March 8, 2007
The Libby Verdict III Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:50 PM EST I’d like to further discuss the final contention in John Steele Gordon’s last post, regarding the position of the special prosecutor. Mr. Gordon writes that it is “unequivocally clear . . . that appointing special prosecutors to handle politically sensitive cases is the worst idea to arise out of American democracy since Prohibition.” I assume Mr. Gordon is being slightly hyperbolic here, but his main point is a serious one and, I think, one deserving of additional consideration. I certainly won’t disagree that the special prosecutor position, as currently defined and performed, is flawed, and that the last two decades provide ample evidence of this. I don’t think Lawrence Walsh was an unmitigated disaster on the scale of Kenneth Starr, but I can understand why conservatives resent his investigation. Starr, for his part, was surely one of the most loathsome and irresponsible men of the 1990s. I have limited sympathy for administrations that appoint special prosecutors and then find their investigations inconvenient. But it’s also understandable that someone like Clinton would find it difficult to fire even someone like Starr, when the latter would not hesitate to evoke the specter of Archibald Cox, Richard Nixon, and the Saturday Night Massacre. Still, while it’s clear that the special prosecutor is not a perfect investigatory mechanism, doing away with it altogether might be a worse option. First, an administration is never forced to appoint a special prosecutor; it does so when an internal conflict of interest requires an independent investigation to occur. If government is to retain its legitimacy in the eyes of the public, there has to be some such mechanism in place when the executive branch cannot be trusted to investigate itself. Even if special prosecutors tend to run imperfect investigations, I would fear the political consequences of these investigations being supervised by people like John Ashcroft or Janet Reno. Would any conservative believe that Whitewater was aboveboard if the Clinton Justice Department had been responsible for that conclusion? And would any liberals believe that Richard Armitage was the only leaker in the Plame case if Ashcroft had been the investigating officer? A second point in defense of special prosecutors is that an adequately Machiavellian administration, finding itself under politically undesirable scrutiny, actually can fire investigators who are less protected than a special prosecutor. I cannot think of better proof of this fact than this week’s congressional hearings on the suspicious dismissals of eight United States attorneys. As the hearings have made clear, a whole team of federal prosecutors have recently lost their jobs due to political considerations. Carol Lam, the U.S. attorney in San Diego, was fired after investigating the corruption scandal around former Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham. David Iglesias, the U.S. attorney for New Mexico, ended up unemployed when he failed to comply with politically motivated requests from Rep. Heather Wilson and Sen. Pete Domenici. The U.S. attorney for Maryland, who found himself under pressure to lay off an investigation into associates of then-Gov. Robert Ehrlich, also fell victim to a purge from above. Not all the fired U.S. attorneys lost their jobs for such defensive reasons. Some, like Arkansas’s Bud Cummins, seem to have been removed simply to make room for someone new—someone like J. Timothy Griffin, who, with a few years of prosecutorial experience, could someday run for high office as a Republican. Because the executive branch, operating under the Patriot Act, has broad discretion in overseeing the criminal justice system, there is little that can be done to redress the grievances of the eight ousted prosecutors. In this circumstance, Congress is doing its best to expose the excesses of the executive, but it cannot restore these attorneys to their offices. I still agree with Mr. Gordon that the special prosecutor is a flawed mechanism of oversight. But since the name and memory of Archibald Cox are evidently not enough to keep justice apolitical, I tend to worry more about politicians interfering with the work of prosecutors than about prosecutors interfering in the political process. Michael Barone, no left-winger he, commented yesterday [Correction: It turns out that the blog posting at www.usnews.com was misattributed to Michael Barone and was actually written by Bonnie Erb] that “what’s going on in Washington is not sufficiently removed from the routine doings of a tawdry Third World dictatorship to give any American comfort.” I’m somewhat comforted by the notion that, in an extreme circumstance, a special prosecutor could be appointed to investigate potentially tyrannical malfeasance. If his investigation ends up being overzealous, that may be a price worth paying.
March 8, 2007
The Libby Verdict II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:45 AM EST I largely agree with Fredric Smoler here, but I have a few comments. 1) I think the contrast between the New York Times editorial on the subject yesterday and that of the Washington Post is a perfect example of how pathetic the New York Times editorial page has become in recent years under Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. Its editorials, especially on political subjects, have become ever more badly written, poorly argued, and intellectually dishonest. They are also boring, because to know the subject of a New York Times editorial is to know its contents, so why bother reading it? I have noticed of late that the letters to the editor column seems to have almost no letters that disagree with the paper’s positions. I wonder if that is because of deliberate policy or because no one but the choir bothers to read the editorials and write letters to the Times anymore. 2) I am in no position to argue with the jury’s verdict, as I only followed the trial in the papers and on TV; I didn’t sit there day after day. But let me note one thing. I was speaking with a very distinguished litigator the other day and I asked him what he thought the outcome of the trial would be. He agreed with me that it seemed to be a case of he said/he said, which isn’t much to base a perjury conviction on, but was quite certain Libby would be convicted. I asked why, and he said, “It’s a D.C. jury.” His point was that Washington is a city steeped in politics (it has no other reason to even exist), and the jury pool is overwhelmingly Democratic (John Kerry took 48.75 percent of the vote nationally but 90.5 percent of the vote in the District of Columbia). How about in the future granting an automatic change of venue for these sorts of trials to a swing state at least 500 miles from Washington? 3) While Lewis Libby may have committed perjury and obstructed justice, he should never have had the chance to. Patrick Fitzgerald’s brief was to answer two questions: Was a crime committed in the “outing” of Valerie Plame and, if so, by whom? But Fitzgerald knew from the very beginning that the answers to those questions were (1) no, and (2) Richard Armitage. He should have shut down the investigation within a month. According to Robert Novak, whose column in July 2003 started this whole sad mess, David Boies, a nationally-famous lawyer (he headed Al Gore’s post-election team in 2000), said that “Fitzgerald never should have prosecuted Libby because there was no underlying criminal violation. Boies scoffed at Fitzgerald’s contention that Libby had obstructed him from exposing criminal activity.” 4) One thing that is unequivocally clear is that appointing special prosecutors to handle politically sensitive cases is the worst idea to arise out of American democracy since Prohibition. Every single time this has happened in the last 20 years, from Iran-Contra to Whitewater to Valerie Plame, it has been a disaster, for democracy, for justice, and for American politics. Let this be the last of this misbegotten idea that serves only journalists (and in this case not even them).
March 7, 2007
The Libby Verdict Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:20 PM EST Today’s New York Times editorial, “A Libby Verdict,” salutes the verdict, calling it “another reminder of how precious the American judicial system is, at a time when it is under serious attack from the same administration Mr. Libby served,” and then asserts that “we also do not understand why the federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, chose to wage war with the news media in assembling his case, going so far as to jail a Times reporter, Judith Miller, for refusing to reveal the name of a confidential source.” The difficulty with these two sentences is that they seem to be logically contradictory. Libby was convicted because reporters testified. They were reluctant to do so, and seem to have testified because they finally preferred violating the confidentiality of a source to going to jail for contempt. It seems likely that Fitzgerald had to go to war with the news media—to use the somewhat hyperbolic image of the editorial—if he was to win his case, and he did win his case: He persuaded the jury that Libby had lied. The Times wants the end without the means, but we rarely get that choice in life. The Times editorial concludes that the trial testimony provided “some of the clearest evidence yet that this administration did not get duped by faulty intelligence; at the very least, it cherry-picked and hyped intelligence to justify the war.” The Washington Post editorial makes for an interesting contrast, pointing out that Mr. Wilson’s original charges have not been confirmed by the trial, and that a bipartisan investigation by the Senate intelligence committee has refuted a fair number of them: Wilson had not effectively debunked the evidence suggesting that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger, he had not been sent by Cheney to Niger to investigate the matter, and his report had not circulated at the highest levels of the administration and then been ignored. The Post also notes that Wilson’s subsequent charge, that there was a conspiracy to leak Valerie Plame’s identity, was not confirmed at the trial either, and that the trial evidence shows that this charge is unlikely to be true. My sense is that the evidence of the trial is consistent with the hypothesis that the administration, in common with most other observers, had no doubt that Saddam Hussein had retained substantial quantities of “weapons of mass destruction,” most likely chemical weapons, in defiance of the armistice terms of the 1991 Gulf War, and was seeking to develop other WMD. We now know that the administration was mistaken. Because the administration was so sure it was right in a conviction it shared with many opponents of the war—for example, the French government—it recklessly put forward some pretty raw intelligence about Iraqi activities, seeking to prove something it “knew” to be true, which was that the Iraqis were in breach of the armistice agreement. The Iraqis, of course, were in breach—they had refused the inspectors access to the country—but they had not used that breach to attain any increased military capacities. There are a lot of lessons in this, but they are more subtle than the ones the Times seeks to draw. The administration did cherry-pick and hype intelligence, but it did so to persuade, not to deceive; its critics having set it a probably impossible task, to prove without inspections what only inspections could prove, and doubting the good faith of its critics, it was careless with the evidence in hand, supremely confident that the results of the war would prove the assumptions about Iraqi WMD. Suppose that the Iraqis really did have substantial reserves of nerve gas, or really had tried to buy uranium in Niger. Suppose, for that matter, that they had succeeded. All of the best arguments against the war—the extreme difficulty of creating a stable and democratic Iraq, the likelihood of significant strategic gains for Iran, etc.—would still remain. Now suppose that the administration had somehow created that stable and democratic Iraq, but its errors about WMD remained errors, and its cherry-picking of intelligence, and its hyping, had still been exposed. The odds of anyone caring too much about the intelligence failures and hyping seem low. There are many things to be said against the way the administration planned and conducted this war, but the more euphemistic version of “Bush lied, GIs died” is not one of them.
March 7, 2007
Eager Deavers Posted by Alexander Burns at 06:10 PM EST Given the discussion that’s occurred on this blog regarding the Valerie Wilson/Lewis Libby affair, it seems appropriate to comment on the guilty verdict issued against Libby yesterday afternoon. The whole CIA leak investigation has taken an excruciatingly long time—it was well over a year ago that Patrick Fitzgerald announced his indictment against Libby—and this verdict is welcome as a kind of short-term closure. There will be appeals, of course, and Libby’s Legal Defense Trust has already announced a new fundraising push for the next round of litigation. Trial watchers on the left have sometimes compared this to the Watergate investigation, Vice President Cheney to Nixon, and Libby to Howard Hunt, Bob Haldeman, or Charles Colson. I think it’s fair to say, though, that the charges against Libby and the allegations of misconduct on the part of the Vice President’s office really do not measure up to the wrongdoings of Watergate. If they did, I trust Mr. Fitzgerald would have issued additional indictments accordingly. As it is, his investigation has been declared inactive. There’s also far less public awareness of the Libby prosecution than there was of Watergate, and less consensus on its advisability. By the time Nixon resigned, mainstream Republicans had abandoned him. Today the White House and its allies can still defensibly maintain their support for the Vice President’s downed aide. It seems to me that a far better analogue for the Libby scandal would be the prosecution of Ronald Reagan’s former deputy chief of staff, Michael Deaver, during the twilight years of the Reagan administration. Deaver, after leaving the White House, became a powerful lobbyist. Throughout his time in the West Wing, he had been dogged by accusations of influence peddling and self-interested political horse-trading. William Safire alleged multiple times that Deaver’s actions in the White House were at least partly motivated by the aide’s desire to set up a cushy gig for himself after leaving Reagan’s side. When Deaver’s post–White House activities were investigated by Congress and a federal prosecutor, he ended up being charged with multiple counts of perjury. Like Libby, he was not charged with an additional criminal offense. His conviction on three counts of lying under oath, however, was enough to complete his fall from grace. Lewis Libby’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for later this spring. Given that his offenses can carry a sentence of up to 30 years, I am curious to see whether his judge follows the example of Deaver’s. In Deaver’s case, the defense lawyers convinced the court that the Reagan aide’s alcoholism had hampered his testimony on the stand. Consequently Deaver avoided prison time altogether, escaping with a $100,000 fine and 1,500 hours of community service. Some saw this as an appropriately light punishment for an inoffensive transgression. Some even saw it as excessive, given that Deaver was not charged with an active crime, and only with lying about apparently legal, albeit unethical, actions. Still others, though, saw Deaver’s light sentence as an insult to the idea of public ethics and to the system of criminal justice. The reasoning went that unless unethical actions carried stiff punishments, which could function as deterrents, Washington would continue to be populated by hordes of eager potential Deavers. Thirty years would clearly be an excessive sentence for Libby, but I hope Judge Walton, in sentencing Libby, does not totally repeat the reasoning of the court that sentenced Deaver. Even if perjury was Libby’s only offense, such carelessness, evasiveness, and arrogance should carry a stiff price for the country’s most powerful government agents. “Eager Libbys” doesn’t have quite the same ring as “Eager Deavers.” But if the former Cheney aide escapes with a slap on the wrist, a new generation of imprudent presidential aides might deserve his name as a title.
March 7, 2007
What's In a Gene? II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:50 PM EST Alexander Burns writes, “As The New York Times reported, ‘Jefferson’s Y chromosome belongs to the branch designated K2, which is quite rare’ and relatively common among Middle Eastern and Jewish peoples. Though Jefferson’s Jewish ancestor would have been quite far removed in time from the third President, it’s an ironic turn of events that Madeleine Albright’s first predecessor at the State Department also had hidden Jewish heritage. I found the story quite interesting too, but I don’t think that this proves that Thomas Jefferson had a Jewish ancestor, only that it makes it likely that he had a Middle Eastern one. Of course, so did many of his successors in the White House. A Spanish noblewoman named Sancha de Ayala went to England in 1371 in the entourage of Constanza, daughter of Pedro the Cruel, King of Castile, who married John of Gaunt. Sancha married Sir William Blount and left many British descendants. Among the American Presidents who can claim descent from her are George Washington, William Henry Harrison, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, Herbert Hoover, FDR, Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, and, obviously, George W. Bush. Sancha de Ayala is a classic “gateway ancestor,” one who leads to a vast recoverable ancestry, in her case in medieval Spain and the Mediterranean generally. See here. One of her ancestors was born in Constantinople, and there are likely to have been some of Moorish descent. While Thomas Jefferson does not seem to have this descent, he does have descents from William the Lion, King of Scots, and Henry I and Edward III, kings of England. These royal descents guarantee a richly varied ancestry, as kings often married far afield and for political reasons. Edward III, for instance is descended from Charlemagne more than a a thousand times. Indeed, it would be astonishing if Jefferson did not have a remote Jewish ancestor, given the fact that many Jews converted to Christianity (and vice versa) in the early Middle Ages. Of course, none of these descents are agnatic (through the male line) as the Y chromosome descends. Jefferson’s male line is only known as far back as his great-grandfather, also Thomas Jefferson, who died before 1697. How a Middle Eastern Y chromosome found its way into the Welsh gene pool will almost certainly never be known. Parish record keeping of births and marriages began only in 1538 (and often later as some parishes dawdled) in England and Wales. Before then, only the rich can be traced through wills.
March 6, 2007
What’s In a Gene? Posted by Alexander Burns at 05:00 PM EST The last few weeks have been good ones for genealogists. Every now and then, genealogy makes headlines with the story of some public figure’s unknown past, or of the secrets genes reveal about a long-dead historical personage. In recent years, many of these stories have related to the revelation of unknown Jewish descent: Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Sen. John Kerry, Gen. Wesley Clark, and, most recently, Sen. George Allen discovered that their recent ancestors include Jews. Since the middle of February, however, a whole spate of genealogical information has hit the front pages. I wonder whether any of it is significant. First, and perhaps most widely reported, was the story of the Reverend Al Sharpton’s family tree, which apparently grew quite close to that of the late Senator Strom Thurmond. Sharpton’s ancestors, it seems, were owned by relatives of the Thurmond family. Sharpton said this discovery was “probably the most shocking thing” he’s ever learned. I find that statement questionable, given that Sharpton has asserted for years that his ancestry might include slaves. Nevertheless, it’s an unpredictable connection that genealogists unveiled, and, for Sharpton, no doubt a meaningful one. Next, the genealogist William Addams Reitwiesner unveiled research into the genealogy of another black political leader. According to Reitwiesner, one of Barack Obama’s ancestors, George Washington Overall, owned slaves. This seems, at first, rather more shocking than the Sharpton story. The man who may be the first black President, descended from slave owners? Obama, however, has long acknowledged that family rumors hold that his ancestry is linked to that of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. Compared to that legend, descent from an ordinary slave owner seems altogether unsurprising. Finally, it was reported last Wednesday that geneticists at the University of Leicester have uncovered evidence suggesting that Thomas Jefferson may have had Jewish ancestry. As The New York Times reported, “Jefferson’s Y chromosome belongs to the branch designated K2, which is quite rare” and relatively common among Middle Eastern and Jewish peoples. Though Jefferson’s Jewish ancestor would have been quite far removed in time from the third President, it’s an ironic turn of events that Madeleine Albright’s first predecessor at the State Department also had hidden Jewish heritage. All of this is interesting. But in a historical sense is any of it significant? Should we understand Sharpton, or Obama, or Jefferson differently because of their genes? For the first two men, I think the answer is unambiguously no, as the results of studying their genealogy only serves to sharpen their preexisting images. For Sharpton, discovering that his ancestors were owned by Thurmond’s is almost appropriate, as it almost seems to confirm the polar opposition between the worldviews of these two men. For Obama, finding proof that his ancestors owned slaves helps enhance his cherished image as a walking, talking embodiment of modern American diversity. Indeed his spokesman said as much: “It is a true measure of progress that the descendant of a slave owner would come to marry a student from Kenya and produce a son who would grow up to be a candidate for President of the United States.” What about Jefferson? Do we learn anything new about this founding father from this discovery about his genes? I tend to think not, since Jefferson himself was unaware of any Jewish ancestry he might have had. Unless we cling to an outdated notion of racial determinism, we can hardly reinterpret Jefferson based on the ancestry of his Y chromosome. We might consider this as still more evidence of racial mixing among early Americans. In Jefferson’s case, we really don’t need any further proof of this. But we might further reconsider whatever allegiance we still have to the notion that America was founded solely by “the stock of the Puritans.” And in one individual’s case, former Senator Allen might reconsider what it means to be a “common-sense Jeffersonian conservative.”
March 5, 2007
Sam Tanenhaus’s Arthur Schlesinger Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:30 AM EST Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, had a piece in yesterday’s Times Week in Review section, “History in the Present Tense,” celebrating and mourning Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Tanenhaus calls Schlesinger “our last great public historian,” linking him with Richard Hofstadter and C. Vann Woodward. He defines public historians as academics who write “classic works that reanimated the past even as they rummaged in it for clues to understanding, if not solving, the most pressing political questions of the present.” The best widely selling historians today—Tanenhaus mentions Gordon S. Wood and James M. McPherson—do not, on this account, “command the broad cultural authority that Mr. Schlesinger and his contemporaries did.” I am not sure this is entirely correct about McPherson—I know a lot of laymen who read him and seem to revere him—but assume, for the moment, that it is true. For Tanenhaus, “this raises a troubling question: ‘Why do current historians seem unable to engage the world as confidently as Mr. Schlesinger did?’” Tanenhaus tentatively answers his question by noting that Schlesinger “wrote less often about the past than about the present or the nearly present,” and he also notes that “it is hard to imagine our more recent leaders being discussed in such lofty terms.” He goes on to canvass other possibilities, for example that bestsellers on the Founders “are books that, for all their merits, seem not only about the past but also, to some extent, mired in it. They are archival. And that may be the problem.” Maybe, but I think Tanenhaus was on to something interesting in his first shot at the problem. My guess is that many modern academic historians are to a degree focused on the present, no matter what their period and whether or not they acknowledge the fact, but they have a less than heroic vision of the country and of its political leaders. Schlesinger had heroes, and they wielded political authority. Political history has not been the dominant strand in the academy for a generation, nor has a sense of political authority as heroic been much in fashion. A vision of American history that is relentlessly antiheroic will not easily rise to the level of imagining American history even as tragedy. Tragedy, by a traditional definition, is about the fall of great men, and our political classes are not too widely understood by modern academics as great men. I have the impression that many historians, nowadays interested in demystifying and deconstructing visions of American political elites as great men, have also been interested in trying to deconstruct the notion of “broad cultural authority.” In that case, it is perhaps no mystery that people who spend their lives trying to overthrow “broad cultural authority” should not themselves command it. One more thought: When recently reviewing a somewhat sour account of some of our traditional elites—World War II American generals—for this website, I had occasion to recall a remark of Goethe’s, for it is possible that our modern historians are quite correct in their post-heroic views. On this theory, modern historians choose to look hard at squalid and often ugly facts, and as Goethe remarked, “No man is a hero to his valet.” On that occasion, however, I then remembered Hegel’s rejoinder that this is “not because the hero is not a hero but because the valet is a valet.” After all, if many modern historians are hostile to the notion of great men, several explanations for this propensity are logically possible.
March 4, 2007
The Alternative Minimum Tax Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:35 PM EST In 1969, in the last, dying days of the Lyndon Johnson administration, the secretary of the treasury, Joseph W. Barr, who has the distinction of having had the shortest of all tenures as secretary of the treasury, less than one month, testified to a Congressional committee. He stated that 155 very high-income families had managed to pay no federal income taxes in 1966 (the last year for which information was then available), thanks to various perfectly lawful means. For instance, the interest on state and city municipal bonds was not taxable, so if one invested only in such bonds, no income tax would be due, even if the interest income was in the millions. The story, not surprisingly, was big news, and well it should have been, with millions of citizens with average incomes paying income taxes and a few with very high incomes not, thanks to accounting technicalities. This had happened before. In 1934, for instance, J. P. Morgan, Jr., had spent several months cruising on one of the world’s largest yachts, Corsair, but still paid no income taxes thanks to the deductibility of capital losses against regular income. Morgan had simply sold stock at depression prices that had been bought in the booming twenties at high prices, and then bought it back, thus establishing a capital loss while maintaining his position in the stock. This too, had caused an uproar, and Congress amended the tax code making only a very small part of capital losses deductible against ordinary income. The rest could be deducted only against capital gains. The result of the 1969 revelations was a new provision in the tax code that required the rich to pay a minimum tax regardless of whatever legal deductions they had. To ensure they did, certain potential deductions effectively available only to the rich, such as accelerated depreciation, reserves for losses, and mineral depreciation allowances, were limited or not allowed at all in certain circumstances. But in 1986, as part of the great tax reform of that year, the minimum-tax provisions were changed fundamentally. Many of the limitations on the rich-guy investment deductions were removed, and limitations on such ordinary-guy deductions as mortgage interest, state and local taxes, and even union dues were imposed on those with high incomes. Since the point at which these limitations would kick in was set very high, little money was raised—only $1.7 billion the first year—and almost exclusively from the rich. But the drafters of the legislation made one serious mistake. They did not index for inflation or for rising real incomes. These caused more and more people to become subject to the alternative minimum tax, as it was now called, and have to pay more taxes. In later years, other changes in the two tax systems—the regular tax system and the alternative minimum tax—including the Bush tax cuts, brought still more people under the AMT. This year it is estimated that 23.4 million taxpayers, more than one in four, will have to pay under a system intended to catch the rich. By definition, far fewer than 25 percent of the population can be “rich.” Still worse, the very people who are supposed to be targeted are not being caught. Most people having to calculate their taxes under AMT are in the $75,000–$500,000 income range. In other words, the upper middle class. Meanwhile, more and more upper-income families are paying very low taxes. In 2003, the last year for which we have data, 41,000 families earning more than $200,000 paid less than 10 percent of their incomes in federal taxes. And remember those 155 rich families that got off scot free in 1966? In 2003, 2,824 rich families paid no taxes at all. It is highly unlikely that anything beyond a few patches will be done about this until a new administration is in place in 2009, as the next presidential election is already, alas, in full swing. But nothing could make clearer the utter moral, financial, political, and economic bankruptcy of the federal tax code. I would hope that liberals, moderates, and conservatives of good will (and that’s the overwhelming majority of each group, as otherwise democracy couldn’t work) would agree that something fundamental needs to be done, and the sooner the better for all of us. We, and the American economy, have suffered under the tyranny of the federal tax code long enough. I would propose that as a starting point we might agree that any new tax code (the old one, I think, is quite beyond repair) should conform to these basic principles: 1) Everyone ought to pay taxes that are proportional to their incomes. 2) The richer should pay a greater proportion of their incomes than the less rich. 3) The amount of tax owed should be clear, easy, and inexpensive to calculate, and paid in a way that least inconveniences the taxpayer. 4) Taxes should distort the underlying economy as little as possible. The current system (not, of course, that there is anything even remotely systematic about it) flings down and dances upon each of these common-sense principles, which are straight out of Adam Smith. I’ll have more to say about this in a future post.
March 3, 2007
The Plainsman Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:55 PM EST I watched The Plainsman last night, one of the many famous movies I’ve suddenly realized I’d never actually seen. It is from 1936, a Cecile B. DeMille epic with Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur playing Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane. It has its oddities, and also its accuracies. Hickok was one of the only great gunslingers to have fought for the Union in the Civil War—he got his start in that cause on his father’s Illinois farm, which was an Underground Railroad station—and an early scene in The Plainsman, which starts at the close of the war, shows Cooper’s Hickok silently perturbed by a white man kicking and otherwise abusing a black porter. This is uncharacteristic, I think, of 1936 movies, but true enough to Hickok. The gunfights are also less implausible than most depicted in movies, since the historical Hickok was the victor in the only Western fast-draw duel recorded by history—he killed Davis K. Tutt Jr. in Springfield, Mo., in 1865—and the scenes where a solitary Cooper shoots down numerous antagonists also seem less absurd than is generally the case, since Hickok actually did that, and on several occasions. Similarly, the scenes of Cooper shooting various members of war parties off horses at prodigious distances can be set against the allegation that the historical Hickok made a celebrated shot, downhill on a windy day, at a range of better than 750 yards. Some of the oddities of The Plainsman happen very early on: Lincoln, on the eve of his assassination, worries about the economy absorbing masses of soon-to-be-released soldiers, which sounds more of a 1936 New Deal concern than one from 1865, but I could be wrong about that, and I’m confident that if I am a co-blogger will swiftly point it out. More jarring, and not only because it also seems a bit anachronistic, is a scene in which the manufacturers of small arms plot to sell repeating rifles to the Plains tribes, lured by prospective super-profits and appalled by the imminent disappearance of their mass market, now that the Civil War is over. This sounds like Merchants-of-Death stuff, and almost certainly was, for 1936 was the year that North Dakota Sen. Gerald P. Nye’s “Senate Munitions Committee,” as it was called, abruptly closed up shop. That happened following Nye’s injudicious attack on Woodrow Wilson, whom Nye viewed rather the way a lot of people view Bush and Cheney today—as someone who had lied America into a war of choice. The theory then, and a theory now, was/is that arms manufacturers need wars to sell their wares, and that this need is the main source of wars. As Nye put it, “When the Senate investigation is over, we shall see that war and preparation for war is not a matter of national honor and national defense, but a matter of profit for the few.” Arms sales, however, are rarely the cause of wars. The Plains tribes were arming, to the extent that they could, to resist being starved to death on worse and worse land, not because predatory Lords of Capital were forcing weapons into their hands (and at one point The Plainsman seems to acknowledge the fact). In 1936 Nye’s committee failed to nationalize the arms industry, but the ever-popular Merchants of Death theory did inspire Congress’s three neutrality acts, which made it more difficult for various governments belatedly attempting to arm against the very real threat of fascism. The most “progressive” moment in The Plainsman is thus also the saddest, a reminder that bad ideas are at least as tenacious as good ones, and at least as easy to cheaply dramatize.
March 2, 2007
Hair Force One II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:55 PM EST My thanks to Alexander Burns and those who posted to the Discussion section on the fact that the Clinton haircut is, in fact, legendary. My apologies for thinking it was true. Proving Mr. Burns’s point that the sensational—or at least embarrassing—story gets page one and the eventual correction debunking it is lucky to make page B17, this is absolutely the first time I have ever heard, in 14 years, that the story had turned out not to be accurate. I don’t read the Washington Post with any regularity (and in 1993, before the Internet, I didn’t read it at all), and if the Post buried the correction, you can imagine what the other newspapers that had picked up the story did with it. However, I might point out that this is a blog, not an American Heritage article. The latter get edited by editors and gone over by fact checkers, without whom the best of historians would make fools of themselves on a regular basis. Blogs by their nature and purpose are more spontaneous and of-the-moment and thus more prone to error. A blog such as this one, it seems to me, is essentially a written conversation, and conversation does not come with footnotes or peer review (at least not until after the fact). While I, and the others who write for this blog I’m sure, will never state as fact what we know—or even suspect—not to be so, we all make mistakes, harbor misconceptions and prejudices, and think we know more than we do. Historians are human too, after all, if you’ll pardon the shocking revelation. We all depend on others, not the least our readers, to point out the assorted errors of our ways. So have no mercy on me. I love to find out that I’ve made a mistake, because it means I’ve learned something.
March 2, 2007
Hair Force One Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:05 AM EST At the beginning of this week, John Steele Gordon and I had an instructive exchange about presidential decorating and the periodic renovation of the White House. In part of this exchange, reference was made to President Clinton’s having gotten a “legendary” haircut in Los Angeles International Airport, supposedly shutting down the transit hub in the process. As several commenters have pointed out, this story turns out to be, well, legendary—or, to put it more simply, false. Though I have little affection for the forty-second president, this seems like an error worth correcting. On May 20, 1993, the Washington Post reported that President Clinton had held up numerous LAX flights in order to get a $200 trim from the posh stylist Cristophe. Supposedly a few flights were held up for 10 minutes, at least one was delayed by nearly a half hour, and one was forced to circle in the air for a good 17 minutes, all so that the newly inaugurated President could taste the life of a movie star. Though the White House denied that any delays had occurred, this story spread, moving from the Post’s gossip column to the front pages of other national papers. How humiliating for an administration only five months old, to have the President caught acting so recklessly. Or so it seemed. Fortunately for the Clinton Administration, and unfortunately for the Washington Post, the report was debunked in a little over a month. At the end of June Newsday reported that, based on the records of the commercial airlines and the FAA, the Post’s story was wrong. Air Force One caused no delays at LAX. President Clinton did get an overpriced haircut, which may have been embarrassing on its own, but he didn’t inconvenience any ordinary travelers in order to do so. The gossip had been published in error, and the media had run away with the story. In the end, it was not President Clinton who had behaved recklessly, but the press. We’ve talked a lot about media bias on this blog, and we’ve tended to focus on ideological bias. The greatest bias within the news media, however, is not at all ideological or partisan. It is toward the sensational and the outrageous. News outlets—and now, blogs—tend to report on stories like the LAX affair enthusiastically and, if the stories turn out to be wrong, retract them quietly and with little contrition. In July of 1993 the Washington Post ombudsman, Joann Byrd, chided her paper for doing just this. Beyond this reproach, however, the Post suffered little. Instead, the Clintons had to bear the brunt of the paper’s error. Apparently they still do.
March 1, 2007
Arthur Schlesinger Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:45 PM EST Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., died yesterday. Fifteen years ago I had the privilege of interviewing him for American Heritage magazine, and we talked for a couple of hours about a book he had just written, The Disuniting of America. In that book Schlesinger had analyzed and in part lamented academic pressures for what he thought some destructive and dishonest multicultural curricula, and he took issue with a political and intellectual tendency he thought misconceived and a little dangerous—but not very dangerous. He thought the drive to preserve certain forms of cultural difference and identity perverse, but also, happily, almost certainly doomed to failure. He made at least one mistaken prediction: He remarked that “I am sure that once the great majority of college professors bestir themselves, we’ll see an end to the sillier stuff,” but I think most of the rest of what he said has held up pretty well. Schlesinger was confident about his country’s prospects in an era of increasing ethnic and racial diversity. He noted that America was still assimilating immigrants very effectively, and that we were in fact the most successful multi-ethnic society the world had yet seen. This was an interesting and somewhat bold thing to say in 1992, and not only because of the risk of outraging the guardians of academic piety. In 1992 Jim Crow was not yet a generation in the past, and anti-black racism was still seen as the feature that had most strikingly distinguished the United States from other modern societies. On this score, however, history has so far been very kind to Arthur Schlesinger. I recently had occasion to reflect on just how kind, and to do so in an unlikely place. Last weekend the editor of American Heritage took me to see Madame Tussaud’s, in Times Square, apparently the most popular tourist attraction in New York City, but one few if any native-born New Yorkers of our acquaintance had ever seen. We were both native-born New Yorkers, and we decided to buck a trend. There are a number of things to say about Madame Tussaud’s, but for this purpose, I’ll restrict myself to the effigy of Josephine Baker, born in St. Louis, Missouri, who died a French citizen, with a croix de guerre to her credit, and a Place Josephine Baker in Montparnasse. She was a famous refugee from American racism, and her name still evokes the shameful fact that some people once fled not from Europe to escape degradation, but to Europe for the same end. This very pointedly inverted a great American myth, but in the face of a widespread suspicion that racism is a rising tide in Europe, and a receding one here, who would do it now? And Paris, once a Mecca to expatriate black Americans—more recently the scene of protracted clashes between Muslim Frenchmen and the police, and a city anticipating a rising vote for the National Front—was in those days not alone in being a better place to be of an ethnic or racial minority than was the United States. When I was in my twenties, if you patronized the Yorkville bars in Manhattan, you could still see black ex-GIs talking in pretty fair German to the locals, fondly remembering a country where they had felt less racial hostility than they had in their own. Those days, too, are past. Arthur Schlesinger, to his great credit, saw this one coming. From one perspective, it is a little odd that he did. Historians are not normally credited with any great prophetic powers, and there is a strong sense that by its very nature the study of history does little if anything to let you predict the future—the owl of Minerva, as the saying goes, only takes wing at dusk. The unalarmed and generally optimistic tones of Schlesinger’s little book on American multiculturalism nonetheless suggest that a good historian can get a sense of the logic and trajectory of a culture as it moves and mutates over time. It remains true that we usually remember the future and imagine the past, and Schlesinger was fully aware that the present sets at least parts of historians’ agendas. His historical work often reflected his own political concerns, and he was in retrospect not uncritical, on this very score, of some of the books that had made him famous. But on the evidence of Schlesinger’s case, a careful study of history is unlikely to make you sillier about the future.
March 1, 2007
Hypocrisy Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:20 PM EST What is it about hypocrisy revealed that causes such an intense jolt of schadenfreude in those who learn of it? The fire-and-brimstone televangelist who turns out to be a regular customer of prostitutes, the friend-of-the-common-man labor leader who is found to live like a prince, the buttoned-up President whose Oval Office recordings reveal an incredibly foul mouth and not a little anti-Semitism are all instant fodder for late-night comedians and water-cooler conversations. The reason perhaps is that, as La Rochefoucauld explained three hundred years ago, hypocrisy is indeed the tribute that vice pays to virtue. We are all miserable sinners and we all wish to conceal the fact. Until relatively recently, that was usually easy to do, and hypocrisy was largely a private matter. As La Rochefoucauld’s contemporary John Milton put it, hypocrisy was the “only evil that walks invisible, except to God alone.” But that has changed with the onrush of technology in modern times. The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887) was the greatest American preacher of his day, regularly filling Brooklyn’s vast Plymouth Church with crowds of up to 2,500 to hear him denounce sin. But the modern media had developed by Beecher’s heyday, and when a former friend and protégé sued him for adultery with his wife, the case was a nationwide sensation. (Beecher was exonerated by ecclesiastical tribunals, and a civil jury deadlocked on the issue, but it seems likely that he was in fact guilty; even Beecher admitted he had been extraordinarily indiscreet.) A more recent preacher against sin, this time of the environmental sort, has been former Vice President Al Gore, who has made a major post-political career out of crusading against global warming. He has been tireless in preaching this gospel, and his movie on the subject, An Inconvenient Truth, has just won an Oscar for best documentary, although many critics have said it is more propaganda than documentary. I have not seen it myself. But while instructing the rest of us in no uncertain terms to use less energy in order to reduce our “carbon footprints” and thus reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, it turns out that Gore himself is a prodigious personal consumer of energy. According to a Tennessee think tank, whose report has not been contradicted as to the facts it reports, Gore’s house in Nashville uses about 20 times as much electricity as the average American household. Last August alone, the house consumed over 22,000 kilowatt hours of electricity that month while the average household uses a little over 10,000 kwh a year. Gore’s heated swimming pool burns through about $500 a month in natural gas, and his average bill for gas is over $1,000 a month. Altogether, Al Gore is spending more than $30,000 a year for gas and electricity at his Nashville home. And that’s not all. Al Gore also owns two other houses, one in Carthage, Tennessee, about 50 miles from Nashville, and one in Washington, D.C. He is, apparently, a frequent flyer on private jets, which emit far more greenhouse gases per passenger mile than do large, efficient commercial jets. All told, if human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are a major cause of global warming, then the gospeler of global warming is a part of the problem, not just the herald of its solution. Personally, I couldn’t care less how much energy Al Gore uses. He is a rich man with a very busy schedule and the more power to him, so to speak. If I were in a position to do so I would happily fly on private jets. As Mrs. August Belmont explained a century ago about her private railroad car, “It is not an acquired taste; one takes to it immediately.” Further, I am a skeptic regarding human-caused global warming. The science is both extremely complex and not well understood, and those most loudly proclaiming the dangers are exactly those who stand to benefit the most from designing and adopting policies to curb it. But what I find most interesting is that Al Gore seems to have been caught entirely flat-footed by this revelation, and the response to it has been notably lame. Buying “carbon offsets” to mitigate one’s own carbon emissions seems economically dubious at best (see here) and remarkably elitist, even for environmentalists. They are reminiscent of the indulgences that were a prime cause of the Reformation. The poor who sinned paid for it in purgatory; the rich who sinned bought indulgences so they could have their fill of earthly pleasures and still go straight to heaven. With the Internet, FOIA requests, millions of video cameras operating in both private and public places, and cell phone cameras by the billions, the days when hypocrisy was visible only to God are long gone. It seems to me that people in public life should do a “hypocrisy inventory” to assess their vulnerabilities and, at the very least, have a good public relations response ready to go should it become necessary. Or, of course, they could heed the instruction recorded the gospeler St. John, to “go and sin no more.”
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