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.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
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.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Walter Cronkite, RIP
Many of the tributes to Walter Cronkite, who died on Friday at 92, stressed his complete unresemblance to the blow-dried mannequins who now so often perform his onetime function of reading the news. Someone like Cronkite, they implied (and indeed this rather slight fellow, visibly balding in photos taken when he was still in his 30s, had a "face made for radio"), would never be offered his old job today. In truth, it was a particular set of circumstances that allowed him to become a fixture in everyone's living room and in America's collective imagination.
While he emerged as a significant figure in the world of broadcast journalism as one of the remarkably gifted crew of correspondents assembled by Edward R. Murrow to cover the Second World War for CBS, his success owed a lot to his difference from his mentor. Murrow had majored in speech and drama as a student, and his greatest journalistic achievement, that of evoking the atmosphere of London during the Blitz for an audience that could only hear, was fundamentally literary. To produce the desired effect, Murrow had to rely upon a self-consciously dramatic, and occasionally arch, diction and style; on the printed page and at a distance from the immediate occasion, it seemed melodramatic and overheated. Nobody really talked like Murrow in everyday conversation.
Everyone, on the other hand, talked like Cronkite. He too had started out in radio, as a sports announcer (so, oddly enough, did Ronald Reagan), but after a couple of years moved on to become a reporter for what was then United Press. The concise, unadorned idiom of the wire-service man stuck. So, perhaps, did a sense of what mattered; as a passenger on B-52 bombing raids, Cronkite was at some personal risk while covering the war, which may well have inculcated an impatience with the fake gesture of the posturing 'war reporter' and an understanding of the expressive potential of the ordinary airman's casual speech. The sense that reporting in itself was both an honourable calling and a workaday craft does not appear to have left him. He made the locution "this reporter" very much his own, and his nightly CBS broadcasts aired from what was obviously a genuine newsroom and not a mere studio set. His signature sign-off, "and that's the way it is", assumed that the broadcaster's aspiration should be the apparently humdrum virtue of unquestionable reliability.
Where Murrow, in his later incarnation as a television presenter, was an impossibly glamorous figure like the foreign correspondents of an earlier time, Cronkite continued to speak in the familiar tones of his native Kansas City, Mo., and if he was not everyman, was perhaps everyman's idea of everyman. He established himself as a comfortable presence at the peak of the postwar boom, in an age when the American public that had been shaped by the great unifying national experiences of depression, war, and then cold war, was understood by others and understood itself, in monolithic terms.
Specialists in marketing and public opinion posited a largely undifferentiated mass audience, and had not yet perfected the arts of narrowcasting and segmenting it into a multitude of niche publics. Broadcast news was less fiercely competitive, and the ethos of infotainment had yet to pervade the news divisions of the major networks. When that would come, one could choose a news show and a newscaster tailored to one's own sensibility. Aaron Brown if you liked wry wit, Dan Rather if you preferred a touch of self-importance, Peter Jennings if you hankered for trenchcoated glamour, Bill O'Reilly if you sought no more than confirmation of your own oafish prejudices. It is no slight to Cronkite's art (and art of a sort it was) to observe that consisted of embodying while also elevating, universal accessibility and acceptability. The common denominator, in his hands, need not be as low as it would be in others. And there were occasions when he managed to unobtrusively educate his viewers; his boyish enthusiasm as he explained the promise and peril of space exploration was kinetic.
The iconic moment in which he announced the death of John F. Kennedy, getting out the words even as his voice quavered, doffing his heavy black-rimmed glasses out of emotion, showed him maintain the professionalism his viewers expected, while visibly sharing their humanity. No wonder that so many Americans saw him as seeming to hold their world together through an experience they endured together.
Cronkite notoriously rejected the suggestion that he become a pundit. And, truth be told, when he did express personal opinions on matters of public controversy, there was little that was interesting or original about them. Dwight Eisenhower (whom he accompanied on a return to the scene of D-day twenty years later) assumed he was a Republican, while liberal Democrats were equally certain that he was one of their own at heart. In 1980, the centrist independent Presidential candidate John Anderson seriously pressed Cronkite to become his running-mate.
At least one journalistic intervention of Cronkite's was a political event in its own right. After the Tet offensive appeared to discredit official claims that the Vietnam War was not only winnable but in the process of being won, he went to the front. There is some dispute as to how well he understood what had happened. Among historians, Peter Braestrup has suggested that Cronkite and his peers missed the underlying story, the failure of the Viet Cong in their effort to spark a nationwide uprising that would overturn the Saigon regime and their subsequent disastrous losses. Chester Pach has argued that, on the contrary, Cronkite was correct in seeing that victory was elusive and that the South Vietnamese either could not or would not fight for themselves to the degree required to lend credibility to the claims of the optimists. And so he concluded that on the most positive reckoning, nothing better than protracted stalemate was likely. So he concluded, "the only rational way out, then, will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honourable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could."
As the sociologist Todd Gitlin has written, by 1968 this was close to conventional wisdom in much of official Washington and indeed among a majority in the political classes. Cronkite's words represented one of the later gasps of the cold war consensus in American politics and diplomacy that was to unravel so frighteningly over the remainder of that year and the ones ahead. With his report, it was clear that despair over an end to Vietnam short of protracted stalemate was now a mainstream stance. Lyndon Johnson, perhaps, spoke better than he knew when turned to his aide Bill Moyers and remarked "if I've lost Cronkite, I've lost America." The America that emerged on the other side of that trauma was splintered in its politics as well as in its cultural tastes, and increasingly its political solitudes would be reflected in the largely separate parallel Americas of a hundred different channels, of Fox news and CNN, of liberals and conservatives screaming at other. Cronkite was popular and respected enough that he could remain a welcome presence in a majority of living rooms for the final decade or so of his prime-time career. But that audience was no longer there for anyone else.
While he emerged as a significant figure in the world of broadcast journalism as one of the remarkably gifted crew of correspondents assembled by Edward R. Murrow to cover the Second World War for CBS, his success owed a lot to his difference from his mentor. Murrow had majored in speech and drama as a student, and his greatest journalistic achievement, that of evoking the atmosphere of London during the Blitz for an audience that could only hear, was fundamentally literary. To produce the desired effect, Murrow had to rely upon a self-consciously dramatic, and occasionally arch, diction and style; on the printed page and at a distance from the immediate occasion, it seemed melodramatic and overheated. Nobody really talked like Murrow in everyday conversation.
Everyone, on the other hand, talked like Cronkite. He too had started out in radio, as a sports announcer (so, oddly enough, did Ronald Reagan), but after a couple of years moved on to become a reporter for what was then United Press. The concise, unadorned idiom of the wire-service man stuck. So, perhaps, did a sense of what mattered; as a passenger on B-52 bombing raids, Cronkite was at some personal risk while covering the war, which may well have inculcated an impatience with the fake gesture of the posturing 'war reporter' and an understanding of the expressive potential of the ordinary airman's casual speech. The sense that reporting in itself was both an honourable calling and a workaday craft does not appear to have left him. He made the locution "this reporter" very much his own, and his nightly CBS broadcasts aired from what was obviously a genuine newsroom and not a mere studio set. His signature sign-off, "and that's the way it is", assumed that the broadcaster's aspiration should be the apparently humdrum virtue of unquestionable reliability.
Where Murrow, in his later incarnation as a television presenter, was an impossibly glamorous figure like the foreign correspondents of an earlier time, Cronkite continued to speak in the familiar tones of his native Kansas City, Mo., and if he was not everyman, was perhaps everyman's idea of everyman. He established himself as a comfortable presence at the peak of the postwar boom, in an age when the American public that had been shaped by the great unifying national experiences of depression, war, and then cold war, was understood by others and understood itself, in monolithic terms.
Specialists in marketing and public opinion posited a largely undifferentiated mass audience, and had not yet perfected the arts of narrowcasting and segmenting it into a multitude of niche publics. Broadcast news was less fiercely competitive, and the ethos of infotainment had yet to pervade the news divisions of the major networks. When that would come, one could choose a news show and a newscaster tailored to one's own sensibility. Aaron Brown if you liked wry wit, Dan Rather if you preferred a touch of self-importance, Peter Jennings if you hankered for trenchcoated glamour, Bill O'Reilly if you sought no more than confirmation of your own oafish prejudices. It is no slight to Cronkite's art (and art of a sort it was) to observe that consisted of embodying while also elevating, universal accessibility and acceptability. The common denominator, in his hands, need not be as low as it would be in others. And there were occasions when he managed to unobtrusively educate his viewers; his boyish enthusiasm as he explained the promise and peril of space exploration was kinetic.
The iconic moment in which he announced the death of John F. Kennedy, getting out the words even as his voice quavered, doffing his heavy black-rimmed glasses out of emotion, showed him maintain the professionalism his viewers expected, while visibly sharing their humanity. No wonder that so many Americans saw him as seeming to hold their world together through an experience they endured together.
Cronkite notoriously rejected the suggestion that he become a pundit. And, truth be told, when he did express personal opinions on matters of public controversy, there was little that was interesting or original about them. Dwight Eisenhower (whom he accompanied on a return to the scene of D-day twenty years later) assumed he was a Republican, while liberal Democrats were equally certain that he was one of their own at heart. In 1980, the centrist independent Presidential candidate John Anderson seriously pressed Cronkite to become his running-mate.
At least one journalistic intervention of Cronkite's was a political event in its own right. After the Tet offensive appeared to discredit official claims that the Vietnam War was not only winnable but in the process of being won, he went to the front. There is some dispute as to how well he understood what had happened. Among historians, Peter Braestrup has suggested that Cronkite and his peers missed the underlying story, the failure of the Viet Cong in their effort to spark a nationwide uprising that would overturn the Saigon regime and their subsequent disastrous losses. Chester Pach has argued that, on the contrary, Cronkite was correct in seeing that victory was elusive and that the South Vietnamese either could not or would not fight for themselves to the degree required to lend credibility to the claims of the optimists. And so he concluded that on the most positive reckoning, nothing better than protracted stalemate was likely. So he concluded, "the only rational way out, then, will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honourable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could."
As the sociologist Todd Gitlin has written, by 1968 this was close to conventional wisdom in much of official Washington and indeed among a majority in the political classes. Cronkite's words represented one of the later gasps of the cold war consensus in American politics and diplomacy that was to unravel so frighteningly over the remainder of that year and the ones ahead. With his report, it was clear that despair over an end to Vietnam short of protracted stalemate was now a mainstream stance. Lyndon Johnson, perhaps, spoke better than he knew when turned to his aide Bill Moyers and remarked "if I've lost Cronkite, I've lost America." The America that emerged on the other side of that trauma was splintered in its politics as well as in its cultural tastes, and increasingly its political solitudes would be reflected in the largely separate parallel Americas of a hundred different channels, of Fox news and CNN, of liberals and conservatives screaming at other. Cronkite was popular and respected enough that he could remain a welcome presence in a majority of living rooms for the final decade or so of his prime-time career. But that audience was no longer there for anyone else.
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Robert S. McNamara, RIP
While his name has become synonymous with limitless hubris in the making of public policy, Robert S. McNamara, who died on Monday at 93, actually embodied what many, maybe most, Americans claim to want in their public servants: the application of disinterested expertise to the task at hand, considerations of partisan advantage or interest-group benefit be damned. And that was at the root of both his notorious failures and the successes they have come to overshadow in the public mind.
Schooled in Taylorism at Berkeley and trained in the most up-to-date application of quantitative methods in his wartime service, McNamara was the archetypal number-cruncher in the high noon of American technocracy. His rise paralleled the faltering of ideology in postwar politics, and the ascendancy of the conceit that if intelligent enough men were placed in the right positions, enough data provided to them, and the process engineered with the requisite skill, then policymaking could be reduced to something approximating a precise science, a matter of mere technique. Government with the politics left out.
But this underestimated the extent to which the political, and indeed the human, permeate any contraption for the wise framing and execution of laws. And it was clear early on that McNamara was at his best where political considerations could be shoved to the margins. One of his early triumphs as a wartime statistician was devising a system for the optimal provision of supplies by air to the China-Burma-India theatre. So many aircraft, so many tons of supplies, the right formulae, and the optimal solution did indeed emerge. The method was inevitably less reliable when applied to the fire-bombing of Japan, where the numbers mattered, but no more than the imponderables of human resolve, on the part of both Japan's civilian population and its military oligarchy. If war, as the most familiar Clausewitzian axiom has it, is policy (politics) by other means, then McNamara's calculus was necessarily incomplete to the degree that it could not compute the political variables of ambition and sacrifice, fear and will.
As an executive at the Ford Company after the war, McNamara famously boasted that he knew next to nothing about cars, only the managerial techniques by which they were designed, built, and marketed. It is a canard that he supported the ill-fated Edsel, but his insistence on top-down decisionmaking, for all the efficiencies it generated in the short term, empowered the generation of executives whose insular self-regard would virtually sink America's auto industry.
On becoming John F. Kennedy's Secretary of Defense, he readily admitted he knew no more about weapons systems and strategy than he had known about cars and trucks. But he was appointed to streamline the financing and administration of America's defenses by gimlet-eyed scrutiny of the defense budget, and to curtail the inter-service rivalries and political logrolling that had marred defense policy in the Eisenhower era. And he did so in large measure. The prerogatives of service chiefs and the whims of Congressional committees did count for less. But there were costs along the way. If the generals and admirals found it harder to give ignorant or self-serving advice, they had a tougher time getting a hearing when they had relevant wisdom to impart.
After Kennedy and McNamara, the Secretary of Defense would be the President's principal adviser on military matters, but it did not follow that his counsel was always sounder than that of the uniformed cicerones to whom earlier Presidents might turn. Different as the two men might be, Donald Rumsfeld was as self-assured and commanding as McNamara ever was, and on the costs and pitfalls of Invading Iraq, he proved less prescient than General Erik Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff he politically neutered when he publicly contradicted Rumsfeld's estimates of what the job would require.
On the making of America's actual strategy, McNamara had one major success to his credit, but a qualified one. At the dawn of the Kennedy administration, American nuclear plans called for a rapid resort to nuclear hostilities in the event of a Soviet thrust into Western Europe. McNamara knew such threats were losing the plausibility successful deterrence required in the face of America's own vulnerability in the coming age of the ICBM, and he sought credible conventional options for defending the Continent. If he was arguably right on the merits of pushing for stronger conventional defenses, his public insistence on the folly of small national deterrents as wasteful and ineffective complicated relations with all three of Britain, France, and West Germany. But as far as he was concerned, the task of educating America's allies in the realities of the nuclear age had been too long postponed, and could not await the politic moment.
Early on, he advocated a "no cities-counterforce" strategy, in which Soviet forces, not population centres, would be targeted, in the hope of producing similar restraint on the part of the enemy, and "bargaining pauses" in which one might step back from Armageddon. But he ultimately acknowledged that controlling the escalation of hostilities would prove harder in practice, and that the proposed strategy would not materially reduce American losses in a nuclear exchange. (To be sure, he was never a true believer in so-called "flexible response", which was mainly a rationale for strong central control of NATO's nuclear weapons in American hands; I explore this and related questions in the salient chapters of my doctoral dissertation, as yet unpublished.) From 1967 on, he openly espoused the doctrine of "mutual assured destruction" under which nuclear weapons were useful only for deterring each other, with their employment tantamount to mutual suicide. The world, as Peter Scoblic has argued, became modestly safer with the triumph of McNamara's assumptions about the ultimate unwinnability of a nuclear war.
What mattered, he argued, was not so much the numbers on each side as the survivability of one's forces in the face of a preemptive attack that they could deter, so that an uneasy equilibrium would replace ungoverned arms racing as the central trope of nuclear strategy. But if he was broadly right, McNamara characteristically erred in assuming that the Soviet leadership shared his views of what was rational; he did not anticipate the desire of at least some factions in the Kremlin, following the apparent climbdown that ended the Cuban Missile Crisis,
never to be caught in a position of nuclear inferiority again, or the subsequent growth in Soviet strategic forces not just up to, but beyond, rough parity.
At the outbreak of the Cuban crisis itself, he correctly observed that the Soviet missiles affected the strategic balance only at the margins; the only problem the United States faced, he confronted, was the modest political one of having been outfaced and defied in its own sphere of influence. But this was to understate the problem; if relative (and calculable )numbers of nuclear weapons mattered less, as he argued, then subjective judgments of resolve were the primary determinants of the credibility of security guarantees to allies, and so mattered more. Thus a great deal of the architecture of nuclear stability was at issue in the Caribbean, more than McNamara seems to have understood. His sense that escalation control might fail and events elude control did serve him well; he rightly argued that the course of early resort to bombing or invading Cuba, as some in the military proposed, was fraught with incalculable peril, and threw his weight behind a quarantine of Cuba as the initial response. After that October he resiled violently from his previous position that nuclear hostilities could be micromanaged. His intensified awareness that in a nuclear crisis events might prove resistant to rational direction, whoever was in charge, seems to have haunted him; thereafter he became more pessimistic about the chances of man's surviving to the end of the century, and his visceral horror of nuclear arms caused some of his subordinates to doubt whether his views were compatible with the dictates of his job.
It is not true that Vietnam was "McNamara's war." The most careful study of the decisions that put American troops on the ground and thus irrevocably staked American prestige on the outcome, that by Fredrik Logevall, notes that they were the personal choices of Lyndon Johnson, who feared as much for his personal reputation as that of his party or country. McNamara sought to ensure a diplomatic track was opened up, even though he was insistent that negotiations on terms other than those of thinly disguised Communist surrender had to await some improvement of fortunes on the battlefield, an improvement he could never contrive to bring about. At least from early 1965, he seems to have doubted that victory was likely, though he proved ingenious in devising quantitative measures by which it might be possible to conclude that the situation had ceased to deteriorate, or at least that the other side was losing more men. (If the precise calibration of military means to geopolitical end might not be possible with nuclear weapons, he seems to have thought it worth the trying at lower levels of violence.)
Here his reliance on data and intelligence served him worst of all; the inescapable ruler of events was that the North Vietnamese and their South Vietnamese allies were simply prepared to bear far higher losses than their adversaries in order to attain ultimate victory. When McNamara finally issued a hedged mea culpa in his 1995 memoir In Retrospect, he united in condemnation foes of the war and right-wingers who saw it as a winnable cause undone by political missteps. The former seized on his admission that he had never rated the odds of success as high as validating their claim the war should never have been fought, the latter concluded McNamara had never had the confidence in victory that might have led to its energetic prosecution. But as former Senator Eugene McCarthy (who almost unhorsed LBJ in the 1968 New Hampshire primary and compelled his retirement from office) observed, it seems unlikely that the American effort would have ended sooner had McCarthy resigned in protest or taken his doubts to the public; LBJ would have marginalized him as he did other in-house dissenters or pressed him to step down sooner than 1968.
And when McNamara resigned, he did so as a haunted man, prone to crying jags in his Pentagon office that caused colleagues to fret for his mental stability, and with his own family divided by the war. It is now the conventional wisdom that his subsequent work as dispenser of alms to the Third World in his role as President of the World Bank was atonement. But in some ways he had changed too little. While loans to developing nations rose from less than $1 billion a year to over $12 billion on his watch, his oft-proclaimed goal of triggering 5% annual growth in the world's poorest countries came to naught.
The preference for large-scale white elephants was all too reminiscent of the theories of economic modernization and nation-building he sought to apply in Vietnam, and too often in the latter case as well the money vanished into the pockets of corrupt dictators and larcenous officials. As ever, he was largely blind to the political, and thus the human, dimension.
There was something in McNamara's manner and appearance, the steel-rimmed glasses, helmet of shiny hair, clipped speech and army of charts (well before the age of the PowerPoint)that invited caricature. But as any viewer of the interviews by Errol Morris for his documentary The Fog of War can attest, he was no passionless calculating machine. Often close to tears of despair or guilt in his later years, he seemed then as much as the prisoner of his passions as he had once been of his delusive rationalism, unforgiving of himself if only because he was part of a world and a species that would not bend to logic's demands.
Schooled in Taylorism at Berkeley and trained in the most up-to-date application of quantitative methods in his wartime service, McNamara was the archetypal number-cruncher in the high noon of American technocracy. His rise paralleled the faltering of ideology in postwar politics, and the ascendancy of the conceit that if intelligent enough men were placed in the right positions, enough data provided to them, and the process engineered with the requisite skill, then policymaking could be reduced to something approximating a precise science, a matter of mere technique. Government with the politics left out.
But this underestimated the extent to which the political, and indeed the human, permeate any contraption for the wise framing and execution of laws. And it was clear early on that McNamara was at his best where political considerations could be shoved to the margins. One of his early triumphs as a wartime statistician was devising a system for the optimal provision of supplies by air to the China-Burma-India theatre. So many aircraft, so many tons of supplies, the right formulae, and the optimal solution did indeed emerge. The method was inevitably less reliable when applied to the fire-bombing of Japan, where the numbers mattered, but no more than the imponderables of human resolve, on the part of both Japan's civilian population and its military oligarchy. If war, as the most familiar Clausewitzian axiom has it, is policy (politics) by other means, then McNamara's calculus was necessarily incomplete to the degree that it could not compute the political variables of ambition and sacrifice, fear and will.
As an executive at the Ford Company after the war, McNamara famously boasted that he knew next to nothing about cars, only the managerial techniques by which they were designed, built, and marketed. It is a canard that he supported the ill-fated Edsel, but his insistence on top-down decisionmaking, for all the efficiencies it generated in the short term, empowered the generation of executives whose insular self-regard would virtually sink America's auto industry.
On becoming John F. Kennedy's Secretary of Defense, he readily admitted he knew no more about weapons systems and strategy than he had known about cars and trucks. But he was appointed to streamline the financing and administration of America's defenses by gimlet-eyed scrutiny of the defense budget, and to curtail the inter-service rivalries and political logrolling that had marred defense policy in the Eisenhower era. And he did so in large measure. The prerogatives of service chiefs and the whims of Congressional committees did count for less. But there were costs along the way. If the generals and admirals found it harder to give ignorant or self-serving advice, they had a tougher time getting a hearing when they had relevant wisdom to impart.
After Kennedy and McNamara, the Secretary of Defense would be the President's principal adviser on military matters, but it did not follow that his counsel was always sounder than that of the uniformed cicerones to whom earlier Presidents might turn. Different as the two men might be, Donald Rumsfeld was as self-assured and commanding as McNamara ever was, and on the costs and pitfalls of Invading Iraq, he proved less prescient than General Erik Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff he politically neutered when he publicly contradicted Rumsfeld's estimates of what the job would require.
On the making of America's actual strategy, McNamara had one major success to his credit, but a qualified one. At the dawn of the Kennedy administration, American nuclear plans called for a rapid resort to nuclear hostilities in the event of a Soviet thrust into Western Europe. McNamara knew such threats were losing the plausibility successful deterrence required in the face of America's own vulnerability in the coming age of the ICBM, and he sought credible conventional options for defending the Continent. If he was arguably right on the merits of pushing for stronger conventional defenses, his public insistence on the folly of small national deterrents as wasteful and ineffective complicated relations with all three of Britain, France, and West Germany. But as far as he was concerned, the task of educating America's allies in the realities of the nuclear age had been too long postponed, and could not await the politic moment.
Early on, he advocated a "no cities-counterforce" strategy, in which Soviet forces, not population centres, would be targeted, in the hope of producing similar restraint on the part of the enemy, and "bargaining pauses" in which one might step back from Armageddon. But he ultimately acknowledged that controlling the escalation of hostilities would prove harder in practice, and that the proposed strategy would not materially reduce American losses in a nuclear exchange. (To be sure, he was never a true believer in so-called "flexible response", which was mainly a rationale for strong central control of NATO's nuclear weapons in American hands; I explore this and related questions in the salient chapters of my doctoral dissertation, as yet unpublished.) From 1967 on, he openly espoused the doctrine of "mutual assured destruction" under which nuclear weapons were useful only for deterring each other, with their employment tantamount to mutual suicide. The world, as Peter Scoblic has argued, became modestly safer with the triumph of McNamara's assumptions about the ultimate unwinnability of a nuclear war.
What mattered, he argued, was not so much the numbers on each side as the survivability of one's forces in the face of a preemptive attack that they could deter, so that an uneasy equilibrium would replace ungoverned arms racing as the central trope of nuclear strategy. But if he was broadly right, McNamara characteristically erred in assuming that the Soviet leadership shared his views of what was rational; he did not anticipate the desire of at least some factions in the Kremlin, following the apparent climbdown that ended the Cuban Missile Crisis,
never to be caught in a position of nuclear inferiority again, or the subsequent growth in Soviet strategic forces not just up to, but beyond, rough parity.
At the outbreak of the Cuban crisis itself, he correctly observed that the Soviet missiles affected the strategic balance only at the margins; the only problem the United States faced, he confronted, was the modest political one of having been outfaced and defied in its own sphere of influence. But this was to understate the problem; if relative (and calculable )numbers of nuclear weapons mattered less, as he argued, then subjective judgments of resolve were the primary determinants of the credibility of security guarantees to allies, and so mattered more. Thus a great deal of the architecture of nuclear stability was at issue in the Caribbean, more than McNamara seems to have understood. His sense that escalation control might fail and events elude control did serve him well; he rightly argued that the course of early resort to bombing or invading Cuba, as some in the military proposed, was fraught with incalculable peril, and threw his weight behind a quarantine of Cuba as the initial response. After that October he resiled violently from his previous position that nuclear hostilities could be micromanaged. His intensified awareness that in a nuclear crisis events might prove resistant to rational direction, whoever was in charge, seems to have haunted him; thereafter he became more pessimistic about the chances of man's surviving to the end of the century, and his visceral horror of nuclear arms caused some of his subordinates to doubt whether his views were compatible with the dictates of his job.
It is not true that Vietnam was "McNamara's war." The most careful study of the decisions that put American troops on the ground and thus irrevocably staked American prestige on the outcome, that by Fredrik Logevall, notes that they were the personal choices of Lyndon Johnson, who feared as much for his personal reputation as that of his party or country. McNamara sought to ensure a diplomatic track was opened up, even though he was insistent that negotiations on terms other than those of thinly disguised Communist surrender had to await some improvement of fortunes on the battlefield, an improvement he could never contrive to bring about. At least from early 1965, he seems to have doubted that victory was likely, though he proved ingenious in devising quantitative measures by which it might be possible to conclude that the situation had ceased to deteriorate, or at least that the other side was losing more men. (If the precise calibration of military means to geopolitical end might not be possible with nuclear weapons, he seems to have thought it worth the trying at lower levels of violence.)
Here his reliance on data and intelligence served him worst of all; the inescapable ruler of events was that the North Vietnamese and their South Vietnamese allies were simply prepared to bear far higher losses than their adversaries in order to attain ultimate victory. When McNamara finally issued a hedged mea culpa in his 1995 memoir In Retrospect, he united in condemnation foes of the war and right-wingers who saw it as a winnable cause undone by political missteps. The former seized on his admission that he had never rated the odds of success as high as validating their claim the war should never have been fought, the latter concluded McNamara had never had the confidence in victory that might have led to its energetic prosecution. But as former Senator Eugene McCarthy (who almost unhorsed LBJ in the 1968 New Hampshire primary and compelled his retirement from office) observed, it seems unlikely that the American effort would have ended sooner had McCarthy resigned in protest or taken his doubts to the public; LBJ would have marginalized him as he did other in-house dissenters or pressed him to step down sooner than 1968.
And when McNamara resigned, he did so as a haunted man, prone to crying jags in his Pentagon office that caused colleagues to fret for his mental stability, and with his own family divided by the war. It is now the conventional wisdom that his subsequent work as dispenser of alms to the Third World in his role as President of the World Bank was atonement. But in some ways he had changed too little. While loans to developing nations rose from less than $1 billion a year to over $12 billion on his watch, his oft-proclaimed goal of triggering 5% annual growth in the world's poorest countries came to naught.
The preference for large-scale white elephants was all too reminiscent of the theories of economic modernization and nation-building he sought to apply in Vietnam, and too often in the latter case as well the money vanished into the pockets of corrupt dictators and larcenous officials. As ever, he was largely blind to the political, and thus the human, dimension.
There was something in McNamara's manner and appearance, the steel-rimmed glasses, helmet of shiny hair, clipped speech and army of charts (well before the age of the PowerPoint)that invited caricature. But as any viewer of the interviews by Errol Morris for his documentary The Fog of War can attest, he was no passionless calculating machine. Often close to tears of despair or guilt in his later years, he seemed then as much as the prisoner of his passions as he had once been of his delusive rationalism, unforgiving of himself if only because he was part of a world and a species that would not bend to logic's demands.
Monday, July 06, 2009
Palin Departs
The jumbled metaphors, absent logic, and idiosyncratic syntax of that sequence of digressions piled atop one another that she sputtered forth made it hard to tell precisely what Sarah Palin meant to say. It is more or less clear that she's going, and a good deal of subsequent commentary has been devoted to the question of whether she will be back in some other guise.
Bill Kristol, who helped elevate la pasionaria of Wasilla from well-earned obscurity as the first and most prominent supporter of her selection as John McCain's running mate, made a game try at defending her actions. True, he conceded, she will now enter any subsequent race unable even to claim the experience of a single full term as Alaska Governor. But, he went on, she can now devote her time and abundant energies to swotting up on national issues, raising money and establishing the infrastructure for a presidential run in 2012 (or 2016). If it works, he concluded, what seems now like a crazy gamble will ultimately be judged "crazy like a fox."
Even most other Republican pundits have shown themselves less inclined than Kristol to drink that Alaskan Koolaid. Michael Barone, Fred Barnes, and Mark Steyn have all expressed doubt as to whether she can recover after the farcical display of her farewell, an event that could not have been better-designed to reinforce much of the public's doubts about her temperament, judgment, and intelligence. Barnes, normally a reliable fugleman for the Christianist right, has rejected analogies with Richard Nixon's hiatus from electoral politics from 1962 through 1967, followed by his successful bid for the White House in 1968. Nixon, Barnes pointed out, was a former Congressman, Senator, and Vice-President when he stepped out of the limelight. While much of the public emphatically didn't care for him, his political liabilities did not include the egregious inexperience that Palin has ensured will dog her in any further tries for elective office.
True, "Caribou Barbie" (as Maureen Dowd has dubbed her) has hardly helped herself. But at the end of the day, her appeal to some voters, and the repulsion she elicits in others, has surprisingly little to do with how much experience she has in an executive capacity or how deeply she understands the details of nuclear strategy or international monetary arrangements. And it follows that recasting herself as a more knowledgeable figure (perhaps through a few years in Congress, as Barnes has recommended) will do less for her than it might for other political figures widely judged in need of seasoning.
While many observers were appalled that the ostensibly steady and tested McCain would pick someone with so little experience and gravitas as his understudy, the exceptional intensity of responses to her, pro and con, had more to do with who she was and whom she spoke for. The closest thing I have read to an intellectually respectable case for Palin's political future comes from Ross Douthat of the New York Times, who noticed that her appeal had more to do with class than ideology. Palin, he suggested, is in some ways the natural counterpoint to Barack Obama. Where he incarnates the "meritocratic ideal" that someone of humble roots can, if he has the aptitude, make his way to Columbia, Harvard Law School and the fast track to the White House, she embodies the "democratic ideal" of political success without the benefit of such academic attainments. To some voters, she is the representative of a noble but fading America of small towns, life in the outdoors, and a preference for folk wisdom over fancy book larnin'. To others, she and her loutish brood are one of the weirder sub-species of trailer-trash.
There is something in Douthat's assessment. The clamorous support Palin garnered from downscale voters of limited education and provincial tastes and manners was rooted in just that; so was the often snide mockery by the meritocrats in the press of her academic record, religious views, speaking style and record in office. But if there were occasional exaggerations and distortions in some of the coverage of Palin's history (not least the bizarre conspiracy theories about the parentage of her poor retarded child) there is enough in what has been established beyond plausible dissent to demonstrate that she is not fit to be president. And her unfitness runs deeper than what reading a policy paper here and there can fix.
A healthy skepticism towards the contrivances of academic system-builders is one thing, but an envious antipathy to all that smacks of learning or disinterested expertise is quite another. An attachment to small-town ways that have passed into history almost everywhere in America save for Alaska is one thing; a suspicion of cosmopolitanism and urbanity as next door to treason something altogether different. And it's clear which side of such distinctions Palin stands on, when she casts herself as the voice of "real Americans" and "the pro-American parts of America." It's obvious just how constricted this woman's understanding of her own country is when she boasts to an audience of bawling yokels that her semi-employed, under-achieving, snowmobile-racing hubby is one of those Americans "who knows how to work with his hands"; the tacit implication, I suppose, is that those of us who work mainly with our brains are sissies, subversives, or something equally contemptible. And it's certainly hard to mistake the deep-rooted ignorance of why some familiarity with history or the world beyond one's own shores is indispensable to statesmanship in the unforgettable contention that the visibility of Russia from Alaska gives her a claim to foreign policy expertise.
It is devoutly to be wished that Palin's star fall fast and far; unfortunately, she visibly identifies with and gives voice to a sizeable constituency within the GOP. As I was listening to Palin's remarks, I was reminded of what the brilliant British expat pundit Henry Fairlie, a High Tory, wrote about the legions of provincial social conservatives at the 1980 Republican National Convention, while they were consolidating their power as one of its strongest factions. In a piece reprinted in the new collection of his writings, Bite the Hand that Feeds You, Fairlie describes these Republicans as:
"...narrow minded, book banning, truth censoring, mean spirited; ungenerous, envious, intolerant, afraid; chicken, bullying; trivially moral, falsely patriotic; family cheapening, flag cheapening, God cheapening; the common man, shallow, small, sanctimonious...those who in Germany gave the Nazis their main strength and who in France collaborated with them and sustained Vichy."
That last turn of phrase is somewhat over the top, especially when applied to the GOP of Reagan and Goldwater, even that of George W. Bush. But it is closer to the mark than one would like for at least a large slice of the party which Sarah Palin may still seek to lead. And even if Palin does prove to have damaged her own chances of doing so beyond repair, the blinkered worldview she articulates will find other champions, perhaps all the more dangerously plausible for articulating the same sulfurous resentments in complete sentences.
Bill Kristol, who helped elevate la pasionaria of Wasilla from well-earned obscurity as the first and most prominent supporter of her selection as John McCain's running mate, made a game try at defending her actions. True, he conceded, she will now enter any subsequent race unable even to claim the experience of a single full term as Alaska Governor. But, he went on, she can now devote her time and abundant energies to swotting up on national issues, raising money and establishing the infrastructure for a presidential run in 2012 (or 2016). If it works, he concluded, what seems now like a crazy gamble will ultimately be judged "crazy like a fox."
Even most other Republican pundits have shown themselves less inclined than Kristol to drink that Alaskan Koolaid. Michael Barone, Fred Barnes, and Mark Steyn have all expressed doubt as to whether she can recover after the farcical display of her farewell, an event that could not have been better-designed to reinforce much of the public's doubts about her temperament, judgment, and intelligence. Barnes, normally a reliable fugleman for the Christianist right, has rejected analogies with Richard Nixon's hiatus from electoral politics from 1962 through 1967, followed by his successful bid for the White House in 1968. Nixon, Barnes pointed out, was a former Congressman, Senator, and Vice-President when he stepped out of the limelight. While much of the public emphatically didn't care for him, his political liabilities did not include the egregious inexperience that Palin has ensured will dog her in any further tries for elective office.
True, "Caribou Barbie" (as Maureen Dowd has dubbed her) has hardly helped herself. But at the end of the day, her appeal to some voters, and the repulsion she elicits in others, has surprisingly little to do with how much experience she has in an executive capacity or how deeply she understands the details of nuclear strategy or international monetary arrangements. And it follows that recasting herself as a more knowledgeable figure (perhaps through a few years in Congress, as Barnes has recommended) will do less for her than it might for other political figures widely judged in need of seasoning.
While many observers were appalled that the ostensibly steady and tested McCain would pick someone with so little experience and gravitas as his understudy, the exceptional intensity of responses to her, pro and con, had more to do with who she was and whom she spoke for. The closest thing I have read to an intellectually respectable case for Palin's political future comes from Ross Douthat of the New York Times, who noticed that her appeal had more to do with class than ideology. Palin, he suggested, is in some ways the natural counterpoint to Barack Obama. Where he incarnates the "meritocratic ideal" that someone of humble roots can, if he has the aptitude, make his way to Columbia, Harvard Law School and the fast track to the White House, she embodies the "democratic ideal" of political success without the benefit of such academic attainments. To some voters, she is the representative of a noble but fading America of small towns, life in the outdoors, and a preference for folk wisdom over fancy book larnin'. To others, she and her loutish brood are one of the weirder sub-species of trailer-trash.
There is something in Douthat's assessment. The clamorous support Palin garnered from downscale voters of limited education and provincial tastes and manners was rooted in just that; so was the often snide mockery by the meritocrats in the press of her academic record, religious views, speaking style and record in office. But if there were occasional exaggerations and distortions in some of the coverage of Palin's history (not least the bizarre conspiracy theories about the parentage of her poor retarded child) there is enough in what has been established beyond plausible dissent to demonstrate that she is not fit to be president. And her unfitness runs deeper than what reading a policy paper here and there can fix.
A healthy skepticism towards the contrivances of academic system-builders is one thing, but an envious antipathy to all that smacks of learning or disinterested expertise is quite another. An attachment to small-town ways that have passed into history almost everywhere in America save for Alaska is one thing; a suspicion of cosmopolitanism and urbanity as next door to treason something altogether different. And it's clear which side of such distinctions Palin stands on, when she casts herself as the voice of "real Americans" and "the pro-American parts of America." It's obvious just how constricted this woman's understanding of her own country is when she boasts to an audience of bawling yokels that her semi-employed, under-achieving, snowmobile-racing hubby is one of those Americans "who knows how to work with his hands"; the tacit implication, I suppose, is that those of us who work mainly with our brains are sissies, subversives, or something equally contemptible. And it's certainly hard to mistake the deep-rooted ignorance of why some familiarity with history or the world beyond one's own shores is indispensable to statesmanship in the unforgettable contention that the visibility of Russia from Alaska gives her a claim to foreign policy expertise.
It is devoutly to be wished that Palin's star fall fast and far; unfortunately, she visibly identifies with and gives voice to a sizeable constituency within the GOP. As I was listening to Palin's remarks, I was reminded of what the brilliant British expat pundit Henry Fairlie, a High Tory, wrote about the legions of provincial social conservatives at the 1980 Republican National Convention, while they were consolidating their power as one of its strongest factions. In a piece reprinted in the new collection of his writings, Bite the Hand that Feeds You, Fairlie describes these Republicans as:
"...narrow minded, book banning, truth censoring, mean spirited; ungenerous, envious, intolerant, afraid; chicken, bullying; trivially moral, falsely patriotic; family cheapening, flag cheapening, God cheapening; the common man, shallow, small, sanctimonious...those who in Germany gave the Nazis their main strength and who in France collaborated with them and sustained Vichy."
That last turn of phrase is somewhat over the top, especially when applied to the GOP of Reagan and Goldwater, even that of George W. Bush. But it is closer to the mark than one would like for at least a large slice of the party which Sarah Palin may still seek to lead. And even if Palin does prove to have damaged her own chances of doing so beyond repair, the blinkered worldview she articulates will find other champions, perhaps all the more dangerously plausible for articulating the same sulfurous resentments in complete sentences.
Sunday, July 05, 2009
On the Death of Dave Batters
The onetime Conservative MP Dave Batters killed himself last Tuesday at the appallingly early age of 39, and his youth inevitably means that he left few political footprints, and his public life is condemned to mirror the sad incompleteness of his private one. Batters had declined to pursue reelection in 2008, informing the public that he was struggling with chronic depression, as well as trying to shake off a related prescription drug addiction.
One of the journalistic commonplaces that was trotted out on this occasion as on similar ones is that those who have never suffered from depression cannot really comprehend the nature of Batters's ordeal. I am not even sure that those who do are much better equipped. The term 'depression' obscures at least as it illuminates. In his searing memoir of his own battle with what we might better call (at least for the moment) profound despair, Darkness Visible, William Styron derides the timidity of the word, which in other contexts, he observes, can cover anything from an economic downturn to a declivity in a road. Joshua Wolf Shenk, in his splendid essay "A Melancholy of Mine Own," contends that it is not only too imprecise to be useful, but actually misleads in its attribution of essential similarity to what are often wildly divergent battles with an infinite variety of psychic demons.
A rather banal and obtuse piece by the political columnist for Batters's hometown paper in Regina speculates that public life added to Batters's burdens, and that the politician's trafficking in optimism weighed with particular heaviness on a man who, at his core, found himself so awfully bereft. In fact, those bearing grave wounds in their inner lives often find solace in the
acclaim that public life brings; if you will indulge the clinical jargon, it brings the affect which too often eludes them in the quotidian interactions of private existence.
Among political figures indisputably of the first rank, both Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill would almost certainly be diagnosed today as sufferers from chronic clinical depression. (This alone should suffice to disprove the canard that the ailment is rooted in weakness of character.) The latter referred to it as his "black dog", and often made a point of keeping some distance from the edge of the platform whenever he found himself in a train station. "I've no desire to quit this world", he remarked, "but sometimes thoughts, desperate thoughts, come into one's head."
Depression does not necessarily ennoble, any more than other afflection. It is more convincing to see adversity of any stripe as making people pretty much what they already are, only more so. But it does seem likely that acquaintance with persistent, intractable sadness and futility schools one in the inescapable tragedy of the human condition. The man who has chosen a political vocation may find that it leaves him better armoured for the emotional demands that public crisis imposes, demands that might crush others.
It is tempting to think that Lincoln and Churchill were able to rise to the awful responsibilities of wartime leadership at least in part because they had lived privately in the terrible night that the conditions of war turned into the national experience. At some level, others may have sensed this and half-consciously turned to them as the indispensable guides when an entire country sought the way out of Dante's "dark wood." A number of scholars have noted Lincoln's remarkable growth as a rhetorician in the years of his wartime leadership; circumstances summoned forth what now seems quite clearly the prose of the tragic poet, if you will, that the day required. As for Churchill, he was dismissed through much of the 1930s as an irredeemable anachronism, his mock-Augustan prose hopelessly out of place in modern Britain. Yet his imperishable speeches of 1939 and 1940, as Orwell perceptively wrote, now seemed to match the hour in their sense of the solemnity and gravity of events. There were, he went on, many Britons who could not necessarily follow Churchill's meaning word by word, but were moved and inspired by his words to meet his conception of their potential fortitude, rooted in his own experience of what one might endure and overcome.
The late Canadian diplomat, scholar and poet Douglas LePan was a friend of mine, a friend who was fortunate enough to lead a long, rich life. He wrote that nothing great in human affairs could be accomplished without courage, but that
Courage shadowed by weakness may be the most precious of all
since it carries sweetness into the heart of the building,
carries it like honey into the hollows of the honeycomb.
I don't know what David Batters endured or what the experience might, under other circumstances, have allowed him to do. None of us now will.
One of the journalistic commonplaces that was trotted out on this occasion as on similar ones is that those who have never suffered from depression cannot really comprehend the nature of Batters's ordeal. I am not even sure that those who do are much better equipped. The term 'depression' obscures at least as it illuminates. In his searing memoir of his own battle with what we might better call (at least for the moment) profound despair, Darkness Visible, William Styron derides the timidity of the word, which in other contexts, he observes, can cover anything from an economic downturn to a declivity in a road. Joshua Wolf Shenk, in his splendid essay "A Melancholy of Mine Own," contends that it is not only too imprecise to be useful, but actually misleads in its attribution of essential similarity to what are often wildly divergent battles with an infinite variety of psychic demons.
A rather banal and obtuse piece by the political columnist for Batters's hometown paper in Regina speculates that public life added to Batters's burdens, and that the politician's trafficking in optimism weighed with particular heaviness on a man who, at his core, found himself so awfully bereft. In fact, those bearing grave wounds in their inner lives often find solace in the
acclaim that public life brings; if you will indulge the clinical jargon, it brings the affect which too often eludes them in the quotidian interactions of private existence.
Among political figures indisputably of the first rank, both Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill would almost certainly be diagnosed today as sufferers from chronic clinical depression. (This alone should suffice to disprove the canard that the ailment is rooted in weakness of character.) The latter referred to it as his "black dog", and often made a point of keeping some distance from the edge of the platform whenever he found himself in a train station. "I've no desire to quit this world", he remarked, "but sometimes thoughts, desperate thoughts, come into one's head."
Depression does not necessarily ennoble, any more than other afflection. It is more convincing to see adversity of any stripe as making people pretty much what they already are, only more so. But it does seem likely that acquaintance with persistent, intractable sadness and futility schools one in the inescapable tragedy of the human condition. The man who has chosen a political vocation may find that it leaves him better armoured for the emotional demands that public crisis imposes, demands that might crush others.
It is tempting to think that Lincoln and Churchill were able to rise to the awful responsibilities of wartime leadership at least in part because they had lived privately in the terrible night that the conditions of war turned into the national experience. At some level, others may have sensed this and half-consciously turned to them as the indispensable guides when an entire country sought the way out of Dante's "dark wood." A number of scholars have noted Lincoln's remarkable growth as a rhetorician in the years of his wartime leadership; circumstances summoned forth what now seems quite clearly the prose of the tragic poet, if you will, that the day required. As for Churchill, he was dismissed through much of the 1930s as an irredeemable anachronism, his mock-Augustan prose hopelessly out of place in modern Britain. Yet his imperishable speeches of 1939 and 1940, as Orwell perceptively wrote, now seemed to match the hour in their sense of the solemnity and gravity of events. There were, he went on, many Britons who could not necessarily follow Churchill's meaning word by word, but were moved and inspired by his words to meet his conception of their potential fortitude, rooted in his own experience of what one might endure and overcome.
The late Canadian diplomat, scholar and poet Douglas LePan was a friend of mine, a friend who was fortunate enough to lead a long, rich life. He wrote that nothing great in human affairs could be accomplished without courage, but that
Courage shadowed by weakness may be the most precious of all
since it carries sweetness into the heart of the building,
carries it like honey into the hollows of the honeycomb.
I don't know what David Batters endured or what the experience might, under other circumstances, have allowed him to do. None of us now will.
Tim Hudak: Early Impressions
It's not inconceivable that circumstances could eventually deposit Tim Hudak (whom Ontario Progressive Conservatives chose as their leader a week ago) in the Premier's chair. But they would have to conspire in slightly peculiar ways to do so. Hudak is not altogether devoid of appeal; in his public appearances (I have never met him in person) he seems genial enough, if in a rather calculating manner too obvious even for a politician. While I would not go so far as to pronounce him a stupid man, he appears not be a very reflective or curious one. And in his over-emphatic solicitude for what he styles 'middle-class values' and his ostentatious display of the family that might have emerged from a 1950s sitcom, he fits an older voter's notion of what a young man should be like. Though a dozen years younger than Dalton McGuinty, in his demeanour and discernible attitudes he seems a few years older. One can, without any effort, actually close one's eyes and imagine him addressing a crowd of constituents as 'folks.'
It is, then, no surprise that he goes down better the further one gets from the urban centres of the Province. Nor is it shocking that he would emerge as the favourite of those PCs who attribute John Tory's defeat in the last election to his cautious centrism. Hudak's insistence that his party prospers when it articulates an unabashedly conservative message was nectar to party activists pining for the ideological clarity of the Common Sense Revolution. Yet nostalgia for the glory days of Mike Harris is not so widespread as to look like the foundation of a Conservative restoration at Queen's Park, and current conditions differ in important ways from those that brought Harris to power.
For one thing, the NDP government of Bob Rae was seen, fairly or otherwise, as not only spending recklessly but either to no good effect or to that of worsening the early 1990s recession as far as Ontario was concerned. While plunging revenues and rising unemployment were part of Rae's inheritance, the popular perception was that his government's early measures had forfeited the confidence of the business community that was a prerequisite of recovery.
The McGuinty government, on the other hand, has stepped up spending, but not to a degree that strikes a majority of the electorate as unwarranted; moreover, it has avoided the symbolism-laden missteps that an NDP government deemed obligatory in such fields as labour relations, and which so troubled business. As well, the government's critics have yet to find a convincing case for blaming Ontario's economic woes on McGuinty and his colleagues, so obvious is the principal role of extraneous forces. And if the deficits of the Rae era are a distant memory (and a vague one, insofar as they had little tangible impact on the lives of most voters), the Harris cuts are more vivid ones, and not of a pleasant variety. At the time, Harris and his colleagues could successfully invoke Ontario's deepening indebtedness as justification for reductions in social spending; it is now widely understood that this was essentially an excuse for doing what they already wished to do on ideological grounds. That suspicion is likely to shadow Hudak (whose wife was one of Mike Harris's key advisers, and whose early supporters included the former Premier himself).
As parties out of power often do, Ontario's PCs have become a cranky, eccentric, and arguably extreme bunch in recent years. Either out of conviction or to win the second-preference support of those who backed others (notably the loopy rustic Randy Hillier), Hudak has embraced some decidedly dodgy policies. One of these is a legislated cap on increases in property assessments, along the lines of legislation in California and Florida. Such measures have been plausibly criticized as impairing the efficient operation of the real estate market and effectively subsidizing homeowners, and in California, they have contributed to the structural gridlock that makes mere passage of a budget occasionally impossible. Hudak has also echoed Hiller's call for the abolition of Provincial Human Rights Commissions. There is an unanswerable case for restricting the authority of HRCs, and doing away with their ability to threaten liberty of expression; the indispensable Liberal MP Keith Martin has a Private Member's Bill that would largely do this.
To call for outright abolition, on the other hand, is to align oneself with eccentrics in Hillier's mold and to make a substantial gift to one's political opponents; Liberal apparatchiks have already indicated they will not be timid in warning urban swing voters about the extent to which Hudak has accepted Hillier's platform as his own.
There are, of course, parts of Ontario where this unambiguous shift to the right is likely to prove more palatable than John Tory's uninspiring centrism; the problem for the PCs is that they already hold these seats. So it would seem that at least the short-term impact of Hudak's victory will be to strengthen his party where it has nothing more to gain but to leave it more vulnerable where it is now weak, and needs to recover in order to have any realistic chance of winning the next election.
It is, then, no surprise that he goes down better the further one gets from the urban centres of the Province. Nor is it shocking that he would emerge as the favourite of those PCs who attribute John Tory's defeat in the last election to his cautious centrism. Hudak's insistence that his party prospers when it articulates an unabashedly conservative message was nectar to party activists pining for the ideological clarity of the Common Sense Revolution. Yet nostalgia for the glory days of Mike Harris is not so widespread as to look like the foundation of a Conservative restoration at Queen's Park, and current conditions differ in important ways from those that brought Harris to power.
For one thing, the NDP government of Bob Rae was seen, fairly or otherwise, as not only spending recklessly but either to no good effect or to that of worsening the early 1990s recession as far as Ontario was concerned. While plunging revenues and rising unemployment were part of Rae's inheritance, the popular perception was that his government's early measures had forfeited the confidence of the business community that was a prerequisite of recovery.
The McGuinty government, on the other hand, has stepped up spending, but not to a degree that strikes a majority of the electorate as unwarranted; moreover, it has avoided the symbolism-laden missteps that an NDP government deemed obligatory in such fields as labour relations, and which so troubled business. As well, the government's critics have yet to find a convincing case for blaming Ontario's economic woes on McGuinty and his colleagues, so obvious is the principal role of extraneous forces. And if the deficits of the Rae era are a distant memory (and a vague one, insofar as they had little tangible impact on the lives of most voters), the Harris cuts are more vivid ones, and not of a pleasant variety. At the time, Harris and his colleagues could successfully invoke Ontario's deepening indebtedness as justification for reductions in social spending; it is now widely understood that this was essentially an excuse for doing what they already wished to do on ideological grounds. That suspicion is likely to shadow Hudak (whose wife was one of Mike Harris's key advisers, and whose early supporters included the former Premier himself).
As parties out of power often do, Ontario's PCs have become a cranky, eccentric, and arguably extreme bunch in recent years. Either out of conviction or to win the second-preference support of those who backed others (notably the loopy rustic Randy Hillier), Hudak has embraced some decidedly dodgy policies. One of these is a legislated cap on increases in property assessments, along the lines of legislation in California and Florida. Such measures have been plausibly criticized as impairing the efficient operation of the real estate market and effectively subsidizing homeowners, and in California, they have contributed to the structural gridlock that makes mere passage of a budget occasionally impossible. Hudak has also echoed Hiller's call for the abolition of Provincial Human Rights Commissions. There is an unanswerable case for restricting the authority of HRCs, and doing away with their ability to threaten liberty of expression; the indispensable Liberal MP Keith Martin has a Private Member's Bill that would largely do this.
To call for outright abolition, on the other hand, is to align oneself with eccentrics in Hillier's mold and to make a substantial gift to one's political opponents; Liberal apparatchiks have already indicated they will not be timid in warning urban swing voters about the extent to which Hudak has accepted Hillier's platform as his own.
There are, of course, parts of Ontario where this unambiguous shift to the right is likely to prove more palatable than John Tory's uninspiring centrism; the problem for the PCs is that they already hold these seats. So it would seem that at least the short-term impact of Hudak's victory will be to strengthen his party where it has nothing more to gain but to leave it more vulnerable where it is now weak, and needs to recover in order to have any realistic chance of winning the next election.
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