Andrew Ferguson: Alan Shrugged ... And Washington fell to its knees
[Andrew Ferguson, a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the author, most recently, of Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America.]
I? was in the midst of reading up on Alan Greenspan, whose new memoir, The Age of Turbulence, has just been published to wide publicity and boffo sales, when I saw in a local gossip column that he and his wife had been spotted (somehow!) spending yet another Sunday afternoon in the owner's box at FedEx Field, watching the Washington Redskins.
For Washingtonians of a certain sort, the owner's box and its shifting set of inhabitants plays roughly the same social role that the roof of Lenin's Tomb did in the old Soviet Union--a promontory upon which members of the city's elite can display themselves. And I recalled an odd moment from a biography of Ayn Rand, the radical libertarian philosopher to whom Greenspan was devoted earlier in his career.
"Do you think Alan might basically be a social climber?" Rand once asked a mutual acquaintance.
It wasn't a rhetorical question, apparently. This was in the late 1950s. By then, Rand had published her two thick, preposterous novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and stood poised on the brink of international stardom. Her creepy philosophy of Objectivism, placing the self at the center of the moral universe, was being enthusiastically embraced, as it still is, by tens of thousands of pimply teenage boys in the dreamy moments between fits of social insecurity and furious bouts of masturbation. As her cultish fame spread, Rand wanted to keep tabs on her most intimate acolytes. Of these Greenspan was the most promising and, by all appearances, the most normal. Which worried her.
He had, for example, a life; most of the members of the Collective--the name her dozen closest followers attached to themselves--did not, devoting themselves to her welfare exclusively. Greenspan was making good money, soon to be great money, as a savvy economics consultant. He lunched with bond traders, corporate leaders, even titans of industry, real-life versions of the planet-girding capitalists Rand fantasized about and invented for her books. On Saturday nights Greenspan, then in his early thirties, would gather with his fellow Collective members in Rand's dim, shuttered apartment in midtown Manhattan (she kept the windows closed and the blinds drawn for many years, after one of her beloved cats tumbled tragically to its death). There in the grim presence of their idol they would sit on folding chairs and release expletives of thrilled admiration as her writings were read aloud. One memoir from the Collective, My Years with Ayn Rand by Nathaniel Branden, shows that even then Greenspan's mode of communication was Greenspanian.
"Ayn," Alan would say, overcome by some Randian insight, "upon reading this, one tends to feel exhilarated!"
Greenspan could argue for the gold standard, the absolute deregulation of the economy, the abolition of the Federal Reserve, and every other item of Rand's libertarian dogma with unparalleled rigor. When Atlas was slammed by a left-wing reviewer for the New York Times, who detected in Rand's advocacy of an unbridled free market a poorly concealed totalitarian itch, Greenspan took to her defense with a (now famous) letter to the editor.
To the editor:
'Atlas Shrugged' is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should
Alan Greenspan
New York
But of course Rand was right to feel uneasy about acolyte Alan. Green-span slowly slipped from her orbit, and though he never explicitly repudiated her or Objectivism--he speaks of both fondly, though vaguely, in his new book--he never once tried to advance her pitiless worldview from the many positions of power he has held since leaving her circle. Judged by his public performance, it's as if he'd never believed in Objectivism at all; he was, so to speak, objectively anti-Objectivist. The eloquent theoretician of unregulated capitalism instead became capitalism's highest-ranking regulator, chairman of the same Federal Reserve that Rand disdained as the parasites' protector and chief impediment to the New Man. Greenspan has earned vast praise and celebrity as a result.
How vast? For more than a decade he has been a totem, a mythic figure. In 1998 the New Republic published an article called "Praised Be Greenspan" that described a bond-trading firm that had turned its offices into a shrine to Greenspan, complete with a glass case containing "two Bic pens Greenspan supposedly used in 1993." Traders, reported the magazine, would come in to gaze at his photograph and meditate throughout the day. Much later, readers learned that this detail had been invented by one of the writers of the piece, the infamous fabulist and liar Stephen Glass, but at the time nobody in Washington seemed to think it outlandish: Indeed, it made perfect sense. And the piece was co-bylined by the magazine's chief economics writer, who apparently didn't notice anything amiss either.
And why would he, when even the most revered journalists revere Greenspan beyond the limits of plausibility? In 2000, the Fed chairman was the subject of an entire book by Bob Woodward, entitled nothing less than Maestro, which gives you an idea of the tone. Every page testifies to the approval of the Washington establishment that Woodward serves as chief chronicler and enforcer: "With Green-span, we find comfort," Woodward wrote. "He helps breathe life into the vision of America as strong, the best, invincible. .??.??. Each of us is a character in the nation's great economic soap opera; Greenspan is both director and producer."
How Greenspan managed to rise from Ayn Rand's airless apartment on East 36th Street to the sun-drenched owner's box at FedEx Field is one of the many interesting questions that he fails to answer in his new memoir--and one that has yet to be addressed in the hurricane of publicity that the book touched off. Greenspan likes to joke that he would favor a constitutional amendment barring from the presidency anyone who was willing to do what you have to do to become president. It's a good joke, but it makes you wonder: What do you have to do to become Alan Greenspan?
Timing and luck had a lot to do with it. It's unlikely that before the 1990s the nation's political elite--especially its Baby Boomer journalists, few of whom are frankly left-wing but most of whom are mildly left of center, and all of whom once considered markets mysterious and unsavory--would have lionized a chairman of the Federal Reserve, much less enhaloed him with the star power of a better-dressed, shorter Harrison Ford. But Green-span was perfectly positioned to benefit from the signal political event of the 1990s: the reconciliation of moderate liberalism to market economics and the unimaginable wealth markets can create. Bill Clinton, himself the standard bearer of the squishy left, had a hand in this reconciliation when he resigned his administration to the unadventurous economic policies of free trade and a modest federal budget. He was, in his own phrase, an "Eisenhower Republican."
The amazing technological leaps of the digital revolution helped even more, making everyone from farmers to fishmongers more productive, and setting off an explosion in wealth beyond even Reaganite dreams. Baby Boomer liberals, glimpsing retirement on the horizon, suddenly found themselves getting rich, thanks to privately invested pension plans and 401(k)s stuffed with mutual funds.
From "How do we equalize incomes and make American society fair?" the preoccupying question of Democrats and social progressives became, "Say, where'd all this money come from?" Some goose somewhere was laying some kind of gi-normous golden egg! They looked around for someone to credit--for surely it had to be a government official who was responsible--and settled on the owlish fellow in the Poindexter glasses, who spent his days doing God-knows-what in a sealed-up marble sarcophagus on Constitution Avenue. "In Greenspan We Trust," said the headline on newsmagazine covers.
Greenspan knows better, of course, and in his book he makes desultory attempts to wave off all the adulation. "The evidence doesn't support that conclusion," he has said about his reputation as miracle-maker, thereby maintaining, at least for the record, his reputation for realism, modesty, and "fact-based analysis." But in this case his heart clearly isn't in it. As his memoir shows, he has stoked the mystique himself. He is highly self-amused on the subject of "Fedspeak," the jargon-laden, zig-zagging syntax in which he entombed his public pronouncements. Fedspeak from the mouth of any other public official would be called evasion, euphemism, misdirection, or obscurantism. Greenspan calls it "constructive ambiguity," as though clarity of expression would have made his job nearly impossible.
And maybe it would have, but there's another possible explanation: a deep-seated mistrust of language--a disinclination to phrase ideas in concrete terms. Fedspeak is a particularly floppy form of prose. Take a wooly noun, attach it to a nebulous verb, thrust both at an undefined object, and whammo: You, too, could be Green-span giving his Humphrey-Hawkins testimony before a congressional committee. In Fedspeak, nouns that stand for real things or definable ideas and verbs that describe discrete acts disappear in a cloud where aspects, factors, and dynamics will shape, impact (sometimes positively, sometimes negatively), implement, or enable a series of outcomes, probabilities, or conditions. Try it: I would venture to say, Senator, that the various dynamics in question might negatively impact the relevant probabilities. No one will know what you're saying. But if you're chairman of the Fed, no one will dare complain, either. They'll think you might get mad and blow up their 401(k) plans. Somehow.
No prose as slovenly as Fedspeak appears in Greenspan's book; several passages are even charming in their lucidity, thanks to the efforts of his collaborator, Peter Petre, a former writer for Fortune. But several anecdotes do demonstrate, probably inadvertently, the advantages Greenspan drew from his habitual fuzziness. Economics is an inexact business, of course, and tracing effects back to causes can be difficult, especially when it comes to official actions of the government. But Fedspeak allows the Fedspeaker to claim credit or avoid blame, with equal plausibility, when policies or pronouncements turn out well or badly. That's what's constructive about the ambiguity! Fedspeak is a strategy that preserves not only the independence of the Federal Reserve but also the reputation of its chairman.
To cite one small example: The most famous phrase in Fedspeak is "irrational exuberance," which Greenspan dropped into the final pages of a long speech at a Washington dinner-dance in 1996. At the time the Dow Industrial Average stood at roughly 6,400. It's unclear even by his own account what, precisely, Greenspan intended by using the phrase: At one point he says he was only raising the possibility that stock prices were unrealistically high--merely "putting the issue on the table." But it's also clear he thought prices should go lower, and he knew that markets would drop in response to the remark. Whatever: Before the last drunk had been dragged from the dance floor, Greenspan's statement was rocking world markets, and it continued to do so throughout the night and next day.
In congressional testimony the following week, however, he denied he was trying to talk stock values down. He couldn't do that even if he wanted to, he told the congressmen. He pointed out that his worry about irrational stock prices was put in the form of a question: "How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values?" (No answer was given.) Perhaps most revealing of all, Greenspan's Fed, after its chairman's public fretting, refused to attempt any concrete action that might slow the "escalation" of prices. And sure enough, after this brief hiccup, stock prices resumed their rise for several more years, and Green-span, as we've seen, received credit and the undying gratitude of investors. Yet when the bubble finally burst, Greenspan's worry about "irrational exuberance" sounded like a prophecy: It's not like he hadn't warned us.
He is an expert in having it both ways, ducking in and out of controversies, kibitzing about matters on which he had no responsibility (taxes and spending, for example, which are controlled by elected officials) and then taking offense when elected officials dared to kibitz about the interest rates he and his colleagues controlled. The habit of evasion has continued with the release of this book. Greenspan gave an advance peek at its contents to Bob Woodward, who wrote a front-page curtain-raiser story in the Washington Post. The news in the book, Woodward wrote--undoubtedly with Greenspan's acquiescence--was Greenspan's criticism of the Bush administration and the Republican Congress.
"My biggest frustration," Greenspan writes of George W. Bush, "remained the president's unwillingness to wield his veto against out-of-control spending." As for Republican congressional leaders, they were "readily inclined to loosen the federal purse strings any time it might help add a few more seats to the Republican majority." Their insistence on cutting taxes showed the same heedlessness. The result, Green-span says, was not only unconscionable federal deficits but also his own disillusionment with his party. As a lifelong Republican, he's ashamed.
It should go without saying that Greenspan is not the first Republican to criticize the overspending of the last several Republican Congresses. Lots of Republicans have done it--really, you could look it up. But even they acknowledge, as Greenspan does not, that more than irresponsible spending and tax cuts have contributed to the deficit. We've seen, among other things, two wars; a very, very big hurricane; and a massive deployment of resources against terrorism. Bush officials responded to the Woodward story by noting that Greenspan, as Fed chairman, had testified in favor of the tax cuts. And Bush himself pointed out that today's budget deficit, at 1.5 percent of GDP, is quite low relative to the 30-year average.
Confronted with this fact-based analysis, Greenspan switched the terms of debate. "The president's numbers are correct," he told Fox News. "The issue is really not the short term .??.??. but what the potential is for the budget deficit when the Baby Boomers retire." That's not true: The complaints that Woodward splashed on the front page of the Post, and which launched Greenspan's book into bestsellerdom, were precisely about the "short term." Yet Greenspan slides in and out, bobs and weaves, keeping his reputation for integrity intact.
In the Washington that Greenspan inhabits, some kinds of evasiveness are preferable to others; it helps if you're criticizing out-of-favor Republican greasebags and an unpopular Republican president. And you can see why he would want, at all costs, to preserve his standing. There's something endearing in the evident pleasure he takes from the high life he leads. He refers insouciantly to "the glitter of the White House," the welcome sanctuary of its tennis court, the convenience of the presidential box at the Kennedy Center. At certain points in his book he just flips open his social calendar and lets his ghostwriter jot down the names: "I did build up a wonderful circle of friends: .??.??. Henry and Nancy Kissinger, Oscar and Annette de la Renta, Felix and Liz Rohatyn, Brooke Astor (I knew her as a kid of seventy-five), Joe and Estée Lauder. .??.??. "Plus Barbara Walters.
More surprisingly, it turns out that much of what Greenspan has to say, when he sets evasiveness aside, is banal, on the subject of policy as well as people. Richard Nixon, he says, was paranoid and profane; Ronald Reagan liked to tell stories; Gerald Ford was normal. Half the book is devoted to discussions of globalization, the emergence of China, the disinflationary effects of new technology, and so on. But no one who reads the Economist or the Wall Street Journal will find anything fresh in his gloss (though you might be interested that he has more admiring things to say about Chinese dictator Zhu Rongji than about, for example, George W. Bush). No Washington hostess has ever struck a name from a guest list for excess banality. Sometimes it helps.
All this gives us hints of how to account for the mysterious rise of Alan Greenspan, but only hints, and hints are what we'll have to settle for. He is not a self-revealing man. Even without the Fedspeak, the opacity is preserved. Which has surely been his intention to the last. Perhaps for him the only essential thing about the story of Alan Greenspan is that the story has a happy ending. By his own lights, that long-ago letter to the Times has been proven right: "Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment."
As for the parasites--well, we know what happens to them.
Read entire article at Weekly Standard
I? was in the midst of reading up on Alan Greenspan, whose new memoir, The Age of Turbulence, has just been published to wide publicity and boffo sales, when I saw in a local gossip column that he and his wife had been spotted (somehow!) spending yet another Sunday afternoon in the owner's box at FedEx Field, watching the Washington Redskins.
For Washingtonians of a certain sort, the owner's box and its shifting set of inhabitants plays roughly the same social role that the roof of Lenin's Tomb did in the old Soviet Union--a promontory upon which members of the city's elite can display themselves. And I recalled an odd moment from a biography of Ayn Rand, the radical libertarian philosopher to whom Greenspan was devoted earlier in his career.
"Do you think Alan might basically be a social climber?" Rand once asked a mutual acquaintance.
It wasn't a rhetorical question, apparently. This was in the late 1950s. By then, Rand had published her two thick, preposterous novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and stood poised on the brink of international stardom. Her creepy philosophy of Objectivism, placing the self at the center of the moral universe, was being enthusiastically embraced, as it still is, by tens of thousands of pimply teenage boys in the dreamy moments between fits of social insecurity and furious bouts of masturbation. As her cultish fame spread, Rand wanted to keep tabs on her most intimate acolytes. Of these Greenspan was the most promising and, by all appearances, the most normal. Which worried her.
He had, for example, a life; most of the members of the Collective--the name her dozen closest followers attached to themselves--did not, devoting themselves to her welfare exclusively. Greenspan was making good money, soon to be great money, as a savvy economics consultant. He lunched with bond traders, corporate leaders, even titans of industry, real-life versions of the planet-girding capitalists Rand fantasized about and invented for her books. On Saturday nights Greenspan, then in his early thirties, would gather with his fellow Collective members in Rand's dim, shuttered apartment in midtown Manhattan (she kept the windows closed and the blinds drawn for many years, after one of her beloved cats tumbled tragically to its death). There in the grim presence of their idol they would sit on folding chairs and release expletives of thrilled admiration as her writings were read aloud. One memoir from the Collective, My Years with Ayn Rand by Nathaniel Branden, shows that even then Greenspan's mode of communication was Greenspanian.
"Ayn," Alan would say, overcome by some Randian insight, "upon reading this, one tends to feel exhilarated!"
Greenspan could argue for the gold standard, the absolute deregulation of the economy, the abolition of the Federal Reserve, and every other item of Rand's libertarian dogma with unparalleled rigor. When Atlas was slammed by a left-wing reviewer for the New York Times, who detected in Rand's advocacy of an unbridled free market a poorly concealed totalitarian itch, Greenspan took to her defense with a (now famous) letter to the editor.
To the editor:
'Atlas Shrugged' is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should
Alan Greenspan
New York
But of course Rand was right to feel uneasy about acolyte Alan. Green-span slowly slipped from her orbit, and though he never explicitly repudiated her or Objectivism--he speaks of both fondly, though vaguely, in his new book--he never once tried to advance her pitiless worldview from the many positions of power he has held since leaving her circle. Judged by his public performance, it's as if he'd never believed in Objectivism at all; he was, so to speak, objectively anti-Objectivist. The eloquent theoretician of unregulated capitalism instead became capitalism's highest-ranking regulator, chairman of the same Federal Reserve that Rand disdained as the parasites' protector and chief impediment to the New Man. Greenspan has earned vast praise and celebrity as a result.
How vast? For more than a decade he has been a totem, a mythic figure. In 1998 the New Republic published an article called "Praised Be Greenspan" that described a bond-trading firm that had turned its offices into a shrine to Greenspan, complete with a glass case containing "two Bic pens Greenspan supposedly used in 1993." Traders, reported the magazine, would come in to gaze at his photograph and meditate throughout the day. Much later, readers learned that this detail had been invented by one of the writers of the piece, the infamous fabulist and liar Stephen Glass, but at the time nobody in Washington seemed to think it outlandish: Indeed, it made perfect sense. And the piece was co-bylined by the magazine's chief economics writer, who apparently didn't notice anything amiss either.
And why would he, when even the most revered journalists revere Greenspan beyond the limits of plausibility? In 2000, the Fed chairman was the subject of an entire book by Bob Woodward, entitled nothing less than Maestro, which gives you an idea of the tone. Every page testifies to the approval of the Washington establishment that Woodward serves as chief chronicler and enforcer: "With Green-span, we find comfort," Woodward wrote. "He helps breathe life into the vision of America as strong, the best, invincible. .??.??. Each of us is a character in the nation's great economic soap opera; Greenspan is both director and producer."
How Greenspan managed to rise from Ayn Rand's airless apartment on East 36th Street to the sun-drenched owner's box at FedEx Field is one of the many interesting questions that he fails to answer in his new memoir--and one that has yet to be addressed in the hurricane of publicity that the book touched off. Greenspan likes to joke that he would favor a constitutional amendment barring from the presidency anyone who was willing to do what you have to do to become president. It's a good joke, but it makes you wonder: What do you have to do to become Alan Greenspan?
Timing and luck had a lot to do with it. It's unlikely that before the 1990s the nation's political elite--especially its Baby Boomer journalists, few of whom are frankly left-wing but most of whom are mildly left of center, and all of whom once considered markets mysterious and unsavory--would have lionized a chairman of the Federal Reserve, much less enhaloed him with the star power of a better-dressed, shorter Harrison Ford. But Green-span was perfectly positioned to benefit from the signal political event of the 1990s: the reconciliation of moderate liberalism to market economics and the unimaginable wealth markets can create. Bill Clinton, himself the standard bearer of the squishy left, had a hand in this reconciliation when he resigned his administration to the unadventurous economic policies of free trade and a modest federal budget. He was, in his own phrase, an "Eisenhower Republican."
The amazing technological leaps of the digital revolution helped even more, making everyone from farmers to fishmongers more productive, and setting off an explosion in wealth beyond even Reaganite dreams. Baby Boomer liberals, glimpsing retirement on the horizon, suddenly found themselves getting rich, thanks to privately invested pension plans and 401(k)s stuffed with mutual funds.
From "How do we equalize incomes and make American society fair?" the preoccupying question of Democrats and social progressives became, "Say, where'd all this money come from?" Some goose somewhere was laying some kind of gi-normous golden egg! They looked around for someone to credit--for surely it had to be a government official who was responsible--and settled on the owlish fellow in the Poindexter glasses, who spent his days doing God-knows-what in a sealed-up marble sarcophagus on Constitution Avenue. "In Greenspan We Trust," said the headline on newsmagazine covers.
Greenspan knows better, of course, and in his book he makes desultory attempts to wave off all the adulation. "The evidence doesn't support that conclusion," he has said about his reputation as miracle-maker, thereby maintaining, at least for the record, his reputation for realism, modesty, and "fact-based analysis." But in this case his heart clearly isn't in it. As his memoir shows, he has stoked the mystique himself. He is highly self-amused on the subject of "Fedspeak," the jargon-laden, zig-zagging syntax in which he entombed his public pronouncements. Fedspeak from the mouth of any other public official would be called evasion, euphemism, misdirection, or obscurantism. Greenspan calls it "constructive ambiguity," as though clarity of expression would have made his job nearly impossible.
And maybe it would have, but there's another possible explanation: a deep-seated mistrust of language--a disinclination to phrase ideas in concrete terms. Fedspeak is a particularly floppy form of prose. Take a wooly noun, attach it to a nebulous verb, thrust both at an undefined object, and whammo: You, too, could be Green-span giving his Humphrey-Hawkins testimony before a congressional committee. In Fedspeak, nouns that stand for real things or definable ideas and verbs that describe discrete acts disappear in a cloud where aspects, factors, and dynamics will shape, impact (sometimes positively, sometimes negatively), implement, or enable a series of outcomes, probabilities, or conditions. Try it: I would venture to say, Senator, that the various dynamics in question might negatively impact the relevant probabilities. No one will know what you're saying. But if you're chairman of the Fed, no one will dare complain, either. They'll think you might get mad and blow up their 401(k) plans. Somehow.
No prose as slovenly as Fedspeak appears in Greenspan's book; several passages are even charming in their lucidity, thanks to the efforts of his collaborator, Peter Petre, a former writer for Fortune. But several anecdotes do demonstrate, probably inadvertently, the advantages Greenspan drew from his habitual fuzziness. Economics is an inexact business, of course, and tracing effects back to causes can be difficult, especially when it comes to official actions of the government. But Fedspeak allows the Fedspeaker to claim credit or avoid blame, with equal plausibility, when policies or pronouncements turn out well or badly. That's what's constructive about the ambiguity! Fedspeak is a strategy that preserves not only the independence of the Federal Reserve but also the reputation of its chairman.
To cite one small example: The most famous phrase in Fedspeak is "irrational exuberance," which Greenspan dropped into the final pages of a long speech at a Washington dinner-dance in 1996. At the time the Dow Industrial Average stood at roughly 6,400. It's unclear even by his own account what, precisely, Greenspan intended by using the phrase: At one point he says he was only raising the possibility that stock prices were unrealistically high--merely "putting the issue on the table." But it's also clear he thought prices should go lower, and he knew that markets would drop in response to the remark. Whatever: Before the last drunk had been dragged from the dance floor, Greenspan's statement was rocking world markets, and it continued to do so throughout the night and next day.
In congressional testimony the following week, however, he denied he was trying to talk stock values down. He couldn't do that even if he wanted to, he told the congressmen. He pointed out that his worry about irrational stock prices was put in the form of a question: "How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values?" (No answer was given.) Perhaps most revealing of all, Greenspan's Fed, after its chairman's public fretting, refused to attempt any concrete action that might slow the "escalation" of prices. And sure enough, after this brief hiccup, stock prices resumed their rise for several more years, and Green-span, as we've seen, received credit and the undying gratitude of investors. Yet when the bubble finally burst, Greenspan's worry about "irrational exuberance" sounded like a prophecy: It's not like he hadn't warned us.
He is an expert in having it both ways, ducking in and out of controversies, kibitzing about matters on which he had no responsibility (taxes and spending, for example, which are controlled by elected officials) and then taking offense when elected officials dared to kibitz about the interest rates he and his colleagues controlled. The habit of evasion has continued with the release of this book. Greenspan gave an advance peek at its contents to Bob Woodward, who wrote a front-page curtain-raiser story in the Washington Post. The news in the book, Woodward wrote--undoubtedly with Greenspan's acquiescence--was Greenspan's criticism of the Bush administration and the Republican Congress.
"My biggest frustration," Greenspan writes of George W. Bush, "remained the president's unwillingness to wield his veto against out-of-control spending." As for Republican congressional leaders, they were "readily inclined to loosen the federal purse strings any time it might help add a few more seats to the Republican majority." Their insistence on cutting taxes showed the same heedlessness. The result, Green-span says, was not only unconscionable federal deficits but also his own disillusionment with his party. As a lifelong Republican, he's ashamed.
It should go without saying that Greenspan is not the first Republican to criticize the overspending of the last several Republican Congresses. Lots of Republicans have done it--really, you could look it up. But even they acknowledge, as Greenspan does not, that more than irresponsible spending and tax cuts have contributed to the deficit. We've seen, among other things, two wars; a very, very big hurricane; and a massive deployment of resources against terrorism. Bush officials responded to the Woodward story by noting that Greenspan, as Fed chairman, had testified in favor of the tax cuts. And Bush himself pointed out that today's budget deficit, at 1.5 percent of GDP, is quite low relative to the 30-year average.
Confronted with this fact-based analysis, Greenspan switched the terms of debate. "The president's numbers are correct," he told Fox News. "The issue is really not the short term .??.??. but what the potential is for the budget deficit when the Baby Boomers retire." That's not true: The complaints that Woodward splashed on the front page of the Post, and which launched Greenspan's book into bestsellerdom, were precisely about the "short term." Yet Greenspan slides in and out, bobs and weaves, keeping his reputation for integrity intact.
In the Washington that Greenspan inhabits, some kinds of evasiveness are preferable to others; it helps if you're criticizing out-of-favor Republican greasebags and an unpopular Republican president. And you can see why he would want, at all costs, to preserve his standing. There's something endearing in the evident pleasure he takes from the high life he leads. He refers insouciantly to "the glitter of the White House," the welcome sanctuary of its tennis court, the convenience of the presidential box at the Kennedy Center. At certain points in his book he just flips open his social calendar and lets his ghostwriter jot down the names: "I did build up a wonderful circle of friends: .??.??. Henry and Nancy Kissinger, Oscar and Annette de la Renta, Felix and Liz Rohatyn, Brooke Astor (I knew her as a kid of seventy-five), Joe and Estée Lauder. .??.??. "Plus Barbara Walters.
More surprisingly, it turns out that much of what Greenspan has to say, when he sets evasiveness aside, is banal, on the subject of policy as well as people. Richard Nixon, he says, was paranoid and profane; Ronald Reagan liked to tell stories; Gerald Ford was normal. Half the book is devoted to discussions of globalization, the emergence of China, the disinflationary effects of new technology, and so on. But no one who reads the Economist or the Wall Street Journal will find anything fresh in his gloss (though you might be interested that he has more admiring things to say about Chinese dictator Zhu Rongji than about, for example, George W. Bush). No Washington hostess has ever struck a name from a guest list for excess banality. Sometimes it helps.
All this gives us hints of how to account for the mysterious rise of Alan Greenspan, but only hints, and hints are what we'll have to settle for. He is not a self-revealing man. Even without the Fedspeak, the opacity is preserved. Which has surely been his intention to the last. Perhaps for him the only essential thing about the story of Alan Greenspan is that the story has a happy ending. By his own lights, that long-ago letter to the Times has been proven right: "Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment."
As for the parasites--well, we know what happens to them.