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12/17/2007
Personal Asides: Some Republicans Would Rather Harpoon Huckabee than Win….Well What is it—Resume or Non-Resume Running for President?...”Max” Wants to Know: Where Do the Numbers Come From…Correction: The “Des Moines” Editor is Reminiscent of—Not Nurse...  | | Herbert C. Hoover, hands down best resume holder, wonderful guy personally and one of the worst presidents in history. |
Huckabee.
“We don’t smoke/ And we don’t chew/ And we don’t go/With girls who do!”
That seems to be the attitude of the white shoe Republicans who want a vice presidential candidate to run with Romney or Giuliani (though Romney is more likely to get the nomination for president) than a blue-colored, witty, phrase-making former 2-term governor who was listed as one of the best governors in the United States. I’m talking about Mike Huckabee who would bring great strength to the ticket and should be cast in the role of vice president if they could work things out-so that he would drop the Fair Tax and be a loyal campaigner-partner.
Tsk-tsk. Country club Republicans are spreading this stuff right now about Huckabee. Do you know that as governor he objected to a 15-year-old girl who was raped by her stepfather having a court-ordered abortion? Of course-abortion is the taking of a human life which is what country clubbers can’t bring themselves to recognize or admit. Do you really want to be governed by somebody who suggested quarantining all people with AIDS? In the early days of this infection no one knew how contagious it was for sure and AIDS is still a sacred cow because of its closeness to homosexuality. (Digression item: Did you see that article in the “Catholic New World” where Catholic Charities is going to “honor” AIDS victims? Honor them? Do they honor cancer victims? Stroke victims? AIDS patients ought to be given solace, full medical treatment, compassion, understanding, the full extent of counseling--but “honor”? Do you “honor” cigarette smokers who come down with lung cancer? Or an obese guy who continued eating until he had a heart attack? “Honoring” AIDS victims is endemic of the abject lavender political correctness that’s hit the church. End of digression).
Back to Huckabee. Do you know that although it’s ethically okay in Arkansas-gifts being exempt from ethics laws as it was under Bill Clinton as governor--Huckabee got $112,000 in freebies in a single year as governor
…including, get this, a wedding registry at Target, a $39 asparagus pot, a $100 Jack LaLanne power juicer and a $259 cookware set. How awful.
Also that he said he has a theology degree when he has not? In the last debate he said, “I’m the only guy on the stage with a theology degree. I think I understand [terrorism] well.. Republican white-shoe purists swarmed all over that one. He has a bachelor of arts in religion in his undergraduate studies so his theology degree is at the college level. Since then he put in 46 hours toward a masters-three years of study in New Testament Greek. Anybody else have that?
The point I’m making is not that he should be the presidential candidate but to get white-shoe Republicans to understand that this next year may well equal 1974, the Watergate year, for Republicans. What you do is get a full-fledged expert on the economy, law and governance to run for president and build toward broadening the ticket for vice president. For some reason or other neither Romney, Giuliani or Thompson have the pull with evangelicals that Huckabee has. Get him to ditch the Fair Tax and give him two terms to be vice president and you have another candidate with proven communications skills and experience to be president. Why is that so hard for white-shoe people to understand?
Resume vs. Non-Resume.
One of my close friends asked me: which is it? At one time you said resumes don’t mean much in the arsenal of a presidential candidate and the next time you cited the power resumes of Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. Which is it?
The answer is political candidates are not governed by absolutes. Obviously when you’re running a five-star general who led the greatest invasion in world history and conquered the Axis…and who had never run for office…you cite the resume as indispensable. But resumes don’t necessarily mean much. Take for instance the holder of this resume who ran for president:
This man was the youngest student ever admitted to this particular university and hadn’t even received a high school diploma but who was picked for this major university as a freshman because of his high achievement…who matched superb grades with terrific extracurricular participation-elected junior class treasurer, treasurer of the student body, outstanding shortstop on the university baseball team, working his way up as newsboy and clerk in the registration office and starting up the student laundry service…during the summer between freshman and sophomore years working as a geologist mapping the north side of the Ozarks…who also managed the university’s baseball team and who, when a former president of the United States came on campus and ducked into the stadium to catch the baseball game without paying the ticket, approached him and dinged him for the ticket eliciting this from the former president: “You will go far, young man!”
After graduating with high honors pushed ore carts 70 hours a week at a gold mine near Nevada City, California…landed a modest office job and hired by a mining company as an engineer at Coolgardie, Australia where he wsa responsible for inspecting and evaluating mines before purchase…transferred to China serving as an enginer in Chihli and Johol provinces…finding huge coal deposits there…helped defend his company’s interests during the Boxer Rebellion....going to Australia to develop highly lucrative zinc mines…then developing the Bawdwin silver mine in Burma where he became a multi-millionaire at age 28…forming his own company in development of world resources becoming a two-digit multi-millionaire so that he need never work again at 32…
In his mid-30s he is tapped by the president of the United States as U.S. food administrator for which he declines pay…become a symbol of U.S. humanitarianism in World War I and top economic adviser to President Wilson at the Versailles conference, causing FDR to volunteer to campaign for him if he were to seek the presidency as a Democrat…named secretary of commerce, he impels the department to engage in a wide range of testing services unique to government, the Census bureau to expand its questioning to add invaluable economic and social data previously unknown…sets up the first regulation for commercial aviation…instrumental in convincing the U.S. steel industry to abandon the 12-hour workday, pressed for construction of Boulder Dam. All before he received the Republican nomination for president at the age of 54.
Now compare this resume to that of his opponent. The New York-born son of a teamster, with such little formal education that well into his adult years could hardly spell correctly or write a sentence that didn’t need editorial revising, worked from childhood on at the Fulton Fish Market, joining Tammany Hall the Democratic party’s machine base, running for the legislature, then sheriff of New York county, then president of the New York city board of aldermen and finally governor of New York. All his jobs from adolescent years onward were political patronage jobs. Laughed and said he was a graduate of “the University of Hard Knocks.” Spoke with a lowbrow New York accent, laughed at because he couldn’t even pronounce the name “radio” correctly, calling it “ra-a-a-d-io” becoming the Democratic nominee for president at age 55. Almost no contest, right?
The one with the infinitely better resume won-Herbert Hoover. By all odds one of the best-meaning but ineffective presidents ever, who raised taxes during the Depression, utterly the worst thing to do, signed the Smoot Hawley tariff that he thought would protect U.S. farmers from foreign competition; instead it launched a world-wide tariff war, telling Americans “prosperity is just around the corner.” Could his opponent Al Smith whom he defeated 58% to 41% have done better. He could hardly have done worse. As governor he bought about the 8-hour workday, minimum wage, workmen’s compensation, a state labor arbitration commission, promoted the rights of women and immigrants, cleared slums, extended medical services to rural areas, built schools, hospitals, prisons and parks and established a state budget system. Given Hoover’s egregious mistakes the ill-educated, so-called political hack Smith could well have been superior in the White House.
I guess the point is this: Apart from someone who has a 5-star resume and is hailed as the savior of the West, one shouldn’t concentrate unduly on a resume. That’s all I was saying. Maybe I should have made it clearer.
Max Wants to Know.
A correspondent to this website named Max wants to know where I got the statistics I used last seek in demolishing Democratic assertions on the economy. They are published in “The American,” the magazine of the AEI Public Policy Institute. November-December 2007 issue in an article by Stephen Moore, senior economics writer for the “Wall Street Journal,” a member of its editorial board and contributor to CNBC-TV.
Correction: Not Nurse Ratched but--.
The other day I wrote that the severely feminist Des Moines “Register” editor who was the Dominitrix with a whip and spurs reminded one of Nurse Ratched in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Not as much as she did Nurse Diesel in Mel Brooks’ film “High Anxiety.” Sorry.
| | | Flashback: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back, Gene Vacillates but Then Katzenbach Says the Tonkin Resolution Committed the Senate Irrevocably to the War and Nothing Can be Done About it: That Did It.
[Fifty plus years of politics written for my kids and grandchildren.]
Proceeding haltingly, two steps forward and one step back, in 1967 Gene McCarthy moved close to entering the presidential contest. He seemed to be relishing the interest he was drawing. On February 28 he told a student gathering at the University of Minnesota that the war “is morally unjustifiable” and publicly asked the president “to look what we are doing in Vietnam.” A few days later, on March 5, speaking in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina he made a strong proposal-to give up trying to negotiate a way out of Vietnam and begin “disengagement” which meant a first step to withdrawing.
When Johnson asked Gen. William Westmoreland to appear before Congress to give a report on Vietnam, McCarthy said it was a “dangerous practice” to have a military commander make a case which would not just involve military tactics but political matters, denouncing the move as “escalation of language, method and emotions.” In May he defended the right of dissent saying, “What we are really asking from the people of this country is heroic virtue-and no one has the right to ask for heroic virtue unless he has done everything to prevent conditions from developing in which that kind of virtue is called upon.” It was developed by Fr. Godfrey Diekmann OSB in concert with McCarthy.
But a very important session…as far as campaign money was concerned…was private and occurred on March 22, 1967 in the Manhattan apartment of 74-year=old Thomas Finletter. Finletter, the second secretary of the air force (named by Truman) was a Philadelphia mainline Brahmin, was a key contact for wealthy donors to Stevenson. Finletter had had a distinguished career in the state department and Pentagon and now practiced leisurely at the influential Courdert law firm. He was a leader of the New York “reform” movement and a key to a lot of liberal Democratic money. Purpose of the meeting was to get McCarthy to commit to run for president against Johnson. Russell Hemenway, head of the National Committee for an Effective Congress was there along with John Shea, an influential Wall Street lawyer.
McCarthy listened to their importuning of him to run. His press secretary, my friend, Art Michelson, was there that night and heard McCarthy say “No matter how much the Senate might do [in opposing Johnson’s plans on the war], Lyndon Johnson will not be moved unless someone challenges him for president. That is the only thing he will understand.” When asked whether Bobby Kennedy would run, Gene said he thought Kennedy would not: it was too great a risk and that Kennedy wanted to ensure a more united Democratic party later when he would make a move.
Everybody left Finletter’s apartment thinking Gene would run but two days later he had a change of heart. He had heard that Bobby was seriously interested in running and he wanted to show that he (Gene) was not looking at it just as a personal opportunity. He met with James Wechsler of “The New York Post” who had attended the earlier meeting with Schlesinger and Galbraith and told him that if Bobby ran he (Gene) would support him. Bobby was too sophisticated to believe this and told Wechsler not for publication that the very last person he would count on were he to make the decision to run would be Gene McCarthy. By June, 1967 Gene seemed to be drifting. Named chairman of the African affairs subcommittee of Foreign Relations his mind seemed taken up with his new responsibility-but he was also absorbed with the overheated climate of violence in U. S. urban ghettoes: Detroit, Newark, Washington.
McCarthy questioned whether the nation could afford “guns and butter,” saying, “we must set some priorities even though the secretary of defense recently was quoted as saying we are capable of fighting another war of the magnitude of Vietnam.’
He added this: “We can put off our pursuits of the supersonic transport and slow down our efforts to reach the moon, if need be. It will not go away and we now know what it is made of.” Jocular reference to the old children’s nursery rhyme that the moon is made of green cheese. It was about this time, summer of 1967. that I spent a goodt deal of time in Washington, sometimes a week at a stretch, lobbying on a host of items for Quaker and saw quite a great deal of Gene and his key staffers who were St. John’s men. During that time Gene got a lot of publicity serving on a special ethics committee and he shared a lot of his insights with me.
“Never Keep a Guy Who Stays in the Office After You Go Home.”
It was the time of the Tom Dodd ethics hearing. McCarthy was one of six senators named to an ethics panel to investigate the ethics of the senior Connecticut senator who was the father of the current senator and presidential candidate, Chris Dodd. The story of Tom Dodd was this. Brilliant lawyer, a top assistant to no fewer than five U.S. attorneys general. Then after World War II, sent as a top prosecutor to Nuremberg, Germany as a major assistant to Justice Robert Jackson who was trying Nazi criminals. When the trials were over they had convicted all but three of the defendants.
Dodd went to the U. S. House. Then when Democratic Sen. . Abe Ribicoff retired, his successor in the Senate. He was a father figure to his staff, a ruddy-faced old Irishman, severely moral in his family life, an economic liberal and, in fashion of U.S. Catholicism at the time, a Democrat who was also a red hot anti-Communist. Dodd developed a reputation for hard-work in the Senate and a staff that worked seemingly around the clock to perform constituent and other services for those back home. Two crack administrators were his top assistant (male) and Dodd’s personal secretary (female) who worked together like clockwork.
White-haired and upright at all times, Dodd was kind to his staff, though patriarchal and took a grandfatherly interest in their lives. He could be censorious when things weren’t done according to Hoyle. But he relied very heavily on his staff and who delegated much to them. Two who supervised the operation and seemingly worked around the clock to see that things went smoothly, earning Dodd the reputation of having one of the finest offices in Washington, were his administrative assistant and his personal secretary.
Stunningly, these two brought charges against him for double billing private corporations that (legally at that time, of course) had contracted for him to make speeches and receive honoraria and a host of things that showed a venal quality: penny ante cheating the government, that kind of thing. Why-- when Dodd regarded the administrative assistant and a kind of son and his secretary with such affection as a daughter? Here’s why.
Late one night Tom Dodd left the office and…as per usual…the two dedicated staffers volunteered to stay late to get out a report that was needed shortly. They were known to have put in an all-nighter if need be-the words with a vastly different meaning to them than to Dodd. Dodd was edified at their work habits. That night Dodd left the office, jumped in his car and drove halfway home to the Washington suburbs when he discovered he had forgotten his briefcase and turned back. When he returned to his office he found the administrative assistant and his secretary “in flagrante delicto” on his couch. Dodd raised the roof with them, demanded to know how long this had been going on, raged and threatened at one point to tell their spouses on them. They were contrite and tearful. He made them promise never to consort again. He thundered that if this happened one more time they’d be fired. In a rage he sent them home.
He took the role of the solemn but forgiving father and said he wouldn’t tell their spouses. In revenge, they conspired to get back at Dodd by going through his files and producing minor and major discrepancies to embarrass the old man. It was thought that Dodd had never told them to cover up but as previously loyal workers they had done it anyhow-just to avoid trouble for him and themselves. Now they publicized it and it produced a storm. But they had the goods on old Tom. The brouhaha led to the Senate appointing a special ethics panel to decide what to do about Tom. Everybody in the Senate felt queasy since they had staffers, presumably loyal, who were watching the procedure and many senators thought that if they would be unduly harsh on old Tom their malcontented staffers might pull the same ting on them. So going in, the idea on the panel was to go easy on old Tom.
Gene, Jerry Eller and I would dine quite a few nights in Washington while the ethics hearing were going on…on my company’s ticket (yes-yes-yes ethically okay then) at the posh Montpelier Room of the Madison Hotel. Eller was not famous for working hard in the office-nor was Gene. But they were a convivial pair, more like two father and son, with a great weakness for puns, stories of the old St. John’s (with which I would join in), friendly conspirators and cynics about the senatorial process.
“What you do when you want to choose an administrative assistant, is to be sure he has early habits-coming to work after you arrive and leaving before you do?” asked McCarthy drolly one night at the table. “In fact I will go so far as to say that you want to fire an administrative assistant who works in the office long after you go home. I don’t have to worry about this with old Jerry here.” Meaning that Dodd’s trouble was with two so-called workaholics who found themselves in love working late nights. Jerry was not one to work hard at all, although, like Gene, he was sort of a brilliant quick study. He was sort of like a Hollywood star, going to bed very late, getting up with a hangover, dawdling around the house with his wife and kids until mid-morning and coming to the office at about 10 a.m. and checking out before 4:30 p.m. Having Michelson in the office was worse-they usually formed a sardonic trio. Usually Gene had left before the hour or 4 and was over at the Carroll Arms coffee shop swapping yarns and martinis with one or more of The Little Sisters of the Media. As a result their office drew the reputation of being leisurely in the extreme but witty, fun-loving and the place to go to pick up one-liners ridiculing both parties and the Senate.
We would meet for dinner almost every night at the Montpelier Room during the ethics hearings for quite a stretch and usually share old stories from college, kidding about the professors we knew. I wondered but didn’t ask: why no Abigail? Well, Eller’s wife wasn’t there either.
How would Gene rule on the Dodd case? I thought he’d go easy on Dodd. Gene’s demeanor on human imperfections was usually so tolerant, I expected the political realist in him would entertain a spirit of forgiveness for old Tom.
At first this seemed to be the case. The question was whether Dodd would get a rebuke or slap on the wrist-or out-and-out censure. Censure would virtually end his career. At first it seemed Gene favored a mere rebuke. After all Dodd’s record was seemingly impeccable-and the cause of his downfall was his catching his administrative assistant and his personal secretary in adultery which led them to joint vindictiveness. And Senators almost always allowed their staffs to prepare their ethics statements and see that the books are straight. In addition these two worked on his campaign bookkeeping (which in those days was not forbidden). Everyone familiar with legislative files could easily concoct a case of favors being done which in returns triggered favors in return, mostly contributions. There is no lawmaker above this in either party.
At the first of several dinners, Gene seemed favorable to the idea of a rebuke.
But a self-appointed defender came before the ethics committee appeared--a lion of the Senate, Russell Long. While Long was the son of the late Huey Long, he had built a reputation in the Senate of overwhelming legislative majesty and expertise. Normally having Long on your side would be a good thing; Long was hugely respected and had great expertise on tax policy and power which he freely exerted as chairman of Senate Finance on which Gene also served (and with whom Gene agreed on the tax depletion allowance). Normally having Long in Dodd’s corner should have gotten Dodd off with a rebuke. Censure was the sentence that had been meted out to Joe McCarthy who had become toxic in the Senate to both sides. .
But coincident with Long’s appearance, Gene took the sudden position that Dodd deserved censure. Long made his case for Dodd in the committee with a brilliant display of pyrotechnics that brought tears and laughter to the committee and for a time it looked like Long would get Dodd off. After all, politicians are leery of assailing one of their number of having loose ethics, worrying that a payback might hit them. Playing fast and loose with campaign funds was, at that time, a game almost everybody did (except John Williams of Delaware). It was endemic in the system. Art Michelson, the indispensable press secretary to Gene seemed, after all, to have been paid by Howard Stein, CEO of the Dreyfus fund as either a corporate expenditure of a personal one without annotation-at least that’s what Michelson had hinted very broadly to me.
But just as the committee was ready to go into executive session to deliberate its verdict, Gene showed up in a grim mood. After ordering his regular martini (very dry), he said:
“If the committee fails to censure Dodd, I’ll resign and go public about the Senate’s lousy ethics.”
Wow. That was a stunner. I’ve often wondered why. I remember that first he was sorry for Dodd and rather sarcastic about the machinations of Dodd’s staffers that brought the matter to light. Then Long got involved in the defense. Was it that he finally decided that Dodd was corrupt, which hardly seemed to be the case compared to the standard of the Senate at that time. Or was it that Long, Hubert’s friend of friends, was defending Dodd? Or that Dodd allowed himself to be used by Lyndon Johnson when Gene opted out of the vice presidential pickings at the Atlantic City convention of 1964 where Gene ended up feeling humiliated (Dodd having agreed to fly to Washington with Hubert so that there would be a pair of senators from which LBJ would pick one)?
I told him that for what it was worth every single administrative assistant probably knew enough about funny financing of his boss to put him in disrepute-Eller included, which was not very diplomatic to say but they knew what I meant. I didn’t mention Michelson’s employment. Well I lost. Gene was determined to do what he wanted to do.
Gene went to the committee the next morning and did exactly that. After he said he’d resign from the ethics committee and blow the whistle, Dodd was a cooked goose. Everybody started thinking of how bad they would look-so they censured Tom Dodd. That night after he scored big headlines with his statement, I said that from now on if a senator or congressman would have any foreboding of sexual impropriety, he’d shut up. I asked Gene and Eller: what kind of morality is that?
They said: not relevant.
Not relevant? Anyhow that’s how it worked out. Dodd was censured and the censure carried through to the whole Senate. Dodd said he wouldn’t run again. Not long afterward Dodd had a major heart attack. As a private citizen he died shortly afterward of a second major attack.
Later, a staffer to Russell Long told me Long believed that two reasons caused Gene to do this. First that he-Long-had defended him since Long was a close friend and former classmate at Louisiana State of Hubert Humphrey. And second that Dodd went along on the flight with Hubert from Atlantic City to Washington, D.C. which produced the media play that Hubert benefited in.
We’ll never know.
Not long after that Gene got himself sort of embroiled in an ethics case-although not as spectacular as Dodd’s but it smacked of a Long payback and Eller said definitely it was. On the Finance committee, Russell Long, the chairman, tried to get an amendment passed to a bill that would require the feds to purchase drugs by their generic names rather than the more expensive brand names for the new Medicare program. Gene voted to table it-the vote seen by Long and others as a clear sop by McCarthy to the pharmaceutical lobby. Gene’s close political friend and one who went to St. John’s with me was his former legislative assistant, Larry Merthan, was the chief lobbyist for Pfizer, one of the largest drug manufacturers in the world. Gene’s point on the committee was that the matter of generic drugs should “be studied.” Why “studied” as the drugs would be the same and just cost far less? Long left the room for a long time (long enough to do some checking). After an initial vote favored tabling, he said--with an eye on Gene--that by God people who feel so strongly about ethics that they would crucify Tom Dodd might find that the sword is double-edged, indicating strongly Long would speak up about the role of the drug industry over some members-mentioning Pfizer by name.
At the next go round, Gene tossed in his cards and voted for generic, then voted to send the bill to the floor. His bluff was called. But the game wasn’t over yet. The bill passed the Senate with generic in; the House had generic out. And lo and behold the House-Senate conference agreed to keep generic out until the study favored by Gene was completed. Somebody was very active behind the scenes.
It took a long time but generic purchases by the government were approved, but Gene never explained his purpose on that initial vote.
Back to the War and Katzenbach is the Deciding Factor.
But all these things were in the background. After Gene returned to Washington from a speech in Minnesota where despite everything he had been quoted as saying “I am a reasonably good supporter of the administration by and large,” something happened to make that statement inoperative. Gene’s old enemy, Nicholas Katzenbach, under-secretary of state and former U. S. attorney general testified before Foreign Relations on August 17. 1967 that whether Congress had changed its mind on Vietnam was moot. By voting for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, Congress had supplied “the functional equivalent” to a declaration of war, he said. In the midst of the testimony, McCarthy stalked from the room visibly angry. Later at dinner he told us the die was cast. I decided he meant that he would run for president.
What he told us he told to Ned Kenworthy of “The New York Times.” He said, “This is the wildest testimony I ever heard. There is no limit to what he says the president can do. There is only one thing to do-take it to the country.”
A short time later, Gene called Finletter and told him all systems were go. He would run and Finletter should start the money operation.
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12/14/2007
Personal Asides: The Worst Debate of All-Time…The U. S. Bishops’ First Job: Get Rid of the USCCB…Give Joe McCarthy Some Credit—but Easy on the Total Rehab Stuff.  | | Joe McCarthy: Needs a retouch not a rehab. |
Worst Debate.
Without being sexist about it, it’s been my experience that something happens to a woman when you put her in charge of a political debate. In 1977 I became president of The City Club of Chicago and continue as its chairman today and from that era on candidates have dreaded and feared any debate put on by the League of Women Voters whom none other than David Axelrod called the league of women vultures. So we at the City Club never had a woman run a debate and thus have acquitted ourselves well in that department. I don’t hear much about LWV debates any more but I assume they have passed out of existence. Whenever there are candidatorial debates the League is wisely avoided as main coverage and other civic organizations pitch in.
What is the rap about a woman running a debate? The League of Women Vultures would always insist on such strict rules that they utterly precluded anyone deriving sense and clarification of thought out of such events. Now take a look at that atrocity of several nights ago when “The Des Moines Register” hosted a Republican debate. As the sole dominatrix came a woman with a Buster Brown haircut and a whip and spurs: Nurse Ratched. She was Carolyn Washburn, editor of “The Register.” Given that we have come some 2,500 years after the Greeks invented democracy, Carolyn’s madhouse was testimony that giving a woman power to elicit or shut down speech of men is a near aphrodisiac for any female.
Believe it or not she demanded a show of hands at one point rather than an expression of views. As the sole proprietor of the debate, she did not entertain any questions to the candidates whatever about Iraq or immigration. No one on the stage changed their standings but the event was a total disaster. Also how Alan Keyes got onto the stage is beyond me. He is the only one I have ever seen who in the space of 10 seconds allotment for answer can start out roaring angry. Keyes is a brilliant man whom I would rather have U. S. Senator than Obama but he has become a camp-follower in Republican presidential efforts who makes money the way Harold Stassen did by running for president, collecting funds and converting them to a means that somehow or other-through legal but highly imaginative means-are converted to the use of his private industry which is running for president or any other office he can determine.
U. S. Bishops.
Now that Francis Cardinal George has been elected as head of the Catholic bishops’ trade association, the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, he would immensely please a diverse group within the Church ranging from Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Nebraska on the right to Anne Burke, the former interim head of the National Review Board in the center-two people who are so widely divergent as to imagine a tent has not been constructed broad enough to hold them both. Bishop Bruskewitz whom I deeply admire is a gutsy scholar, authenticist prelate and canon lawyer who believes the USCCB should be abolished. Anne Burke is a talented lawyer, state Supreme Court Justice, indubitably far more centrist or even liberal than Bruskewtiz who feels the USCCB should be abolished.
There is little hope that Cardinal George will do anything like that, however. Talented and intellectual he may be, but those who have been waiting for him to assume the reins of the Chicago archdiocese these ten years of his nondescript tenure now know better than to assume he is a man of decisiveness that would spring from inner conviction. Still, if there have not been abundant earlier reasons for the USCCB to be canned, its woolly-headed film review service, a part of its propaganda arm, Catholic News Service, just gave us another.
This is to bring you up to date on a film that has just been released-a children’s film that hopes to imitate “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” by C. S. Lewis…called “The Golden Compass.” The film which has been just released is based on a series of children’s books, “His Dark Materials,” by British writer Philip Pullman. Pullman is an atheist and is not tepid about it, following in the genre of Christopher Hitchens and Ricahrd Dawkins. Pullman’s intent is to sell atheism and malevolent anti-Catholicism to anyone who can con including children-and the way he intends to do it is by producing a sweet children’s film which has some of his most unsavory bigoted parts disembowled. The game plan involves a $150 million film which will encourage children to buy his trilogy.
Nor is this a charge I am making on supposition. Pullman is famous or notorious for this belief. He says, “I don’t think it’s possible there is a God. I’m trying to undermine the basis of Catholic belief. My books are about killing God. I am all for the death of God. Pullman is nothing if not ambitious. The death of God has long been a watchword among French Revolution protagonists, Nazis and Soviets. Hitler boasted that genocide of Jews was deicide: i.e. by killing Jews he sought to prove the non-existence of God.
Pullman rounded up Random House, Barnes & Noble, Coca-Cola and Burger King to help finance the film. The virulent anti-Catholic message of Pullman’s books has been watered down so it is barely recognizable-although the bad guys belong to what Pullman calls “the evil Magisterium”-an ominous group bent on global domination. The Magisterium to Catholics is nothing less than the teaching authority of the Church. IN the film, agents of the Magisterium refer to certain ideas that are hateful to them as “heresy.” The film is murky, bland and on the surface innocuous-but Pullman’s goal is to have the film…filled with talking animals, flying gypsies, good witches ands the like…lead to purchases of his books. The books concern explicitly with the killing of God (which occurs in the final volume of his trilogy) and characters prattle quotes to young readers such as “The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake” and “In every world, trhe agents of the Magisterium are sacrificing children to their cruel god!” The Magisterium experiments on children, separating them from their true animal spirits (called daemons) and turning them into zombies so as to create a more compliant, docile populace.
No one is calling for the banning of Pullman’s books or his film-but you’d think, would you not, that the film reviewers for the USCCB’s “Catholic News Service” who actually work for a variant of the Church magisterium would be concerned? Harry Forbes and John Mulderig would at least report some of the downsides to the books on which the film is based? Nope, in their review published in “The Catholic New World” this week they give it a laudatory review. Which atheist Pullman can easily use to hornswoggle more viewers and hence more readers. Ah but they give it a pass because “Most moviegoers with no foreknowledge of the books or Pullman’s personal belief system will scarcely be aware of religious connotations and can approach the movie as a pure fantasy adventure…Will seeing this film inspire teens to read the books which many [sic] have found problematic? Rather than banning the movie or books, parents might instead take the opportunity to talk through any thorny philosophical issues with their teens.”
Again, no one is calling for a ban on the film or the books-but giving the film a warmly appreciative review by CNS and hoping that if teens read the anti-Catholicism, their parents will take the effort to instruct them on the verities of the Faith is utterly, utterly stupid.
Not as stupid as an USCCB allowing such a review to be printed. No, chaotically stupid in allowing the USCCB to exist in the first place, with the yes-your-excellencies, no-your-excellencies presiding at contributors’ expense in a marble, expensive palace with a presidium where each has his own little microphone and can join playing UN security council. This we Catholics get for equating apostolic succession with mitered and crosiered elevated pretense ala the UN.
Joe McCarthy.
Just because a revisionist conservative mood is in vogue to rehabilitate those discarded into the dustbin of history whose value sorely need to be burnished and more greatly appreciated…Robert A. Taft being one, my old boss Walter H. Judd another, my friend the late Jim Farmer of CORE, the only Republican in the civil rights quartet otherwise composed of Martin L. King, Whitney Young and Roy Wilkins…meticulous care should be applied to another-Joe McCarthy. A comic book-like partial rehab job has been tried by Ann Coulter but it is wafer-thin. Now, a correspondent urges I review the latest book about him, “Blacklisted by History” by M. Stanton Evans [Crown Forum, 672 pp., $29.95] which undertakes a full-scale re-presentment.
I did not know McCarthy, having come to Washington shortly after he did-but I did know a great many people who had reason to appraise his work including the legendary Tom “Tommy the Cork” Corcoran who moved from being FDR’s top political operative to stalwart anti-Communist and friend of Chiang kai-Shek. Tom Corcoran’s belief was that Joe was at leat 90% right. Judd’s view was that any good Joe did was vastly overshadowed by the general disrepute he brought to the issue of pro-Communism in government. But all the same he-and I-steer clear from the popular media rap on McCarthy--that he was an incorrigible liar and that anyone fortunate enough to have been assailed as a Communist by him has an a-priori case for secular sainthood. That is not remotely the case. Much of the truth is in the middle and Joe McCarthy did not deserve his name made into a curse which is the contribution Owen Lattimore made to obscuring the truth.
Just one incident. As we all know, Joe had nothing whatsoever to do with Alger Hiss although Hiss’ conviction for perjury seemed to confirm in some minds that there was definitely smoke in the kindling. Second, Joe didn’t go around making charges that lots of people were Communist but used other descriptives. Third, his biggest case involved the long forgotten name of Lattimore whom Joe called “an articulate instrument of the Communist conspiracy in America.” There he was indubitably right. Lattimore was cleared by the political whitewash without doubt by the Republican ex-governor of Minnesota Hubert Humphrey convinced President Truman to appoint to the federal bench, Luther Youngdahl. Joe was correct about Lattimore. Lattimore was a shill, a fellow traveler of and an apologist for the USSR and Mao. But later, by insisting that Lattimore had been Hiss’ boss Joe was in error.
Evans’ book errs when it seeks to completely exonerate McCarthy from charges of political overkill and when it fails to give due academic credit to others including Ron Radosh, adjunct fellow of the Hudson Institute whose scholarship Evans appropriates without citation. Also,. Gen. George Marshall was totally wrong on his evaluation of Mao but that doesn’t make him a com-symp. Edward R. Murrow was totally wrong in his documentary when he accused McCarthy of zeroing in on the wrong Annie Lee Moss who worked near the Pentagon’s code room and whom Joe said flatly was a Communist. Murrow showed there were two Annie Lee Mosses and claimed Joe had the wrong Annie Lee Moss: Murrow was the one who was wrong-the Annie Lee Moss Joe cited was, in fact, a Communist and was the right one to designate and should never, ever had clearance to work near the code room.
In his zeal to clear everything about McCarthy, Evans errs in trying to whitewash Cohn and Schine. Their excursion through Europe had them spending the moon on the taxpayers’ dime and their trip was a rather futile one, seeking to find pro-Commie books in embassy libraries. But Evans is right-on when he moves to the Joseph Welch-McCarthy confrontation (although without showing indebtedness to others). Welch was a blowsy, phony Boston lawyer who could wipe away a tear faster than he could excessively bill a client. This tripe about Joe naming a young lawyer on Welch’s staff as a member of the pro-Red National Lawyers’ Guild and thus ruining the kid is the stuff of fiction and was done by Welch entirely for the TV cameras since Welch himself had told the same thing to the “New York Times” earlier. Probably the most unsatisfactory elements of the book are two: failure of Evans to acknowledge other sources whose material he takes credit for…and his attempt to whitewash Joe when a brief scrubbing of inaccuracies would have served the cause of truth better.
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12/13/2007
Personal Asides: Has Huckabee a Glass Jaw?...But All the Same, Mike, Drop that “Fair Tax” or It’ll Kill You… The Difficulties Facing the Dems on Economics.
One Punch and He’s Out?
Has Mike Huckabee…as the immortal Rahm Emanuel was reported to say…a glass jaw: one punch and he’s decked? Usually that phrase is given to a neophyte candidate-not one who has been a longtime governor, who has won far more contests than he lost. Who dealt with legislatures and had to run frequently in a state dominated by the Clintons. Odds are it’s just Emanuel doing what he and his buddy David Axelrod love to do-mislead the other side.
Nothing wrong with that. I used to do it all the time when I was in the campaign strategy business but it works best when a celebrity candidate looms without political experience. The candidate with the most brittle glass jaw was one the Republicans ran for Congress in suburban Minneapolis with a powerful name-George Mikan who had been a star for the Minneapolis Lakers. Talk about a glass jaw! He was so terrible that in attempting to swing on his opponent he knocked himself out. Probably in the history of the democratic process…going back to ancient Athens and 100 B.C….there was no worse candidate for office than Mikan.
The So-Called “Fair Tax.”
Yet all the same, Mike you the first thing you should do is drop the stupid so-called “Fair Tax” which has been part of your arsenal ever since you decided to run for president-as a counter to the legitimate charges that you raised taxes repeatedly in Arkansas. I know how he got it. He listened to one of those reformers who said that when you run for president you have to have something “positive” to say-so he picked that turkey up. The idea of a “positive” campaign comes from editorial boards who know very little about the process. Nobody got elected president advocating a positive program. They got elected president with their resumes…Eisenhower, Reagan…or their ability to generate fear so as to decimate their opponents.
Strategically, Mike doesn’t have to renounce the thing. All he has to do…as soon as he wins the first caucus or primary…is to name a pre-stacked panel of fiscal experts with the order to come back to him after having examined all plans including the “Fair Tax.” Then send them home and forget about. In the meantime when asked say you got a panel looking at all the options…including your “Fair Tax”…in depth. Then after you get on the national ticket you do one of two things. If you’re the vice presidential nominee you obviously defer to the presidential nominee’s program (which if it is Romney as I hope it will be will solve that). Or if you’re the presidential nominee-which I don’t think Mike will be…allow that the panel hasn’t finished it’s work and just criticize the current tax code so that when and if you’re elected you can dump that “Fair Tax” turkey off a pier.
What’s wrong with the “Fair Tax”? While initially it sounds good…doing away with the IRS and applying a single national sales tax-national-on purchases, easing the pain on the less wealthy by providing a monthly rebate…it is a chamber of horrors. Understand that exporters love the idea; it shrinks their tax burden and puts them even with companies form overseas that are prospering doing business with China. But there’s a hideous joker in the deck-a joker that will soon have voters laughing all the way to the polls at Mike. F-T supporters talk about a 23% rate, meaning that for every dollar paid, 23 cents is taxed. But it translates into a 30% tax on a 27-cent expenditure and possibilities for black market are unending. Remember the guy in the ghetto who pulls back his coat sleeve to show a long arm on which 15 wristwatches are fastened? He’ll soon be on the street selling DVD players without tax. Europe is a continent full of tax dodgers; we would soon be with that slippery process and we’d become a nation of sleaze artists.
Abolishing the IRS? Europe tried to do it but its politicians found a way of adding the income tax on top for a double-tax burden and a curtailment of economic growth. Before there would be no chance of this happening you’d have to have a constitutional amendment pass repealing the income tax’s 16th. No more army of IRS auditors to invade your privacy? You’d have to have people ferreting out information to be sure that there’s no cheating. So the same IRS people would be put to different jobs. Thirty percent is too high a tax for the average man to pay and a natural for tax evasion.
Difficulties Facing Dems on Economics.
The purpose of any campaign is to stir fear-but problems grow when facts don’t justify the scare. Take the latest poll on the economy. For the question “Are income taxes fair?”-a question that might have motivated Mike Huckabee to pick the “Fair Tax” on the supposition that the common prejudice is that income taxes are not perceived as fair…here’s the answer given to Gallup last April. Sixty percent feel that income taxes they pay themselves are fair; 37% believe the taxes they pay are unfair. In 1997 the figures were 51% fair and 43% unfair.
Democrats-from Hillary to John Edwards to the vaguely wistful Barack Obama-like to maintain that the burden of tax-paying falls mainly on the middle-class. But that is easily dismissed by statistics. The big portion of federal income tax burden is paid by a small group of very-very wealthy Americans. The wealthiest 1% of the population earn 19% of the income but pay 37% of the income tax. The top 10% pay 68%. The bottom 50%, those below the median income level-earning 13% of the income, pay 3% of the taxes.
| | | Flashback: Gene Moves to Seriously Considering a Run for President.
[Fifty plus years of politics written as a memoir for my kids and grandchildren].
With Abigail McCarthy frequently repeating Lincoln’s dictum that it is fatal for a party to oppose a war after which the country has been engaged in it and needs to win, Gene McCarthy continued to dabble with the idea of running for president. Several times during 1965-66…particularly in 1966…two close friends of Gene would sit down and plan a hypothetical campaign: Larry Merthan, a former staffer and executive with Pfizer and Martin Haley. Haley was a legend. He and I never met but when I was going to St. John’s and he to St. Thomas in St. Paul, his admirers said he would surely one be a multi-millionaire before 30. They were wrong. He did that feat before he graduated from college with an entrepreneur’s eye for making money. By the time I first laid eyes on him, at a civic function which I was scouting as a Republican party operative, he was portly with a bulbous nose and had sworn off the hard stuff. He was head of something called The Martin Haley Companies which involved public relations and advertising. He was reputed to have been bored by material success by age 40. He was slightly younger than I but I cannot believe he is still alive sicne no dynamo could possibly operate at full throttle as did he--but would be gratified to learn if he is.
Merthan and Haley would sit down and draw up a prospectus for McCarthy’s running in either 1968 or ``72. This was done without the permission of McCarthy but he was aware of it. But ever since he had signed a letter urging President Johnson not to resume the bombing of North Vietnam-a letter Abigail hated-McCarthy had been toying with the idea of running. By Christmas, 1966 the Merthan-Haley team brought him the prospectus for a presidential campaign which he barely sniffed at and never mentioned it again. The idea of him running as he did-as an insurgent-was not in the blueprint. It turned on the supposition that Johnson was not in good health and would probably not run again, that Hubert Humphrey would and McCarthy would stand a pretty good chance of getting the nomination. Even that was highly problematical but McCarthy took the document home and studied it for a time.
By 1967, a year before the presidential contest, anger about the war from the Left captivated the media and convinced it that the nation itself was on the verge of revolt. Troops strength was nearing 400,000 and the war was growing in intensity. On February 1 an estimated 2,000 clergymen and laity from 45 states came to Washington under the rubric of “Clergy and Laity Concerned.” About half jammed into the New York Avenue Presbyterian church two blocks from the White House. Senators Gruening (Alaska) and Morse (Oregon) were invited to speak and they convinced McCarthy to do so. They spoke in anger; he spoke academically. But his speech was not exactly accurate though it sounded good. “In every other war, we’ve had the support of what is generally accepted as the decent opinion of mankind,” he said. That was not remotely the truth. The Revolution was; not the War of 1812, not the Mexican. The Civil War was but not the Spanish-American, nor World War I. But it sounded good.
He added: “We do not have that today.” He then proceeded to give a longish historical recitation that involved asking ourselves three questions to justify our objectives in Vietnam. “First, we must ask if there is a possibility of victory? Second, will the cost of victory be proportionate to what is gained? And finally, will a better life emerge following our victory?”
These questions show how far McCarthy had come in just the past year. These questions could not have been answered with surety for any of our engagements. The possibility of our winning the Revolution over Great Britain then at the height of its powers would have to be answered in the negative; and the same with the War of 1812. The second, if asked about the Civil War, might well prompt a negative response. The third question is always a pacifist one: does a better life emerge with certainty from any war? Not World War I which carried with it the seeds of World War II. Did World War II guarantee a better life with the inception of the Cold War, the rise of Red China, aggression in eastern Europe and Asia? These are questions that lead to questionable answers or likely negative ones. McCarthy’s questions show that he has become a pacifist along the lines of Dorothy Day of the “Catholic Worker” movement and the philosophy current under Fr. Godfrey Diekmann OSB at St. John’s.
Diekmann, incidentally, sent along a friend, a Jesuit priest, to meet McCarthy during the rally. Born in the iron ore mining town of Virginia, Minn., the son of a stolid union man who had disavowed his Catholic faith as impractical during the Depression, his son had always been fascinated by Catholicism. He was Fr. Daniel Berrigan, SJ. who agreed with McCarthy but who had resolved to follow a far more radical method of dissent from the government.
Although his speech was hopelessly dull, McCarthy that day-Feb. 1, 1967-moved out of the realm of orthodoxy that Abigail had wished into opposition to the government. In doing so he very much pleased their daughter, Mary, who was an 18-year-old undergraduate at Radcliffe. McCarthy was definitely on the road to challenge Johnson if no one else could be found for the job.
Not long afterward, Abigail McCarthy had a meeting with Art Michelson, McCarthy’s press secretary, to review some speaking requests for her that they had received in the office. .
“I’m not sure I ought to do this,” she said as she looked at the letters. Michelson knew what she meant.
“Tell me, Arthur,” she said as they walked to the elevator, “why do so many people feel Gene is an intellectual? So deep? So different from any other politician?”
Maybe he isn’t, said the cynical Michelson. But he has a handle on using intellectual’s imagery and poetic allusions nobody knows. It’s a game. Tell me another who makes the quotations he does.
“That’s it, then, is it?” she asked with a smile as they waited for the elevator.
Yeah, I guess so.
“And his stand on the war?”
He hates it.
“Or does he just want to reject people before they reject him? And he kind of gives up-which saves him from--. ”
He didn’t want the conversation to end like that so he caught the elevator door, surprising the elevator attendant and said: wait, I’ll go down with you.
When they got to the lobby of the Senate Office building he tried to figure her out.
He asked: You think--.”
“I think he’s a kind of backstabber, “ she said coldly. “He has always wanted to get even. His opposition to the war is bogus.”
The Last Supper.
After the dinner meeting with his old ADA pals-Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., James Wechsler, Clayton Fritchey, Gil Harrison, John Kenneth Galbraith and Joseph Rauh at Rauh’s home in Washington on April 17, 1967 (while Mrs. Rauh sat in the kitchen with his two Secret Service men)-Hubert Humphrey never met with them as a group again.
They had had their say on Vietnam.
As he had.
They had detected by his use of the word “morass” that he agreed with them and knew that he was in for very tough political times. He was terribly upset by their anger but knew he had pledged to be loyal to the president and that he would be.
But even Hubert’s loyalty to Johnson would have a terminus.
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12/12/2007
Flashback: Abigail McCarthy Quotes Lincoln “One Fundamental Principle of Politics is to be Always on the Side of Your Country in a War”;The Statement Endures. Hubert Besieged by His Liberal Pals Starts to Waver Again on the War.
[More than 50 years of politics written as a memoir for my kids and grandchildren].
Abigail: One Fundamental Principle.
In the Fall of 1965, Gene McCarthy’s press secretary (a close friend of mine), Art Michelson picked up Abigail at their home to take her to make a speech to the Democratic Congressional Women at the Statler-Hilton. As they rode along, she got on what was to be her favorite theme-the Vietnam War. Michelson had dismissed Jerry Eller’s concern that the two McCarthys were heading for a split over the war, saying, “what the hell, didn’t I just overhear you fighting with your wife the other day? Forget it.” And Michelson had fought often with his own wife, had been notoriously unfaithful to her with the then beauteous Wanda the Weather Bunny and had come back repentant. But now as he drove his car and heard her, he decided that the McCarthy’s were diverging over more than a strategic disagreement.
She had been reading a Civil War history and quoted Abraham Lincoln as saying, “One fundamental principle of politics is to be always on the side of your country in a war.” Michelson said: “Yeah, well he was a fine one to talk. As a congressman he criticized our involvement in the Mexican War.”
She shot back: “Yes he did. And he was a one-term congressman because of that. He found he couldn’t run for reelection in Illinois.”
Michelson said no, he had always thought that the Whig seat had been handed around and Lincoln’s time was up.
She said, “you know better than that, Arthur. Who would hand off House seats that way. Everything about the Congress is longevity.”
Well, he said, I wasn’t there so I don’t know.
But she held forth on it. It was a matter of character, she said. A war is a terrible thing but failing to support a country which is at war is even worse. It’s a matter of character.
He was going to quarrel with her about that but she was on her way to a speech and he didn’t want to get her excited. But as he drove he wondered how she was going to handle it: her husband becoming a critic of Vietnam and she with the belief that support of your country in time of war is the first lesson of politics. He didn’t attend the speech so he presumed she finessed it. Probably the women assumed she was on the side of her husband, he decided.
Not long later-in November-Gene called for a “full and complete investigation” of the CIA in its activities in the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Cuba and other areas which, he said, “raise serious questions about the relationship of the agency to the process of making and directing foreign policy.” He tangled with Sen. Dick Russell (D-Ga.) on that point as earlier related and the Senate voted against the probe 61 to 28 with Vice President Humphrey actively working against the measure and hardly speaking to McCarthy when they passed in the hall.
Then McCarthy started a hail of fire against the administration. He criticized a letter to the “St. Louis Globe-Democrat” by the CIA’s Richard Helms, the same man who flunked McCarthy’s test of wine and flowers visa-vis James Bond. The letter lauded the paper for criticizing J. William Fulbright on his opposition to Vietnam. McCarthy started an uproar so that Helms ultimately had to apologize to Fulbright. On the floor McCarthy spoke with a voice dripping sarcasm: “This is one of the risks you run into when you promote career men. It’s a little like the trouble you run into with armed slaves-it takes a little while for them to adjust.” Maybe I’m dense (as I often was with a McCarthy epigram) but I never fully got the sense of the simile although The Little Sisters of the Media, particularly Marya McLaughlin of CBS thought it brilliant.
For one fond of handing out zingers, Gene was particularly sensitive. Not long afterward the appointment of Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach for undersecretary of state came up. Gene angrily stormed in committee and delayed approval of his nomination by demanding the source of an erroneous newspaper report about him to a casual Katzenbach comment made at a Washington cocktail party. Katzenbach told ABC’s Howard K. Smith that McCarthy had been absent on a paid-speaking junket in St. Louis when the Senate fell 10 votes shy of invoking cloture on the 1966 Civil Rights Act and cited him as one of those responsible for the death of the bill. It was the beginning of an administration payback to Gene but unfortunately it was wrong.
McCarthy had a legitimate beef. A year earlier Katzenbach, a Kennedy ally as AG asked McCarthy and a handful of other liberals to vote against legislation banning the poll tax in state elections because if it passed, it would confuse a pending important Supreme Court ruling of the Virginia poll tax that Katzenbach felt sure would end its legality. So in deference, McCarthy voted against the Ted Kennedy bill-only to be greeted with a rebuke by Kennedy on the floor. McCarthy got The Little Sisters of the Media to put it in proper perspective. Marya McLaughlin didn’t want to do it because it was arcane for a television program but McCarthy pressed her so she did. She pouted for a week but she got over it when he had Jerry Eller send her roses. “Jerry,” she said teasingly when the administrative assistant personally delivered them to her at the Capitol, “why are you delivering them? He’s the guy who got me mad.” Not only that, said Eller, but he made me pay for them! “What?” she said, McCarthy was a notorious tightwad. “You be sure you collect!” He did but it took a while.
Hubert In and Out of the Doghouse.
Meanwhile, Hubert was in his “feel sorry for Hubert” mood. His faux pas, saying that by no means would Johnson drop him for vice president in 1968 had earned a withering LBJ rebuke. Hubert’s loyal aide Max Kampelman said to Michelson: “Hubert’s a fatalist who tries to maximize his opportunities. I think he feels that if you do everything you’re capable of, virtue will triumph. He gives the president 18 hours a day; he doesn’t play golf; he’s working all the time and when he’s not working, he’s thinking. So, while he would be disappointed if history decided he’s not to be president, he wouldn’t be a beaten, depressed man. He’s service-oriented and he would want to serve in some other way.”
Just when Hubert felt he was getting out of the doghouse, something else happened. LBJ knowing his vice president was talkative gave orders that Hubert was not to be given any early knowledge of the 1967 State of the Union message until after the White House press was briefed on its contents. So every reporter in Washington knew what was in the document before Hubert. Just when Hubert was getting anxiety pains again, LBJ was asked at a news conference if he would keep Hubert as veep. “I’ve never known a public servant I’ve worked better with or one for whom I’ve had more admiration or one that the public can trust more,” said Johnson. Then Johnson gave Hubert the job of rebuilding the Democratic party which LBJ had ignored and sent him and Muriel on an international trip which Hubert loved because it was a chance to get away from the shop and pretend he was his own man again. But this time he didn’t have much of a picnic as there were anti-Vietnam demonstrations in almost all his European stops.
In Rome, Hubert met with Pope Paul VI who gave him a letter for LBJ. Typical of Hubert, he put it in his coat and never thought of it again. A week after he returned Muriel found it when she was preparing to send the coat out to the cleaners. Hubert had it sent to the White House and worried all night that he would catch the wrath of LBJ for the delay but it was never mentioned.
Hubert Calls it Privately a “Morass.”
A few of Hubert’s friends noticed his discomfiture in his job and on April 17, 1967-a balmy Spring night-they invited him to a stag dinner at the home of a longtime ally, Joseph Rauh, a co-founder of the ADA. They were all anti-Vietnam by then. Present were Presidential Assistant Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., newspaper columnists James Wechsler and Clayton Fritchey, “New Republic” editor Gil Harrison and Harvard economist and former ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith. Before Hubert arrived, Schlesinger advised they all go easy on Hubert. Well they did all during the dinner. Schlesinger kept it quiet but he had just come from a session with Robert Kennedy and felt Kennedy was in a tight spot-trapped between his opposition to the war and his reluctance to openly challenge Johnson in 1968.
After dinner they tackled the war and Hubert told them they could speak frankly. But he didn’t. Schlesinger began by saying that the administration didn’t realize that there had come to be great changes in Communism and it was still clinging to the view that Communism was a monolithic structure. Hubert disagreed heatedly. He said there was more progress made toward détente under Johnson than ever before and less USSR-baiting as well.
Then Hubert tackled Vietnam. He said that our stand in Vienam was a major factor in the anti-Communist resistance in Indonesia. Schlesinger exploded: “Hubert, you know damn well those generals were just fighting for their lives and would have been doing so whether we were in Vietnam or not!” Hubert restated his view. Schlesinger said angrily, “well, that’s shit and you know it!”
Hubert: I resent that language, Arthur.
Schlesinger (who had been drinking heavily): Oh you’re the big vice president on us now, huh?
Hubert: No. And you know I never pull that stuff.
Schlesinger: All right. I’m sorry.
Hubert: You don’t have to be sorry, just argue reasonably.
Pause.
Hubert: Well, I will tell you that the military believes we should expand the bombings and that whenever we do, we start getting results.
Schlesinger: That’s shit, too.
They all exploded with laughter.
Hubert: Do you feel you’re better equipped than the generals on issues of this kind?
Schlesinger: You bet I do. I remember how certain the generals were on the Bay of Pigs among other things. They were catastrophically wrong.
Hubert: Now suppose I were president and you were my advisers. What would you tell me to do to get out of this morass?
They talked about this later. Hubert used the word “morass” at least twice that night. They all pitched in with advice.
Hubert: I guess all of you think we should stop the bombing.
Unanimous vote.
Hubert: On balance, I think you’re right. The risks we take for stopping the bombing is less significant than other factors. But the president’s advisers don’t agree.
He added: Don’t get the wrong idea. I only have periodic, short-range talks with the president on Vietnam.
Harrison: Hubert, do you think the president is capable of doing what Jack Kennedy did after the Bay of Pigs and public acknowledge error.
Silence.
Everybody stirred. For a while they thought Hubert hadn’t heard the question. But he had. He sat there for at least 30 seconds and then said-
“I don’t know.”
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12/11/2007
Personal Asides: Tackett’s “Tribune” Emanuel Sucker Story…Now Let’s Look at the Role “Hope “ Played in Prior Winning Campaigns.
The Idealistic Rahm Emanuel as Portrayed by Tackett.
The “Tribune” has been going through a drought on Washington bureau chiefs. One was James Warren who complained often and bitterly that Cokie Roberts and her husband Steve were were getting limelight by appearing as talking heads on TV and, worse, taking honoraria for talks to certain civic groups. Quite unremarkable. And neither were employed by the “Tribune.” Columnists in Washington and elsewhere do this legitimately and honorably all the time and no one could imagine why it was of importance to him. The answer was nobody had asked him for either talking head opinion or to make a speech.
Then Warren got some offers and there was no more to be said about that: it was merely an advertisement for himself. Inevitably and not because he was so good at what he did, he was promoted out of Washington by his paper and now pursues the same kind of modishly liberal cliché’ driven journalism, involving little thought, back home. Any day now he will be writing something that says foreign policy problems are intractable and unable to be squeezed into an election cycle. Brilliant. Pulitzer stuff.
Now the Washington bureau chief is one Michael Tackett about whom to say he is a predictable liberal is to translate probability to certainty. A paper which once had Arthur Sears Henning, Walter Trohan (possibly the greatest Washington bureau chief ever, who broke the story of Truman’s firing MacArthur), Willard Edwards and Chesly Manly now has a predictably liberal boilerplate maker who passes vague bleatings of wispy dreams as analysis…with due credit to one of the hardest gut Democratic non-idealists around.
Tackett’s column Sunday a case in point. Did you know that this presidential campaign consists of two words: hope and fear? Now you do.
Now look see. Rudy Giuliani’s bargain with the voters is “he will keep you safe.” Mitt Romney would not only keep Guantanamo open but would “expand it.” By which you are to understand that Romney truckles to fear. John McCain “continues to push on an otherwise unpopular war on the fear that terrorists will take over the world if U. S. troops pull out of Iraq.” (Just like FDR and Churchill did warning of the Nazis; JFK urging greater defense expenditures in `60; Hubert in staying the course in Vietnam in `68). But back to Tackett.
If you wonder how in the world a low-voltage candidate like Fred Thompson capitalizes on fear, he does it this way-“as he leverages his `Law & Order’ persona.” Please.
To continue: Ron Paul “pushes fear of government in most any form.” I’ll concede that. But Duncan Hunter? “Rep. Duncan Hunter is a fear-firster, too-on the war, on immigrants, pretty much on any threat and in his world threats are everywhere.” Hunter’s sole background has been House Armed Services where he was chairman so by any measure using this experience would incite fear, according to Tackett.
Moving on: Hillary Clinton. I’ve not been a Hillary fan but what is this? “She portrays herself as the only candidate seasoned enough in combat to overcome the fear mongering of her Republican opponents.” Strictly invention of yours to keep your fear theme lasting through the end of the column, Michael. The lady touts herself as having had experience in two branches, period and this includes domestic as well as foreign issues.
John Edwards “used to offer sunshine and hope when he first ran for president in 2004. Now he talks up fear in the form of poverty…” No, to be fair once again, his palaver is the inequity of two societies; you’re straining again to make your column’s pretext hold, Michael. “Rep. Dennis Kucinich seems to think we might also need to fear UFOs.” I’ll grant you that, but that’s unfair since Kucinich needs help in more ways than campaign money.
Now those who project hope.
Mike Huckabee.
He’s included to give Tackett’s piece the flavor of objectivity. For one thing, he’s from Hope, Ark. But…and if he doesn’t flub, I’m for him for vice president… he stresses fear more than most: the necessity to keep segments of the middle class that are falling behind from further exploitation as he sees it from non-reciprocal trade: that’s fear. Everything about Huckabee is fear of one thing or another. That includes his best-seller “How to Stop Digging Your Own Grave with Your Knife and Fork”-fear of premature death by overeating. There’s capitalization on public fear of the IRS which he wants to eliminate. His stand on a more open immigration is based on fear that we will fail in our expectations of harbor to the underprivileged. His message to business evokes fear…the drying up of the migrant labor pool, the fear that the GOP will alienate Hispanics in future elections.
But all this is prelude to the point liberal zany Tackett wants to conclude by. The real man of hope is-ta-tah-
Barack Obama!
And then he turns rhapsodic with his prose sounding like it came from Obama’s latest brochure (maybe it has): “He says that as president he would talk to America’s enemies directly”-something eyes-in-the-skies foreign policy dabbler Tackett likes. “He talks about building bridges. Of issuing a new call for national service. Of a call for a new generation of leadership that avoids the culture wars of the `60s and the political fights of the `90s. He projects hope in his speeches and, as much, in his manner.”
Now the peroration. Tackett has someone to quote to verify his think piece.
“If you look at the ascendancy of Barack and Huckabee in both parties, the change candidates which is the same as hope, are doing well.” Who says this to Tackett? Rahm Emanuel! “Glory-osky Zero!” as the cartoon waif Little Annie Rooney used to say to her dog, “you know what?”
Rahm Emanuel is a man of hope too, not fear!
All this time it’s been hope-not fear--that Emanuel has communicated to Democratic candidates for the House as to what will happen to them if they don’t follow his f-word orders to the [f-explicative] letter. I will allow when he finishes with them they are filled with the fervent hope he doesn’t call again with his scatological threats.
. The ones I talk to say that he told them they’d better do this and that or he’d get their …aw you get the idea. Like the former challenger to Henry Hyde who was pulled…jerked…out of action by the ex-ballet dancer purveyor of hope acting as out-of-the-district Svengali and deprived of the chance to compete against Peter Roskam because Rahm had a better candidate. Who lost.
Back to the stars-in-his-eyes Tackett. A windup quote from that patron saint of hope, Rahm Emanuel.
“It just may be that after eight years of fear being dished out, voters will want the antidote to fear. After eight years, it doesn’t sell like it used to.”
Summary by Tackett: “The dreamers will bet on hope. The cynics will double down on fear.”
The End. Ka-ching! The sound of the cash register. Another sucker story sold to the “Trib.”
Well, after reading his reincarnation from cadaverous, hollow-eyed political thug to Tackett’s Beacon of Hope, Emanuel probably got on the phone with his staff.
“G-D------! Do I have to do everything by myself? Why the [explective] don’t we get more stories out like this? We’d better or you’re all [explective] goin’ to be lookin’ for a new berth, I’ll tell you that!”
Which Ranks Higher with Voters-Hope or Fear?
Just for the heck of it I did a survey of past presidential campaigns to see what role “hope” played in their winnings. Answer: very little. Basically one presidential race: that of Ulysses S. Grant. And one post-election deal to collect some Southern electoral votes based on hope the bargain would be kept: that of Rutherford B. Hayes.
For the overwhelming majority, voter fear carried the day. If things were running all right, fear that they could get worse with the opponent. If things weren’t, fear that to stick with the incumbent would make things worse. Here goes.
George Washington ran no campaign but was chosen first president because of the fear of the founders that what had been accomplished by creation of a new Constitution would die a-borning without his indispensable leadership…John Adams won by condemning the French Revolution as a mobocracy, fearing that with Jefferson its excesses would come here…Thomas Jefferson beat Adams by exciting fear that the Alien and Sedition laws were a forerunner of despotism…James Madison beat Charles Pinckney by spreading fear that Pinckney, the Federalist, would establish an aristocracy associated with Alexander Hamilton, inimical to Jefferson’s small government ideas…James Monroe was so far ahead of his opponent, Federalist Rufus King that he had no need to incite fear of anything.
John Quincy Adams won in the House after a campaign spreading the story that Andrew Jackson despite being a hero was an ignorant rube who, Adams feared, would demean the presidency (he didn’t when he won later); also fear that a paralytic stroke suffered by another opponent, William H. Crawford would put a dying man in the presidency and fear that his third opponent, Henry Clay, architect of the American System (huge investment in internal improvements) would spend the country to penury.
In the next go-round, Jackson defeated Adams in a pay-back for the “hideous bargain” at the last election in which Adams rewarded Clay for ceding his forces to Adams by giving him a cabinet post. To continue this trend, Jackson warned, would sink the country in corruption.
New Yorker Martin Van Buren won over his varied opponents by winning the South based on his spreading fear that unless he won, slavery was a goner and the South’s economy would go pffft. . William Henry Harrison defeated Van Buren by propagating the fear that the Panic of 1837 would be just a forerunner with the land becoming desolate in poverty.
James K. Polk won election by his forces stirring fear that Henry Clay would mis-rule, calling him a gambler and drunk. You could add womanizer to that but Polk didn’t have to. Zachary Taylor won by spreading fear in the Southern states that Lewis Cass, his opponent, would end slavery (Taylor owned 100 slaves). Franklin Pierce became the 14th president partially by spreading fear that the country would be taken over by Rome if his opponent, Gen. Winfield Scott, were to win since Scott’s daughter had become…gasp!... a nun!
Pennsylvanian James Buchanan won over John Charles Fremont by purveying the fear that civil war would engulf the country if Fremont won because Fremont was anti-slavery whereas Buchanan was diplomat, compromiser by instinct and could forestall civil war. Abraham Lincoln won election by shutting up and allowing his somewhat ambiguous earlier remarks on slavery to stand but his agents spread fear that the nation would forever be part slave if opponent Stephen A. Douglas was elected; slavery would grow with election of John Breckinridge and it would be made permanent under John Bell. Lincoln was reelected narrowly over Gen. George B. McClellan by generated fear over the chaos that could come from changing horses in the midst of Civil War.
Gen. Ulysses Grant was elected because of his enormous popularity as a war hero; no fear need be generated but here there was hope that Grant would be an excellent president. He wasn’t. . He was reelected despite scandals by having his campaigners say that his opponent, Horace Greeley, was a danger because his woolly-headed reforms would end patronage and hurt business. Rutherford B. Hayes won a disputed contest over electoral votes by agreeing to pull federal troops out of the south immediately. No fear but hope a secret deal would work. It did.
James A. Garfield defeated Winfield S. Hancock by his followers warning the economy would tank if the protective tariff were not continued which stirred business’ fears and support for Garfield. Grover Cleveland won by capitalizing on James G. Blaine’s purported anti-Catholicism which frightened the Irish of New York to vote Democratic. Benjamin Harrison defeated Cleveland in a campaign where not fear but terminal issue dullness dominated. Cleveland came back and defeated Harrison when fear was not dominant. William McKinley won over William Jennings Bryan by capitalizing on fears generated by the Panic of 1893 under Cleveland and scaring Wall Street over Bryan’s free silver program. Theodore Roosevelt topped Alton B. Parker in a spiritless campaign. William H. Taft beat Bryan by scaring Wall Street over Bryan’s “socialistic” call to nationalize the railroads
Woodrow Wilson beat both Taft and Theodore Roosevelt (running on a third party ticket) due to split in the Republican ranks. Wilson won reelection over Charles Evans Hughes by capitalizing on the fact that “he kept us out of war” and nurtured fears that under anyone else we would enter the World War. Warren Harding defeated James M. Cox by making it a referendum on the League of Nations, warning voters that if Cox won we would join and lose our national sovereignty. Calvin Coolidge won over John W. Davis through placidity and no controversy. Herbert Hoover defeated Alfred E. Smith by use of fear that the Catholic Smith would turn the nation over to the rule of the pope. Franklin Roosevelt won over Hoover because of the Depression; he won reelection after generating the fear that Alf Landon would terminate the “recovery”; won reelection to a third term by spreading fear that under a less savvy president we might be drawn into World War II; and won reelection to a fourth by spreading concern that the middle of a World War was not the time to change horses.
Harry Truman won election by spurring the fear that the real aim of the GOP was to dismantle the New Deal. Dwight Eisenhower was elected without promoting fear, merely that as a general he could provide peace in a Cold War. Both 1960 candidates JFK and Richard Nixon trumpeted fear of a rampant Communism in the Cold War but Kennedy made the better case. Lyndon Johnson was elected over Barry Goldwater by capitalizing on fear that Goldwater’s rashness would trigger a nuclear war with the USSR. Richard Nixon won over Hubert Humphrey by capitalizing on fears of crime in the streets, civil rights demonstrations and a Vietnam war that seemed not to go anywhere. He defeated George McGovern through spreading fear of a defenseless public stemming from the Democratic platform’s pledge for immediate end to the war, end to capital punishment, a pledge for busing to promote racial balance and ban on handguns. Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford without generating fear. Ronald Reagan topped Carter by capitalizing on public fears of domestic uncertainty through runaway inflation, gasoline shortage and the hostage crisis in Iran,
He was reelected after the Walter Mondale campaign got off to a bad start when the candidate promised to raise taxes and fear generated by a lengthy investigation of his running mate’s (Geraldine Ferraro’s) failure to disclose her husband’s complex finances with some innuendo that the Mafia was involved.
George H. W. Bush won by capitalizing on societal fears over his opponent’s pardoning of a criminal and failure to say he would support the death penalty for one who would rape and murder his own wife. Bill Clinton defeated Bush not with fear but with the aid of Ross Perot who as an independent candidate led both candidates for a time. George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore but won through decision of the U. S. Supreme Court (no fear generated by either campaign). No fear or hope involved. Bush won reelection over John Kerry by stressing fear i.e. capitalizing on waffling of Kerry that might endanger security.
| | |
12/10/2007
Personal Asides: The CNN GOP YouTube Debate Was Excellent…Andy the Entertainer…Huckabee’s Only in Trouble Unless He Wobbles…Tales from the Lavender Priesthood…Dear “Sun-Times” and Dear “Time” Magazine.
CNN GOP YouTube Debate.
In contrast to a lot of stuffy old pundits who believe that policy wonks should dominate running of the presidential debates, I think the last Republican showdown, sparked by YouTube questions, was very revelatory. Asking these guys if they believe in the literalness and inerrancy of the Bible was very important and would not have been asked by limp-eyed, world-weary secular journalists with few absolutes other than the run-of-the-mill liberal ones. I got a lot more out of it than having them recite for the umpteenth time the stands they have perfected on boilerplate about keeping the Bush tax cuts etc.
Andy the Entertainer.
My old friend Andy Young whom I knew from civil rights days and when I did a film documentary of his life…minister, former congressman, UN ambassador and Atlanta mayor…has developed a unique way of helping his allies. Speaking in Atlanta the other day in behalf of Hillary Clinton, Andy delved into the fact that the Clintons are “blacker”-especially Bill than Barack Obama. Andy is the only black political preacher-orator with a specific pull to (largely) uneducated, rural southern folk. Urbans seem to prefer Obama; southern black folk listen to Andy.
I wasn’t there but knowing Andy I can imagine what happened. Andy can get more of a rise from a southern, largely rural, black audience with humor than can any other black preacher I’ve heard. Jesse is too ponderous and oracular; Meeks too stentorian; Sharpton is too street-savvy urban hustler. But with largely more conservative, southern, family-oriented black folk there is only one Andy to entertain.
Thus saying the Clintons are blacker than Barry was fine. Finally he crossed the line by saying “Bill Clinton has probably gone with more black women than Barack!” The crowd shouted its approval of such convivial outrage and Andy said he was just “clowning around.” But if it put an emphasis on the Clintons’ personal life…even if speculatively…no harm done with that hugely tolerant black audience, respectful of what it perceives that Clinton did for them. And in the broad context of Andy’s message, to tie a bond closer to Hillary than Obama’s, it was probably non-hurtful, black humor in that group being what it has always been.
Huckabee.
Because the liberal media believe they are the arbiters of political gaffes, viewed from their left-wing prism, statements made by Mike Huckabee years ago when he ran for the U. S. Senate are regarded as near disasters today-but they will only be so if Huckabee attempts to wriggle out of them to please liberals ands thus endanger his base. I refer to his statements about the AIDS crisis requiring carriers to be isolated from the general population and that “homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural and sinful lifestyle and we now know it can pose a dangerous public health risk.”
The strategy should be to amplify the AIDS comment by illustrating how little was known about the infection when he made the statement and not back away from its essentiality. About homosexuality there should be no restatement. If there is and he weasels, he’s not for prime time. His only concern should be not to please Mark Halperin of “Time” but preservation of his base.
The pardoning factor is irreversible and just one of the things many governors carry around with them: good intentions did not carry through at the end. No qualms or stuttering around should be offered. To those nya-nya-nya handwringers who take a conspiratorial view i. e. what media build up they can destroy, the answer is that Huckabee will gratefully take the buildup rather than not-because before media got interested in Huckabee he had no chance whatsoever. Handling this problem sagely means that he can pass a first minor league problem.
Opposition to Huckabee is growing from white-shoe, country club Uncle Milty (Friedman) Republicans who want a more pristine, 100% pro-free market running-mate so they can feel comfortable that another gilt-edged patrician with maybe Harvard MBA credentials is number two on the ticket…regardless of the fact that 2008 will be like 1974, the Watergate year, for Republicans.
Tales from the Lavender Priesthood.
1. Roger Cardinal Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles, talked with Los Angeles police last week after it was revealed he had told a group of priests he had been assaulted last summer by a man who was angry about the clergy abuse in the Catholic church, the man suddenly coming up on him and pummeling him when he was trying to mail a letter. Why no reporting of it to the cops when it happened? The cops: “he prefers not to involve the police if he doesn’t have to.” Now we see.
2. “Chicago” magazine has as its main spread, the Father Mark Sorvillo
Story. Lavender priest pleads guilty to stealing nearly $200,000 from St. Margaret Mary’s parish on the north side. He gives cars, plane tickets and thousands of dollars in cash to James Sosnicki, a married Louisville man who stripped frequently at gay clubs in Chicago, police said. He had been under suspicion since threatening to close the church’s school because of the parish’s strained finances. He skimmed more than $40,000 from collections, wrote checks from parish accounts to himself and his creditors and charged more than $62,000 at Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdale’s and Marshall Field’s in the parish. Sorvillo will likely serve two years of his four year sentence. While investigating Sorvillo authorities learned the priest and had and insured an Acura inLouisville and discovered the driver was Sosnicki.
Well at least he was doing it with grown-ups. Another reason to thank God for the “gift” of homosexuality as a former rector of Mundelein once invoked.
3. The Twin Cities’ new archbishop, coadjutor John Nienstedt, is a traditionalist with regard to homosexuality-which is getting him fired upon in certain lavender-friendly quarters of the archdiocese. He is waiting to replace the retiring Harry Flynn who has been a quivering pillar of Jello on the issue. Not Nienstedt, formerly bishop of New Ulm, Minn. (one of my favorite towns). Probably the most lavender parish in the diocese is St. Frances Cabrini where Nienstedt was instrumental in canceling a talk by a father and daughter, co-authors of “Are There Closets in Heaven? A Catholic Father and a Lesbian Daughter Share Their Story.” Then Niestedt used the archdiocesan newspaper, the “Catholic Spirit,” to instruct the faithful, referring to a document approved by the USCCB. He went farther than most bishops have in recent years to detail the logical consequences to Catholics who act against this matter of serious moral teaching.
He wrote-correctly in theological terms-“Those who actively encourage or promote homosexual acts or such activity within a homosexual lifestyle formally cooperate in a grave evil and, if they do so knowingly and willingly, are guilty of a mortal sin. They have broken communion with the Church and are prohibited from receiving Holy Communion until they have had a conversion of heart, expressed sorrow for their action and received absolution from a priest.”
He was blasted by an outfit called “Catholic Rainbow Parents” whos convener Mary Lynn Murphy said, “such extreme talk [sic] from the most prominent Catholic leader in our state not only offends Catholics [sic] but all LGBT [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender] citizens, their families and friends and gives license to hatred and violence against all of us.”
Now comes another outfit, this one founded by Harry Flynn, the “Catholic Pastoral Committee on Sexual Minorities [sic].” Its cofounder and communications coordinator David J. McCaffrey said: “This piece from Nienstedt marks an all-time high in this archdiocese in the level of spiritual violence-actually, it should be called `persecution’-directed at LGBT persons, their families, friends and supporters.”
Persecution…license to hatred and violence. That’s what 2,000 years of Judeo-Christian tradition will do to them. Poor babies.
Dear “Sun-Times.”
I should let you in on a little news. Your coverage of the Henry Hyde funeral by Dan Rozek missed a significant news story. Paragraph 2: “The longtime Republican legislator, who led a successful effort to ban federal funding of abortions and an unsuccessful attempt to impeach President Bill Clinton…” Uh, the attempt to impeach Bill Clinton was successful. On December 19, 1998 the House voted to impeach him. The charges were one count of perjury and obstruction of justice. What you should have said was that Hyde “led a successful attempt to impeach President Bill Clinton” but the Senate with a two-thirds majority needed to convict did not do so. On perjury, the count being 45 votes for conviction and 55 against; on obstruction of justice, 50-50 with five Republicans voting against.
Dear “Time” Magazine.
Just a note to say that your Dec. 3 issue, main article, “What Makes us Good/Evil” missed an important issue. Perhaps you were too hurried to get it to the cover. You say “gorillas and chimps [have] mastered sign language.” They have not as any and all scientific data say. You say that using “tools” like throwing a rock is the same as conceiving and making tools. They are not. But these are not the only errors.
In the article reference either to a meaningful God-or a meaningless god-gets not a single mention. In more than 3,000 words which is supposed to be journalistic-an exploration of good and evil-there is not a single reference to religion, not a smidgeon of hint that any study worth its name could ignore totally a view that has been with man since the beginning of record-making.
That’s about as bad a journalistic feat as has been done in my lifetime that I can recall.
| | | Flashback: Hubert Returns from Vietnam with Over-the-Top Endorsement. “Tide of Battle Has Turned in our Favor.” Now it’s Gene’s Turn to Get the Shakes of Indecision on the War for which Even The Little Sisters of the Media Rebuke Him. Then He Fails at Trying to be Funny to LBJ but CBS’s Marya McLaughlin Thinks it’s Brilliant.
[Fifty years of politics written for my kids and grandchildren].
Before returning to Washington from his Southeast Asia travels, Hubert held a news conference in Australia and denounced Sen. Robert Kennedy’s suggestion that the National Liberation Front, the Vietcong’s political arm, be included in a postwar South Vietnam government. Such a concession would be tantamount to including “a fox in the chicken coop” or “an arsonist in a fire department.” Then, satisfied he had taken care of RFK, he boarded Air Force 2 for Washington. He arrived Jan. 24, 1966 and received live television coverage at the airport, a bear hug from LBJ and a reputation as a hero of the administration. “I return, Mr. President, with a deep sense of satisfaction in our cause and its ultimate triumph…The tide of battle in Vietnam has turned in our favor.” In reward he was given the task of selling the Vietnam war at home. The salesmanship began at 8 a.m. the following day.
Johnson had invited every member of Congress-half to come to the White House the first day, half the second-to hear Hubert. It was interesting that among the Senators only two, Georgia’s Richard Russell and South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond-agreed with Hubert. Humphrey’s top foreign policy aide, John Rielly (a fellow St. John’s grad, later to be longtime president of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations and my longtime friend) said later, “I thought, my God, is this how far we’ve come in one year that these are our only friends!” At the meeting, Rielly (not a misspelling of his surname:) recalls Oregon’s Wayne Morse grumbling, “I never expected my vice president to make this plea for war.”
Was pragmatism the only reason he changed his mind from opposition to staying in Vietnam to a full-hearted backing of the president? Yes…without Johnson on his side he was politically dead… but he finally saw a chance that maybe victory could be had. He returned from the Asian trip enthused by the degree that other Asian leaders said we were needed in Vietnam. Said an aide Ted Van Dyk: “In this next year particularly [1966-67] he was most outspoken in defense of Vietnam policies. That was the point at which he really began defending the administration and you could see he began being taken back into the inner councils a little bit.” Finally LBJ took the wraps off Humphrey whose original directive was to concentrate on domestic lobbying to no longer have to clear his speeches with the White House. Humphrey was put back on the re-invite list to the Tuesday luncheons at the White House where Vietnam strategy was discussed.
McCarthy and Hubert, Gene and Abigail, Diverge More Widely.
Gene McCarthy debated, after a skull session with aides Jerry Eller and Art Michelson, whether or not to begin to oppose Vietnam more frontally. Abigail McCarthy was strongly opposed to this effort. There was no mention of his challenging LBJ at this point. The argument Michelson made was that an intellectual challenge to Vietnam now would spur a period of creative reappraisal among liberals.
The argument Abigail made was that it was the height of Don Quixote-ism to question LBJ when overwhelming progress would be made on liberal domestic programs Gene had cared about-the likely passage of Medicare for example. He should not let a disagreement about Vietnam cause a rupture so that he would be an outcast from an administration responsible for all this future progress. Gene was indecisive. So he gave signals to both sides. After Dean Rusk testified before televised hearings of the Foreign Relations committee on Vietnam, McCarthy said “I believe there is reason to be encouraged by the intensive efforts to work out some kinds of peaceful settlement and by the renewed emphasis of economic and social reconstruction in South Vietnam.”
But Humphrey’s zealous defense of the war and the necessity to win it as well as his shilling for what he called “a Johnson Doctrine for Asia” smattered Gene the instinctive foreign policy conservative. “If studied carefully,” Humphrey trumpeted, “the Honolulu Declaration has as much significance for the future of Asia as the Atlantic Charter had for the future of Europe.” Oh, really? And how was Europe faring at that time with the Soviets expanded over its eastern segment? Then Hubert added with typical enthusiasm that the U. S. can “defeat aggression, to defeat social misery, to build viable, free institutions and achieve peace” by launching an Asian “Great Society.” He said, “ I think there is a tremendous new opening here for realizing the dream of the Great Society in the great area of Asia, and not just here at home. And I regret we haven’t been able to dramatize it more.”
After the Humphrey return from Asia there was an effort by Oregon’s Wayne Morse to repeal the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that enabled the war. Morse was joined by some fresh allies: J. William Fulbright, the chairman of Foreign Relations; Stephen Young of Ohio. As an indication of his tentative, hesitatingly effort to dip a toe in, Gene joined the small group: he didn’t really want to but didn’t really not want to. Morse was overjoyed and hyped McCarthy’s joining to the media as a rebuke to Humphrey.
They were a tiny group of five who supposedly opposed the effort-but when the heat got on, in deference to Abigail, McCarthy tried later to go AWOL. The effort was a dismal failure; the Senate squashed the Morse effort 92 to 5 but Gene weasled. In the middle of the parliamentary skirmishes, McCarthy voted with both sides incurring the anger of both. Abigail trumpeted that his joining “that group of kooks” as she put it was a mistake. (Two days later the U. S. troop commitment to South Vietnam increased by another 30,000 to a total of a quarter million, which would reach 380,000 by the end of 1966).
When the press tried to question McCarthy about his membership in the group of five, he wavered which didn’t satisfy anyone. Like John Kerry a generation later, he tried to have it both ways in explaining his views to the press: I voted for it before I voted against it. He said he voted against the motion to kill Morse’s amendment as a parliamentary procedural question but would have voted against the Morse amendment itself as well as another to reaffirm the Tokin resolution. Why? “Too much emphasis has been placed on resolutions like Tonkin. They tend to undermine the constitutional authority of the president and may be used to restrict and impede the Senate in fulfillment of its constitutional responsibility.” Then a startling opinion: It was not necessary to rescind or reaffirm Tokin because “I believe that the actions of the president in Vietnam are constitutional and legal without the resolution.” This may have been an attempt to justify his original support of the Tonkin resolution. But it all ended a blur and the image was coming through of McCarthy the pedantic, Hamletesque lawmaker torn by indecision.
Predictably, Abigail zinged him bitterly. When he fled to the Little Sisters of the Media for solace-particularly its youngish, good-looking, raven-haired chieftess, Marya McLaughlin of CBS-TV for consolation-they were no less understanding. “Oh Gene,” said Marya, “for God’s sake stop it! You waffled and that’s the end of it.” The “St. Paul Pioneer-Press,” his hometown paper, hit him in its editorial saying what he had done was “to completely confuse the public as to his real views on Vietnam. He didn’t offend the hawks by voting for the military authorization bill. He didn’t offend the doves by opposing the Morse amendment. He now owes the public a much clearer picture of just how he does view President Johnson’s Vietnam policy and what the future policy of the United States in Southeast Asia should be. He cannot remain an `ambivalent’ bird forever.”
All the while, Humphrey’s almost exuberant over-the-top support of Vietnam, giving it not just 100% but 200% enthusiasm-got some criticism in the liberal media and he made epigrammatic wit with it with The Little Sisters (not with Abigail). It proved Hubert was continually going over the top. After a Spring, 1966 speech to U.S newspaper publishers, he was asked about casualties and how the country could continue to tolerate a death rate of 200 a week plus several hundred wounded. . His answer: “I am happy to be able to tell you, sir, that out of every one hundred [American soldiers wounded], ninety-nine live.” Vietnam “is almost like the first voyage of an explorer into a new land. We are going to be in Asia for a long time.”
His parodies convulsed The Little Sisters of the Media but not Abigail. She said that she was obviously different from Gene: “I want our country to win this war.” The implication was he didn’t. The Little Sisters obviously and deliciously said they did not. Gene was in the middle. Gene continued plodding along by academic-sounding comments on the war. He told the “Minneapolis Tribune” this: “The public and private testimony of the administration has not been realistic. This war is not simply an extension of North Vietnamese or Chinese Communism. There is a much stronger element of a South Vietnamese civil war to it than the administration states.” In this he was, of course, wrong but it was a popular thing to say.
He did other interviews. To the “Washington Post” he said “the administration has not been proving its case for steady escalation of the war. The burden of proof for expanding the war rests with the administration and they haven’t proved it. In 1961 they talked about saving it with $50 million in aid with U.S. advisers. Last year, the story was we would win if we could get through the monsoon. Then we were told that bombing the North would do it. There is justification for asking explanations of why we have failed and why we haven’t negotiated.” Abigail ridiculed this saying it was defeatist talk (it was: it was in essence advocating the U. S. get out).
All the while Hubert was roaring full-throttle in support of the war. He gave an interview to Eric Severeid, a Minnesotan, on April 19. 1966. He thundered forth on the Great Society for southeast Asia theme. Severeid was incredulous, restating it in its most unattractive terms: “You seem to be saying that the Johnson Doctrine, if we may call it that, is proposing a relationship between this country and Asia, far away as it is, sprawling and diverse as it is-a relationship as fundamental, as long-lasting, intimate and possibly expensive as our historic associations with Europe. Is it of this scale, of this magnitude?” Humphrey: “I think so!” Marya McLaughlin to Gene at one of their growing longer times over coffee and wine: “Satisfied now, Sir Eugene, that this thing is getting out of hand?” At home Abigail was saying: “We must win this war.”
President Johnson was not giving up to woo McCarthy to his side before the Minnesotan would come down finally against the war. Lady Bird and said that Abigail favored the war so Johnson invited them both to the LBJ ranch for dinner after McCarthy had delivered a speech in Austin. The guest: Richard Helms, then a nominee for deputy director of the CIA. McCarthy was then pressing in the Senate to bring the CIA under closer congressional supervision because of its purported promotion of the Vietnam war by creation of a special bipartisan committee. Dick Russell who ran an ad hoc committee objected that McCarthy was trying to “muscle in” on presidential prerogatives in foreign policy. McCarthy objected to Russell as believing in the “psychosis of the Inner Ring.” Marya McLaughlin who reported on it for CBS-TV as a brave McCarthy initiative. He allowed her to buy him a white wine the next day at the Carroll Arms. The Foreign Relations committee approved by 14 to 5 McCarthy’s initiative. As expected, it was defeated by 61 to 28 in the full Senate as Hubert lobbied against it, the two barely nodding as they passed in the corridor), after a 3-hour debate where no media or recording stenographers were present, only the second held by the Senate since World War II.
At the LBJ ranch dinner at which Abigail was thrilled to be part of and whose views Johnson personally welcomed, Helms, who would become the next CIA director, told McCarthy and Abigail that we were following the best course on Vietnam. Abigail was quite pleased with this but was stunned when her husband pointed to yellow flowers at the table and asked Helms to identify their species. Helms could not. McCarthy nodded to the goblet of wine and asked Helms if he could identify the vintage they had consumed at dinner. Helms could not. “James Bond would have known the answer,” exulted McCarthy. LBJ frowned; Lady Bird looked away in embarrassment. Helms didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. It was an attempt to be witty and to embarrass Helms and Johnson-but it was not Gene’s more memorable lines. And on the way to their Austin hotel, Abigail let her husband have it: “What was that nonsense all about? Was that supposed to be a bright, repartee response when you couldn’t think of an answer?”
But when he related it to The Little Sisters of the Media, they-particularly Marya McLaughlin-thought it brilliant.
Disunion in Minnesota DFL Politics.
Back home in Minnesota, Karl Rolvaag…who had launched the motorboat full gain from the concrete pier in Brainerd without unfastening its chain…sending both he and then Attorney General Mondale to exploring the lake bottom…was still secretly imbibing as governor-and heavily. No one could get him to stop nor could they get the attractive First Lady of Minnesota, Florence Rolvaag, to stop drinking (she later died of alcoholism). Bright young Lt. Governor A. M. (Sandy) Keith, 37, undertook to challenge his chief, a bleary-eyed 53, for the gubernatorial endorsement in 1966. Hubert was called in to mediate. He suggested that Rolvaag step aside for Keith (no takers), that Keith allow Rolvaag to serve another term with the understanding he would not run again and Keith was the heir apparent (no takers). Hubert then tried to get Rolvaag appointed as ambassador to either Sweden or Norway but news of Rolvaag’s drinking had preceded him. There was a possibility of, of all things, God forbid, Iceland but Rolvaag wasn’t interested.
So the DFL convention roared on in discordant enmity with Keith defeating Gov. Rolvaag for the endorsement after 21 ballots. Rolvaag vowed to run in the primary anyhow. He did and defeated Keith for the nomination-but lost to Republican Harold Levander in the Fall, a grievous blow to Hubert. Rolvaag in defeat and still in his cups finally took Iceland and flew away to become our ambassador.
To make matters worse, with Democrats facing challenges in the 1966 midterms concerning inflation, crime in the streets, a so-called challenge to LBJ’s credibility and the war, Hubert became the point man on all fronts. Chilled by a Gallup poll showing that Robert Kennedy was more popular than either LBJ or Hubert which led to speculation that RFK might replace him on the ticket in 1968, Hubert replied to a press question by saying Johnson wanted him to continue as his running-mate. He was called on the carpet by Johnson for saying this and a chastened Hubert had to clarify that a president has many options and that “I don’t predict whom he will want in 1968.” Hubert campaigned in 26 states saying that the only danger is if the Democrats “weasel or wobble” on the war. Then LBJ said he had to go to a conference of Asian leaders on the Vietnam war following which he would go to a hospital for minor throat and abdominal surgery (causing Hubert to privately exult that his chief would probably not run in 1968).
Hubert was sickened when he went to college campuses to be greeted by picketers and demonstrating students chanting, “Hubert-Hubert, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” Johnson’s Asian trip and coming hospitalization were welcome inducements to Hubert to get off the campaign trail. Things weren’t going too well on the campaign trail anyhow, so Hubert with a dramatic flourish cancelled his campaigning to return to Washington to remain there during the president’s absence in Asia and during his surgery.
In November the Republicans won eight new governors, three new senators and 47 new House members. Things looked bleak for the Democrats in `68 unless the war could be ended, law-and-order returned to urban streets, student riots quelled. Only solution: if Bobby Kennedy would be on the ticket they could win.
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12/7/2007
Personal Asides: Three Minor Matters and One Major…This Man Huckabee.  | | Keep an eye on him. A possible VP. |
Three Minor.
1. Someone ought to tell Richard M. Daley for god’s sake get a haircut will you? This notion that someone sold him that because his hair grows over his collar and curls down his cheeks is attractive in a 65 year old gentleman is a terribly false one. This is evidently Maggie’s doing but here she is in grievous error.
2. And while they’re at it, that same someone ought to go to Attorney General Lisa Madigan and tell her that she is a perfectly attractive young woman-spirited, witty, convivial, intelligent, perspicacious-but she is only near perfect in looks where she could be 100%. She has a predominately high forehead-very high--which means that she ought to adjust her hair style for bangs. Who will do that for me? And don’t give me the nonsense that since she is a feminist cum attorney charged with doing the people’s business she cannot be bothered with such non-intellectual interference. If you believe that, you don’t know what woman is.
3. I trust nobody has been fooled by the made-up “feud” between two “Sun-Times” columnists who are supposed to represent two different readers’ niches. One if Mary Mitchell who writes while black; the other is Neil Steinberg who writes while Jewish. They are pretend quarreling over whether a police superintendent should be white. Sorry, Michael Cooke, good try but no cigar. Think up another stunt.
One Major.
Thoughts following Mitt Romney’s speech on his faith.
To call Mormonism a cult…which a wise man said is a religion without clout…is to treat it as weird and at first contemplation more unbelievable than the dogmas of the prime church of Christianity, from which all others emerged-mine, the Roman Catholic faith. Four solid years of theology in the pre-Vatican II era of St. John’s led me to embrace these beliefs-still valid post-Vatican II. It would be understandable indeed if one seriously doubted the validity of these beliefs and could decide not to vote for anyone who held them. Most of them are tenets of the original Christianity-regarded then as a cult when compared to the Jewish and idol worshiping prevalent at the time.
Boss, we have a presidential candidate here who has admitted he subscribes to these tenets:
That to be saved we must eat the flesh of Christ and drink His blood. We acknowledge that Christ was born of a woman who retained her virginity and who was impregnated by the Holy Spirit.
That we were all, save one in the millennia years of humanity, stained with the Original Sin of Adam, the first creature.
That of all creatures heretofore or since, Mary, was conceived without Original Sin which even Aquinas for one refused to believe (showing that the Angelic Doctor had his limitations). Yet this Catholics believe de fide, as pronounced infallibly in 1858 (thanks to other theologians coming later who responded to Thomas’ doubts which did not interfere with his becoming a Doctor of the Church).
That what we know about Christ, the founder of our religion, has been communicated through what we call Divine Revelation-which would probably not pass muster in any law or journalism school in the country (“you mean that nothing whatsoever was written down until long after Christ died and what was then depended on hearsay of people who told people who told other people and who are dead?”). That’s right which means…
That after the Ascension, the apostles handed on to their hearers what He had said and done. That this they did with that clearer understanding which they enjoyed after they had been instructed by the light of the Spirit of Truth.
That they did this in such manner that the things they told us about Christ were true and unreserved (the doctrine of “vera et sincera”).
That as it was taught to us in highest theology “granting that the apostles were at least honest men not to say especially chosen by God, we would expect them not to fabricate. Nor would the other evangelists-Mark, the companion oaf Peter; and Luke the associate of Paul-have any earthly reason to prevaricate. This because all they could look forward to on the promise of Christ was suffering and persecution for telling the truth and in this they were not disappointed.
That after a very ordinary man who is nevertheless a priest-maybe even an unworthy one-- consecrates bread and wine, these become without qualification not symbols but the entity of Jesus Christ, true God and true man while the bread and wine retain the appearances of sensible things-and upon which the faith rests with all its weight on Scripture and the evidence of Tradition testified by John who records that after Jesus worked the miracle of multiplying the loaves and fishes said, in John’s words: I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the desert and they are dead. But this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that men may eat and not die. I am the living bread that has come down from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread will live forever and the bread that I shall give is my flesh for the life of the world.”
That we must confess our sins to a priest who very likely is of ordinary mien and often composed of undesirable qualities, but notwithstanding, one who invokes the decision from God to grant us absolution with the proviso we go and sin no more.
That Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture (all to be written with capital letters in the texts) form the sacred deposit of the word of God.
That the Mother of Christ exists are mediatrix to our salvation par excellence.
That she deserves the title mediatrix because she cooperated in an unique way with Christ in his redemptive labors on earth because in heaven she continues interceding for those who are still working out their salvation as pilgrims of the Church Militant or souls suffering in purgatory.
That Mary’s meditation is the crucial issue on which Catholic and other Christian traditions divide.
That Catholics believe in two final destinies: one for man individually and the other for humanity as a whole.
That on the Last Judgment Christ will come in all majesty, escorted by the angels; then he will take his seat on the throne of glory. “All the nations will be assembled before him and he will separate men from one another as the shepherd separates the sheep on his right hand and the goats on his left.”
That there will be two Judgments-one for us individually known as Particular and one for all humanity that ever lived since Adam, known as the General.
That if we pass muster at the Particular Judgment, we, the just dead, examined and found justified, shall rise again.
That since the Council of Trent four terms have been applied to identify the qualities of the resurrected body: impassibility (or immunity for further death and pain); subtility (or freedom from restraint by matter); agility (which is something I could use to greater effect right now but which means obedience to spirit with regard to movement and space) and clarity (or refulgent beauty of the soul manifested in the body).
That the Pope has “infallibility.” But it does not mean he is perfect (Andy Greeley’s purposeful misunderstanding with which he has made so much fun in line with his wish to continue as a pop heretical priest-columnist-media showoff). “Infallibility” is not “impeccability” but that when the pope speaks ex-cathedra, i.e. from the chair on faith and morals viz the Immaculate Conception, he cannot err. We note that God who is absolutely infallible gave this gift with certain restricted limits: in matters of faith and morals, when the whole people of God unhesitatingly hold a point of doctrine and always depending on wise providence and the grace of the Holy Spirit.
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Look at these items and see if you can understand somebody wondering about the weirdness and mental stability of a Christian candidate.
This Man Huckabee.
As one who spent a good portion of my life managing political campaigns and/or strategizing how Republican candidates can get elected, I know what I believe but understand that to win one must have a ticket the appeals to a broader consensus than one man can. My preferred candidate for president is, as I have said, Mitt Romney. He is the person you would hire for president. His views on social issues, Iraq, economic issues square almost totally with my own. I am not bothered because he has shown deviations-especially on moral issues. After all, as my good friend and spiritual son Jim Leahy has said (in the Chicago Daily Observer) we are in this effort to convince people to join us, are we not…therefore we shouldn’t be disturbed when they do and should stop trying to affix a length of time where they must believe as we do in order to be accepted by us. I remember full well Ronald Reagan’s conversion to pro-life came after he signed into law the farthest reaching abortion law in the nation, ranking with the one signed in New York by Nelson Rockefeller.
There is enough room in the coalition that Reagan pioneered to embrace some diversity. That diversity could well come with Mike Huckabee. While I buy into most everything the “Wall Street Journal” prescribes, I know the coalition does not in every particular. You have blue collars who worry very much about so-called “free trade” and think there should be a movement toward “fair trade.” If so, your man is Mike Huckabee who distances himself from Nafta and would insist on penalties for countries that wish to practice discrimination against our products while expecting we will do the same with theirs-reciprocity. .
For those who feel there should be some expressed compassion in the immigration question that has not been shown by the avid listeners to either Rush Limbaugh or Laura Ingraham, here is one who does not follow in slavish lockstep.
Those who support farm subsidies and an expanded federal role in health care have a champion in Mike Huckabee. While at the same time you have one who
Supports the concept of winning the Iraq War,
Supports every item of pro-life and opposition to same-sex marriage,
Supports appointment of strict constructionists to the federal bench,
Supports junking the Income Tax code and replacing it with the Fair Tax and substitute it with a 23% national retail sales tax on nearly all goods and services which while it hasn’t been worked out sufficiently for my own consumption (will the state taxes when added to that approach 30% will the income tax repeal result in the unintended consequence of an income tax and a national sales tax?) these are bold initiatives, long considered, and now well worth talking about in a campaign.
But given his brilliance in debate and his general political attractiveness, I think the time has come when he should be first in line for vice president on a Republican ticket.
Your comments.
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12/6/2007
Flashback: LBJ Invites the McCarthys to the White House; Gene Angers Abigail By His Reference to the Hair in Johnson’s Nostrils.
[More than 50 years of politics written as a memoir for my kids and grandchildren.]
The Hair in LBJ’s Nostrils.
In this somewhat overlong précis of Hubert and Gene, the one person I find myself siding with…indeed rooting for…is Abigail McCarthy. Because she’s genuine. Any man who has any knowledge of marriage whatsoever-even a Cistercian monk with no interest in women-- should be able to understand. Here she meets this tall, good-looking but remote egotist who had left St. John’s Abbey because the novice master tells him he has to tap maple trees for syrup, adding “you may have been first in your class in the university but you’re not big around here.” That was the reason Gene left: not celibacy or the vows of poverty and obedience; he thought he would continue being a big man on campus. So he walks out and become a high school teacher. At the high school, Abigail Quigley who had seniority over him was told to move down the row since the big intellectual is coming to teach. He pops into the faculty room, listens to their conversation and saunters out giving the idea that their topics are not remotely worth his time even to participate.
He goes to another seminary in a hope to recapture the adulation he had at St. John’s and it doesn’t work. So he walks out again; they renew courtship composed of Saint Eugene mumbling one-liners making fun of everybody and jibing at them. They marry and he wants to live with her in a kind of ultra-Catholic commune on a farm. His wealthy father gives them a farm and he-Abigail helps, though-goofs it up, damn near killing himself when he’s spray painting and it infects his lungs, she saving his life. She’s desperate to get out of there. She’s a small town girl from Wabasha, Minnesota with a definite literary skill, charm and sensitivity-in fact a much better writer than he is. So she gets him to apply at St. Thomas College in St. Paul. He’s accepted. No sooner does he teach than he says he wants to instill social justice on earth-but she’s wise to him. His ego again. So he runs for DFL chairman in Ramsey county and talks to Hubert who’s the mayor of Minneapolis. But when Hubert leaves the meeting, always the droll one-liners from Gene, making fun of him and a lot of people higher on the ladder than he is. There gets to be a pattern here.
He runs for Congress which means he has to take a leave from teaching-and he doesn’t like to hear any complaints about his lethargy and boring speaking style. He wins, gets an immediate boost in income (a Congressman’s salary) and they go to Washington. Abigail is just like any other wife-thrilled with the big city, the fact that of all people Lady Bird Johnson is nice to her and so is Muriel Humphrey. He serves in the House and then wants to go to the Senate. But one of Hubert’s friends, multi-millionaire Eugenie Anderson, wants to go, too. So Gene starts making epigrammatic digs at her. How dare she try to take Gene’s fancied job away from him. Hubert is neutral; of course he should be neutral: Eugene Anderson staked him big time with big bucks to build the party up. Gene can’t understand it so he starts poisoning the well with Hubert in conversation with his friends. Abigail says: for God’s sake, why are you so divisive? If you want to run against Eugenie then run against her but why this bitterness and cruel wit?
He gets the convention endorsement and won’t even come down from his hotel room to shake hands with Eugenie-a petulant ego-driven self-absorbed spoiled brat whose Mommy thought Gene was the apple of her eye. Abigail is always the smarter one. He finally shakes hands with Eugenie much later. He goes to the Senate and Abigail finds a world of social friends in Washington-this time a more powerful group, the wives of Lyndon Johnson, Frank Church, George McGovern and all the other senators. As Hubert goes up in estimation, Gene keeps drilling at him with sardonic humor. Of course Abigail doesn’t like it. She tells him he’s a big spoiled baby who always had his own way and can’t accommodate whenever life doesn’t cave in for him.
He gets bitter at the 1960 presidential candidates saying he’s twice as smart as Stu Symington and twice as Catholic as John Kennedy and he does his old epigrammatic bit making fun of Kennedy because he doesn’t know much about the Church and it looks like he’s going to get the presidency. Abigail tells him this isn’t going to work. People are going to get wise to this spoiled kid routine. So he drifts off and keeps company with The Little Sisters of the Media, a group of old maids-Mary McGrory, Nancy Dickerson, Marya McLaughlin, Shana Alexander et al who think he’s so precious and brilliant and devastatingly witty. Then Johnson has to pick a vice president and, knowing that the presidential convention will be flat and full, tries to instill some suspense into the vice presidential pick by pondering whether it will be McCarthy or Hubert. McCarthy passes the word that Hubert will not be constant on Vietnam if Vietnam turns sour. Imagine that: Hubert won’t be constant. Johnson leans to Hubert and McCarthy tosses in the cards spoiling LBJ’s fun. When Hubert is picked at the convention, McCarthy behaves so badly at the Democratic delegation celebration for Hubert that Abigail stays upstairs in her room-not going to be humiliated by this spoiled kid who can’t handle even a minor interruption in his road to glory.
Now with LBJ is trouble over Vietnam and Hubert trying alternately to get us out of there and please Johnson by sounding like a hawk, Gene is making fun of them all the time-causing the Little Sisters of the Media to convulse with laughter. Abigail has just about had enough of it. Just when she thinks all her friends…the wives of other Democratic senators…will start turning her off because of Gene’s spoiled kid attitude, an invitation comes from LBJ to go to the White House. It’s a last-ditch effort to try to salvage the old relationship with Gene. She looks forward to it hugely. They go and a number of other senators and their wives are there along with the secretaries of state and defense and Hubert and Muriel who are very nice to them. Muriel is kidding with Abigail something she hadn’t done in a while.
. Then, after dinner, LBJ maneuvers around, gives Gene a high sign that he wants to talk with him and they go to the other side of the room where the president-about the same height as Gene-stands on his tiptoes and, raising his head so he can look at Gene through his bifocals, starts conversing with him. Everybody notices that the conversation is getting long. Hubert and Muriel are talking with others. Abigail is impressed. Highly so. They talk for a long-long time. Abigail is fascinated. Gee, her husband is the source of all that attention from the president Maybe they’ll work it out and everybody will be friends again.
On the ride home-Gene told me this-she asks excitedly, “what did the president want? And what did he say? What did you think of him spending all that time with you?”
As he steered the car home, he said laconically. “Well, for one thing I didn’t think anything. Just looking at all the hair in his nostrils.”
She said, “Pardon me?”
“Just looking at all the hair in his nostrils. Why doesn’t his barber--.”
“Are you kidding me? What the hell is this, you trying to be gauche? You mean you got nothing whatsoever out of a one-on-one with the president of the United States?”
“Not especially.”
By now he had pulled his car into the driveway. They walked to their front door and there waiting on their front porch was Jerry Eller, his administrative assistant, who had been waiting there for them to come back. He had a package of office stuff for Gene to look at. I got the rest of the story from Eller.
“Jerry, I don’t think I want to look at it now,” said Gene.
“No, Jerry,” she said. “Come in. I want you to hear this. I want you to hear it. You’re part of this operation. You’re the administrative assistant. This is a perfect time. Let me tell you what happened tonight and let Gene tell you. And you decide how mature this is.”
Oh, Lord, Eller thought. Did I just walk into something. They unlocked the door and Eller (my old classmate) goes in somewhat reluctantly knowing that he is going to be eyewitness to a marital dispute.
Then as he sits down on the divan Eller hears the whole thing. Gene’s total unimpressed state with Johnson, his not listening to what the president has to say because he’s peering at the hair in his nostrils. When she gets exasperated, Abigail can swear pretty well and she does.
“Tell me,” she says with her hands on her hips (she was a very attractive, dark-haired Irish woman who had a number of beaux before she made a hell of a mistake in trying to lasso this very-very strange duck. “Tell me what the hell you are trying to accomplish by p-----g off the president of the United States…the leader of your party…when he’s obviously making a play for your support…when we’re in the midst of a war and he needs your support. What do you get out of this, Gene? This is all about you, isn’t it? Not the country, not the party; not anybody but you.”
“That’s what it’s all about for you,” he said. “Your social friends.”
“My social friends. They’re not my friends particularly. They’re--.”
“Of course they are. They mean everything to you.”
“Let me finish. What’s your rationale for this spoiled child stuff Gene? What did you get out of it when you put on that spoiled brat act after Hubert got the vice presidency? What’s it all for, Gene? So you can charm the pants off Little Sisters of the Media with your goddamn intellectual insights all the while for that little titillation…”
“Little what?”
“Titillation. I take it that’s all you’re getting out of it. I don’t know.”
I’m going, said Eller.
“No,” said Gene, “stick around. What you have here is a Washington society matron upset because her party didn’t go well.”
Goodbye, all, said Eller. See you in the morning. Jesus, he thought, maybe they’re going to split up. What about the fine upstanding Catholic lawmaker then?
They were still going at it as he deftly closed the door behind him.
Hubert Goes on a Mission for LBJ.
All the while Hubert Humphrey’s state of mind wasn’t much better than the McCarthys. Finally he gets an okay from Johnson to go overseas-to the December 30, 1965 inauguration of President Marcos of the Philippines, with additional stops in Japan, Taiwan (then called Formosa) and Korea. Humphrey is given the mandate to get commitments from each of the four nations he visits to help us in Vietnam-to prevent a Communist takeover of Vietnam. Humphrey was estatic.
Great, he says, anything to get the hell out of here. Anxiety pains immediately eased up. Muriel was overjoyed. But somehow the “New York Herald Tribune” got word that he was going to Saigon as well. Nobody had said anything about Saigon. They printed it. Johnson flew into a rage and told his press minions to deny it; Hubert’s not going to Saigon. Johnson decided Hubert had leaked this in order to put pressure on LBJ to send him to Saigon. Not true. Hubert asks a friend: “Tell me, am I so duplicitous acting that I’d leak going to Saigon when I’m not?” No, said the friend, but Johnson would if he were in your shoes and he’s judging everybody by himself. Nobody is as tricky as Johnson; he’s so crooked intellectually and morally he can’t lay straight in bed at night so he thinks everybody else is the same way he is.
Jack Valenti, an unctuous Italianate presence to Johnson, a Uriah Heap, groveling character who, it was plain, would do anything to serve his chief-even risk his manhood-called Hubert on the phone and said he was to accompany Hubert on the trip. Purpose: of course to report to the Chief everything Hubert did that was good or bad-particularly bad. The idea of being on a respite from Washington vanished for Hubert then. Muriel started to worry about his health. Well they went together and Valenti told Hubert he was going to give him good marks in his report to the boss. Hubert said to others; sonuvabitch, I’m vice president of the United States…second in command…land this little creep tells me if I play my cards right he’ll give me a good grade.
But then he gets a break. He no sooner gets back in this country than he has to grab a change of clothes and go back to Asia for the funeral of Indian Prime Minister Lai Bahadur Shastri in the second week of January, 1966. This time Valenti doesn’t go along. Hubert and his aide David Gartner get to New Delhi 27 hours later and Hubert’s invited to participate…along with Dean Rusk… in a meeting there with Soviet Premier Alexsei Kosygin, which is the first major face-to-face between U. S. officials and the new premier. The meeting lasts 1-1/2 hours and is a success. Then while taking a walk around the garden of the Indian presidential palace with Gartner and two secret service agents, Hubert rounds a corner and almost bumps headlong into Kosygin who’s doing the same thing. Kosgyin’s English speaking daughter and two bodyguards are along. The daughter translates and Hubert gives him some vice presidential cufflinks. They talk about Vietnam and Russian intentions there. On his own, Hubert sets up a meeting with Mrs. Indira Gandhi, the sister of Pandit Nehru. It was fortuitous because Mrs. Gandhi rose to power overnight just a few days later and Hubert has a relationship.
Now LBJ is overjoyed. He believes Hubert is a great emissary. Besides he didn’t get much press on the trip so that’s all to the good for LBJ. In reward the president now sent him on a 14-day, 43,000 mile trip to nine Asian nations-this time including South Vietnam. First stop Honolulu where U. S. and South Vietnam leaders agreed to what is known as the Declaration of Honolulu which said that the U. S. approach to South Vietnam would be based on social and economic development goals. Now, said Hubert, we’re cooking. But when he got back Johnson wasn’t mad at anything, just worried that Robert Kennedy was stealing Hubert’s leftwing buddies in preparation for 1968. Then he clapped Hubert on the back and sent him forth once again-to Honolulu where he wold pick up South Vietnamese premier Nguyen Cao Ky, chief of state Nguyen Van Theiu, special ambassador Averill Harriman (who was starting to be doddering) and McGeorge Bundy along with the creep Jack Valenti. They would all go once again to Saigon, other stops in South Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Pakistan, India, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines and Korea. Hubert put on a display that topped any other vice president’s visit including that of Richard Nixon for Ike and Lyndon Johnson for Kennedy-calling hogs in Vietnam, teaching Bangkok kids to say “okay” and “goodbye,” to share views of the dustbowl days of South Dakota with the drought in India and kissing babies in rural rice paddies and Saigon slums.
Meeting with the press in off-the-record talks, Hubert grew expansive and reverted to his old anti-Commie views when he beat the Communists in the Farmer-Labor party of Minnesota. “I fought those bastards then and I’m going to fight them now,” he said as he popped down a few cool ones. “We licked them then and we can lick them now. They’re not the forces of freedom. We are.” Then he sounded a lot like the George W. Bush of today.
“If we don’t stop `em in South Vietnam they’ll be in Honolulu and San Francisco.” Back home when he heard these words repeated by one newsman who was in the habit of serving as an emissary to Johnson, LBJ was happy. He had finally got Hubert to be a man you could go to the well with.
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12/5/2007
Personal Aside: Fast Rudy as a Variant of Fast Eddie: It’s Getting Tiresome.  | | Fast Eddie | | |  | | Fast Rudy. |
Giuliani.
Only a species of Chicagoan will understand me when I say that Rudy Giuliani is a variant of Eddie Vrdolyak. Eddie Vrdolyak, for the benefit of you who have lived in the dark forest of innocence to Chicago wiles, is a Croatian who is one of the brightest lawyers and political operatives in city history. Never overwhelmingly popular, he is an acquired taste. I must say I acquired the taste early and love Vrdolyak as the brilliant rogue he is. He has equal appeal to both men and women-something unusual in politics. Not that he is, at a graying age now, a matinee idol but, fast of quip and brilliant at repartee he is terrific fun to be with. I know because I went on a fast trip to Washington, D. C. on one of his runs for mayor and we had a fascinating time; fascinating to hear him speak, to see and watch him. He is instinctively Chicago as when he said about the Daley’s that “they are a special breed and everybody else is just a Polack.”
That’s exactly right; that’s how the Daleys think! There was a time when the man known as Fast Eddie was so fast that he could outrun and outtalk any attempt to criticize him. He has an unique Chicago personality, a flair, an élan that is hard to explain if you are not one of us old Eddie fans. I am not alone when I told him on our last meeting that I hope he beats the rap-something to do with allegations that he maneuvered illegally to collect a commission on sale of property. God there have been so many of these things surrounding him I am tired of even thinking of them. But I am sincere: I hope he beats the rap.
But just as I hope he does, I know that there will be other charges. That’s because Eddie is like a moth fascinated by the flame. He can and does make millions with his undeniable acumen at law and politics. But somehow this doesn’t seem to matter to him. He seems always to get involved in some kind of manipulative enterprise or whatever. If it isn’t in the sale of Chicago property it is in Cicero, with the ghost-strategizing he did for its president the long-lashed Betty Loren Maltese who is serving a big term in the clink.
I m beginning to think that Rudy Giuliani is the nation’s Eddie Vrdolyak. Undeniably brilliant, wondrously street-smart, just the guy you would like to see become president if for no other reason than to anger the ACLU and “The New York Times” and to scare the devil…literally…out of the Islamic terrorists. The stories that Rudy tells about his relatives being foot-soldiers to the mob are the same as Eddie’s saying that he first thought the definition of a book was a guy working out of a backroom in his neighborhood drug store.
The thing about Rudy is the same attraction that holds for Eddie. You know that if they got in they would cut corners, drive circles around staid old laws like the Constitution and somehow…I don’t know how…gain huge respect in the process. Henry Kissinger used to tell when in his after dinner cups how he would go to Moscow and Bejing and tell them that he worked for a crazy sonuvabitch. He’d say: “I mean c-r-a-z-y!” He would see fright in their eyes because one look at Nixon rolling the equivalent of Captain Queeg’s steel ball-bearings In his hands…his eyes lighted with insecurity, his body jerking up and down with all kinds of neuroses, that the people in China and Russia would get the idea that this guy Nixon and his Svengali Kissinger were worth fearing.
But Nixon who was a kind of maniac with a shriveled ego did himself in. I fear…although I would love to spend the rest of my days reading about Fast Eddie…that he has finally singed his wings flying too near the flame. And I am starting to wonder about Rudy. The stuff that’s being turned up about his top cop Kerik shows a frightful cavalier-ness. The material about his law firm-public affairs agency that is making $100 million is scary-scaring me more than the Islamic fascists. And finally, there’s an old saying that when two words are associated closely in one news sentence, they can be poison. That is the association of “presidential candidate’ and “girl friend.”
I think just as Chicagoans in the past were prepared to laugh off Fast Eddie’s past as no prologue to the future, things started to turn around and they realized that with Vrdolyak as mayor there would be more difficulty than we have seen at any one time since the days of Big Bill Thompson. Conversely, I am beginning to believe that voters may understand a mayor who’s had three divorces, and had the awful lack of sagacity to dress up as a woman and who takes cell phone calls from his wife while speaking to the NRA. These are wonderfully colorful things-each probably answerable. But there are things that are beginning to slow him down. The so-called trip to see his girl friend which was paid by taxpayer money-that story is false because I understand the money was first paid by the agency and under a longstanding arrangement reimbursed. . But frankly I am getting tired of trying to understand Rudy just as I have become tired of trying to understand Eddie.
We have had a fascinating little run in the pre-primary season with Fast Rudy but now the winter season is here and it’s time to get serious. So let us douse the romanticism, set Rudy along with Eddie on a lineup and thrill to them as characters…much like New York Mayor Jimmy Walker…hail them where their true imagination can be lauded, and then forget them.
Forget them and set ourselves down to the hard task of picking a Republican candidate for president who if elected will not cause us to arise in the morning and groan “what in the name of God has he done now?”
Your views please.
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12/3/2007
Personal Asides: Jingle Answer…Crowding the Hyde Mourners’ Bench… The Soft Liberal White Bigotry of Lessened Expectations…The WSJ’s Misunderstanding of the Meaning of a Political Campaign…Fr. Andy and Laissez Faire for the Unborn.  | | Emanuel--Oh so sorry about Henry! |
No One Got It.
No one knew the complete jingle and I am amazed because it was relatively common during my youth-but then again who is as old as I?
A flea and a fly in a flue/
Were imprisoned so what could they do?/
Said the flea “Let us fly!”/
Said the fly, “Let us flee!”/
So they fled through a flaw in the flue.
Frank Nofsinger, you mean you never heard this? Didn’t they have this in Rochester, Minnesota, Salt Lake, Connecticut and all the other places you’ve worked?
Crowding the Mourners’ Bench.
No sooner did Henry Hyde die than the “Tribune” rushed out with a story long on laudatory and very-very short on analysis…topped by the “Sun-Times” which had more of a story. The difference between the two papers is starting to be this-in obit news of the greats, for the sanitized version read the “Tribune” which is like reading the establishment’s official bio; if you want to learn more than he official typescript you read the “Sun-Times.”
Two who crowded the mourners’ bench, burbling their lachrymose tears into their hankies were, predictably, Democratic Congressman Rahm Emanuel who was White House political director for Bill Clinton when Hyde led the House impeachment and the recently resigned (to spend more time with his family, of course) Republican Denny Hastert (good ol’ Denny, his eyebrows waggling up and down, his lips pursed as if to say perhaps major but then thinks better of it).
Now that the dead Hyde can’t contradict, Emanuel said that Hyde was like a friendly mentor to him in the House. (This after Emanuel’s service as White House political director when he had looked heavenward in innocence as Larry Flynt and “Salon” detailed a 40 year old story about Hyde in an attempt to destroy him and the charges of perjury against Bill Clinton. You see, everybody does it!). Warm, greathearted old Uncle Henry put a grandfatherly arm around him and--. (Knowing Henry he’d pull that scrawny neck to his bosom so tightly the ex-ballet dancer couldn’t breathe).
Then the newly-thin Hastert crowded into the pew with his misty-eyed reminiscence that Hyde was-lo and behold-a mentor to him as well when Hastert was in the state legislature.
The “Trib” mentioned nothing whatsoever of any possible connection, even subliminal, between Emanuel and the payback recycled smear on the late congressman. Nor that Hastert refused his fond mentor’s request for an extension of his judiciary chairmanship and then backed a rival to head the House International Relations committee. There is no institutional memory at the “Trib” evidently; not even to remember to look at the Morgue clips or what passes for them these days. It can remember the Flynt charge but nothing else, no Illinois connection. That’s because its Washington staff is largely out-of-town, thus out-of-luck and historically out-of-pocket.
If the “Trib” didn’t have John Kass and Dennis Byrne, well, I dunno what it’d be.
Over at the “Sun-Times,” Chicago smart Lynn Sweet and Abdon Pallasch gave a revelatory précis-echoing the tabloid’s once great coverage of old-- of what happened as Hyde prepared the bill of impeachment against Clinton. They interviewed Ab Mikva, former Jimmy Carter-appointed federal judge who was Clinton’s ethics chief in the White House (self-adulated “Mr. Ethics” who like the bordello piano player didn’t fathom what was going on in the anteroom of the Oval Office while his chief was being pleasured by a eager and willing to please taxpayer-paid intern).
Mikva’s job was to water down House impeachment to censure. He told Sweet real historical news: that Hyde originally was favorably disposed to censure but swerved away from that decision after…as Ab said (for the first time I ever read) officially that somebody in the White House orchestrated the leakage of the old affair against Hyde. That’s right: someone in the White House leaked it, Ab said. Never came out before. Great, Lynn! You deserve far more dough than what you obviously must get for that great revelation. And who in the White House…? Aw forget it.
This is all news to the “Tribune” which has much more staff and resources than the “Sun-Times” but is afflicted with corporate journalistic memory that doesn’t extend beyond the day before yesterday. Like when you’re teaching political science and a kid asks “who was Hubert Humphrey?” Makes you want to swat him. And he asks angrily because he’s bored that you are intruding on his precious relevance with today by bringing the name Humphrey up.
But the world cup for vacuous came to me last week. The “Herald” newspaper which covers the northwest suburbs who had someone collecting comments with the tabula raza of somebody who just arrived from Mars. When told the Congressman reflected what few others did-the full nature of the office which goes by the title “United States Representative in Congress” it seemed like fresh news to him but not enough news to print. He copied down the title like it was news to him: United States Repre--.
But here’s the payoff. When told that the Congressman on his retirement, after 32 years in the cockpit of House action from Watergate backlash from Jerry Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan. George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton to George W. Bush, having headed two House committees, was savaged by the White House and blocked by his own Speaker after dealing with the first impeachment of a president since Andrew Johnson and going on to defend a war with Iraq all the while doubting its efficacy…the kid asked brightly--
“A book? On what?”
On gardening, of course.
The Liberal White Bigotry of Lessened Expectations.
Not long ago the top Cook county commissioner next to Todd Stroger, the president, told the media that white racism is afoot and that since Todd’s budget hasn’t been passed, it was Whitey’s doings. The commissioner, Bill Beavers (who happens to be a friend of mine because I admire his chutzpah) is black; Todd Stroger is black. There was a great uproar on the board and in the editorial boards because notwithstanding that Stroger is black as are most of his major associates, Cook county government is run by incompetents.
Refreshingly, the two major papers here editorialized by rejecting cynical use of the race card. But there is always at least one white liberal chirruping in the front of the bus (too young to remember the civil rights battles) to whom there is no such thing as incompetence if the purveyors are black. It is the soft bigotry of lessened expectations, pretending that it is oh so wrong to label it incompetence since that would somehow be “racism.” Chesterton was right: when you believe in nothing you grab for an absolute anything that’s around.
One who believes white racism is afoot is Mary Mitchell of the “Sun-Times.” But that’s understandable. Writing while black is her job description. Mitchell was hired to fill a niche-that being the angry black woman so as to accelerate the readership of the paper by polarizing its readers. Other segments fall into line like dominos. The white north side bachelor swinger (a little long in the tooth now because he’s well over 40), Richard Roeper who has a predictable liberal hate Bush whine A liberal cum secular-agnostic Jew (as he repeatedly reminds us) who was locked up for wife-beating, Neil Steinberg who regularly comments on Catholic theology which he doesn’t understand or comprehend. Item from Friday: “Until I saw the musical onstage [“Jesus Christ Superstar”] when I was 17, good Jewish boy that I was, I was unfamiliar with the story-oh, I knew who Jesus was and his mom, too, I guess but Herod and Pilate and the Garden of Gethsemane were all new to me. A reminder that one man’ sacrilege is another’s Intro to Religion 101.” Such a secular, world-weary schmuck.
Followed by a black gossip columnist whose sole qualification is that she was the secretary to Kup but who sports near ebonics, who seeks to bring celebrity to her pals by telling us what restaurants these nobodies patronize. Top it off with a bubble gum chewing stringy-haired woman with an Italian surname, turned faux-evangelical from Wheaton as a “religious columnist” who cheered ding-dong-the-witch-is-dead when Jerry Falwell passed and you have pretty much the guts of a paper going pfffft. Without the indisputably great Jack Higgins, Lynn Sweet, Fran Spielman and Abdon Pallasch what would we do?
The WSJ Doesn’t Get It.
Don’t ask a policy wonk to analyze politics. Fusty, dull Dave Broder is one and tries hard but he hasn’t broken a story in decades…was dazed when two police reporters pulled Watergate from under his nose…but wouldn’t have known what to do with it had it bit him on the thigh. Because he writes with such tedium that you can hear the plaster harden on the wall, he got the Pulitzer prize when the awardees got down to the “B’s”-- but the only paper around here that’s carrying him is the “Herald” in the suburbs and I swear the copy desk doesn’t read him either. Any day now he’ll write that the Middle East’s problems will take a long time to solve.
The “Wall Street Journal” is my all-time favorite newspaper because it has superb issue analysis depth but I was in enough campaigns in the past…even some winning ones…where the rule was: don’t let the policy wonks determine the strategy. When, for example, a speech writer not policy wonk came up with the idea of Eisenhower…whose early 1952 campaign was flat and dull…announcing that he would go to Korea, the policy wonks laughed-indeed as did Ike at first. What is the sense of sending a 5-star to Korea when he would do nothing but confer with Ridgeway and have mess with the troops? Then the light-bulbs glowed on. And Eisenhower caught on. Of COURSE! That’s the way to top Adlai Stevenson who is a civilian and to emphasize the 5-star general’s resume. The policy wonk desk working for Ike still didn’t get it until after he came home and his popularity had zoomed beyond Stevenson’s.
Friday the WSJ brilliant, incisive Kimberly Strassel who is my favorite when it comes to putting the murky language of economics into plain language ventured into political analysis. She was and is a disaster as a politico critic and she shouldn’t touch it again. Her point: the Republicans haven’t come up with new, fresh ideas on the presidential campaign trail. She doesn’t realize that a presidential campaign is not the place for anybody to come up with new, fresh, wonkish ideas-just ideas like Ike’s going to Korea. The last time someone tried coming up with a new, fresh idea was Ronald Reagan in a federalism speech which damn near killed him aborning. The complexity bewildered the press, bewildered him…turned out to be imperfectly conceived… and they fired the guy who devised the idea. You think Franklin Roosevelt would have dared come up with full-blown Social Security while running for president in 1932? Or the NRA? Or the NIRA? Or anything? Of course not! The thing to do on the trail is to restate old positions. Fred Thompson’s restating of the flat tax is acceptable because it’s been around for a half century.
But Ms. Strassel still doesn’t get it. She complains the race “is about biography.” Of course, that’s what Eisenhower made of it when he went to Korea. He knew he wouldn’t solve Korea by going there; it re-burnished his five stars. She continues: “Mr. Giuliani’s campaign is about his past as a New York tough guy who can face down terrorists.” OF COURSE! Why do you think he’s been leading the polls among Republicans…until now at least… because he has a stunning view of federalism?
She continues: “Mr. Romney’s, his past as an MBA who can manage our border.” OF COURSE! Next: “Mr. McCain’s, his past as a Vietnam vet who recognized the problems in Iraq.” OF COURSE! She could have added: Mr. Huckabee’s effective governance in Arkansas. The one who talks issues all the time Ron Paul. He doesn’t talk about his having been a physician. And is he leading the pack? NO! (I’ll hear from the Paul people now). One who has a vibrant way to solve Iraq is Duncan Hunter. And is he leading the pack? NO! One of the more aggressive speakers on his views to meet the challenges of the future was Sam Brownback. And is he around now? NO! Get with it Kim and return to your economic analysis. To the Desk: Stop her before she kills the editorial page!
“Laissez Faire” Andy on the Unborn.
Since I don’t like Andy Greeley, I don’t read Andy Greeley . No, that’s not right. Since I don’t like Andy Greeley I make it a strenuous obligation not to read Andy Greeley. But as you know I am beset with human weakness so my eye occasionally strays to his column. If one’s eye offends you, pull it out-well I blame it quite a lot and before I turn in for all eternity,I’ve a mind to.
Since I first met him when he, my cousin George and I were all 13 and he, along with George, the nearest one I, as an only child, had as a brother). They were the twin straight “A” dimpled darlings of Quigley (I went to public h.s., Taft). George was smarter but Andy was the showboat of the two, not only the first kid with his arm waving in the air (“Father, I know the answer!”) but the spoiled rotten brat of the class who would stand on his head to get attention. And since then this is what he has proved out to be and do.
The Big Dutchman, Cardinal Albert Meyer, thought him the smartest young curate he ever met and slated him for a future monsignori (purple) which could lead to (after the Dutchman was gone) a bishopric (crimson) and, who knows?, the cardinalate (red). He steered the smartest kid in the class to the U of C. While Meyer lived, whenever Andy performed, everybody applauded politely. Andy then was a model priest-writer of pious thoughts…finding the perfect mate, the value of chastity… like Daniel Lord, SJ and John O’Brien, SJ whose slender pamphlets were found for 10 pennies each in the racks in the vestibules of every church.
Then the Dutchman died to be replaced by John Cody. Cody didn’t fancy Andy’s smarter-than-you gibes trimmed to the liberal Democratic texts so he took him off the fast track to the purple. That meant, so sad, no crimson or red. Other smart young curates like his classmate and my cousin George went on to fulfill their tasks but Andy couldn’t take it. He resolved to get attention by sticking out his tongue to gain attention in many ways. He was denied tenure at the U of C and charged bigotry. He became a columnist and to get attention spewed things and ideas no other priest could say. Then he turned to novels and wrote soft-porn being sure his picture in ecclesiastical garb (one even in his Mass-saying vestments) appeared to hype the sales. But he never forgot to even-up with Cody. A so-called “scandal” over “corporation sole” surfaced in the “Sun-Times” in manipulative techniques of ferreting out information for which only an insider could obtain… although ”corporation sole” was a Chicago bishop’s preserve since Mundelein. It alleged the old man pocketed archdiocese dough. Never proven but which raised eyebrows from here all the way to Rome.
But what was also alleged was that this Prince of the Church had in his coltish days as priest sired a son who, grown to manhood, looked remarkably like Cody, as we were taught to lisp in catechism class, “in image and likeness.” The shame of it caused the aorta of the enlarged heart in the old man to pop and he tumbled dead in the bunker at 1555 N. State while at bay from liberal priest critics and the media after which Andy’s colleagues in roman collars and journalism said good riddance. Today Cody wouldn’t have had to be ashamed now since demonstrable heterosexuality in the bishopric would be a consummation devoutly to be wished. But you must remember all this was in the innocent age of the Chicago church-when an occasional stray priest might be suspected of lifting his eyes up to the choir loft in admiration of a soprano, not a tenor. Then came Bernardin with whom Andy had a mixed relationship-once promoting him to be the first American pope and then, when spurned, dropped like a hot potato, predicting, archly, that the Chicago archdiocese would undergo sex scandals. Following the written prediction a rapproachment between the two after which came Bernadin’s ill health and death.
A pinwheel of color and an intellectual show-off, Andy still loves to grab attention. He has done so by violating and ridiculing on occasion the teachings of his church all the while adhering to his clerical garb as to thumb his nose and flaunt his multi-millionaire celebrity to those whose good sense got him precluded from bishop. There was a time when Andy and I, though never friends, were civil. That was when George lived who brought us both together. I was even invited to his home fronting on Lake Michigan in Indiana and was shown by the Great Man where the Great Man composed his novels. Not now because of his heterodoxy: first mild, opposition to “Humanae Vitae,” then a spate of things. Always Andy has obediently followed the catechism written daily by the Democratic Left, executing each twist and turn of its dialectic with exactitude. When John Kennedy the hawk urged us to bear any burden, Andy was there; when George McGovern did a 180 and caused a cut in funding in Vietnam, Andy was there.
Abortion decimated Catholic fealty for the liberal Democrats-not Andy. Then came the golden saxophone emblem pinned prominently to his black, immaculately pressed suit coat, representing a large donation to Bill Clinton, the abortion president. An ocean-tide of predictable lip-synch Democratic propaganda columns in the slavishly liberal “Sun-Times” that have lasted through the years. But rarely did he write of abortion. Until now. His one-party (he had boasted to me he had never, ever voted for a Republican) dialectics require he consider abortion and so he did last week.
Any thought that the priesthood, natural law and the rubrics of abortion that have rated Catholic theological opposition for 2,000 years would prevent his joyous support of the Democratic party is, of course, ridiculous. He deserves the “Archbishop Thomas Cranmer” Award…the man who shred the dogma of the church to serve his King…for unswerving partisan constancy over all. Thus, when he makes that final journey, across the river and into the trees, to paraphrase Douglas MacArthur his last thoughts shall be-not of the Corps, the Corps and the Corps but of the Party…the Party…and the Party.
He makes a futile effort to have both at once. “I subscribe to the position that abortion, now mater how nearly universal in human history, is morally unacceptable…” Then: “But I wonder if it is proper or prudent to try to impose this Catholic moral view on a whole society that does not agree with us, especially when we cannot even persuade most of our own people.” Translate this to civil rights as faced by Hubert Humphrey with his civil rights challenge to his party in 1948. “I wonde4r if it is proper or prudent to try to impose this…on a whole society that does not agree with us, especially when we cannot even persuade most of our own people”-meaning the Democratic party composed of senior patriarchs with committee chairmanships and millions of voters in the South.
To continue with Andy’s speciousness: “Might it not be a wiser strategy to strive to persuade the Catholic faithful, four-fifths of whom do not believe that it is always wrong, before trying to make Catholic morality the law of the land?” Apply that to Humphrey standing before the Democratic convention of 1948: should we not try to “persuade” the Democratic faithful rather than make it a litmus test now? Which side do you think Andy the party-first Democrat was on in 1948 when he was 20 years old? The side that Humphrey represented for moral solidity even if it jeopardized a Democratic victory and prompted the walkout of the South?
Further: “While we’re doing that, it will be replied, all those babies are dying, and we’re letting it happen.”
His answer: “Perhaps for the time that it would take to persuade our own, we may leave the embryos to God’s loving care, the God who also must protect the vast number of embryos who spontaneously abort.”
Leave them to God’s care. Just as we do miners who are trapped in West Virginia, eh, Andy? We go to the utmost to save them; we search lakes and ponds for missing people. We don’t we leave them to God’s loving care?
Anyhow what’s the use since so many of our bishops are guilty of turning their backs on abuse? Andy: “Howver, we are not likely to convert anyone, Catholic or not, by apodictic ukases from men who have, perhaps irrevocably, tarnished themselves by the abuse scandal, men who are making a lot of noise to which no one listens anymore.”
Finally, the futility: “Does anyone think that the outcome of such an election could be affected in the slightest by a statement about abortion from Catholic bishops?” His hoped for answer is no. But when it comes to Iraq where Andy has a partisan interest, yes-yes-YES the bishops must speak!
Echoing the words of Henry II, wrong so often but right when applied here: “Will no one rid us of this priest?”
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11/30/2007
Personal Asides: Henry Hyde 1924-2007): Rest in Peace. May Your Assassin Know No Rest… Bill Brady and Russ Stewart on WLS-AM Sunday.
Henry Hyde.
The man I knew for forty years as “Uncle Henry” is gone. There will not be his like in the Congress again soon. Perhaps never. Some thoughts:
I hope that Congressman Rahm Emanuel has retained some portion of the innate grace from his ballet dancing past not to attend Henry’s wake or funeral. But if he goes it will be typical.
Typical because as everyone in Washington knows including the media that will not publish it, Emanuel, once President Bill Clinton’s hatchet-man (felicitously called his political director) looked skyward in innocence as porno-magazine owner-editor Larry Flynt disclosed that decades earlier Henry had an affair from his Illinois legislature days-which was supposed to tit for tat, to even things up with a president who allowed himself to be pleasured in an anteroom off the Oval Office by a courtesan intern paid by the taxpayers…on occasions enjoying himself with her even when a House member was on the phone talking to him about the possibility of war…who then lied about it under federal oath, lied to the people and then admitted he lied.
You see, chortled Emanuel executing his Grand Pas d’action, Hyde is a hypocrite! Everybody does it! Evil that is performed should be countenanced as self-justificatory. People lie so the truth should be repealed. The Clintonesque media loved it and still do. With that supreme bettement tendu jete Emanuel left the business and went on to become a multi-millionaire investment banker who legally yes but adroitly used his old White House contacts to enrich himself when he knew nothing about banking, to run for office as an interloper in his district and, reverting to his old trade to complain that a female Democratic competitor who lived there all her life, was the beneficiary of an attack by her near-senile supporter who mistakenly said Emanuel had dual citizenship which Emanuel escalated to an anti-Semitic insult; nd, once nominated gain the help of Mayor Daley’s water commissioner and patronage workers to elect him to the House…where he landed a seat on Ways and Means and chairmanship of the “D triple C.” And now as head of the Democratic House caucus. There he stands as a gaunt, grey-faced shadow behind Nancy Pelosi. Very impressive.
Where Rahm is different than anyone else in this game is that everyone else in politics at one time or other had a job to do they didn’t like. As one who knew him many years ago when he was young (young? he was never young) there’s nothing about the work Rahm doesn’t like. Including the job he was shocked, shocked to see done on Henry Hyde, scars of which were carried in Hyde’s failing health and in today’s obituary.
You would not expect a him to feel remorse. So he will step to the bier, lean, gaunt-like, looking for all the world as an advance-man for a famine. He will be in his proper navy blue sincere suit, dark tie with Windsor knot with his cavernous eyes lowered reverently in sorrow. Corleone orders the cortege car to follow the hearse overflowing with expensive flowers bearing the ribbon: “From a bereaved friend.”
Almost as if Henry hadn’t received this threat from the bad-breathed one who said:
You can have it both ways if you’re smart, Henry. Vote for impeachment but see that it doesn’t pass the Committee. Think of your family. Your wife is already dead, god rest her soul but your daughters and sons who look up to you and their children, what will they think of you? Understand this is a war but it is different here than the war you fought in World War II. Then you could fire a gun and kill somebody a mile away. Not now. You want this to go into your obituary? It will if we bring it out or if Mr. Flynt brings it up in his magazine. But you can spare yourself this.
Henry said later to me: “I couldn’t live with myself if I listened to that.” Before retirement when asked if he would go through the impeachment again he said, “honestly, I don’t know.” But when he was confronted by the bad-breathed surrogate who said all this-- you won’t have to go through if you kill impeachment-Henry answered no. Even so, he knew the media world wouldn’t understand the difference between a president sworn to defend the Constitution lying under oath and a guy decades ago with a woman. They didn’t then; they don’t now. They can’t afford to see the difference.
Twice the bad-breathed one approached him. The second time he said fundamentally this--
This is the real world, Henry and just as you prepare to bring impeachment think of what our disclosure will do to you and your family. You go to Mass now every morning and to communion, too. Well think of what those in the pews will think as you go up there to receive the Eucharist Henry; think of what they will say. They will say this is Henry Hyde the adulterer. Think what your grandchildren will say and think about you forever, Henry. Do you understand?
Henry did and carried out his duty. The Flynt charge was made. It hit Hyde harder than he thought it would. It stayed with him for life. Once he told me that he had been hit by the “Irish sickness,” i.e. depression. Much later he began to physically fail after an operation. He began to fall. He had to get a wheel-chair.
He told me with a smile, “I think the wheels are coming off” but a committee staffer Tom Streithorst said, “you know what it is? It’s the affair. It’s killing him physically. He’s of the older generation. Your generation. These days a long-ago episode means very little. But bred as he is in the Judeo-Christian tradition, what was a meaningless thing long ago rides with him now as he looks at his children. He’s mortified. He will never be the same.”
When he brought the bill of impeachment to the august Senate, he was told by Trent Lott that it wouldn’t fly. Lott had been a boy cheerleader at Old Miss, the man with bad breath had reminded somebody with a hint of more to come. Ted Stevens said it was inconceivable to do this for a lie about sex. The man with bad breath? Anyhow, the Republican Senate crumbled. No president can lie under oath, violate the Constitution and not pay a price. He did but they got even.
When I had lunch with Henry near his retirement home in Geneva, I knew he had overcome it. He told one funny story after another. Frankly, I thought he was still under-appreciative of what he had accomplished. That’s why, I hope that before his heart stopped early-early last morning at 3:30 a.m. or so he understood fully where he stands in our firmament.
The man who died yesterday truly fit the title “United States Representative in Congress” where many do not: they are just locals sent to the House to get goodies for their districts and then quit when they can play the lobbying game and make a lot of money. Not Henry Hyde. He stayed until he could stand no more and he went home.
In retrospect, it is clear that he was a man of the Whole House and the Whole Congress. For one thing, it’s an anomaly but his great goals were achieved much easier when the House was run by the Democrats. Maybe that was because Democrats knew him for what he was--instinctively he always was a Chicago blue-collar working guy, an Irish Catholic Democrat from birth.
To his greatest credit: He enacted the Hyde amendment…the first curtailment of abortion since “Roe v. Wade” and passed it repeatedly each congressional session through Democratic as well as Republican houses. It is intriguing that only when Republicans gained control of the House that he ran into trouble with the establishment of that body. There had been an understanding under Republicans following the accession of Newt Gingrich that committee chairmen serve out term limits to allow others to be chairman. Impeachment took up so much time when he was judiciary chairman that when impeachment was completed, he asked Speaker J. Dennis Hastert for am extension to allow him to work on other things that had been on his agenda. The Speaker waggled his eyebrows, pursed his lips as if to say something important and then decided not to. The answer came from Hastert’s top Illinois minion: no, you will have to step down, because as you know, rules are rules.
So Hyde did. Since he had been ranking Republican on House International Affairs he was thought a natural to become chairman of it. But just to be sure he asked Hastert. The Speaker listened to his request, waggled his eyebrows, pursued his lips as if to say something important and then decided not to. The answer came from the same Hastert minion: no, you see, the Speaker favors someone else for the job. Not you..
Thereupon Henry ran for the chairmanship that should have been conferred on him as his right-- against the guy as an insurgent against the Hastert machine, , knocked him off and became chairman of International Affairs.
Whenever Henry is laid to rest they will be burying one of the few “national” House members (only 18 since 1789) in our nation’s history. These few started with…
…the man who could have either a House or Senate seat and decided on the House since it was, in his view, more important and from which he wrote and caused to be passed the Bill of Rights, Rep. James Madison of Virginia. Rep. Fisher Ames of Massachusetts who served in the first, second and third Congresses and devised the committee system; Rep. Henry Clay of Kentucky who as Speaker made the job second in influence only to that of the president (before we went to the Senate) but who at the same time relaxed the Speaker’s autocratic control over members. They include…
… Rep. John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, outnumbered by pro-slavery members and northern compromisers but so influential he was called Old Man Eloquent, whose greatness was made in the House against slavery (following his ineffective presidency) and who died on the House floor; Rep. Thaddeus Stevens of Vermont, the abolitionist, who brought articles of impeachment against President Andrew Johnson; Rep. James Garfield of Ohio, who made his mark as banking and currency chairman to oppose roaring inflation and as Republican floor leader of the House; Rep. William McKinley of Ohio who as Ways and Means chairman glimpsed the future of economic growth he was later to certify as president; Thomas B. Reed of Maine who restored hierarchal control as a powerful Speaker to join in tandem with Theodore Roosevelt. And also….
…Rep. .Joseph Cannon of Illinois who as Speaker re-directed what had become a loose collection of discordant debaters into a legislative power once again; Rep. George Norris of Nebraska who successfully challenged Cannon when he grew tyrannical and made the body more democratic; Rep. Fiorello H. LaGuardia of New York who with Norris banned employers’ from preventing their workers to organize into unions; Rep. Robert (“Fighting Bob”) La Follette of Wisconsin who with his progressive sons who fought the growing power of corporations over U.S. political life; Rep. Jeannette Rankin of Montana, a doughty feminist, the first woman to ever serve in the House and who voted against our entry into two world wars. Plus another great woman…
…Rep. Jessie Sumner of Illinois, the agrarian populist who urged farmers to raise less corn and more hell; Rep. Sam Rayburn of Texas who was by all odds the outstanding Speaker of the 20th century during seventeen years ranging from FDR’s progressivism to Dwight Eisenhower’s moderation; Rep. Walter Judd of Minnesota who alerted the country to the Nazi and Japanese threat and to the threat of communism. His strong right arm on Foreign Affairs from Illinois the indomitable Marguerite Stitt Church of Illinois and of course…
… Newt Gingrich of Georgia, no friend of Henry’s, but the most innovative and creative (in policy) Speaker since Clay, yet a disastrous and chaotic mis-manager, reckoned even today as 50% genius and 50% nuts. His hammer, a man who had killed bugs for a living in Dallas, Rep. Tom De Lay of Texas, the most effective majority leader (of either party) in its history.
The history of this country spans what began as an aristocracy and expanded to step-by-step to reach out to the little people. We waged successful battles against slavery, sweatshops, segregation; we instilled taboos against incest, bestiality, cannibalism, prostitution, drug addiction, mutilation, self-degradation. First property owners only voted, then with Jefferson and Jackson the “great unwashed,” then after Lincoln the blacks, followed by the empowerment of labor to somewhat match capital; farmers to equate their power with the railroad barons; women to win the vote alongside the men; motor-voter expanding the franchise.
Finally…finally…someone stood up to defend the littlest people of all-the unborn. It happened first in the state House and then, after he modestly declined the honor in the U.S. House and could find no one else (they were all afraid), he pulled a scrap from his notebook and wrote in longhand what was to become the Hyde Amendment.
Someday when we get over our contemporary misapplication of “liberalism” which negates the rights of the unborn and get back to what liberalism was meant to be, Henry Hyde…once a blue-collar Democrat and since then a blue-collar Republican…will be remembered as he truly was-the Greatest Abolitionist and protector of human rights.. That time is not here yet. America has a wondrous habit of denial on abortion. It is like (as he once said) the 13th floor in a hotel: a floor that technically doesn’t exist but in reality does.. You get in an elevator and go up through the floors-1-2-3…up to 10-11-12…and 14. Wait! You say: What happened to the 13th floor? Nothing. It’s there only it’s ignored. We call it Floor 14. Like Floor 13 we just choose to ignore it. But thanks to him we have recognized it.
It is no exaggeration to say that Henry Hyde saved millions of lives that would have been otherwise snuffed out. Which served human rights greater than these: Alexander Hamilton, who raged against the slave trade in New York but couldn’t change it; these anti-slave trade leaders talked the talk well but couldn’t change things: Julia Ward Howe, John Jay, Elijah Lovejoy, Lucretia Mott, Tom Paine, Henry David Thoreau, Sojurner Truth, William Wilberforce. Henry Hyde actually passed legislation that not only defended rights but saved millions of lives.
We will see that one day. Not now with this squalid culture but someday.
Henry told me one day…probably anticipating what was to come through his own personal Gethsemane…that the great incentive to be pro-life is this: that no matter how we may have messed up earlier in life, if he defend the unborn children, his great expectation is that when the most unworthy of us arrives Up There, they will hear a chorus of angelic voices. They will be the voices that were stilled by abortion but who will greet us.
As a fellow earthen vessel, I hope a small trio of singers will greet me. I know…I am sure…an orchestral symphony the size of the Mormon Tabernacle choir will and are greeting Henry with a heavenly concert exulting praise for what he has done to stir the nation’s conscience in their behalf.
Well done to the man I used to call in all fondness “Uncle Henry.”
The assassin never laid a glove on your matchless reputation.
God bless you and keep you in His bosom, sir.
Bill Brady & Russ Stewart.
State Sen. Bill Brady (R-Bloomington) chairman of the Fred Thompson presidential campaign in Illinois and journalist-commentator and political analyst for The Chicago Daily Observer will be my guest on WLS-AM (890) on Sunday at 8 p.m.
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11/29/2007
Personal Asides: Finish This Bit of Doggerel…Free Association of Thoughts on Political Subjects. .  | | Heeeere's Harold! |
Doggerel.
Finish if you can…with search engines at rest…this bit of doggerel.
“A flea and a fly in a flue/
Were imprisoned so what could they do?
___________________/
___________________/
___________________.”
Free Association.
Two Illinois-born septuagenarian journalists are at the head of the line as Washington pundits. Robert Novak, born in Joliet, who for many years has been a friend of mine has the reputation of being a Republican-but that’s not right. He is first of all a news-gatherer and lets the chips fall where they may. He has a tendency to be somewhat mischievous as with his leaked notation the other day that Hillary Clinton people have something on Barack Obama and may leak it.
This angered the Mother Superior of Liberal Self-Righteousness, Carol Marin but when I had lunch the other day with a person high up in the Obama campaign, I learned that the rumor that Hillary’s got something on Obama and may have it divulged has been on the street for weeks. Ms. Marin would like to install the Marquis of Queensbury rules on political journalism so that the onus always falls on conservatives (she interviewed Henry Hyde a few years ago and told him that her elderly aunt couldn’t bring herself to vote for him because the old aunt is Democrat-which I am sure disturbed the venerable Henry not a bit). But sadly the Mother Superior who wears her ideology on her sleeve isn’t making the rules. Anyhow the Mother Superior doesn’t like it when rumors fly that somebody may have something on Obama. That is so-so-so how shall we say, un-genteel. Now if somebody had something on Bush that would be another matter.
Bob is a brilliant economic and social conservative and I would also say an Arab-ist, a tough critic of Israel, a supporter of term limits, what else? He is too much a fan of Jack Kemp for my taste: I believe Kemp is about as much an economic determinist as Karl Marx (only on the free market side). Everything with Kemp is shaped by economics. I vowed that if he ever used that hoary old line “a rising tide lifts all boats” I would regurgitate all over his copy of Adam Smith. Kemp is a classic example of a athletic jock who played ball while his classmates at Occidental were studying, who came late to ideas and has never gotten over it. When I used to go into his office every so often he would drop allusions to Plato’s analogy of the cave. Freshman Philosophy 101. Kemp is also gutless. His running HUD was a disaster.
In addition to everything else, Novak has written the bravest i.e. self-revelatory autobiography I have ever read with the exception of the diary of Samuel Pepys. “Prince of Darkness” is an outstanding piece of work and you should read it-topped only by the TV interview conducted of him on EWTN by Raymond Arroyo who is really one of the best interviewers in the business but who is too much ignored because he is not on the networks or major cable stations. His interviews with bishops are superb.
The other big name journalist from Illinois is David Broder. Reading David Broder doesn’t tell you anything. He eschews gossip of course, eschews ideology and writes ploddingly. In private conversation he is crisp and insightful. He is an excellent speaker. Were he to develop his journalism to match his speaking style he would be truly notable. He is so fusty, so establishmentarian in his ponderous, cliché-driven opinions it is just natural that he has won a Pulitzer prize for commentary. Just the kind of stuff the Pulitzer prize committee would vote for-stuff that doesn’t offend anybody and carries with it a residue of political correctness. I am saddened that Bob Novak hasn’t won a Pulitzer since the stuff he details is fresh and original. But then the Pulitzer people are resolutely unoriginal and if you are a critic of Israel as Bob is that disqualifies you.
Speaking of the journalistic fad to be politically correct, this week we have had a spate of stories about Harold Washington since he has been dead 20 years. I yield to no one in my love for his fun-loving, mischievous personality and his eagerness on election night to privately tell the Sultan of Pout, Jesse Jackson that he should plan to visit Africa more often because the black face and personality here will belong to Harold. I wish I could tell you what he called me one night when we were both on Chicago public radio. He was a Congressman then and I zinged him for refusing to meet with President Ford. At the break in the show he turned to me, roared with laughter and said “Roeser, you’re a whole sack full of a------s.” The engineer waved frantically because we were not off the air and Harold covered his mouth and we screamed with laughter. How can you not like a guy like that.
The outrageous ego-strutting Jackson offended Harold in the election night warm-up before the winner was introduced. But there is no doubt that Harold was the most vivid, warm and ingratiating personality ever to hold the Chicago mayoralty, exceeding even Richard J. Daley. Richard J. was at his best when he forgot about himself and sputtered with anger but Harold was always at his personal best-witty, conversant, literate (far more so than Richard J. or his kid) although he hugely overused the word “burgeoning.” To Harold everything was burgeoning-poverty, the desperation of his enemies, the insidiousness of the Republicans et al.
All these things the media don’t capture in an effort to sanitize and sanctimonize Harold. They also make him out to be a great mayor. He was not. He was a great political movement leader. Government was rather boring to Harold and he exhibited a masterly attention to detail. There was no vision or familiarity with municipal government in him. But politics was a different matter. He said it best: “Politics is more fun than eating Crackerjack or shooting pool.”
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