William Safire, who died at 79 on September 27, was a conservative pundit worthy of admiration mainly for the ways in which he differed from others of that breed. And while it may not have occurred to him, he was fortunate to come to maturity in a time when conservatism was a minority persuasion in American life.
Safire cut his teeth not as a partisan apparatchik, but as a broadcast producer and then a public relations executive, working for the New York PR impressario Tex McRary. One of his assignments in that capacity was to handle PR for a model American home on display at an industrial exposition in Moscow in 1959. When then-Vice President Richard Nixon visited along with Nikita Khrushchev and came out the loser in a pointed verbal exchange, Safire stage-managed the rematch in which Nixon got his own back, and took the photograph of the occasion that adorned millions of front-pages a day later. He wrote speeches for Nixon's 1960 presidential campaign, and later served him in the White House. It was the associations with the Nixon administration that made so many at the New York Times unhappy when Safire joined the paper as an op-ed columnist in 1973. Safire, they claimed, would carry water for his former employer rather than act as a real journalist.
This turned out to be wrong on at least two counts. Unlike many columnists, Safire wore out shoe leather cultivating and contacting sources; on-the-ground research went into his columns, not just warmed-over opinions with references to daily events spliced in. And he was no administration apologist, even before he erupted in print upon learning that someone in the Nixon White House had ordered that his phone be tapped. Safire defined himself as a 'libertarian conservative' and until he relinquished his column in 2005, he was a reliable critic of Republicans who managed to make peace with the arbitrary power of the modern state as soon as they took office. He lambasted Ronald Reagan's Supreme Court appointment Antonin Scalia for his pinched conception of free speech, and was the first major commentator on the political right to castigate the second Bush administration for its encroachments on privacy rights and civil liberties in the name of the war against terrorism.
For his pains, he was mocked by Jonah Goldberg of the National Review as an "ACLU Republican." But in the wake of the excesses of the Patriot Act, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo Bay, it is Safire who looks prescient in his consistent skepticism about aggrandizement of state power, even to a noble end. Almost alone among American right-wingers, he worried about the implications of media consolidation for the diversity of opinion in public life.
To be sure, Safire was often wrong, and occasionally irresponsible. In the Nixon White House, he had placed his pen at the service of the egregious Spiro Agnew's over-the-top attacks on the press and the intelligentsia. And as a columnist, he sometimes swallowed inaccurate information from his sources. He was slow to distance himself from some of the conspiracy theories that circulated during the Clinton years (though he was free enough from party orthodoxy to vote for Clinton in 1992), and he was, at first, insufficiently skeptical of some of the intelligence peddled by the Bush administration in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. He never quite acknowledged some of his errors, including giving far too much credence to dubious reports of links between Iraqi intelligence and the 9/11 conspirators.
But if he never became a cog in the emerging Republican propaganda machine of pundits who dare not stray from partisan talking points, or indulged the lunacies of the Christianist right, this may have been because he spent his time as a columnist on a newspaper where he was surrounded by those of emphatically different ideological tint. This certainly made it hard for him to be the sort of good hater that flourishes in the age of Limbaugh and Beck, Coulter and O'Reilly, and the wannabes who grow up in the stifling right-wing subculture of captive think-tanks and talk radio, eager to confirm the prejudices of the already converted. And it didn't hurt that this Syracuse drop-out loved learning and language with the passion of the autodidact. His language column in the NYT magazine abounded in puns, some of them bad and some of them terrible, and he wrote at least two thoroughly researched and genuinely provocative historical novels, Freedom (dealing with Abraham Lincoln's dilemmas in the Civil War ) and Scandalmonger (which addressed themes of press fecklessness in the context of a real-life scandal involving several of the Founding Fathers). His sense of humour, and sense of complexity were rooted in a deeper sense of proportion, which made him the kind of principled conservative a convinced liberal could salute.
Saturday, October 03, 2009
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Irving Kristol, RIP
On his death at 89 on September 18th, Irving Kristol was almost universally acknowledged as perhaps America's most significant public intellectual of the latter decades of the Twentieth Century. If every movement is the shadow of one man, what went by the name of "neoconservatism" in American political debate was in large part his. He was also considerate enough to supply a pithy and memorable definition; a neoconservative, he averred, was "a liberal who has been mugged by reality." But if he did indispensable service in puncturing liberal illusions, in the last thirty-five years or so of his life, he encouraged equally destructive conservative ones, in the process unmaking the movement he had helped create as a distinctive school of thought.
The Brooklyn-born Kristol was one of the few surviving members of that generation of Jewish New York intellectuals who came of age in the Depression and fought their ideological wars (Stalinism vs. Trotskyism; democratic socialism vs. totalitarianism; ultimately neoconservatism versus various brands of liberalism and social democracy) first in various alcoves of the CCNY cafeteria and then in the pages of periodicals such as Commentary, Partisan Review, and Dissent. While he held editorial posts with Commentary and The Reporter, and was a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, he made his mark as a founding editor of three deeply influential journals. In 1953 he and Stephen Spender formed the London-based Encounter, ideologically eclectic and devoted to the struggle against totalitarianism. Far too much was made of the 1966 revelation that it had received covert funding from the CIA through its sponsor, the Congress for Cultural Freedom; Kristol seems to have known, while Spender did not, and resigned in protest on finding out. While it is certainly arguable that even such attenuated state sponsorship was technically subversive of editorial independence, there is no evidence that any contributors wrote differently or that editorial decisions were altered as a result. In any event, no journal contributed more to the intellectual vibrancy of an unyieldingly democratic center-left in the English-speaking world.
In 1965 Kristol formed the perhaps more influential Public Interest, which scrutinized the liberal reforms then at the height of their popularity in the United States not through the lens of ideology but with social science methodologies. It brought into general circulation the idea that social reforms always entail at least some unintended consequences, now accepted as axiomatic by analysts of every realistic persuasion. More controversially, Kristol and some of his colleagues went on to argue that some of these consequences pertained to the character of the intended beneficiaries, and redefined questions of economic deprivation as in part sociocultural problems. Whenever the "dependency effect" is discussed, the debate they began continues.
At this stage, Kristol had not relinquished his loyalties to the Democratic Party, and was scornful of traditional conservatives for their root-and-branch opposition to the New Deal. They would be better advised, he argued, to advocate discrete reforms to the welfare state that would protect individuals against unpredictable hardship, while removing those features inimical to the bourgeois virtues. He was prone to see threats to those virtues where they did not exist, or to exaggerate them where they did, and he made too much of the campus unrest and broader social tumult of the 1960s, detecting incipient moral collapse in social irritants such as pornography and overdue reforms like the widespread availability of abortion.
His underlying streak of pessimism was reinforced, and he tended thereafter to present America's liberal establishment as monolithically spineless, unwilling to face up to the forces of disorder at home or an ascendant Soviet bloc abroad. Retaining the onetime Marxist's weakness for schematic class analysis, he resorted to increasingly shrill and indiscriminate attacks on a "new class" of intellectuals in academe, the media and the public sector who were hostile to the business ethos, abandoning his vestigial ties to liberalism completely and migrating to the GOP sometime in the 1970s. This class was never uniformly opposed to the bourgeois norms Kristol saw as embattled, and indeed such a class is unavoidable in an advanced industrial society. An inescapable question is whether his disdain for the conceits of theoreticians shaded over into outright anti-intellectualism. The temptation had long been been there. In 1952 he wrote an essay on McCarthyism which was highly critical of the Senator but suggested the public at least knew he was unambigously anti-Communist, while knowing no such thing about quite a few prominent liberal intellectuals. He had a point but the brush he wielded was insufficiently narrow and, as the historian Kevin Mattson points out, the basic argument laid the foundation for a class war of the self-congratulatory "ordinary" against ostensibly dangerous elites.
The Republican antipathy to big government was eroding in practice around the time he definitively gave up on liberalism as such, and the basis of Kristol's rapprochement with the right was the nostrum of supply-side economics, which he assiduously popularized in the late 1970s. The vision of hefty self-financing tax cuts allowed the GOP to offer American voters big-government services on a small-government tax bill, and thus to woo those who rejected the fiscal austerity associated with traditional conservatism. "I was not certain of its economic merits", Kristol acknowledged, "but quickly saw its political possibilities." The possibilities, however, were the illusory ones of the free lunch the nonexistence of which conservatives pride themselves on discerning before others. But more baneful than the horrendous deficits generated by supply-side nostrums was the power of the, for most part traditionally Democratic, social conservatives whose adhesion to the Republican coalition in 1980 brought short-term benefits but long-term perils, and whose worst instincts Kristol was now prepared to indulge.
In the 1980s he became vociferously critical of the irreligion of liberal intellectuals, especially those of Jewish heritage, and uncritically identified public endorsement of religious values as a necessary support to private morality which he did not trust individuals to discern and follow without quasi-official promptings. It was a right-leaning pundit of a later generation, David Frum, whose response to the social changes of the 1960s and 1970s was the quote from Clemenceau that "the Revolution must be accepted or rejected in its entirety." But Kristol agreed with the sentiment, which was that of the ideologue rather than the practical man. As an infantryman in World War Two, Kristol had abandoned his youthful socialism in the face of the crudity and ignorance of his fellow soldiers, convinced that the common man could not be trusted with political power. Yet in his latter years he was insistent that American conservatism should be, and to thrive had to be, wholeheartedly populist.
On the one occasion when I met him, during a talk he gave at the University of Toronto, and I wondered aloud about the intellectual hygiene of the Christianist segment of the GOP, he patronizingly implied I was engaged in mere snobbery. But by that time he had given up on liberalism in any sense, having written in a 1993 article that liberals were not simply mistaken in good faith about this or that discrete issue out of misinformation or intellectual laziness, but were bound to err by virtue of their skepticism toward inherited tradition and revealed religion (though he was not himself, it seems, a religious believer). "Liberals are wrong because they are liberals", he wrote, and "now that the other 'Cold War' is over, the real cold war now begins." He meant the cold war against liberal influence in American culture and society, and the analogy manages not only to slur the decent liberals who once stood with him against totalitarianism but to trivialize the threat against which they contended.
Kristol had written little of note on foreign policy when, in 1985, he founded a foreign-policy counterpart to The Public Interest, The National Interest, which has since emerged as America's principal organ of the realist tradition, consistently skeptical of the Wilsonian meliorism which he always scorned, though mainly in its left-wing manifestations (rather oddly, insofar as his son Bill's Weekly Standard is a voice of uber-Wilsonian interventionism and "National Greatness" conservatism). But Kristol's few earlier writings on foreign policy had included a paper "Does NATO Still Exist?", the sort of question one rarely asks if one has any intention of answering it in the affirmative. And Kristol's negative answer was rooted in both the pessimism that had soured his view of liberal arrangements domestically and an unexpected affinity for the unilateralism and isolationism associated with the Robert Taft wing of the GOP. He suggested that NATO's strategy of graduated deterrence lacked all military plausibility and had been cobbled together only to spare America's feckless European allies the cost of financing an adequate defence of their own. The American troops on the Continent, he went on, were mere hostages and he happily predicted mounting Congressional pressure for their withdrawal, as an alternative to the risk of massive US casualties in defence of a Europe whose citizens showed their terminal decadence in their antinuclear sentiment and their delusion that reducing tensions would mellow the Soviet regime to the point that it posed no threat.
The only kind of NATO that made sense, he suggested, was one consisting solely of European states, with its own nuclear arms if it chose, and the US a small-a ally but not a member. The result would have been a United States less constrained by the preferences of allies in secondary theatres of the Cold War such as Central America, but dramatically increased risk in its central one. And the record of American unilateralism under the second Bush administration has hardly been encouraging.
Irving Kristol was a bracing and necessary voice of prudence when liberal hubris required a healthy corrective, and the neoconservatism he largely spawned was a creative and valuable tributary of the liberal mainstream. But when he led it into an electoral and ideological alliance with the Republicans, the new maxim of "no enemies to the right" turned into a prescription for irresponsibility, and deprived the movement of the chastening sense of limits that was its original rationale.
The Brooklyn-born Kristol was one of the few surviving members of that generation of Jewish New York intellectuals who came of age in the Depression and fought their ideological wars (Stalinism vs. Trotskyism; democratic socialism vs. totalitarianism; ultimately neoconservatism versus various brands of liberalism and social democracy) first in various alcoves of the CCNY cafeteria and then in the pages of periodicals such as Commentary, Partisan Review, and Dissent. While he held editorial posts with Commentary and The Reporter, and was a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, he made his mark as a founding editor of three deeply influential journals. In 1953 he and Stephen Spender formed the London-based Encounter, ideologically eclectic and devoted to the struggle against totalitarianism. Far too much was made of the 1966 revelation that it had received covert funding from the CIA through its sponsor, the Congress for Cultural Freedom; Kristol seems to have known, while Spender did not, and resigned in protest on finding out. While it is certainly arguable that even such attenuated state sponsorship was technically subversive of editorial independence, there is no evidence that any contributors wrote differently or that editorial decisions were altered as a result. In any event, no journal contributed more to the intellectual vibrancy of an unyieldingly democratic center-left in the English-speaking world.
In 1965 Kristol formed the perhaps more influential Public Interest, which scrutinized the liberal reforms then at the height of their popularity in the United States not through the lens of ideology but with social science methodologies. It brought into general circulation the idea that social reforms always entail at least some unintended consequences, now accepted as axiomatic by analysts of every realistic persuasion. More controversially, Kristol and some of his colleagues went on to argue that some of these consequences pertained to the character of the intended beneficiaries, and redefined questions of economic deprivation as in part sociocultural problems. Whenever the "dependency effect" is discussed, the debate they began continues.
At this stage, Kristol had not relinquished his loyalties to the Democratic Party, and was scornful of traditional conservatives for their root-and-branch opposition to the New Deal. They would be better advised, he argued, to advocate discrete reforms to the welfare state that would protect individuals against unpredictable hardship, while removing those features inimical to the bourgeois virtues. He was prone to see threats to those virtues where they did not exist, or to exaggerate them where they did, and he made too much of the campus unrest and broader social tumult of the 1960s, detecting incipient moral collapse in social irritants such as pornography and overdue reforms like the widespread availability of abortion.
His underlying streak of pessimism was reinforced, and he tended thereafter to present America's liberal establishment as monolithically spineless, unwilling to face up to the forces of disorder at home or an ascendant Soviet bloc abroad. Retaining the onetime Marxist's weakness for schematic class analysis, he resorted to increasingly shrill and indiscriminate attacks on a "new class" of intellectuals in academe, the media and the public sector who were hostile to the business ethos, abandoning his vestigial ties to liberalism completely and migrating to the GOP sometime in the 1970s. This class was never uniformly opposed to the bourgeois norms Kristol saw as embattled, and indeed such a class is unavoidable in an advanced industrial society. An inescapable question is whether his disdain for the conceits of theoreticians shaded over into outright anti-intellectualism. The temptation had long been been there. In 1952 he wrote an essay on McCarthyism which was highly critical of the Senator but suggested the public at least knew he was unambigously anti-Communist, while knowing no such thing about quite a few prominent liberal intellectuals. He had a point but the brush he wielded was insufficiently narrow and, as the historian Kevin Mattson points out, the basic argument laid the foundation for a class war of the self-congratulatory "ordinary" against ostensibly dangerous elites.
The Republican antipathy to big government was eroding in practice around the time he definitively gave up on liberalism as such, and the basis of Kristol's rapprochement with the right was the nostrum of supply-side economics, which he assiduously popularized in the late 1970s. The vision of hefty self-financing tax cuts allowed the GOP to offer American voters big-government services on a small-government tax bill, and thus to woo those who rejected the fiscal austerity associated with traditional conservatism. "I was not certain of its economic merits", Kristol acknowledged, "but quickly saw its political possibilities." The possibilities, however, were the illusory ones of the free lunch the nonexistence of which conservatives pride themselves on discerning before others. But more baneful than the horrendous deficits generated by supply-side nostrums was the power of the, for most part traditionally Democratic, social conservatives whose adhesion to the Republican coalition in 1980 brought short-term benefits but long-term perils, and whose worst instincts Kristol was now prepared to indulge.
In the 1980s he became vociferously critical of the irreligion of liberal intellectuals, especially those of Jewish heritage, and uncritically identified public endorsement of religious values as a necessary support to private morality which he did not trust individuals to discern and follow without quasi-official promptings. It was a right-leaning pundit of a later generation, David Frum, whose response to the social changes of the 1960s and 1970s was the quote from Clemenceau that "the Revolution must be accepted or rejected in its entirety." But Kristol agreed with the sentiment, which was that of the ideologue rather than the practical man. As an infantryman in World War Two, Kristol had abandoned his youthful socialism in the face of the crudity and ignorance of his fellow soldiers, convinced that the common man could not be trusted with political power. Yet in his latter years he was insistent that American conservatism should be, and to thrive had to be, wholeheartedly populist.
On the one occasion when I met him, during a talk he gave at the University of Toronto, and I wondered aloud about the intellectual hygiene of the Christianist segment of the GOP, he patronizingly implied I was engaged in mere snobbery. But by that time he had given up on liberalism in any sense, having written in a 1993 article that liberals were not simply mistaken in good faith about this or that discrete issue out of misinformation or intellectual laziness, but were bound to err by virtue of their skepticism toward inherited tradition and revealed religion (though he was not himself, it seems, a religious believer). "Liberals are wrong because they are liberals", he wrote, and "now that the other 'Cold War' is over, the real cold war now begins." He meant the cold war against liberal influence in American culture and society, and the analogy manages not only to slur the decent liberals who once stood with him against totalitarianism but to trivialize the threat against which they contended.
Kristol had written little of note on foreign policy when, in 1985, he founded a foreign-policy counterpart to The Public Interest, The National Interest, which has since emerged as America's principal organ of the realist tradition, consistently skeptical of the Wilsonian meliorism which he always scorned, though mainly in its left-wing manifestations (rather oddly, insofar as his son Bill's Weekly Standard is a voice of uber-Wilsonian interventionism and "National Greatness" conservatism). But Kristol's few earlier writings on foreign policy had included a paper "Does NATO Still Exist?", the sort of question one rarely asks if one has any intention of answering it in the affirmative. And Kristol's negative answer was rooted in both the pessimism that had soured his view of liberal arrangements domestically and an unexpected affinity for the unilateralism and isolationism associated with the Robert Taft wing of the GOP. He suggested that NATO's strategy of graduated deterrence lacked all military plausibility and had been cobbled together only to spare America's feckless European allies the cost of financing an adequate defence of their own. The American troops on the Continent, he went on, were mere hostages and he happily predicted mounting Congressional pressure for their withdrawal, as an alternative to the risk of massive US casualties in defence of a Europe whose citizens showed their terminal decadence in their antinuclear sentiment and their delusion that reducing tensions would mellow the Soviet regime to the point that it posed no threat.
The only kind of NATO that made sense, he suggested, was one consisting solely of European states, with its own nuclear arms if it chose, and the US a small-a ally but not a member. The result would have been a United States less constrained by the preferences of allies in secondary theatres of the Cold War such as Central America, but dramatically increased risk in its central one. And the record of American unilateralism under the second Bush administration has hardly been encouraging.
Irving Kristol was a bracing and necessary voice of prudence when liberal hubris required a healthy corrective, and the neoconservatism he largely spawned was a creative and valuable tributary of the liberal mainstream. But when he led it into an electoral and ideological alliance with the Republicans, the new maxim of "no enemies to the right" turned into a prescription for irresponsibility, and deprived the movement of the chastening sense of limits that was its original rationale.
Friday, August 28, 2009
Edward M. Kennedy, RIP
No reasonable defender of Edward Kennedy, who died at 77 on August 25, can deny that his rise to political prominence was the baldest nepotism. With no deeds of note to his name, and already burdened by scandal (cheating on a Spanish exam at Harvard) he sought election to the Senate seat once held by his brother; a family retainer had held it between John Kennedy's election to the Presidency and the 30th birthday that made Edward eligible for the office. His rival in the Democratic primary, State Attorney General Edward McCormack, correctly observed that if Ted had been "Edward Moore" rather than "Edward Moore Kennedy", "your candidacy would be a joke." But familial connection trumped experience and merit. (To be fair, as the nephew of a Speaker of the House, McCormack was an implausible critic of dynastic presumption, but he had some achievements to his credit.)
But if Ted Kennedy was the beneficiary of family history, he was its prisoner as well, and it was only late and gradual emancipation that made him one of the most consequential public men of America's last half-century. He was a minor Senator until the assassination of his brother Robert left him as not only the lone survivor among four brothers, but the repository of the hopes RFK's presidential crusade had aroused among American liberals (it is arguable, and Michael Knox Beran has made the argument most persuasively, that Robert's impulses were not uniformly liberal, but it is hard to quarrel with mythology). There was an unrealistic, but not insignficant, effort to draft "Teddy" as the Democratic standard-bearer at the chaotic Chicago convention, and it was only the accident at Chappaquiddick and his evasion of responsibility for his own behaviour that prevented him from seeking the presidency in either 1972 or 1976.
When he did run, in 1980, it was against an incumbent of his own party, viewed by many Democrats as unsalvageably inept. There was no true ideological chasm between Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy, but Kennedy's own history and Carter's half-hearted moves to the center meant that the only practical strategy for denying Carter renomination was to challenge him from the left. In truth, it was simply Carter's sheer feebleness as a leader that Kennedy scorned, with the contempt, as Theodore H. White put it, of a master mechanic for a fumbling apprentice. And when Roger Mudd of CBS asked him precisely why sought the White House, his verbal flailings became a byword for inarticulacy. Then, far more than he had anticipated, the doubts about his integrity and courage that Chappaquiddick had engendered made him an unacceptable alternative among the Democratic primary electorate, much less forgiving than the voters of his own Massachusetts. It was only after losing too many contests for any realistic hope of victory that he found his voice as the champion of a liberalism from which both his party and his country were drifting away, culminating in his powerful address to the convention that renominated Carter, while suspecting nonetheless that he could not be reelected.
After his own easy reelection in 1982, Kennedy toyed perfunctorily with another presidential run before announcing that he would not challenge Ronald Reagan in 1984. Part of this was political calculation: Kennedy understood Reagan's popularity transcended the public's disagreement with him on discrete policies; and while the economy was weak, it was not in the severe depression that might incline a majority of Americans to overcome their reservations about Kennedy himself and embrace the now-unfashionable big-government liberalism which he seemed to embody. But part of it was that he was now comfortable with his role as the Senate's principal spokesmen for the liberal cause and that he was reluctant to subject his children to the fears of another campaign, with the dark spectre of assassination an ever-present possibility. And in relinquishing the presidential aspirations that fate had apparently assigned to him, he began the most productive chapter of his public life, carving out a more signficant record in the Senate than either John or Robert had managed.
He did this, moreover, without ever holding the post of Minority or Majority Leader, and was not always even the Chairman of a major committee. As Adam Clymer's exhaustive biography recounts, he forged pragmatic legislative compromises with Republicans like Orrin Hatch, Bob Dole, and John McCain, eschewing credit where this was the price of agreement. David Brooks has suggested that after 1980, Kennedy simply moved to the centre and abandoned a liberalism that was no longer relevant or saleable, but this oversimplifies. Kennedy remained the spokesman for his party's most fervent and ideological wing, while simultaneously striking the best practicable deal with Republican colleagues, a combination rare in American political history.
The legislative goal with which he continued to identify himself was the liberal grail of national health insurance, even if he pursued a Fabian strategy of incremental reform. Recovery from his own injuries in a plane crash, and the many illnesses in his family had sharpened his awareness of the gratuitous cruelty with which America's health care system compounds sickness with the threat of penury. It was wrong, he said, that others should be denied the chance to endure illness and loss without fear of financial catastrophe that Kennedys enjoyed, simply because "Kennedys can pay" and they could not.
And he was never quite the doctrinaire of legend; in the 1970s, he was the principal Democratic sponsor of deregulation of civil aviation and interstate trucking, breaking up the de facto cartels that kept airline travel out of reach for many Americans and the prices of the groceries trucked to their neighbourhood groceries artificially high. Later, he worked behind the scenes to encourage the release of Soviet dissidents and help the Clinton administration nudge the Northern Ireland peace process along (despite his previous parroting of the extreme nationalist line).
The record, of course, was mixed. He was shrill, self-righteous, and occasionally irresponsible on many foreign policy questions, demagogically supporting half-baked proposals for a nuclear freeze and overstating the case against invading Iraq. He had good reason for opposing Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court, but the nasty hyperbole in his criticism of Bork's record helped envenom the politics of judicial nominations.
It is often lazily assumed that private character and public conduct are inseparable, but Kennedy the conscientious legislative craftsman and the Kennedy who drunkenly chased women half his age rarely affected each other. There was one embarrassing point at which personal scandal constrained the performance of public duty. After a late-night carouse led to charges of rape against a nephew, Kennedy sat silent through the Judiciary Committee's consideration of Anita Hill's claims that Clarence Thomas sexually harrassed her; that was the summer "your mother dates Kennedys" emerged as a mock schoolyard taunt. Over the next two years, Kennedy fiund a new discipline, sobriety, and serenity, in part through a second marriage, and refurbished his standing as a lion of the Senate. And against the infirmites of his private life must be set the years as tireless paterfamilias to not only his own children but the nephews and nieces of his slain brothers. His passing could not be other than a sad occasion, all the more poignant in that he was the only one of four brothers to live something close to a normal lifespan. "My brothers", he memorably said on one occasion, "were given many gifts, but not length of life." That was a few years ago, but even then there was pleasure in the unaccustomed sight of a Kennedy given time to grow old.
But if Ted Kennedy was the beneficiary of family history, he was its prisoner as well, and it was only late and gradual emancipation that made him one of the most consequential public men of America's last half-century. He was a minor Senator until the assassination of his brother Robert left him as not only the lone survivor among four brothers, but the repository of the hopes RFK's presidential crusade had aroused among American liberals (it is arguable, and Michael Knox Beran has made the argument most persuasively, that Robert's impulses were not uniformly liberal, but it is hard to quarrel with mythology). There was an unrealistic, but not insignficant, effort to draft "Teddy" as the Democratic standard-bearer at the chaotic Chicago convention, and it was only the accident at Chappaquiddick and his evasion of responsibility for his own behaviour that prevented him from seeking the presidency in either 1972 or 1976.
When he did run, in 1980, it was against an incumbent of his own party, viewed by many Democrats as unsalvageably inept. There was no true ideological chasm between Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy, but Kennedy's own history and Carter's half-hearted moves to the center meant that the only practical strategy for denying Carter renomination was to challenge him from the left. In truth, it was simply Carter's sheer feebleness as a leader that Kennedy scorned, with the contempt, as Theodore H. White put it, of a master mechanic for a fumbling apprentice. And when Roger Mudd of CBS asked him precisely why sought the White House, his verbal flailings became a byword for inarticulacy. Then, far more than he had anticipated, the doubts about his integrity and courage that Chappaquiddick had engendered made him an unacceptable alternative among the Democratic primary electorate, much less forgiving than the voters of his own Massachusetts. It was only after losing too many contests for any realistic hope of victory that he found his voice as the champion of a liberalism from which both his party and his country were drifting away, culminating in his powerful address to the convention that renominated Carter, while suspecting nonetheless that he could not be reelected.
After his own easy reelection in 1982, Kennedy toyed perfunctorily with another presidential run before announcing that he would not challenge Ronald Reagan in 1984. Part of this was political calculation: Kennedy understood Reagan's popularity transcended the public's disagreement with him on discrete policies; and while the economy was weak, it was not in the severe depression that might incline a majority of Americans to overcome their reservations about Kennedy himself and embrace the now-unfashionable big-government liberalism which he seemed to embody. But part of it was that he was now comfortable with his role as the Senate's principal spokesmen for the liberal cause and that he was reluctant to subject his children to the fears of another campaign, with the dark spectre of assassination an ever-present possibility. And in relinquishing the presidential aspirations that fate had apparently assigned to him, he began the most productive chapter of his public life, carving out a more signficant record in the Senate than either John or Robert had managed.
He did this, moreover, without ever holding the post of Minority or Majority Leader, and was not always even the Chairman of a major committee. As Adam Clymer's exhaustive biography recounts, he forged pragmatic legislative compromises with Republicans like Orrin Hatch, Bob Dole, and John McCain, eschewing credit where this was the price of agreement. David Brooks has suggested that after 1980, Kennedy simply moved to the centre and abandoned a liberalism that was no longer relevant or saleable, but this oversimplifies. Kennedy remained the spokesman for his party's most fervent and ideological wing, while simultaneously striking the best practicable deal with Republican colleagues, a combination rare in American political history.
The legislative goal with which he continued to identify himself was the liberal grail of national health insurance, even if he pursued a Fabian strategy of incremental reform. Recovery from his own injuries in a plane crash, and the many illnesses in his family had sharpened his awareness of the gratuitous cruelty with which America's health care system compounds sickness with the threat of penury. It was wrong, he said, that others should be denied the chance to endure illness and loss without fear of financial catastrophe that Kennedys enjoyed, simply because "Kennedys can pay" and they could not.
And he was never quite the doctrinaire of legend; in the 1970s, he was the principal Democratic sponsor of deregulation of civil aviation and interstate trucking, breaking up the de facto cartels that kept airline travel out of reach for many Americans and the prices of the groceries trucked to their neighbourhood groceries artificially high. Later, he worked behind the scenes to encourage the release of Soviet dissidents and help the Clinton administration nudge the Northern Ireland peace process along (despite his previous parroting of the extreme nationalist line).
The record, of course, was mixed. He was shrill, self-righteous, and occasionally irresponsible on many foreign policy questions, demagogically supporting half-baked proposals for a nuclear freeze and overstating the case against invading Iraq. He had good reason for opposing Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court, but the nasty hyperbole in his criticism of Bork's record helped envenom the politics of judicial nominations.
It is often lazily assumed that private character and public conduct are inseparable, but Kennedy the conscientious legislative craftsman and the Kennedy who drunkenly chased women half his age rarely affected each other. There was one embarrassing point at which personal scandal constrained the performance of public duty. After a late-night carouse led to charges of rape against a nephew, Kennedy sat silent through the Judiciary Committee's consideration of Anita Hill's claims that Clarence Thomas sexually harrassed her; that was the summer "your mother dates Kennedys" emerged as a mock schoolyard taunt. Over the next two years, Kennedy fiund a new discipline, sobriety, and serenity, in part through a second marriage, and refurbished his standing as a lion of the Senate. And against the infirmites of his private life must be set the years as tireless paterfamilias to not only his own children but the nephews and nieces of his slain brothers. His passing could not be other than a sad occasion, all the more poignant in that he was the only one of four brothers to live something close to a normal lifespan. "My brothers", he memorably said on one occasion, "were given many gifts, but not length of life." That was a few years ago, but even then there was pleasure in the unaccustomed sight of a Kennedy given time to grow old.
Saturday, August 08, 2009
John Hughes, RIP
The shared experiences that define generations are often evoked with more honesty and clarity in modest films aimed at a wide audience than in apparently more ambitious ones. In the latter, idiosyncrasies of genre and theme suggest that whatever we are watching, it's rooted in the peculiarly personal and so can't claim to be representative. John Hughes, who died at 59 on Thursday, worked exclusively in slight genres, and had done little work since the 1990s (what there was after that was often pseudonymous and generally perishable).But many of my generation and perhaps the ones on each side (depending on how you define these things) regarded him as the poet laureate of our adolescence.
Almost every tribute so far has credited Hughes with inventing the modern "teen movie", at least in its standard themes and stock story-lines. And, not entirely for the better, he more or less did. How many interchangeable tales of scorned nerds turning the tables on their tormenters would we have been spared had Hughes in his turn spared us "Weird Science"? For that matter, how many predictable domestic comedies observed from a teen's eye view might have been avoided had he not made "Sixteen Candles"? And if these were his only films, I doubt many of us would remember him at all. But the further he moved from such formulaic slapstick, the better he was.
If "Pretty in Pink" and "The Breakfast Club" defined the genre with which Hughes is now associated, they did so by the seemingly simple device of treating adolescents as three-dimensional human beings, defined by inchoate aspirations as much as by hormonal drives. Of course, Hughes placed his characters in dilemmas particular to adolescence, pertaining to first romantic relationships, finding out what on earth one wants to be, and moving out from under the shadows of parents who are in one way or another (as all parents, at least some of the time, are fated to be) inadequate. But they are also engaged in the effort to balance freedom with belonging that is not settled with the coming of adulthood, but lasts throughout it, such that a viewer in middle age can watch a John Hughes film and feel the pang of recognition, not just that of recollection.
The underlying insight is that ambivalence over every major choice, the difficulty of reconciling seemingly contradictory goals, and battles with clueless, arbitrary authority, are universal experiences. Nobody's really happy in high school, is the folk wisdom, not even the popular kids with the assurance of future success seemingly beckoning them on; Hughes's gift was to find the stuff of small-scale, and often light-hearted, but real drama in that insight. And in the report to the uncomprehending assistant principal at the end of The Breakfast Club, it is explicit that awareness of the shared feeling of outsiderdom is the basis for camaraderie, however unlikely.
Even in the more overtly comedic Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the eponymous day of unscripted fun in downtown Chicago becomes the occasion not for Lessons about Life but for the incidental deepening of bonds among the three central characters and the realization that harmonizing the responsibilities of adulthood and the pleasures that are life's raison d'etre is really the art of living well. Hughes's always-light touch, and the fact that those in authority are almost often figures of fun (think of Jeffrey Jones's absurd Ed Rooney ) make it easy to miss the point.
From the mid-1980s on, Hughes's touch grew less sure, artistically in at least one case, commercially in several. As impresario behind the mechanical and, to my mind, ferociously unfunny Home Alone and its sequels, he made more money than he had before but hardly burnished his reputation. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles did not do as well at the box-office as some had hoped, although Steve Martin and John Candy complemented each other superbly and showed how much life was left in the seemingly tired genre of the road trip movie. Uncle Buck did worse yet in financial terms, and is perhaps Hughes's most underappreciated film. Candy combines an occasionally cruel pranksterism with an underlying sweetness of disposition, and his character's unexpectedly poignant struggles to hold on to the joys of his bachelor existence while accepting at least some of the burdens of conventional adulthood shows that Hughes could address his favourite themes outside the walls of a high school gymnasium or classroom. A John Hughes film didn't have to be set in a high school to succeed, and, sadly, setting a film there won't imbue a film with the magic Hughes could work.
Almost every tribute so far has credited Hughes with inventing the modern "teen movie", at least in its standard themes and stock story-lines. And, not entirely for the better, he more or less did. How many interchangeable tales of scorned nerds turning the tables on their tormenters would we have been spared had Hughes in his turn spared us "Weird Science"? For that matter, how many predictable domestic comedies observed from a teen's eye view might have been avoided had he not made "Sixteen Candles"? And if these were his only films, I doubt many of us would remember him at all. But the further he moved from such formulaic slapstick, the better he was.
If "Pretty in Pink" and "The Breakfast Club" defined the genre with which Hughes is now associated, they did so by the seemingly simple device of treating adolescents as three-dimensional human beings, defined by inchoate aspirations as much as by hormonal drives. Of course, Hughes placed his characters in dilemmas particular to adolescence, pertaining to first romantic relationships, finding out what on earth one wants to be, and moving out from under the shadows of parents who are in one way or another (as all parents, at least some of the time, are fated to be) inadequate. But they are also engaged in the effort to balance freedom with belonging that is not settled with the coming of adulthood, but lasts throughout it, such that a viewer in middle age can watch a John Hughes film and feel the pang of recognition, not just that of recollection.
The underlying insight is that ambivalence over every major choice, the difficulty of reconciling seemingly contradictory goals, and battles with clueless, arbitrary authority, are universal experiences. Nobody's really happy in high school, is the folk wisdom, not even the popular kids with the assurance of future success seemingly beckoning them on; Hughes's gift was to find the stuff of small-scale, and often light-hearted, but real drama in that insight. And in the report to the uncomprehending assistant principal at the end of The Breakfast Club, it is explicit that awareness of the shared feeling of outsiderdom is the basis for camaraderie, however unlikely.
Even in the more overtly comedic Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the eponymous day of unscripted fun in downtown Chicago becomes the occasion not for Lessons about Life but for the incidental deepening of bonds among the three central characters and the realization that harmonizing the responsibilities of adulthood and the pleasures that are life's raison d'etre is really the art of living well. Hughes's always-light touch, and the fact that those in authority are almost often figures of fun (think of Jeffrey Jones's absurd Ed Rooney ) make it easy to miss the point.
From the mid-1980s on, Hughes's touch grew less sure, artistically in at least one case, commercially in several. As impresario behind the mechanical and, to my mind, ferociously unfunny Home Alone and its sequels, he made more money than he had before but hardly burnished his reputation. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles did not do as well at the box-office as some had hoped, although Steve Martin and John Candy complemented each other superbly and showed how much life was left in the seemingly tired genre of the road trip movie. Uncle Buck did worse yet in financial terms, and is perhaps Hughes's most underappreciated film. Candy combines an occasionally cruel pranksterism with an underlying sweetness of disposition, and his character's unexpectedly poignant struggles to hold on to the joys of his bachelor existence while accepting at least some of the burdens of conventional adulthood shows that Hughes could address his favourite themes outside the walls of a high school gymnasium or classroom. A John Hughes film didn't have to be set in a high school to succeed, and, sadly, setting a film there won't imbue a film with the magic Hughes could work.
Budd Schulberg, RIP
Budd Schulberg, who died at 95 on August 5, was hardly a writer of the first rank, but he managed to create two memorable archetypes in American culture nonetheless. His sensibility was, perhaps, essentially that of the journalist or memoirist, and his adroit reworking of firsthand experience and observation allowed him to make a literary impact in excess of his actual gifts as a novelist and screenwriter. (If his actual autobiography, Moving Pictures, was disappointing, it may have been because so much of his best material had already been effectively recycled into his fictional creations.)
His father was head of production at Paramount, and the Hollywood milieu in which he grew up was rendered as incisively and evocatively in his 1941 novel What Makes Sammy Run? as it has ever been. Sammy Glick, the onetime newsboy who ascends to prominence in the movie business by dint of his demonic energy and capacity for casual betrayal but remains a prisoner of his own insatiable and only half-understood longings, remains the definitive fictional Hollywood insider. The manic and profane Ari Gold of HBO's Entourage is only the latest effort to update what has now become a stock figure, and even Jeremy Piven's manic performance cannot disguise the fact that no knockoff is likely to be more vivid and sharply etched than Schulberg's original. Schulberg's novel is no masterpiece of elegant construction, and with the exception of the narrator, Al Manheim, a newspaperman-cum-screenwriter who functions as Schulberg's stand-in, the other characters are two-dimensional. It is Sammy who brings the story to life and who so richly embodies the essence of America's dream factory that this technically undistinguished novel remains perhaps the final word on its subject.
As a screenwriter himself, Schulberg is best known for the 1954 On the Waterfront, in which Marlon Brando played a longshoreman who turns on the corrupt union officials running the docks, including his brother (perhaps Rod Steiger's finest performance). Both Schulberg and the director, Elia Kazan, had appeared as friendly witnesses before HUAC, so the film has inevitably been seen in retrospect more as an allegory of the blacklist than as an expose of the labour racketeering that was very much a live issue in the 1950s. And the protagonist's denunciation of the crimes (including murder) from which union members were expected to avert their eyes in the name of solidarity is indeed a resonant reminder that a cause, to be honoured, must be honourable. In later interviews, Schulberg was insistent that while the excesses of the McCarthy period were genuine and contemptible, the Hollywood Communists who put their own talents in hock to the CPUSA made unconvincing champions of artistic independence or the sanctity of individual conscience.
Schulberg's "naming names" before HUAC and his defence of the principled informant in On the Waterfront earned him a reputation in the intellectually lazier precincts of the left as a McCarthyite reactionary, but this was wide of the mark. After the 1965 Watts riots, he demonstrated his sympathy for the downtrodden by founding the Watts Writers' Workshop, where he helped young black men with literary ambitions find the voices in which to articulate their frustrations. And he also penned one of the most sulphurous portraits of political demagoguery in American popular culture in his screenplay for Kazan's 1957 A Face in The Crowd.
Here Andy Griffith plays a small-time criminal, Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes, who is arrested for vagrancy in an Arkansas backwater and uses a jailhouse guitar performance to entrance a local radio reporter. He quickly establishes himself as radio pitchman for a vitamin supplement whose properties seem to anticipate those of Viagra, a TV performer, and ultimately a figure of political importance. On his prime-time "cracker barrel" he panders to the prejudices of his viewers and helps a stiff Senator remake his image as a likable populist in preparation for a presidential run. His power is destroyed when he is caught mocking the gullibility of his viewers into an open mike, but another mediagenic rabble-rouser (this one played by a young Rip Torn) is waiting in the wings....and there always will be.
Obviously, Schulberg did not despise his audience as Lonesome Rhodes did his. He did hamhandedly spell out the moral of the tale for the dimmer viewers, through the superfluous commentary of a slumming intellectual played by Walter Matthau, who laments Rhodes's provision of empty nostrums and pat solutions for a populace eager to "escape from freedom." As J. Hoberman has written, A Face in the Crowd is too over-the-top to fully work as drama, not clever enough for successful satire. But Schulberg, he points out, was prescient in his anticipation of the partnership among Madison Avenue image-making techniques, mass entertainment with a cornball tinge, and an affected populism that was beginning to emerge and that has loomed so large in American electoral politics ever since.
And of course, Lonesome Rhodes himself is a vivid figure, who is, in Griffith's smoothly menacing performance, a force of nature as much as Sammy Glick, cynical but occasionally fooling himself, seductive even to those who are appalled; the reporter who discovers him, played by Patricia Neal, is smitten even though she knows better, much as a female writer in What Makes Sammy Run? sees through the manipulative Sammy, but wants to feel "all that energy....inside me." Even more than with Sammy Glick, the original has resisted emulation, with such imitations as Tim Robbins's folk-singing xenophobe Bob Roberts readily forgettable by contrast. True, this colourful creation would not exist without Griffth's magnetic performance or Kazan's vigorous direction; but he was a product of Schulberg's observation and imagination first.
His father was head of production at Paramount, and the Hollywood milieu in which he grew up was rendered as incisively and evocatively in his 1941 novel What Makes Sammy Run? as it has ever been. Sammy Glick, the onetime newsboy who ascends to prominence in the movie business by dint of his demonic energy and capacity for casual betrayal but remains a prisoner of his own insatiable and only half-understood longings, remains the definitive fictional Hollywood insider. The manic and profane Ari Gold of HBO's Entourage is only the latest effort to update what has now become a stock figure, and even Jeremy Piven's manic performance cannot disguise the fact that no knockoff is likely to be more vivid and sharply etched than Schulberg's original. Schulberg's novel is no masterpiece of elegant construction, and with the exception of the narrator, Al Manheim, a newspaperman-cum-screenwriter who functions as Schulberg's stand-in, the other characters are two-dimensional. It is Sammy who brings the story to life and who so richly embodies the essence of America's dream factory that this technically undistinguished novel remains perhaps the final word on its subject.
As a screenwriter himself, Schulberg is best known for the 1954 On the Waterfront, in which Marlon Brando played a longshoreman who turns on the corrupt union officials running the docks, including his brother (perhaps Rod Steiger's finest performance). Both Schulberg and the director, Elia Kazan, had appeared as friendly witnesses before HUAC, so the film has inevitably been seen in retrospect more as an allegory of the blacklist than as an expose of the labour racketeering that was very much a live issue in the 1950s. And the protagonist's denunciation of the crimes (including murder) from which union members were expected to avert their eyes in the name of solidarity is indeed a resonant reminder that a cause, to be honoured, must be honourable. In later interviews, Schulberg was insistent that while the excesses of the McCarthy period were genuine and contemptible, the Hollywood Communists who put their own talents in hock to the CPUSA made unconvincing champions of artistic independence or the sanctity of individual conscience.
Schulberg's "naming names" before HUAC and his defence of the principled informant in On the Waterfront earned him a reputation in the intellectually lazier precincts of the left as a McCarthyite reactionary, but this was wide of the mark. After the 1965 Watts riots, he demonstrated his sympathy for the downtrodden by founding the Watts Writers' Workshop, where he helped young black men with literary ambitions find the voices in which to articulate their frustrations. And he also penned one of the most sulphurous portraits of political demagoguery in American popular culture in his screenplay for Kazan's 1957 A Face in The Crowd.
Here Andy Griffith plays a small-time criminal, Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes, who is arrested for vagrancy in an Arkansas backwater and uses a jailhouse guitar performance to entrance a local radio reporter. He quickly establishes himself as radio pitchman for a vitamin supplement whose properties seem to anticipate those of Viagra, a TV performer, and ultimately a figure of political importance. On his prime-time "cracker barrel" he panders to the prejudices of his viewers and helps a stiff Senator remake his image as a likable populist in preparation for a presidential run. His power is destroyed when he is caught mocking the gullibility of his viewers into an open mike, but another mediagenic rabble-rouser (this one played by a young Rip Torn) is waiting in the wings....and there always will be.
Obviously, Schulberg did not despise his audience as Lonesome Rhodes did his. He did hamhandedly spell out the moral of the tale for the dimmer viewers, through the superfluous commentary of a slumming intellectual played by Walter Matthau, who laments Rhodes's provision of empty nostrums and pat solutions for a populace eager to "escape from freedom." As J. Hoberman has written, A Face in the Crowd is too over-the-top to fully work as drama, not clever enough for successful satire. But Schulberg, he points out, was prescient in his anticipation of the partnership among Madison Avenue image-making techniques, mass entertainment with a cornball tinge, and an affected populism that was beginning to emerge and that has loomed so large in American electoral politics ever since.
And of course, Lonesome Rhodes himself is a vivid figure, who is, in Griffith's smoothly menacing performance, a force of nature as much as Sammy Glick, cynical but occasionally fooling himself, seductive even to those who are appalled; the reporter who discovers him, played by Patricia Neal, is smitten even though she knows better, much as a female writer in What Makes Sammy Run? sees through the manipulative Sammy, but wants to feel "all that energy....inside me." Even more than with Sammy Glick, the original has resisted emulation, with such imitations as Tim Robbins's folk-singing xenophobe Bob Roberts readily forgettable by contrast. True, this colourful creation would not exist without Griffth's magnetic performance or Kazan's vigorous direction; but he was a product of Schulberg's observation and imagination first.
Saturday, August 01, 2009
Mrs. Aquino's Legacy
There are political figures whose historical impact cannot neatly be reduced to concrete achievement and inherent ability on the one hand or to their roles as national symbols on the other. Corazon Aquino, who died in Manila at 76 earlier today, is certainly one instance.
The daughter of an established landowning family, she married another child of the Philippine establishment, the lawyer and politician Benigno Aquino, Jr., whose comparatively rapid rise from Mayor of Conception to Governor of Tarlac Province established him as one of the most visible opponents of the emerging dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. Aquino was jailed on dubious charges soon after Marcos declared Martial Law in 1972, and his wife became his unofficial spokesman to the wider world. He was released in order to undergo heart surgery in the United States in 1980, and then he resettled his family. But in 1983, he insisted on returning to the Philippines, with the clear aim of challenging Marcos, but was fatally shot by the soldiers escorting him off the plane that brought him back to Manila. His own martyrdom and her widowhood made Corazon the symbol of the democratic aspirations the Marcos regime had so visibly blocked.
"What do I know about being president?", she famously asked in 1985, not long before declaring her candidacy in the elections that Marcos reluctantly accepted under international pressure and hoped to "fix", if that was what it took to stay in power. And when he was declared the winner of the 1986 contest, it was almost universally understood that an accurate count would show he had been defeated. That was very much the conviction of the Filipinos and Filipinas who poured into the streets in a wave of "people power" that was credited with reversing the initial verdict and installing Corazon Aquino as President. But the reality was more complex.
Popular sentiment and street demonstrations alone did not overturn the initial verdict; Marcos was deserted by key supporters at home and abroad. Less widely remembered than the eruption of "people power" was the flight from the Marcos camp of key military leaders after the puppet legislature had announced his victory. The desertion of Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile and the head of the national police, Fidel Ramos, indicated that other power-brokers were not prepared to stand by Marcos in the face of the international obloquy and perhaps isolation that his seemingly transparent act of electoral theft would bring. "People power", not to put too fine a point of it, had its roots in a military coup that didn't quite come off.
At the same time, the Reagan administration, previously tolerant of Marcos as a force for regional stability, withdrew its support, largely at the prompting of Sen. Richard Lugar, whose recent visit had convinced him that the alternatives were Marcos's speedy replacement or a period of protracted domestic strife from which the communist insurgents of the New People's Army might profit. It was only once it was clear that he could not count on continued American backing, however reluctant, that Marcos left, and reconciled himself to exile on Hawaii.
The afterglow of "people power" helped sustain Aquino's popularity at high levels for some time, and she presided over the restoration of genuinely free parliamentary elections and an independent judiciary, as well as ratification by referendum of a new Constitution that codified Philippine liberties. Yet it became apparent that Aquino could not govern simply on the basis of the mystical connection with the electorate that, in many minds (sometimes her own) "people power" implied. Her tenure saw a half-dozen attempted coups, one led by Enrile, and it is likely one would have succeeded, but for the strong support she enjoyed from Ramos, who succeeded her in 1992. Whether out of conviction or expedience, she secured Ramos's backing, and that of the bulk of the military, by distancing herself from her naive campaign rhetoric in favour of a settlement with the New People's Army and eventual amnesty for insurgents. By design or happenstance, she adopted a more practical and effective policy combining domestic reforms that deprived the insurgents of much of their support with ongoing military action; the insurgency continues, but at a much reduced intensity.
Aquino's stature as an icon of Filipino democracy helped her consolidate democratic institutions, but her underlying lack of relevant experience and detailed knowledge was apparent in her fair-to-middling economic record. To be sure, increased political stability and a stronger legal regime made a more welcoming climate for investment, but growth rates remained sluggish, while excessive population increase imposed a low ceiling on GDP per capita (clerical influence in this country, where more than 80% of the people are Catholic, prevents the use of artificial contraception as widely as economic realism requires).
And if the mythology of "people power" served as one source of inspiration in subsequent efforts to overthrow repressive regimes elsewhere, the precedent has had unintended consequences in the Philippines itself. The notion that street demonstrations and other expressions of popular disaffection are the default means of removing unsatisfactory leaders seems to have been internalized by much of the population. One President, Joseph Estrada, was ultimately impeached in the face of popular anger over an illegal gaming scandal of picayune proportions. Aquino herself was one of those agitating for the removal of Estrada's successor and the incumbent, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, in a case where the arguments seem more closely balanced. Arroyo has initiated restrictions on public protests that are profoundly worrisome as well as allowing warrantless detention.
But it is unclear how much of the public opposition is rooted in dislike of those actions of Arroyo's actions that do put her fitness to rule in doubt, and how much in irritation over her economic reforms, notably a widely disliked value-added tax that is bringing down the country's chronic deficits. And in any case, had Estrada been left in power, the public might not have had Arroyo to contend with. The question inevitably arises of whether the regular resort to public protest in order to force political change remains a safeguard of Filipino freedoms or if it has become an obstacle to necessary political stability. If "people power" was intended to allow for the orderly and constitutional removal of governments that had outlived their usefulness, the record so far is mixed. Corazon Aquino can, and indeed should, be celebrated for her eloquence and courage in the face of the Marcos regime, but "people power" can prove too weak a weapon to bring down dictatorship unaided, and too potent to fit within a framework of constitutional government.
The daughter of an established landowning family, she married another child of the Philippine establishment, the lawyer and politician Benigno Aquino, Jr., whose comparatively rapid rise from Mayor of Conception to Governor of Tarlac Province established him as one of the most visible opponents of the emerging dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. Aquino was jailed on dubious charges soon after Marcos declared Martial Law in 1972, and his wife became his unofficial spokesman to the wider world. He was released in order to undergo heart surgery in the United States in 1980, and then he resettled his family. But in 1983, he insisted on returning to the Philippines, with the clear aim of challenging Marcos, but was fatally shot by the soldiers escorting him off the plane that brought him back to Manila. His own martyrdom and her widowhood made Corazon the symbol of the democratic aspirations the Marcos regime had so visibly blocked.
"What do I know about being president?", she famously asked in 1985, not long before declaring her candidacy in the elections that Marcos reluctantly accepted under international pressure and hoped to "fix", if that was what it took to stay in power. And when he was declared the winner of the 1986 contest, it was almost universally understood that an accurate count would show he had been defeated. That was very much the conviction of the Filipinos and Filipinas who poured into the streets in a wave of "people power" that was credited with reversing the initial verdict and installing Corazon Aquino as President. But the reality was more complex.
Popular sentiment and street demonstrations alone did not overturn the initial verdict; Marcos was deserted by key supporters at home and abroad. Less widely remembered than the eruption of "people power" was the flight from the Marcos camp of key military leaders after the puppet legislature had announced his victory. The desertion of Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile and the head of the national police, Fidel Ramos, indicated that other power-brokers were not prepared to stand by Marcos in the face of the international obloquy and perhaps isolation that his seemingly transparent act of electoral theft would bring. "People power", not to put too fine a point of it, had its roots in a military coup that didn't quite come off.
At the same time, the Reagan administration, previously tolerant of Marcos as a force for regional stability, withdrew its support, largely at the prompting of Sen. Richard Lugar, whose recent visit had convinced him that the alternatives were Marcos's speedy replacement or a period of protracted domestic strife from which the communist insurgents of the New People's Army might profit. It was only once it was clear that he could not count on continued American backing, however reluctant, that Marcos left, and reconciled himself to exile on Hawaii.
The afterglow of "people power" helped sustain Aquino's popularity at high levels for some time, and she presided over the restoration of genuinely free parliamentary elections and an independent judiciary, as well as ratification by referendum of a new Constitution that codified Philippine liberties. Yet it became apparent that Aquino could not govern simply on the basis of the mystical connection with the electorate that, in many minds (sometimes her own) "people power" implied. Her tenure saw a half-dozen attempted coups, one led by Enrile, and it is likely one would have succeeded, but for the strong support she enjoyed from Ramos, who succeeded her in 1992. Whether out of conviction or expedience, she secured Ramos's backing, and that of the bulk of the military, by distancing herself from her naive campaign rhetoric in favour of a settlement with the New People's Army and eventual amnesty for insurgents. By design or happenstance, she adopted a more practical and effective policy combining domestic reforms that deprived the insurgents of much of their support with ongoing military action; the insurgency continues, but at a much reduced intensity.
Aquino's stature as an icon of Filipino democracy helped her consolidate democratic institutions, but her underlying lack of relevant experience and detailed knowledge was apparent in her fair-to-middling economic record. To be sure, increased political stability and a stronger legal regime made a more welcoming climate for investment, but growth rates remained sluggish, while excessive population increase imposed a low ceiling on GDP per capita (clerical influence in this country, where more than 80% of the people are Catholic, prevents the use of artificial contraception as widely as economic realism requires).
And if the mythology of "people power" served as one source of inspiration in subsequent efforts to overthrow repressive regimes elsewhere, the precedent has had unintended consequences in the Philippines itself. The notion that street demonstrations and other expressions of popular disaffection are the default means of removing unsatisfactory leaders seems to have been internalized by much of the population. One President, Joseph Estrada, was ultimately impeached in the face of popular anger over an illegal gaming scandal of picayune proportions. Aquino herself was one of those agitating for the removal of Estrada's successor and the incumbent, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, in a case where the arguments seem more closely balanced. Arroyo has initiated restrictions on public protests that are profoundly worrisome as well as allowing warrantless detention.
But it is unclear how much of the public opposition is rooted in dislike of those actions of Arroyo's actions that do put her fitness to rule in doubt, and how much in irritation over her economic reforms, notably a widely disliked value-added tax that is bringing down the country's chronic deficits. And in any case, had Estrada been left in power, the public might not have had Arroyo to contend with. The question inevitably arises of whether the regular resort to public protest in order to force political change remains a safeguard of Filipino freedoms or if it has become an obstacle to necessary political stability. If "people power" was intended to allow for the orderly and constitutional removal of governments that had outlived their usefulness, the record so far is mixed. Corazon Aquino can, and indeed should, be celebrated for her eloquence and courage in the face of the Marcos regime, but "people power" can prove too weak a weapon to bring down dictatorship unaided, and too potent to fit within a framework of constitutional government.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
DVD Review: "W" (Lion's Gate; 2008)
The loopy conspiracism that marked Oliver Stone's past forays into the history of his own time is less pronounced in "W." than in either "JFK" or "Nixon" but is there all the same, and Stone's grasp of the very recent past proves not much firmer than his hold on the 1960s' and '70s. In structure, "W." is a traditional biopic, apparently designed to answer the question, as Stone put it, of how George W. Bush went from "an alcoholic bum to the most powerful man in the world?" The result, he concluded, would surprise both the recent President's admirers and his critics. It is, I think, likely to sit better with the more fervid of the latter, but the discerning in either camp need not look hard to find fault.
The patterns and incidents in Bush's personal ascent from wastrel to world figure are rendered with fidelity, at least in broad outline, to the documented record. We first encounter the grandson of a Senator and son of a then-Congressman as a drunken frat-boy undergoing the ritual hazing that initiates "pledges" into Skull and Bones. This is followed by a brisk recap of his scapegrace antics, from DUI arrests to fumbled or abandoned jobs (with Bush the Elder repeatedly bailing him out), unexpected defeat in his first youthful run for Congress, religious conversion, assumption of the role of political enforcer to the first President Bush, as well as his liaison to the social conservatives among Republican ranks, and finally his own successful runs for Governor and President, and hapless stumbling through the invasion of Iraq and botched occupation.
In Stone's world, as in the real one, Bush seems to have concluded from his father's alienation of his party's activists, which prompted the primary challenge from Pat Buchanan that softened him up for defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton, that a Republican President must keep his own base on side at all costs. More speculatively, his rise does seem to owe something to a complicated relationship to the father who patently regarded him as something of a disappointment, with the more disciplined and conscientious brother Jeb initially the designated heir to the Bush political patrimony. In Stone's version, this is credible enough if schematic and somewhat reductive.
But from early on, there are signs that Stone and his collaborators not only dislike Bush (fair enough) but cannot take him as seriously as, like him or not, he deserves. The real Bush's public personality is certainly not to everyone's taste ( I for one always found his aggressive regular guy-ness, soapy religiosity, self-evident anti-intellectualism, and juvenile infatuation with sports off-putting in the extreme). It does strain credulity that he is quite the vulgarian and buffoon depicted here, perennially yapping and stuffing his cake-hole at the same time, and at one point defecating with the bathroom door open, his wife in bed a few feet away. A fellow so charmless and crass would have trouble getting elected to the Houston City Council, much less the White House. Stone cannot even allow his occasional flights of crusading idealism to pass without mockery, through the presence on the soundtrack of the theme song from an old television series about Robin Hood. The itch to depict Bush in as doltish and boorish a light as possible is one which Stone must scratch at every chance, and the result is too broad for rounded biography, but insufficiently imaginative for satire.
But what I first took as Stone's reflexive raillery is reflective of a deeper weakness. It is not just that personal antipathy makes it impossible for him to take Bush seriously, his lurid conception of how American politics (indeed the world) works prevents him from even needing to. For this Bush is not just an incurious if narrowly crafty man surrounded by subordinates most of whom have worked out their worldviews in more detail than he has; nor is he a sporadically engaged leader who delegates far more power is wise. He is the dimmest of puppets, his strings effortlessly pulled by Karl Rove or Dick Cheney. That Stone's conception of politics remains obtusely conspiratorial is clear from a scene of a session in the White House Situation Room in which uber-puppetmaster Cheney reveals the agenda behind the invasion of Iraq; not merely transplantation of democracy to the Arab world or transformation of the Middle East as a region, but locking down energy supplies and a permanent military base. This is, he says, "empire. Real empire. Nobody will ever fuck with us again."
Certainly, the failures of the Bush administration can be taken as a political object lesson, a warning in the perils of certain kinds of folly. That tale could be entertaining, edifying, and accurate to boot. But Stone does not present the messy, complex reality of ideologically driven over-interpretation of ambiguous intelligence, misguided reliance on Iraqi exiles who told policymakers what they wanted to hear, a strategy based an American presence that proved smaller and shorter than reality demanded, and lamentable failure to plan for the day after military victory. Rather, he gives us a secret government, whose members confirm the conspiracy theories of the hard left in their candid exchanges with one another. There is no room here for the unpredictability of events, hubris, even run-of-the-mill ineptitude, only the smoothly malevolent workings of a cabal working behind the back of its half-comprehending front man. And this turns out to be as unsatisfying dramatugically as it as taken as analysis.
One of the predictable pleasures of a film like this is comparing the cast members to the figures they portray. On that score, "W." is uneven at best, with the majority of the performers neither bearing much resemblance to their originals nor providing compensation by way of persuasive interpretation. James Cromwell and Ellen Burstyn incarnate the elder Bushes as identikit upper-crust WASPS, while Richard Dreyfuss and Toby Jones are respectively too silkily threatening and too blandly smarmy as Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. Scott Glen's distracted belligerence is off-key for Donald Rumsfeld while Jeffrey Wright's Colin Powell is disconcertingly self-effacing. Elizabeth Banks and Thandie Newton are fetching as Laura Bush and Condoleezza Rice, but their parts are somewhat under-written, giving neither much to do.
Josh Brolin has been rightly praised for the surface verisimilitude with which he essays the title role, and indeed he faithfully reproduces many of his recognizable quirks of expression, intonation, and gait. As well, he poignantly enacts Bush's Oedipal resentments and sudden religious conversion. But the performance cannot escape two-dimensionality because of Stone's conception of Bush as a political cipher whose actions issue from the promptings of smarter men. The result is that this version of Bush is interesting and plausible only in his secondary facets, and a blank when it comes to ones that matter most. The purely personal biography of the man is not altogether without interest, but there is not enough in the more-or-less representative experiences of a man of his background to compel sustained attention. History would care little for George W. Bush except as a political actor, and since Stone denies him so much of that significance, there is little reason for the viewer to care either.
The patterns and incidents in Bush's personal ascent from wastrel to world figure are rendered with fidelity, at least in broad outline, to the documented record. We first encounter the grandson of a Senator and son of a then-Congressman as a drunken frat-boy undergoing the ritual hazing that initiates "pledges" into Skull and Bones. This is followed by a brisk recap of his scapegrace antics, from DUI arrests to fumbled or abandoned jobs (with Bush the Elder repeatedly bailing him out), unexpected defeat in his first youthful run for Congress, religious conversion, assumption of the role of political enforcer to the first President Bush, as well as his liaison to the social conservatives among Republican ranks, and finally his own successful runs for Governor and President, and hapless stumbling through the invasion of Iraq and botched occupation.
In Stone's world, as in the real one, Bush seems to have concluded from his father's alienation of his party's activists, which prompted the primary challenge from Pat Buchanan that softened him up for defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton, that a Republican President must keep his own base on side at all costs. More speculatively, his rise does seem to owe something to a complicated relationship to the father who patently regarded him as something of a disappointment, with the more disciplined and conscientious brother Jeb initially the designated heir to the Bush political patrimony. In Stone's version, this is credible enough if schematic and somewhat reductive.
But from early on, there are signs that Stone and his collaborators not only dislike Bush (fair enough) but cannot take him as seriously as, like him or not, he deserves. The real Bush's public personality is certainly not to everyone's taste ( I for one always found his aggressive regular guy-ness, soapy religiosity, self-evident anti-intellectualism, and juvenile infatuation with sports off-putting in the extreme). It does strain credulity that he is quite the vulgarian and buffoon depicted here, perennially yapping and stuffing his cake-hole at the same time, and at one point defecating with the bathroom door open, his wife in bed a few feet away. A fellow so charmless and crass would have trouble getting elected to the Houston City Council, much less the White House. Stone cannot even allow his occasional flights of crusading idealism to pass without mockery, through the presence on the soundtrack of the theme song from an old television series about Robin Hood. The itch to depict Bush in as doltish and boorish a light as possible is one which Stone must scratch at every chance, and the result is too broad for rounded biography, but insufficiently imaginative for satire.
But what I first took as Stone's reflexive raillery is reflective of a deeper weakness. It is not just that personal antipathy makes it impossible for him to take Bush seriously, his lurid conception of how American politics (indeed the world) works prevents him from even needing to. For this Bush is not just an incurious if narrowly crafty man surrounded by subordinates most of whom have worked out their worldviews in more detail than he has; nor is he a sporadically engaged leader who delegates far more power is wise. He is the dimmest of puppets, his strings effortlessly pulled by Karl Rove or Dick Cheney. That Stone's conception of politics remains obtusely conspiratorial is clear from a scene of a session in the White House Situation Room in which uber-puppetmaster Cheney reveals the agenda behind the invasion of Iraq; not merely transplantation of democracy to the Arab world or transformation of the Middle East as a region, but locking down energy supplies and a permanent military base. This is, he says, "empire. Real empire. Nobody will ever fuck with us again."
Certainly, the failures of the Bush administration can be taken as a political object lesson, a warning in the perils of certain kinds of folly. That tale could be entertaining, edifying, and accurate to boot. But Stone does not present the messy, complex reality of ideologically driven over-interpretation of ambiguous intelligence, misguided reliance on Iraqi exiles who told policymakers what they wanted to hear, a strategy based an American presence that proved smaller and shorter than reality demanded, and lamentable failure to plan for the day after military victory. Rather, he gives us a secret government, whose members confirm the conspiracy theories of the hard left in their candid exchanges with one another. There is no room here for the unpredictability of events, hubris, even run-of-the-mill ineptitude, only the smoothly malevolent workings of a cabal working behind the back of its half-comprehending front man. And this turns out to be as unsatisfying dramatugically as it as taken as analysis.
One of the predictable pleasures of a film like this is comparing the cast members to the figures they portray. On that score, "W." is uneven at best, with the majority of the performers neither bearing much resemblance to their originals nor providing compensation by way of persuasive interpretation. James Cromwell and Ellen Burstyn incarnate the elder Bushes as identikit upper-crust WASPS, while Richard Dreyfuss and Toby Jones are respectively too silkily threatening and too blandly smarmy as Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. Scott Glen's distracted belligerence is off-key for Donald Rumsfeld while Jeffrey Wright's Colin Powell is disconcertingly self-effacing. Elizabeth Banks and Thandie Newton are fetching as Laura Bush and Condoleezza Rice, but their parts are somewhat under-written, giving neither much to do.
Josh Brolin has been rightly praised for the surface verisimilitude with which he essays the title role, and indeed he faithfully reproduces many of his recognizable quirks of expression, intonation, and gait. As well, he poignantly enacts Bush's Oedipal resentments and sudden religious conversion. But the performance cannot escape two-dimensionality because of Stone's conception of Bush as a political cipher whose actions issue from the promptings of smarter men. The result is that this version of Bush is interesting and plausible only in his secondary facets, and a blank when it comes to ones that matter most. The purely personal biography of the man is not altogether without interest, but there is not enough in the more-or-less representative experiences of a man of his background to compel sustained attention. History would care little for George W. Bush except as a political actor, and since Stone denies him so much of that significance, there is little reason for the viewer to care either.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Apollo 11 Plus 40
I see a portion of the Apollo program's legacy every morning, when I turn on my computer. For at least a few seconds each day, I sit rapt before the picture of the moon's surface, which manages to be both desolate and ineffably beautiful. And if I choose, a twitch of the mouse brings up the famous, and haunting 'earthrise', an image widely credited with catalyzing the contemporary concern with the natural environment into existence.
In declaring it an explicit national goal to put a man on the moon and return him to Earth before the close of the decade, John F. Kennedy asserted "we go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share." But for all its cultural, aesthetic, arguably spiritual, significance, the achievement's roots were in large measure crassly political. And if it is remembered as perhaps America's greatest feat of peacetime mobilization, it was only notionally a peacetime feat at all, for good and for ill.
Triumphs in astronautics, from the launch of Sputnik I through Yuri Gagarin's circuit of the globe, suggested that the Soviet Union was not only surging ahead of the United States in the ability to deliver nuclear warheads by ballistic missile, but in the mastery of science and technology seen as emblematic of modernity. As well, John F. Kennedy had won the presidency largely on claims of a (non-existent) missile gap, and then had stumbled badly at the Bay of Pigs. Americans, and those who nervously preferred to be their allies, could not help wondering if they were not on the losing side of a contest to determine which economic and political system was more conducive to prosperity and progress. In accepting an adviser's suggestion to focus national energies on manned flight to the moon, Kennedy sought to dispel the suspicion that the future belonged to Communism, and that its victory in the Cold War logically followed.
Assigning such importance to putting a man on the moon made more sense as political symbolism than in either narrowly military or purely scientific terms. Kennedy's predecessor was right in his claims that Soviet accomplishments in rocketry meant little to the balance of advantage in atomic weaponry, and the new priority given manned spaceflight was a diversion from other fields of space science where the United States was in fact well ahead of its rival.
But Kennedy had the justification of a crisis in public perception, domestically and abroad, and was fortunate enough to articulate the goal at the apogee of public and Congressional deference to presidential prerogatives, particularly when the national security could be invoked. So there was little dissent in Congress, and NASA head James Webb (a former head of the Bureau of the Budget under Harry Truman, and a formidable bureaucratic infighter in his own right) got what he asked for. Under the resulting "crash program", NASA's civilian staff quadrupled between 1962 and 1966, and contract personnel rose from 36,000 to more than 375,000. At its peak, the agency consumed more than 5% of the federal budget, more than half of which went to manned spaceflight. The cost of the Apollo project was some $25 billion.
While Apollo was a striking achievement, it was essentially one of engineering and management. Success was a function less of fundamental technological breakthroughs than of the efficient central direction of researchers, production staff, engineers and technicians working for a legion of separate firms, with wildly divergent procedures, techniques,and corporate cultures. Some 80-90% of project expenditure took the form not of in-house spending but of private sector contracts. The model was essentially that perfected by the United States government as it mobilized for military production in World War Two. Rather than spend time and money to construct in its entirety a public manufacturing base geared to the manufacture of tanks, ships, and planes, Washington had relied primarily on the plant and personnel of civilian companies, most of them, in that time of at best partial recovery from depression, with plenty of unused capacity and glad for the work. Thus Ford expanded its facilities in and around Detroit; after an airfield was added, B-24 Liberators were produced at Willow Run. (Transmissions were made there until the bankruptcy announcement earlier this year.)
For Apollo, the bulk of the work was done by firms like McDonnell-Douglas, not NASA's in-house technical personnel. Development and production of the Lunar Module in particular were perennially behind schedule and over budget, given the difficulty of reconciling modest weight and endurance sufficient to survive what was expected to be a rough landing; of fitting in the gear required for landing with the components required for subsequent ascent; of crafting engines and guidance controls for operation outside Earth's atmosphere (with all that implied for testing beforehand). The need to ensure safe return could be met only by building in considerable redundancy. These problems were solved for the most part by throwing lots of money at them. Capitalism of a sort, but immune from the discipline imposed by competitive markets.
The firms in the aerospace and (certain sectors of the) electronics industries involved in Apollo often remained industry leaders for several decades thereafter. These were, of course, the industries most tightly tied both politically and institutionally to the defence establishment, part of what Eisenhower had called the "military-industrial complex." And they were nourished by what was at bottom a wartime approach to R&D; sustained investment over years, and under monopsony conditions. In other words, a wartime project, defended on national security grounds, at a time of something distinct from war, but perhaps not quite peace either.
As onetime NASA historian Roger Launius has noted, the conditions were unusually propitious. The project commanded the vehement support of the president at the apogee of executive power in the American system, and prosperity made it seem effortlessly affordable. I would add that in quasi-war, as in the real thing, cost is rarely an object and critics tend to muffle their doubts rather than risk misguided questions about their own loyalty. The problem for NASA, Launius concludes, is that its administrators took this as the norm. They were, perhaps, blind to the limitations of the economic model at work. What "spinoffs" materialized for the benefit of civil industries that could not depend on their links to a dirigiste defence sector, he points out, arose by happenstance early on. It was not until the early 1990s that NASA even enjoyed institutionalized links to private industry through a number of facilities geared to technology transfer. By that time, NASA's claim on American national resources was much smaller, and that of manned spaceflight smaller yet.
Tom Wolfe, who wrote so evocatively about the astronauts in The Right Stuff, observed in the New York Times last weekend that the Apollo Project was dead almost as soon as Neil Armstrong uttered his famous words. The cultural impact was a one-shot, with few echoes. True, there were a few more flights, but their audiences diminished; it took the shadow of unexpected calamity to propel Apollo 13 to the top of the front page. Part of it, Wolfe observes, was that the symbolic victory had been won. Judged by the harsher standards of military utility, space flight was irrelevant to the Cold War now. And the advent of detente made military, and even quasi-military, demands on the public purse unpopular with Congress. When the Cold War turned chilly again, space mattered mainly in the context of space-based weapons systems developed outside NASA by the military. And the end of the long postwar boom made large multi-year spending on space exploration seem like a luxury to politicians of both left and right. The former would rather spend it on social programs, the latter return it to the taxpayer.
Survey data, as Launius points out, had changed little since the early 1960s; supporters and opponents of substantial spending on manned spaceflight were about evenly matched. It was in Washington that the climate had changed. And after Vietnam and Watergate, Presidents could not cloak their favourite programs in the armour of urgent national security needs without Congressional challenge. To justify its existence, NASA was driven to expedients such as early ventures into "space tourism", but the first teacher in space died in the Challenger disaster. The second president Bush's call for a return to the moon and a manned mission to Mars have yet to lead to much.
To be fair, much of the most scientifically meritorious work by NASA has taken place in the last few decades, and has not involved manned flight; the Pathfinder probe and the Hubble telescope certainly loom large. One of the more problematic aspects of the Apollo inheritance is the notion, by no means dead, that the solution to whatever ails America is likely to lie in a centrally managed crash program with lavish funding. "If we can put a man on the moon," the refrain runs, then surely we can organize and spend so as to cure cancer or end poverty. But both scientific discovery and fine-grained social engineering require a kind of imagination and attention to the particular that the state supplies less dependably than it does administrative and technical expertise. As for manned exploration of the heavens, it now seems clear that in purely political terms doing it the second time will be harder.
In declaring it an explicit national goal to put a man on the moon and return him to Earth before the close of the decade, John F. Kennedy asserted "we go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share." But for all its cultural, aesthetic, arguably spiritual, significance, the achievement's roots were in large measure crassly political. And if it is remembered as perhaps America's greatest feat of peacetime mobilization, it was only notionally a peacetime feat at all, for good and for ill.
Triumphs in astronautics, from the launch of Sputnik I through Yuri Gagarin's circuit of the globe, suggested that the Soviet Union was not only surging ahead of the United States in the ability to deliver nuclear warheads by ballistic missile, but in the mastery of science and technology seen as emblematic of modernity. As well, John F. Kennedy had won the presidency largely on claims of a (non-existent) missile gap, and then had stumbled badly at the Bay of Pigs. Americans, and those who nervously preferred to be their allies, could not help wondering if they were not on the losing side of a contest to determine which economic and political system was more conducive to prosperity and progress. In accepting an adviser's suggestion to focus national energies on manned flight to the moon, Kennedy sought to dispel the suspicion that the future belonged to Communism, and that its victory in the Cold War logically followed.
Assigning such importance to putting a man on the moon made more sense as political symbolism than in either narrowly military or purely scientific terms. Kennedy's predecessor was right in his claims that Soviet accomplishments in rocketry meant little to the balance of advantage in atomic weaponry, and the new priority given manned spaceflight was a diversion from other fields of space science where the United States was in fact well ahead of its rival.
But Kennedy had the justification of a crisis in public perception, domestically and abroad, and was fortunate enough to articulate the goal at the apogee of public and Congressional deference to presidential prerogatives, particularly when the national security could be invoked. So there was little dissent in Congress, and NASA head James Webb (a former head of the Bureau of the Budget under Harry Truman, and a formidable bureaucratic infighter in his own right) got what he asked for. Under the resulting "crash program", NASA's civilian staff quadrupled between 1962 and 1966, and contract personnel rose from 36,000 to more than 375,000. At its peak, the agency consumed more than 5% of the federal budget, more than half of which went to manned spaceflight. The cost of the Apollo project was some $25 billion.
While Apollo was a striking achievement, it was essentially one of engineering and management. Success was a function less of fundamental technological breakthroughs than of the efficient central direction of researchers, production staff, engineers and technicians working for a legion of separate firms, with wildly divergent procedures, techniques,and corporate cultures. Some 80-90% of project expenditure took the form not of in-house spending but of private sector contracts. The model was essentially that perfected by the United States government as it mobilized for military production in World War Two. Rather than spend time and money to construct in its entirety a public manufacturing base geared to the manufacture of tanks, ships, and planes, Washington had relied primarily on the plant and personnel of civilian companies, most of them, in that time of at best partial recovery from depression, with plenty of unused capacity and glad for the work. Thus Ford expanded its facilities in and around Detroit; after an airfield was added, B-24 Liberators were produced at Willow Run. (Transmissions were made there until the bankruptcy announcement earlier this year.)
For Apollo, the bulk of the work was done by firms like McDonnell-Douglas, not NASA's in-house technical personnel. Development and production of the Lunar Module in particular were perennially behind schedule and over budget, given the difficulty of reconciling modest weight and endurance sufficient to survive what was expected to be a rough landing; of fitting in the gear required for landing with the components required for subsequent ascent; of crafting engines and guidance controls for operation outside Earth's atmosphere (with all that implied for testing beforehand). The need to ensure safe return could be met only by building in considerable redundancy. These problems were solved for the most part by throwing lots of money at them. Capitalism of a sort, but immune from the discipline imposed by competitive markets.
The firms in the aerospace and (certain sectors of the) electronics industries involved in Apollo often remained industry leaders for several decades thereafter. These were, of course, the industries most tightly tied both politically and institutionally to the defence establishment, part of what Eisenhower had called the "military-industrial complex." And they were nourished by what was at bottom a wartime approach to R&D; sustained investment over years, and under monopsony conditions. In other words, a wartime project, defended on national security grounds, at a time of something distinct from war, but perhaps not quite peace either.
As onetime NASA historian Roger Launius has noted, the conditions were unusually propitious. The project commanded the vehement support of the president at the apogee of executive power in the American system, and prosperity made it seem effortlessly affordable. I would add that in quasi-war, as in the real thing, cost is rarely an object and critics tend to muffle their doubts rather than risk misguided questions about their own loyalty. The problem for NASA, Launius concludes, is that its administrators took this as the norm. They were, perhaps, blind to the limitations of the economic model at work. What "spinoffs" materialized for the benefit of civil industries that could not depend on their links to a dirigiste defence sector, he points out, arose by happenstance early on. It was not until the early 1990s that NASA even enjoyed institutionalized links to private industry through a number of facilities geared to technology transfer. By that time, NASA's claim on American national resources was much smaller, and that of manned spaceflight smaller yet.
Tom Wolfe, who wrote so evocatively about the astronauts in The Right Stuff, observed in the New York Times last weekend that the Apollo Project was dead almost as soon as Neil Armstrong uttered his famous words. The cultural impact was a one-shot, with few echoes. True, there were a few more flights, but their audiences diminished; it took the shadow of unexpected calamity to propel Apollo 13 to the top of the front page. Part of it, Wolfe observes, was that the symbolic victory had been won. Judged by the harsher standards of military utility, space flight was irrelevant to the Cold War now. And the advent of detente made military, and even quasi-military, demands on the public purse unpopular with Congress. When the Cold War turned chilly again, space mattered mainly in the context of space-based weapons systems developed outside NASA by the military. And the end of the long postwar boom made large multi-year spending on space exploration seem like a luxury to politicians of both left and right. The former would rather spend it on social programs, the latter return it to the taxpayer.
Survey data, as Launius points out, had changed little since the early 1960s; supporters and opponents of substantial spending on manned spaceflight were about evenly matched. It was in Washington that the climate had changed. And after Vietnam and Watergate, Presidents could not cloak their favourite programs in the armour of urgent national security needs without Congressional challenge. To justify its existence, NASA was driven to expedients such as early ventures into "space tourism", but the first teacher in space died in the Challenger disaster. The second president Bush's call for a return to the moon and a manned mission to Mars have yet to lead to much.
To be fair, much of the most scientifically meritorious work by NASA has taken place in the last few decades, and has not involved manned flight; the Pathfinder probe and the Hubble telescope certainly loom large. One of the more problematic aspects of the Apollo inheritance is the notion, by no means dead, that the solution to whatever ails America is likely to lie in a centrally managed crash program with lavish funding. "If we can put a man on the moon," the refrain runs, then surely we can organize and spend so as to cure cancer or end poverty. But both scientific discovery and fine-grained social engineering require a kind of imagination and attention to the particular that the state supplies less dependably than it does administrative and technical expertise. As for manned exploration of the heavens, it now seems clear that in purely political terms doing it the second time will be harder.
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