Week of July 16, 2007

For a Short While Today, It Will Be President Cheney

Political reporters don't ponder why some people do not talk to them. In the book Mr. Novak shows no sign of understanding that people in government and business are often leery of reporters because they have reason to be. Say the wrong thing in a loose moment, and you can lose your job, your income, your standing. You can also wind up indulging a passing mood and hurting people. Mr. Novak belongs to the tough school. When H.R. Haldeman was unsettled by personal bad press, he didn't invite Mr. Novak to lunch. Mr. Novak says he treated Haldeman"more harshly because he refused any connection with me. He made himself more of a target than he had to be by refusing to be a source." This is honest, and unlovable.

In the auto industry, there’s on thing you can always count on: a new environmental or safety rule is proposed, executives will prophesy disaster. In the nineteen-twenties, Alfred Sloan, the president of General Motors, insisted that the company could not make windshields with safety glass because doing so would harm the bottom line. In the fifties, auto executives told Congress that making seat belts compulsory would slash industry profits. When air bags came along, Lee Iacocca told Richard Nixon that"safety has really killed all our business." A few years later, when Congress was thinking about requiring fuel-economy standards, auto executives warned that instituting such standards would create"massive financial and unemployment problems." And now, with Congress debating a bill to raise fuel-economy standards, for the first time in almost twenty years, the Chicken Littles are squawking again, forecasting doom for Detroit and asserting that making higher-mileage vehicles is technologically unfeasible and economically suicidal.

One of the more interesting aspects of humanity is our lack of knowledge of our history. I don't mean the recent stuff, in which we have been and are splendidly served by such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, Pliny and the rest of a long line currently culminating in the men and women who wander across landscapes talking most knowledgeably and entertainingly on our television screens. No, let us, as instructed by Dame Julie Andrews, start at the very beginning.

Because, it now emerges, we learned to walk upright in the trees. Now, I realise that it was some time before anybody got to write anything down, but I would still have thought that this was a fascinating piece of information well worth passing on in the oral history sessions around the camp fires (after we had learned to talk, obviously).

Bush, an honourable man, might have made a good President - without Iraq. His fault was to heed too often the voices of the Zionist lobby in Washington. Never before has the Israeli tail wagged the American dog quite so vigorously; the results threaten to prove as disastrous for Israel as for the Western alliance.