June 23, 2006
Mr. Sulzberger, Meet Colonel McCormick Posted by John Steele Gordon at 02:45 PM EST The New York Times has done it again, leading this morning’s edition with the revelation of a highly classified government program, this one involving banking records, despite a request from the Bush Administration that, for national security reasons, it not do so. The program has already led to the capture of several high-level Al Qaeda operatives. Its future effectiveness is now in doubt.
The Times’s own story reports that the program is perfectly legal and that the appropriate members of Congress have been briefed on it. So why did the Times endanger the national security of the United States and injure the war effort? Simple: It had newspapers to sell and the country be damned.
The executive editor of the Times, Bill Keller, explained, “We have listened closely to the administration’s arguments for withholding this information, and given them the most serious and respectful consideration. We remain convinced that the administration’s extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest.”
Is “public interest” the only thing to consider? No doubt the public would have been most interested in the spring of 1944 to learn that Operation Overlord was intending to land in Normandy, not the Pas de Calais. The OSS was going to a great deal of trouble—even to the point of building a dummy army and feeding the Nazis information about it through turned German spies—to deceive Hitler into believing that that was where the landings were going to be. There is no doubt that their success in this deception was a vital element in the success of the D-Day landings.
Mr. Keller’s statement contains not one word about the possible adverse effect of the Times’s story on the War on Terror. It is hard to escape the idea that the Times just doesn’t care if it can sell some papers. If it can do the Bush administration an injury in the process, well, so much the better.
All this is very reminiscent of the Chicago Tribune when it was run by Colonel Robert R. McCormick. McCormick was a great, barrel-chested bully of a man who stood well over six feet tall. Born to great wealth (his great-uncle Cyrus McCormick had invented the reaper that revolutionized American agriculture, his mother’s family owned the Chicago Tribune), McCormick hated Franklin Roosevelt and all he stood for. His animus to FDR and the New Deal permeated his newspaper, both news columns and editorials, as much as eggs permeate a cake. Or animus to George Bush permeates the New York Times.
There were numerous breaches of national secrets in the Tribune, thanks to McCormick’s get-Roosevelt-at-any-cost attitude, but the most spectacular and potentially by far the most damaging occurred on June 7th, 1942, shortly after the Battle of Midway had transformed the strategic situation in the Pacific but before the extent of the American victory was fully known. That morning’s front page carried the headline NAVY HAD WORD OF JAP PLANS TO STRIKE AT SEA. The Tribune attributed the information it published to “reliable sources in the naval intelligence.”
The inescapable conclusion any knowledgeable person reading the story would have made was that naval intelligence had broken the Japanese naval code (JN-25). This, of course, is exactly what it had done, one of the most valuable and closely guarded secrets of the entire war. The Navy, apoplectic, and assuming that the damage had already been done, wanted to bring McCormick up on charges under the Espionage Act to make an example of him. This just kept the story going in the papers, and the Navy was finally persuaded that the legal necessity of revealing much intelligence in open court made it impossible to pursue it and dropped the case.
The damage might have been catastrophic. Our ability to read the code was an enormous tactical advantage and had the Japanese changed their codes, there would in all probability have been tens of thousands more dead American sailors and marines before the war was over or we were able to crack the new code. By the mercy of providence, the Japanese inexplicably failed to note the story in the American media and did not change their codes.
Robert McCormick, as morally obtuse as he was politically self-indulgent, was a far-right Roosevelt hater who indulged his hate at the expense of his country. The publisher of the Times, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., seems no different, except for his place on the political spectrum.
What was once the greatest newspaper the world has ever known is much diminished.
June 22, 2006
Iraq and Okinawa Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:30 AM EST It was a bad day in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan yesterday. A total of nine U.S. soldiers were killed, far above the daily average in recent months.
It goes without saying that every life lost is a personal tragedy, not only for the young men who died when they had so much to live for, but for those who knew and loved them. There is little we can do but offer them the “thanks of the Republic” and to hope that “our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.”
But for those not personally touched by these deaths, we might look at things from a wider perspective. Today marks the sixty-first anniversary of the official end of the Battle of Okinawa, the last great battle of World War II. Over the time it took to capture the 459-square-mile island, about 12,500 Americans died, and about 60,000 were wounded. Japanese military deaths were at least 100,000, and civilian deaths far worse. Among the dead were the great war correspondent Ernie Pyle and the commander of U.S. land forces on Okinawa, General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., the highest ranking American soldier to die in the Second World War.
So while nine deaths in one day in the War on Terror are a very bad day indeed, on Okinawa American battle deaths averaged more than 150 a day. So terrible was the slaughter on that once beautiful island that many historians believe it led directly to the decision to use the atomic bomb in order to convince the Japanese high command to surrender without an invasion of the main islands.
June 20, 2006
Democracy and Republicanism II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:15 PM EST Joshua Zeitz wrote, “Findley claimed that even self-styled virtuous men like Morris had their own interests to protect, and what’s more, that they had ‘a right to advocate their own cause.’ What they didn’t have a right to do, he argued, was deny that they acted from a position of self-interest. In this sense, the Anti-Federalists were the truly gifted prognosticators of the moment. They anticipated the sort of hyper-competitive, interest-block democracy that America would soon become.”
I agree with Findley that everyone has interests to protect and advance. It borders on the definitional that to be alive is to have interests. I also agree wholeheartedly that one should acknowledge those interests. Alas, we very seldom do.
Corporations—flags waving and “America the Beautiful” playing softly in the background—push for protection from foreign competition to protect jobs, to maintain the country’s industrial base, etc., etc. Never mentioned is the fact that tariffs and other impediments to foreign competition make it much easier to earn a certain level of return on investment by allowing them to—harrumph—raise prices. Equally, labor unions push constantly for an increase in the minimum wage, arguing (crocodile tears streaming down both cheeks) that it is needed to help the poor and the downtrodden. Unmentioned is that the poor and downtrodden don’t belong to labor unions. It is a rare union member indeed who earns the minimum wage. But a legally mandated minimum wage acts as a floor for union wages: Push up the minimum wage and you make it much easier to push up union wages. (When both management and labor are on the same side, as they were when they both passionately opposed deregulation of the airline and trucking industries in the 1970s, or in favor of bailing out Chrysler in the 1980s, for instance, you can be sure they are protecting a cushy situation that benefits them at the expense of the public.)
Perhaps the most egregious example of this was in the late nineteenth century when industrialist pressure kept tariffs so high that the government couldn’t spend the money that rolled into its coffers. In 1884, for instance, government revenues exceeded expenses by an awesome 30 percent (Revenues $348 million, surplus $104 million). The industrialists argued that the country’s nascent industries couldn’t compete with the more established European firms and needed the protection to prevent being driven out of business by low-cost imports. Jobs would be wiped out! We’d have to return to our rural past! All will be lost! It was only in 1899 that, when the spectacular falling out between Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Carnegie, and the ensuing lawsuit, caused the books of the privately-held Carnegie Steel Company to be opened, it was revealed how specious this argument was. The Carnegie Steel Company turned out to be, by orders of magnitude, the world’s most efficient steel company, a company that was, in fact, very profitably underselling British steel manufacturers in the British market, despite the transportation costs.
It is human nature, I suppose, to perceive one’s own interests as being firmly aligned with what is good for society in general. Still, it would be nice if just now and then someone would say, “Well, yes, we stand to make a buck here, but it’s also a good deal for everyone and here’s why.” But pending that unlikely event, perhaps the press corps could do its duty and perform that function, pointing out how the various parties lobbying for and against something stand to benefit from their positions.
I won’t hold my breath.
June 20, 2006
Speaking of Glory Road . . . Posted by Allen Barra at 12:00 PM EST . . . as I did in this space yesterday, here are a few observations about the true story that the movie tells, and about basketball at that time.
—The same year the Texas Western Miners became the first all-black team to win the NCAA title was also the year that the Boston Celtic great Bill Russell became the first black NBA coach.
—The 1965-66 Texas Western game was characterized by the slam dunk, a relatively new play in college basketball. Ten months after TWU’s championship, the NCAA Rules Committee voted to outlaw the slam dunk. The ban would last ten years.
—Despite the style of ball the ’66 Miners helped usher in, their play that season was, according to center David “Big Daddy D” Lattin, “more white-oriented than any team we saw in the NCAA tournament. We played the most intelligent, the most boring, the most disciplined game of all.”
—Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp never stopped berating the 1966 Texas Western team that beat his Wildcats for the national championship. He once referred to them as “a bunch of crooks,” and in an interview years later said, erroneously, that TWU was “placed on probation” for recruiting violations on the ’65-’66 team.
—Despite Rupp’s accusations, the seven black players on the ’65-’66 TWU squad did just fine. Four graduated that year, the other three went back and got their degrees. One of the players died in 2002. The surviving players are all married and have grandchildren.
—The effect of the Miners’ victory in the ’66 NCAAs was electric and immediate, inaugurating what one historian called “the most substantial increase in integration in the history of college sports.” The next season every conference in the Southeast and Southwest had black players.
—Don Haskins had coached girls’ college basketball before accepting the men’s job at Texas Western. He coached the rest of his career there, retiring in 1999 after winning seven Western Athletic Conference titles. In 1997 he was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame. Among the letters of recommendation he received was one from Pat Riley, who played on the Kentucky team TWU beat in 1966.
—Despite the later recognition of what the ’66 Miners accomplished, there was relatively little sense at the time that history was being made. “I started my five best players,” Haskins would tell an interviewer years later. “That they were all black and that it was the first time five black players had started in an NCAA championship game meant nothing to me.” According to Pat Riley, “As I got into the NBA and players began to speak to me about that game, I started to realize the significance of it.”
June 20, 2006
Democracy and Republicanism Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:20 AM EST In our exchange on the nature of democracy, John Steele Gordon responded to my remarks about the republican (small R) origins of certain strains in democratic theory—particularly, the emphasis on organic community and disinterested government that many of the founding fathers shared.
Mr. Gordon writes: “I hereby nominate ‘disinterested government’ as the oxymoron of the week. Only in the cloud-cuckoolands of political theory are governments ever disinterested. Hamilton and Madison had no such illusions. Brilliant as they were, and deeply versed in political theory as they were, they wanted a government that would work in the real world, the world of real human beings, not so many tabula rasas to be written on by intellectuals. In that sense they were engineers, not intellectuals at all.”
Actually, Madison and Hamilton—along with most of the founders—were deeply versed in classical political theory and very much subscribed to the tenets of republicanism, however unrealistic those ideas would prove in later years.
Gordon Wood, a Brown University historian who is one of the foremost authorities on the American Revolution, and who has spent decades reading and analyzing the political discourse of the eighteenth century, writes the following in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution: “Most of the revolutionary leaders . . . continued to hold out the possibility of virtuous politics. They retained the republican hope that at least a few . . . still had sufficient virtue to become disinterested umpires and promote an exclusively public sphere of activity in government.”
Hamilton, for instance, believed that learned men like himself “form no distinct interest in society” and were prepared to serve as “impartial arbiter[s]” in the pursuit of the common good. Madison believed that the Constitution was designed perfectly to exclude from government “men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs,” and to include in their place men whose “enlightened views and virtuous sentiments render them superior to local prejudices, and to schemes of injustice.”
Madison and Hamilton were desperately trying to reconcile a deeply-held faith in republican virtue with the realities of an increasingly complex, diverse post-colonial society. Time would prove their vision unrealistic, as Mr. Gordon has himself maintained.
Actually, Mr. Gordon’s assertion that “only in the cloud-cuckoolands of political theory are governments ever disinterested” is more in keeping with the Anti-Federalist argument of the late 1780s than with the Federalist argument put forward by Madison and Hamilton.
Anti-Federalists believed that there was no such thing as a disinterested elite that could safeguard the “wants of the people” and insisted (correctly, it would seem from hindsight) that everyone—even James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and George Washington!—had interests to protect. What’s more, they believed that such a status quo was all right, as long as everyone was honest about the existence of interest in politics.
Such was the thrust of the extraordinary debate in the Pennsylvania assembly in 1786 between Robert Morris, a financier who would later be a backer of the new Constitution, and William Findley, an ex-weaver from the western part of the state who would soon emerge as a leading Anti-Federalist. Findley claimed that even self-styled virtuous men like Morris had their own interests to protect, and what’s more, that they had “a right to advocate their own cause.” What they didn’t have a right to do, he argued, was deny that they acted from a position of self-interest. In this sense, the Anti-Federalists were the truly gifted prognosticators of the moment. They anticipated the sort of hyper-competitive, interest-block democracy that America would soon become.
What I mean to suggest here is the same point I’ve tried to press with Mr. Gordon over the last week. Democracy is a big word with a terrific number of meanings. It’s nothing so simple as political sovereignty resting in the people rather than the elite. Which is to say, Ellen Feldman’s original point—the point that began our discussion here—is right. One can speak of an American brand of democracy (if, of course, one recognizes that this brand of democracy is in a constant state of evolution).
On a somewhat related note, I’m a little taken aback by Mr. Gordon’s denigration of “intellectuals,” whom he compares unfavorably to engineers. (My engineer friends would also take exception to the dichotomy. They are some of the best intellectuals I know.)
Mr. Gordon is certainly within his right to deride those who thrive on theory and theoretical disputation. But Madison and Hamilton would have prided themselves on being just that—on belonging to a learned, cultivated class of men who gave themselves over to books and lofty ideas. This was the entire point of republican virtue. It’s why Ben Franklin, having earned his fortune, made an ostentatious show of retiring from business so as to devote his full attention to more virtuous matters of the mind.
Anti-intellectualism is all good and fine, I suppose. But the founders wouldn’t have had anything of it.
June 19, 2006
More Democracy! III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:00 PM EST Joshua Zeitz and I have been discussing what constitutes “democracy.” I maintain that the only thing necessary is that all law-abiding citizens of adult age be allowed to vote and that those votes determine the composition of the government and thus, indirectly, its policies. Mr. Zeitz maintains that many polities regard government-provided social services, such as pensions, health care, and higher education, as an inseparable part of “democracy.” I think they are an inseparable part of a social democracy, not all democracies. That’s why the adjective “social” is a necessary part of the term by which these types of democracies are denoted.
This country has been a democracy longer than any other (although, to be sure, what constituted a democracy in the era of the Founding Fathers—when the term had a negative connotation not that far from “mobocracy”—or of Andrew Jackson would hardly pass muster today). In this sense it has been “a shining city on a hill” to the rest of the world.
But it also is the inventor—and so far sole practitioner—of a grotesque perversion of democracy called gerrymandering. If democracy is where the voters choose their elected officials, gerrymandering is where elected officials choose their voters. By carefully crafting district lines to include the maximum of one party’s voters and a minimum of the other’s, they assure the election of the favored party’s candidates.
Gerrymandering has a long history in this country. In 1812 the Jeffersonian governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, combined with the Jeffersonian Assembly to create a district whose borders were drawn for no other purpose than the election of Jeffersonian candidates. When the great portrait painter Gilbert Stuart saw a map of the district in a newspaper office, he whipped out a pencil and added wings, claws, and eyes and proclaimed it a salamander. Someone suggested calling it a Gerrymander instead, and an enduring word and one of the most famous political cartoons in American history was born. (Elbridge Gerry pronounced his name with a hard G, like the G in “gear,” but the eponymous word has come to be pronounced with a soft one.) Gerrymandering was a minor lapse from democracy (although a perfectly legal one), on a par with ballot-box stuffing and graveyard voting, until the modern era, as it was, at best, an imprecise science. Computers changed that. Armed with specially designed software, politicians could carve out districts with exquisite precision. In 1980 Rep. Phil Burton of California was the principal force behind a gerrymander of California Congressional districts that he called, “my contribution to modern art.” One district had no fewer than 385 sides, as its border included or excluded individual precincts and even houses.
The politicians in state after state have done the same and the result has been deeply injurious to the American political system. New York State has what is by common consent “the most dysfunctional legislature in the country.” One big reason for that is that both houses of the legislature are so gerrymandered that they never change party. For more than the last 30 years, the Senate has been safely Republican and the Assembly safely Democratic. With completely safe seats, incumbents needn’t worry about their constituents’ opinions, which is the very essence of democracy.
To give an example of how big a difference gerrymandering can make, consider the 1992 election for Congress in Texas. A Democratic legislature and governor put in place district lines that, while Democratic candidates won only 49.2 percent of the votes, gave 70 percent of the Congressional seats to Democrats. When Republicans got total control of the machinery of state government a decade later, they created a gerrymander that did the same for them.
And with gerrymandered districts, general elections become pro forma. Thus the primary is the only important contest. Since many states restrict primary elections to party members, independents are effectively disenfranchised. And primary elections tend to be dominated by each party’s hard core, thus empowering the left in Democratic primaries and the right in Republican ones. The abiding genius in Anglo-American political systems has always been that it empowers the center, where the vast mass of the people are to be found. Gerrymandering, I’ve no doubt, is one of the reasons American politics has become so uncivil in recent years: The extremes, ever more influential, have become the tails that wag the dog of political discourse.
In recent decades some gerrymanders have been created with the ostensible purpose of redressing past (and some say present) racial prejudice by creating so called “minority majority districts” tailored to assure the election of black and Hispanic candidates. I regard this as, at best, well-meaning racism in and of itself, as there is little evidence, beyond assertion, that such districts are necessary to give black and Hispanic candidates a fair chance at being elected. Douglas Wilder had no trouble being elected governor (an office that can’t be gerrymandered) in the former Confederate state of Virginia. In the 1990s, Connecticut’s 4th Congressional District, with only a 4 percent black population, nonetheless had a black Congressman. (Hint: he was a Republican.)
This has, ironically, caused disaster for the left half of American politics. With many black voters pushed into particular districts, the remaining districts have become more and more Republican, and the once-solid South is solid once more, but for Republicans.
The Supreme Court has always shied away from stepping into this controversy, as it tries to avoid all political controversies. But it seems to this non-lawyer that gerrymandering flatly contravenes the Fourteenth Amendment, Section 2 (as modified by the Nineteenth and Twenty-sixth Amendments), which says that if the right to vote is denied to any class of citizens, the state’s representation in Congress shall be reduced accordingly. With gerrymandering, millions of citizens are denied the right to vote in any meaningful sense. Sure they can show up at the polls and pull a lever, but it doesn’t matter one bit if they do so or not. Their votes are rendered meaningless by the deliberate action of the state legislature.
That’s wrong, unfair, undemocratic, and, most of all, un-American.
June 19, 2006
Glory Road and Basketball History Posted by Allen Barra at 10:45 AM EST In 1965 Don Haskins, the men’s basketball coach at an obscure university, Texas Western (now the University of Texas at El Paso), decided to level the playing field, so to speak, by tapping into a new source of talent: black players. In 1966 his squad became the first all black team to win the NCAA championship. That their opponent was Kentucky, coached by the very symbol of white domination of the sport, Adolph “The Baron” Rupp, almost seems to be something out of fiction. In fact the whole story, like that of nearly every inspirational sports movie, from Remember the Titans (which, like Glory Road, the film based on Haskins’s team, was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer) to Friday Night Lights, seems to be something out of fiction.
Glory Road, which has just been released on DVD, gets most of the known facts right but never quite succeeds in illuminating them. Played by Josh Lucas—beefier here than as Reese Witherspoon’s amiable beer-swilling husband in Sweet Home Alabama—Haskins is a decent, dedicated man who never becomes self-conscious about his role in sports or social history and who is merely intent on fielding the best team he possibly can. Very good. Affirmative action does not work in sports, and there is no reason why a coach should consider starting a player for any other reason than his ability.
Surely there was some steel and fire to Haskins that made him the first coach in the south to face the inevitable storm of scorn and protest that he knew would follow his decision, but the script, by Chris Cleveland, Bettina Gilois, and Gregory Allen Howard, never begins to deal with this. Nor does it seem to have a clue as to how Haskins inspired and united his boys in the face of such adversity. Recalling their coach for Frank Fitzpatrick’s 1999 book, And The Walls Came Tumbling Down: Kentucky, Texas Western, and the Game That Changed American Sports, Haskins’ players invariably recalled hating him at the time for his unrelenting toughness.
It might be interesting to see how a white Southerner hammered discipline into young black kids, most of them from New York and other urban areas, back in the era of segregated sports. Instead we’re spoon fed big doses of tough love washed down with platitudes such as “It’s not about talent, it’s about heart!” and “The dignity’s inside you!” (Where else would it be?)
Glory Road isn’t shoddy, and it isn’t offensive—except perhaps for the shamelessness of the title, which links it to the greatest movie about the American Civil war, Glory. But it’s so respectful of its major characters that the ironies and complexities of their story never really come alive. Only Derek Luke, who stood out in Friday Night Lights, makes a sharp impression among the players as an unapologetic urbanite plunked down reluctantly in a rustic Texas setting.
The film leads the viewers step by step through Texas Western’s season, telling us not only when to cheer but who to boo, especially John Voight, as a caricature of Adolph Rupp, who, to be fair, is deserving of much scorn for the ungracious remarks he continued to make over the years about the team that defeated him. Voight, in the typical actor’s affectation, plays Rupp with an unnecessary prosthetic nose, an obvious attempt to bring verisimilitude to an underwritten role. Glory Road’s political simplicity may help to make it a hit with the teen crowd that needs its politics and history spelled out on flash cards; it probably also won’t hurt that the basketball scenes are edited with an MTV-style rhythm, as the one-thing-at-a-time style of basketball that was played in the mid-sixties would probably have kids laughing in the aisles today. (Like the big title fight between Jim “Cinderella Man” Braddock and Max Baer, Texas Western’s title game with Kentucky was supposed to have been a snooze, so the director and editor supply the dramatics that history neglected.)
Directed by a first-timer, James Gartner—who has, on the evidence of this film, no discernible style—Glory Road has one truly memorable sequence, a documentary segment at the end with the real Haskins and Pat Riley, who played for Kentucky in the 1966 championship game, reminiscing and laughing about the game’s significance, that has all the genuine warmth, humor, and rough edges that have been combed out of the movie’s account of the story.
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