October 15, 2007
On the Norwegian Nobel Committee Posted by Alexander Burns at 01:00 PM EST For readers interested in this weekend’s exchange about the Nobel Peace Prize, I recommend this article from yesterday’s New York Times for further reading. It provides a good snapshot of Nobel Committee members wrestling with the question of what, exactly, “peace” is supposed to mean, and also with the political consequences of awarding such a prize. On the latter question, the key comment seems to be from Francis Sejersted, the former chairman of the committee, who tells the Times: “Awarding a peace prize is, to put it bluntly, a political act.” On the former question—the changing meaning of “peace”—the Times cites Ole Danbolt Mjos, who chaired the committee that awarded Wangari Maathai in 2004. Mjos said the prize is really “about how we live together, share resources, preserving the earth.” I find this a compelling, if not 100 percent satisfying, explanation of what the committee now looks for in a laureate. Check out the article and see what you think.
October 15, 2007
U.S. Attorneys, Then and Now Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:20 AM EST From the annals of U.S. attorney scandals, an interesting precedent: In 1977 Griffin Bell, President Jimmy Carter’s Attorney General, requested the resignation of David Marston, a former staff assistant to Republican Sen. Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania, whom Carter’s predecessor, Gerald Ford, had appointed U.S. attorney for Philadelphia. Though he claimed no trial experience prior to his appointment, Marston had quickly emerged as a highly successful prosecutor, securing the convictions of several corrupt state legislators. In firing Marston, Bell was attempting to mollify Rep. Joshua Eilberg, a powerful Philadelphia congressman whose law firm was under investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office and who had urged the President to place a Democrat in the position. It later emerged that neither Carter nor Bell knew of the pending investigation of Eilberg’s law firm at the moment they decided to fire Marston. The President and his attorney general assumed that Eilberg was simply interested in replacing a Republican appointee with a Democratic appointee. Nevertheless, the appearance of a partisan cover-up haunted Carter throughout the rest of his term and eerily foreshadowed the current controversy over the Bush administration’s firing of several U.S. attorneys.
October 15, 2007
The Duke Non-Rape Case—Sources Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:00 AM EST In a post last June, Alexander Burns wrote, regarding the Duke case, “I . . . find it believable that the Duke faculty, as well as members of the national media, joined in a ‘rush to judgment that was racist at its heart.’ . . . I’m curious where I might look for evidence of such racism. I’ll admit that I try my hardest to block out the hysterical yammering of Nancy Grace and journalists like her, so I’m probably not as tuned in to this case as the average American. This being the case, what would I say if I wanted to convince somebody that the media and faculty would have reacted differently if the exotic dancer in the case had been white?” I would highly recommend Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, by Stuart Taylor and K. C. Johnson. It reads like a John Grisham novel (in fact it’s blurbed by Mr. Grisham) but is written by a nationally respected legal reporter and a history professor at Brooklyn College who blogged exhaustively on the case as it was unfolding. The book has been very well reviewed, even in The New York Times Book Review, although the Times, deservedly, comes in for brutal criticism in the book for its shamelessly agenda-driven coverage of the case. On Amazon, it’s been reviewed by 32 readers, 30 of them giving it five-star reviews. (There is one four-star and one, inevitably, one-star review.)
October 14, 2007
Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Nobel Peace Prize II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:10 PM EST Joshua Zeitz helpfully clarifies that Martin Luther King, Jr., received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 for his embrace of nonviolent means to achieve the goals of the civil rights movement, not for his opposition to the Vietnam War. Mr. Zeitz is, of course, entirely correct, and I never meant to imply otherwise. Let me add that I think Dr. King deserved the prize as much as anyone who has ever received it. The civil rights movement produced a profound social revolution in this country. A historically oppressed minority demanded justice and, after a long, intense, often bitter struggle, received it. I wonder if people under, say, 50, realize just how intense, protracted, and bitter the struggle was, how much it consumed the political attention of the country in the late forties, the fifties, and the early sixties. But considering its size and the depths of feelings on both sides, it was, I think, a remarkably bloodless struggle. It was by no means completely bloodless. Like all such movements, the civil rights crusade has its honored martyrs, many of them, including, of course, Dr. King himself. Compared to comparable struggles in other countries and at other times, however, the death toll was very low. I think that was due in part to the strength of American constitutional institutions and respect for the rule of law, but much was certainly due to Dr. King and the other leaders of the movement, who argued that moral force would win the day and sooner than physical force could. But for them, this country might have been drenched in blood in the middle decades of the twentieth century, and we are forever in their debt that it was not.
October 14, 2007
Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Nobel Peace Prize Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:00 PM EST John Steele Gordon suggests dividing Nobel Peace Prize laureates into groups—“those, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Ralph Bunche, and Henry Kissinger, who accomplished something in the cause of peace by ending a war. . . . those such as Woodrow Wilson, Charles Dawes, Frank Kellogg, Cordell Hull, George Marshall, and Norman Borlaug, who made . . . future wars less likely . . . [and] those, such as the Society of Friends, Linus Pauling, Martin Luther King, Jr., the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, and Eli Weisel, who opposed war (or violent means to obtain domestic political goals) or particular aspects of war and who were given the prize for their eloquence or symbolic value in the cause of peace.” Finally, Mr. Gordon writes, there are the “political peace prizes.” The problem with this scheme is that Martin Luther King said virtually nothing about the related topics of war and peace at the time he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. He did not deliver his first public address against the Vietnam War until 1965, when he told a group at Howard University that the conflict was “accomplishing nothing.” Several weeks later he called on the U.S. government to negotiate with the National Liberation Front and endorsed a halt to the bombing campaign against North Vietnamese targets. Under intense pressure from allies in the civil rights movement who feared the consequences of antagonizing Lyndon Johnson’s presidential administration, King said little else about Vietnam until two years later, when he delivered a strong and controversial antiwar speech at New York City’s Riverside Church. The decision to award him the Nobel Prize in 1964 thus had little to do with his opposition to war or his espousal of peace, per se, but instead indicated approval of his embrace of nonviolent means to right injustice at home. Mr. Gordon’s categorization hints at this possibility, but some clarification seems helpful.
October 14, 2007
The Nobel Peace Prize IV Posted by Alexander Burns at 04:25 PM EST Mr. Gordon makes a new argument in his latest post. He writes that Al Gore is different from other Nobel recipients, like Norman Borlaug and Muhammad Yunus, who have won without literally working toward peace because his most important potential contributions are, at this point, largely unrealized. This strikes me as a fairly reasonable point: If we’re going to have what is, essentially, a Nobel Humanitarian Prize, perhaps it makes sense to recognize the individuals who have made the greatest concrete progress toward achieving their humanitarian goals. From this perspective, Borlaug and Yunus are clearly worthier honorees than Gore. From another perspective, though, the Nobel has frequently been given to people whose most significant contributions are, on a basic level, still just potential contributions. Frank Kellogg won the Nobel Peace Prize the year after the Kellogg-Briand Pact, banning war, was signed. Nicholas Murray Butler was a joint recipient of the prize two years later (with Jane Addams) for his work promoting the pact. So, in three years you had two men honored for the same treaty, which had not yet had any demonstrable impact in discouraging war. As we all know, the world erupted in bloodshed a few years later. Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho won the prize in 1973 (the latter declined it) for the Paris Peace Accords. Fortunately, in this case, the Nobel Committee was rather more farsighted than it was in its optimistic assessment of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Just look at the lasting, two-state solution that endures in Vietnam. Oh, wait . . . My point here is not to berate the Nobel Committee for a few judgments that seem silly in retrospect. My point is to say that Al Gore’s “paper profit” is at least as significant as those of numerous other Nobel honorees. For what it’s worth, I’d say he’s much more likely to end up a metaphorically wealthy man than Frank Kellogg or Henry Kissinger did. I have no interest in debating Mr. Gordon on the issue of climate change, or responding, by proxy, to the criticisms of a marginally significant British judge. (Although I will, incidentally, note the irony of many conservatives’ appealing to the jurisprudence of a—gasp!—foreign legal authority. Imagine if a liberal used such an argumentative tactic on a subject like the death penalty.) On the subject of climate change, the science is in. The planet’s getting warmer, and a leading cause is manmade carbon emissions. Estimates can disagree over whether climate change will raise sea levels by one foot or twenty. But sea levels are only one metric by which to gauge the impact of climate change, and flooding is only one of the many negative consequences humanity would face if it decided to ignore this problem. On this particular subject, we might want to try and see the forest for the drunken trees. As to the question of whether the Norwegian Parliament or the Norwegian Nobel Commitee awards the Peace Prize, Mr. Gordon suggests that this is “a distinction without a whole lot of difference.” I’d argue otherwise. Legislative bodies, such as the U.S. Congress and the Norwegian Parliament, are driven by electoral concerns. Bodies they appoint, like the 9/11 Commission, or help appoint, like the Supreme Court, are much less susceptible to such motivations. For people who wish to devalue the Nobel Peace Prize, or to cast aspersions on the worthiness of its recipients, the notion that craven Scandinavian socialist politicos decide who wins it is a useful misconception to spread. I’m certainly not saying that Mr. Gordon intended to do anything like this, but I do think this was an important mistake to correct.
October 13, 2007
The Nobel Peace Prize III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:30 AM EST Just a few responses to Alexander Burns’s post. The nature of peace and war has changed markedly since Alfred Nobel established the Peace Prize in his will, calling for it to be awarded to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” I think he would be astounded at how much standing armies have shrunk in size over the last few decades and how long it’s been since there was a “peace congress.” Great-power war was a constant threat in Nobel’s day—Abou Ben Adhem’s nightmare. It is much more remote today. So who receives what is perhaps the most prestigious prize in the world has—and should have—changed. Perhaps its name should be changed to the Nobel Humanitarian Prize to reflect the new reality. And certainly I have no objection to the prize, whatever it’s called, going to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have done good work in the cause of humanity. Mr. Burns mentions three people who have not contributed to peace in any direct sense but have won the Nobel Peace Prize: Norman Borlaug, Muhammad Yunus, and Al Gore, and puts them on the same plane. I do not. Both Borlaug and Yunus, when they were recognized, had accomplished a great good. Borlaug had developed strains of wheat that produced much higher yields. Thanks to these new strains, Mexico became a net wheat exporter by 1963 and Pakistan and India both saw wheat production double between 1965 and 1970, the year Borlaug won the Peace Prize. The “green revolution” he fostered has continued to spread to other areas and other crops, greatly reducing world hunger. He is one of the giants of the twentieth century and was known to be so when he won the Peace Prize. Yunus began his microloan program in 1976 and established the Grameen Bank (which shared the prize) in 1983. In the next two decades it helped tens of thousands of Bangladeshis lift themselves out of abject poverty by providing low-interest credit, and the idea has spread widely to other countries. Increasingly, private foundations are helping to reduce poverty in this way, rather than by means of grants to governments, which are often deeply corrupt in poor countries (by no means the least of the reasons they are poor). But Al Gore was awarded the prize merely for his prediction of the consequences of not following one possible way to combat global warming. His movie, An Inconvenient Truth, won an Oscar for best documentary but is, in fact, propagandistic, selecting facts and making unsubstantiated claims with gay abandon. A British judge recently ruled that there were at least nine serious errors of fact in the movie and ruled that it can only be shown in British classrooms if it is accompanied by balancing information. Al Gore has consistently refused to debate the subject, even though he is an excellent debater. (He mopped the floor with Ross Perot on the subject of NAFTA, for instance, early in the Clinton administration.) Even The New York Times, which gave the story the lead with a two-column head, (all other Nobel prizes this year got only a reefer on the front page), states that Gore’s co-winner, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is much more cautious in its predictions. Gore, for instance, predicts a 20-foot rise in sea levels over the next century; the panel thinks one foot (about equal to the rise in the last hundred years) is more like it. That’s a very big difference. Al Gore has unquestionably raised the public consciousness regarding global warming. But he has done his level best to shut down any discussion of both its causes (an open scientific question) and possible solutions other than the one he favors—capping and then reducing carbon emissions—an open political question. To use a financial metaphor, Borlaug and Yunus had their money in the bank when they were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Al Gore has, at best, a paper profit. If he ends up intellectually broke, the Nobel Peace Prize will have been diminished. Mr. Burns is correct that I erred in saying that the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded by the Norwegian Parliament. It awarded by the Nobel Prize Committee, which is appointed by the Norwegian Parliament. That strikes me as a distinction without a whole lot of difference. (By the way, if someone would like a short course in how microlending works and would like to read a wonderful novel in the process, let me recommend A Town Like Alice, by Nevil Shute. Shute was a wonderful storyteller perhaps best remembered today for his On the Beach, made into an unforgettable movie by Stanley Kramer.)
October 12, 2007
The Nobel Peace Prize II Posted by Alexander Burns at 04:30 PM EST I was a little disappointed to see that John Steele Gordon tackled the subject of the Nobel Peace Prize before I could get to it today—although not that disappointed. Predictably, Mr. Gordon’s thoughts are rather different from the ones I’ve been mulling over. There is plenty in Mr. Gordon’s post that I find ill-reasoned and problematic, but rather than setting our views in direct and artificial opposition, I thought I’d offer the alternative observations that occurred to me this morning. The Nobel Peace Prize has an interesting history. As Mr. Gordon helpfully detailed, many winners of the prize have been people who worked on peacemaking in a formal, legalistic sort of way. Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Ralph Bunche are good examples of this kind of Peace Prize recipient. The majority of Nobel honorees, not just the American winners, have been of this variety. Consider the examples of Oscar Arias, the president of Costa Rica who was awarded the prize in 1987 for his efforts to end civil strife in Central America, and John Hume and David Trimble, who won in 1998 after they worked to forge a lasting peace in Northern Ireland. An increasing number of honorees, however, have been coming from outside the sphere of government and have been winning as a result of accomplishments outside the field of legal peacemaking. Historically, plenty of Nobel Prizes have gone to activists, like Martin Luther King, Jr., Lech Walesa, and Desmond Tutu, whose political contributions improved the condition of humanity but didn’t directly deal with preventing war. Now, two years in a row, the Peace Prize has gone to a private-sector actor whose accomplishments seem even more tenuously tied to literal concerns of war and peace. Last year’s recipient, Muhammad Yunus, is a pioneer of microfinancing, which aims at promoting popular entrepreneurship and business growth in impoverished countries. This year’s winner, Al Gore, has worked to build international consensus around the need to act on the issue of climate change. Neither of these men, or the organizations with which they shared the Peace Prize, has dealt with ending an armed conflict or anything like it. Yet they have both won the highest award a peacemaker can receive. It seems, then, that the Nobel Commitee (not, as Mr. Gordon stated, the Norwegian parliament) is judging Peace Prize nominees by a slightly different understanding of “peace” than it used to. Their principal interest seems to be in honoring individuals whose work has advanced humanitarian, internationalist ideals, rather than in picking out the best peace negotiators. Yunus may not have stopped a war, but he has contributed a remarkable economic innovation in the form of microcredit. This invention may, in the long run, help far more people than the Treaty of Locarno ever did. I think that outcome is pretty likely. Similarly, if Gore’s activism continues to spur international action on the environment, it will help reverse the deleterious effects of climate change and avert famines, epidemics, and disastrous flooding. It seems to me there’s a pretty good case to be made that this achievement would be equivalent to Norman Borlaug’s or Linus Pauling’s. In Akira Iriye’s Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World, the author argues that the Nobel Committee’s decision in 1999 to award the prize to Doctors Without Borders signaled a recognition that international NGOs had begun to rival governments in their ability to shape the common path of humanity. Now it seems the Nobel Committee has come to understand that our world is one in which private individuals, like Gore and Yunus, can effect similar changes in the global social landscape by interacting primarily with other private individuals. This morning Gore sent out an e-mail to his supporters calling the climate crisis “our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.” I find it amazing, and moving, to think that the “global consciousness” he’s referring to is grounded not only in compacts between states but also in an actual community of countless, disparate, concerned individuals. Whether or not you want to call them “peacemakers,” the men and women who have helped build this community are blessed indeed.
October 12, 2007
The Nobel Peace Prize Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:50 AM EST To no one’s surprise, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Al Gore and the United Nations Committee on Climate Change for their work on global warming. Let’s take a look at previous American Peace Prize winners and what they received the prize for. 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt, for leading negotiations to end the Russo-Japanese War. 1912 Senator (and former Secretary of State) and president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Elihu Root, for his work in advancing arbitration as a means of settling international disputes. 1919 President Woodrow Wilson, for advocating the establishment of the League of Nations. 1925 Charles G. Dawes, member of the Allied Reparations Committee (and later Vice President of the United States), for developing the Dawes Plan to help Germany stabilize its economy and meet its reparations obligations. 1929 Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg, for his work on the Kellogg-Briand Treaty to end war. 1931 Jane Addams, international president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University, for his advocacy of the Kellogg-Briand Treaty. 1945 Secretary of State Cordell Hull, for his work establishing the United Nations. 1946 Emily Greene Balch, honorary international president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and John R. Mott, chairman of the International Missionary Council and President of the World Alliance of Young Men’s Christian Associations. 1947 American Friends Service Committee, on behalf of the Society of Friends (the Quakers). 1950 Ralph Bunche, principal secretary of the United Nations Palestine Commission and chief mediator to end the first Arab-Israeli war. 1953 Former Secretary of State George C. Marshall, for the Marshall Plan. 1962 Linus Pauling, for his crusade against nuclear testing above ground. 1964 Martin Luther King, Jr., for leading the American civil rights movement. 1970 Norman Borlaug, for leading the “green revolution” that greatly increased food yields. 1973, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, for the Vietnam peace accord. 1985 International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, for its campaign on the dangers of nuclear war. 1986 Author Eli Weisel, for his “practical work in the cause of peace” and for delivering a powerful message of “peace, atonement, and human dignity.” 1997 Jody Williams, jointly with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which she headed. 2003 Former President Jimmy Carter, “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” 2007 Former Vice President Al Gore, for his work on global warming. It seems to me that this list can be divided into groups. There were those, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Ralph Bunche, and Henry Kissinger, who accomplished something in the cause of peace by ending a war. Then there were those such as Woodrow Wilson, Charles Dawes, Frank Kellogg, Cordell Hull, George Marshall, and Norman Borlaug, who made (or attempted to make—neither the League of Nations nor the Dawes Plan nor the Kellogg-Briand Treaty worked) future wars less likely by specific actions, policies, or scientific accomplishments. Then there are those, such as the Society of Friends, Linus Pauling, Martin Luther King, Jr., the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, and Eli Weisel, who opposed war (or violent means to obtain domestic political goals) or particular aspects of war and who were given the prize for their eloquence or symbolic value in the cause of peace. Finally there were the political peace prizes. Had Jimmy Carter shared the 1978 prize with Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin for achieving the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab nation, I doubt that anyone would have objected. It was a huge advance toward bringing peace to the world’s leading powder keg, and Carter contributed significantly to achieving it. But since leaving the presidency, Carter has been drifting ever further leftwards and has wallowed in the moral smugness that has always been his most prominent characteristic. (Just the other day he said that the only thing he regrets about his Presidency was not having sent one more helicopter to rescue the hostages in Iran. Really. Running for reelection, he carried only as many states as Herbert Hoover had carried in 1932 and won even fewer electoral votes. But he has no regrets having, I guess, made no mistakes other than failing to send enough helicopters.) Had he possessed the gift of eloquence he might have contributed something to the cause of peace since 1981. But no one has ever accused President Carter of that. The only speech of his that has lasted in the national memory is one of the most disastrous in recent presidential history, the “malaise speech.” Violating the longstanding and wise unwritten rule that ex-Presidents should give their opinions in private, he has publicly opposed American foreign policy at nearly every turn. And that was what he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for. As for Al Gore, his prize, too, seems more political than anything else. Has he brought about peace anywhere? No. Has he instituted a policy, treaty, or scientific revolution that makes war in the future less likely? No. Has he been unusually eloquent in the cause of peace? No. He has instead advocated, often by tendentious means, a scientific hypothesis that is by no means settled and a political program predicated on that hypothesis’s being fact. The political class (the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded by the Norwegian parliament) loves that particular program because it would greatly increase the power of politicians. Ergo the prize. Other programs might accomplish much more at far, far less cost and disruption to the world economy (see here for another approach). Indeed, Al Gore’s approach to solving global warming might well increase the chances of future war by bringing fast-rising world prosperity to an end. Prosperity is good for peace. Alfred Nobel wanted the peace prize he established awarded “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” How Al Gore and his crusade for one particular approach to combat global warming fits that bill is a mystery to me.
October 12, 2007
“Laws Die; Books Never” (Bulwer-Lytton)—Or Almost Never Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 10:20 AM EST I made a special trip to the university library near my house, just to look up something in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, the index of magazine articles printed during the twentieth century. I’ve been doing the same thing roughly my whole life—same Reader’s Guides, same place on the shelves. Except that yesterday, they were gone. The librarian said the decision had been made to throw out nearly all of the Reader’s Guides in order to save space, since the content is now on a database. I might have pointed out that a database is not a book. It can’t impart the power of periphery or of perspective. Apparently, however, that ship has sailed, or that garbage truck has left the loading dock of America’s libraries, choose your metaphor. I am certainly inured to computer research, however, and so the librarian and I looked up the database. First we couldn’t find it, and then it wouldn’t work—or was it the other way around. Ever optimistic, I asked where it was that they kept the Reader’s Guides that they hadn’t thrown out. Maybe they had made a mistake and kept July 1934 to August 1935. She looked that up and told me that whatever was left was on the second floor. The second floor was actually quite hollow, except for row upon row of metal bookshelves, all empty and making a tinny sound in answer to my heels, a sound with a sting, when one wonders which books were thrown out to make it possible. The Reader’s Guides were nowhere in sight. But I congratulate the librarians on achieving their goal: They’d certainly freed up lots and lots of space. A sentimental confession: when I was writing my new book on Lincoln (The Case of Abraham Lincoln: Murder, Adultery and the Making of a Great President), I used to dream not about topping the bestseller list or of being short-listed for the Booker Prize (which is for fiction anyway), but of seeing the book added to the Lincoln section at some of my favorite libraries. For a moment, walking out of the university library in question, I doubted that libraries are going to last long enough for my Lincoln book (it comes out in November). In the one I was in, the one that was making all the space by throwing out books, one half of the ground floor was boarded up and draped with a huge sign: “Café Coming in November!” Praise be: They have the space for a coffee shop. After all, you can get a copy of the Reader’s Guide for July 1934 to August 1935 on almost any corner, but where can you find a cup of hot coffee? Don’t call me old-fashioned because I repeat the one thing I know: An Internet café is not a library. And a database is not a book.
October 11, 2007
A Dying Language III Posted by Richard F. Snow at 11:00 AM EST John Steele Gordon is of course quite right about the withering of Morse code; it seemed quite inevitable when I read it, but the melancholy certainty had never before occurred to me. In his response, Fred Smoler quotes me as having used the term “lightning slinger.” It’s a term the railroadmen themselves—who were never as poetic and self-consciously picturesque as the steamboat men—really did use, although the phrase may have been more regularly applied by newspapermen when writing about something admirable a railroad telegrapher had done: “ALERT LIGHTNING SLINGER SAVES MAIL TRAIN.” But even the workaday term they more often employed, “brass-pounder,” has a clink of quotidian glory to it. I got very attracted to this telegraphic world during its last hours and, guided by the photographer David Plowden, think to this day I came closest to dying in Mansonian circumstances than I ever had before or—I hope—since. David is the great recorder of the vanishing works of the nineteenth century on the American continent, especially the surviving relics of the world of steam that powered it, and when in the late 1970s he heard I was driving to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with my wife and young stepchildren, he said I had to stop at—what? Saunders Gap? Eely?—because there I would the see last working HORIZONTAL railroad telegraph key: just like the key you hammered up an down, but a bit easier on the hand because this one you could rattle from side to side. He gave me scrupulous instructions on how to get there, and on a hot, buzzing August morning we set out for the place. There was the depot with its bay. There was nothing else whatever for 15 miles in any direction. There were no wires, and I imagined they hadn’t recently been redirected underground for ecological purposes. The tracks were still there, simmering with black rust. Also there, slowly approaching us from the depot, were a band of people who evidently lived in it and clearly weren’t employees of the Calumet & Northern. I’ve always been too scared to see The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but you know what I mean. They wanted to know why we’d come down a four-mile dirt road to visit them. Hoping that truth and fatuity might prove strong allies, I told him that we heard the last horizontal sending key in North American rail service was right in that building, and we'd come to offer it our respects. I won't say that the whole atmosphere changed with my squeaky declamation, but at least one of them smiled a little, and another grunted “Shut down,” and we smiled and waved and thanked them again and again and edged back to our little rental piece of crap Dodge Aspen and were permitted to resume our lives uneaten.
October 10, 2007
The Bear Bryant I Knew: An Interview with John Underwood (Part 2) Posted by Allen Barra at 04:30 PM EST This is the conclusion of the interview that begins here. Probably the most famous coach–quarterback relationship in history was the one between Bear Bryant and Joe Namath.On the surface, they seemed to be total opposites—Bryant growing up dirt poor in an Arkansas town so small it wasn’t on the map, while Namath, the son of immigrant parents, grew up in a Pennsylvania steel mill town. Bryant was the full-time authoritarian, while Namath was supremely rebellious. Yet, they clicked, or at least they learned to. Why do you think they worked together so well?
The easy answer would be that Bryant, in his own words, considered Namath “the best athlete I ever saw,” and why wouldn’t a smart coach make every effort to get along with such a player? Bryant said he would have been a “damn fool” not to make such an accommodation. But it was a lot more complicated than that, and to understand the strength of the relationship (and the depth of it), you need to read Bryant’s account of one of the greatest “gut checks” he ever had—the time he suspended Namath from the Alabama team for the last two games of the 1963 season, both on national television. Even his coaches tried to talk him out of it. (Namath’s offense, having to do with team off-campus-conduct rules, was relatively minor by today’s standards.) But Bryant understood Namath’s background and his need for benevolent discipline. After a face-to-face confrontation, Joe supported the punishment, and the next year he was allowed back and quarterbacked Alabama to another national championship. Bryant then got him legal help in negotiating what at the time was the biggest pro contract in NFL history, a $400,000 deal with the New York Jets (Bryant’s salary, he liked to point out, was $12,000 that year). I think it revealing to note that they grew closer after Namath left school. He returned to the Alabama campus whenever he could, which usually meant getting on the blackboard with Bryant to discuss football tactics. They played golf together (Bryant, ever competitive, said he found ways to beat Namath with strokes), and when offered the Dolphins job, Bear purposely sought Namath’s advice. Namath even helped him recruit players. Bryant told of Joe talking one hotshot candidate out of a school that, among other things, offered him a new car. Namath told him playing for Bryant was more valuable.
Bear Bryant had a power to intimidate strong men—George Blanda, for instance, as you pointed out, and just about every sportswriter he encountered. Did you ever feel that he was trying to intimidate you? What was your initial reaction? And did your opinion of him change in the course of doing the book? The short answer, again, is no, he never intimidated me, but I qualify that by saying I don’t think he ever tried. For reasons I never examined (probably because our relationship was always so gratifying), he granted me a kind of familial respect,like one might a beloved if erratic younger sibling. I certainly saw the difference, though, and once even dared criticize it. I was in Tuscaloosa for a game and after a Wednesday practice walked with him into the press room to confront about a dozen journalists, dutifully huddled around an empty chair. Bryant, smoking a cigarette, sat down, and without looking at or acknowledging anyone, smoked it down to the butt, the ashes coagulating, intact. Total silence. Finally, Bear spoke: “Good practice today.” The writers scribbled, audibly, on their notepads. “Defensive backs need better coaching.” More scribbling. “Big game Saturday.” Scribble, scribble. And so it went. All told, I doubt more than five questions were asked from the floor. Finally Bryant said, “Anything else, men?” Nope. He thanked them and got up, and as we walked out together I said, “You call that a press conference?” He grinned. “That’s the way we do things in Alabama.” For sure, that kind of awe could be called intimidation. But I saw the other side, too—how candid he was with those he knew well enough to trust, writers like Benny Marshall and Fred Russell and Mickey Herskowitz and Alf Van Hoose. For me it came to a head with the partnership we forged in telling his story. He never refused an answer, never dodged an issue, never let a subject go unexamined. To use his words, that’s the way he did things in Alabama. At least when I knew him.
October 10, 2007
The Bear Bryant I Knew: An Interview with John Underwood (Part 1) Posted by Allen Barra at 03:15 PM EST Paul W. “Bear” Bryant, who died in January 1983, was by most reckonings the greatest college football coach of all time. To many Americans, though, he was more than that: He defined the ethos of a time long gone when college football existed for the good of coaches, players, and schools and not as an appendage to the professional game. Bryant’s 1974 autobiography, Bear: My Hard Life & Good Times as Alabama’s Head Coach, co-written with Sports Illustrated’s John Underwood (who also co-wrote the autobiography of another great American icon, Ted Williams, My Turn at Bat), is regarded as a modern sports classic of candid observations and gruff good humor. Bear has recently been republished by Triumph Books with a new introduction from Underwood and a CD of an interview with Bryant. Underwood spoke to us from his home in Florida about his relationship with Bryant and their collaboration on Bear. The interview is appearing in two parts. Bear Bryant seems to loom larger in college football today than he did a couple of years after his death in 1983. His image has grown stronger while that of his contemporaries such as Bud Wilkinson and Woody Hayes has faded. What do you think accounts for this? It’s difficult to summarize such an attribute, but I would have to say that what set Bryant apart from all the others (in any field) that I knew, know, or know of, was a presence that fairly demanded not just attention and respect but outright awe. He was tall, imposing, ruggedly handsome, and amazingly erudite in that countrified growl of a voice, and he filled any room that he walked into and any field of play that he graced. The effect was universal. Years after he quarterbacked for Bryant at Kentucky, George Blanda wrote that on seeing him for the first time he thought, “This must be what God looks like.” Blanda said when Bryant walked into a room, you wanted to stand up and applaud. In the new introduction I wrote for the book, I recalled a time when Bryant invited me to live with the Alabama team for a story I was doing for Sports Illustrated. It was before an important road game, and at the pregame breakfast on Saturday I sat next to an Alabama professor and department head who had also been invited along. (Bryant curried faculty support by doing smart things like that.) When he made his talk to the team, he barely spoke above the growl of a whisper that he activated whenever he wanted your utmost attention. The players leaned forward in their seats, eager to hear, and in so doing one accidentally tipped over a glass of water. The spill hitting the floor sounded like Niagara Falls. When Bryant finished, the professor turned to me and said, “If I could reach my students like that, I’d teach for nothing.” Bear Bryant and Vince Lombardi were practically exact contemporaries, with both ruling their respective worlds of college and professional football. But Lombardi left no disciples behind, while Bryant produced more successful coaches and assistant coaches than anyone in football history. Why do you think he was so successful at turning out acolytes? Respect, deeply felt and almost religiously applied on his coaches’ part, and an equal willingness on his to let them spread their wings (within reason, and within the context of staff unity). I write in the introduction of a time Dude Hennessey told of when practice had gone sour and a disgusted Bryant ordered his staff to meet in his office “first thing” the next morning. Not being sure what “first thing” meant, and not daring to ask, Hennessey slept on his office floor that night. Consistent, too, with his coaches was that they always seemed to enjoy going the extra mile, I suspect because Bryant disdained anything less. And despite what has been accurately characterized (even by him) as his own large ego, he appreciated them. I was driving with him across campus late one night after we’d been to dinner in Tuscaloosa, and as we passed the athletic offices he noticed a light on in an upstairs window. Matter-of-factly, without turning in my direction, he muttered, “It’s that damn Howard Schnellenberger up there making me look like a genius.” I heard him say almost the same thing another time about another lighted window of another assistant coach, Ken Donahue. I think they knew he felt that way, and learned from it. I think it made a huge difference.
October 9, 2007
A Dying Language II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:00 AM EST John Steele Gordon’s post on Morse code is startling and a bit distressing. It had not occurred to me that Morse could be dying until he mentioned the fact, which now seems blindingly obvious. Where (and why) would it have survived? I am, I suppose, just old enough be someone who for couple of weeks thought about getting a ham radio operator’s license. I very, very briefly learned Morse, although not well enough to remember much of it now, and considered getting a merit badge for this feat, before a very early departure from the Boy Scouts. I do remember my father bringing home what was called a short-wave radio, a thing not much smaller than a breadbox, painted what in the late 1950s seemed a very snappy white-streaked beige. It is still by the bed in the room I lived in as a child—I noticed it a couple of years ago—and it had, of course, tubes in it. Perhaps a decade ago, when visiting my mother, I turned it on, and I waited for a very long time while they warmed up. I do remember listening to the pips of Morse when it first arrived. I did not know Morse well enough to decode the messages and marveled that they might have come from anywhere in the world. If the information visible through the great glass plate on the front of the machine was any guide, and in retrospect I am not sure it was, some of them came from remarkably far away. They were to me what I dimly remember H. L. Mencken observing freight cars had once been to small boys growing up inland, and oceangoing ships to small boys who had seen a port—infinitely romantic evocations of both the breadth of the world and the fabulous yet suddenly conceivable prospect of getting into contact with a larger patch of it than one had yet seen. One might not have to learn the French the terrifying Mr. Nolan barked at us in grammar school; I somehow got the notion Morse would do. In books then written for boys, Morse got you out of bad jams—locked in a room by kidnappers, or in a German POW camp’s cooler, you softly rapped SOS (or some other message) against a wall, and good things happened, a reward for being prudent and resourceful enough to have learned Morse code. And as it happened, I knew that Morse really could get you out of places and into the much wider world. It had gotten my grandfather out of a tiny town in West Virginia, when he’d walked down a mountain and gotten a job as a telegrapher at the age of 13. From there he’d become a conductor on the B&O, and then a merchant seaman who had rounded the Horn—all because he’d known Morse code. I remember telling that story to the former editor of American Heritage Magazine, and I remember him whistling respectfully. “A lightning slinger!” he’d exclaimed, a phrase that did not make Morse code any less romantic in my twenties than it had been when I was half that age. Now it turns out that Morse is dying. The world suddenly (and I am sure irrationally) seems much smaller, and a deal less intoxicating.
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