February 16, 2007
Dragging Lincoln Into Iraq IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:25 PM EST Rep. Don Young faux-quoted Lincoln to be sure. I would recommend a little book called They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions, by Paul F. Boller Jr. (a history professor) and John George (a professor of political science). It wouldn’t have saved Congressman Young from making a fool of himself in this case (although a little familiarity with Lincoln’s prose might have: It just doesn’t sound like him), but it is a fascinating compendium of things that were never said, or said by someone else, or said in some other way. Many a famous quotation—from the Duke of Wellington to Groucho Marx—goes down in flames. But it seems to me that Joshua Zeitz mischaracterizes what Representative Young said while phony-quoting Lincoln. Mr. Zeitz writes that Young “is suggesting that critics of President George Bush’s Iraq policy are undermining troop morale and should be treated as ‘saboteurs,’ a notion that is as obnoxious to the principle of free speech as it is dangerous to democratic process . . .” Young was suggesting that congressmen (not all critics) who “willfully take action” (not merely speak) are sabotaging the war effort. The measure that passed the House today (246-182), but is almost certainly a dead duck in the Senate, is mere speech, a “sense of Congress” resolution with no force in law. But if House Armed Services Committee Chairman John Murtha’s plan to place severe limitations on exactly how and under what conditions military forces can be used and deployed were to pass, that would certainly sabotage the war effort and, indeed, would have no other purpose than to do so. Representative Murtha is fully entitled to seek passage of any legislation he chooses, but his bill, if enacted, would force defeat on the United States. Sounds a bit like sabotage to me and would inescapably undermine troop morale. Defeat always does. Repesentative Murtha, of course, would deny he seeks defeat in Iraq. He would just prefer to win the war by basing troops in Okinawa instead of Iraq. And how what Representative Young—exercising his right of free speech—said is “obnoxious to the principle of free speech” is a mystery to me. It seems that many liberals have this odd notion that the First Amendment protects their right to say and advocate what they please but that criticizing what they say and advocate is somehow suppressing free speech. Like the leftist campus hooligans who regularly prevent those they disagree with from speaking (or recruiting), free speech, for too many on the left, is a matter of “free speech for me but not for thee.”
I also fail to see how criticism of the left by those on the right is dangerous to the Democratic process. It seems like the essence of it to me, just as criticism of the right by those on the left is.
February 16, 2007
The Bunk of Tomorrow Debunked Today Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:55 PM EST The recent discussion of power struggles in New York’s state government reminded me of an item I clipped a few weeks back from my favorite source of political news, the Page Six gossip column in the New York Post. This was published before the Assembly chose a new comptroller. The item read: “Albany pols are concerned because one of the possible candidates to succeed state Comptroller Alan Hevesi is said to be a closeted homosexual. The Democratic majority in the Assembly will pick Hevesi’s replacement, probably from their own ranks. ‘Though they would appoint an openly gay candidate, they worry about someone in the closet,’ one Dem told Page Six. ‘After the Hevesi fiasco, they want honesty, and worry about the pressures involved for a statewide official to remain in the closet.’” There is much food for commentary here, but what interested me most was the final sentence in the Page Six item: “They point to what happened to New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey, who was forced to resign when his secret came out.” This is demonstrably false, as McGreevey’s homosexuality did not become public knowledge until he brought it up himself during his resignation speech. For the record, McGreevey’s departure from office had nothing to do with his sexual preference; he was forced to resign for repeated acts of corruption that were unacceptable even by New Jersey standards. Surely I was not the only person whose reaction on hearing about McGreevey’s “I am a gay American” speech was: “That devious son of a gun is trying to turn himself into a martyr!” And if Page Six is any indication, it seems to be working. We’ve all seen situations like this, where a misunderstanding takes hold and you know it’s wrong but are powerless to stop it. It’s common today to hear that Bill Clinton was impeached for having an affair; I’m sure that schoolchildren are already being taught exactly that. In fact he was impeached for committing perjury, but that makes a much less exciting story. Then there’s the following item, which I read in a newspaper this week: “Scooter Libby, former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, is on trial for identifying CIA agent Valerie Plame to the press.” (The newspaper was The Onion, and yes, I know that it’s satirical, but this appeared in the serious introduction to a string of gags and was clearly meant to be accurate.) In the unlikely event that anyone still recognizes the name Scooter Libby a year from now, those of us who were paying attention will patiently point out that Libby was put on trial for lying to investigators, not for “outing” Valerie Plame, which has been admitted by someone else and, in any event, was not a crime. Admittedly, a gossip column and a parody newspaper are slender reeds on which to rest a theory of mass deception. To be fair, most regular news stories do get these points right, however reluctantly. But fine distinctions tend to get lost when incidents are recalled weeks later, let alone years, especially if the resulting approximation is more lurid. We can all think of historical events that turn out to be much more nuanced than they seem, when you examine them closely. Now we have a chance to witness it happening right before our eyes.
February 16, 2007
Dragging Lincoln Into Iraq III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:00 PM EST Fred Allen posts, with understandable asperity and admirable terseness, on Rep. Don Young of Alaska, who has recited on the floor of the House a fabricated Lincoln quote, one claiming that congressmen who damage morale in wartime should be arrested, exiled or hanged. Lincoln did not say this. But Lincoln did in effect exile a Congressman, Democrat Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, who had given an antiwar speech saying that the Civil War was being fought to liberate blacks and enslave whites. This does seem at least roughly comparable to saying that the Iraq war has been fought only to fatten profits for corporate America, aid Israeli racist aggression against the Palestinians, and establish American world empire, and for no better motives, which is the sort of thing people say all the time. Defending the treatment of Vallandigham, Lincoln wrote to another congressman, the Democrat Erastus Corning, that “long experience has shown that armies can not be maintained unless desertion shall be punished by the severe penalty of death. The case requires, and the law and the Constitution sanction, this punishment—Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wiley agitator who induces him to desert?” But the story is a little complicated: Lincoln did not approve in advance Vallandigham’s arrest by General Ambrose Burnside (the man who presided over the slaughter of the Army of the Potomac at Fredericksburg), regretted that the arrest had occurred, and when he had Vallandigham sent through Confederate lines in Tennessee was in fact tempering a court martial verdict that had ordered Vallandigham imprisoned for the duration of the war. He did not exile Vallandigham in the normal sense of the word, because Lincoln did not recognize the sovereignty of the Confederacy, so Lincoln in effect had Vallandigham sent from one portion of U.S. territory to another. When Vallandigham later came back into Union-controlled territory from Canada, Lincoln left the man unmolested, and Vallandigham was allowed to engage in political activity with perfect impunity. On the other hand, the letter to Corning suggests that Lincoln at least had some grave reservations about antiwar figures encouraging desertion. Now I can readily imagine people in the antiwar movement encouraging desertion—after all, this happened during Vietnam, and I would be amazed if it hasn’t happened during the Iraq War. So I can imagine Lincoln taking much tougher measures than practiced by either Lyndon Johnson or George Bush—because he did.
February 16, 2007
Dragging Lincoln Into Iraq II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:50 PM EST In his post earlier today, Fred Allen notes that Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) erroneously quoted Abraham Lincoln as having said, “Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs, and should be arrested, exiled or hanged.” As Fred explains, Lincoln said no such thing. Ignoring for a moment the patently offensive quality of Young’s gaffe—he is suggesting that critics of President George Bush’s Iraq policy are undermining troop morale and should be treated as “saboteurs,” a notion that is as obnoxious to the principle of free speech as it is dangerous to democratic process—it’s worth noting that Lincoln was himself a staunch antiwar congressman. As a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Lincoln introduced a resolution on December 22, 1847, demanding that President James Polk furnish Congress with “all the facts which go to establish whether the particular spot of soil on which the blood of our citizens was so shed, was, or was not, our own soil.” The resolution, which went nowhere, followed the standard Whig line that the Polk administration had lied to Congress and the nation about the location of the skirmish that justified America’s war with Mexico. Weeks later, on January 3, Lincoln voted with 84 other Whig congressmen for a resolution declaring that the war had been “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States.” (Of course, as President, Lincoln did order the banishment of antiwar Rep. Clement Vallandigham to Canada on charges that Vallandigham’s speeches against the war effort constituted “expressed or implied” treason. Lincoln seems by then to have forgotten his earlier wartime political record. It’s not generally remembered as his best or smartest move.) If it “damages morale” and “undermines the military” to ask, as Democrats (and a clear majority of Americans) are currently doing, why the Iraq war was necessary in the first place, and whether the administration’s strategy is fundamentally flawed, then surely Lincoln’s resolution and vote, which called into question the cause and legality of the Mexican-American war, did the same. By Don Young’s estimation, Lincoln should have been shot, exiled, or hanged. Good thing Don Young wasn’t around in 1848.
February 16, 2007
Dragging Lincoln Into Iraq Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 09:00 AM EST Rep. Don Young of Alaska, in his five-minute address in the congressional “debate” over the anti–Iraq surge resolution yesterday, quoted Abraham Lincoln as saying, “Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs, and should be arrested, exiled or hanged.” If you don’t recall President Lincoln coming out in favor of hanging congressmen, you’re right. (The President also tended to make noun and verb agree.) An author named J. Michael Waller wrote an article titled “Democrats Usher In an Age of Treason” for Insight magazine in 2003 that began, “‘Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs, and should be arrested, exilded or hanged,’ that’s what President Abraham Lincoln said during the War Between the States.” When called on it, Waller explained that “the supposed quote in question is not a quote at all, and I never intended it to be construed as one. It was my lead sentence in the article that a copy editor mistakenly turned into a quote by incorrectly inserting quotation marks.” You can see Congressman Young delivering the phony quotation here.
February 15, 2007
Church, State, and a Changing Nation Posted by Alexander Burns at 05:10 PM EST There is an intriguing article in today’s London Times concerning the shifting demographics of the United Kingdom. Apparently, due to huge and consistent immigration over recent years, the Catholic Church is poised to overshadow the Church of England as the most significant religious institution in the U.K. The changing face of Britain has lately been the subject of public discussion, but most of that discussion has focused on the nation’s growing Muslim population. Meanwhile, practicing Catholics, immigrating to the U.K. from places like Poland, have swelled in number. According to the Times, “Average Sunday attendance of both [the Catholic Church and the Church of England] stood even at nearly one million in 2005 . . . but the attendance at Mass is expected to soar.” The Times points out that this trend, if it continues, will result in the first eclipse of the Anglican church since the Protestant Reformation nearly half a millennium ago. The Church has not lived free from danger during its long existence. But this new demographic challenge to the already declining Church of England seems like a more trying test of the institution than, for example, any of James II’s crypto-Catholic legislation. While baptized Anglicans still vastly outnumber Catholics, only a paltry fraction of Anglicans actually attend Church. In a nation like Britain, which lacks American-style separation of church and state, the relegation of practicing Anglicans to minority status raises serious questions about the relationship between the national government and the national church. Elizabeth II serves as the head of both the British state and the Church of England. Is it appropriate for a nation to have a monarch who also serves as its spiritual leader, when the faith she leads constitutes only a minority of true believers? More broadly, since the Church of England is a creation of the state, shouldn’t its function be reconsidered as the composition of the nation changes? And, as a professor of mine recently pointed out, since Prince Charles is so excited about multiculturalism and world religions, can’t we anticipate a further decline of the church’s historic primacy, even before accounting for demographics? Finally, today is the fifty-fifth anniversary of the death of Elizabeth Windsor’s father, King George VI. Is it possible that his daughter will be the last monarch to lead the Church of England? It’s not at all clear what the answers to these questions are. They do raise interesting and worthwhile considerations, though, about traditions, demographics, and national identity. They’re also helpful reminders of the kinds of questions Americans don’t have to worry about, thanks to the First Amendment.
February 15, 2007
Asbestos, Tobacco, Guns, and Blame Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:20 PM EST One of the myths of our time, fostered by self-serving tort lawyers (if you’ll pardon the redundancy), politicians, and bureaucrats, is that corporations are soulless moneymaking machines always quite ready to knowingly sell dangerous, even deadly, products at a profit. Meanwhile it is governments and tort lawyers who fearlessly patrol the market place to protect the consumer and bring malefactors of great wealth (there is, of course, no profit for tort lawyers in suing impecunious malefactors) to justice. The media, often supplied with ready-made if tendentious sob-stories by—guess who!—tort lawyers, are all too often ready and willing to buy into the myth. But all too often government has been one of the prime movers in selling products that are known to be or are later found to be unsafe. And governments can’t be sued, thanks to the ancient legal doctrine of sovereign immunity. In World War II, for instance, the Navy mandated the use of asbestos in the massive shipbuilding program of the time. Had the shipyards or the asbestos manufacturers refused to use it, they would have been seized by the government in a New York minute. It was the military’s distribution to servicemen of free cigarettes in both world wars that caused the rapid increase in smoking among males in the first half of the twentieth century. Shortly after New Orleans became the first city in the country to sue gun manufacturers for failing to install safety devices on their products, it sold 7,300 guns seized by the police to gun dealers, assuring their quick return to the streets. All this is detailed in a great article in Reason magazine by my friend Walter Olson, which can be found here. His point is not that government should be as sueable as other entities. (Wouldn’t tort lawyers just love to sue the deepest pockets on the planet, even if that meant that every government action and decision got second-guessed by a jury?) Instead, he argues merely to dispense with the myth. As he puts it, “Maybe it’s time to discard the caricature still so much favored in some circles, in which profit-making entities wear the black hats and public servants the white. We shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that governments necessarily do worse than businesses in preventing risk to the public. But there isn’t much evidence that they do better.”
February 14, 2007
The Governor Goes to War II Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:25 AM EST In October 2004 an Atlantic Monthly profile of then–New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer noted that the crusading lawyer kept a portrait of Theodore Roosevelt in his office. This portrait was taken as a useful token of Spitzer’s personality and ambition. It signified his identification with one of New York’s best-known governors, noted for his aggressive and confrontational political style. It also suggested the boundlessness of Spitzer’s ambition. If there was any doubt that his aspirations extended beyond the statehouse in Albany, the portrait removed it. Considering the recent developments of Spitzer’s second month in office, detailed by John Steele Gordon, it occurs to me that Spitzer’s relationship to TR may be taking on a new significance. In addition to sharing some of TR’s political style, Spitzer now seems to face some of the same challenges in governing that Roosevelt confronted. Spitzer faces a legislature that, as Mr. Gordon noted, does practically nothing to represent the interests of New York voters. It is controlled by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a New York City Democrat, and Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, a Republican from Rensselaer County. If Spitzer hopes to accomplish real reform in Albany, he’ll eventually need to take out both of these men. Bruno already seems close to falling—his majority has narrowed to two votes and a Spitzer-allied Democrat seems poised to take over. With Lieutenant Governor David Paterson, the former Senate minority leader, by his side, Spitzer should soon see substantial cooperation from the legislature’s upper chamber. Speaker Silver and his cadre in the Assembly will be Spitzer’s more tenacious adversaries, and this is where the parallel with TR begins to show. After the first congressional elections of Roosevelt’s Presidency, the House elevated Joe Cannon, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, to the office of speaker. In the Senate, Rhode Island Republican Nelson Aldrich led his party. Cannon in particular wielded huge influence, since he was not only speaker, but also, simultaneously, chairman of the House Rules Committee. Both he and Aldrich were members of Roosevelt’s party, but both were resistant to the kinds of reforms the President hoped to implement. During his time in the White House, Roosevelt actually dealt with these men fairly gingerly, maintaining friendly relations with Cannon even while locking horns on issues of policy. After leaving office, however, Roosevelt found himself frustrated by the continued power of the GOP’s congressional leadership. Then, during the first Congress of Taft’s Presidency, Roosevelt lent some support to a group of younger, progressive members of Congress determined to overthrow the speaker. The so-called “insurgents” in the House, led by members like George Norris, removed Cannon from his position as Rules Committee chair and instituted a seniority system, which promoted members based on their terms of service. This replaced the previous method of committee assignments and promotions, which placed sole appointment power with the speaker. Soon thereafter, Democrats seized control of the House in the 1910 midterm elections and expelled Cannon from the speaker’s office altogether. A century later, Governor Spitzer finds himself similarly opposed by a legislative leader of his own party as he pushes for reform. He is presented with a decision either to moderate his own agenda or to fight to the death against this anti-reformist leadership. If he hopes to succeed as governor, Spitzer will surely have to end by taking down the speaker. Unlike Roosevelt, Spitzer seems to have recognized and accepted this early on. And unlike Cannon, Speaker Silver has decided to start the fight.
February 13, 2007
Primary Envy III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:45 PM EST I find myself largely in agreement with John Steele Gordon, Julie Fenster, and Alexander Burns on the pressing need for primary reform. As Ms. Fenster points out, a state’s suitability to retail politics certainly doesn’t correspond to its civic-mindedness. Out of 38 states that had contested primaries in 2006, New Hampshire ranked twenty-eighth in voter turnout. In fairness, the only competitive New Hampshire primary last year was in the first congressional district (a race that turned out to be very interesting indeed; an insurgent antiwar Democrat ultimately defeated her party’s preferred candidate and then went on to unseat an incumbent Republican congressman). But if New Hampshire wishes to lay claim to first-in-the-nation status, it’s going to have to do better than that. When I was growing up, my parents used to vote even in uncontested primaries. They likened it to going to synagogue; it was just something you were supposed to do, especially if you boasted special civic piety. (One of the arguments New Hampshire politicians often invoke to protect their first-in-the-nation status is that most other states have lower turnout in presidential primaries. But this is a loaded argument. Of course voter turnout is lower in, say, New Jersey. In past years, by the time the Garden State presidential primary came around in June, the presidential nominees were already chosen. As the 2006 off-year primaries demonstrated, New Hampshire voters are no different from anyone else. When the stakes are low, they stay home and watch television. The really interesting question is whether turnout in New Jersey will exceed turnout in New Hampshire in 2008, as the state legislature in Trenton has moved its primary date to February.)
If New Hampshire voters aren’t any more civic-minded than the rest of the country, neither have they been any better informed, despite the lavish attention heaped upon them by presidential contenders. This has been the case since the very birth of the New Hampshire myth. In the wake of his primary victory in 1968, exit polls showed that a large number of Eugene McCarthy’s supporters mistook him for Joseph McCarthy, the conservative Republican senator from Wisconsin who had been dead for 11 years. These same polls showed that 55 percent of McCarthy voters supported the bombing campaign against North Vietnam, even though McCarthy’s entire candidacy was predicated on a bombing halt. Then and now, New Hampshire voters are every bit as misinformed as the larger American electorate. I’m not arguing that New Hampshire is a bad place. Quite to the contrary. It’s a lovely place. It’s got clean lakes to swim in, tall mountains to hike, beautiful town greens, covered bridges, and tax-free outlet malls. Can’t go wrong on any of those counts. But why should it get to go first? Effectively, if I might invoke some grade-school logic, because it called first. In 1968, when Eugene McCarthy won an upset victory against Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, thus giving birth to the tremendous lore surrounding the Granite State primary, only 15 states chose their delegates by primary. At least 57 percent of national convention delegates were selected by county committeemen, state party apparatchiks, and elected officials. Though he didn’t compete in a single primary that year, as early as June 2, Vice President Hubert Humphrey had enough delegates to secure the nomination. Which is to say, neither the New Hampshire primary nor the national system of primaries and caucuses is an ancient or timeless political tradition. When the Democrats changed their rules in the early 1970s and made primaries the chief vehicle for selecting convention delegates, New Hampshire capitalized on the McCarthy myth and, in 1975, passed a state law mandating first-in-the-nation status. Incredibly, the state legislature in Concord continues to believe that its laws are binding on the nation. I like John Steele Gordon’s idea, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for seeing it enacted. Presidential candidates are obsequious in their courtship of Granite State voters. It’s why Bill Clinton didn’t even bother to compete in Delaware in 1992; he didn’t want to upset New Hampshire notables who were peeved at Delaware for moving its primary up. My guess is that more states will push their primaries forward, and in 2012 New Hampshire will hold its primary on the day preceding Thanksgiving 2011. After all, it’s only fair. They called first.
February 13, 2007
Primary Envy II Posted by Alexander Burns at 12:50 PM EST I share some of Julie Fenster’s frustration with the presidential nominating process. As a New Yorker, I am unlikely to have much say in selecting either of the major-party nominees in 2008. I am not hugely concerned about this, since I think Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina have recently tended to choose the best candidate, at least where my party is concerned (Kerry over Dean, Gore over Bradley). And when these early states have not clearly fallen behind a consensus candidate, other states have been able to weigh in on the process. In 1992, for example, the New York primary ended up being a somewhat significant contest between Bill Clinton and Jerry Brown. Looking further back, in 1984 Gary Hart ended up viewing California’s comparatively late primary as a potential last stand. I also think there’s an argument for concentrating disproportionate nominating power in smaller, more rural states, since larger states like New York, California, Illinois, and Texas can ensure that their interests are represented through the huge amount of campaign money that comes out of zip codes like 10023 and 90210. This may not give much personal influence to people like me and, perhaps, Ms Fenster. But it does mean that the interests of, say, Hollywood, are unlikely to be overlooked as easily as those of the farming industry would be, were Iowa cut out of the nominating process. At the end of the day, however, I have to agree that the presidential nominating process needs reform, if only because it has become so concentrated at the front end of election years. We’re headed toward a setup in 2008 whereby early primaries will come in such quick succession that any serious candidate will need a major win in January or early February in order to stay viable. Some states, like Illinois and New York, may attempt to take advantage of this arrangement by moving up their primaries in order to boost home-state candidates. There is some reason for optimism, though. Recently, as reported by Political Wire and Stateline.org, a division of the Pew Research Center, the National Association of Secretaries of State “has dusted off its proposal to divide states into regions—the East, South, Midwest, and West—and hold four primaries, each a month apart, between March and June. All states in a region would schedule their primaries on the same day. The order of the contests would rotate every presidential election year.” This suggestion bears some resemblance to Mr. Gordon’s idea for holding six or eight regional primaries, with one coming every two weeks. At a glance, I think the Gordon plan is probably superior. To divide the United States into only four big regions lumps a lot of unlike states together. Why should West Virginia hold its primary on the same day as Maine, as the NASS proposal would have it? And why should residents of Detroit, Michigan, and Fredonia, Kansas, end up voting as a bloc? With more regional subdivisions, you’d probably end up with a more coherent and effectively reformed process. Regardless of specifics, though, the idea of regional primaries is a good one, and one I hope to see gaining greater support in the near future. I’m not sure I want to have to answer phone calls from all 10 or so Democratic presidential candidates—but I know I don’t like the idea of all those calls going to Nashua and Charleston.
February 13, 2007
The Governor Goes to War Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:25 AM EST Julie Fenster decries the fact that the few thousand people in Iowa who go out to the caucuses in the depths of the Midwestern winter probably have more influence on the presidential nominations than the 19 million citizens of New York State, whose primary election is usually scheduled too late to have much effect. I agree, but I would like to see the current presidential primary “system” replaced with six or eight regional primaries (or caucuses, if a state prefers), scheduled every two weeks, with the region going first changing with each election. Why Iowa and New Hampshire have been allowed to hijack something as important as a presidential election for their own parochial interests is one of the mysteries of American democracy. Right now, of course, New York State is so institutionally corrupt that its politics is determined not by the people but almost solely by the politicians and the special interests. Gerrymandering makes most elections for the legislature foregone conclusions. Once elected, the senators vote for an all-powerful majority leader and the assemblymen for an all-powerful speaker. Once that is done, they might just as well go home for all the influence the individual legislators have over legislation. New York State government is truly “three men in a room,” the majority leader, the speaker, and the governor. Only the last is elected by the people. The result of this has been a steady decline in New York’s once unchallenged economic and political power. Were it not for New York City—a world unto itself that is thriving thanks to global economic forces—the once proud Empire State would be the Basket Case State, for upstate New York is in deep depression. Its once booming cities—Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, Rome, Schenectady—decaying. And it will stay that way until the political culture of Albany changes. Happily, there are a few signs that that political culture might indeed be beginning to change. The state’s new governor, Elliot Spitzer, campaigned on reforming the way business is done in Albany and was overwhelmingly elected (to be sure, against a candidate so weak that I confess I can’t remember his name). One of the first orders of business once he took the oath of office on January 1 was a new state comptroller, the previous one having resigned after a scandal. The comptroller not only keeps the state’s books and audits state entities, he makes investment decisions on the state’s $145 billion in pension funds. It’s a job that calls for expertise not only in accounting but in investment. With the legislature in recess until January 3, Spitzer could have made a recess appointment on his own. Instead he made a deal with the other two men in the room. A special commission would interview candidates and choose the most qualified. The legislature, meeting in joint session, would then pick among them. The commission met, interviewed, and chose three candidates. The speaker didn’t like the selection he had agreed to choose from, so he reneged on the deal without even an apology, and his legislative sheep dutifully picked the man he wanted, an assemblyman with no qualifications whatever except loyal service to the speaker. To say that Governor Spitzer was furious would be to understate the case, and he did a most unusual thing for Albany. Instead of raising hell in private among the “three men in a room” for this bald-faced betrayal, he went public. He lambasted the legislature and the speaker. Then he went further. In the home district of Assemblyman William Magnarelli of Syracuse, one of the sheep, he told the local newspaper, “Bill Magnarelli is one of those unfortunate Assembly members who just raises his hand when he’s told to do so, and didn’t even bother to stand up and say, ‘Whose interest am I representing?’” As The New York Times put it, “It was, by Albany standards, a shocking breach of etiquette for a sitting governor to lambaste a colleague from his own party in his home district.” It was more than that, it was a declaration of war against the legislature. Spitzer has now promised to support primary opponents against members of the legislature who do not do their jobs and show some backbone. If he follows up on that and uses the bully pulpit of the governorship to its fullest, the political tectonic plates in Albany could shift fundamentally and—who knows?—maybe the people of New York State might once again have some say in the legislative process. What a concept! Spitzer earned a take-no-prisoners reputation as state attorney general, often, in my opinion, running roughshod over both the truth and his targets’ rights in the process. That’s why I voted for what’s-his-name instead of Spitzer last November. But if Governor Spitzer is going to truly do battle with the New York State Legislature—the heart and soul of what is wrong with New York State and the primary cause of its sad decline—and take no prisoners in the process, I will not only wish him well, I will hold his coat, keep him supplied with bottled water, and mop his brow between rounds. It looks like New York State politics might get interesting for the first time in decades. I certainly hope so.
February 12, 2007
Primary Envy Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 12:55 PM EST I live in New York State, which is to say that I am openly jealous of the people in Iowa, who not only have the biggest influence in the primaries, being the first to vote, but have the chance to meet the candidates to the point of ennui—trying them out, taking them to task, flipping pancakes with them. No primary candidate has been in New York (or about 40 other states) since—well, maybe Ted Kennedy. Remember when he ran? The early primary (or caucus) is supposed to keep retail politics alive, so I understand. The people of Iowa act as surrogates for the rest of us. I would like to fire the people of Iowa as my surrogate. Looking at the historical statistics, two thirds of them can’t be bothered to vote in the caucus. After all of the attention (and tens of millions of dollars) showered on the state, only 12.2 percent of eligible Iowans voted in the 2004 primary. In other presidential years, when the both parties had a race in contention, the rate was only a little higher. It is a rousing year when as many as a quarter of them manage to finish their full stacks and cast a vote. Ungrateful urchins! New Hampshire isn’t much better, by the way. Here is a better proposal. Whatever state has the highest turnout in the presidential primary is automatically scheduled as the first primary in the country four years later. Reward the people who care enough to vote.
February 12, 2007
Bill Kristol and Stephen Douglas Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:00 AM EST I’m not particularly a fan of Bill Kristol, the outspoken neoconservative magazine editor who has been one of the most strident proponents of the Iraq War. But rather than criticize Kristol for his position on the war, I’d like to suggest that he is a bad historian. Appearing today on Fox News Sunday, Kristol said the following: “We’re electing a war President in 2008. If I can go back to [Sen. Barack] Obama and Lincoln for just one second, Lincoln’s ‘house divided’ speech in 1858 was a speech saying we cannot live as a house divided on slavery. And he implicitly says we’ll have to fight a civil war if necessary on this. Obama’s speech is a ‘can’t we get along’ speech—sort of the opposite of Lincoln. He would have been with Stephen Douglas in 1858. Let’s paper over these differences, rise above politics, and all get along. That’s not Giuliani’s mode. And I think in a war context, social conservatives want to win the war against Islamic jihadism.” Kristol is referring, of course, to Obama’s decision to launch his 2008 presidential bid from the steps of the Old State House in Springfield, Illinois, where Lincoln (like Obama), served eight years as a state legislator, and where he also lived with his family for the better part of his adult life. Regardless of what one may think of Obama’s decision to jump into the fray after just two years as a U.S. senator, surely the well-choreographed event makes sense. By evoking Lincoln’s memory, he is subtly framing his candidacy as a realization of a dream long-deferred—a dream of a truly egalitarian nation—and also reminding potential voters that he has logged about as much time in Washington and Springfield as his famous predecessor. Granted, Obama is taking some liberties with history. Lincoln did not profess the kind of racial egalitarianism as radical Republicans like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, both of whom genuinely believed black and white Americans to be equals. Indeed, during his famous debates with Stephen Douglas he took pains to tell listeners that he did not consider black men his social or intellectual equals, though it’s not clear to what extent he tailored those statements to the racially conservative disposition of downstate voters. (Years later, Frederick Douglass wrote favorably of his wartime meetings with Lincoln and said that the President treated him as an equal.) Moreover, Lincoln rose to the Presidency in the days before the growth of the modern state, when that office demanded considerably less experience than it does today. Ironically, it was under Lincoln’s watch that the federal state (and with it, the Presidency) underwent its first major period of expansion. But if Obama is playing loose with Lincoln’s legacy, Kristol is woefully ignorant of it. Or, he has a tin ear. Equating Barack Obama, a black man, with Stephen Douglas, a slavery apologist, is nothing short of idiotic. More fundamentally, Lincoln was very much a conciliator. In 1858, when he debated Douglas, in 1860, when he was elected to the Presidency, and until September 22, 1862, when he issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, he opposed the extension of slavery in the territories, but not its existence in the slave states. He was nominated in 1860 over the party favorite, then-radical William Seward, because his moderation made him palatable to residents of Southern Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Even in his second inaugural address, in which he denounced slavery in bloody, biblical terms, he looked forward to a merciful period of reconstruction. Surely he would not have compromised an inch on black civil rights, as did his successor. But in temperament, Lincoln was very much a man of the center. Stephen Douglas, on the other hand, was no conciliator. True, he attempted to have his cake and eat it too, by sponsoring legislation (the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act) that repealed the Missouri Compromise while insisting all the while that popular sovereignty would effectively keep slavery out of the newly organized territories. But intellectual dishonesty is not the same as consensus-building. It was Douglas, after all, who violently disrupted an almost 35-year compromise that kept slavery out of all territories acquired in the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36’30” line. It was Douglas who turned a blind eye for two years to Southern-sponsored violence and electoral fraud in Kansas. (He broke with the Democratic administration in 1857 and opposed the Lecompton Constitution, mainly to save his political skin in Illinois.) It was Douglas who used racially incendiary language to appeal to the baser emotions of downstate voters. Indeed, throughout 1858 Douglas played the populist rabble-rouser to Lincoln’s statesman. I wonder if Bill Kristol appreciates the irony of his commentary. After all, it’s really he, not Obama, who should look smilingly on Stephen Douglas, a man who foolishly unleashed sectarian violence that he could not contain, for reasons that were later hard to fathom, and for which he stubbornly refused to accept even the slightest responsibility.
February 11, 2007
The Not So Invisible Hand Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:30 PM EST The invisible hand, Adam Smith’s most famous phrase, comes from his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), not his far more famous An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith held that the rich “are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants.” To put that another way, the pursuit of self-interest is good for everybody in the long run, rich and poor alike. Wal-Mart is certainly rich and is now planning a campaign, along with General Electric, that might well make them even richer, at least in the short term. The campaign will also do their customers good by saving them considerable money and do the environment a lot of good by saving prodigious amounts of energy. The invisible hand is moving. The campaign aims at convincing the public to shift from the incandescent light bulbs that now dominate the market for household lighting, and which are essentially the bulb that Thomas Edison so famously invented in 1879, to CFL’s—compact fluorescent light bulbs. The latter have been around for over 20 years but have been unable to capture even 10 percent of the market. There have been two reasons for that. One is that the early models were terrible. They were very slow to turn on, didn’t produce much light, and what light they did produce was often harsh. Many of them made an annoying hum and didn’t fit in many existing lamps. Those problems have all been fixed. CFL’s today take perhaps a minute to reach full brightness but are bright enough right away and otherwise are indistinguishable from incandescent bulbs. The other problem is price. CFL’s cost at least three times as much as the Edisonian bulb. So why should the public switch? Again, there are two reasons, both powerful. First, the CFL bulb lasts upwards of 10 times as long before needing to be replaced. So while CFL’s are three times as expensive to buy, their purchase price per hour of use is less than one third as much as Edison’s bulb. The second reason is even more powerful, for it involves immediate payback. A CFL bulb uses 75 percent less electricity to produce a given amount of light. An incandescent bulb produces mostly heat and can reach 300 degrees. A CFL bulb heats up only to about 100 degrees. So despite the higher initial cost, consumers would be in the black, thanks to energy savings, in just five months and saving money every month thereafter until the bulb burns out in eight or ten years. Now comes the really good part, thanks to the law of large numbers. There are about 110 million households in the United States. If every one of those households switched just one incandescent bulb to a CFL, it would save as much electricity as is produced by two average power plants. In terms of fossil fuel not burned and greenhouse gases not put into the atmosphere, it would be the equivalent of taking 1.3 million cars off the road. And how many lightbulb sockets does the average American household have? Believe it or not, the average is well over 50. I just counted and I have 43—from outdoor floodlights to 15-watt pseudo-candle hall lights—and I have a relatively small house. Some of my palazzo-dwelling neighbors must have 200 or more. Do the math, and there is the clear potential for a mammoth reduction in energy use and carbon emissions at absolutely no sacrifice by the average consumer. Talk about a win-win situation. Wal-Mart and GE, which has 60 percent of the domestic light bulb market, are hoping to double the CFL share of that market this year and have it grow steadily thereafter. In the short run, they will sell a lot of light bulbs at higher prices than the bulbs they sell now, but once saturation is reached and the incandescent light bulb joins the phonograph and the stock ticker among the Edison inventions retired to the Smithsonian, they will, presumably, sell far fewer. It is a risk they seem willing to take, perhaps in hopes of reaping a major PR benefit. That, of course, remains to be seen. It’s an old saying that no good deed goes unpunished, and if you’re a corporation, that goes double. For much more on this, see here.
February 11, 2007
Deterrence III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:30 AM EST John Steele Gordon agrees that deterrence is “a slim reed upon which to depend if Iran should get nuclear weapons” but suggests that the examples I gave about failed deterrents are not altogether apposite, because “the countries involved are either non-nuclear on both sides or on one, with the aggressor the non-nuclear or using non-nuclear means. Pakistan might have risked trying to assassinate the Indian parliament, but I doubt it has ever seriously entertained the idea of lobbing a nuke into New Delhi, for fear of the consequences.” Mr. Gordon seems to think that rational actors will not use nuclear weapons against adversaries capable of retaliating in kind, but doubts the rationality of the Iranian leadership. These are fair points, although many apparently rational actors have contemplated the use of nuclear weapons against nuclear-armed adversaries. NATO assumed it might be forced to first use of nuclear weapons in the event of a Warsaw Pact attack on West Germany, and a lot of ink was spilled elaborating theories in which either NATO or the Warsaw Pact might think first use of nuclear weapons was a rational strategy. The most common theory was that preempting the bulk of an enemy’s nuclear arsenal might in certain situations be the least bad strategy. No one did it, of course, but an awful lot of people talked and wrote about it. A lot of weapons were procured on the strength of arguments of this kind, SS-20s and Pershing IIs, MIRVs, and generations of ever-more accurate weapons designed for so-called counterforce strikes. While I could repeat my argument that non-nuclear deterrence has failed many times, that would avoid Mr. Gordon’s point. He is arguing that nuclear weapons are sufficiently different from other weapons that they are a special case. Again, there is much to be said for this view, but some non-nuclear outcomes are sufficiently terrible that the view does not seem to me to be indisputable. Thinking this over, I stand by one of my examples, at least after tinkering with it a bit. I agree that RAF Bomber Command’s failure to deter Hitler does not prove that strategic deterrence failed, because for that to be the case, one would have to prove that Hitler went to war despite his belief in the efficacy of strategic bombing. But (a) Hitler went to war with Poland believing that Great Britain would back down, so he did not think he was risking strategic bombardment, and (b) in 1939 the Luftwaffe did not concern itself overmuch about the efficacy of British strategic bombing (this would change, and the memory of the RAF’s strategic bombing has had quite a remarkable effect on German attitudes toward war). But turned around, I think the example makes my point. The British chose to go to war with Hitler despite their (wholly mistaken) belief that in 1939 Nazi Germany possessed the means to launch absolutely devastating strategic attacks on British cities. Respectable estimates in the 1930s had predicted hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in the first hours of war. The estimates of likely casualties were in fact much greater than the numbers that would have been inflicted by a Hiroshima-style bomb. So Britain went to war convinced it was risking something worse than a nuclear attack. And while Britain initially refrained from targeting enemy civilians, in large part out of concern about retaliation in kind, after some provocation Britain escalated attacks against enemy civilians, with no reason to assume that Germany could not retaliate to ghastly effect. Strategic bombers were supposed to ensure MAD, and deter accordingly. Long before it was clear that their (initial) lethality had been overestimated, they nonetheless failed to deter.
February 10, 2007
The Normandie Posted by Ellen Feldman at 06:00 PM EST I share John Steele Gordon’s affection for the Normandie, to which he paid fine tribute on the AmericanHeritage.com homepage today. She was more than surpassingly beautiful and dizzyingly fast. She was racy. If, as Kipling said, the liner was a lady, then, as Ludwig Bemelmans pointed out, the Normandie was a femme fatale. Her passenger list reflected her character. Stodgy society booked passage on the dowager Queen Mary. Cole Porter, Marlene Dietrich, Ernest Hemingway, and other aristocrats of the arts and darlings of cafe society crossed in the Normandie’s cabins, where the sinuous art deco lines promised smooth sailing, at least aesthetically. The Normandie’s death by fire and capsize was heartbreaking, but an ironic twist makes the story almost tragic. As Harvey Ardman tells the tale in his definitive book, Normandie: Her Life and Times, one of the chief architects of the ship, a Russian naval engineer named Vladimir Yourkevitch, was at his office in lower Manhattan when he got a call from an old friend telling him, in Russian, that his beloved ship was burning. Yourkevitch’s first reaction was not cavalier but confident. He knew the Normandie’s superb firefighting system. The flames, he was sure, would quickly be extinguished. He returned to work but could not concentrate. Finally he left his office, hailed a cab, and told the driver to take him to Pier 88. By this time the crowds in the area of the burning ship had brought traffic to a halt. Realizing that things were more dire than he had imagined, Yourkevitch got out and began to run. As he turned the corner of 48th Street and Twelfth Avenue, he came into view of the smoking, listing ship and the scores of firefighters who were continuing to cascade water on it. The sight broke his heart, but his mind clicked into gear. He was certain that if the seacocks were opened, the ship would settle upright and safe in the shallow water. Three times he tried to get through the police lines, but his heavily Russian-accented English made him unintelligible to New York’s Finest. Finally he found a naval officer and managed to convey who he was and how he could save the ship. “The Navy is in charge,” the officer told him. “Don’t you worry about it. We know what to do.” Yourkevitch finally gave up and returned to his apartment on Riverside Drive. From his windows overlooking the Hudson, he watched his ship die.
February 10, 2007
Deterrence II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:05 PM EST Fredric Smoler’s post calls deterrence a slim reed upon which to depend if Iran should get nuclear weapons. I entirely agree, but for a slightly different reason. In the great geopolitical struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, we relied on MAD (mutually assured destruction) to keep the Cold War from going hot. It worked (at least we’re all still here). But the governments of both countries were run by rational people. The Soviet leadership may have been thugs, with the moral constraints of Mafia dons, but they were rational thugs, unwilling to risk everything on one throw of the dice. I am not nearly so confident that the Iranian leadership is now, or will be in the future, so rational or so risk averse. The president, who is not the real power in the country to be sure, seems to me very much a loose cannon. And the mullahs presumably (although perhaps power has already absolutely corrupted them) think they are God’s anointed, which is a dangerous belief for those with nuclear capability to have. But that said, it seems to me the examples Mr. Smoler cites are not altogether apposite, as the countries involved are either non-nuclear on both sides or on one, with the aggressor the non-nuclear or using non-nuclear means. Pakistan might have risked trying to assassinate the Indian parliament, but I doubt it has ever seriously entertained the idea of lobbing a nuke into New Delhi, for fear of the consequences. So it seems to me that nukes deter nukes, but, as Mr. Smoler argues, they otherwise make aggression more likely. One reason for that, of course, is that possession of nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them makes a country, ipso facto, a Great Power, and Great Powers, by definition, must always be treated carefully and respectfully. Great Powers can get away with a lot that small powers would get slapped down hard for. When France was developing its “force de frappe” in the early 1960s, someone asked Charles de Gaulle why he was spending so much money on it when France couldn’t hope to come close to equaling the arsenals of the U.S. or the USSR. De Gaulle replied (I’m making up the exact words—which might take me hours to find—but the words are true in spirit to what he said), “Imagine there is a world crisis and I, as president of the Republic, have to protect the interests and safety of France. I call the White House to give the French position and ideas. If I don’t have the bomb, I talk to the undersecretary of state for European affairs. If I have the bomb, I talk to the President. That’s why.” By no means the least of the charms of nuclear weapons, especially for tyrants, is that they are a very cheap way of achieving Great Power status.
February 10, 2007
Deterrence Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:15 PM EST This posting went up yesterday in fragmentary form because of a transcribing error. Here is the full post. One of the most common historical analogies now being deployed in defense of a proposed policy is the alleged success of deterrence. On this theory, no one should worry too much about an Iranian nuclear weapon because Iran will be deterred by the threat of nuclear retaliation, just as the Soviet Union was deterred. The assumption that everyone thinks the way the Soviets thought is troubling. For example, Pakistan was so little deterred by the Indian nuclear arsenal that Kashmiri terrorists armed, trained, and controlled by Pakistan tried to assassinate the Indian legislature. Leaving aside the Soviets, how well did strategic deterrents in fact deter? Admiral Tirpitz built the German battle fleet to keep Britain out of what became World War I; one excellent book on his thinking has the morbidly witty title Yesterday’s Deterrent. A few decades later Great Britain built its strategic bombing force to deter Germany from starting what became World War II. The American nuclear deterrent didn’t keep North Korea out of South Korea, or keep China neutral during the subsequent Korean War, or deter North Vietnam. Israeli nuclear weapons failed to deter her adversaries in the 1973 October War. A recent example of peculiar optimism about deterrence can be found in last Sunday’s op-ed piece in the Washington Post “What to Ask Before the Next War,” by Paul Pillar, a former U.S. intelligence officer who now teaches at Georgetown University. Pillar first asks “why would deterrence, which has kept nuclear peace with other adversaries, not work with Iran?” and the implication seems to be that deterrence will work just fine. Oddly, Pillar then asserts that Iran’s response to any attack on the facilities it is apparently using to build a nuclear weapon might well include terrorism against the United States, additional attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, and a wider war in the Persian Gulf. This concedes that Iran will not necessarily be deterred from attacks on the United States and its allies while it itself has no nuclear weapons and we have thousands. So far, after all, our deterrent has failed to stop the Iranians from sponsoring the kidnapping, murder, and torture of American officials, soldiers, and civilians and the murder of Argentine (and other) civilians. Under the circumstances, the odds seem good that a nuclear Iran will be even bolder than Iran has been to date. A deterrent, after all, can be a shield behind which one more aggressively wields a sword.
February 9, 2007
James Gordon Bennett and Helen Jewett Posted by John Steele Gordon at 07:25 PM EST As a supplement to Ellen Feldman’s interesting post on Helen Jewett and O. J. Simpson, let me add two things. One is a valuable book on the Helen Jewett murder by Patricia Cline Cohen called The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York. I recommend it, not only for its thorough coverage of the case but for its tour d’horizon of the demimonde of New York in the 1830s.
The second is to come to the defense of James Gordon Bennett (who is not related to me, unless perhaps back in the impenetrable mists of Scottish history somewhere). She quotes Walt Whitman’s description of him as a “reptile marking his path with slime wherever he goes and breathing mildew at everything fresh and fragrant.”
That was one of the more flattering comments made about James Gordon Bennett by his journalistic contemporaries. Benjamin Day, editor of the Sun, wrote that Bennett’s only chance of dying an upright man “will be that of hanging perpendicularly from a rope.” Twice he was physically assaulted on the street by other newspaper editors. There were a couple of reasons for this. One was that Bennett was an easy man to dislike. He had a genius for making enemies and no gift whatever for friendship. The other was that Bennett, in the earliest days of the New York Herald, when he was struggling to build circulation and was the paper’s only employee, deliberately attacked other editors as a circulation ploy. He would grossly insult the editor of a larger newspaper, who would respond in kind, and the latter’s readers, made aware of the Herald by their response, began buying it to see who Bennett would attack next.
But Bennett did much more than that. He, far more than any other single individual, invented the modern newspaper and therefore the modern media. James Gordon Bennett is the Henry Ford of the fourth estate. Newspapers before the Herald had usually been either specialty publications, dealing with a single part of the news, such as shipping news, or papers funded by a political party that shamelessly advanced the party’s agenda.
The Herald was different. It was a general interest newspaper and was politically independent. Like the Model T, it was intended for the masses, and like the Model T the masses loved it. The innovations introduced by Bennett are staggering. Many he did not invent, but he did bring them together for the first time, thereby creating what we think of as a newspaper. He was the first to print a weather report, to report sports news, to carry a stock report. When much of the business district of Manhattan burned on the night of December 15, 1835, Bennett printed a map of the burned area, the first time an American newspaper used an illustration. He was the first to cover the private doings of the rich and famous. “That filthy rag!” former Mayor Philip Hone howled into his diary when he read in the Herald about a costume party he had attended the night before dressed as Cardinal Wolsey. Bennett hired the first foreign correspondents, in major European capitals, and help found the Washington press corps. Bennett even coined the word leak in the journalistic sense.
And he covered the Jewett murder like a rug. Respectable newspapers (and the Herald was one) were not supposed to cover unsavory stories like that. But Bennett thought a newspaper should publish what the readers wanted to read, not what the editors thought they should read. He knew that the combination of sex, class, and mayhem would prove irresistible, and he was right. His competitors had no choice but to cover the story also, and the Jewett murder turned into the first crime to receive nationwide saturation coverage, the first of a long line that has included the Benjamin Nathan murder in 1870, Lizzy Borden, Leopold and Loeb, the Lindbergh kidnapping, and, of course, O. J. Simpson. Bennett interviewed the madam of the bawdy house where the crime had taken place and printed the entire interview, the first time this basic journalistic staple appeared in an American newspaper.
By the Civil War, the New York Herald was the greatest and most widely circulated newspaper in the country—indeed the model for all the others—and immensely influential, with a circulation that reached 400,000 a day. (When Bennett founded the Herald, all the New York papers combined didn’t have a circulation of 40,000.) As Harper’s Weekly wrote in 1858, “No American journal at the present time can compare with it in the point of circulation of news. Its friends regard it as a universal guide. It has, naturally, been much abused. Abuse is the necessary price of success in any business; and it must be admitted that Mr. Bennett had not given himself much pains to conciliate his rivals. His plan has ever been rather to court than to avoid controversy; his lance is always at rest; and his powder invariably dry. But whatever rival journals may have said in their wrath, no one can seriously deny the merit of the Herald without impugning the judgment or the morals of the community which for twenty years has given generous and undivided support.”
James Gordon Bennett died in 1872, as unloved and alone as always, but having changed the world. He left his name, his immense fortune, and his incomparable newspaper to his son, James Gordon Bennett, Jr. (with whom he is often confused). The son would do much in the next 50 years to diminish all three.
February 9, 2007
Deterrence Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:15 PM EST One of the most common historical analogies now being deployed in defense of a proposed policy is the alleged success of deterrence. On this theory, no one should worry too much about an Iranian nuclear weapon because Iran will be deterred by the threat of nuclear retaliation, just as the Soviet Union was so deterred. One problem with this analogy is that it assumes that everyone thinks the way the Soviets did, which is clearly not the case. For example, Pakistan was so little deterred by the Indian nuclear arsenal that Kashmiri terrorists armed and trained by Pakistan tried to assassinate the Indian legislature.
A recent example of this thinking can be found in an op-ed in today’s Washington Post, “What to Ask Before the Next War,” by Paul Pillar, a former U.S. intelligence officer who now teaches at Georgetown University.
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