily by Chinese leaders, which needs to be firmly debunked. Not only does it ignore the fact that much of this economic growth was inevitable, as soon as China began to abandon decades of Mao Zedong's backward-style socialism. But its corollary is terrifying. For if turning tanks and machine guns on innocent civilians can be justified as a price worth paying in 1989 in return for economic growth, the logical consequence is that the government should be ready and willing to do so again today. Worse still, in a world where so many countries wish to emulate China's economic success, it encourages them to copy such repressive measures.

Nor is it true to say that the story of post-Tiananmen China is one of the Communist Party conceding economic reform in return for continuing repression in the political arena. The truth is the leadership had no choice in the matter. By 1989, economic reform had already passed the point of no return in China.

What remains largely unrecognized, even 15 years after the massacre, is how close China came to following a different path in 1989 -- one which would have avoided the bloodshed. How the leadership was initially prepared to deal with the protests in a peaceful manner.

Persuading the majority of the students to end their protests was never the problem, despite the presence of a few radicals among them. Rather, the real difficulty lay in formulating a consensus within the leadership that would suppress the powerful undercurrent in the party that favored using force.

Initially it seemed that 1989 would finally see the party break with its habit of trampling on all forms of public dissent. New ways were formulated to deal with the situation as it changed rapidly from day to day, especially after a hard-line editorial in the April 26 People's Daily provoked anger among protesters.

On May 4, Zhao Ziyang, the party's General Secretary, publicly praised the protesters for reflecting "the same sentiments as those of us within the government," on issues such as introducing democracy and fighting corruption. He pledged the demonstrations would be handled according to the "principles of democracy and law."

On May 8 and 10, Mr. Zhao won the support of the Politburo Standing Committee for using these principles to begin a dialogue with all levels of society. National People's Congress Chairman Wan Li also voiced strong support for this decision. And ten of China's most senior generals sent a letter to Deng Xiaoping, who was then the chairman of the Central Military Commission, calling for a peaceful response to the student protests.

With such an extensive consensus among senior officials, what could previously have scarcely been imagined suddenly became a real possibility. The proposed dialogue between the different levels of society in China could have given a much-needed boost to political reform and wiped out residual resistance to further economic reform. A new orientation in the relationship between government and people seemed possible. China's future had never seemed brighter than at that moment.

But only a week later such hopes were crushed. On May 17, Deng, China's unofficial but paramount leader, took the decision to use force and, from that point on, most of those who had previously supported dialogue fell silent or abruptly changed their stance to fall in line. Deng only needed the support of key figures with control over the military in order to carry out his order. So everyone else was sidelined and practically all institutions within the government, and even the party, effectively ceased to function.

The fundamental flaw in China's governmental structure, that allows absolute and unchecked power to be wielded by the likes of Deng, had once again inflicted an unnecessary tragedy on the Chinese people.

It would be a mistake to see the Tiananmen crackdown as a total victory for the conservatives. They still lost the battle to preserve their vision of socialism, since their efforts to reverse the process of economic reforms collapsed within a few years. But they did succeed in preserving the ugliest political reality of modern Chinese history -- the government's refusal to accept direct criticism of any kind from its people, and its readiness to subvert, frustrate and finally crush any critics.

Posted on Thursday, June 3, 2004 at 9:45 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Theodore Rabb: History Is Being Left Behind as Schools Rush to Comply with the No Child Left Behind Act

Theodore K. Rabb, a professor of history at Princeton University, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (June 4, 2004):

...Appalled by what has happened to historical literacy, three years ago Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia persuaded his colleagues in Congress to support a program, Teaching American History, to enable school districts around the country to enhance teachers' knowledge and skills, refresh curricula, and in general improve history instruction. That was certainly a promising move, but it is now being undermined by another Washington initiative: the No Child Left Behind Act....

Here, I would argue, is the most insidious effect of the law: not its financial, pedagogic, or constitutional shortcomings, but its devastation of subjects other than reading and math in the first eight grades.

That outcome is clear and widespread. Because so much money is at stake, school districts are shifting primary- and secondary-school class hours to reading and math, the only subjects tested by the law. The Council for Basic Education, a nonprofit group founded in the 1950s to shore up democracy through quality public education, has documented the change, as has testimony from states as diverse as Indiana, Maryland, New Mexico, New York, and Tennessee. In response to a survey I conducted in New Jersey, one superintendent reported: "We have double periods of mathematics and language arts each day in grades 3-6, and sometimes only three periods a week of social studies and science." "When extra practice time is needed for test-taking strategies," another superintendent notes, "it is taken from social studies or science classes." A gathering of superintendents in January told me that 90-minute social-studies classes are regularly cut in half or even by two-thirds, while reading and math gobble up the time.

The consequences a few years hence are predictable: a further (possibly precipitous) drop in students' familiarity with their heritage. Denuded of history in the first eight grades, how can they possibly redress the balance in high school, when new subjects and activities clamor for attention, and one-year classes are forced to scamper through the entirety of state, U.S., or world history?

It might be assumed that, once alerted to the problem, our government would rush to find remedies. After all, Congress has given Senator Byrd's Teaching American History an annual budget of $100-million; the White House has put its full weight behind We the People, an initiative sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and designed to improve the understanding of American history; and Bruce Cole, NEH chairman, has proclaimed that "citizens kept ignorant of their history are robbed of the riches of their heritage." Why, then, do they allow the No Child Left Behind law to cripple their commitments and initiatives?

For that is what they do. In one discussion of the issue that I know about, federal powers-that-be recommended that historians rely on "sensible" superintendents -- an act of trust that our assessment-fixated society contradicts at every turn. Similarly, Raymond J. Simon, assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education, has suggested that, if "focused and organized," districts should be able to solve the problems with No Child Left Behind. Secretary Paige himself dismisses the concern. Nobody is being told to drop other subjects, he says, and he will not be deflected from his cause: "A child that can't read is not going to learn history or civics." How, he does not say.

What is so sad is that a solution is available. In other advanced countries, like the Netherlands, testing in the early grades covers all subjects, including history.

Posted on Thursday, June 3, 2004 at 8:15 AM | Comments (0) | Top

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