November 6, 2007
Lincoln and the Margin of Error Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 03:15 PM EST Eighty years before political polling became a science, and three months before the 1856 election, Abraham Lincoln made his prediction—his projection, in the modern parlance—of the results in Illinois. Lincoln wasn’t running for anything that year, but the election renewed his political prospects, drawing him into a decision to join the nascent Republican Party. I am mindful of his 1856 conundrums during this 2007 election year, because they are the stuff of my book The Case of Abraham Lincoln, about which I am giving talks at the drop of a hat these days. The new party would help Lincoln, of course, but he helped it first, giving speeches all over Illinois that helped to shape its stance and spirit. In his travels, Lincoln was a walking-talking news-gathering machine, consuming newspapers and talking to practically everyone. He had the knack of weighting such comments according to who was uttering them and what was said to prompt the discussion. In August, he made his projection of the November results. Here is how close he came: Candidate: Actual result / Lincoln’s Prediction Buchanan (Dem.): 44.1 percent / 46.2 percent
Fremont (Rep.): 40.2 percent / 42.4 percent
Fillmore (Know-Nothing): 15.7 percent / 11.4 percent [Simplified from The Case of Abraham Lincoln: A Story of Adultery, Murder and the Making of Great President] Lincoln was a remarkable politician. And not a bad mathematician. In the end, his prediction was off by an average of only 2.9 percent—even less than the modern-day margin of error.
November 6, 2007
Pork and the Line-Item Veto IV Posted by Alexander Burns at 01:25 PM EST As one proponent of the line-item veto might have said: “Here we go again.” Mr. Gordon responds in several parts to my thoughts on the line-item veto. First, he takes issue with my use of the word “patently” to describe the unconstitutionality of the line-item veto. “The fact that three justices thought it constitutional makes the word ‘patently’ inappropriate here,” he writes. “Yesterday’s Supreme Court dissent has very often become tomorrow’s majority opinion, as Mr. Burns knows full well.” Indeed I do know this. However, if you look at the justices who dissented—Breyer, O’Connor, and Scalia, with the latter only dissenting in part—it seems likely that the anti–line item veto majority on the Court has actually gotten stronger over time. O’Connor has retired and was replaced by Justice Samuel Alito. Along with Chief Justice Roberts, the other new member of the Court, Alito does not strike me as a likely prospect for recruitment to Justice Breyer’s minority view. A 7 to 2 vote against the line-item veto is not what I would call a close-run thing, especially when you consider that Justice Scalia’s dissent was not exactly ringing. As for Mr. Gordon’s suggestion that President Bush and the Republican Senate leadership might not understand the Constitution—well, to paraphrase Francis Urquhart, you might very well think that, but I could not possibly comment. Second, Mr. Gordon speculates that Rudy Giuliani, who is a good prospect to lead the GOP ticket next year, actually opposed the line-item veto in his capacity as New York mayor, but not as a matter of personal conviction. This is demonstrably incorrect: Giuliani has continued to argue that the line-item veto is unconstitutional long after leaving the office of the mayor. But don’t take my word for it, just ask this guy. Third, Mr. Gordon proposes an alternative means by which the President could cut down on pork: by reviving the power of impoundment. I don’t know enough about this matter to judge whether it’s a good idea, so I’ll stick to the question of the line-item veto as such. I imagine, though I do not know, that all the concerns I raised earlier about expanded presidential power would likely apply. I’m still interested to hear Mr. Gordon’s thoughts on that subject. Finally, Mr. Gordon clarifies that when he “referred to a new contract with America, [he] did not mean simply the line-item veto but a whole panoply of reforms, most of them congressional rules, not laws.” He also argues that this “hasn’t been tried yet,” and “invite[s me] to take a look at the ridicule heaped on the first contract with America in 1994 by the mainstream media, on precisely the grounds that the voters didn’t care, before the election of that year. The ridicule stopped on Election Day.” I’m not sure what media scorn Mr. Gordon is referring to—this New York Times article, for example, seems perfectly respectful—but I would actually challenge the premise of Mr. Gordon’s argument here. Not only would I submit that a latter-day contract with America is unlikely to gain many votes next year, but I’d observe that it’s not really clear how many votes the original contract actually won for the GOP. According to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll right before the 1994 election, just 31 percent of voters even knew of Newt Gingrich’s magnum opus. There was indeed a “political tsunami” that year, but whether earmarks and pork had anything to do with it is hardly a settled question. To end on a high note, it seems Mr. Gordon and I agree about at least one thing: I should have directly cited the blog post I was quoting when I mentioned a previous comment of his. Some might very well think of this as a minor, even frivolous correction, but I generally try to set high standards for conduct in blogging and I regret my error.
November 5, 2007
Pork and the Line-Item Veto III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:00 PM EST Mr. Burns should have made clear when he quoted me as writing, “There’s only one problem: It is patently unconstitutional,” that I was talking about another matter entirely (congressional representation for Washington D.C.), not the line-item veto. To be sure, the Supreme Court threw out the 1996 act that gave President Clinton a line-item veto, by a vote of 6 to 3, for reasons Mr. Burns elucidated. The fact that three justices thought it constitutional makes the word “patently” inappropriate here. Justice Breyer’s dissent, which was joined in part by Justices O’Connor and Scalia, is worth reading. It is a classic Hamiltonian argument of implied powers, distinguishing between things that are explicitly forbidden by the Constitution (such as granting titles of nobility) and means on which the Constitution is silent (such as chartering a bank, in Hamilton’s case) to a legitimate end. Yesterday’s Supreme Court dissent has very often become tomorrow’s majority opinion, as Mr. Burns knows full well. Mr. Burns writes, “President Bush asked Congress to enact the line-item veto in his 2006 State of the Union Address, and Senators Bill Frist and Mitch McConnell moved to comply.” Unless President Bush and the Republican leadership in the Senate last year are in some alternative constitutional universe, this too would indicate that the line-item veto, in one form or another, cannot be “patently” unconstitutional. Further, he writes that Rudy Giuliani was the man who initiated the lawsuit that resulted in the Supreme Court’s decision. Indeed he was, but I think it was really the mayor of New York more than Rudy Giuliani who initiated the suit. If Mr. Giuliani gets elected to the Presidency next year, I’ll be very surprised indeed if he doesn’t have a constitutional epiphany regarding the line-item veto. That veto could take many forms and be limited in many ways, some of which might have passed muster with the Supreme Court majority of 10 years ago. One way would be simply to repeal the provision of the 1974 Budget Control Act (perhaps the mostly wildly misnamed act in the history of Congress) that forbids Presidents to impound funds rather than spend them. President Nixon—in his desperate last days as President—signed the bill but stated that he thought that provision unconstitutional. I agree, as I see no constitutional requirement that the President spend the money that Congress appropriates, while there is a flat prohibition against “money being drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law . . .” As far as I know it has never been tested in court. There is nothing to stop a President today from asserting the same idea and impounding funds, inviting a lawsuit. I bet he would win it. Of course impoundments are a greater power than a line-item veto. The latter could be overridden by Congress, the former cannot be. I did not label Congressional spending corrupt; I labeled pork corrupt. And it is. Forcing the Navy, say, to buy ships it doesn’t want and can’t use as a favor to some company located in a particular congressional district is corrupt, however legally the appropriation is enacted. It is corrupt because it is spending public money for private gain. When I referred to a new contract with America, I did not mean simply the line-item veto but a whole panoply of reforms, most of them congressional rules, not laws. Requiring that committees reconciling differing versions of a bill not add new spending, for instance. Requiring earmarks to be publicly posted on the Internet so that the people can see them in the light of day in time to form an opinion. Forbidding non-germane amendments. Requiring all political donations to be posted on the Internet the same day the money is deposited into the legislator’s campaign bank account, with full disclosure of who is actually giving the money. There are dozens more that are obvious to anyone whose first interest is not getting reelected to Congress. Mr. Burns writes, “If this is an issue that voters currently care about, I don’t think we’ve seen any evidence of it yet.” That is because it hasn’t been tried yet. But corruption was a major issue in the 2006 election (far more potent than Iraq, in my opinion). I would invite Mr. Burns to take a look at the ridicule heaped upon the first contract with America in 1994 by the mainstream media, on precisely the grounds that the voters didn’t care, before the election of that year. The ridicule stopped on Election Day when one of the great political tsunamis in American history swept the Democrats out of power in Congress (and practically everywhere else).
November 5, 2007
Pork and the Line-Item Veto II Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:40 AM EST Mr. Gordon addresses a major political subject, wasteful spending, in his post this morning, and suggests that the President of the United States ought to have a line-item veto to use on spending bills. He argues that a line-item veto would curb pork-barrel congressional appropriations, and that any party “willing to seize the issue . . . would do very well next November.” To quote Mr. Gordon, “There’s only one problem: It is patently unconstitutional.” His post does not go very far into the history of the line-item veto, but we’ve actually seen this movie before and we know how it ends. In 1996 Congress granted the White House a line-item veto, only to see it struck down by a district court, and then, in June of 1998, by the Supreme Court in Clinton v. City of New York. As John Paul Stevens observed in his decision, the Constitution explains how bills become law and how the President can veto them, and it’s quite obvious that the line-item veto isn’t part of the plan. Any politician who wants to enact a line-item veto, therefore, must be prepared to amend the Constitution, not just pass a bill. Constitutional obstacles aside, is the line-item veto a good idea? I have serious doubts. Despite Mr. Gordon’s faith in the President as “the only [official] without parochial interests,” and his rather strange assertion that the President is “the only one who looks at the budget . . . as a whole,” I am not so sure that this enhancement of presidential power would not alter the political process in an adverse way. Right now, the President’s more limited veto is an essential mechanism of our balanced government. On the one hand, under this system, Congress must consider the President’s preferences before passing legislation in order to avoid provoking a veto. On the other hand, legislators can also force the President to compromise with their priorities. Members of Congress can effectively override the President’s preferences by passing bills that combine initiatives he dislikes with initiatives he judges essential. If the President wants to get his, he has to make sure Congress gets theirs. It is clear that there are problems with this system, and Mr. Gordon outlines some of them, but it is equally clear that amending it with a line-item veto would rather dramatically enhance the President’s power in relation to that of Congress. Mr. Gordon is pretty comfortable labeling congressional spending “corruption,” but the overwhelming majority of legislative appropriations are perfectly legal, if often undesirable. Perhaps these appropriations are so out-of-control that it would be worth expanding the Presidency in order to restrict them. But I would be uneasy about the unintended consequences of such an act. One last note: As I quoted above, Mr. Gordon suggests that the line-item veto could be a powerful element of a reformist political platform, and that any party that supports it could reap benefits at the polls. Consider, though, that President Bush asked Congress to enact the line-item veto in his 2006 State of the Union Address, and Senators Bill Frist and Mitch McConnell moved to comply. But their party got wiped out in the midterm elections that year. Right now, the leading Republican candidate for President, Rudy Giuliani, is also the man who initiated the lawsuit that ultimately stripped Bill Clinton of his line-item veto. If this is an issue that voters currently care about, I don’t think we’ve seen any evidence of it yet.
November 5, 2007
Pork and the Line-Item Veto Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:25 AM EST If ever there was a textbook example of why we need a line-item veto, the water projects bill that President Bush vetoed in its entirety on Friday is it. The bill funds the Army Corps of Engineers, which currently has a project backlog of $38 billion. The Corps requested $4.9 billion for what it identified as necessary projects for this year—dams that needed immediate attention, for instance. But construction projects are dear to the hearts of members of Congress. They get to boast of bringing home the bacon, to cut ribbons at groundbreaking ceremonies, and, all too often, to get the project named for themselves, a common practice I find obscene. So the water projects bill is always as full of pork as a bratwurst. The bill as passed by the House funded $14 billion in projects, almost three times what the Corps asked for. The Senate funded $15 billion. Once a bill passes both houses, it usually needs to go to a committee made up of members of both houses to reconcile the differences between the two versions. The final bill is then voted on by each house and sent to the White House if it passes, as it almost always does. When the water projects bill went to the committee this year, a funny thing happened. Since the House authorized $14 billion and the Senate $15 billion, one might think that the final bill would have authorized, say, $14.5 billion. But welcome to Washington: It authorized $23 billion. In other words, $8 billion of pure pork was added to the already pork-laden bill behind closed doors with no debate whatever. The President’s veto is almost certain to be overridden. Pork, if nothing else in Washington, is a splendidly bipartisan affair. Meanwhile, The New York Times yesterday reported that the military appropriations bill is also loaded with pork. The House version has 1,337 earmarks, not a single one requested by the Pentagon, which is not a branch of the federal government famous for self-restraint in the appropriations process. The cost would be $3 billion. The Senate has added $5 billion more. (The Times also points out, in great detail, how much of the money in these earmarks ends up being spent on lobbying for further earmarks and the fact that the companies favored by congressmen and senators to receive earmarks have a funny habit of seeing that the solons in Washington get handsome campaign contributions.) So the next time you hear a member of Congress decry the federal deficit, don’t believe a word of it. The Army Corps of Engineers requested $4.9 billion. Congress is cramming down its throat $23 billion. If the military appropriations bill pork is added in, that’s $26.1 billion over and above what was requested. That amounts to 15.6 percent of the federal deficit in fiscal 2007 just in those two bills. Much of this grotesque corruption (not necessarily illegal, of course, although ask Duke Cunningham and Bob Ney how they like their accommodations in the federal penal system) stems from the early 1970s. Members of Congress, to be sure, have always been willing to spend the public’s money to ensure their own reelections, but the ending of the presidential power to impound funds (i.e., refuse to spend them) and the breakdown of the seniority system in Congress caused a collapse of discipline. In the seniority system, the senior member of the majority party on each committee was automatically the committee chairman. Thus he didn’t have to cater to other members of the committee in order to be elected chairman. He could hand out pork judiciously, if that’s the word. Once the seniority system ended, however, Congressional logrolling (you vote for my project and I’ll vote for yours) became more and more rampant, until it spun completely out of control in the last few years. A line-item veto, in which particular appropriations could be struck from a bill before the President signs it, would end this at a stroke. As, I’ve said before, good ideas spread, and 43 states have given their governors the line-item veto. (The Confederate Constitution, by the way, also gave the executive the line-item veto.) The President is the only one in Washington elected by the whole country (along with the constitutionally powerless Vice President), so he is the only one without parochial interests, the only one who looks at the budget, and the national interest, as a whole. Making him a major player in budget negotiations, which he isn’t now, would go a long way toward establishing fiscal discipline. With the public’s disgust at corruption in the last Congress, which resulted in the Republicans losing their majorities after 12 years, and the ratings of the current Congress, which make President Bush wildly popular in comparison, I would guess that the party willing to seize the issue and make a “contract with America” that would offer specifics on how they would bring fundamental reform and transparency to Congress would do very well next November.
November 4, 2007
Paul Tibbets IV Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:20 PM EST I posted on Paul Tibbets and Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons before reading Alexander Burns’s post on the same topic. Mr. Burns writes that “part of the reason why the President’s call was so difficult was because he did have choices, both politically and morally. It’s easy to frame the debate over Hiroshima in binary terms—should Truman have used nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or left them unused altogether? These, however, were not the only options available to the man in the Oval Office. He could have chosen other targets, or issued a warning first, or not dropped the second bomb, or taken any number of alternative courses. I’m not saying America, or the world, would be better off today if Truman had done so. But if one wants to make an effective assessment of the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it makes sense to consider the full range of Truman’s options, and the painful degree of freedom he actually had.” I think much of this is true, and wisely said. Truman had choices other than using both bombs or using neither. What about the choices Mr. Burns mentions? If Truman had attacked Hiroshima but waited longer before attacking Nagasaki, he would still have used a nuclear weapon against a civilian population, and I don’t think he would have escaped much if any of the opprobrium he has since suffered (and Tibbets, who attacked only Hiroshima, would presumably be the object of the same amount of vituperation he has suffered in history as it did happen). Attacking a city with a nuclear weapon is sometimes said to violate one of the principles of just-war theory: It is necessarily indiscriminate. Hiroshima had significant war industry, and there were military camps located nearby, including Field Marshal Shunroku Hata’s 2nd General Army Headquarters, which was responsible for the defense of southern Japan. Hiroshima was also a communications center, storage point, and assembly area for troops. Conventional bombers attacking these targets would have killed a lot of civilians—at least one conventional air raid (the attack on Tokyo on March 9, 1945) killed more people than died in the attack on Hiroshima. But if sufficient restrictions had been made on their use, conventional bombers attacking those legitimate targets in and around Hiroshima would not have killed as many civilians as a nuclear weapon had to kill when used against a city. Another criterion used to judge a military act under just war theory is proportionality: The force used must be proportional to the wrong endured and to the possible good that may come. An earlier end to the war in the Pacific, compared with the costs of later endings, may meet the criterion of proportionality, as my previous post suggested. In any case, I have never met anyone, or read anyone, who seemed prepared to justify Hiroshima, and do so sincerely, but was enraged by the odiousness of attacking Nagasaki. What about a warning that we were about to use a nuclear weapon? The book I linked to in my previous posts argues, I think persuasively, that a warning would have been a good idea but would almost certainly not have affected Japanese decisions. That means that a warning would have been prudent in forestalling accusations of American criminality but in all likelihood would have saved no civilian lives. So while I have never heard a good argument against issuing a warning, I think that conclusion, if you accept it, somewhat lowers the moral stakes when we assess that particular alternative. What about choosing other targets? A demonstration shot, with one of the only two weapons we had, might have significantly reduced the probability of bringing the war to the earliest possible conclusion. Effective use of one of the two weapons, on the other hand, almost certainly risked the charge of a criminal lack of discrimination. So while I agree that Truman had many choices, I am not sure he had many if any prudent choices that would have spared a Japanese city and its civilian population.
November 3, 2007
Paul Tibbets III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:50 PM EST John Steele Gordon posted yesterday about the death of Paul W. Tibbets, who piloted the Enola Gay, the B-29 that at Harry Truman’s order dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Mr. Gordon notes, of the resulting controversy, that “Truman really had no political choice. I think he also had no moral choice. The roughly 110,000 deaths from the two atomic bombs is a ghastly number. But it is a tiny fraction of the deaths Truman had every reason to believe would result from the alternative. Many of those deaths would have been American servicemen, of whom President Truman was commander in chief.” I am glad Mr. Gordon posted this, because I think it is true, but I also think his tactful remarks risk understating the moral pressure an ideal observer might have felt to use a nuclear weapon at Hiroshima, because while many of the lives Truman may have saved were American, most of them were not. The author of an interesting recent book on the morality of World War II, which I reviewed I reviewed on this website last year, offers several very professional estimates of how many lives the use of nuclear weapons saved; his most conservative estimate is that between 850,000 and 1.8 million lives were spared by the decision to drop the bombs, and that most of those lives were not American. I should underscore that this conservative estimate is very conservative indeed. In 1945 between 100,000 and 250,000 Asian noncombatants were dying every month, and a blockade of Japan that lasted through 1946, one of the most likely alternatives to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, could have killed as many as 10 million Japanese (the inhabitants of Tokyo were down to 800 calories a day in early 1946, and MacArthur brought in 800,000 tons of food to avert famine) So most of the lives Truman probably saved by dropping the bomb were, like the lives he took, Asian civilian lives, and many of them were the lives of enemy civilians, rather than American soldiers. Soldiers, by one way of reckoning, assume the risks of war when they take up their trade. By contrast, no Japanese civilian had voted for war, and very few of those who would have died in the famine, or the invasion, had committed atrocities. By one way of reckoning, a war leader has a special obligation to spare enemy civilians. Paul Tibbets probably saved, at Harry Truman’s orders, a staggering number of innocent lives. It is a little odd that almost no one says this in public, whereas the obscenely stupid phrase “Hiroshima and Auschwitz,” with its implied moral equivalence, is on many lips, and at the tip of many pens. Truman may not have long considered those Asian civilian lives when he made his decision, but we have to consider them, because we know things Truman did not, and we certainly ought to consider those lives when assessing Tibbets. Instead of being praised, in our day Tibbets is often explicitly damned, sometimes by people of imperfect moral standing. Assume, for the sake of the argument, that the victim’s of Hiroshima are the victims of simple and wholly vicious mass murder, the decision to kill them having been made for the worst of reasons. That assumption is made very frequently; as a specimen, Tibbets’s obituary in The New York Times notes that “while he was deputy chief of the United States military supply mission in India in 1965, a pro-Communist newspaper denounced him as “the world’s greatest killer.” This is a curiously self-abnegating claim for a pro-Communist newspaper to make, given Stalin’s record (a reasonable though conservative modern estimate of deaths from Stalin’s repression, leaving out all famine deaths) is four million. Of course, by 1965 Stalin had been dead for more than a decade, and perhaps the Indian pro-Communist paper meant “greatest living killer.” Well, Mao was still ticking along in 1965, and modern estimates of what is euphemistically called surplus mortality under Mao get to 70 million. If that high-end estimate is off by an exponent it would still make a pro-Communist newspaper unduly modest when awarding Tibbets the greatest-killer prize. The point is not that everyone does it, because everyone doesn’t. The point is that Tibbets probably saved more lives than anyone in history ever has by a comparably swift and discrete action.
November 3, 2007
Paul Tibbets II Posted by Alexander Burns at 07:55 PM EST John Steele Gordon notes the passing of Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., the commander on the mission to bomb Hiroshima. Tibbets’s obituary reminds me of this article by Robert Kaplan, in the September Atlantic, about the B-2 bomber, “The Plane That Would Bomb Iran.” The piece is behind a subscription wall, but it’s also posted, perhaps illegally, here. One of the featured characters in Kaplan’s narrative is Paul W. Tibbets IV, a B-2 pilot who is the grandson of the Enola Gay officer. For those familiar with Kaplan’s writing, the article is predictable. But it contains a poignant sketch of the Tibbets family, including Paul Tibbets, Jr., whom his grandson calls “the ultimate warrior . . . the mission was everything, which meant his family suffered.” A brief thought on Tibbets’s most famous mission. It seems to me that there is a growing consensus that using the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the right thing for Harry Truman to do. I’m not necessarily in disagreement with this consensus, but I’m also not totally comfortable with this position as Mr. Gordon presents it. “Truman really had no political choice,” he writes. “I think he also had no moral choice. The roughly 110,000 deaths from the two atomic bombs is a ghastly number. But it is a tiny fraction of the deaths Truman had every reason to believe would result from the alternative.” Truman’s decision was excruciating, and I envy no leader faced with a similar choice. But part of the reason why the President’s call was so difficult was because he did have choices, both politically and morally. It’s easy to frame the debate over Hiroshima in binary terms—should Truman have used nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or left them unused altogether? These, however, were not the only options available to the man in the Oval Office. He could have chosen other targets, or issued a warning first, or not dropped the second bomb, or taken any number of alternative courses. I’m not saying America, or the world, would be better off today if Truman had done so. But if one wants to make an effective assessment of the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it makes sense to consider the full range of Truman’s options, and the painful degree of freedom he actually had.
November 2, 2007
The Genius of Raymond Chandler: An Interview with Judith Freeman (Part 2) Posted by Allen Barra at 01:00 PM EST This is the conclusion of the interview that begins here. So many fine actors have played Philip Marlowe over the years—Dick Powell, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Montgomery, James Garner, Robert Mitchum, Powers Boothe, and James Caan in TV productions, even Elliott Gould. Chandler, who died in 1959, lived long enough to see Powell, Bogey, and Montgomery play the part. Which was his favorite, and who else would he liked to have seen play Marlowe? And—I presume you’ve seen most of the Marlowes—who is your own favorite? Chandler initially had Cary Grant in mind as the actor he felt was suited to the role of Marlowe, but that was probably Chandler projecting his own image of himself as the well-dressed, good-looking debonair guy—and as a young man Chandler was that. He looks incredibly elegant and handsome in a picture taken in L.A. in the twenties showing him standing under a tree in profile. Cary Grant never played Marlowe, and given the Marlowes we’ve seen, it’s kind of hard to imagine him in the role of hard-boiled dick. As far as I know, Chandler never weighed in on Robert Montgomery’s performance for the record. He is on record as saying that he thought Dick Powell (in Murder My Sweet, an adaptation of Farewell, My Lovely) made the best Marlowe, but I’m a little uncertain about when exactly he made that comment—before or after he saw Bogart in The Big Sleep. (The Big Sleep came out in 1946, two years after Murder, My Sweet.) He definitely appreciated Bogart’s performance, though to my knowledge he never actually said he thought Bogart was the best Marlowe. What he said was that Bogart was “the genuine article”—so much better than any other tough-guy actors that he made bums of the Ladds and the Powells, and perhaps that can be interpreted as crowning him as the ultimate Marlowe. Or it could be an indication of Chandler’s appreciation of a film performance. Bogart, he said, could be tough without a gun, which Powell never could. But I think Chandler was really talking about Bogart’s acting ability, that he was the genuine article as an actor. He recognized that Bogart was a great, better than Powell, and he brought a charged quality to the role, even though he was quite wrong physically for the part. It was the quality of Bogart’s performance, that sense of humor that contained a grating, rather misogynistic undertone of contempt, especially for the women in the story, that Chandler found compelling. All that Bogart had to do to dominate a scene, he said, was to enter it. In contrast, Dick Powell was a much softer guy, more ordinary, a less cynical, less harsh and jaded Marlowe. He seems more human in many ways, more vulnerable, and you see this in his scenes with women. He doesn’t snarl at Claire Trevor, who plays Mrs. Grayle (alias Velma), or try to outwit her with force, but sort of bats the ball around with her, sometimes uncertainly plays cat and mouse, and he almost gets a naughty schoolboy-caught-in-the-act look on his face when he’s caught staring at her legs. He was closer, I think, to the true Marlowe, to the spirit of the man that Chandler created on the page and who arose out of his own fantasies. But I can understand how he’d be seduced by the brilliant Marlowe that Bogart created. It’s a tough call for me as to which Marlowe I prefer, but I’d have to say that the Dick Powell Marlowe is my favorite because I feel he’s the truest, closest incarnation of the literary Marlowe, though I loved Bogart in The Big Sleep and laughed out loud in scene after scene and was mesmerized by his acting. I also loved Robert Mitchum in a later adaptation of Farewell, My Lovely, not because he convinced me he was Marlowe but because he was Robert Mitchum, filling the screen with his great brooding presence. The Marlowe I least liked was Robert Montgomery, in Lady in the Lake, who, even though he may have been the father of that perky Bewitched Elizabeth Montgomery, made a really nasty Marlowe, so snarling and misogynistic I could hardly watch him. I thought Elliott Gould was great, the first actor to capture that sense of Marlowe’s sexual ambivalence, but he never became Marlowe for me, he was always Elliott Gould, and the completely changed ending of the movie had him behaving in ways Marlowe never would. It’ll be interesting to see what Clive Owen does with the role, in an adaptation of Chandler’s Trouble Is My Business, to be directed by Frank Miller. In any case, it’s clear that Marlowe will never die, and that he provides a very malleable suit of armor for an actor to slip into. Chandler once wrote a letter to the effect that “Over there [England] I’m an author, over here just a writer of mysteries.” Why do you suppose it was that British critics discovered Chandler so much earlier than their America counterparts? The rest of that quote in the letter is “Don’t know why,” meaning Chandler himself couldn’t figure out why he was viewed so differently in England from America. And I don’t know why either. He knew a lot more about England than I do, and he couldn’t figure it out. But it’s possible that Americans felt defensive about how their society was being portrayed, didn’t like the fact that those early Chandler novels depicted a pretty corrupt culture, from cops to politicians, whereas the British were fascinated by the sordidness of that sun-filled world that had been so hyped. It could also be the puritanical streak coming out: Some American critics talked about the “nastiness” of the characters, how no one except Marlowe was decent, and the language was so bad. Even the critic for The New York Times complained that the publisher had to resort to the dash in The Big Sleep, so degenerate was the language, and complained that Chandler had created a world of moral defectives—pornographers and blackmailers and homosexuals and gangsters. This sounds so prudish now, but then Americans are kind of prudish compared with Europeans. Can you imagine a European politician draping a nude statue before he’d stand in front of it for a press conference? Could be the British were just so much more curious about these remarkable books, so uninvested in a self-serving image, more interested in the otherness of the settings, and more willing to be amused by a really brilliant writer.
You introduce an idea about Chandler that few have ever dared to investigate, namely the possibility that he was homosexual. No doubt this is going to enrage a great many of his long-time fans, but I think your case is well made. Can you summarize? Actually I’m not the first to raise the question of homosexuality in connection with both Chandler and his work, and specifically Philip Marlowe. The subject came up in both Frank McShane’s and Tom Hiney’s biographies, and also in essays written before and after Chandler’s death, including a very moving one by his close friend Natasha Spender, wife of the poet Stephen Spender, who knew him very well at the end of his life and whom I interviewed for my book. But you are right in saying that I look at the subject more closely than others have, because I felt it had a place in the discussion of his marriage. The truth is we’ll never know if Chandler harbored homosexual inclinations. I found nothing in my research to indicate he ever had a relationship with a man. What is clearer is that both Chandler and his creation Marlowe harbored very complex feelings when it came to women (and men) and their sexuality. There’s an anxiety, a feeling they are sliding along a slippery slope of attraction and repulsion, mistrust and anxiety, a kind of boyish prurience as well as an impossibly strict code of morality, in a world where women are the villains and men long for friendship. I’m not going to repeat all the arguments I make in the book, or the discoveries that came from my readings and interviews; they’re there for the reader to discover. Any discussion of an iconic hard-boiled writer, and an iconic male literary figure, that even dares to bring up the question of homosexuality is bound to raise certain hackles, but I like to believe that I handle the subject with a certain sensitivity and respect, and I stress that there’s no clear answer to the question.
November 2, 2007
Paul Tibbets Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:30 AM EST Paul Tibbets died yesterday at the age of 92. He was a retired brigadier general in the Air Force, and his death would have been of interest chiefly to family and friends, except for one mission in a long military career. That one mission, however, earned him a reefer on the front page of the New York Times. On August 6, 1945, the 30-year-old Tibbets, then a colonel, commanded Enola Gay (named for his mother), the B-29 that carried an atomic bomb to Hiroshima and dropped it. When the bomb exploded 1,890 feet over the city, it killed instantly somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 human beings. Thousands more died later of radiation poisoning and radiation-induced cancers.
Tibbets was a bomber pilot (one of the very best, by all accounts, which is why he was chosen for this mission) and he did what bomber pilots do in wartime, having received a lawful order. Therefore he is purely symbolic, no more responsible for the bomb or it use than any of the other eleven men on board Enola Gay. It is interesting that while I have known of Paul Tibbets all my life, I haven’t the faintest idea who was the pilot on the B-29 that dropped the second bomb, on Nagasaki, three days later.
And yet a powerful symbol he was. He requested that there be no funeral service or headstone placed on his grave, for he did not want to be a locus for antiwar demonstrations. History, like life, is not fair.
It will never be settled whether President Truman (who was responsible) was right to order the use of the atomic bomb, for if history is not fair, it is also not mathematics. Different people can have different opinions. As for me, I think he was right, especially given the knowledge he had at the time. The Battle of Okinawa had been horrendous. The island is only 454 square miles, yet capturing it had taken from April 1st to June 21st and had cost the lives of 11,260 American soldiers, sailors, and marines, along with 33,769 wounded. A total of 36 Allied ships were sunk and 368 damaged; 763 American aircraft were destroyed. About 110,000 Japanese were killed. Extrapolating from Okinawa, everyone thought the conquest of the main islands of Japan would be a bloodbath for both sides quite unprecedented in history. Further, both the country at large and the armed forces were very war-weary. The victorious American forces in Europe were, to put it mildly, unhappy at the prospect of being transferred to the Pacific.
Had Truman decided not to use the bomb, one wonders what would have been the public reaction afterwards when it was learned that he’d had a weapon that might have ended the war in a week (which, after all, it did) with no American casualties at all. Truman really had no political choice. I think he also had no moral choice. The roughly 110,000 deaths from the two atomic bombs is a ghastly number. But it is a tiny fraction of the deaths Truman had every reason to believe would result from the alternative. Many of those deaths would have been American servicemen, of whom President Truman was commander in chief.
When Paul Tibbets landed Enola Gay back on Tinian, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s highest decoration for valor after the Medal of Honor. As far as I’m concerned, he deserved it. And now he deserves to rest in peace.
November 2, 2007
The Genius of Raymond Chandler: An Interview with Judith Freeman (Part 1) Posted by Allen Barra at 10:00 AM EST Raymond Chandler is the most influential mystery writer since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. His leading advocates, including W. H. Auden, Clive James, and even, grudgingly, Edmund Wilson, have argued that he transcends the genre of detective fiction and that his books should be simply considered literature. No one denies that Chandler’s influence on popular culture has been enormous: The Big Sleep, the Bogart-Bacall vehicle directed by Howard Hawks, is still regarded (along with John Huston’s film from Dashiell Hammett’s book The Maltese Falcon) as one of the two greatest American detective movies ever made, and Chandler’s books and film scripts (most notably for Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train) helped define the concept of film noir, which continues to influence writers as diverse as the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami and the graphic novelist Frank Miller, who is set to direct a film version of Chandler’s Trouble Is My Business. Judith Freeman’s The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, which comes out November 6 from Pantheon, is the first book to examine in depth the strange relationship between Chandler and his much older wife, Cissy, as well as their peripatetic life together in and around Los Angeles. Ms. Freeman answered questions for us from her home in California. The interview is appearing in two parts. Raymond Chandler has been imitated, parodied, and practically plagiarized for so long that his style of detective story has practically become a cliché. Yet somehow the work not only survives but stays fresh. Just about all his books have been in print continuously since they were published. What do you think it is about Chandler that endures? The short answer is his brilliance, which is a multi-faceted thing. There’s his humor for starters. As Christopher Isherwood observed, There’s fun in Chandler. He’s an immensely amusing writer, and readers connect with that wit. And yet he says some profound things about American society and the corruption in its institutions, how we’re a big, rough, rich, appetent society, and crime is the price we pay for our gluttony. His books contain that quality he most valued in writing, namely vitality, and it is a hard thing to fake if you don’t have it, which is why so many imitators fail. But in the end I think it’s Marlowe that gives the books their real staying power. Philip Marlowe is an enigma. He says so himself at one point. He’s vulnerable, like us, and we feel his sad good-naturedness. He’s an iconic America male, just as Marilyn Monroe was an iconic American female. And this is interesting because Chandler once said that only he and Marilyn Monroe had managed to reach all the brows—high-brow, middle-brow, and low-brow. This is another reason why Chandler endures. He reaches across the intellectual spectrum with stories that still seem fresh in their telling. When I was at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival two years ago the writer whose name was evoked most often when taking about L.A. was Raymond Chandler. This is odd because Chandler certainly had mixed feelings about Southern California in general and Los Angeles in particular. I think one of his most famous putdowns was that L.A. had “all the personality of a paper cup.” Yet he had many opportunities to move and never did. How would you sum up his strange on-again, off-again affair with the City of Angels? He had a definite love-hate relationship with L.A. I think he loved it when he first arrived, in 1913, and it must have been a pretty idyllic place then, very different from London, the city where he’d spent much of his childhood. He really took to driving and loved automobiles. But L.A. was a place that got despoiled quite rapidly, and the banality and lack of taste in a population composed increasingly of transplanted Midwesterners—the so called hog-and-hominy crowd—began to disgust him. On the one hand, you had religious nuts of every stripe, and on the other, you had bunko artists bilking the ignorant rubes, as well as gangsters, bad cops, and corrupt politicians. Smog arrived, and stupid fads, and objects with built-in obsolescence. After a while L.A became Paradise Despoiled for him, a grotesque and impossible place to live. California, he said, was the department store state—everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else. He lost it as a place to set his fiction, because he had to either love a city or hate it to write about it, or maybe both, he said, “like a woman.” Eventually L.A. bored him. It became “just a tired old whore” to him. Still, he put it on the literary map. His relationship with L.A. was very symbiotic. The city gave him his material, and in return he gave it a lasting identity. No one wrote better about L.A. or captured more of its unique essence. What were Cissy’s feelings about her husband’s writing? Was she supportive or did she feel, as many of Chandler’s contemporaries did, that he should try to write something more “serious”? Chandler claimed his wife never liked what he wrote. He said her advice to him was to quit writing out of the corner of his mouth. What did she mean by that? I think she meant, drop that tough-guy stuff. Loose the slang and prison talk and violence, write a story that depicts a softer, more romantic world, not one filled with gangsters and crooks and rotten blondes. We should be glad he didn’t take her advice.
November 2, 2007
Waterboarding, Then and Now Posted by Alexander Burns at 08:00 AM EST About 10 days ago, Fred Smoler and I had an exchange about torture and the moral rectitude of the American government. I argued that the executive branch’s current endorsement of what is effectively torture indicates “some kind of decay in the moral compass of the American government.” Mr. Smoler took issue with this characterization, suggesting that torture “isn’t, and cannot be [the only issue] if we are assessing moral compasses in wartime.” Mr. Smoler also observed that Americans used torture as a counterinsurgency tactic in the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century. Readers who followed this exchange with any degree of interest might direct their attention to this article from Politico.com. The self-described “amateur historian” Daniel A. Rezneck details an event from the U.S. effort in the Philippines, in which Theodore Roosevelt overrode the decision of a court-martial and dismissed a general accused of permitting torture. President Roosevelt declared at the time: “Great as the provocation has been in dealing with foes who habitually resort to treachery, murder and torture against our men, nothing can justify or will be held to justify the use of torture or inhuman conduct of any kind on the part of the American Army.” Rezneck cites Edmund Morris’s description of the episode as one that garnered Roosevelt “‘universal praise’ from Democrats . . . and from Republicans, who said that he had ‘upheld the national honor.’” In order to avoid reopening a blog debate that’s gone cold, I won’t claim that TR’s example highlights a certain, shall we say, ethical degeneracy on the part of the present-day American state. Rezneck’s article does make me wonder, though, if we’ll ever again be a society where the President can win bipartisan plaudits for forcefully opposing torture.
November 1, 2007
The Melting Pot—2007 Version Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:00 AM EST Some enterprising genealogist recently unearthed the fact that Barack Obama is the ninth great-grandson of a Maryland immigrant named Mareen Duvall. Duvall, a French Huguenot, was a classic American success story. Arriving in Maryland in the 1650s as an indentured servant, by the time of his death in 1694 he was one of the largest landowners in Anne Arundel County. He had 12 children, so he has a vast descendancy. There is even something called the Society of Mareen Duvall Descendants. One of those descendants turns out to be . . . Vice President Dick Cheney, who is Senator Obama’s ninth cousin once removed. Also related to Senator Obama through Mareen Duvall are the Duchess of Windsor, Harry Truman (twice, thanks to a cousin-cousin marriage some generations back), and the actor Robert Duvall. Oh, and me too. Mareen Duvall is my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, making me a ninth cousin of the Vice President and a ninth cousin once removed of the senator. It is amazing how genealogically interconnected Americans are. Of the 42 men who have been President, only 15 have no known relationships to other Presidents. Franklin Roosevelt was related to no fewer than 16 other Presidents, the two Bushes to 15, Taft and Coolidge to 14. Part of the reason for that is that Roosevelt, the Bushes, Taft, and Coolidge have many New England ancestors and thus are descended from the mere 25,000 or so immigrants who came in the Great Migration from 1620, when the Mayflower arrived, and 1642, when the English Civil War broke out. Immigration to New England largely stopped after that and so the descendants of the 25,000 intermarried over and over until the nineteenth century, when the “New England diaspora” began and new immigrants, such as the Irish and Portuguese, began coming to New England.
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