July 24, 2007
Confidential Sources II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:25 PM EST I agree with Alexander Burns that Novak broke his word to Senator Eagleton never to reveal him as the source. A deal is a deal. Even politicians and journalists—neither profession exactly famous for gentlemanly behavior—can understand that. I also agree that it would be great if we could get it standardized that a promise of confidentiality made to get the story should have an expiration date, such as 50 years after the death of the journalist, so that historians can use the material. The historical record is imperfect enough. Speaking of the historical record, there have been far worse instances of destruction than a journalist taking a confidence to his or her grave. I can think of three infamous cases off the top of my head, all of them British. After Lord Byron’s death in 1824, his publisher, John Murray, burned his memoirs. While surely unpublishable at the time, they must have been fascinating. So fascinating, in fact, that that is why Murray destroyed them. How true they were, of course, is another matter. After the death of Sir Richard Burton in 1890, Lady Burton burned his journals. Burton had led one of the most adventurous of Victorian lives, which is saying something. Speaking numerous languages fluently, he traveled the world, went many places never seen before by Europeans (he discovered Lake Tanganyika in the heart of Africa, among other things). Fluent in Arabic (he translated The Arabian Nights into English) and Muslim customs, he dressed in Arab clothing and went to Mecca for the Hajj. Had he been discovered, his fate would undoubtedly have been very unpleasant indeed. Apparently he was as sexually adventurous as he was geographically, and his wife did not want the details to besmirch her husband’s memory. They might have, I suppose, at the time, but today his journals would make this extraordinary man only more extraordinary. Finally, Queen Victoria left her diary to her youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice. She had kept it faithfully from when she was still a child until a few days before her death at the age of 81, having reigned over Britain at the height of her glory for more than 63 years. The diary was massive, 111 volumes filled with the details and vignettes of the remarkable life of the person who gave her name to an age. A good, direct writer and sometimes very observant, the Queen knew all the great figures of her time and was present at innumerable events of historical significance. The diary was published and is a remarkable document to put it mildly, but it was only published after Princess Beatrice destroyed the parts that she and she alone deemed “unsuitable.” Only about one third survives. What a tragedy.
July 24, 2007
Confidential Sources Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:50 AM EST Last week I had the dubious privilege of attending a breakfast with Robert Novak, the septuagenarian journalist who writes the second-longest running column in America. He has a new memoir out, The Prince of Darkness, about his 50-year career in Washington. I can’t say I was planning to buy the book. I’m not a particular fan of Novak, and political memoirs are often just 500-page vehicles for justifying mistakes and settling old grievances. But at this event free copies of Novak’s book were in abundance, so I thought, what the heck, why not see what the old curmudgeon has to say? I started paging through the introduction as I waited for the Q&A with Novak to begin. Once Novak started talking, it didn’t take too long for me to learn what the book’s big, controversial revelation was, outside of its account of the Valerie Plame affair. Novak blows many of his confidential sources from over the years, and most notable among them is the anonymous senator who told him, in April of 1972, that “the people don’t known [George] McGovern is for amnesty, abortion and legalization of pot. Once middle America—Catholic middle America, in particular—finds this out, he’s dead.” Novak kept the identity of this quote’s author a secret for 35 years, even amid speculation that he had invented the comment for his own partisan purposes. In The Prince of Darkness,
Novak reveals that his source was the late Sen. Thomas Eagleton, who was briefly McGovern’s running mate in 1972. There’s an irony to this revelation. Eagleton is remembered mostly as the guy McGovern ditched when the going got tough, after revelations that the Missouri legislator had undergone psychiatric treatment in the past. It adds an odd twist to the story to learn that before McGovern ever humiliated his running mate, Eagleton had knifed his Senate colleague by way of Bob Novak’s column. What’s controversial about Novak’s new disclosure, however, is that he revealed Eagleton as his source in spite of the senator’s repeated instructions not to do so. Novak claims that Eagleton’s death released him from their confidentiality agreement and that the two of them will have to settle up in heaven (or, he added at breakfast, perhaps somewhere else). But his assumption that such an agreement ends at death is not a widely accepted one, and one has to question the ethics of publishing such surprising information about Eagleton when the man cannot defend himself. The whole affair makes me wonder how much information historians lose to confidentiality agreements like this one. The Eagleton-McGovern affair is ultimately a detail point in the 1972 election, but the identities of some of Novak’s other blown sources may, at some point, be valuable to historians. And Novak is not even one of the country’s most conscientious journalists. Wouldn’t it be useful for historians to know, for example, who Dana Priest’s sources were for the now-famous Washington Post story on secret CIA prisons? Wouldn’t a full portrait of the last seven years include information about which officials were dissenting from (dare I say undermining?) the President’s policies? And imagine how frustrated some would have been if Woodward and Bernstein had died before Mark Felt, and the identity of Deep Throat had never been resolved. Maybe in the future some journalists will decide to help out historians by revealing their sources in a more delicate way than Novak. Maybe journalists could put records of their research, including records of anonymous sources, in university libraries with instructions that they not be opened for 50 years. That way, their data can be preserved for the use of history scholars in a way that avoids Novak’s sensationalism. On the other hand, maybe the way things are now is the way they’ve got to be, in order to protect valuable, anonymous whistleblowers—people who might be worried about disclosing their identity even after half a century. Perhaps historians should continue to accept journalists’ confidential sources as unknowable. Either resolution is imperfect and unsatisfying. I wonder what my fellow bloggers think of Novak’s disclosures, and about how long a confidentiality agreement should last.
July 23, 2007
More on Detroit Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:10 PM EST Over the weekend, Fred Schwarz posed several questions about today’s lead feature (which I wrote) on the 1967 Detroit riots. Fred’s questions are excellent, and with his permission, I’ll copy and answer them here on the blog: 1) Fred wrote: “In consecutive paragraphs [Josh] talks about landlords who abandoned their properties in black neighborhoods. In one case he says this was true because ‘they housed far too many tenants.’ So landlords have a captive group of tenants who are paying above market rates since they can’t live anywhere else, and the landlords respond to this effective monopoly by shutting down their buildings? It may be true that they tore down the buildings to avoid property taxes, but in that case, the housing crisis was caused by high taxes as much as by racism.” Fred is absolutely right about motive. Landlords in many cities like Detroit often abandoned their properties to avoid paying property taxes and maintenance on them. Worse still, they sometimes hired arsonists to torch these properties, thus allowing them to default on their property taxes and (fraudulently) collect insurance money. Though it’s tempting to blame the housing crisis on high taxes, in fact the shortage owed to an artificially manipulated housing market. Since African-Americans had no choice but to rent in certain neighborhoods, a landlord with, say, two houses, each containing three apartments, could torch one property (thereby collecting the insurance money and avoiding future maintenance and tax costs), subdivide the second property into six units, and charge the exact same rent for these substantially smaller apartments. With nowhere else to go, black renters had little choice but to pay the same rents for ever-smaller and more deficient housing stock. If taxes were the key problem, landlords in other sections of the city would have attempted the same strategy. But they didn’t. This strategy made sense only in majority-minority neighborhoods. 2) Fred asked me to explain how the FHA “insured the vast portion of home mortgages.” This is also a very good question. Before the 1930s, most Americans were not homeowners. In a volatile employment market, the average worker and his family posed a default risk for mortgage providers. Thus, banks reduced their risk by demanding prohibitively high down payments, keeping the terms of their loans short (say, five or ten years), and requiring clients to pay the interest up front, thus ensuring that the bank would realize an early profit. The Federal Housing Authority, a New Deal innovation, sought to boost employment in the building trades by freeing up capital for new home construction. In simple terms, the FHA insured mortgages, thus eliminating much of the risk for banks and other mortgage providers. In turn, it demanded that participating lenders make mortgages more accessible by lengthening the terms of their loans, allowing for smaller down payments, and spreading interest payments over the course of the loan so that homeowners would accrue equity in their property with each monthly payment. Thanks largely to the FHA, by 1960 about 60 percent of homes in America were owner-occupied. 3) Fred’s final question followed on this last point. “As far back as 1948, covenants under which homeowners agreed not to sell their homes to blacks were declared unenforceable because enforcing them would require the government to participate in an unconstitutional act of discrimination. These were private agreements, and they were declared unconstitutional. How, then, was it possible for a government agency to have an explicit racial prohibition in its regulations?” Fred is exactly right that the Supreme Court invalidated restrictive covenants in 1948 (Shelley v. Kraemer). That case simply made restrictive covenants unenforceable; it wasn’t until 1968, when Congress passed (and Lyndon Johnson signed into law) an open-housing act that such practices also carried penalties. But the FHA was not technically invoking restrictive covenants. People were free to sell their homes to black buyers; the government simply refused to insure mortgages in such cases. Using maps that were drawn up by another government agency, the Home Owners Loan Corporation, the FHA assessed every census tract in America for the stability of its housing market. Assuming that houses lost value in neighborhoods that were racially mixed or primarily black or Latino, the FHA assigned such areas lower scores or “redlined” them altogether; in other words, it refused to insure mortgages in these neighborhoods or insured them on unfavorable terms. This meant that black Americans could not secure mortgages, as their mere presence in a neighborhood would choke off affordable credit. On one hand, the FHA could claim it was simply following the logic of the free market. When African-Americans moved into a neighborhood, white homeowners tended to flee en masse, thus glutting the local real estate market and collectively driving down the prices of their homes. In this sense, it was white racism, not government policy, that was to blame. On the other hand, the logic was circular. White homeowners understood on some level that when black families moved into their neighborhoods, home prices dropped. Prices dropped in part because the FHA stopped insuring mortgages for prospective buyers in these newly heterogeneous neighborhoods, thus making loans more expensive and driving down the amount of money that buyers could reasonably offer. It was a vicious circle, and one that kept the majority of black urbanites trapped in a rapidly depleting and deteriorating universe of old housing stock. It was a recipe for disaster.
July 23, 2007
Verdict: Not Proven Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 04:05 PM EST A recent article (registration may be needed) by William Kristol was headlined: “Bush the Winner: Why History Will Judge the Prez a Clear Success.” Regardless of how you feel about our current Prez, this headline is nonsense, because history doesn’t judge. The recent “founders boom” revealed this clearly: For every Beavis saying “John Adams was cool,” there was a Butt-Head saying “No way, dude, John Adams sucked.” The same goes for Thomas Jefferson (oracular sage or racist voluptuary), Benjamin Franklin (master of practical wisdom or hedonistic faker), and all the rest. A book just published argues that Aaron Burr, despite trying to steal the 1800 presidential election, killing Alexander Hamilton, and then attempting to start his own country in the Southwest, all within a period of half a dozen years, was actually a noble patriot. If history can’t get its story straight on these old-timers, how long will it take to make up its mind about President Bush? Not to mention the books we receive almost every day purporting to “debunk” the “conventional wisdom” on this or that historical event or person. Just about everyone thinks Washington and Lincoln were pretty good eggs (though even there you’ll get an argument), but outside of them and a handful of others, there is nothing close to unanimity about who the good guys and bad guys are in American history. The need to say something new about any well-worn subject leads to a sort of oscillation in which the academic reputation of a person or thing oscillates up and down with a period of roughly 30 years. When combined with the endless supply of graduate students in search of doctorates, this turns the old Hegelian dialectic into an eternal cycle: Instead of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, it’s thesis, thesis, thesis, thesis . . . The above discussion, of course, leaves aside the question of what is meant by “history”: University historians? Informed readers? The general public, most of whom probably could not name more than two or three Presidents? Personally, I would prefer leaving the verdict up to an impartial body, like the staff of American Heritage—except we have trouble even agreeing on a place to eat lunch. And any community of historically informed persons that you decide to empanel as a jury will be more numerous and further from agreement than that, even if it were somehow possible to predict how people will think in the future. Whether you like President Bush or hate him, the Kristol piece shows that whenever somebody appeals to “the verdict of history,” all it means is that he’s losing the present-day argument.
July 20, 2007
What We Told Our Readers to Tell Their Children About Vietnam Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 02:30 PM EST The first major article I worked on after joining the American Heritage copy department in 1988 was called “What Should We Tell Our Children About Vietnam?” An Oklahoma schoolteacher who had served in Vietnam wrote to many public figures, asking for advice on what to tell his students, and we published their responses. Many of these were fascinating, but—typically for a publishing employee—what I remember most about this piece was what a monumental pain it was to fit the copy. As the article appeared in our pages, each individual response had its own heading, which was usually four lines deep and needed a couple of lines of text beneath it. Since these heads could not be split by a column break, just about every response had to have lines cut or added. I gave Richard Snow, then our managing editor, a monumentally complicated set of galleys filled with instructions like, “Cut 7 lines total from next 3 items OR add 2 lines to first item.” Richard, in what I would soon come to realize was typical fashion for him, described my efforts as “lapidary.” I had to look it up. Oh, and did I mention that this was the last issue we put together by sending out for type, instead of using our own computers? We would tell the typesetter, “First 6 lines 10.5 picas wide, right justified, followed by 24 lines 21 picas wide,” and if they messed it up or left out a word, we’d have to wait another day for them to do it all over again. Then we would make our cuts and have the typesetters reset the entire thing and fix all their new errors, after which we would make more adds and cuts and send it out again. This was my introduction to publishing. With all these busy memories, you will understand why my recollection of the article itself was rather sketchy. My main impression was of a bunch of blowhards spouting their usual boilerplate. But the other day I came across this article while looking for links to accompany Allen Barra’s review of Rescue Dawn, and as I skimmed through it, the words that in 1988 I had seen essentially as marbles to be fit into a box now sounded a lot more interesting, especially in view of events that have occurred since. The entire article is worth a look, but below are some widely varying viewpoints that struck me as especially telling, in both positive and negative ways. They have been chosen with a mild bias towards respondents who remain prominent today.
Richard Armitage
Naval Operations Coordinator, Defense Attaché Office, Saigon, Vietnam, 1973-75; now Assistant Secretary of Defense
First, the U.S. government was unwilling or, perhaps, unable to articulate effectively goals and objectives for our involvement in Vietnam, thus failing to mobilize public support for this sacrifice. Second, the government failed to realize that Dau Tranh (Vietnamese for “struggle”) had both military and political applications and that the Vietnamese Communists gave equal weight to both sides of this equation. Third, once committed to sacrifice, we did not fight to win because of political constraints. . . . . Patience is not a well-known attribute of democracy; thus a consistent and credible rationale for our actions must be presented to enable the government to continue its course. —————————— Malcolm Browne
Chief Indochina Correspondent, Associated Press, 1961-65; Saigon Correspondent, ABC, 1965-66 Maybe the lesson of Vietnam was this: If you really want to win a war, you’re best off fighting it on your own, with as little help from outside as possible. I watched South Vietnamese fighting spirit evaporate in direct proportion to increases in the level of U.S. aid, combat assistance, and advice that was poured in. It’s just possible that Saigon would have waged a better war if we had simply stayed out. . . . —————————— George Bush
Director, CIA, 1974–75; now Vice-President of the United States —We must ensure that any major foreign policy commitment has the full support and understanding of the American people, for it is through their sons and daughters and their tax dollars that our power and influence are projected. Without such support a protracted U.S. involvement cannot succeed. —The United States must have a clear understanding of the historical processes at work. The United States viewed the Vietnam War as the first step in China’s drive to expand its influence throughout Southeast Asia, forgetting the long history of fighting between China and Vietnam. In fact, Chinese-Vietnamese hostility reemerged soon after our withdrawal. —The United States entered the Vietnam War viewing it as another Korea. In fact, the causes for the war, the topography, and the methods used by the enemy were very different. —The United States essentially fought the war for the South Vietnamese. In future conflicts of this type, every effort must be made to encourage the beleaguered people of a country to fight for their own survival, as is being done in Afghanistan and Nicaragua. —————————— Arthur J. Goldberg
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, 1965–68 The most important lessons for students to learn from the disastrous Vietnam War: One, America should never be involved in a war where its vital national interests are not at stake. Two, our country should never engage in a war which is not declared by Congress in a formal declaration, as required by our Constitution. —————————— Barry Goldwater
U.S. Senator from Arizona, 1953–65,1969–87 The best thing I could tell your students is that when you decide to go to war, you must at the same instant decide to win it. It’s just like having a fight with another fellow: If you go into it halfheartedly, you’re going to get the daylights beat out of you. That’s about what happened in Vietnam. We had some brilliant victories over there, but we also had some dreadful decisions made in Washington, relative to our efforts. —————————— Timothy Leary
Producer of Psychedelic Celebrations, 1965–66; wrote and acted in the film Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out It was a disastrous, insane, imperial invasion of a weirdo Third World country. It will leave a deep scar in the American soul for one generation. Trust the CIA, not the military, for estimates about military events. —————————— John S. McCain III
Prisoner of War, Vietnam, 1967–73; now U.S. Senator from Arizona Following the end to U.S. involvement in Indochina, Gen. Maxwell Taylor stated the conditions under which he thought it was appropriate to commit U.S. troops overseas. I subscribe to General Taylor’s criteria and believe these maxims must be adhered to in the wake of our misfortunes in Vietnam. First, the objectives of the commitment must be explainable to the man in the street in one or two sentences. Second, there must be clear support of the President by Congress. Third, there must be reasonable expectation of success. Finally, there must be a clear American interest at stake. —————————— John D. Negroponte
Second Secretary for the Department of State in Saigon, 1964—68; U.S. Delegate to the Paris Peace Talks, 1968–69 I think the most important thing for your students to know about the Vietnam War is that the United States lost. For countries, just like individuals, I think that learning the true meaning of the maxim “You can’t win them all” is an inevitable part of the maturation process. . . . But most important of all, I think we picked a difficult fight in a very faraway place. I am sure the results will help ensure that we pick our fights more carefully in the future. —————————— George S. Patton
Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, 1962–63; Commanding Officer, llth Armored Cavalry Regiment, Vietnam, 1968–69 The most important point your students must understand, is that because of our defeat in so-called limited warfare by an eighth-rate power (if that high), our enemies have discovered an Achilles’ heel and are putting it to us in Central America today. We have demonstrated a weakness in this type of conflict, and they are capitalizing on that weakness. Because of that, some blood may be spilled in that area in the future, if we have to invade. Cuba is the problem—not Nicaragua. —————————— Nicholas Proffitt
Newsweek Bureau Chief, Saigon, 1972 There were no “good guys” or “bad guys” in Vietnam. There were good people and evil people on both sides. You know the story of the American Revolution. To most of the Vietcong, we Americans were the British. They were the Americans. —————————— Ronald Reagan
Governor of California, 1967–74; now President of the United States Vietnam was not so much a war as it was one long battle in an ongoing war—the war in defense of freedom, which is still under assault. This battle was lost not by those brave American and South Vietnamese troops who were waging it but by political misjudgments and strategic failure at the highest levels of government. The tragedy—indeed, the immorality—of those years was that for the first time in our history our country and its government failed to match the heroic sacrifice of our men in the field. This must never happen again. —————————— Elliot L. Richardson
Secretary of Defense, 1973; U.S. Attorney General, 1973 First, today’s junior high students should understand that the United States should never undertake a military action that cannot, whether for military or political reasons, be successfully carried out. Second, because there are many situations like Vietnam and Nicaragua where decisive U.S. military action is not appropriate or feasible, the United States needs to exert effective leadership in pursuing alternative means of protecting its security interests. —————————— Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Author and historian; Special Assistant to the President, 1961–64 It is a great mistake for the United States to get involved in any war beyond its zone of direct and vital interests. We are not world saviors—either in Vietnam in the 1960s or in the Persian Gulf in the 1980s. —————————— William C. Westmoreland
Commander, U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, 1964–68; Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, 1968–72 The Vietnam War was a limited war, with limited objectives, prosecuted by limited means, with limited public support. Therefore, it was destined to be (and was) a long war, a war so long that public support waned and political decisions by the Congress terminated our involvement, resulting in a victory by the North Vietnamese Communists. The military did not lose a battle of consequence and did not lose the war. The war was lost by congressional actions withdrawing support to the South Vietnamese government despite commitments by President Nixon.
July 20, 2007
Disaster and Technology II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:45 AM EST I was not in New York when the steam pipe exploded. I was in the Denver airport, waiting for a plane that was two hours late, and saw it live on CNN. That’s about as close as I care to come to such an event, thank you very much. If that means living vicariously, so be it. Ellen Feldman mentions that news of the Titanic disaster spread around the world in hours thanks to the technological miracles of submarine cables and wireless, and that a few decades earlier it would have taken weeks for the news to spread. Indeed. In January, 1856, the Collins liner Pacific, sailing from Liverpool to New York, simply vanished. No trace of her or any of the 280 souls on board ever appeared. It is unlikely we will ever know what happened. Ms. Feldman mentions the heavy use of cell phones, both as communication devices and as cameras, and I agree with her that they are often obnoxious when used in the wrong place or too loudly. (In the Denver airport I watched in fascination as a man, oblivious to his surroundings, carried on an animated conversation—complete with emphatic hand gestures—with an unseen interlocutor, using a hands-free cell phone. Twenty-five years ago such a scene would have brought the security guards and probably men in white coats.) But the proliferation of cell phones and camcorders has produced a revolution in the amount of evidence regarding historical events that can be utilized. The first time a tornado was photographed was in 1884, and it was, I believe, the 1950s before one was caught on movie film. Today you can buy dozens of DVDs of tornado movies. I’ve seen some that are very impressive to put it mildly. One was shot from the entrance to a storm cellar, with the man’s wife screaming at him in the background to stop filming and close the door. The famous Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination is, so far as I know, the only one, and by far the most important piece of evidence regarding exactly what happened. But when 9/11 happened, 38 years later, things were different. There is only one piece of film footage of the first plane striking the north tower. It was shot by a French film crew who were doing a piece on New York City firemen and just happened to be filming them while facing south on Greenwich Street—the World Trade Center in the background—when history happened before their astonished eyes. But there are dozens if not hundreds of views of the second plane hitting the south tower, taken from every conceivable vantage point, and there’s an almost infinite amount of film of the immediate aftermath, the desperate rescue attempts, and the fall of the towers. Ms Feldman writes, “Outside on the street, they were stopping to capture the scene digitally. I assumed they were all fledgling photojournalists, dreaming of breaking into the big time with their pictures. A neighbor whom I ran into on the long trek home interpreted the picture-taking differently. She says we have turned into a nation of individuals who can experience events only vicariously. Perhaps that’s another result of technological innovation.” I don’t agree. Our species is the most communicative on the planet. We make a flock of parrots seem like Trappist monks. And when there is a big event, the urge—the deep need—to communicate with other humans becomes overwhelming. Technology just makes us more able to communicate, more able to be human. We can not only tell people when we got home what we saw (Hey, honey, guess what!), we can show them what we saw. That doesn’t mean we can only live vicariously; it simply means we can experience more fully at second hand what we didn’t (fortunately or unfortunately) experience firsthand.
July 19, 2007
Disaster and Technology Posted by Ellen Feldman at 10:50 PM EST Years ago when I was a student beginning to care about history, a teacher’s remark about the Titanic set me thinking about technology. Just as the ship was seen as an emblem of modernity, so the speed with which the news of its sinking traveled was another hallmark of the modern world. Had ocean liner and iceberg met in an earlier era, it would have taken weeks for the news to spread. Other examples of technology coloring the way we perceive and react to events abound. When television brought the violence of the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam into American living rooms, Americans left the comfort of those living rooms to take to the streets. Yesterday’s steam explosion in midtown Manhattan set me brooding about the connection between technology and disaster again. I was about to leave the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street when I looked out of one of the tall windows of the main hall and saw a plume of what I thought was smoke rising to the east. A short time earlier I had heard rumblings which I took to be thunder, but when I emerged from the windowless Rare Book Room and saw that the sun was out, I assumed that the storm had been brief or my ears had deceived me. Now the low rumbling that accompanied the geyser shooting skyward indicated that I had in fact heard something, but it had not been thunder. The great hall of the library was filled with readers, researchers, and tourists. Since the library’s glorious restoration, it is common to see gaggles of out-of-towners wandering the halls and reading rooms with necks craned and cameras aimed. But at 6 p.m. on July 18, every eye and lens (I’ll get to the latter later) was focused on the sight outside the building. The plume of what we now know was steam continued to rise, obscuring the skyscrapers beyond. And now hundreds of people were running toward the library, some of them covered with mud and other debris, many crying. No one spoke the words 9/11, but I doubt a soul in that hall was not thinking them. The reaction was not surprising, but what followed was. One after another, people began taking out their cell phones. I am not an admirer of the gadgets. I find them annoying on buses and sidewalks and in shops and restaurants. I find them unconscionable in libraries. (My husband tells me I have turned one reading room I frequent into a fascist state in my zeal to stamp the things out.) But I was grateful for them at that moment. While some people could not get through, others managed to make contact. Within minutes, the word had gone around. We were witnessing not a terrorist attack, but a steam pipe explosion. Even the official information came by way of cell phone. One guard on duty called his wife who turned on the television and reported what was happening back to us who were on the scene. I left the library through the 42nd Street entrance, as directed by the guards, and joined what was now a crowd of thousands moving west. There was no panic. There were no rumors. Everyone was telling everyone else that, despite the morning’s news of a just-released intelligence report predicting another attack on American soil, this was instead an urban accident due to aging infrastructure. And many were talking into their cell phones reporting to friends and families that they were unhurt. The ability to communicate during that nervous time was a boon, but there was another aspect of those cell phones I found more perplexing. Inside the library, people were crowding the windows to take pictures of the disaster. Outside on the street, they were stopping to capture the scene digitally. I assumed they were all fledgling photojournalists, dreaming of breaking into the big time with their pictures. A neighbor whom I ran into on the long trek home interpreted the picture-taking differently. She says we have turned into a nation of individuals who can experience events only vicariously. Perhaps that’s another result of technological innovation.
July 19, 2007
“Man’s Best Friend” Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:35 AM EST Yesterday’s lead piece on this website——“Isn’t It Ionic?”—describes a failed experimental aircraft designed by Alexander de Seversky, a Czarist émigré and aviation pioneer. The piece notes that the Ionocraft worked, after a fashion, but explains why predictions that ion drives would soon propel aircraft the size of city blocks at great speeds and altitudes of 300,000 feet didn’t pan out. The piece is nonetheless, and properly, respectful about Seversky, noting that he designed a number of things that did work, one of them being the P-47 Thunderbolt. I hadn’t known that, and as I read it wondered how many readers had ever heard of a P-47. Probably not too many, which if true, seems unfair. I once heard someone make an interesting case that the P-47 was the most efficient and effective Allied fighter of the Second World War. It was not as good an air-superiority or escort fighter as a P-51 Mustang, nor as deadly a fighter-bomber as an RAF Typhoon, but it did everything a fighter or fighter-bomber could do very effectively—it was, this man claimed, second best at everything, which is no mean feat. In some cases, trying to do everything is a mistake, since a machine designed for so many disparate purposes does nothing well enough; the classic case of a World War II–era aircraft designed to do everything but doing nothing very well was the French Potez 63. But the P-47 did everything well enough. It was a clumsy dogfighter below 8,000 feet, but since it escorted heavy bombers, Luftwaffe fighters had to engage P-47s at higher altitudes, where it did just fine: P-47s made 3,752 air-to-air kills, and in the first three months of 1944, the period in which the Allies more or less destroyed the Luftwaffe, P-47s shot down more German fighters than did P-51s. After those three months, P-47s flying below 8,000 feet didn’t have too many Luftwaffe fighters to worry about. You could even make a claim that it was the plane that won the war. In Europe the Thunderbolt flew more sorties than P-51s, P-38s, and P-40s combined. Seversky designed the P-47 with another Georgian refugee (the European kind of Georgian, not the sort Sherman chased into the Carolinas), Alexander Kartveli. It was the largest Allied fighter built during the war, perhaps twice the size of a Spitfire, and it was a very rugged aircraft. It carried 500-pound bombs, its eight machine guns could inflict heavy damage on lightly armored targets, and for harder targets it carried various rockets, which could be devastatingly effective; I have met Americans who saw P-47s destroy a panzer regiment in less than 20 minutes. That was probably not a unique event; between June 6, 1944 and V-E Day (May 7, 1945), P-47s destroyed 86,000 railway cars, 9,000 locomotives, 6,000 armored fighting vehicles, and 68,000 trucks. As far as I know, it is the only American aircraft to have inspired a work of classical music (Bohuslav Martinu’s P-47 Thunderbolt Scherzo for Orchestra). A few years ago, I heard it receive a more jocular tribute, although not, I think, a less respectful or less sincere one. Following some former World War II infantrymen, at that time in their early eighties, through the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, I saw one of them nudge another as they passed a P-47, and point a thumb at the plane. “Man’s best friend,” he murmured. The other grunted assent. It had the air of an old joke, except that as far as I could tell, neither one was wholly joking.
July 18, 2007
The Roberts Book Is Actually Kind of Lame Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 04:45 PM EST A few months ago the contributors to this blog weighed in with their opinions on A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, by Andrew Roberts. While the discussion was vigorous, it was handicapped somewhat by the fact that none of us had actually read the book. With the superhuman perseverance for which I am so justly famed, I have finally managed to finish it, and I can report that while it does have its virtues, the book ultimately amounts to more of an argument than a history, and not always an effective one. Roberts’s main points are that (1) the English-speaking peoples—the U.S.A., Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the West Indies, to which the author grudgingly adds Ireland and South Africa—had a better twentieth century than any other major linguistic group, and (2) the “special relationship” between the United States and Britain has been, and continues to be, of immense value to both nations and to the world as a whole. Domestically, he says, the Anglophones’ commitment to personal liberty and free markets has made them world leaders in culture and technology, while globally, their commitment to supporting and spreading democracy has been and remains the world’s greatest force for good. At first glance, neither proposition sounds all that controversial. Regarding (1), who had a better century? Surely not the German-, Japanese-, Russian-, Chinese-, or Arabic-speaking peoples. Not the Spanish, French, or Italians either. Looking down the list of world languages in the almanac, even if you could somehow turn “Indian-speaking” into a qualifying group, the subcontinent has had only a so-so record since the 1940s; the Portuguese-speaking peoples can claim few major achievements outside the soccer field; and while the Korean-speaking peoples have accomplished much in the face of great adversity, there’s no overlooking Kim Jong Il. As for (2), while Roberts’s chapter about the War on Terror is open to debate, the Anglos were unquestionably on the right side in both world wars and the many Cold War proxy conflicts, even if their methods and allies were not always impeccable. From this standpoint, Roberts is making an argument that only a crazy person or a college professor would disagree with. To be sure, the book has its flaws. Factual errors are quite common; I noticed a dozen or so in areas I happened to be familiar with, and a comprehensive list would probably number in the hundreds. Some of these are minor, some less so, and while none are big enough to invalidate the author’s argument, they do combine to undercut his authority. (Roberts’s comment on a recent article by William Boyd, with which Roberts disagrees strongly, is applicable here: “Boyd’s article was replete with factual errors, but that did not detract from the passion of [his] thesis.”) In the later chapters especially, the writing becomes scattershot, as Roberts free-associates like a modern-day blogger on whatever topic springs to mind: Three paragraphs on America’s oversupply of lawyers followed by two paragraphs on the Channel tunnel; a page on aboriginal rights in Australia, then a page defending American-style fast food, then a single paragraph summing up the 1968 Presidential election. There’s also a peculiar digression on how the Watergate affair would not have been a problem if the United States were a constitutional monarchy. And he makes bizarrely frequent mention of bets on various world events that are recorded in the archives of a London gentlemen’s club, apparently expecting us to be interested. But the biggest problem is that the book is so proudly, massively, aggressively one-sided. Roberts makes some good big-picture points that tend to get overlooked—reminding us, for example, of what a long and destructive struggle of attrition the Cold War was (in which context the Vietnam War was not a total defeat, because it prevented Communism from spreading across all of Southeast Asia); how consistent, if sometimes unrealistic, the Anglophones’ global commitment to freedom has been; how benign American and British colonial practices were in comparison with those of other nations; and how noble and brave the citizens, armed forces, and military and civilian leaders of the Anglosphere were during both World Wars. Points like these can easily get lost in the tight focus of much historical writing, and Roberts deserves praise for reminding us of them. Unfortunately, though, the book reads like a lawyer’s closing argument, with every scrap of positive evidence overemphasized and anything that’s negative either belittled or ignored. In this book, virtually every action taken by British Conservatives and American Republicans is good, the only exceptions coming when they fail to be interventionist enough abroad or laissez-faire enough at home. Labourites and Democrats are cut less slack but still given credit, in most cases, for good intentions, as well as for upholding the rule of law and fighting totalitarianism. But when it comes to certain unquestionably ugly features of history, instead of confronting them squarely, Roberts spares no effort to come up with creative excuses for why they really weren’t all that bad. In his discussion of America’s civil-rights movement, he asserts that “the English-speaking peoples’ tradition of protest,” as exemplified by Gandhi and his followers, “goes some way towards counterbalancing” America’s centuries of slavery and racism, since Martin Luther King and his allies were big Gandhi fans. Oh, and non-English-speaking countries treated their minority groups worse than we did—even worse than South Africa (where, by the way, “it was the English-speaking community that tended to oppose apartheid”). Moreover, “In the so-called McCarthyite ‘terror’, no-one was sent to any gulags or forced to till the permafrosted soil of Alaska, and there were no deportations, tortures, internments or attempts to revoke the US citizenship . . . even of the pro-Stalinist [Bertolt] Brecht.” So that’s all right then. You get the idea. All of what Roberts says is important and much of it is accurate, but the book is written to persuade, not to inform. This makes it no different from much modern historical writing, whether it’s “A People’s History of Such-and-such” or “A Politically Incorrect Guide to So-and-so,” whether a compendium of France’s historical sins against America or the latest fulmination from a tenured Marxist (and these days there are very few non-tenured ones). Roberts’s evident purpose is to counteract the constant stream of anti-Western books and articles that, in his view, tend to dominate public discussions of history. There’s certainly something in that. In the end, though, a book of history must be more than a collection of mostly reliable facts. To buy an author’s argument, you have to trust him to give both sides, and in this book Roberts brings up opposing views only for the purpose of dismissing them. That won’t do. Roberts is a man of impressively broad knowledge who writes clearly and with vigor, but readers will put down his book wondering how much he left out. If he would apply his many talents to writing an even-handed history, one that acknowledged the English-speaking peoples’ flaws and missteps while balancing them against their strengths and accomplishments, he could make most of the same points much more convincingly. As it stands, though, wherever you dip into the book, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that Roberts is trying to pull a fast one.
July 18, 2007
Mysteries of Life After Woolworth II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:25 PM EST Fred Smoler raises an interesting question about yesterday’s lead feature (which I authored) on the rise and fall of Woolworth’s. Fred writes, “What puzzles me is why a decade ago modern Manhattan could not support a Woolworth’s, but now it can support an apparently infinite number of chains of what are nominally pharmacies—Duane Reade, Rite Aid—that seem to me to be not entirely unlike the Woolworth stores of my childhood, minus the lunch counter and the needles and thread.” One answer might be that prescription drugs have become a boom industry since the introduction of Medicare in 1965 and in light of steady postwar advances in the medical sciences. In late 2006 the International Business Times reported that Walgreen Company, America’s leading pharmaceutical chain, saw its revenues climb by 17 percent, largely on the strength of drug sales. Fully two thirds of Walgreen’s revenue comes from the sale of pharmaceuticals. Along similar lines, I found this industry analysis, which explains that while “front-store merchandise typically yields higher profit margins than prescription drugs,” prescription and over-the-counter drugs account for about 61 percent of the industry’s revenues. Perhaps Woolworth should have branched out into pharmaceutical sales. Less chewing gum, more antibiotics. Fred will be pleased to know, however, that one can buy needles and thread at CVS.
July 18, 2007
Mysteries of Life After Woolworth Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:50 AM EST Josh Zeitz’s feature article on this website yesterday , published on the tenth anniversary of the event it commemorates, is titled “Why Woolworth’s Had To Die.” Josh’s argument about the necessity for the death invokes a couple of causes: If I understand him correctly, he suggests one cause was that Woolworth (along with other chain store five and dimes) perished because it stayed relatively down-market despite rising postwar affluence, which cost it some customers. The other cause was that suburbanization moved many of Woolworth’s customers out of the old downtown business districts and into shopping malls, where newer retailers out-competed Woolworth on price, quality, variety and the design of stores. This makes sense, but what puzzles me is why a decade ago modern Manhattan could not support a Woolworth’s, but now it can support an apparently infinite number of chains of what are nominally pharmacies—Duane Reade, Rite Aid—that seem to me to be not entirely unlike the Woolworth stores of my childhood, minus the lunch counter and the needles and thread. I suppose a five and dime sold a much greater variety of goods than a Duane Reade does, but the gap is surely closing fast. Within three blocks of this apartment there are as many Duane Reades and one Rite Aid, which raises the next question: How can one account for the precise sorts of retailers who serially overpopulate the niche vacated by Woolworth stores? Five and dimes vanished from this part of town decades after I moved into it, and shortly after they disappeared you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting an ice cream store or a Szechuan restaurant, which presumably filled the gap left by the lunch counters of the five and dimes. Within a couple of years most of those outlets vanished in turn, to be replaced by cell phone stores. The cell phone stores were briefly threatened by an astonishing efflorescence of Victoria’s Secret outlets, which almost immediately disappeared. Why was the demand for fried dumplings, if not infinite and eternal, so much more tenacious than the appetite for fancy lingerie? I do not know, but it was. In any event, a number of the cell phone stores survived, and are now being threatened both by a rash of banks and by neo–five and dimes thinly disguised as pharmacies, some of which have the same vague and subtly demoralizing seediness I remember attending the five and dimes. Amazingly, as I think upon them the Woolworth stores begin to possess, if only in retrospect, a mild appeal. Until a moment ago I could still remember their perfect charmlessness, but now that Josh Zeitz writes of them in the past tense, the five and dimes evoke the virtues of a more egalitarian city and have attained the variety of glamor that enshrouds something Hopper painted, rather than the banality of anyplace my mother dragged me when Eisenhower was President and she needed something for the house. I am pretty sure this is mere nostalgia. I am also convinced that someone will someday mourn the passing of the Duane Reades and Rite Aids. But right now I can’t quite imagine it.
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