Books
This Department features reviews and summaries of new books that link history and current events. From time to time we also feature essays that highlight publishing trends in various fields related to history.
If you would like to tell the editors about a new book (even your own) that addresses the concerns of HNN -- current events and history -- or would like to write a review, please send us an email: editor@historynewsnetwork.org.
Kirk Bane: Review of Deborah Baker's Blue Hand: The Beats in India (Penguin, 2008)
Jacob Laksin: Review of Andrew C. McCarthy's Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad
Joseph Palermo: Review of David Freddoso's The Case Against Barack Obama
Aziz Huq: Review of Hugo Slim's Killing Combatants: Method, Morality, and Madness in War
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Doug Ireland: Review of Terence Kissack's Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States, 1895-1917
Source: Gay City News (8-28-08)
[Doug Ireland can be reached through his blog, DIRELAND, at http://direland.typepad.com/.]
It may come as a surprise even to gay activists well-read in their history that, more than a half-century before the 1950 founding of the Mattachine Society as the first, lasting modern association of homosexual liberationists, there was a strong and vibrant discourse in America which unfailingly defended the right to same-sex love.
It came not from homosexual intellectuals, but from American anarchists.
In the just-published "Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States, 1895-1917," Terence Kissack, the former executive director of San Francisco's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society, has given us the first book-length study of this little-known phenomenon. The work is a vital and important addition to gay historiography
It was thanks to American anarchist writers and propagandists that the defense of homosexuality developed in Europe by the likes of Karl Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld in Germany and Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds in England crossed the Atlantic to these shores - at a time when no other political movement or notable public figure in the US dealt with the issue of same-sex eroticism and love.
"The anarchist sex radicals," Kissack writes, "were interested in the ethical, social, and cultural place of homosexuality within society, because that question lies at the nexus of individual freedom and state power."
The towering figure of American anarchism, Emma Goldman, was an extremely charismatic public speaker who lectured to large audiences all over the United States, reaching, she estimated, some 50,000 to 75,000 people a year. And quite frequently she spoke about homosexuality, repeatedly devoting whole lectures to the subject.
A contemporary account of one of those Goldman lectures on homosexuality reported: "Every person who came to the lecture possessing contempt and disgust for the homo-sexualists [sic] and who upheld the attitude of the authorities that those given to this particular form of sex expression should be hounded down and persecuted, went away with a broad and sympathetic understanding of the question and a conviction that in matters of personal life, freedom should reign."
The reason that Goldman and other anarchist figures began to include a defense of same-sex love in their discourse toward the end of the 19th century was that "homosexuality had become a focus of surveillance and regulation by police and other authorities... convictions for the crime of sodomy jumped and medical journals began to feature articles on the subject..."
After homosexuality was linked to Charles Guiteau, the disgruntled political aspirant who assassinated President James Garfield in 1881, the "conflation of crime, insanity, and homosexuality [especially in the medical discourse] reflected the commonly held belief that sexual attraction - much less activity - between members of the same sex was a danger to the moral and social order."
The trial and conviction of Oscar Wilde in Britain in 1895, Kissack recounts, "was a wake-up call for anarchists [which] prompted the anarchists to engage in an examination of the social, moral, and legal place of same-sex desire... The efforts of Goldman and other anarchists on Wilde's behalf constitute the first articulation of a politics of homosexuality in the United States."
Wilde had connections to anarchism before his trial. Following the death sentences given to the eight anarchist agitators for the eight-hour work day who were convicted on trumped up-charges in the Chicago Haymarket bombing of 1886, Wilde signed a petition to the governor of Illinois demanding clemency for them (two eventually had their sentences commuted as a result).
In 1893, Wilde responded to a poll of writers and artists by the French journal L'Ermitage asking their political views by saying, "I am an artist and an anarchist." A year later Wilde repeated his claim. "We are all of us more or less Socialists now-a-days," he said, adding: "I think I am rather more...I am something of an Anarchist."
In his first play, "Vera; or The Nihilists," Wilde quotes the pamphlet "Catechism of the Revolutionist" by the anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and Sergei Nechaev, who were widely rumored to have had a homosexual relationship.
Indeed, Wilde's critiques of Marx - who had used homosexuality to have Bakunin thrown out of the First International - were very similar to those of Bakunin. Opposing state ownership of the means of production, Wilde wrote that, "If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we have to face Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first," words which today, after the fall of Communism, seem rather prescient.
Goldman, who insisted that Wilde's trial and conviction were a "great injustice," found Wilde's book "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" to be "pure Anarchy," and said that his play "Lady Windermere's Fan" expressed "the revolutionary spirit in modern drama."
Kissack details how, after his trial, Wilde became "a totemic figure" for the anarchists, and at a time when the American productions of Wilde's plays were closed down and forbidden and his books pulled from library shelves, anarchist journals reprinted his texts and poems.
Goldman reprinted Wilde's "De Profundis" in one of the first issues of her magazine Mother Earth, and in a letter to Hirschfeld, the German homosexual rights activist whom she'd befriended, wrote that "the entire persecution and sentencing of Wilde struck me as an act of cruel injustice and repulsive hypocrisy on the part of the society which condemned this man," adding that "as an anarchist my place has always been on the side of the persecuted."
This statement, Kissack notes, reflected one of several approaches in American anarchist thinking on homosexuality. Benjamin R. Tucker, the well-known individualist anarchist who was the editor and publisher of the anarchist magazine Liberty, "framed his politics of homosexuality as an abstract discussion of individual rights, rather than a defense of persons who were homosexuals. He made no reference to identity, either individual or community-based." Goldman, on the other hand, who spent time with many homosexuals, "spoke of [them] as a persecuted minority like others, deserving better treatment."
Kissack devotes a chapter to Alexander Berkman and his "Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist," published in 1912. Berkman's book is an account of the 14 years he spent in prison for having committed, at age 21, a failed assassination attempt on Henry Clay Frick, the manager of Andrew Carnegie's steel empire.
Kissack notes that "homosexual desire, in all its manifestations, is a key theme of 'Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist,'" which was one of the best-selling anarchist books and one widely reviewed in the mainstream press. "It documents, not just the coercive sexual culture of prisons - rape and prostitution - but also the consensual loves that exist behind bars."
The book "contains an entire chapter devoted to the moral, ethical, and social place of same-sex desire...[Berkman] presents love between inmates as a form of resistance to the spirit-crushing environment of prison...It is one of the most important political texts dealing with homosexuality to have been written by an American before the 1950s."
Having read Berkman's book, that's an assessment I can heartily endorse.
In his book, Berkman - who put an excerpt from Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol" on its frontispiece - described his aversion to homosexuality when he entered prison, and his rejections of advances by inmates who wanted him to be their "kid." But Berkman's attitude was transformed over time by several romantic attachments he developed to young men while he was incarcerated, and by the end he was grappling toward an ethics of homosexuality.
After his release from prison, Berkman went on the lecture circuit with a talk on "Homosexuality and Sex Life in Prison" which was, Kissack writes, "an appeal for tolerance and better understanding of the diverse expressions of erotic desire... Berkman's homosexual politics reflected his pragmatic view of the ethics of sexual desire. In his lectures he contended, 'You can't suppress the unsuppressible,' and that to make a crime out of erotic desire was - and he knew this from personal experience in prison - cruel and bound to fail. You cannot regulate the fundamental human need for emotional and physical affection. This position reflected basic anarchist doctrine, as well as Berkman's experience behind bars."
Emma Goldman is today an icon of the feminist movement, and Berkman's name survives in American history because of his failed assassination attempt. But in "Free Comrades," Kissack also rescues from obscurity such forgotten American anarchist sex radicals as Tucker, John William Lloyd, Leonard Abbott, and others, and carefully and judiciously examines their variegated critiques of established attitudes toward same-sex relations.
The American anarchist movement never recovered from its persecution during and after World War I, which it opposed, and the arrest and jailing or deportation of many of its key figures, including Goldman and Berkman, during the so-called Palmer Raids carried out against thousands of suspected radical leftists by the federal government from 1919 to 1921. Kissack devotes a final chapter to tracing the remnants of the anarchist movement after this debacle and the influence of its radical sex politics in later years, right up to today.
"Free Comrades," which is impressive in its command of the anarchist literature of the time and of the political context within which the events it recounts took place, is meticulously sourced and footnoted, and contains an invaluable bibliography for those who wish to explore further this forgotten but significant slice of the history of homosexuality.
Kissack's book is published by AK Press, a small anarchist collective in San Francisco that brings out about 20 books a year, and so unfortunately is unlikely to be readily available in bookstores. That's a pity, for it belongs on the bookshelf of any serious student of gay or left history. But "Free Comrades" can be ordered directly, at a cost of $17.95 plus shipping, from AK Press, 674-A 23rd Street, Oakland, California 94612, or via the publisher's web site, http://www.akpress.org/.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Ulf Zimmermann: Review of Michael Kammen's American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century
Source: H-Net (11-1-99)
Ulf Zimmermann. Review of Michael Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century. H-PCAACA, H-Net Reviews. November, 1999
Kammen shows us how concepts of culture as well as its production and consumption have changed over time. Though glancing back to colonial times, he focuses on how these changes occurred hand-in-hand with economic, political, and personal developments in the twentieth century and on how they can be framed in distinct phases.
While many see "mass" culture beginning with, say, the spread of newspapers in the eighteenth century, he sees it as really coming into its own with the advent of modern mass media,most signally television. But as he stresses, when TV was invented is not what matters; what's important for mass culture to come into being is the leisure time and disposable income to consume it. That came only after World War II and really took off in the late 1950s when practically every American family had a television.
Preceding that he sees what he terms a "proto-mass" culture beginning with the mass consumption of necessary goods as offered in Sears catalogues and burgeoning in the 1920s with the increasing consumption of leisure goods and activities, ranging from arts to sports. Standardization of food in packages and in restaurants likewise illustrate these trends. And as Henry Ford realized, for his mass production of automobitles to succeed, he also had to have mass consumers. These were soon created by modern advertising and "PR."
Preceding that, in turn, is what Kammen calls "popular" culture which he distinguishes from mass culture by stressing its participatory, interactive nature. Even though radio is a mass medium, for example, it still required listeners to construct their own "theatre of the mind" while TV presents everything to us ready-made. And because to watch it, we can't do other things as we can while listening to the radio, we are thus rendered more passive.
Popular culture came into its prime between 1885 and 1935 when leisure time expanded and organized entertainment reached new heights and unprecedented audiences. Occurring at the same time was an increasing blurring between high and low brow culture. While cultural stratification or taste levels have persisted they've become more widely shared across classes--superbowl fans may listen to symphonies, and the "three tenors" sing for World Cup soccer. The marriage of Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller in 1956 personifies this merging of cultures.
A corresponding issue and change Kammen addresses is that of cultural authority and cultural power. Americans have taken their cultural cues from a shifting series of "cultural authorities." In colonial times these were the clergy and in the nineteenth century various reform figures. In the late Victorian era cultural "professionals" emerged and authority gradually became insitutionalized in museums and musical and theatrical venues. After World War II academics briefly held sway. But partly because of these academics' tiresome disagreements and partly because of the growth of public opinion polling, people tuned them out and paid more attention to the cultural authority the country's Gallups now granted the public itself.
The relationship between cultural power and cultural authority also changed considerably. Earlier, movie studios and ad agencies might have been said to wield cultural power while museums and critics wielded authority. But today cultural authority is the province of large corporations which produce and promote culture (think Time/Warner and Disney). Books become bestsellers and movies blockbusters despite critics' "authority." Entertainment entrepreneurs have been able to combine their cultural power with authority by a savvy straddling of taste levels--what might be "elitist" leadership modified by responding to public demand. Corporate leaders did not, for example, like rock 'n ' roll but could not long refuse the bottom-line benefit of its mass appeal.
"High" and "low" culture are equally in pursuit of the dollar, Kammen aptly reminds us, and there's been as much low culture rising to influence the high as that latter has trickled down to the former. Andy Warhol is perhaps the best example of the conflation of mass production, mass culture, and elite art. Accordingly, correlations between social class and taste which seemed fairly clear between ca. 1870 and 1945 have become much less so since the 1950s. (Where we used to talk about taste and refinement, we began in the late fifties to talk about "lifestyle.") Efforts to make these high/low distinctions in the U.S. emerged to some extent from Americans' insecurity vis-a-vis Europeans whom they had emulated so long. But when they realized that Europeans saw ragtime and jazz as American culture, American pretenders to cultural arbiterdom were forced to reconsider their concepts of culture. Some have therefore argued that high culture is in decline, others might say it's being redefined. Either way we've become increasingly "bicultural" in the sense that even if we have elite tastes we also enjoy other entertainments.
Why was anybody worried about this? Because of the same insecurity cited above. Often in the twentieth century European critics asked, Why did the U.S. flourish politically and economically but not culturally? Why did American avant-garde art, literature, and music continue to depend on European models or even imports and immigrants? One answer Kammen offers is that throughout much of the century Americans put their emphasis on the "common man." This was demonstrated in that ultimate public poll, the presidential election, which rejected an elite "egghead" like Adlai Stevenson. By now, of course, the American cultural problem is the opposite: The world is awash in American mass culture, with people around the globe both reveling in the consumption of it and raging against its destruction of their own cultures and values.
Why have taste levels become less meaningful? The postwar spread of affluence and education made it more difficult to maintain "lower" distinctions. He sees the consequence as an increase in cultural populism accompanied by a decline in elitism and worries about a loss of "guidance." Others worry, with Tocqueville, that if in a democracy everybody's taste is equally valid we'll end up with complete mediocrity (they're confusing art with politics). But I'd argue, and I think Kammen ultimately agrees, that democracy affords more opportunity for the expression, and dissemination, of genius and its products--as well as for the greatest production and consumption of junk of course.
While some may not agree with Kammen's definitions and periodizations, they provide valuable points of departure. Important to me are his efforts to relate these definitions and periods to those other economic, political, and social phenomena, which he does in rich detail. What's missing? Is there a definition of culture? Well, if there is one, it's an all-embracing one that ranges from what the Germans call "Alltagskultur" ("everyday culture") to the most elitist arts. And while the "public" has to some degree become a cultural authority, we still look to cultural authority figures. Irma Rombauer and Julia Child, Alex Comfort and Ann Landers, Amy Vanderbilt and Martha Stewart--and Oprah of course--are names he reels off only partly tongue-in-cheek. And when it comes to art we still defer to the expertise of museum directors as the Mapplethorpe case illustrated.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Luther Spoehr: Review of Susan Sessions Rugh’s Are We There Yet? The Golden Age of American Family Vacations (University Press of Kansas, 2008).
Source: HNN (8-30-08)
This book’s sprightly title gives rise to the hope that the author will wear her learning lightly, a hope that is only partly realized. Susan Sessions Rugh, a historian at Brigham Young University, has a sharp eye for the telling example and vivid quotation, even from non-scholarly sources. Here, for instance, is Calvin Trillin: “I might have seen more of America [on family vacations] if I hadn’t had to spend so much of my time protecting my half of the back seat from incursions by my sister, Sukey.”
Most of Rugh’s book, however, is far more earnest, including much analysis synthesized from other social and cultural historians, such as Michael Kammen, Elaine Tyler May, Karal Ann Marling, Hal Rothman, and many others. Furthermore, it bounces back and forth chronologically so frequently that it ultimately comes to resemble a prototypical ‘50s family vacation, full of stops and starts, arid stretches alternating with enjoyable interludes.
Kirk Bane: Review of Deborah Baker's Blue Hand: The Beats in India (Penguin, 2008)
Source: Special to HNN (8-30-08)
In 1962-63, poet Allen Ginsberg traveled across India seeking spiritual enlightenment, new experiences, and an escape from America’s “Babbitt monsters.” Joining him on this sojourn were fellow Beats Gary Snyder, Joanne Kyger, and Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg’s lover. In A Blue Hand: The Beats in India (New York: Penguin, 2008), Deborah Baker provides an engaging chronicle of Ginsberg’s fifteen month pilgrimage.
Baker explores Ginsberg’s life prior to his Indian odyssey. She examines the poet’s 1948 vision of God, Ginsberg’s eight month institutionalization the following year, and his enthusiastic experimentation with drugs. Baker also discusses “Howl” and considers Ginsberg’s relationship with other Beat writers, “a motley crew of friends,” including William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Jack Kerouac. In the spring of 1962, Time assessed Ginsberg and his freewheeling, iconoclastic associates. Beats, the magazine declared, “prefer to wear beards and blue jeans, avoid soap and water, live in dingy tenements or, weather permitting, take to the road as holy hoboes, pilgrims to nowhere. Most of them adore Negroes, junkies, jazzmen and Zen. The more extreme profess to smoke pot, eat peyote, sniff heroin, practice perversion.”
The United States, Ginsberg believed, was a “warmongering, materialist country” lacking compassion. “America dropped the bomb and was applauded,” he asserted. “America executed the Rosenbergs…America used foreign aid programs as weapons in the Cold War. America used obscenity laws to censor Burroughs, Miller, Genet, D. H. Lawrence…America attacked the Cuban revolution and ran South American governments according to American self-interest. In America, moneymaking was the only index of social status.” But, Ginsberg maintained, India was different. India, he averred, “had continued the search for God…India held the answers.”
Traversing the country, Ginsberg sought illumination from gurus and various holy men (including the Dalai Lama), mentored a group of young Bengali poets, visited opium dens, befriended intellectuals, participated in his first political demonstration, and closely observed cremation ceremonies. Baker vividly details his repeated visits to the pyres at Nimtola. “Fully stoned” on ganja, Ginsberg watched “the stream of corpses arrive on charpoys bedecked with flowers, the pyres roaring around” him. He “forced himself to witness the exact process by which flesh was transformed into bone and ash, moving from pyre to pyre with his journal to describe the sight, sound, and smell of a cremation with nearly hallucinatory intensity.”
Ginsberg prophesied that Westerners seeking spiritual insight would follow his example and travel to India. “India will become the holy place of pilgrimage for the young! They will come like birds migrating to a promised land,” he insisted. (Ginsberg’s prediction, of course, came true. In 1968, actress Mia Farrow, folksinger Donovan, Beach Boy Mike Love, and all four Beatles visited Rishikesh as disciples of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.)
Baker, whose In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Biography, excels at description. Consider, for example, her graphic depiction of third-class train trips; Ginsberg traveled in this manner while in India. “Third-class travelers,” Baker writes, “had to force themselves on the train, fighting off all comers in an unseemly contest for a seat. Failure meant standing instead of sitting, sweating in crowded corridors while naked babies in the arms of old ladies peed on one’s feet. To make it to the inevitably appalling toilet, you had practically to be passed, arms crossed on chest, over the heads of your fellow unseated passengers.”
A Blue Hand is impressively researched. Baker consulted every major Ginsberg biography, including Barry Miles’s Ginsberg, Bill Morgan’s I Celebrate Myself, and Michael Schumacher’s Dharma Lion. She also relied on Ginsberg’s Indian Journals and obviously spent many hours in the archives at Columbia, Stanford, UC-Davis, the University of Texas, the University of Virginia, and the Ginsberg Trust.
A Blue Hand requires close and careful reading. Baker jumps back and forth in time and place, working in various characters. Counterculture enthusiasts and Ginsberg students will heartily applaud this book, an exceptional work soundly researched and splendidly written.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Lee P. Ruddin: Review of Richard J. Ellis’s Presidential Travel: The Journey from George Washington to George W. Bush (University Press of Kansas, 2008)
Source: Special to HNN (8-26-08)
Presidential travel is big news today. George W. Bush’s state visit to Britain in November 2003 filled papers on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet it was not a story pertaining to the “illegal” war in Iraq that dominated=2 0the front pages. Neither was it the exaggerated scale of the “Stop the War” march that colonized newsstands. Rather it was the litany of requests from the White House: from diplomatic immunity for 250 Secret Servicemen to blast- and bullet-proof windows installed in Buckingham Palace.
The commander-in-chief and a 700-strong entourage worthy of a traveling medieval monarch flew into London Heathrow. Once Bush stepped off Air Force One, Marine One flew the Bushes to the Palace where they enjoyed the pomp and circumstance of the Queen’s hospitality.
How Thomas Jefferson would turn in his grave. The regal six-story jet offends the Jeffersonian image of a citizen’s executive traveling modestly among his people. Unlike the 43rd President of the United States, the 3rd shunned the trappings of monarchy and the “flattery and scheming of courtiers” (p.168). Even at his first inaugural, in 1801, Jefferson dramatized his “republican simplicity” (vii) by refusing the customary horse and carriage, choosing instead to walk the route. Unlike the 3rd President of the United States, the 43rd, at his first inaugural, in 2001, dramatized his “present-day celebrity” (vii) by choosing instead to drive the route, refusing the customary walk — up until the last block that is, after protests even larger than against Nixon, the 37th, in 1969.
“Moving a president today,” Richard J. Ellis, author of Presidential Travel: The Journey from George Washington to George W. Bush, writes “is a hugely complex operation that makes Queen Elizabeth I’s royal progresses look like a casual romp in the countryside” (p.13).
Long gone are the days when you could physically strike the president. Since this was exactly what Lieutenant Robert Beverly Randolph did to Andrew Jackson in 1833. The Randolph incident provides a glimpse into the presidency that was but is no more. Presidential Travel tells the tale of that transformation. But the Willamette University Professor’s thesis is far more nuanced than a 170-year-odd history pertaining to the (lack of) guards surrounding the president. Think more U.S. identity in microcosm. Especially since Ellis sees presidential travel as an “obvious but underut ilized lens through which to examine the evolving relationship between the president and the public” (vii). It is for this reason that the title can be summed up by Three R’s: Republicanism, Royalty, and Representation.
Fear of monarchy is as old as American exceptionalism. Such a fear kept the executive in check. Concerns of a regal presidency underlay the norm against incumbents traveling abroad, Congress’s disapproval of a presidential travel allowance, and the nation’s resistance to provide protection for the “First Citizen.” These were just three of the cards the nineteenth-century polity played to keep the president exceptional and not monarchical. Each is recounted with detached erudition by Ellis.
Let us take the first and third cards: Abroad and Assassination (in reverse order).
Three presidential assassinations (Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James Garfield in 1881, and William McKinley in 1901) in just over thirty-five years put paid to the nineteenth-century expectation that the president should mingle freely with his people and thus narrowed the gap between the Old World and the New World.
Assassination attempts on Gerald Ford (1975) and Ronald Reagan (1981) swung the pendulum further toward an imperial presidency and Praetorian Guard away from a republican chief magistrate and a man of the people. “The rise of the regal presidency has many causes,” Ellis contends “but chief among them is that a regal president is easier to protect than a republican one” (p.135). Yet, as far as our narrative is concerned, “The emergence and institutionalization of a protective guard around the president called into question the cultural significance of presidential travel” (p.239). We are indeed a world away from the time when William Howard Taft greeted an audience from the back of a train in Eaton, Ohio, in 1911 (p.213). But is this a bad thing? Since Ellis himself states that “This book is not a jeremiad, not a call to go back to simpler or more innocent time” (p.4).
It was the nation’s changing role in the world that led twentieth-century presidents to travel abroad, not changing transportation technologies. As Ellis reminds us, “Faster and safer ships had not led nineteenth-century presidents to head for Europe” (p.198). Theodore Roosevelt did help bend the “Ironclad Custom” (pp.172-177). And Woodrow Wilson did help break the “Ironclad Custom” (pp.177-193). Yet Franklin Roosevelt truly shattered the “venerable precedent” (p.171).
“After World War II, the ironclad custom no longer applied. The war’s enduring lesson, according to conventional Cold War custom, was that the United States could not retreat from entangling alliances or run from the Old World’s problems” (p.196).
The New World’s loss is the Old World’s gain. Yet this was not a story that filled papers on either side of the Atlantic when Bush visited Britain in 2003. And neither is it one reported by Ellis in his brilliantly illustrated 250-page hardback. Still this is the philosophy of those behind “AmericaInTheWorld”— the international alliance opposed to American isolationism — soon to be launched by UK Conservative leader, David Cameron, in London.
Presidential Travel goes to far greater depths than presidential travel; presidential travel is merely the tip of the iceberg. Think more presidential power-lite. So much so it could be read as a subsidiary work to the heavyweight tomes penned by the ilk of Richard Neustadt (Presidential Power) or James Pfiffner (Understanding the Presidency). There is no mistaking that Ellis’s subtle, yet encyclopaedic, knowledge of the presidency rivals that of Sean Wilentz and others.
Historically rich with lively anecdotes, Ellis's book is an immensely impressive, informative and important work. Presidential Travel is big news today.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Jacob Laksin: Review of Andrew C. McCarthy's Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad
Source: Frontpagemag.com (8-21-08)
[Jacob Laksin is a senior editor for FrontPage Magazine. He is a 2007 Phillips Foundation Journalism Fellow. His e-mail is jlaksin@gmail.com.]
Before he was the notorious Blind Sheikh, the spiritual advisor and instigator of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, and a convicted terrorist in his own right, Omar Abdel Rahman was a guest of the American government. Between 1986 and 1989, the Egyptian-born Rahman applied at least four times for a U.S. tourist visa (such visas typically last 90 days). Already a credentialed militant, he had in 1987 earned a place on the State Department’s terrorist watch list for his fatwa, years earlier, urging the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and for his relentless preaching of jihadist violence. But only once did the U.S. refuse him a visa. By then, it was too late.
Andrew McCarthy was the lead federal prosecutor of the World Trade Center bombing conspiracy trial in 1995 and the man who would put Rahman away for life. When he invokes “willful blindness” in the title of his absorbing new book, it is this depressing history—a fatal mixture of bureaucratic bungling and strategic shortsightedness—that he has in mind. Part survey of Islamic terror in the 1980s and nineties, part memoir of the nine-month trial that brought the World Trade Center bombers to justice, Willful Blindness is a bracing chronicle of the first major terrorist attack on American soil and a valuable reminder that radical Islam was a real and present threat to the United States long before September 11.
It would be difficult to document every government failure in the run-up to the 1993 bombings, but McCarthy’s meticulous account surely comes close. Consider the case of Mahmud Abouhalima. Later to become the plot’s de facto leader, he received a residency visa as an “agricultural worker” under the 1986 immigration bill—this despite the fact that he was employed as a cab driver. Perhaps, as McCarthy aridly notes, he was “tending to the fecund fields of Brooklyn.” But oversights like these are mere peccadilloes next to the FBI’s craven 1989 decision to stop monitoring the men who would become the World Trade Center bombers. No sooner did the terrorist trainees charge that their surveillance by FBI agents—at a firing range in Long Island, no less—constituted religious harassment than the agency hurriedly closed the book on the investigation. Nothing to see here, folks: just a few pious citizens taking their AK-47s out for target practice.
Still, at least there was an investigation. Not so in November 1990, when an Egyptian radical named Sayyid Nosair, his skills honed at the shooting range, gunned down Jewish Defense League leader Rabbi Meir Kahane. Had the FBI pursued leads in the assassination, it would have discovered Nosair’s involvement in the conspiracy to attack the World Trade Center and other American locations as well. Instead, the agency deferred to the unsound judgment of the New York Police Department, which pronounced Kahane’s murder the work of a lone gunman. The bombing plot went forth as planned.
Most damning, perhaps, is the studious inattention that the Bureau and the entire national security bureaucracy paid to the Blind Sheikh. For years before the 1993 bombing, Rahman played a double game, disavowing terrorist strikes in public while winkingly blessing attacks by his zealous followers. Cleverness finally caught up with him when an FBI informant, an erratic Egyptian named Emad Salem, recorded the sheikh as he approved terrorist attacks against the United Nations and urged strikes against the U.S. Army. These directives would prove critical to McCarthy’s successful case against Rahman.
Lest one give the FBI too much credit even here, McCarthy points out that Salem’s breakthrough nearly didn’t happen. Fearing the fallout if a bombing were to occur on its watch, the FBI at one point instructed Salem that he could talk about bombs but not assist the conspiracy by touching actual bomb parts. A shrewd caveat, one might think—except that Salem’s cover as a bomb expert would have been blown had he followed the directive. In any case, before that could happen, a feud between the informant and his FBI handlers drove Salem away just before the bombing, though he reemerged in the aftermath to help prosecute the plotters.
McCarthy does not exempt himself from harsh criticism. Like so many government officials in the years before Osama bin Laden became a household name, McCarthy admits, he began with a serious blind spot about Islam. Initially believing that preachers like Rahman could be discredited as “fundamentalist crazies,” he came to realize with dismay that their justifications for terrorism were taken directly from foundational Islamic texts. On the legal front, McCarthy blames himself for allowing the bombing conspirator Ahmed Abdel Sattar to escape prosecution. Deeming the evidence too weak for a conviction—a conclusion he now regrets—McCarthy declined to prosecute Sattar. Savoring his reprieve, Sattar spent the next ten years helping the imprisoned Rahman direct his terrorist followers in Egypt. He was not apprehended until 2005.
For McCarthy, the institutional failures of the 1990s were not accidental. Rather, they were the inevitable consequences of treating terrorism as a criminal matter. Indeed, central to McCarthy’s narrative is his view that the U.S. criminal justice system, for all its virtues, was woefully unprepared to defend the country against Islamic terrorism. At the time of the 1993 bombing, for instance, there was no special provision in the law covering bombing conspiracy—meaning that at most the terrorists could get five years under a federal conspiracy statute. Prosecutors also had to prove that a “substantial step” had been taken to commit a crime—a measure that created a perverse incentive to let terrorist conspiracies proceed until the last possible second.
During the trial, too, there was no shortage of trouble. In complying with discovery rules, McCarthy had to turn over his list of hundreds of unindicted co-conspirators to the individuals named therein. These included one Ali Mohamed, whom McCarthy suspected of being a terrorist. Presciently, as it turned out: upon receiving the list, which included Osama bin Laden’s name, Mohammed relayed it to al-Qaida operatives, giving them a valuable glimpse into the state of U.S. intelligence. Civil liberties absolutists who demand due-process rights for terrorist captives, ignoring the consequences for national security, would do well to study McCarthy’s chapters on the trial.
Compelling as his book is, one wishes that McCarthy had advanced some alternatives to the flawed criminal-justice strategy he so powerfully exposes. Legal scholars like Jack Goldsmith, for example, have urged the creation of national security courts as an alternative to the traditional variety. Administered by independent rather than military judges, but governed by rules of evidence that would not compromise national security, these courts could conceivably satisfy both sides of the national-security debate. McCarthy’s background would make his view of such proposals worth hearing.
Such omissions are the exception, however, in this impressively detailed book. Willful Blindness sometimes makes for painful reading, returning as it does to a time when, to adapt Trostky’s line, the U.S. was not interested in Islamic jihad but Islamic jihad was very much interested in the U.S. But then, it is precisely because the temptation to do nothing is ever-present that, 15 years after the World Trade Center bombing, McCarthy’s chronicle of opportunities missed reads like such a contemporary tale.
Monday, August 18, 2008
Joseph Palermo: Review of Jerome Corsi's The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality
Source: Special to HNN (8-18-08)
We can only hope that Barack Obama is right when he tells us that the Republican smear machine will not succeed this time in distracting voters to the point of endorsing yet another George W. Bush-type disaster. "Not This Time" is Obama's familiar refrain. But with Jerome Corsi hawking his hot-off-the-press anti-Obama screed, The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, and bouncing around both the Republican echo chamber and the corporate media, we will have to be vigilant in countering the Right's lies, innuendo, half-truths, guilt by association, and misrepresentations of Obama's life and record.
Where does the Republican Right find these people?
Jerome Corsi's biggest claim to fame is that he co-authored the infamous "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" hatchet job on John Kerry in 2004. Judging from the shrill and paranoid tone of Corsi's latest effort I get the impression Obama has really scared these guys this time. Corsi dedicates page after dreary page to making Obama out to be a George McGovern/Michael Dukakis "far left radical" who will soon be rejected by "center-right" voters. But Corsi's terrible writing reeks of desperation. But if Obama is just another McGovern or Dukakis why does the Far Right feel so threatened by him? My impression after trudging through Corsi's excrementitious narrative is that there is real fear out there among Republicans this year because the Democrats had the good sense to finally nominate a candidate who has great popular appeal and who is advocating a truly new direction for the nation.
Corsi also co-authored a book with Kenneth Blackwell who in 2004 was Karl Rove's hack in Ohio who directed the Bush campaign's voter suppression activities. Blackwell is also African American so Corsi makes sure his readers know early on that he's no racist and he really likes black people. But he also admits to working against Carl Stokes when he ran for mayor of Cleveland in 1967 attempting to become the first black mayor of a large American city. Corsi boasts about getting his Ph.D. from Harvard in political science in 1972 and working for the U.S. Agency for International Development where he claims to have "received a Top Secret security clearance" from the State Department. He doesn't explain why he passed up trying to become a professor at a university (my hunch is that he could never cut the rigors of peer reviewed academic research.) His main career, he claims, is in "financial services."
In this "book," Corsi cites all sorts of dubious right-wing web sites and apparatchiks including Phyllis Schlafly, Ann Coulter, John Fund, Sean Hannity, Fox News, William Kristol, Dick Morris, Christopher Hitchens, Michelle Malkin, and a vast assortment of other far-right wags and bloggers. His footnotes read like a "who's who" of right-wing Republican mouthpieces, and the book reads like a mini-right-wing echo chamber. The book is not only a fabrication of who Obama is, it is a poorly written precis for how best John McCain and the Republicans can slime and divide their way into hanging on to the White House for one more miserable term.
Corsi's view of American society is ahistorical. He might have a Ph.D. from Harvard in political science but he has no understanding whatsoever of how fundamental political rights in this country were won through hard work, organizing, and struggle. In Corsi's worldview all labor unions and trial lawyers are evil, women shouldn't have reproductive rights, blacks and Mexican immigrants should know their places, and anyone to the left of Joe Lieberman is a "socialist."
Corsi is forever fixed in 1972 like an insect embedded in resin. Every four years we repeat the McGovern-Nixon battle and re-fight the same culture war. But the bottom line is that Corsi is intellectually dishonest and he willfully lies and misrepresents his subject matter for maximum emotional effect. He impugns Obama's integrity and patriotism so many times in this work it's impossible to chronicle them all.
Much of the ground Corsi plods through is already well trod: We hear all about Reverend Wright again, and about flag pins and holding your hand on your heart during the national anthem, and ties to Islam, and to Bill Ayres, and Louis Farrakhan and all the other bullshit you can catch any given night on Sean Hannity's show. There is nothing "new" in this book but Corsi has compiled it in such a way that it will provide a lot of fodder for right-wing talk radio, Fox News, and probably much of the toxic corporate media too. The book is chock full of gratuitous attacks on everything Obama has done his entire life. Corsi even criticizes him for reading Franz Fanon in college. Corsi's "methodology" is to use guilt by association once, twice, or thrice removed, combined with lies, misrepresentations, half-truths and quarter-truths, innuendo, dubious assertions, stretched critiques, and sheer hatred of his subject matter to suggest sinister connections and motives in everything Obama has ever done his entire life.
Corsi criticizes Obama for advocating Marxist "wealth re-distribution" and "socialism," but he also attacks him for being "hypocritical" for receiving large campaign donations from Wall Street and corporations. Corsi also assails Obama for giving a speech prior to the Iraq War against the invasion, but also slams him for voting to fund the war after he became a U.S. Senator. In a weird twist, Corsi hits Obama for not calling for cutting off funding to the troops; in effect, criticizing Obama for not being Dennis Kucinich.
"Obama had to shift ground in order to explain a voting record more centrist on the Iraq War than the words of his unrecorded but highly touted antiwar speech would suggest." (p. 259) This statement comes after Corsi dedicates page after page to calling Obama a "socialist" and a "far leftist" incapable of moving to the "center."
He claims that John McCain's path to victory is to focus on "the issues," but there are no "issues" in this book, only smears and innuendo. Corsi writes: "McCain's strength involves policy issues, especially with a general electorate that in the United States is still today more center-right politically than it is far left." (p. 281) He pays no attention to the fact that on many "issues" the Republicans do not poll well. "McCain should advocate continuing the Bush tax cuts and exploring private enterprise solutions to our nation's health needs." (p. 284) Corsi calls on McCain to "repeat the reliable Republican objections that universal health care would be another bottomless Democratic pit, nothing more than a social welfare giveaway that would destroy the private health-care system." (p. 250)
On this point I agree with Corsi, McCain should definitely make that argument.
Corsi picks at scabs to try paint Obama as "anti-Israel." It is a terrible disservice to the nation fanning the flames of division between blacks and Jews just to win an election. He equates pulling US troops out of Iraq with being "anti-Israel." Corsi pushes the race button, the tax button, the abortion button, the Israel button, the terrorist button, the '60s radical button, etc. He leaves no hot button issue untouched. He uses the annoying rhetorical "we" in expressing his unqualified assertions to suck the reader into becoming part of the anti-Obama herd: "In our analysis of Obama's experience as a Chicago community organizer trained in Saul Alinsky's radical socialist methodologies, we warned 'Change,' a slogan first introduced by Alinsky, was nothing more than a code word for the typical income redistribution those on the left have sought since the days of Karl Marx. Here, in Obama's proposal for increasing the capital gains tax, we find proof for the point." (p. 246)
David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist, is Corsi's bete noir in his morality play. He claims that Axelrod has constructed out of whole cloth a "cult of personality" around Obama that can be easily punctured: "Obama, like Dukakis, is vulnerable to negative information about his past that can burst any cult-of-personality bubble that public-relations experts, such as Axelrod, can try to create around a political persona." (p. 283)
Corsi is a big fan of nuclear weapons and a big advocate of "Mutually Assured Destruction" as a great way to run international relations. He clearly views nuclear weapons as if they were any other kind of weapon -- unless a US adversary such as Iran attempts to get them. Then he advocates Bush-style saber rattling and threats. "This is truly the crux of Obama's argument," he writes: "because we do not demonstrate moral leadership, other nations have no choice but to proliferate nuclear weapons. At the base of the argument, Obama is saying a world with nuclear weapons is our fault." (pp. 261-262) Someone should inform Corsi that cowboy diplomacy has already been proven to be a miserable failure.
"According to watchdog OpenSecrets.org," Corsi writes, "Wall Street investment firms and U.S. law firms representing multinational U.S. corporations in their global operations lead the list of Obama bundling contributors." (p. 252) That fact is very interesting to learn after chapters of text claiming that Obama wants to "redistribute" the nation's wealth. Gee, I wonder why all those companies are giving money to a "socialist" candidate.
But the silliest and most petty attack Corsi musters up is where he slams Obama for being a secret cigarette smoker. He states that Obama's smoking "should be a trivial concern," but three paragraphs later launches into an wholesale indictment based on this "trivial" matter: "A person who has to hide his or her smoking appears to be living in a lie. Moreover, New Age guys do not smoke; New Age guys who smoke out of sight cannot be trusted. A New Age politician dreaming of change and hoping for the future is not an image consistent with a guy who has to smoke cigarettes on campaign breaks just to make it through the day. Maybe that's the way Obama takes such care to maintain the pretense he is a nonsmoker. The smoker image conflicts with the campaign personality Axelrod is trying to craft, so much so that Obama hid the habit from a reporter who had become like a friend to him. If Obama takes pains to hide his smoking from us, what else does he take pains to hide?" (p. 235)
Visions of "terrorist fist jabs" danced in my head.
But Corsi is not finished with the smoking section: "Obama's secret smoking may not be a trivial issue after all. Looked at from a certain perspective the habit is a crack in the wall, a flaw that calls into question whether the persona Axelrod has crafted for Obama is who Obama really is, or simply the person Axelrod wants us to see." (p. 235) Corsi segues from Obama's smoking to a strategy to beat him: "Defeating Obama will require removing the mask Axelrod has placed before Obama's face, so that important segments of the electorate can fully appreciate how radical, and politically unacceptable to them, his policy views truly are." (p. 235)
Corsi also pounds Michelle Obama for writing a senior thesis as an undergrad at Princeton on "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community." Corsi sees Michelle as "angry" and a devotee of "black power" but also slams her as an "elitist" because she was educated at Princeton. Here's how Corsi inelegantly puts it: "Michelle might have been raised by a middle-class black working family on Chicago's South Side, but while being educated at an Ivy League school she indulged in the luxury of experiencing alienation, instead of being grateful for the opportunity. Nor was the impression diminished when the public learned that Michelle, like Barack, also got her law degree at Harvard, in 1988." (p. 233) So Michelle Obama is an "elitist" who "indulged" in feeling alienated as part of a tiny minority of black students at Princeton. According to Corsi, she should have just shut up and been "grateful for the opportunity."
And that leads me to one of my observations about this wretched book: Corsi cuts these people no slack whatsoever. Whether he's talking about Obama in high school or college or chronicling the Obamas' biographies, which are pretty extraordinary, he ignores their accomplishments while manufacturing phony beefs like Barack's smoking and Michelle's senior thesis. Corsi looms over Obama's life like a great white god judging his every move, every decision, every book he read or person he learned from. Corsi's attitude is that of the old slave master -- the white supremacist. The tone of the entire book is Corsi telling us in every conceivable way that this lowly black man has nothing to offer.
And that racist attitude leads me to raise the further question: Who the Hell is Jerry Corsi to judge Barack Obama? Obama has more intelligence in his little finger than Corsi has in his entire body. It's strange to read an utter mediocrity like Corsi casting judgment on a truly talented individual, but it is typical coming from the increasingly desperate and pathetic Rightwing.
From reading even the Preface it is clear that Corsi, like Karl Rove, is still smarting over losing the culture wars of his youth. He reminds me of David Horowitz (who he cites more than once in the book) because he's always bitching about the "black militants" and "student radicals" and the "feminists" who populated the campuses when he was in college. I suppose Corsi was too busy being a "good" Nixon Republican to have any fun and watched in horror while the anti-war activists and longhairs were getting laid and enjoying themselves, hence his lifelong career as a hatchet man for the Far Right. How else can one explain such vituperation?
Corsi pretends to be "patriotic" and he claims to be all about the flag and the military and "values," etc. But his politics of divide and conquer, black versus white, young versus old, rich versus poor, make the country weaker. At one point in the book he claims to admire Robert F. Kennedy. But Corsi's prescriptions are totally the opposite of what Kennedy advocated at the end of his short life. He would be appalled at Corsi's callousness toward the working class and the poor in this country and in the world, and for his racist diatribe against a person of Obama's accomplishments and character.
Joseph Palermo: Review of David Freddoso's The Case Against Barack Obama
Source: Special to HNN (8-18-08)
David Freddoso is among the young white men who rose out of the National Review-Young Republican farm league where Ronald Reagan is god and hating "liberals" is a way of life. He has written "The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate." John O'Neill, of "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" fame, blurbs the book, and Freddoso acknowledges and quotes his "former boss" and mentor: the arch-rightwinger Robert Novak. It is another Regnery hit job on a Democratic presidential candidate, the same right-wing publishing house that brought us Michelle Malkin's treatise on how great was the internment of 112,000 Japanese-Americans during World War Two, as well as O'Neill's 2004 partisan screed that defecated all over John Kerry's sterling Vietnam war record.
Freddoso cites as "evidence" emails he received from random people when they heard he was writing a book on Obama, and arbitrary posts from the comments section of the Obama campaign's web site. He quotes a "letter to the editor" from an obscure newspaper, and he cites Fox's "Hannity and Colmes" and "The O'Reilly Factor" as well as Chris Matthews. He cites a blogger from Jamaica, the charlatan Jonah Goldberg, the Harvard Crimson, and writers from the National Review, which give the book an "echo chamber" quality. There are numerous factual errors in the book that Media Matters.org has already documented.
Throughout the book, Freddoso repeats a Republican talking point that we've heard from David Brooks and others: "Obama presents not ideas but feelings. He is the candidate of emotivism. Obamian passion is based on the persona that his followers have created for Obama in their own minds. Many don't know who the man really is." (pp. 66-67) His account is full of apocryphal stories; grotesque generalizations; geeky attempts at "humor"; anecdotal evidence; rumors and innuendo; cutesy plays on words; and the thickheaded reliance on the myth of the "liberal media."
But the major flaw in the book is that there is no historical context. Freddoso makes no attempt to explain to readers how American politics produced the Obama phenomenon in the first place. By decontextualizing Obama's popularity, Freddoso is free to argue that Obama's appeal is solely the result of "celebrity" and other intangible qualities, which mirrors John McCain's recent Paris Hilton attack ad. For Freddoso, the last eight years (and the 12 years of Republican control of Congress) didn't even happen. He misses the groundswell of opposition the Bush-Cheney-Rove era has produced. He willfully ignores that one of the reasons why Obama is so popular stems from the fact that President Bush and the Republicans are so UNpopular, and that Americans are longing for new leadership. Obama emerged on the scene from the wreckage of the Bush Administration to offer the nation hope. Freddoso keeps it a mystery why people are excited about the change in direction Obama promises. Most people think having a president who can speak English and not embarrass himself or lie every time he opens his mouth would be a positive new development. Not Freddoso and his ilk. (At least Freddoso is willing to admit "even Republicans are hesitant to defend" Bush at this point (p. 55), and "President Bush has proven a big disappointment.") (p. 74)
Another impression I got from the book is that Freddoso does not understand that Obama, as an African American, might see the world in slightly different terms than he does. I think his contacts with black people must be limited to like-minded colloquies with Kenneth Blackwell-type conservatives and other ideological soul mates. He seems "shocked" to hear African-American voices expressing displeasure with certain aspects of the American dream. He needs to read more Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Martin Luther King, Jr. and less Shelby Steele, Clarence Thomas, and Ward Connerly.
Freddoso tries hard to make the case via guilt by association that Obama is a corrupt politician. He rehashes the Antoin Rezko stuff taking most of his material from Chicago newspapers. After pages and pages of innuendo that Obama conspired with Rezko in some fashion, he never explains why the Bush-appointed U.S. Attorney in the region didn't indict him or even ask him to testify at Rezko's trial if the two men were such close associates. Political indictments were a dime a dozen in Bush's Justice Department -- just ask former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman or his nemesis Karl Rove. Freddoso juxtaposes unsubstantiated charges to give the impression of a vast criminal conspiracy reminiscent of the Right's hyperventilating during the Clinton years about the "Whitewater" land deal. But "where's the beef?" Freddoso also trudges through worn-out Reverend Wright material again hitting all the sour notes, and he dedicates almost an entire chapter to the former Weatherman, Bill Ayres. It's all old "news."
In one laughable section at the end of the book entitled, "Obama: Timeline of a (Brief) Political Life," Freddoso compiles relevant names, dates, and events:
"Aug. 4, 1961 -- Obama born in Hawaii.
Feb. 16, 1970 -- Weatherman terrorist bombing in San Francisco kills one.
Mar. 6, 1970 -- Unsuccessful Weatherman bombing in Detroit.
Jun. 12, 1972 -- Saul Alinsky dies.
Oct. 18, 1974 -- Larry Grothwahl testifies before a Senate subcommittee on William Ayres's involvement in bomb plots. . . . " (p. 237)
Even though Obama was 9 years old in 1970 it seems he still cannot escape guilt by association with a short-lived and ill-fated radical group from the 1960s.
According to Freddoso, everything Obama did while serving in the Illinois State Senate, no matter how routine -- passing legislation that benefited his constituents, wheeling and dealing with other Senators and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley to get grants and other appropriations passed, putting together private-public partnerships to rejuvenate blighted neighborhoods -- are all part of a grand conspiracy with sinister motives and a hidden corrupt agenda. This kind of thing could have been written about any politician in America (especially Republican politicians). He criminalizes the quotidian operations of legislators and relentlessly pounds Obama from the Right AND from the Left. He purposely doesn't try to contextualize anything. Only someone from the Right could get away with this kind of tripe, and get a lot of money and TV appearances in the process. Great for Fredo. Not so great for American political discourse.
For Freddoso, Obama embodies "the hard-core radicalism of the 1960s era and Chicago's Machine politics," (p. xi) and "[h]e is simply another liberal Democratic politician who will divide America along the same lines as it has been divided for decades." (p. xii) That last line is astonishing because it was Karl Rove, Freddoso's ideological soul mate, who won the last two presidential elections by pitting rich against poor, white against black, straight against gay, old against young, native-born against immigrant, "patriot" against "traitor," and the religious against the secular. And Fredo is fretting over the possibility that Obama might "divide" the country?
Freddoso whines about what he sees as Obama's Teflon coating: "Barack Obama is not to be criticized. He is above that sort of thing. He is immune to criticism." (p. 71) But he makes no attempt to explain Rev. Wright, Pfleger, Ayres, Rezko, "bittergate," flag pins, fist bumps, and most recently tire gauges and Paris Hilton, along with Obama being called "presumptuous" a "terrorist" a "secret Muslim" and an "elitist." These media-fueled controversies with Obama at the center beg the question: If Obama is "immune" to criticism then where did all this derogatory stuff come from?
"It's not that Barack Obama is a bad person," Freddoso continues. "It's just that he's like all the rest of them. Not a reformer. Not a Messiah. Just like all the rest of them in Washington. And just like all the other liberals, too." (p. 233) That is an interesting statement given that Freddoso's political party ran "Washington" from 1995 to 2007 in the House of Representatives, and from 2001 to 2009 in the White House. In fact, the Republicans ran the House, the Senate, and the Presidency from 2003 to 2007, so any problems Freddoso has with "Washington" can be placed right on the doorstep of the Republican National Committee. He should cut out the middleman and email his complaints directly to the RNC.
Freddoso offers a tiny bit of backhanded praise to Obama for exposing the Clintons in the Democratic primaries and creating a "new point of agreement between liberals and conservatives: that the Clintons are a dangerous and cutthroat pair that will do absolutely anything to win and cling to power." (p. 69) This passage comes after a gratuitous paragraph of vitriol aimed at Bill Clinton, apropos to nothing, where he reminds his conservative readership of Clinton's "hoarding of political enemies' FBI files," "firing the White House travel office," "philandering," "lies under oath," and "last-minute pardons." (p. 68) But Freddoso goes on to lambaste Obama for distancing himself from the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) "as if it were a molten porcupine." (p. 233) This criticism contradicts Freddoso's earlier assault on Clinton because Clinton was the personification of the DLC. Fredo despises Clinton but sticks up for the DLC when Obama turns his back on it; an organization Clinton was instrumental in forming. Curious.
One of the funniest parts of the book is when Freddoso gets melodramatic with some bullet points toward the end summarizing a few of the nefarious reasons why Obama would be unacceptable as president. Here are a few of the outrages Obama has committed:
"Obama co-sponsored a bill in 1997 that required certain municipalities to create affordable housing funds using revenues from bonds. Among other things, the funds were to be used to preserve existing buildings and to subsidize construction of new ones."
"In 2001, Obama co-sponsored and passed legislation that increased such developers' state subsidies by creating an 'affordable housing tax credit.' In other words, if you donated land or money to a state-approved affordable housing project, you got half of the value back in tax credits, which could be carried forward to future tax years."
"In 2003, Obama co-sponsored the Illinois Housing Initiative Act of 2003, which required the governor to develop a plan for more low-income housing. The bill also would have 'provide[d] for funding for housing construction and rehabilitation and supportive services." (pp. 217-218)
Although it certainly was not Freddoso's intent, his litany of Obama's actions in support of low-income housing seems a pragmatic approach to transforming dilapidated "projects" into mixed-income development zones. Obama's housing initiatives resemble the public-private partnership that Robert F. Kennedy dedicated himself to as the junior Senator from New York: the Bedford-Stuyvesant Renewal and Rehabilitation Corporation, which was controlled by the local community, and the Bed-Sty Development and Services Corporation, which included private investors from outside the community. Freddoso's venom aimed at Obama's efforts to include the private sector in urban redevelopment projects is puzzling coming from someone who prides himself for being a "conservative." I thought they liked the private sector.
In Freddoso's climactic peroration one can almost hear the Star-Spangled Banner swelling in the background: "What sort of nominations does such a man make as president? What kind of diplomacy does he pursue, given that so much of diplomacy consists in reading, understanding, and judging others' intentions and character? This is why these ties deserve scrutiny. If Barack Obama becomes president, his good judgment, or lack thereof, will affect the entire country." (p. 234)
I suppose Freddoso's aim was to alert his readers to the danger Obama poses with a flourish of memorable rhetoric. But his concluding paragraph falls flat. His journalism profs at Columbia should have helped him hone his style. Even I wanted a better ending.
And after eight years of George W. Bush -- I think we can risk a Barack Obama presidency.
Aziz Huq: Review of Hugo Slim's Killing Combatants: Method, Morality, and Madness in War
Source: Special to HNN (8-18-08)
“War is cruelty and you cannot refine it,” Gen. William Sherman proclaimed in self-justification to the civilian population of Atlanta a few days before taking the city. In Just and Unjust Wars, Michael Walzer doubted and resisted Sherman’s dicta, especially the refusal to refine or restrain. War may be hell, Walzer explained, but “[e]ven in hell, it is possible to be more or less humane, to fight with or without restraint.”
Killing Combatants: Method, Morality, and Madness in War, Hugo Slim provides a panoramic perspective to this debate. Some readers will decide that the book is not their cup of tea when, early in the second chapter, he sets forth his seven-part categorization of civilian suffering. To abandon the book, however, would be to miss out on an illuminating, if necessarily superficial tour of the costs of war.
To take Slim’s catalogue of horrors at face value, more wars have been fought in Sherman’s mould—less humanely rather than more. While most religious traditions, including all three of the great monotheisms, have longstanding traditions of just war, it has been in only the past 150 years that governments have made concerted, coordinated efforts to restrain themselves in advance. The 1863 Lieber Code, adopted by the Union army, and the First Geneva Convention of 1864, mark the modern advent of coordinated efforts to make war more humane, first by establishing minimal rules of humane conduct, and then by putting the force of (international) law behind those rules. Most recently, international tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the International Criminal Court have added potent muscle to law.
But how much difference have these legal and institutional developments made? Matching or outpacing these developments, however, have been accelerating transformations of the technology of war. Consider December 6, 1935, when twelve Italian planes swooped down on the Ethiopian town to bomb houses and a Red Cross hospital. Less than eighteen months later, the bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica fell victim to the Fascists’ newly perfected technique of carpet bombing. Jeremiads about the dangers of terrorism foreshadowed nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons as preoccupations for the twentieth century. The more rules war accrues, the more ways people find to kill each other. In the match between enlightened legalism and technocratic brutalities, the seers rarely seem to have the upper hand
And then there are the landmarks of war that no amount of legal remediation seems to be able to change. Slim cites St. Augustine, in the City of God, bemoaning the “ancient and customary evil” of rape, as he comforts women raped by Alaric’s Goths during the sack of Rome. Then, in calm and clinical detail, he explains how rape remains a “typically very public” feature of twentieth century wars from the Japanese occupation of Nanking to the amorphous wars of Liberia and Sierra Leone. Rape, in Japan, the former Yugoslavia, and in innumerable African context, is moreover, not an accidental side-effect of war, but a deliberate policy aimed to harm combatants by attacking their weakest assets.
One of the most challenging and eye-opening sections of Slim’s analysis is his exploration of how war harms civilians beyond the direct range of bombs, bullets, and brutality. Addressing rape, he elaborates on the persisting social stigma, rejection, and even violence faced by women raped by enemy forces. (In a stunning, but telling, aside, he notes that no woman in Nanking ever acknowledged a child from a Japanese rape.)
Not only sex but space and nourishment can become weapons. Long before the practice of “hamletting” developed in the Vietnam War, armies would propel civilian populations into strategically advantageous positions. Sieges would exploit limitations of space and food. Today, refugee camps can become regrouping posts for chastened rebel groups. After the Rwandan genocide, the Rwandan government felt compelled to attack mainly Hutu refugee camps where the former genocidal forces were coalescing. In the same conflict, Slim notes, there is evidence that rapes were organized during the genocide so as to maximize the spread of AIDs. The result was four-fifths of women so victimized were HIV-positive after the conflict. Human imagination, it seems, admits of few limitations, especially when it comes to the generation of human pain and suffering.
What is a reader to make of 250 pages detailing the manifold paths of human suffering and the ideologies that license them? Slim closes the book with fifty somewhat limp pages on strategies for changing views about war. Drawing on Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner’s work and Malcolm Gladwell’s now tediously iconic notions of power points and tipping points, he sets forth a six-part framework of rhetorical and emotional strategies for changing minds. Whether this architecture will seed the worldwide grassroots movement of civilians, as Slim hopes, remains to be seen.
Rather, for most readers, Slim’s book frames a question about what the English philosopher Bernard Williams called “moral luck.” Contrary to the philosophical tradition associated with Kant, Williams argued that being moral often depended on being lucky—in where you were born, on whether you went hungry day to day, or as to the shape or your nose or the color of your skin. What Slim’s atrocity exhibit suggests is that for a significant proportion of humanity, now and through time, the want of luck has condemned them to a life in which brutality and remorseless is the coin of the realm. Few resist. Fewer yet do so successfully. To be a reader of Killing Civilians, rather than one of its subjects, however, is to be profoundly fortunate in the timing of one’s birth, the securing of an education, and the obtaining of leisure time. It is, perhaps, to be exceptional in the current of human history.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Murray Polner, Review of Three Books
Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into
a War on American Ideals (Doubleday) --- together with Ron Suskind’s 2007 book, The One Percent Doctrine (Simon & Schuster) --- is the most incisive, dramatic, revealing and thoroughly documented book about the Iraq War and the damage U.S. reliance on torture has done to our country. Despite widespread silence in our mass media and the Congress, torture has been the order of the day, while some principled FBI agents and other brave souls inside the government and military have refused to have anything to do with the CIA’s policy of “rendition,” the practice of outsourcing the torture of alleged suspects to governments specializing in the practice. Who these nations are and who sent them is, of course, highly classified, the government’s way of hiding the dark and ugly world of state terror from the American people. Concluding, Mayer has Philip Zelikow, former Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission and Condoleeza Rice’s assistant, comparing the use of torture with FDR’s internment of the Japanese in WWII. Said Zelikow: “Fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools.” The saddest thing is that no-one was held accountable then and no-one will be held accountable now when and if the Iraq war ever ends.
Yizhar Smilansky, who used the pen name of S. Yizhar, was a veteran of the 1948 war, a writer, and member of the Knesset who published Khirbet Khizeh ( reprinted by Ibis Editions, POB 8074, German Colony, Jerusalem, 2008; www.ibiseditions.com) in 1949. Though highly controversial among some Israelis, for decades this memorable, slender novella has been read in Israeli high schools. Never before translated into English (here by Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweek), Yizhar portrayed Israeli soldiers expelling Palestinians from their fictional village and destroying their homes during the 1948 war. While this is happening, the soldier-narrator watches as women, children, and the maimed flee the invaders. Upset, he tells his readers, “We came, we shot, we burned; we blew up, expelled, drove out, and sent into exile. What in God’s name were we doing in this place?”
Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago, reprinted with a new Introduction by Frank Rich (New York Review of Books, 2008) is a splendid example of Mailer writing in the third person, New Journalism-style, while he was reporting for Harper's. Here he covers the tumultuous 1968 Republican and Democratic conventions against the backdrop of the Vietnam War when Nixon and McGovern were nominated. Mailer, with his exquisite use of language and keen observations, vividly portrays the major and minor actors within the convention halls but also in the open warfare that raged in Chicago parks and streets. He concluded with the unsettling thought, “We yet may win, the others are so stupid. Heaven help us when we do.”
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Jeremy Kuzmarov. Review of Bradley R. Simpson, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S. Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968 (Stanford University Press, 2008)
Jeremy Kuzmarov is Visiting Assistant Professor of History, Bucknell University
Unbeknownst to most Americans, in 1965, following a coup by General Suharto, the Indonesian military massacred upwards of 800,000 people and imprisoned an estimated million more in an attempt to liquidate the communist PKI party. The United States government gave both moral encouragement and logistical support to the mass killings, including the provision of weaponry and “lists” of suspected PKI members to be targeted for assassination. Mainstream newspapers like the New York Times wrote laudatory pieces in praise of the genocidal Suharto government, referring to it as a “gleaming light in Asia” because of its fervent anti-communism and openness towards foreign investment and free-trade. C.L Sulzberger added, in the crude racism of the day, that “the killing had attained a volume impressive even in violent Asia, where life is cheap.”
Bradley R. Simpson’s outstanding new book, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S. Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968, provides chilling new evidence of American complicity with what the CIA itself referred to as “the worst mass killings” since the era of Hitler and Stalin. He comments that the U.S. “viewed the wholesale annihilation of the PKI and its civilian backers as an indispensable prerequisite to Indonesia’s reintegration into the global political economy and the ascendance of a military modernizing regime.”
Building on George and Audrey Kahin’s invaluable study, Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower-Dulles Debacle in Indonesia, Simpson details how U.S. support for the 1965 coup and genocide was part of a much longer destabilization campaign directed against Achmed Sukarno; Indonesia’s first post-independence president whom Washington opposed because of his socialist leanings and leadership of the non-aligned movement of Third World states. Simpson also explores in considerable depth the ideology of American foreign policy-elites and the symbiotic relationship they developed with U.S. trained Indonesian economists who served as key advisers to the Suharto government promoting a mix of privatization, authoritarian development and free-market capitalism. These policies served as a precursor to the structural adjustment paradigm promoted by the World Bank during the 1980s and 1990s, and yielded similarly deleterious effects for the working-class and poor. Significantly, they could only be imposed by fiat, rather than popular consent.
Challenging the romanticized views of the Kennedy administration pervading popular culture and the Obama presidential campaign, one of Simpson’s major contributions is to show the continuity from Eisenhower on in seeking to illegally subvert Indonesian politics and undermine Sukarno. Through the CIA, the Eisenhower administration had funneled arms to dissident generals mounting a series of regional rebellions. Its cover was blown when an Air America pilot, Allen Pope, was captured after shelling an Indonesian village. During the Kennedy era, the special group on counter-insurgency (CI), headed by Robert Kennedy, was particularly influential in trying to build up the paramilitary capabilities of the Indonesian police, who were pro-western in their orientation and seen as a potential counterweight to the power of the military. The CIA further pressed for covert actions – laying the groundwork for the 1965 military coup, which the Johnson administration supported. These policies resulted in part from a growing infatuation with the notion of military modernization developed by prominent intellectuals of the period and RAND Corporation analysts. They believed that through the imposition of order and stability, the military could be the most effective instrument in serving U.S. Cold War interests and promoting economic development and growth. This idea lay behind the U.S. alliance with Suharto, and also shaped its involvement in an assortment of right-wing coups in Latin America and elsewhere during the 1960s and early 1970s.
Going beyond previous scholarship on modernization and the Kennedy administration, which focuses solely on ideology, Simpson advances a political economy analysis, showing how intellectual ideas of modernization were coterminous with the promotion of Western economic interests. Indonesia was particularly valued by policy-elites as a result of its mineral and oil wealth and provided a bonanza to oil corporations like Caltex following the 1965 coup. This was true of many other firms, including General Motors and Morris and Knudsen (precursor to Halliburton) which had been threatened by Sukarno’s movement towards nationalization and thus feared the strength of the PKI. General Suharto was ultimately far more amenable to U.S. interests from an ideological and economic vantage point, resulting in his being embraced in spite of his atrocious human rights record. The long shadow of McCarthyism, furthermore, made his anti-communist pogroms highly appealing to many in the State and Defense Departments who expressed no outspoken criticism of, or dissent against the rising toll of bloodshed. As a State Department staffer once commented, “No one cared as long as they were communists that were being butchered.”
Simpson’s last chapter focuses on the title of his book – the economists who worked as a technocratic elite under Suharto in ushering in the new order. He traces how they were influenced by their training at Berkeley and other Ivy League institutions in free-market capitalist ideals and aimed to promote westernization and modernization through the opening of the country to foreign investors. As Simpson makes clear, their influence on policy stemmed not from any popular consent but rather the violence and repression of grassroots dissent upon which Suharto’s power was based. In an arrogant manner they believed that their specialized technical knowledge of economic theory made them supremely qualified to dictate public policy. Ultimately, however, while Indonesia did experience striking growth levels in its GDP under Suharto, a large majority of the population remained mired in poverty and destitution, lacking in basic social services. Their political freedoms, meanwhile, had long since eroded.
On the whole, as one can see through Simpson’s book, Indonesia provides an important case study for U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War. It demonstrates how ideological and economic objectives came to trump human rights, and how Washington was able to use foreign aid and training programs to effectively promote its interests through native clients who were swayed by Western ideals and had their own power interests at stake. Moreover, it reveals the cold-hearted calculations of American policy-makers who were willing to support murderous violence and genocide in order to advance its objectives.
Simpson’s book is highly significant in one other respect: it shows the perils of authoritarian models of economic development and the fallaciousness of the military modernization theories promoted by Kennedy-era intellectuals, which continue to hold some credence among foreign policy elites today. The catastrophes that befell Indonesia in the late 20th century should serve as a warning as to what can happen again if people continue to think that the end justifies the means.
Sunday, August 3, 2008
Ron Briley: Review of Rick Perlstein's Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (Scribner, 2008)
During the Presidential campaign of 2008, one John McCain television ad opens with a reference to the summer of love in 1967 followed by the solemn comment that McCain did not participate in these frivolous antics; he was a prisoner of war and serving his country. Although he was only in grade school at the time, some conservatives have attempted to link Barack Obama with the violence of the Weather Underground through his association with Bill Ayers. Questions regarding the “liberal” bias of the media are raised by the McCain camp in television pieces comparing Obama with superficial celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Brittney Spears. What do such issues, especially invoking the 1960s, have to do with the economic and foreign policy issues confronting America in 2008? According to Rick Perlstein, the answer is that we are all living in Nixonland crated between 1964 and 1972.
In Nixonland, Perlstein, the author of the award-winning Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001), writes an old-fashioned political history, based primarily upon newspaper and periodical accounts supplemented by archival sources and interviews, focusing upon the Congressional and Presidential electoral campaigns from 1964 through 1972 and how the politics of that period and today were shaped by Richard Nixon. Once demonized by the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s, Nixon’s reputation has risen somewhat in academic circles where George W. Bush is often described as the worst President in American history. But in Nixonland, Richard Nixon reassumes the center stage as a leader orchestrating a politics of divisiveness which Reagan and the younger Bush have only emulated and refined. Perlstein writes his fascinating account somewhat from the perspective of what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., once termed “the vital center.” While never dogmatic, Perlstein often assumes a liberal position under attack from both the political left and right. And he certainly makes a strong case that while much of the media focus in the 1960s was upon the emergence of a radical counterculture; the real story of the era was the formation of a conservative movement which continues to dominate American politics.
Perlstein begins his study with a description of the 1965 urban unrest in Watts which signaled that the Great Society consensus championed by Lyndon Johnson was based upon a rather flimsy foundation. Civil rights legislation and government social programs still left many black Americans out of the consensus, and that frustration erupted in the steamy streets of Los Angeles in August 1965. A white backlash fueled opposition to further civil rights legislation such as an open housing bill, and the Republican Party gained seats in the 1966 Congressional elections. The Vietnam War was also unraveling the Johnson majority, with growing opposition to the Democratic President within his own party.
Richard Nixon, argues Perlstein, was perfectly poised to take advantage of this political discontent. Many believed that Nixon was, indeed, done with politics following his defeats in the 1960 Presidential campaign and 1962 California Gubernatorial race. Yet, the former Vice-President was looking for an opportunity to re-enter the political arena, and this opening was offered by the growing social, class, ethnic, generational, gender, and regional divisions of the late 1960s. Nixon, Perlstein maintains, was able to exploit increasing animosity by white Southerners, ethnics, and suburbanites that a liberal and cultural elite were ignoring the needs of ordinary Americans, while catering to the demands of minorities and spoiled college students who were not willing to serve the nation in Vietnam as their elders had during the Second World War. Employing some of the psychological interpretations developed by Fawn Brodie in her biography of Nixon, Perlstein argues that Nixon identified with these disaffected Americans whom he would later label the silent majority.
Perlstein depicts Nixon as the perennial outsider who worked in his father’s struggling grocery store and attended small Whittier College in California rather than an elite institution such as Harvard. While at Whittier, Nixon organized a fraternity he termed the Orthogonians to challenge the Franklins, who “were well-rounded, graceful, moved smoothly, talked slickly.” Nixon’s club was “for the strivers, those not to manner born, the commuter students like him. He persuaded his fellows that reveling in one’s unpolish was a nobility of its own” (22).
The Franklin-Orthogonian dichotomy is used by Perlstein to characterize Nixon’s political life. Ever the outsider, Nixon attended Duke Law School rather than an Ivy League school, and after graduation he could not find employment with a prestigious Wall Street firm. Following military service in World War II and election to Congress in 1946, Nixon first made his mark nationally with his leading role in HUAC’s investigation of Alger Hiss, whom Nixon identified as one of the culturally elite Franklins. The Hiss case helped propel Nixon to the Senate and Vice-Presidency, but Eisenhower almost dumped the young man from California due to allegations of illegal campaign contributions. Nixon saved himself with the self-pity of his Checkers speech in which the candidate cast himself as an Orthogonian beset by elites who would deny his wife, Pat a new coat and his children a pet dog. Perlstein concludes that the Nixon of the Checkers speech resonated even better with discontented Americans during the late 1960s. Nixon was one of them—a victim of the liberals and cultural elitists just like the rest of middle America.
As the nation was torn asunder by violence in 1968, Nixon, thus, emerged as the law and order candidate who would bring peace with honor to Vietnam, while taking a tough stance against protesters breaking the law and assuring Southerners that desegregation would not be pursued through “forced busing”—positions undercutting the third party candidacy of George Wallace. Achieving a narrow victory in 1968, Nixon remained insecure. Perceiving the media as his enemy and out of step with the American people, Nixon unleashed Vice-President Spiro Agnew’s attacks upon the “nattering nabobs of negativism” within the nation’s leading television networks and newspapers. Perlstein is critical of what he perceives as the media’s retreat during a time when the Nixon administration merited a closer monitoring by the fourth estate in service of democracy and the people’s right to know.
Perlstein chronicles how the insecurity of the Nixon administration culminated in the Watergate crisis. The “dirty tricks” employed by Nixon operatives resulted in the Democrats nominating George McGovern, the candidate Nixon most wanted to face in the 1972 general election. Nixon was able to portray McGovern as the candidate of pot, protest, and abortion, obscuring discussion of economic policies and Vietnam. In the short run, Nixon was able to secure re-election, but the uncovering of his political tactics led to the President’s resignation. Nevertheless, Perlstein asserts that the divisive politics, focusing upon cultural symbols rather than economic interest, unleashed by Nixon still dominate political discourse. He dedicates his book to “the memory of the dozens of Americans who lost their lives at the hands of other Americans, for ideological reasons, between the year s of 1965 and 1972.” Perlstein concludes with the hope that political and cultural disagreements will never again lead to such violence, but he pessimistically notes that we still live in Nixonland.
Critics of Perlstein’s study will note that while the 1960s were turbulent, divisions over race, gender, and class are hardly unique to that decade of American history. One only needs to remember the American Revolution, slavery, Indian Wars, Civil War, social and industrial unrest of the 1890s, and the Great Depression to recognize that there is a legacy of conflict beyond the designs of Richard Nixon. Also, Perlstein is open to criticism for downplaying the role of the ostensibly affable Ronald Reagan in fostering the politics of division, but there is no denying that Perlstein’s massive volume makes for a fascinating read. It is not so much that Perlstein introduces new information and interpretations, but that he is a fine writer who is able to deftly utilize media accounts in the recreation of a fascinating period in American history whether or not one agrees with the label Nixonland.
Friday, August 1, 2008
Zachary J. Lechner: Review of Anthony Lewis's Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment (Basic Books, 2008)
Source: Special to HNN (8-1-08)
[Zachary J. Lechner is a Ph.D. candidate at Temple University .]
Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment is part of Basic Books’ “Basic Ideas” series in which “a leading authority offers a concise biography of a text that transformed its world, and ours.” The authority here is Anthony Lewis, law professor, former New York Times columnist, Pulitzer Prize winner, and author of the bestselling 1964 classic Gideon’s Trumpet and the 1992 work Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment.
Writing for a popular audience, he makes no great revelations in this new book, though drawing on judicial opinions and secondary scholarship, he offers a concise, useful volume on one of Americans’ most cherished and misunderstood legal rights.
Lewis delineates his main argument over the course of twelve chapter essays on the judicial history of the First Amendment. He asserts that the amendment did not arrive fully articulated when the Framers added the Bill of Rights to the proposed Constitution in 1787. Rather, its meaning took shape over time through a series of Supreme Court rulings. Not until 1931 did the Court invoke the amendment in order to protect free expression. The First Amendment “has no discernable history,” Lewis explains, meaning that justices have no record of the Framers’ intentions. So calls for original intent hit a dead end. Lewis focuses mainly on judges, who, he maintains, are influenced by their social surroundings when rendering decisions. He also writes about the significance of other actors—political leaders and citizens—in driving debates about the First Amendment. Judges function as the heroes in Lewis’s book, but he emphasizes that they have frequently ignored or upheld legislative and executive challenges to the right of Americans to think and express themselves.
Lewis opens by chronicling the way dissent was repressed in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England and in colonial America. One of the major instruments was seditious libel, which criminalized publications critical of either the church or the state. Leaders reasoned that such writings would demean authority and rupture the bonds of civil society. Over the first four chapters, Lewis ably charts the historical controversy over seditious libel. In a nation guarded by freedom of expression, this restriction seems incompatible. President John Adams and the Federalists used the concept as justification for the Sedition Act of 1798. This legislation enabled them to fine and imprison their political enemies. The American voters in the “Revolution of 1800,” not the Supreme Court, Lewis clarifies, nullified this legislation. Similarly, in a context of war and fears of Bolshevism, justices upheld the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. The Supreme Court in fact did not put the issue of seditious libel to rest until its ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan in 1964.
Lewis describes the importance of Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Louis D. Brandeis in pushing the Court to sustain the constitutional guarantee of free speech. Between 1919 and 1929 they issued a series of groundbreaking dissents. These laid the path for the Court’s later rulings protecting freedom of expression. The decision in the case of Stromberg v. California (1931) marked the first time the high court struck down a statute on the foundation that it violated the First Amendment. The Court, Lewis states, determined “that free speech was a basic American value, that repression was not to be tolerated to prevent some dim and distant bad tendency.”
The outcome of New York Times v. Sullivan further emboldened defenders of free expression. Seditious libel was dead. No longer could Americans be imprisoned for criticizing a political leader. Common law had compelled defendants to prove the truth of their claim. The judiciary reversed this difficult burden. It now required the plaintiff to prove the falsity of a claim as well as the defendant’s knowledge of the untruth. The Court made an even larger statement in Sullivan. “What had always been a matter of state law,” Lewis points out, “became, in most cases, a subject that turned on federal constitutional law.”
Specifically, the Sullivan decision empowered the press to report freely on the civil rights movement. In subsequent topical chapters, Lewis devotes considerable attention to press freedom and judicial discussions regarding how far that freedom should be extended, especially when it infringes on personal privacy. The Court, however, has refused to allow the press to use truth as an unmitigated defense against privacy interests. Lewis calls for balance. He sides with the late Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., who located the central meaning of the First Amendment in the right to censure the government, not to print anything and everything about non-political figures. Indeed, Lewis is apprehensive about a press that joins with the government to invade citizens’ privacy. Ultimately, he believes, a free society necessitates a compromise between freedom of expression and the right to privacy.
Lewis further details the intersection of journalism and freedom of expression with a penetrating analysis of press privilege. In the Branzburg v. Hayes (1972) decision, the Supreme Court determined that journalists could not invoke the First Amendment to avoid having to testify before a grand jury. The ruling denied press privilege, and the Court has subsequently refused to revisit the issue. Nevertheless, journalists continue to claim special protections under the First Amendment.
Lewis asserts that the Framers surely did not equate “journalists” with “the press,” as professional journalism as we know it today did not exist in the eighteenth century. “The press” probably encompassed publishers of pamphlets, books, and newspapers. Lewis takes a middle-ground position on whether or not journalists can be required to reveal their sources. The notion of “qualified privilege” was outlined in 2005 by David Tatel, a United States Court of Appeals judge for the District of Columbia Circuit. Elucidating Tatel’s position, Lewis writes,
[C]ourts should balance the interest in compelling discourse, measured by the harm the leak caused, against the public interest in newsgathering, measured by the leaked information’s value. Thus, for example, if the government wanted to learn who leaked the story of President Bush’s order for wiretapping without required warrants, a court would weigh the harm caused by that leak against the importance of the information to the public. In my view the latter would plainly prevail, and the reporters would have a privilege not to disclose their sources.
This moderate stance, Lewis contends, would usually but not always shelter the press. He describes the 2003 contempt proceedings against Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matt Cooper of Time. Both journalists cited press privilege in refusing to identify the person who leaked to them covert CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity. Based on qualified privilege, and in this instance, Lewis convincingly and succinctly defends the public’s right to know. It is a good example of his nuanced consideration of the First Amendment’s guarantees and their social ramifications.
Before returning to the subject of the press, Lewis devotes chapters to obscenity and to the use of fear to suppress free expression. The federal government, he writes, has often justified interferences with civil liberties and the First Amendment as necessary wartime measures. In contrast, he describes the Vietnam War-era Court’s more vigorous protection of civil liberties. We are left to wonder why the justices defended the First Amendment in this conflict and not others.
My question points to the major drawback of Freedom for the Thought that We Hate—the author’s failure to rely adequately on social and cultural contexts for each case. Lewis certainly indicates, as any good textbook would, for example, the political expediency behind the Alien and Sedition Acts and the Cold War culture in which the 1950s courts functioned. It is common sense that Supreme Court cases and decisions are products of their times. In the introduction, Lewis suggests that he will go beyond this truism. He states that “great judges” recognized the broad social benefits of free expression, yet he insists, “judicial commitment to openness of expression grew as citizens’ did; each informed the other.” I’m intrigued by this idea, but Lewis is short on examples.
Furthermore, he leaves significant questions unanswered: How do judges’ political orientations influence their legal outlooks? (Surprisingly, Lewis generally ignores this important dynamic.) When are judges merely the products of their times, and when do they break free of prevailing societal constraints? And most essential: In terms of judges, the press, and other non-judicial actors, who influences whom, and when, and why? Perhaps in the introduction Lewis simply should have avoided making an argument about legal change and the public. Such an investigation would necessitate a complex weaving together of legal, social, and cultural history. In such a short survey, with so much territory to cover, that is a tall order for even as gifted a legal scholar as Lewis.
This criticism aside, strong insights abound in Freedom for the Thought That We Hate, particularly in the final chapters. Lewis explores hate speech, balancing freedom of the press with a fair trial, free speech and political campaigns, and the role of the press in a democratic society. He savages the post-9/11 media’s failure to ask the Bush Administration tough questions on torture and the imprisonment of suspected terrorists without trial. He portrays journalists as seduced by power; they are a pale reflection of the fiercely independent and skeptical men and women who distinguished their profession during the Vietnam and Watergate years. Although he maintains his disappointment with the contemporary media, Lewis does acknowledge its close scrutiny of the recent wiretapping controversy, which helped journalists break free of their “deferential” point of view.
Many readers will share his concerns. They may find some of his other opinions more problematic. For instance, Lewis calls for restrictions on exhortations of terrorist violence. The Supreme Court has protected speech unless it involves incitements to violence that pose an imminent threat. “I think we should be able to punish speech that urges terrorist violence to an audience some of whose members are ready to act on the urging,” the author reasons. "That is imminence enough.” As with many free expression controversies, there is no easy answer.
While one can disagree with Lewis’s various stances on First Amendment issues, there is no denying his larger claim that “the freedoms of speech and of the press have never been absolutes.” They evolved over time to occupy a central place in the American constitutional law. Lewis concludes that above all else the First Amendment demands bravery from the press and judges. The judiciary, despite notable exceptions, has pushed American society in a progressive direction, forcing it to live up to its constitutional ideals—pay no mind, he advises, to the misguided critics of “activist” courts. The courage and openness demanded by free expression are, for Lewis, indispensable to the proper functioning of a democratic society. His short study of the First Amendment’s history reminds us of the malleability of its fourteen words and their need for vigilant safeguarding.