Afghanistan

Afghanistan, Foreign Policy, U.S. Senate

Afghanistan as Metaphor

Posted on by mjohnson

The 20 years of American misadventure in Afghanistan, and the deadly, messy departure from that misadventure, is an apt metaphor for our broken, unserious politics.

The congressional hearings this week about the American withdrawal offer a window into the barren soul of not just American foreign policy, but those who pretend to make and influence it. We seemed to have learned almost nothing from two decades of death, destruction, delusion and debt, but assigning blame, as was the purpose of congressional hearings this week, sure makes for a great video clip.

In the period between when a Republican president warned that putting troops and treasure into Afghanistan would mean a long slog to when another Republican president made an ill-considered deal with the Taliban to withdraw, congressional Republicans rarely said a peep about our policy or priorities.

The former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, never once conducted a hearing on the Afghan withdrawal when he chaired the committee. This week he assigned all the blame to a Democratic administration that has been in office for less than a year, because, well, American foreign policy has become all about assigning blame.

Congressional Democrats have an only marginally better record since all but one Democrat who is still in Congress voted to launch the Afghan/Iraq misadventure in the first place.

“We must be careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target,” California congresswoman Barbara Lee said in 2001 when the House voted to give George W. Bush his blank check for war. “There must be some of us who say: Let’s step back for a moment and think through the implications of our actions today. I do not want to see this spiral out of control.”

Congresswoman Barbara Lee

The gentlewoman from California had it right. And she knew her history, equating the open-ended authorization to allow every subsequent president to wage war wherever they wanted to Lyndon Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964 that paved the path to the American misadventure in South Vietnam.

Afghanistan was and is a manifest, bipartisan failure: a failure of congressional acquiescence to presidential power; a failure to recognize America’s catastrophic inability to shape cultures we don’t understand into western style democracies; a failure that imagines the country’s bloated military establishment, propping up a bloated military-industrial complex, can exercise its will at will; and ultimately a failure of American voters to take any of this even remotely seriously.

One of the few bright spots in this week’s performative soundbite trolling on Capitol Hill was the evidence that the current president actually had the backbone to override the advice of his military advisers, who apparently to a man argued to keep American forces in Afghanistan indefinitely.

Republicans, who once won elections on the question of who most supported the military, attacked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs – by one account “assassinated his character and impugned his patriotism” – for his failure to resign when his advice was rejected. General Mark Milley then schooled the odious senator from Arkansas, Tom Cotton, about the critical importance of civilian control of the military. The general might have reminded the senator that American presidents are often at their best when they reject the conventional wisdom of men in uniform, but that may be expecting too much from a military that still cannot imagine its limitations.

Lincoln replaced generals repeatedly, even popular ones. Harry Truman rejected Douglas MacArthur’s advice to bomb China during the Korean War and then sacked the strutting mandarin for insubordination. John Kennedy rejected the advice of his military advisers when they wanted to invade Cuba in 1962. Barack Obama fired another egocentric general for popping off to a journalist. You might argue that civilian deference to gold braid has been out of balance since Vietnam, but to examine that thought you would need a level of discernment and self-awareness impossible for most politicians today.

Afghanistan, with all its mistakes, missteps and misfortunate, cries out for the kind of sober and reasoned debate and review that we seem incapable of mustering.

It is not just Afghanistan, of course, but the failure of our too partisan, too trivial, too odious political class to deal with almost everything. Pick your issue: immigration, infrastructure, income inequality, domestic terrorism, climate, debt, health care – we’re treading water at best, floundering at worst.

And it really is our fault – individually and collectively. We send small people, with small minds and outsized opinions of themselves to do adult work.

“The fault is not in our stars but in ourselves…”

History often celebrates, too late, the naysayers who are prophets, the Barbara Lee’s and the Wayne Morse’s.

Morse, an Oregon senator, was an irascible, pedantic gadfly – a “sanctimonious bore” by one account – and also the kind of politician indispensable in a democracy. Morse early on saw where American involvement in southeast Asia would lead. He was one of two votes in the Senate against LBJ’s Tonkin Gulf resolution, and he also correctly diagnosed where American politics were headed.

“Having abandoned its responsibilities for the big things,” Morse said in 1964, “Congress falls back on making the most of the small things. Frustrated members who fear to question the Pentagon brass, the State Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency, concentrate on the full exercise of more petty powers … having swallowed the camel, Congress strains at the gnats.”

American democracy is imperiled. We know it. Some of us welcome the chaos believing it benefits our tribe. But the fix, if there is one, is not more chaos, not more simple-minded, small-bore politicians focused on today’s soundbite rather than tomorrow’s substance. The fix is to commit to greater seriousness, more personal involvement in a civil and civic life, more engagement with the common good.

Wishing for it isn’t going to work. Electing better people might work, but time is short.

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Additional Reading:

Somethings you might find of interest…

The Constitutional Crisis is Here

The historian Robert Kagan authored the most talked about political essay of the season recently, arguing in the Washington Post that a second Donald Trump presidential candidacy is a near certainty, and also a huge threat to American democracy. It is sobering stuff.

Robert Kagan says we’re not done with him

“The world will look very different in 14 months if, as seems likely, the Republican zombie party wins control of the House. At that point, with the political winds clearly blowing in his favor, Trump is all but certain to announce his candidacy, and social media constraints on his speech are likely to be lifted, since Facebook and Twitter would have a hard time justifying censoring his campaign. With his megaphone back, Trump would once again dominate news coverage, as outlets prove unable to resist covering him around the clock if only for financial reasons.

“But this time, Trump would have advantages that he lacked in 2016 and 2020, including more loyal officials in state and local governments; the Republicans in Congress; and the backing of GOP donors, think tanks and journals of opinion. And he will have the Trump movement, including many who are armed and ready to be activated, again. Who is going to stop him then? On its current trajectory, the 2024 Republican Party will make the 2020 Republican Party seem positively defiant.”

I’ve taken to thinking of myself as (I hope) informed, but a pessimist. This piece made me really nervous.

Why I’m A Single Issue Voter

I’ve long considered Mona Charen among the most orthodox of conservatives – a columnist of the Reagan/Bush ilk. In a recent piece she argued that she’s voting for the Democratic candidate for governor in Virginia next month, because the only issue that matters right now is, well, truth.

“The Republican party, in Washington and nationally, has become a conspiracy of liars. As such, it threatens the stability of the republic. Even a seemingly inoffensive candidate like Glenn Youngkin has given aid and comfort to this sinister agenda by stressing ‘election integrity’ in his campaign. It doesn’t change a thing to reflect that he’s almost certainly insincere. He stopped talking about it after winning the primary, suggesting that all the “integrity” talk was just a sop to MAGA voters. Still, a victory for him will send a message that the Republican party is normal again, a party that good people can support.”

Charen’s tour of the current GOP is also pretty chilling.

Pro-slavery Senator John C. Calhoun Opposed Infrastructure Spending for a Reason.

A really interesting piece here from a historian of the Civil War era on slavery and infrastructure. Seriously.

Calhoun: He was for infrastructure before he was against it

“Calhoun is rarely thought of as a monetary theorist, but his comments on monetary architecture and government spending are surprisingly relevant. Though nearly two centuries old, they hold a lesson about the politics of austerity today, as Republicans oppose needed federal investment in green technology and infrastructure, climate change mitigation, pandemic preparedness, affordable housing, equitable broadband access, and low-cost, high-quality education from pre-K to college. To realize these goals, which are both popular and urgently necessary, federal, state, and local governments will have to deploy the full scope of their fiscal and monetary capacities. We who support those goals can expect Republicans (and corporate Democrats) to blow a lot of smoke in our eyes, generating word cloud after word cloud dominated by ‘deficits,’ ‘inflation,’ and ‘pay-fors.’ Calhoun can help clear the air. His ideas expose the conservative, hierarchical commitments that have always worked to thwart the promise of democratic governance.”

Worth your time.

Daniel Craig Will Now Take Your Questions

Sean Connery is still my ideal James Bond, but you have to admit Daniel Craig has filled the role of the Brit spy like few others. Something a bit lighter here, and pretty funny.

“At 53, Craig is cheerful and clever and friendly. He has bright blue eyes in a tanned and tired face. It is day five of six at the junket which may or may not decide the future of cinema, and he is about 36 hours off quitting Bond for ever. After 2015’s Spectre (most of which he filmed with a broken leg), Craig notoriously claimed he would rather slit his wrists than return to the role.”

From The Guardian, and some of the questions are great.

Afghanistan, Foreign Policy, Politics

This Is On Us …

Posted on by mjohnson

In his first book, published in 1898, the solider, politician, historian and future British prime minister Winston Churchill wrote about The Malakand Field Force, a military unit that fought native tribes in the wild region along the Indian-Afghanistan border. As junior cavalry officer in the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars, Churchill was a first-hand observer of the campaign.

With words that ring down through the years, Churchill, very definitely a proper English gentleman, wrote: “The difficult language, and peculiar characteristics of the tribesmen are the study of a lifetime.” To operate in this place, Churchill suggested, required mastery of the local conditions, the role played by the tribal power brokers in every village and region, and “the general history and traditions of the country.”

Winston Churchill about the time he wrote The Story of the Malakand Field Force

“Men are needed who understand the whole question,” Churchill wrote, “and all the details of the quarrel, between the natives and the Government, and who can in some measure appreciate both points of view. I do not believe that such are to be found in an army.”

Re-read that last sentence as you think about sorting through the debris of 20-years of American military intervention in Afghanistan. Then consider the words of John Sopko, the special inspector general at the Pentagon, who just released what can only be termed a scathing report on the American misadventure.

Among the inspector general’s conclusions: Not only did the United States – both militarily and diplomatically – lack a coherent strategy in Afghanistan – another way of saying we didn’t know what we were trying to accomplish – but the entire $145 billion effort was crippled by the lack of “a detailed understanding of the country’s social, economic, and political dynamics … U.S. officials [were] consistently operating in the dark, often because of the difficulty of collecting the necessary information.”

Nearly the same words Sir Winston penned at the end of the 19th Century.

The recriminations and blame assigning are in full flower, a typical if wholly ineffective Washington, D.C. reaction to a military and diplomatic failure. American politicians are terrific at hyperbole and denial, not so good at solutions.

Idaho’s Jim Risch, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to cite just one example, helpfully noted this week: “We cannot treat [the Taliban] or its leaders as a legitimate government.” Risch went on to assign all the blame to the current occupant of the White House, who has lived there for eight months. “President Biden and his administration must answer for this disaster,” Risch said. “It didn’t have to be this way.”

Taliban fighters in control of Kabul…and all of Afghanistan

But of course, Risch offered no real policy ideas. What would he do not to have it this way? When Risch chaired the Foreign Relations Committee for two years during the Trump Administration not once did he hold a public hearing on American policy in Afghanistan. He could have summoned any “expert” in the world to testify. He didn’t, and only one time did Risch succeed in getting the secretary of state before his committee, and that hearing was almost entirely devoted to the department’s budget and Mike Pompeo’s ethics, or lack thereof.

You’ll search in vain for any Risch concern about the Trump negotiated deal that released 5,000 Taliban fighters and effectively did recognize the Taliban as “a legitimate government.” In June, Risch was meeting in Washington with Afghan president Ashraf Ghani, who it is now reported fled the country with bags filled with millions of U.S. dollars.

Risch said at the time, “there are options in-between departing Afghanistan entirely or remaining there forever.” Risch did not – and still has not – spelled out what he meant by that. One suspects because what he said sounds better in theory than in practice.

To be sure, Risch is not alone in embracing the attitude of “don’t do anything, fail to suggest any workable approach, but keep you options open to complain.” It’s the modus operandi for official Washington. Risch is a good example, however, if only because he is so blatantly obvious about playing the game.

Let’s stipulate at least two things: Joe Biden is the responsible party. He made the call and set the timeline, but he also inherited a colossal mess that has bedeviled four presidents, two from each party.

Second, the Americans who fought, were injured and died in Afghanistan deserve our respect, admiration and thanks, even as we must hold to account those who sent them and commanded them; those who lived for 20 years in a la la land of self-delusion.

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius has consistently offered some of the most important insights into our Afghan debacle. “The hard truth is that this failure is shared by a generation of military commanders and policymakers,” Ignatius wrote this week, “who let occasional tactical successes in a counterterrorism mission become a proxy for a strategy that never was. And it was subtly abetted by journalists who were scratching our heads wondering if it would work, but let the senior officials continue their magical thinking.”

In his narrative of “magical thinking,” Ignatius quotes Admiral Mike Mullen, the former Joint Chief’s chairman, during one particularly rough patch in the long history of rough patches in Afghanistan. “We need to tell our story,” Mullen tells a group of military and diplomatic officials during a video conference, to which Ignatius remarks: “With all due respect to Mullen: The problem isn’t with the story. It’s with the reality.”

Here are two big realities in the wake for the chaotic U.S. departure from Kabul:

Americans who say they venerate our military must quit asking those soldiers to do impossible things in our names, while we largely ignore the reality of their sacrifice and steadfastly refuse to focus on serious issues. Truth be told many Americans couldn’t find Afghanistan on a map. We autopiloted this catastrophe, handing it over to a bunch of petty partisans like the junior senator from Idaho and then fell back on our tribal divisions.

Next week it we’ll be on to something else because, as Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic, we are unserious people governed by unserious politicians. By huge margins we originally embraced the effort in Afghanistan only to lose interest and then ignore things, at least until this week.

Unless we wise up, we’ll do it all again, and again. 

“But before we move on, before we head back to the mall,” Nichols wrote, “before we resume posting memes, and before we return to bickering with each other about whether we should have to mask up at Starbucks, let us remember that this day came about for one reason, and one reason only. Because it is what we wanted.”

Next time you’re tempted to thank a veteran for his or her service, ask yourself whether you’ve exercised your responsibilities as well as they have.

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Additional Reading:

Searching high and low on the World Wide Web to bring you a few good reads…

Blame the Army, Not Biden

Kevin Drum with a provocative take.

“For partisan reasons, Republicans will blame Biden. Even some Democrats and policy experts will do the same. But it just isn’t so. Nobody wants to say this out loud, but the real blame lies with the US military.”

Short and to the point. Read it all here.

The Civil Rights Leader Who Thinks America Is “In Many Ways Worse Off Than It Was Then”

Andrew Young with Martin Luther King, Jr.

Jonathan Alter talks to Andrew Young, a conversation from the Washington Monthly.

“People have every reason to be deeply concerned. This country is in many ways worse off than it was then. We don’t have a strategy for combating voter subversion. We have to depend on Congress or the Supreme Court and both are long shots now, though I haven’t given up on the Supreme Court.”

Andy Young on our present moment.

Bill Murray is Playing Golf in Ireland

I am a passionate follower of all things Irish – football, whiskey, politics. I love The Irish Times, which had this story this week about the actor Bill Murray swinging his way through the Olde Sod.

“The wires are alive with the news that Bill Murray is in Ireland to play golf. He will hack his way through courses such as Druids Glen, Rosapenna and Ballybunion for a YouTube series called The Links Life.”

Here is the link:

Nanci Griffith

The folk and country music singer/songwriter died recently at age 68 – too, too young – and what a charming, talented artist.

Nanci Griffith, 1953-2021

I’ve been playing her songs over and over this week. Including one of the classics.

“Love at the Five and Dime.”

Rita was sixteen years
Hazel eyes and chestnut hair
She made the Woolworth counter shine

And Eddie was a sweet romancer
And a darn good dancer
And they waltzed the aisles of the five and dime

Here’s a video of Nanci singing that fabulous song.

Be well, friends. Write when you get work…all the best.

Afghanistan, Foreign Policy, John Kennedy, Johnson, Obama, Vietnam

We Never Learn …

Posted on by mjohnson

Unless you served or protested, the ignominious end of America’s tragic experience in Vietnam, a war driven by myth, hubris, political calculation and ignorance, is at best a distant memory for most of us. It’s no memory at all for Americans born after 1975, even if our history books remind us that more than 58,000 of our fellow citizens paid the ultimate price for a mistake.

America’s role in Vietnam directly bedeviled and haunted five presidents, ultimately driving two – Johnson and Nixon – from office. Every president since, whether they admit it or not, lives with the Vietnam legacy.

Lyndon Johnson was a political product of a vast, injurious and phony debate over “who lost Red China” to Communism in the 1950’s. When Johnson reached the Oval Office in 1963, he was determined not to be judged as having “lost Vietnam.”

Johnson won a landslide election in 1964 against a candidate – Barry Goldwater – who spoke casually of using nuclear weapons to win a jungle war in Southeast Asia. After that election, Johnson began the long and tragic slog to make a Vietnamese war, that had once been a French war, into an American war.

Lyndon Johnson’s presidency – and legacy – were and are haunted by the American war in Vietnam

The complicated, crass, brilliant Texan oozed cornpone, but he lived and breathed what he called “that bitch of a war,” a years-long struggle that derailed his Great Society and has permanently defined his legacy.

The great economist John Kenneth Galbraith once remarked that a friend told him had it not been for Vietnam, Johnson would be considered a great president. Galbraith replied: “If it weren’t for the Alps, Switzerland would be a flat country.” That war sticks to LBJ like Texas barbecue sauce sticks to a napkin.

Most Americans would say that Nixon was forced from the White House by the crimes of Watergate, which, of course, is correct. But those Watergate crimes had roots in Nixon’s reaction to the Pentagon Papers, an exhaustive account of the American involvement in Vietnam that was leaked to the New York Times in 1971. The papers were a damning indictment of the mendacity, political maneuvering and American delusion that led Dwight Eisenhower, then John Kennedy and finally Johnson to burrow ever deeper into a futile “land war in Asia.”

Had Nixon been as smart a political operative as he thought himself to be he would have used the evidence contained in the leaked Pentagon Papers to discredit the two previous Democratic administrations. The papers were not critical of him, after all. He had inherited the mess. But Nixon was Nixon.

As a brilliant new podcast – “Nixon at War” explains, “Nixon’s long festering paranoia and indignation zeroe(d) in on two of his most despised ‘enemies’ – the press, for publishing the government’s closely held secrets, and the leakers within his own deep state, now personified by Daniel Ellsberg, for the growing threat he believes they pose to his own buried secrets.”

Nixon ordered his political spies to break into Ellsberg’s – the leaker – psychiatrist office in search of dirt. Viola! The seeds of the Watergate break in are planted, the fate of Nixon cast. Were it not for the break ins … well, you know.

Wise voices warning of American folly in Vietnam were everywhere to be found in the 1950’s and 1960’s. During the Eisenhower Administration, Montana Senator Mike Mansfield foresaw that only the Vietnamese could create a stable, democratic government, and they certainly couldn’t accomplish that if millions of Vietnamese thought the United States was merely a colonial substitute for the French, who retreated after their own dismal Vietnam failure.

Others like Idaho’s Frank Church, Oregon’s Mark Hatfield and South Dakota’s George McGovern saw clearly where American hubris was headed. The diplomat George Kennan testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1966 – back when the committee actually had serious hearings about American foreign policy – and declared that the United States was deluded if it thought it had legitimate national security interests in Vietnam. We should get out, Kennan said.

Vermont Republican Senator George Aiken, a flinty New Englander not given to mincing words, had a blunt suggestion: declare victory and leave. We didn’t, until it was too late.

Now, a generation and more on, we have a new reckoning with the curious American belief that our arms and money and good intentions can shape a country far away for a people who have very different ideas. Our longest war – another American war of hubris – is winding down in Afghanistan, and if history is not precisely repeating it is certainly rhyming.

Helicopters carrying U.S. Army soldiers from the 1-320 Field Artillery Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, take off from Combat Outpost Terra Nova as the soldiers head home following a 10-month deployment in the Arghandab Valley north of Kandahar April 23, 2011. REUTERS/Bob Strong

As the Washington Post reported this week on a new secret account of the Afghan War. Ironically the Post kept printing the Pentagon Papers when the Times was enjoined from doing so, further fueling Nixon’s paranoia. The document reeks of the same stench of fabrication and dishonesty that marks the American experience in Vietnam.

Among the revelations are details of a heretofore unknown suicide bomber attack, aimed at then vice-president Dick Cheney. The Pentagon and Bush Administration flat out lied about the attack, and “how close the insurgents had come to harming Cheney.” In the wake of this lying came more lying, and “the U.S. military sank deeper into a pattern of deceiving the public about many facets of the war, from discrete events to the big picture. What began as selective, self-serving disclosures after the 2001 invasion gradually hardened into willful distortions and, eventually, flat-out fabrications.”

The Afghan Papers will be published in book form soon. The Post said in a preview: “The interviews and documents, many of them previously unpublished, show how the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump hid the truth for two decades: They were slowly losing a war that Americans once overwhelmingly supported. Instead, political and military leaders chose to bury their mistakes and let the war drift, culminating in President Biden’s decision this year to withdraw from Afghanistan, with the Taliban more powerful than at any point since the 2001 invasion.”

To Joe Biden’s credit, he made the tough call to finally end a war that America should not have fought and could not win.

Now, there will be an awful reckoning on the ground in Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires. The murderous Taliban will control most of the country, thousands of lives, many of them American, and billions in American treasure will have been squandered. It was all inevitable.

We think we can bomb and purchase our way to democracy in a country that has never had democracy and may not be capable of creating it. We try again and again to re-create the world we want only to fail.

You might think we’d learn. But we never do.

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Additional Reading:

Some additional items you may find of interest…

How The Pandemic Now Ends

A must read from The Atlantic’s Ed Yong.

“In simple terms, many people who caught the original virus didn’t pass it to anyone, but most people who catch Delta create clusters of infection. That partly explains why cases have risen so explosively. It also means that the virus will almost certainly be a permanent part of our lives, even as vaccines blunt its ability to cause death and severe disease.”

Yong won great recognition for his reporting on the pandemic. This piece is well worth your time.

And here is related piece by Scott Galloway that I found very interesting.

How a Trail in Rural Oregon Became a Target for Far Right Extremists

Another great piece of reporting from Leah Sottile in High Country News about how a trail has divided an Oregon community.

“In a state where politics is dominated by the urban-rural divide, it’s as if the proposed Yamhill County trail is the actual place — the exact line — where that divide begins.”

Read the entire piece:

Press Secretary Jen Psaki is Good At Mending Fences. Just Don’t Call Her Nice

The best political job I ever had was the five years I spent as press secretary to candidate and then Idaho Governor Cecil D. Andrus. The job, at least with the right boss, puts one daily in the midst of big events. You deal with interesting people – reporters, too. (Inside joke.) You travel with the politician. You may even have a chance to influence policy.

I’ve made an informal study of people who have been or are press secretaries. I’m convinced that Jan Psaki, the current White House press secretary, is one of the very best to ever hold the position.

White House press secretary Jan Psaki

“When Psaki first appeared in the press briefing room, in January 2021, there was a collective swoon from roughly half the country. This was largely due to what she was not doing: berating the assembled reporters, griping about CNN’s coverage of a presidential tweet, or spouting flagrant, easily disprovable lies. Like her boss, Psaki was being graded on a curve. The New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb tweeted, ‘I really should not be impressed with a calm, professional, and factual press briefing, but I am where I am.'”

Here’s the link to the piece in Vogue:

Brett Kavanaugh Without Tears

Journalist Jackie Calmes has a new book that revisits the story of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. You might have thought you knew everything there was to know about him – of perhaps everything you wanted to know.

I found this excerpt both fascinating and infuriating.

“Kavanaugh emerged from Yale Law School, two appellate clerkships, an internship with the Solicitor General, and a third clerkship at the Supreme Court as a deeply conservative but not especially partisan young man. That changed after the Solicitor General Kavanaugh worked for, Ken Starr, was appointed independent counsel to investigate the Clintons and an Arkansas real estate investment called Whitewater. In 1994, Starr invited Kavanaugh to join him for what he promised would be a short gig. It lasted nearly four years.”

From The Washington Monthly:

Giants? World Series, Anyone?

I sure hope this doesn’t jinks my favorite baseball team, but...Dieter Kurtenbach writes in the San Jose Mercury News what I’ve been thinking, but can’t bring myself to say out loud.

Buster Posey, the catcher, is the heart of a pretty amazing team

I kind of checked out of following the great game last summer, but this San Francisco Giants team has been something else.

“Now, I wish I knew exactly what it was that makes the Giants a true contender,” Kurtenbach wrote this week. “Call it gumption, togetherness, a never-say-never-ness — there’s something special about this team.”

Let’s end with a good news story.

Thanks, as always, for following along. Stay well.

Afghanistan, Baseball, Churchill, Iraq, O'Connor, Politics, Veterans

Just the Beginning

Posted on by christian

332a64f4195b32b9555da335785b58d4It must have been about 1965 when my World War II veteran father had his gall bladder surgery.  As kid I wasn’t aware of many of the details, but I do remember that having the old man in the hospital for several days was a very big deal, particularly since we had to drive 100 miles or so round trip to visit him while he was recovering.

Gall bladder surgery in the 1960’s was a far different operation than it has become more recently and often resulted in several days in the hospital and then a good deal more rest at home.

We joked that Dad had the good sense not to show off his incision as Lyndon Johnson had done when he had the same surgery at about the same time. That classic LBJ moment still ranks as one of the most offbeat presidential photo ops.

Johnson, a Navy veteran of the war, had his surgery at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Washington. My Dad checked into the Veterans Administration hospital in Hot Springs, South Dakota. We had no health insurance. If we needed to see a doctor we paid cash or, as when Mom had some major surgery, we pulled the family belt a little tighter and went on the payment plan. My parents spent years paying off Mom’s surgery and hospital bills, but the VA was free. The country owed it to Staff Sergeant R.E. Johnson and his grateful nation took care of his gall bladder. It may have been one of the few things my old man had in common with Lyndon Johnson.

The VA has been much in the news lately and the commendable retired Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, who took the fall for the obvious shortcomings of the big, sprawling federal bureaucracy, will doubtless go down in history as the general fired for speaking truth to the Bush Administration about the cost and duration of a war of choice in Iraq and then ended up walking the plank due to the failures of his agency to properly take care of many of the veterans of that war. Numerous commentators have made the obvious observation that firing Shinseki will do about as much to right the wrongs of the VA as firing him before the Iraq war did to bring sanity to that misbegotten policy. His tombstone might well read “fall guy.”

Amid all the posturing by political people over the mess at the Phoenix VA hospital, and apparently other VA hospitals, should hover a palpable sense of “you should have known better.” It’s pretty clear that the more than $150 billion we spend annually on the Veterans Administration isn’t nearly enough money to do the right job for the men and women who served their country and now often need very expensive and long-term care.

Yet, when Congress had a chance earlier this year to provide more resources for an agency that is chronically short of resources, for example, primary care physicians who spend all day seeing patients the legislation died during a Senate filibuster. There was hardly a ripple of regret for letting our veterans down.“I don’t know how anyone who voted ‘no’ today can look a veteran in the eye and justify that vote,” said Daniel M. Dellinger, national commander of the American Legion. “Our veterans deserve more than what they got today.”

Next time you see a member of Congress ask them how they voted on that one. It’s a pretty good measure of who really is “supporting the troops.”

Now given a fresh “political scandal,” – and this was certainly true before Gen. Shinseki made his inevitable exit – everyone wants to get aboard the bash the VA bandwagon.

As the old story goes the most dangerous place in Washington, D.C. is the space between a soundbite spouting politician, in this case outraged by the VA’s mismanagement, and a waiting television camera. There has been a genuine stampede to present the VA’s problems as the most recent thing that comes near be “worse than Benghazi…”

But, as noted, this was all readily foreseen and, in fact, rather widely forecast as recently as when the Iraq fiasco was still unfolding. Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz actually produced a study that predicted the long-term cost of the Iraq adventure would be $3 trillion – yes, “T” as in trillion dollars. Stilglitz was derided as a liberal alarmist whose analysis was wildly off the mark, but in 2010 he actually went back and re-ran the numbers and concluded that his huge number likely underestimated the true cost of the ten year war, in part, because he underestimated the health care costs of veterans that will only keep increasing for 30, 40 or 50 more years.

“About 25 percent of post-9/11 veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder,” according one recent report, “and 7 percent have traumatic brain injury, according to Congressional Budget Office analyses of VA data. The average cost to treat them is about four to six times greater than those without these injuries, CBO reported. And polytrauma patients cost an additional 10 times more than that.”

I remember this much about my Dad’s long ago medical care from the Veterans Administration: he had a gall bladder attack and in short order he was in the hospital for surgery. Maybe a few days at most passed from the attack to the cure and this was a VA dealing at the time with vets, like my Dad, who served during World War II. My favorite veteran died when he was 62 having never again set foot in a VA facility.

The young men and women who fought for us in Iraq and Afghanistan will likely live longer  – much longer we can hope – than the World War II generation, even with the many and varied traumatic injuries our soldiers bring home from the battlefield. We’re just starting to feel the impact of that sober reality on the VA and the rest of American society. This truly is just the beginning. Properly resourcing the VA and de-politicizing the process of fixing its shortcomings should be every bit as much a national priority as sending young people to war and keeping them there year-after-year.

“If there is any cause that should be bipartisan, it’s care for our veterans,” writes E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post. “But too often, what passes for bipartisanship is the cheap and easy stuff. It tells you how political this process has been so far that so many of the Democrats who joined Republicans in asking for Shinseki to go are in tough election races this fall.”

This much I know: the VA was there when my Dad needed the medical help that he would have been hard pressed to access and pay for any other way. It was literally a life saver. Now, having pounded our military with endless deployments in the open ended wars that are now apparently a fixture of America in the 21st Century, the bill for those shattered and scared is coming due. Brace yourselves. The cost is going to be far greater than anyone engaged in the current debate lets on and we have no choice but to dig deep and pay it.

Maybe Congress should fume and fuss as much about how our military is used as they do when the health care system, created by Congress by the way, falls short of serving all of our veterans.

 

Afghanistan, John Kennedy, Johnson, Journalism, Uncategorized

First Draft

Posted on by christian

wicker_s160x162My closest personal connection to the events of this day 50 years ago were the few hours I spent more than 30 years ago with the reporter who literally wrote the first draft of history.

Tom Wicker was a southern liberal, born and educated in North Carolina and passionate about civil rights and civil liberties. He also early on developed the ability to write eloquent, piercing, streamlined prose and he just happened to be assigned to the Kennedy motorcade in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Wicker was 37 that day, a hardworking, but little known backbencher in the New York Times Washington bureau. It fell to him to write a story about an event that is still making news.

Wicker called the copy desk at the Times from a downtown Dallas pay phone – some of you may remember pay phones – and dictated his most famous story from notes scribbled on a copy of the official White House schedule for that fateful Friday. Every reporter wonders if they’ll be up to the task of describing a tragedy and a few find out. His voice breaking with emotion, Wicker dictated his lead:

Dallas, Nov. 22–President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot and killed by an assassin today.

Only twelve words in the first paragraph of Wicker’s story. In fact four of the first five graphs of Wicker’s story was but a sentence long. Here they are:

He died of a wound in the brain caused by a rifle bullet that was fired at him as he was riding through downtown Dallas in a motorcade.

Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was riding in the third car behind Mr. Kennedy’s, was sworn in as the 36th President of the United States 99 minutes after Mr. Kennedy’s death.

Mr. Johnson is 55 years old; Mr. Kennedy was 46.

Shortly after the assassination, Lee H. Oswald, who once defected to the Soviet Union and who has been active in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, was arrested by the Dallas police. Tonight he was accused of the killing.

In those five, sparse paragraphs you really have the complete essence of what we remember from Dallas half a century ago. No word is out of place or unnecessary. With so much drama and tragedy and with so little time it would have been easy to overwrite, but Wicker didn’t succumb. That first draft of history from Dallas is simply a first-class piece of reporting created under the most awful and demanding circumstances.

Tom Wicker went on to become one of the most respected and important journalists of the post-war period. He covered presidents, and held them to a high standard, from Kennedy to Carter, wrote 20 books, went inside the prison at Attica, New York during a riot that eventually claimed 39 lives, and made Nixon’s “enemies list.” He never had a bigger story than his story 50 years ago today.

Wicker came to Idaho in the late 1970’s as a guest of the Idaho Press Club. I was an officer in the organization all those years ago, had a drink with him, talked shop, had him sign a couple of books and was too shy – or maybe too naive – to ask him about the Dallas story. Only later did I realize what a masterpiece he crafted on that awful day. With all we know about that day, with all the pictures and books, the conspiracy theories and the what-might-have-beens, Tom Wicker’s first draft remains hauntingly moving and overflowing with sadness. It is a timeless piece of writerly craftsmanship.

Wicker brilliantly chose to end his Dallas story with four paragraphs devoted to the speech John Kennedy was to have delivered, but never did on November 22:

The speech Mr. Kennedy never delivered at the Merchandise Mart luncheon contained a passage commenting on a recent preoccupation of his, and a subject of much interest in this city, where right-wing conservatism is the rule rather than the exception.

Voices are being heard in the land, he said, “voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality, wholly unsuited to the sixties, doctrines which apparently assume that words will suffice without weapons, that vituperation is as good as victory and that peace is a sign of weakness.”

The speech went on: “At a time when the national debt is steadily being reduced in terms of its burden on our economy, they see that debt as the greatest threat to our security. At a time when we are steadily reducing the number of Federal employees serving every thousand citizens, they fear those supposed hordes of civil servants far more than the actual hordes of opposing armies.

“We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will ‘talk sense to the American people.’ But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense. And the notion that this nation is headed for defeat through deficit, or that strength is but a matter of slogans, is nothing but just plain nonsense.”

Afghanistan, Journalism

There is No Herald Tribune Today

Posted on by christian

ihtSome years ago we visited the land of big lakes in northern Italy. I had heard that George Clooney – the actor George Clooney recently seen hugging Katie Holmes in London – owned a smashing villa on the shores of Lake Como where he entertained his Hollywood friends. For some reason, even though we were in the area for several days, George neglected to invite us over for dinner. Or even cocktails. I would have gladly brought a bottle of the local wine.

So, no George on the trip to Varenna and Bellagio – the one on the big lake in Italy, not on The Strip in Nevada. I remember lovely Varenna most fondly, a little town perched rather precariously on a steep hillside above the frightfully beautiful lake. The lovely woman who ran one of the town’s small restaurants announced the menu of the day by saying simply, “we have meat and we have fish.” Perfect.

The first morning in Varenna I set off to find the European vacationing American connection to the New World – the International Herald Tribune. A small newsstand near our hotel turned out to be promising even as I entered with a certain trepidation, Italian not being my first language. The woman behind the counter waited patiently while I looked over the newspapers – La Monde, Corriere della Sera,  the Wall Street Journal and the jackpot the IHT.

I pointed in my best Italian at the Herald Tribune, smiled and put down what I was certain was enough money to pay for the paper. The clerk returned my smile, handled me the paper and, thankfully, a little change. I went away happy, as Ernest Hemingway and John dos Passos must have in their day, with the paper that would catch me up on the pennant races, give me a flavor of news from Washington and tell me of a gallery opening in Milan.

I’ve bought the IHT in Paris and London, Milan and Buenos Aires. I had one of the few truly enjoyable airplane rides of my life when I boarded a flight in Europe and the smiling flight attendant handed me that morning’s Herald Tribune. How very civilized. How very international.

The paper has been through its good times and bad since James Gordon Bennett started the paper in Paris in 1887. In the 1920’s it became the tip sheet for ex-patriots living in Europe and has always offered a take on the world as seen through the distinct lens of Americans living in Paris. Simon Tisdall, writing in The Guardian, remembers that the paper – then called the Herald – figured in Hemingway’s great novel The Sun Also Rises.  The “first thing the autobiographical hero, Jake Barnes, does on his return to France from Spain is buy the Herald,” Tisdall wrote, “and read it in a cafe with a glass of wine.” How civilized.

In their infinite wisdom the powers to be at the New York Times – they own what until today was the IHT – have re-christened the old girl The International New York Times. The Times brass says it is furthering  “the global brand” for the mother ship and I suspect there is marketing wisdom, if not great respect for tradition, in the new name. I’ll just need to get used to it, I guess, as I’ve gotten use to smaller and smaller print papers and shorter and shorter stories. This “old school” newspaper lover is trying to adapt to what the newspaper folks call their “digital platforms.” Give me ink on newsprint, thank you.

Maybe the best thing about the transition to the new name is that there has been respect for the features and style of the old IHT, including the columns that the great Art Buchwald wrote for many years. If you’re too young to know who Art Buchwald was then let’s just say I’m sorry for you. There is no one writing today quite like Buchwald. In April of 1956 he wrote his IHT column about covering the wedding of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier, he of Monaco not the Washington volcano. Think of that celebrity wedding as on par with Kate Middleton and that British bloke she married a while back.

After reporting that his seat at the ceremony, courtesy of the bride’s family due to his feud with the Prince’s family, offered the choice of sitting behind a post or behind ex-King Farouk, Art decided he could see more from behind the post.

Buchwald wrote: “At the palace reception, after the wedding, the bridegroom’s relatives and the bride’s relatives kept separated and eyed each other suspiciously. Most of us from the Kelly side, as we ate foie gras, lobster, chicken and wedding cake, decided our Grace was too good for their Rainier, and she was a girl in a million. We decided that America had given Europe many things in the past, but nothing comparable to this beautiful princess.”

Buchwald might have actually been at the Kelly-Rainier wedding since he knew everybody, but the beauty of his very funny pieces was it was often impossible to separate his fanciful imaginings from his eyewitness reporting. Most of the time the fanciful won out. Buchwald once wrote, as NPR reported, “you know, there are only three things worth seeing in the Louvre museum. That’s the Winged Victory, the Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa. And the rest of the stuff is all junk.”

Art Buchwald was a treasure and the IHT was treasured because of his wonderful prose. He was also right about “our Grace.” She was a girl in a million…but that is another piece.

On my second morning in Varenna, still wondering why the less-than-gracious Clooney hadn’t called, I wandered down to my newsstand and after a few grunts in English and gestures in Italian I bought my Herald Tribune. Perfect. On the third morning, I repeated the ritual looking over the offerings and trying to spot the Herald Tribune among all the papers whose names I couldn’t pronounce let alone read. Finally after some moments of unsuccessful searching the woman behind the counter, who had always responded immediately to my graceless pointing, quietly said in perfect English – “There is no Herald Tribune today. Sorry.”

I smiled my Ugly American smile. She spoke English all along and I can almost hear her saying the same words this morning – There is no Herald Tribune today. I hope the International New York Times can somehow carry on the tradition. I’ll miss the quirky and beautiful International Herald Tribune, just as I miss the quirky Art Buchwald and the beautiful Grace.

 

Afghanistan, Journalism

Newspapers to Dodos

Posted on by christian

Oregonian23June1942

On Tuesday morning June, 23 1942 the Portland Oregonian newspaper reported on the details of a Japanese naval attack on the United States mainland. The first such attack on the continental U.S.

Late in the evening of June 21 – roughly 24 hours before the Oregonian published details of the incident – the Japanese submarine I-25 surfaced in the midst of a group of fishing trawlers near the mouth of the Columbia River offshore of Astoria. The sub’s captain unlimbered his deck gun and reportedly lobbed a handful of shells – the paper reported 9, other accounts say 17 – toward the shore and a coastal battery at nearby Fort Stevens. The submariners weren’t aiming at anything in particular, just attempting to create a little chaos. One shell reportedly destroyed a strategic target – a backstop at a local baseball diamond. While no one was injured the shelling indicated that World War II had come calling to the Pacific Northwest. It was big news and the diligent Oregonian played the story big on Page One with an Astoria dateline.

Had the new distribution schedule for Portland’s venerable daily paper been in effect back in 1942 the newsprint version of that Japanese attack story wouldn’t have been on front steps in Portland until Wednesday morning – 48 hours after the fact. As part of a comprehensive move away from print and to digital, the Oregonian, published in Portland as a daily since the Civil War, will soon offer home delivery only on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. The paper will print every day – so it’s said – just not make home deliver available every day.

The paper also announced additional staff reductions on Friday, including apparently a sportswriter who was summoned home from covering the College World Series in Omaha where the Oregon State Beavers were competing. Reporter John Hunt tweeted “laid off and leaving Omaha.” Well, at least the baseball reporting Hunt knows what it’s like for a ballplayer to get an unconditional release.

The current owners of the Oregonian have adopted similar strategies for papers in New Orleans and Cleveland, so for anyone reading the ink blotches the further reductions in journalistic talent and the continual shrinking of news content shouldn’t have really been a huge surprise. I have no doubt that the economics of journalism have turned brutal and that new approaches are required. Newspaper circulation continues to decline – the Oregonian’s off about one-third in the last ten years – and ad revenue continues to hemorrhage. A newspaper lover is left to conclude that, like Detroit automakers of the past or health insurance company executives of the present, most of the folks running newspapers are decidedly ill-equipped to re-invent their products. Getting better almost never means getting smaller and harder to find.

Still, when a old, respected institution takes a turn for the worse it’s a sad day and, more importantly, cause for larger reflection on what it means to our culture.

When I first moved to Idaho in 1975 (I know, ancient history) you could buy the Oregonian in street boxes or at Hannifin’s Cigar Store downtown. I often bought the daily and Sunday editions to follow the paper’s generally solid coverage of regional issues and politics. Being able to by a neighboring state’s big city daily ceased a long time ago and the paper’s latest retrenchment means you soon won’t be able to get a copy at home every day. This is progress?

Oregonian’s announcement, complete with the kind of “this is good news, really” spin that most ink stained wretches disdain, is just the latest sad chapter in the slow, steady and apparently unstoppable demise of the great American newspaper. The march to the Internet with all its related impact on sense of community, real and serious journalism, politics and advertising (just to name a few) does appear inevitable, but just for a moment I’m going to bemoan the cost to a society that seems ever more fragmented with more and more of our citizens more than ever disconnected from one another.

New York Times columnist Charles Blow worries – I do, too – that “America is quickly dividing itself into two separate nations, regional enclaves of rigid politics, as the idea of common national priorities fades further into a distant past.” But how can we possibly have a common, shared idea of national priorities (or even citywide or regional priorities) when one of the great levelers of our society – carefully collected, written and edited information on our culture and politics, in other words serious journalism – is going the way of the dodo? In the new digital world who will cover City Hall and who will care about the school board? Who will help us determine our priorities or at least suggest that we should have some?

I’m not so nostalgic for the “good old days” of newspapers to believe that community or regional papers have ever been remotely close to perfect. They haven’t. Like all of us newspaper publishers, editors, columnists and reporters can be shortsighted, ill-informed, petty and even biased. I know because I was one and have known plenty of others. Franklin Roosevelt spent a good part of his presidency worrying about what arrogant publishers like William Randolph Hearst would write about him and well he should have. That’s called a democracy.

Still, as an old journalism prof once told us, in most American communities only a handful of people get up and go to work every day thinking about what information the citizens of their community need to know and have the skills and wherewithal to go collect and distribute that information. Some towns, fewer and fewer sadly, are lucky enough to have a publisher or owner who is willing to go out on a limb and set an agenda for change and progress in that town. Newspapers can, at their best, do more than entertain or inform. They can lead and force political and business interests to confront what is needed or needs to change. If not a perfect calling journalism is, and newspapers in particular are, can be a noble calling.

In a reality stinking of newsprint and irony the Mayor of Portland, Charlie Hales, has been a daily punching bag for the Oregonian recently over a series of controversies as City Hall that the paper has highlighted in considerable detail. Friday in the print issue of the paper Hales lamented the news of more layoffs and less visibility for the very institution that has been jabbing him. Then he contributed fifty bucks from his own pocket to the bar tab for Oregonian staffers drowning in the swamp of an industry that is attempting to recreate itself by generally becoming less-and-less vital to the community it seeks to serve.

I’m charging up the iPhone and downloading another less-than-adequate news website app. Such is the way of the world. But as another newspaper starts to slip from print and relevance to digital and something else, I may be the last guy clinging to newsprint. It’s true, as some analogize for newspapers, that we don’t need buggy whips or vacuum tubes any longer, but neither of those obsolete features of a bygone era helped to define community, touch a soul or cover a ballgame. Somethings old are still just better. Life will undoubtedly go on without the kind of journalism and sense of community that the Oregonian, the Plain Dealer, the Times-Picayune, the Seattle P-I, the Rocky Mountain News and a hundred other papers once provided, but will life in those communities be as good?

Put me down as highly skeptical as to whether such transitions are good for the future of the Republic. Ol’ Tom Jefferson both used and despised the press, but that indispensable founder also knew the essential role of the press was fundamental to the success of our noisy, often divisive democracy. “The press [is] the only tocsin of a nation. [When it] is completely silenced… all means of a general effort [are] taken away.”

Let’s hope that the continued migration of a once great industry to the uncertainty of the digital space, with almost certainly fewer reporters, fewer resources and a narrower focus, can make websites of papers like the Oregonian the “tocsin” of a 21st Century America. I’m not so sure. In fact, I’m pretty sure it isn’t going to happen.

 

Afghanistan, Churchill, Coolidge

Graveyard of Empires

Posted on by christian

“All along the north and northwest frontiers of India lie the Himalayas, the greatest disturbance of the earth’s surface that the convulsions of chaotic periods have produced.” That’s how Winston Churchill began his still highly readable 1897 book The Story of the Malakand Field Force.

Young Winston wrote from the British cavalry barracks in Bangalore where he was stationed as part of his deployment to the part of the world the Brits more than once tried to subdue. It worked, as Churchill’s book makes clear, about as well for them as it has for us.

 New Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has now limped home from his first surprise trip to Afghanistan reduced to admitting the obvious – “it’s complicated.” Hagel, a decorated Vietnam vet and, I suspect like many from his generation who served and fought he is a reluctant warrior. Hagel was dissed by the increasingly detestable Hamid Karzai who actually said during the secretary’s visit that Taliban acts of violence in Afghanistan proved a level of collusion with the United States. Karzai then cancelled a joint press conference with Hagel just to make his contempt for the fighting and dying done by American’s perfectly clear.

It should tell us something that Hagel – and all high level visiting Americans – need to make “surprise” visits to Afghanistan since the security situation is so tenuous. It’s clear some the attacks during the Hagel visit were meant to send a message. Is anyone listening?

Former New York Times columnist and Council on Foreign Relations chairman Leslie Gelb says, in a piece titled “To Hell With Karzai,” that it’s time for the Obama Administration “to stop letting these Karzai guys play us for suckers and speed up our exit, and stop wasting American lives and dollars.”

We’re finding – and, of course, this was completely predictable – that getting into Afghanistan was a whole lot easier than getting out. Like Vietnam and Iraq before, we have met the limits of our ability to project force to change politics and history on the ground, this time in the shadow of the Himalayas.

It was a fool’s errand to try in the first place, but makes even less sense to prolong the effort. We will eventually leave Afghanistan and the departure will signal a return of the tribal wars and turmoil that have been a fixture of the place for hundreds of years. It’s difficult, almost impossible, for a superpower to admits its limits, to admit that we cannot always be the positive, democratic role model we so desperately believe to be our destiny, but doing so – admitting the limits of western power in an ancient tribal culture – is the beginning of realism and maybe, just maybe, the beginning of a better approach.

“Except at times of sowing and of harvest, a continual state of feud and strife prevails throughout the land,” Churchill wrote of Afghanistan (and Pakistan) more than 115 years ago. “The people of some valley fight with those of the next. To the quarrels of communities are added the combats of individuals. Khan assails khan, each supported by his retainers. Every tribesman has a blood feud with his neighbor. Every man’s hand is against the other, and all against the stranger.”

And we are the strangers. As of this morning 2,050 Americans have died and more than 18,000 have been wounded in this place where strife prevailed before we arrived and will prevail after we are gone.

 
Afghanistan, Baseball, Journalism, Politics

Dishing it Out

Posted on by christian

An old journalist friend of mine is fond of saying that “the press can dish it out, but we don’t have to take it.” I thought of that great one liner as what might have been – should have been – a serious discussion of federal budget policy over the last week turned into a junior high school style story about Bob Woodward, the ultimate Washington insider, being “threatened” by a mild-mannered White House economic adviser.

By now, unless you don’t follow what passes for serious news these days, you know that Woodward, the more famous half of Woodward and Bernstein of Watergate fame, has been all over the tube expressing dismay at White House staffer Gene Sperling for suggesting that the famous reporter might “regret” pushing his version of a story on the origins of the dubious sequester idea.

As a one-time reporter who was “threatened” over the years by tougher guys than Gene Sperling, I offer a couple of observations on the Washington culture of political reporting, at least as practiced by Woodward.

First, it’s impossible to believe that Bob Woodward hasn’t been roughed up in private before by a White House official who took umbrage at something he was about to write or had written. This is the guy after all who helped unravel the Watergate affair during the Nixon Administration; a White House staffed by a bunch of guys who maintained an “enemies list” that included at least two serious and often critical reporters – Daniel Schorr and Mary McGrory – not to mention Paul Newman and the president of the National Education Association. If Woodward can be “threatened” by an email from a presidential economic adviser – an email where Sperling apologized for losing his temper in an earlier phone call –  he either has been living a charmed existence as the only reporter on the planet never cussed out by a source or he truly has a journalist glass jaw that can’t absorb even the lightest tap. I suspect his motives for making a big issue of this little matter are more complex.

Second, this entire tempest in a thimble casts truly unfavorable light on what many serious people have know for a long time to be Woodward’s dubious methods to gain and hold access to the powerful in Washington, D.C. and, of course, those who hope to be powerful. The dirty little secret of politics and journalism is that reporters and political people engage daily in a carefully choreographed kabuki dance that involves the constant trading of little favors – information, access, quiet confirmation, invitations, tips – that ultimately works to the benefit of those doing the reporting and those in constant need of exposure. Woodward has developed this dance into a lucrative publishing and speaking career that mostly involves repeating the completely predictable wisdom of those willing to provide him access for what he then usually reports as the exclusive inside story of big decisions.

Writing in The New Yorker John Cassidy nailed it when he said Woodward’s real beat has become the Washington establishment; the Georgetown, Wolf Trap, Charlie Palmer Steak, K-Street crowd that lives and breathes the kind of gossip the Washington Post Style section exists to deliver.

“The real rap on Woodward isn’t that he makes things up,” Cassidy writes (and Woodward has been accused of that). “It’s that he takes what powerful people tell him at face value; that his accounts are shaped by who cooperates with him and who doesn’t; and that they lack context, critical awareness, and, ultimately, historic meaning.”

Or as Joan Didion wrote in a critical assessment of Woodward’s work in 1996 his books involve “a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.” The reality Didion describes is at the core of much of the alternative reality, fact-free debate that permeates American politics today. Woodward’s books top the best seller list – therefore, the logic goes, they are important – but when the real history of the Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama Administrations is written the Woodward tomes, free of footnotes, devoid of real analysis and based mostly on comments from unnamed sources, won’t be cited for the simple reason they can’t be trusted. After all Woodward hasn’t really been writing a first draft of history, but a thinly sourced account of people in power who provide access that they hope will, in the short term at least, cast them in the best possible light. What Woodward does is really not journalism, but more like the first draft of self-serving conventional wisdom from the people in the Washington establishment who will talk with him.

No one can take away from Bob Woodward’s (and Carl Bernstein’s) legacy as the shoe leather reporters who uncovered one of the great scandals in American political history and brought down a president. But the young Bob Woodward, who did old fashioned, grind it out police reporting to illuminate Watergate, has become at age 70 as much a fixture of the Washington establishment as the Round Robin Bar in the Willard Hotel. His professional oxygen, just as with the people who cultivate his approving coverage, is publicity and acceptance. Without it he’s just another D.C. reporter in a wrinkled trench coat and not a real player, and to be somebody in D.C. you simply must be a player. Woodward has chosen to chronicle the conventional and the predictable and that will eventually be the way he is remembered – as the court reporter of the Washington establishment.

You could take Bob Woodward more seriously if he both dished it out and took it. Go back, if you can stand it, and read his account of George W. Bush’s decisions to go into Iraq and the subsequent make-up books critical of Bush. The latest Woodward non-scandal, after all those breathless books, is proof that he  doesn’t really either dish it out or take it very well. How Washington of him.

 

Afghanistan, Baucus, Churchill, Clinton, Foreign Policy, John Kennedy, Montana, Otter, U.S. Senate, World War II

War and Congress

Posted on by christian

Burton K. Wheeler was a Democrat who served as United States Senator from Montana from 1922-1946. His career, as he acknowledged in his memoir, was full of controversy. Among other things, Wheeler was indicted on corruption charges and fought with powerful interests ranging from the mining companies in his adopted state to Franklin Roosevelt, a man he had once enthusiastically endorsed for president.

The FBI followed him, particularly after he criticized Roosevelt’s foreign policy prior to American entry into World War II. His patriotism was assaulted. He was deemed a Nazi sympathizer by some. He helped stop Roosevelt’s Supreme Court power play in 1937 and championed important legislation impacting utility companies and Native Americans. If you are defined in politics by your enemies, Wheeler had many. His friends included Charles Lindbergh, William E. Borah, Joe Kennedy, Huey Long and Harry Truman. He was considered a serious presidential contender in 1940. FDR put an end to that with his third term.

Wheeler’s kind of senator really doesn’t exist anymore. Senators of his generation were, of course, from their respective states, but they represented more than local interests. Wheeler and Borah and Robert Wagner and Pat Harrison, who I wrote about recently, were national legislators and the Senate was their stage. Wheeler walked that stage most prominently in 1941 when Americans were profoundly divided over how far the nation should go to provide aid to Great Britain during some of the darkest days in the history of western civilization. Wheeler battled, as he called them, “the warmongers” who he thought were altogether too eager to get the country involved in another European war.

Wheeler lost this “great debate,” the U.S. did come to the aid of the battered Brits, Japan attacked in Hawaii and the Montana senator eventually lost his seat in the Senate. This is a story I’ve tried to tell in the most recent issue of Montana – the Magazine of Western History, the respected history journal published by the Montana Historical Society.

At first blush Wheeler’s fight for non-intervention in 1941 seems like ancient history. Americans fought the good and necessary war to stop fascism and the Greatest Generation is justly celebrated. But, like so much of our history, the fight over American foreign policy prior to Pearl Harbor has a relevance that echoes down to us more than 70 years later as the morning headlines tell of President Obama’s parley in the Oval Office with Hamid Karzai.

We are apparently at the end of the beginning of our longest war. Americans have been fighting and dying in the mountains and deserts and streets of Afghanistan for nearly a dozen years. As we prepare to leave that “graveyard of empires” (leave more or less) the question is begged – have we accomplished what we intended?  And when we are gone will we leave behind such a corrupt, incompetent government that the Taliban and assorted other bad guys will again quickly take charge?

Before 1941, when Montana’s Wheeler and others raised their objection to an interventionist foreign policy, the United States was comfortable with a modest role in the world. The county was stunned by the violence and by what seemed at the time to be the ultimate futility of the Great War. During the 1920’s and 1930’s Americans embraced their traditional attitude of remaining aloof from European disputes, gladly eschewed any ambition to supplant the British as the world’s policeman and the country happily retreated behind two deep oceans. After 1941, hardened by the trials of another world war and the threat of Communist expansionism, Americans embraced a national security state and we have never really looked back.

Today, as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders points out, the United States spends more on its military than the rest of the world’s nations combined and we’ve tripled defense spending since the mid-1990’s. Despite the sobering experience of Vietnam, we rather casually, at least by 1941 standards, deploy our troops around the world with certain belief that such power can impact all events. Americans have been camped in Europe since 1945 – 80,000 are still deployed – protecting our NATO allies who increasing reduce their own military outlays.

After a nine year war in Iraq, a dozen years in Afghanistan, with deployments and bases from Australia to Turkey, and given the need to confront a national fiscal crisis one might think that America’s aggressively interventionist foreign policy would be at the center of Washington’s debates, but no. Once the U.S. Senate had such debates; debates that engaged the American public and where Congress asserted its Constitutional responsibility to actually declare war. But even after September 11 the national foreign policy “debate’ has more often been about the need to expand and deploy American power, rather than how to make it more effective. The current shaky state of the nation’s budget would seem reason enough to really have a foreign and defense policy debate again, but even more importantly Americans and their leaders should, with cold and calculating focus, assess our role in the world.

George W. Bush once famously advocated a “humble” foreign policy and disowned “nation building.” Bush’s rhetoric, of course, hardly matched his policy and a dozen years later, with little debate and perhaps even less sober reflection, we wind down a war that likely will again offer new proof of the limits of American power.

Montana’s Wheeler lost his seat in the U.S. Senate in 1946 largely because he was deemed out of touch with the post-war world. His old-fashioned attitudes about expressing American power were out of fashion. But were they? At least he forced a debate; a debate similar to the one that we need again today.