FDR

American Presidents, Andrus, FDR, Obama

Rope a Dope

Posted on by christian

Ali, FDR and Barack

OK, I never thought I’d find a connection among the “greatest” heavyweight of all time, Franklin Roosevelt and the man now in the White House and officially certified as a resident of the United States, but bear with me.

Throughout his remarkable career Muhammad Ali struggled to be accepted for what he was – a consummate professional, a remarkably intelligent, one-of-a-kind man; an African-American with a gift for language who also challenged all kinds of conventional thinking.

Ali, a convert to the Muslim faith, was a man with a foreign name and remarkable championship skills; a man who made a principled stand against an awful war and paid dearly for it, a champion never accepted by many Americans as “legitimate.”  But, through it all, he could proudly claim to be “the greatest.”

It’s not bragging, they say, if you can do it and Ali could.

I watched the great champion in an old, black and white interview with Howard Cosell last night as he correctly analyzed himself as both loved and hated, misunderstood, undervalued, misrepresented and, well, just not one of us. He knows us better than we know him.

Elected to the presidency four times, father of Social Security, architect of victory in World War II, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was never considered legitimate by some of his persistent critics. The narrative of illegitimacy dogged him in each of his four elections to the presidency.

FDR was – take your pick – a “traitor to his class,” as historian H.W. Brands described him in his fine biography or more nefariously the architect of a vast Jewish conspiracy. As another Roosevelt historian has described the myth makers, they were convinced FDR was out “to betray the United States into the clutches of international conspirators who were plotting a world state under Jewish domination.” In other words, Franklin Roosevelt, the Dutch-American born of aristocratic parents of the Hudson River Valley was secretly a “Jew,” presiding over an administration dominated by an  “invisible Jewish leadership.” In other words – he was illegitimate.

And…the current president, a man besieged until yesterday by many who considered his very birth in the United States illegitimate. Obama, the editor of the Harvard Law Review (that is generally considered a pretty big deal), who a “carnival barker” reality television host can wonder how he ever got into the such an establishment Ivy League bastion.

To some Americans, Barack Obama can never be “legitimate,” just as the great boxer or the greatest president of the 20th Century can’t possibly be legitimate. Accomplishment is simply not enough.

Ali was a “draft dodger,” a “loud mouth” and not even a good boxer. Roosevelt was a Jew, a “cripple” and “mentally ill.” Obama must be a Muslim, and couldn’t have gotten into Harvard on his own. He’s just not a real American. He can’t be “one of us.”

Stay tuned. The production of the president’s birth certificate won’t silence some of the doubters. Even as Obama played rope a dope with the birthers, daffy Donald Trump still said he would need to check the veracity of the document. It just may be illegitimate. The Idaho Falls Post-Register quotes a guy in an eastern Idaho diner wondering if Obama released his paperwork “for political reasons or did he manufacture one?” After all, he had two years to produce the document and “I’m just asking,” the guy says.

As silly as political discourse has become in America, and with too much of the media lacking a filter to shut off the loud mouth de jour, there is something more troubling at play here. The something is deeply engrained in the political DNA of Americans.

For the haters of Roosevelt it wasn’t enough to oppose his policies, he had to be, at a time when anti-Semitism was hardly in the closet, exposed as a secret Jew. He must have been something sinister. He had to be unlike us, illegitimate. Google “was FDR a Jew” and you’ll find them. Like the poor, such folks will always be with us.

For Ali and Barack, it is the differences that count – the names, the color, the background. Accomplishment in the ring or on the Harvard Law Review or in the United States Senate or with the Nobel Peace Prize couldn’t possibly be legit. There must be some other explanation. These guys are different, foreign, not like the rest of us…illegitimate.

Remember all that talk a while back about a post-racial America. Not so fast apparently. I hope I live long enough to see it, but I’m certainly not counting on it.

 

FDR, Federal Budget, Giffords, Humanities, Immigration, Public Television

Symbolic Cuts

Posted on by christian

burnsMinimal Money, Real Impact

Noted documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has waded into the fray over eliminating federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and sharply reducing the measly dollars we spend on the national endowments for the humanities and the arts.

In a piece in the Washington Post, Burns – his Civil War documentary may be the best long-form television ever – asks us to remember that during the Great Depression somehow the country found the dollars to support artists, writers and photographers who produced some of the most enduring work of the 20th Century. Surely, he says, we can afford a fraction of a cent of our federal tax dollar for CPB and the endowments.

In the interest of full disclosure, loyal readers need to know I have a strong bias here. I cut my journalism teeth years ago with a daily half-hour broadcast on public television. I have volunteered for 15 years on various boards dedicated to the mission of the public humanities and the bringing of thoughtful programs on American and world culture, history, literature, religion and philosophy to Idahoans and Americans. I’m a true believer in these well established and minimally funded institutions and I also understand the federal budget.

The $420 million we spend on CPB, almost all of which goes to local public TV and radio stations and programs like those Ken Burns makes, and the $168 million we spend on each of the endowments is a total drop in the federal budget bucket. The Pentagon spends that much in an afternoon.

Case in point, Boeing just got an award from the Defense Department to build a new generation of aerial tankers – price tag $35 billion. Assuming Boeing builds a full fleet of 179 tankers, that averages out to about $195 million per plane. That buys a whole lot of what the endowments and CPB provide Americans.

I know, I know, we need new aerial tankers to replace those in service since Eisenhower was in the White House, but don’t we also need a place – for a tiny fraction of the cost – where Ken Burns’ documentaries reach a huge audience or where the humanities endowment supports a local museum or library?

Congress and the president continue the gandy dance around the real need to address the federal budget deficit. We have a crisis in three areas – defense spending, Medicare and Social Security. We need to address a combination of very difficult tradeoffs. Extend the retirement age, means test Medicare, reduce the size and scope of our military power on every continent and raise taxes. It’s easier to say than to cut, but there you have the real issues.

Anyone who tells you we can address the dismal federal deficit by cutting CPB and the National Endowments is practicing demagoguery on the scope of Huey Long, the subject, by the way, of a Ken Burns’ documentary.

Much of this debate, it must be noted, is about ideology rather than real budget savings. Some conservatives assail public broadcasting or the pointy headed humanities and arts community as the preserve of “liberals.” Nonsense. William F. Buckley found a home on PBS. Were the great man alive today, do you think he could find a place on Fox or CNN? Not a chance. Listen to a week of The NewsHour or Morning Edition and really consider the range of views, opinion and ideology you hear. Public TV and radio have become one of the few real clearinghouses of ideas about the American condition. Not liberal, not conservative, but truly fair and balanced.

America is a country of ideas. We have thrived for as long as we have because we value the big debate, the chance for lots of voices – from Ken Burns to the Red Green Show (on PBS) to the Trailing of the Sheep Festival and a summer teacher institute in Idaho (funded by the Idaho Humanities Council) – to be heard, considered, rejected and embraced.

We must get serious about the federal deficit. We must also recognize that a guy as talented as Ken Burns would never have a chance in the “marketplace media.” A long-form documentary on baseball, jazz, the National Parks or World War II simply won’t find a place in modern commercial broadcasting. So, eliminating that platform is really a decision to eliminate the ideas represented there.

If we lose what a Ken Burns represents, we lose a connection with our history and our culture that simply can’t be replaced. We will regret it, but not as much as our children.

Andrus, Britain, FDR, Reagan

The Gipper at 100

Posted on by christian

reaganMyths are Part of Politics

I only had the chance to see Ronald Reagan in the flesh a handful of times. I distinctly remember when he came to Idaho to campaign for then-Rep. Steve Symms in 1980. He had incredible stage presence, a great voice, mannerisms, an almost unprecedented ability to connect with the audience. The Great Communicator.

With his 100th birthday this past weekend, the Canonization of Reagan has – perhaps – reached its zenith. Reagan is the one Republican all Republicans can rally to. In his approach to the presidency, he has become – even for Barack Obama – a touchstone, an example of how to use the awesome public powers of the office to move the country, the Congress and the world.

It’s both good politics and good historical analysis on Obama’s part to look to The Gipper for inspiration. In a piece in USA Today, Obama said of Reagan: “At a time when our nation was going through an extremely difficult period, with economic hardship at home and very real threats beyond our borders, it was this positive outlook, this sense of pride, that the American people needed more than anything.”

There is a theory among presidential historians that it takes 25 years after a president leaves office to begin to come to grips with the man, the accomplishments and the shortcomings. If that is correct, we’re about to have the historical distance to look back on the Reagan Era and make some judgments.

As much of the Reagan at 100 reporting has pointed out, much about Reagan is – no nice way to put it – a myth.

In 1981 he did push through the greatest tax cut in history to that time, but he also raised taxes 11 times during his presidency. Historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited Reagan’s diaries, says: “There’s a false mythology out there about Reagan as this conservative president who came in and just cut taxes and trimmed federal spending in a dramatic way. It didn’t happen that way. It’s false.”

The Tea Partiers who genuflect at his memory conveniently ignore that the federal deficit ballooned on his watch and the federal government grew. Reagan advocated, passionately advocated, the Star Wars missile defense scheme, but also went to the summit with Gorbachev determined to try to eliminate all nuclear weapons. He pulled U.S. troops out of Lebanon after an attack on Marines there and he did trade arms for hostages. In short, the man’s record is more complex and ultimately more interesting than the Reagan myths.

Myth making in politics is a bipartisan game. Democrats have long clung to their Roosevelt myth, of example. FDR’s sunny disposition, great communicator talents and fundamental faith in the American system are the self same attributes most find so endearing about Ronald Reagan. Yet, Roosevelt’s sunny personality hid a tough, even mean, streak that played out in his efforts to “purge” the Democratic Party of conservatives in 1938. His reverence for the American system didn’t prevent him from trying to “pack” the Supreme Court in 1937. If George W. Bush played fast and loose with the truth in the run-up to the Iraq War, FDR did the same in the run-up to World War II.

Had Roosevelt’s presidency ended after the 1940 election, with the country deprived of his splendid leadership during the war, we might only remember him today as the man whose policies made too little dent in the side of the Great Depression and who blew up his second term trying to “reform” the Supreme Court. Timing counts for a lot in politics.

Like FDR, Reagan created and maintained an uncanny ability to shape the symbols and power of the presidency into an American narrative. They both stood for the America of boundless opportunity; the shining city on a hill. They spoke to the aspirations of Americans, never fully achieved, but important nonetheless. They were, in a word, inspirational leaders.

It didn’t hurt either man’s reputation that their presidencies fell between the tenure of other presidents who never seemed to measure up to the job. Both Reagan and Roosevelt share one other trait, I think, that makes them – myths and all – endure. Both were unlikely leaders, neither really born to the success they achieved. Their success was not inevitable.

True enough Roosevelt came from great wealth and enjoyed the benefits of a powerful name, but unlike his distant cousin, who also became a great president, Franklin was, in the famous words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, equipped only with “a second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament.” FDR’s struggle to overcome polio is a measure of the man’s determination and temperament.

Reagan rose from Hollywood, B-movie actor to GE pitchman, to Governor of California. As Peggy Noonan, who wrote some of his best lines – lines he practiced and delivered so well – wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “He ran for president four times and lost twice. His 1968 run was a flop—it was too early, as he later admitted, and when it’s too early, it never ends well. In 1976 he took on an incumbent Republican president of his own party, and lost primaries in New Hampshire, Florida, Illinois (where he’d been born), Massachusetts and Vermont. It was hand-to-hand combat all the way to the convention, where he lost to Gerald Ford. People said he was finished. He roared back in 1980 only to lose Iowa and scramble back in New Hampshire while reorganizing his campaign and firing his top staff. He won the nomination and faced another incumbent president.”

Reagan, like FDR, had a great sense of humor; something that will get you a long way in life and in politics. Roosevelt could joke about “my little dog Fala” and tweak his political opponents in the process. Noonan recounts a classic Reagan joke, “a man says sympathetically to his friend, ‘I’m so sorry your wife ran away with the gardener.’ The guy answers, ‘It’s OK, I was going to fire him anyway.'”

There is at least one, big, practical political lesson in the lives of the two men – Reagan and Roosevelt – who more than any others have shaped American politics for the last 75 years. Optimism, charm, humor, the ability to communicate from the head and the heart, and the gravitas of that hard to define quality “leadership” are all attributes we value in friends and family. Big surprise: we reward those same qualities in our politicians.

Much of what we think we know about great figures in our history just isn’t so, but still the myths survive, even as the complex truth is much more interesting and ultimately more important.

Andrus, FDR, Foreign Policy, John Kennedy

On This Day

Posted on by christian

FDRFDR’s Arsenal of Democracy Speech

Seventy years ago this evening – December 29, 1940 – Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered one of the most important speeches of his presidency and helped set in motion a vast expansion of presidential power in the realm of foreign affairs.

Fresh from re-election a month earlier to an unprecedented third term, Roosevelt used one of his tremendously effective “fireside chats” via radio to proclaim America “an arsenal of democracy” determined to aid a beleaguered Great Britain that seemed to be on its last legs against Hitler’s powerful army and air force.

Speaking from the Diplomatic Reception Room in the White House, Roosevelt said this would not be “a fireside chat on war,” but rather “a talk on national security.” He proceeded to lay out what he saw as the threats to the United States if the British, blockaded and bombed, were forced to capitulate to the Germans. While the speech was widely praised and well accepted, not everyone, to say the least, agreed. [You can hear the full speech, including the fascinating CBS announcer’s introduction here.]

The non-interventionist bloc in Congress remained very strong in 1940 and 1941. Roosevelt was concerned enough about the anti-war sentiment in the country that he made comments near the end of his 1940 campaign against Republican Wendell Willkie that he would have to eat. He famously said “our boys are not going to be sent into a foreign war.”

Montana’s progressive Democratic Sen. Burton K. Wheeler condemned Roosevelt and his advisers as “warmongers” and Wheeler urged the president to utilize his position and leverage to seek a negotiated end to the fighting in Europe. (Idaho’s William E. Borah, a Republican, who had died in January 1940, surely would have agreed with Wheeler and other leading non-interventionist like Ohio’s Robert Taft and California’s Hiram Johnson, both Republicans.)

Roosevelt followed up his “arsenal of democracy” speech with legislation – forever known as Lend-Lease – that gave the president, in Wheeler’s view and it was a credible view, vast new powers – even dictatorial powers – to aid those countries, debt free, that the president deemed vital to America’s national security. By the end of the war in 1945, Lend-Lease had supplied $50 billion (more than $750 billion in today’s dollars) in material to Britain, the Soviet Union, France and China.

There is little debate that the aid was essential to the war effort. No less an authority than Josef Stalin confirmed that when he told FDR that American equipment had allowed the Allies to win the war. There is also little debate around the fact that Lend-Lease, and Roosevelt’s administration of the program, finally and forever shed the American foreign policy cloak of non-intervention or isolationism. With Lend-Lease, the country was committed to full and unrelenting international engagement and the country has seldom looked back since the act was signed into law in March 1941.

Fundamentally, what Montana’s Wheeler and Idaho’s Borah, among others, were objecting to was the inherent expansion of presidential power in the realm of foreign policy. Wheeler repeatedly warned of the rise of “an American dictator” who would run over the top of the Congress in the establishment of foreign policy.

History has recorded that FDR, while not always candid or even completely honest about his intentions, used his vast foreign policy power with restraint and with a deep commitment to democracy. But those who opposed Roosevelt, even if now mostly forgotten, have also been validated by history. The steady expansion of presidential power in the area of foreign policy that, in many ways, began on a December evening 70 years ago continues to this very day.

The United States has spawned no dictator as Sen. Wheeler feared, but we do have a commander in chief whose power to involve the country militarily in every corner of the globe is routinely unchecked and often not even really debated by the Congress. Franklin Roosevelt’s legacy is well recognized for its sweeping impact on domestic policy, but the 32nd president’s legacy in foreign policy is just has profound and it began with a speech on this day seven decades ago.

American Presidents, Andrus, Basketball, Christie, Economy, FDR, Federal Budget, Immigration, Obama, Stimulus

Is 2010 Really 1938?

Posted on by christian

Getting an Economic Consensus

There are no perfect historical parallels. Nothing is ever precisely like it was in another time. At best, history can help illuminate the present and should, if we’re paying attention, help us avoid making the same mistakes over and over again. Take 1938, for example.

But, alas we are Americans. We can’t get agreement on how to crown a national college football champion, how can we possibly get consensus on what to do with the economy?

President Obama went to Cleveland this week to roll out a plan for more stimulus spending on infrastructure and small buisness tax cuts as a way to get people back to work. He was greeted by reactions ranging from ridicule to yawning. Meanwhile, House Speaker-in-Waiting John Boehner, developing economic policy while he measures the drapes, started dropping hints about what a Republican Congress would do with spending (cut it, including unspent stimulus dollars), the economy (grow it) and taxes (leave the Bush cuts in place). All the while leaving room for a few well placed subpoenas.

These two versions of economic policy couldn’t be more at odds. It does sound a good deal like 1937 and 1938.

As Franklin Roosevelt’s Democrats faced the mid-terms in his sixth year in office, the Great Depression was in its eighth year. Wall Street was restive. Labor unions were sitting down on the job. Democrats were frantic and the president’s counselors were divided. Should FDR double down on spending and fiscal policy aimed at reducing unemployment or should the administration send a message to the markets and business that it was determined to get a ballooning budget under control?

Confronted with what historian David Kennedy has described as, “repeated budget deficits, escalating regulatory burdens, threats of higher taxes, mounting labor costs, and, most important, persistent anxiety about what further provocations to business the New Deal had in store,” business confidence was sapped. “Capital,” Kennedy said, “was hibernating.” Sounds familiar, eh?

At a pivotal Cabinet meeting late in 1937, FDR fumed about his advisers constantly telling him about the sorry state of the economy, but “nobody suggests what I should do.” His economic and political advisers eventually won the debate. The president’s Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, a balanced budget advocate, put it succinctly.

“What business wants to know is: Are we headed toward state Socialism or are we going to continue on a capitalistic basis?”

FDR’s chief political lieutenant, Jim Farley, chimed in. “That’s what they want to know,” that the administration would reduce spending and balance the budget to reassure business and the markets.

“All right, Jim; I will turn on the old record,” Roosevelt responded. A new fiscal policy aimed at reducing spending and balancing the budget was ordered.

The New York Times’ Paul Krugman argues that FDR’s decision brought on the “Roosevelt Recession” of 1938, caused unemployment to top out at 20% and contributed to stunning Democratic losses – six Senate seats and 71 seats in the House – in the 1938 mid-terms. What’s more, Krugman asserts – and he’s critical of Obama from the left for being too timid with his stimulus efforts – the public in the late 1930’s took exactly the wrong lesson from FDR’s shift in policy. Americans became convinced that stimulus spending and job creation efforts hadn’t worked and wouldn’t work. That debate, check the morning paper, still rages.

I keep thinking there must be some middle ground somewhere in the current debate, but I’ve been wrong before. Couldn’t we get something approaching national consensus around two or three major issues?

One, Wall Street and investment banking excesses must be brought under control. Does anyone really think that what happened in the run up to the financial collapse shouldn’t be avoided in the future if at all possible? Regulating greed and excess is not a partisan issue.

Two, spending on well-conceived public works (OK, infrastructure) is both a good long-term investment and good short-term job stabilizer and, one hopes, job creator. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office said recently that the stimulus has – big surprise – increased the deficit and reduced unemployment.

And, three, the deficit needs to come down, but maybe in a planned, systematic way. Maybe the timing on the expiration of those Bush-era tax cuts is really not very conducive to getting capital out of hibernation. Perhaps a compromise is in order?

Someone, the president or John Boehner or the ghost of Henry Morgenthau needs to find a way to knit all the pieces together into a 2010 whole cloth of economic growth, job creation and fiscal sanity. Not holding your breath? I understand.

There is a poem entitled “Nineteen-Thirty-Eight” by Andrea Hollander Budy. It’s about a young woman who lies about not graduating from high school in 1938:

yanked out
when her father lost his job.

Now it was her turn
to make herself useful, he told her.

Nineteen-Thirty-Eight was not a particularly good year and not one to repeat. That much history tells us very clearly.

Andrus, FDR

Things of the Past

Posted on by christian

FDRThe Internet Isn’t the Same

In 1943, Franklin Roosevelt made the long, dangerous journey to Tehran for a wartime conference with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. En route he stopped over in Cairo to huddle with the British Prime Minister and Chiang Kai-shek. The president also did a little sightseeing as he noted in a letter to his long-time assistant Grace Tully.

FDR wrote that he had made friends with the Sphinx and, like every president before or since, concluded that “Congress should know her.”

The lighthearted, intimate letter to Tully is among a new treasure of letters to, from, and about a president that is the subject of a massive collection of books, but about whom we seem to only want to know more. The National Archives gained possession of the 5,000 rarely or never before seen letters, notes and scraps and they most surely will add to the already rich trove of material about the president recently voted the nation’s greatest by a group of more than 200 scholars of the presidency.

“You actually see F.D.R.’s thought process,” Robert W. Clark, supervisory archivist of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, N.Y., told the New York Times.

“(FDR) never wrote memoirs, he wasn’t a reflective kind of guy. This shows him instinctively making decisions that he knew would be for the betterment of the country and the world,” Clark said.

Roosevelt conceived of the modern presidential library and the building and grounds at his home along the Hudson north of New York City is a national treasure. FDR, even without his own diary or memoirs, knew the value of keeping and using an archive. His notion was that all of his principal aides would house their papers at Hyde Park and many did. The collection of materials squirreled away by FDR’s devoted assistant Grace Tully will add to the richness of what has long existed.

The materials include a letter from Benito Mussolini, pre-war musings from Joseph P. Kennedy about the war in Europe and the documents that coordinated the logistics for Roosevelt’s meeting on the day he died with his one-time mistress.

You wonder what the Internet age is doing to this kind of material. Actually, I don’t wonder, I know. The nature of the nation’s historical record has already changed dramatically. Politicians don’t write letters any more. Practically speaking you can’t get a piece of mail into the White House or a Congressional office. All business is done on the phone or my email.

Still, one hopes that George W. Bush’s or Barack Obama’s version of Grace Tully – every politician worth a darn has a Grace Tully – is slipping a few choice notes and letters into a “confidential file” that one day scholars and the rest of us will get to see.

As the FDR archivist says, such things show us how leaders reason, worry and joke. The dry, factual record is only part of the story. History – and our country’s story – lives in the small, intimate details.

FDR, Public Television

More Assaults on Public TV

Posted on by christian

big birdVirginia Governor’s Plan Sounds Familiar

I wrote yesterday about Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s hasty retreat from a controversial Confederate History Month proclamation. Some how the Guv left out any reference to slavery in his proclamation, an oversight he quickly corrected.

McDonnell is not pulling back, however, from another of his controversial proposals – a plan to eliminate state support for the Virginia public television and radio system. Much as Idaho Gov. Butch Otter proposed a four-year phase out of state support for public television earlier this year, McDonnell is asking the Virginia legislature to cut $2.2 million in state support over a four-year period.

The Washington Post quotes the governor’s spokesperson today: “Due to a historic $4.2 billion budget shortfall, and because of the growing educational programming options on cable and through the internet, the Governor had to set priorities and make some tough decisions.” Sounds familiar.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch says the McDonnell is “gunning for Big Bird” and notes that eliminating the modest amount the state devotes to public broadcasting has long been a priority of legislators in the GOP-controlled House of Delegates. McDonnell’s proposal may not fare as well in the Democratic Virginia Senate.

As we know, in Idaho, the heavily GOP legislature refused to embrace Otter’s budget recommendations to eliminate support for public television (and several other small agencies) and the governor quietly signed an appropriation a few days ago that gave the Idaho system the same type of percentage reduction in funding that most other state programs received. Otter also signed, in a public ceremony, legislation to provide a temporary tax credit for donations to public television and several other programs.

Also as in Idaho, the editorial and public response in Virginia has been in favor of allowing public broadcasting to take its share of cuts in a tough economic environment, but not use the downturn as an excuse to eliminate a vital service.

As the Virginia Pilot noted in an editorial: “A tough budget year shouldn’t be used as an excuse to take a gratuitous swipe at local stations that are struggling to continue providing superior educational programming and insightful coverage of local and state issues during the recession.”

In Idaho a massive show of public support for public TV sidetracked the governor’s budget notions. We’ll soon see if Virginians appreciate Big Bird as much as folks in these parts obviously do.

FDR, Public Television

Six Degrees of Separation

Posted on by christian

BerezkhovThe Day I Met Stalin’s Interpreter

My old friend and former business partner Chris Carlson has a belief about meeting a total stranger. Chris contends that if you talk long enough and ask enough questions about the stranger’s friends, family, job and geography you’ll discover some person you both know. I’ve seen him do it and I’m a believer. It is a small world.

It has been said that we are all connected to everyone else by no more than “six degrees of separation” and often it’s really only one or two degrees of separation.

This then is the story of my, dare I say it, one degree of separation with Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler and most of the other leading figures of World War II.

As I mentioned in a recent post, I have been enjoying a fine new book about the historic and controversial Big Three conference of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin at Yalta in 1945. The man who served as an interpreter for Stalin and Russian Foreign Minister Viacheslav Molotov – the Molotov Cocktail was named after him – was quoted in the book. I met and interviewed the interpreter for Stalin and Molotov in Moscow in 1984. As I look back on that encounter, it feels like my own first hand brush with the history and personalities that shaped the 20th Century.

Valentin Berezhkov – that’s his photo at the top of this post – had quite a life and I’m confident my interview wasn’t on his Top Ten list of big events. In addition to providing translation services for Stalin at the wartime conferences with Roosevelt and Churchill, Berezhkov was present when Molotov and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop – that’s the Ribbentrop who was executed after the Nuremberg war crimes trials – signed the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression pact in Berlin in 1941. That infamous deal divided Poland between the Russians and the Germans and cleared the way for Hitler to invade Poland and begin World War II. Later, when Hitler invaded Russia, Berezkhov burned papers at the Russian embassy in Berlin before the SS broke in and kept him captive until he could be exchanged for German diplomats who had been trapped in Moscow when war broke out.

Later in his life, Berezhkov was a writer and diplomat. He served in Washington and was often a spokesman for the Kremlin on a whole range of political, diplomatic and historical issues. He left Russia in 1991 and re-settled in California where he taught at Occidental College. Berezhkov died in 1998.

In 1984, I had the remarkable opportunity to make a reporting trip to the Soviet Union. My Idaho Public Television colleague at the time, Peter Morrill, now the general manager of Idaho PTV, and I accompanied a group of Idahoans on a “people to people” exchange. We spent more than two weeks in Moscow, Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Minsk and Vilnius in Lithuania. The film Peter shot and the interviews we conducted were shaped into two documentaries. During the course of that remarkable trip – quite the adventure for an aspiring young reporter from Idaho – we spent an hour in the Russian capitol with Valentin Berezhkov. I still have his business card.

I confess to not understanding much about Berezhkov’s importance or personal story at the time of that interview. We had asked to speak with someone who could talk about the Russian experience during “The Great Patriotic War.” Our Soviet-era handlers offered him up and he spoke with authority and vividly about the horrible suffering of Russian civilians during the war. He treated us with genuine respect and kindness and seemed to take the rookies from Idaho seriously. I remember wondering just how much of what he told us was pure Soviet propaganda, carefully scripted for the rubes from the West.

When I read the new book on Yalta, and saw the reference to his role in the history of World War II, it all came together. This guy was an eyewitness to some of the greatest history of the 20th Century. He participated in some of the pivotal events that shaped the modern world. I wish now that I had been smart enough to ask him more and better questions.

In Berezhkov’s memoir, published in 1994, he recalled shaking hands with Hitler at the Fuehrer’s office in Berlin in 1940. ”His palm was cold and damp,” he wrote in the book, ”giving me an unpleasant sensation, as if I were touching a reptile.”

As the Independent noted in his obituary, during his translating career, Berezhkov, “to his continuing wonderment, met the entire Soviet leadership – and other world leaders as well, including Adolf Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee.”

In his memoir – At Stalin’s Side – Berezhkov writes with critical insight about how his own life spanned the century from the Bolshevik Revolution to “the disappearance of the great empire in which I lived all my life.” He acknowledges the great tragedies and the awesome failures of communism, but also remembers the sense of hope that existed before what he calls the ultimately “doomed” experiment of communism came crashing down. Late in his remarkable life, he wished for a democratic future for Russia and that his own grandson will enjoy a better life.

I am glad I met and talked, even for a few minutes, to an eyewitness to the history that fascinates me; the history that I can only read about. I’m also glad to know that Hitler handshake was unpleasant. After all, I shook the hand that shook that hand. Small world, indeed.

American Presidents, Andrus, Baseball, FDR, Obama, Politics

A Passion For Anonymity

Posted on by christian

FDRWhen the Staff Becomes the Story

What we now think of as the modern White House staff dates back to the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Before FDR – Woodrow Wilson, for example – presidents had a White House staff that basically included a secretary to handle correspondence and scheduling and maybe a typist or stenographer. Roosevelt changed all that just as he changed almost everything about the modern presidency and the operation of the White House.

When fear was expressed that FDR was engaging in executive empire building by expanding the White House bureaucracy, he famously responded that his assistants would be characterized by a “passion for anonymity.” What happened to that idea?

I’d be the first to concede that the demands of the 21st Century White House, at least in some respects, pale in comparison to those of FDR’s day. FDR didn’t have to deal with the 24 hour news cycle and most everything moved more slowly. Still, Roosevelt battled a depression and won a war with a handful of personal staffers who for the most part didn’t become household names or the subject of long profiles in the New York Times. There wasn’t a Rahm Emanuel or Karl Rove in the group.

I got to thinking about this while reading what was, at least for political junkies, the admittedly fascinating piece on Emanuel in last week’s Times Magazine. If the piece was intended to restore a certain calm to the No Drama Obama operation and tamp down the storyline that the president’s Chief of Staff is – take your pick – tired, discouraged, out of sorts or sync with his boss, too visible, too overbearing, a lightening rod, etc., it doesn’t seem to have worked.

Emanuel has been the subject of a Letterman Top 10 List, countless stories and even a sole-subject blog Rahmblr. The Rahmblr will be profiled, along with his brother, on “60 Minutes” on Sunday. Can you say overexposed?

I’m admittedly from the old school. FDR had it right. In my old school view, political aides, generally speaking, best serve the boss when they aren’t always part of the story. While there is something to be said for a political aide taking the arrows for the boss when the going gets tough, there is not much to be said for political staffers becoming the story.

After a campaign in 2008 where turmoil among Hillary Clinton’s staff and John McCain’s advisers seemed to define the out-of-control nature of both their campaigns, I had a naive notion that an Obama White House might not succumb to the usual inside the beltway fixation on who is doing what to whom among the president’s closest advisers. Naive indeed.

Political operations are unique beasts organizationally and culturally. There is nothing quite like them. Nonetheless, in at least one way, a political operation, be it the white hot White House or some backwater congressional office, are like corporate boardrooms or big league baseball locker rooms. When the antics of the CEO’s underlings or the third baseman’s relationship with the shortstop start to get more attention than the substance of the business or the score of the game, then the boss or the manager usually has a big problem.

Considering the qualities and intelligence of the people involved, it is amazing to me that Clinton and McCain didn’t immediately put a stop to the dysfunction in their staffs during the last campaign. Their failure to do so speaks volumes about their own management and leadership abilities. Stay tuned to see if Obama tolerates more of what seems to be the building drama in his organization.

I think I know what FDR might have done. He had a few trusted advisers – Louis Howe, Steve Early and Harry Hopkins, for instance – but he never let any one adviser totally dominate the administration or his thinking. He kept his own counsel, often not sharing his thinking while keeping his own staff guessing and agile, and he made sure that he, and he alone, made the big decisions.

A little more anonymity, and frankly modesty, from people who haven’t been elected to anything would be a good thing.

My old boss, Cece Andrus, the only fellow elected governor of Idaho four times and someone, as even his detractors admit, who knew how to work the levers and make decisions, used to remind his Statehouse staffers – me included – that “there are lots of names on doors around here, but only one name on the ballot.” In other words, I’m the boss and you work for me. Keep your head and your profile down and tend to business.

Words to govern by.

Egan, FDR, Idaho Politics, Public Television

Killing Off Big Bird…

Posted on by christian

big birdIt Has Been Tried Before

Idaho Governor Butch Otter proposed in his State of the State speech this week a four year phase out of state support for Idaho Public Television. Otter’s proposal would eventually eliminate the $1.7 million the system now receives and uses primarily to support its services statewide.

Combined with other holdbacks, the reduction will be more like 33% in the first year.

Otter’s idea has received extensive media attention and, in an irony too rich not to mention, the governor’s speech containing the proposal was carried statewide only on, you got it, Idaho Public Television. Here’s guessing the public pushback is just beginning.

In an editorial, the Times-News made a practical political point that legislators may really want to ponder: “There are few more respected institutions in Idaho than IPTV. It’s beloved by every Idaho parent with a 4-year-old – even if those 4-year-olds have long since grown up.”

The governor and his advisers have said that public TV should hustle up private and corporate support to keep going, but that seems very unlikely given two hard facts.

One, the folks who run Idaho Public Television have mastered the art of looking under ever rock in Idaho for support. They run a lean, mean operation that makes the absolutely most of the checks they collect from Idahoans. In fact, compared to peer operations – states with state licensed systems – Idaho already out performs in the private fundraising arena.

Two, the worst hard times in anyone’s memory hardly seem like a realistic time to tell a state operation that has been around for 40 years to rattle the tin cup more loudly. Every non-profit I know, even the most popular – and public TV is popular – is hurting in this economic environment.

[Full disclosure: I worked for Idaho public television for about eight years back in the 1970’s and 1980’s, I recently joined the Friends of Public TV Board and I have many long-time friends in the operation. I am not an unbiased observer.]

I do know, from having the weird experience of reporting on the decision, that public television funding was eliminated back in 1981. That, too, was a time of severe budget constraint and legislators were looking under rocks. Part of the discussion then, as now, was also ideological. Some lawmakers, including then-Senator Dave Little of Emmett, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee and father of the current Lt. Governor, simply didn’t think the state belonged in the “government TV” business.

Legislators came to rethink – and some, perhaps to regret – the “unfunding” and state support was partially restored a year later. Also in 1982, the legislature mandated a statewide merger of services that created the streamlined, efficient system that exists today.

Personal opinion: I don’t believe Idaho Public TV can survive in anything like its current form, covering virtually every corner of the state, with the kind of Idaho-specific programming and reach without state support. It simply won’t happen.

This discussion is really about whether statewide public television service and programming will continue – period. Removing state funding will also serve to squander the substantial investment Idaho taxpayers have already made in a more-or-less state of the art delivery system. As a very practical matter, translators will sit unused on many mountain tops.

The state is big enough – no statewide newspaper, two time zones, diverse political and social culture – that public TV here, in more than any state I know, pulls the population together. It’s been a bargain for 40 years and will be a bargain this year and next and beyond, even at twice the price.