October 24, 2005
On Federal Deficits Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:55 PM EST John Steele Gordon makes a number of interesting statements about the origins of and possible solutions to our Federal deficits. He asserts that the eighteenth-century Founders, like other eighteenth-century Englishmen, thought that the King was expected to live off his own revenues. This was indeed true of an earlier phase of British history, but it is stretching a point very far indeed to claim that this was true after the end of the seventeenth century, when a revolution in British public finance compounded of new debt instruments (the sinking fund) and a radical increase in public revenues (much of it the excise, in an age of radically expanding trade) meant that Britain could run and finance vast deficits, deficits that gave it the means to first stalemate and then shatter the French monarchy in what has been called the second Hundred Years War, picking up control of a quarter of the globe in the process. While the consols (the very rough equivalent of our Federal bonds) tend to get much of the credit for this achievement, the effect of radically increased state revenues must not be discounted. A comparable innovation today would be an increase in Federal revenue from a carbon tax and a value-added tax so vast that the Federal government would be unlikely to run deficits in peacetime. So one way to cut down the deficits, striking in its absence from Mr. Gordon’s analysis, would be to increase rather than diminish public revenues. Recent legislation leading to the abolition of estate taxes comes to mind here. This legislation could be altered, excluding estates of less than $5 million from tax, but reinstituting fairly stiff rates for estates exceeding that sum, at no great political cost. Mr. Gordon has a terse explanation for the increase in Federal expenditures: “How did this happen? Simple. It’s called democracy.” Well, yes and no. The U.S. has had something close to universal white male suffrage for all of our history, but the scale of peacetime Federal spending increased so dramatically only in the twentieth century. Democracy is unlikely to be the only cause of the change, unless we assume that black and female voters have been the sole agents of fiscal transformation. Other causes have been war, the threat of war, and a change in the majority’s definition of legitimate public endeavor. It is not obvious that financing significant improvements in public education is no appropriate role for the Federal government, and my memory is that polls show a majority of Americans claim that they are willing to pay higher taxes for such a purpose. For most of the history of the Republic, that would not have been seen as a legitimate role for federal spending, which is to say, our notions of legitimate public spending change. Americans are often fairly practical. We will do what we think will work. Sentiment in favor of massive federal intervention in many spheres of the economy, or broad opposition to such intervention, sometimes follows evidence of failures or successes in existing policy. Federal regulation of telecommunications, air travel and trucking turned out to have some perverse effects; deregulation did work; and we went on to deregulate more sectors of the economy. If some of that subsequent deregulation fails to work as planned, we’ll probably reverse it. My guess is that turning over prisons to entrepreneurs will never happen on a wide scale, and that the privatizing of some services traditionally performed by the military will eventually be reversed. And my hunch is that our current greatly increased deficits spring in significant part from reductions of revenue, rather than from a gross and ludicrous increase in frivolous public expenditure. Two more things: Mr. Gordon is probably too modest in his assumption that unlike eighteenth-century aristocrats, our rich no longer have the power to check taxation of their revenues. The rich have seen some remarkable tax cuts in my lifetime, which makes me think that their power to affect U.S. fiscal policy has not withered away to nothing. If I remember correctly, the maximum bracket rate was something like 83 percent when John F. Kennedy took office. One interesting partial solution to the problem of deficits would be to restore higher taxes on the rich. That would not only modestly increase public revenues, but it would probably make the rich, and their lobbyists, more diligent about catching that $200 million bridge in Alaska. My last point: Gordon suggests a line-item veto for the President. What bothers me about this is the possibility that the President may be wrong and the Congress right, which sometimes seems as great as the opposite possibility. For example, it seems clear that we need a larger Army. Suppose the Democrats take back the White House, in the face of a rupture of the housing bubble following rising interest rates driven by inflation, with savage consequences for consumer spending and business confidence. But due to gerrymandering of House seats and more virulent culture wars affecting Senate races, the Republicans retain control of Congress. Does Mr. Gordon really want a possibly cheese-paring and anti-military Democrat to have a line-item veto on military expenditures? During the Great Society and the New Deal, did the White House or the Congress do more to restrain public spending? And insofar as Franklin Roosevelt did (initially) abhor a deficit, was that good or bad for the pace of our recovery from the Great Depression?
October 24, 2005
Once More on Plame Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:30 AM EST John Steele Gordon again warns against the dangers of using the justice system for political purposes. He is surely right that there is great danger in any such procedure, although it is not clear why he thinks this danger is upon us as a result of Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald’s investigation. After all, who in the investigation’s chain of command can plausibly be accused of politicizing the justice system? Fitzgerald, a distinguished career prosecutor who is not a registered Democrat but who is a Bush appointee, was instructed to investigate the leak of Plame’s identity by another Bush appointee, then-Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey, who reported to yet another Bush appointee, the former Republican senator and then attorney general John Ashcroft. Which of these men has acted in a fashion that suggests any bad faith or ulterior motive in this case? None of the three have any known motive for smearing the most commonly alleged targets of the investigation, Rove and Libby. It is in fact inconceivable that two senior Bush appointees could be gunning for Rove and Libby, so the only possible target for this innuendo is Fitzgerald, a man with so great a reputation for probity and irreproachable prosecutorial conduct that it has reached even my ears, and I know about a rather small number of prosecutors. Various Democrats are no doubt happy that Rove and Libby are under investigation and will presumably be happier yet if they are indicted, but these Democrats cannot logically be accused of politicizing a criminal investigation they neither authorized nor conducted. Fitzgerald, the only possible target of Gordon’s implied charge, has given not a shred of evidence that he is doing anything other than his professional duty. So the only people politicizing the justice system are the people impugning Fitzgerald’s motives with an eye to exculpating in advance any Republican targets of his investigation, which is to say, people originating or parroting the line of prosecutorial bias or malfeasance in the absence of any evidence. Back to history: History suggests that broad trust in the neutrality of the law is a precondition for stable democratic politics. There are times when a criminal justice system does not deserve this trust—in our own history, the career of J. Edgar Hoover immediately comes to mind—and as far as other societies goes, we have an embarrassment of evidentiary riches. Baselessly, cynically, or merely stupidly undermining public trust in the justice system is a destructive act. It is not a patriotic act. In fact, it is as about far from a patriotic act as one can get. One more thing on the Plame affair: John Steele Gordon again asserts that there is not much of a scandal here, and by implication that there has been no crime. We do not yet know if the special prosecutor thinks there has been a crime, but for the sake of the argument, let us assume that Fitzgerald secures indictments for perjury, obstruction of justice, conspiracy, and similar crimes, i.e., for the cover-up rather than for underlying conduct in the Plame matter. If conspiring to obstruct justice is not a scandal, why not? The argument seems to be that these hypothetical conspirators would not have committed their alleged crimes had they not been subject to investigation for crimes they did not commit. In my experience, this is not an exculpatory theory that tends to persuade prosecutors, including Republican prosecutors, just as it did not tend to persuade Democratic prosecutors during the impeachment of President Clinton. As for non-prosecutors, a possible measure of the good faith of people making this argument in the case of Rove and Libby is whether they made the same argument about Clinton. For my money, it is possible to distinguish between the two cases, although the distinction does not work to the advantage of Rove and Libby, but I am not a lawyer, and I have a lively sense that as a registered Democrat I may have a partisan bias in favor of Clinton. People who can distinguish between the cases but think the distinction works to the advantage of Rove and Libby should ask themselves a few questions about their own possible biases, ideally before attacking Fitzgerald. And one more thing, about patriotism. Ellen Feldman notes the difference between the treatment of returning Iraq vets and the old stories about the treatment of returning Vietnam vets. One possible explanation for this disparity is that the country is nowadays somewhat less afflicted by people who admire every century but this and every country but their own. In other words, we are, in one sense, more patriotic than we were during and for some time after Vietnam. Those are our soldiers, and our first impulse is to give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they were sadistic prison guards at Abu Ghraib, but probably not, and more important, the people they are fighting against seem less likely to be mistaken for the French Resistance, which means the Americans fighting them are less likely to be mistaken for the SS. Similarly, maybe Fitzgerald is the American equivalent of Vyshinsky (Stalin’s prosecutor) or Freisler (Hitler’s judge), but the odds seem to be against this possibility, at least in the eyes of most Americans, who do not assume that the fix is in before the first gavel comes down. This is not true everywhere, far from it. Polling data suggests that ours is the most patriotic political culture among modern Western industrial societies. An Anglo-American friend of mine, Jonathan Foreman, has just published The Pocket Book of Patriotism, an American version of a British succès de scandale with the same title. In contemporary Great Britain, patriotism is in many media ears an ugly word, and a book with the word patriotism in its title turned out to be the object of a fair amount of advance suspicion and hostility. In America my friend has been plugging his book on a publicity tour, and the questioners have mostly been fairly sympathetic. There are some ironies here. Johnny’s father, the director and producer and screenwriter (of High Noon, among other films) Carl Foreman, was one of the Hollywood blacklist’s victims, and he was hounded out of the country during the McCarthy years. He remained a patriot, believing that what had been done to him was an outrageous aberration and that American laws did not normally operate to, shall we say, criminalize politics. The people smearing Fitzgerald have not given the country the same benefit of the doubt, and their quickness to impugn our system of justice is at least as striking as was Foreman’s persistent idealism about it.
October 24, 2005
The Federal Spending Machine Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:25 AM EST Senator Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) on Thursday tried to get the Senate to rescind some of this year’s pork barrel spending. His purpose was to provide funds to help rebuild devastated Louisiana and Mississippi without going further into deficit. The Senate decided to keep the pork. The vote wasn’t even close, 82-15 to be exact. (see linked article). Senator Ted Stevens, (R., Alas.), president pro tempore of the Senate (i.e., the senior member of the majority party and thus fourth in line for the presidency), was so outraged at the idea that he threatened to resign from the Senate if Sen. Coburn’s proposal passed. So a $220 million bridge to an island with a population of 50 will be built in Alaska, and the once-busy bridge over Lake Pontchartrain, now in ruins, will have to find the money elsewhere, which is to say in the bond market. It is conventional wisdom that the Democrats are the big spenders and the Republicans are the penny pinchers. Fiddlesticks. Republicans just want to spend big on different things than Democrats want to spend big on. In fact it is the majority party that always wants to spend and the minority party, which has no control over the congressional agenda, that calls for fiscal restraint. Both parties are all in favor of spending on popular local projects—museum parking lots, sculpture gardens, animal rescue shelters, etc.—that are, or at least were, totally outside any area of federal responsibility. How did this happen? Simple. It’s called democracy. The Founding Fathers, looking at English history from the perspective of the still aristocratic late-eighteenth century, saw that it had been the king who had always been the engine of spending. Indeed, Parliament had come into existence in the Middle Ages precisely as a check on the king’s natural extravagance. The very rich represented themselves in the House of Lords, the merely affluent sent representatives to the House of Commons, and the vast mass of the people without property were not represented at all. The king was expected to “live on his own," funding the normal operations of the government out of income from the crown lands, and had to come to Parliament for extra funds. Since the members of Parliament, in granting the king new tax revenues, would be quite literally spending their own money, they were not inclined to be generous. Thus the Founding Fathers thought the President would be the big spender and Congress would be the check on his extravagance, because the states all had property qualifications, restricting the franchise to those with assets that could be taxed. But within two generations all adult white males could vote, and members of Congress increasingly sought their votes with increased spending. It has not just been bridges to nowhere in Alaska and dog shelters in Rhode Island. One of the prime reasons that Social Security is headed for insolvency is that Congress kept upping the promised benefits without providing the necessary tax money to pay for them. The bill, after all, wouldn’t become due for years. It is Scarlett O’Hara who is famous for saying that “Tomorrow is another day,” but the phrase might well be chiseled into the marble of the Capitol Building. What to do? There are several simple changes in current law, some statutory and some constitutional, that would go a long way toward changing the spending culture in Washington. Here are a few: 1) Establish an independent body, insulated from politics like the Federal Reserve, that I’ll call the Financial Management Board, or FMB for short. This board would take over most of the functions of the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office (which largely duplicate each other’s work in any case). The FMB would forecast expected revenues and expenses and price out the cost of legislation, both taxation and spending bills. Those forecasts would be the ones Congress and the President would be required to use. Even more important, the FMB would determine how the federal books are kept, with a mandate to make them as transparent as possible, and would audit them. Want an example of just how dishonest the books of the federal government are? Remember those wonderful budget “surpluses” the government ran in the late 1990s? Well, if the government was taking in more money than it was spending (the definition of a surplus), why did the total national debt in those years go from $5.2 trillion to $5.8 trillion? Because the Treasury was borrowing money from Social Security and calling it income. Bankers and brokers realized well over a century ago that corporate management could not be trusted to keep honest books, so they forced them to accept generally accepted accounting principles and to have their books audited by independent accountants. Government management needs the same discipline. They are just as human as corporate management. 2) Give the President the line-item veto. The President is the only person in Washington, besides the constitutionally powerless Vice President, elected by the entire country. Therefore he alone has his political interests entirely in line with the national interest. Members of Congress on the other hand, while they have a general interest in budget restraint, have a very particular political interest in bringing home the federal bacon. Logrolling (you vote for my bridge and I’ll vote for your courthouse) ensures that there is plenty of bacon brought home. Giving the President the line-item veto would give him a powerful tool in the game of political horse-trading (I’ll go along with your bridge if you’re with me on this major money-saving reform). 3) Give the president the power to set overall spending. Congress, quite properly, has the power of the purse, and the Constitution says that “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law . . .” But there is no restraint on total spending, and in Senator Everett Dirksen’s famous phrase, “a billion here a billion there; the first thing you know you’re talking about real money.” By having the President control overall spending, subject to a Congressional override, with the power to enforce it by making cuts if Congress doesn’t, federal spending could quickly be brought under control. These proposals would profoundly change the culture of Washington and greatly change the distribution of power. So I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for their enactment. For an extended look at the history of federal spending, take a look at my article on the history of the national debt in American Heritage, from November 1995. Or my book Hamilton’s Blessing: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Our National Debt.
October 21, 2005
Back to History Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:25 PM EST That I disagree with John Steele Gordon is not evidence that I can’t check “partisanship at the door and search for truth, not political advantage.” It’s merely evidence that I disagree with John Steele Gordon. What I find more interesting in our exchange, for our purposes as a history Web site, is the controversy over Alger Hiss. I’m glad that Mr. Gordon brought up the topic of the Venona files, as this gives me entrée to recommend to our readers a fascinating article by David Lowenthal, a professor emeritus at University College London. Lowenthal blows some big holes in the theory that the Venona files implicate Hiss. http://hnn.us/articles/11579.html Lowenthal’s argument is complex, but I’ll try to summarize it: The Venona files, which were decrypted and made public about ten years ago, were secret cables sent to Moscow by Soviet agents operating out of Washington, D.C., in the 1930s and ’40s. Venona transcript No. 1822, which was one of the most damning pieces of evidence to emerge against Alger Hiss, concerned an American informant/agent codenamed “Ales,” who (according to the transcript, dated March 30, 1945) attended the Yalta conference and handed over classified material to his Soviet handlers. An earlier transcript, dated March 5, explained that Ales “was at Yalta conference, then went to Mexico City, but has not yet come back.” For a number of reasons, many historians have agreed that “Ales” was Alger Hiss’s code name. Lowenthal shows that this was probably not so. First, the March 5 cable explained that Ales had not yet returned to Washington. The problem is, Alger Hiss had returned from Yalta to Washington—two weeks earlier. Second, in earlier dispatches from Washington, Hiss was identified as “Leonard,” not “Ales.” “Leonard,” moreover, does not appear anywhere in KGB files as a spy. He only appears in secret dispatches as a potential informant (as did many other high-ranking government officials, some of whom informed, some of whom didn’t). So do the Venona transcripts implicate Alger Hiss? Maybe, but probably not. None of this exonerates Hiss. But it certainly complicates an already murky piece of history.
October 21, 2005
A Soldier’s Story Posted by Ellen Feldman at 01:40 PM EST A few months ago, on a flight from Atlanta to New York, I found myself in a seat behind a man of about 19 or 20. He was wearing fatigues, the functional, not the fashionable, kind. Even before we took off, I knew something was up. While the rest of us struggled on our own to squeeze oversized bags into undersized overhead compartments, the flight attendant came over and asked if there was anything he needed. He said there was not. At least, I thought that was what he said. I could hear the stewardess’s words, but the young man spoke quietly. He did, however, shake his head no. A moment later the flight attendant was back clutching something in her hand. I didn’t see what it was—as a novelist, I’m nosy by trade, but as I flier, I know the rules—but she told him not to lose it and to enjoy it. Do they give cameras away in the upper classes of domestic travel? A moment later, she returned a third time with a pencil and paper. She asked the young man his name, rank, and serial number, and wrote them all down. Shortly after takeoff, she returned a fourth time and asked if he would like anything to drink, though this was economy class, and nothing was offered to quench the thirst of any of the rest of us squeezed in cheek-by-jowl. The young man demurred again. Soon the captain came over the speaker system, welcomed us aboard, and said he wanted to extend a particular greeting to Specialist First Class and gave the young man’s name. The entire plane erupted in applause. If the seatbelt sign were not turned on, the passengers probably would have risen to make it a standing ovation. As the flight wore on, other attendants stopped by to ask if the young man needed anything. Various passengers came over to chat and to thank him. The incident indicates, I think, how much has changed and how much has not. Forty years ago, few soldiers returning from Vietnam would have been so fussed over and feted by the public. Many would have been reluctant even to go out among their fellow citizens in uniform or fatigues, though apparently the story of a glass of urine being thrown in the face of a returning GI by an irate protester in a bar, which I heard from at least one Vietnam vet, has turned out to be urban legend. I cannot account for this change of heart toward the military. Though campuses are not erupting in antiwar protests, support for the war in Iraq continues to diminish. Perhaps, thanks to round-the-clock and on-the-scene news coverage, the public finally believes that war really is hell. Perhaps we’re merely guilty that young men and women are dying while we make no sacrifice at all. The altered attitude is even more ironic in view of the fact that the young men fighting in Vietnam were drafted. The men and women in Iraq are volunteers, though certainly some of their extensions of service can be seen as a backdoor draft. But if public opinion, or at least behavior, has changed, the searing effect of battle on the human psyche remains eternal. The young man on my flight said little in response to all the fuss being made over him. He was polite but obviously uncomfortable. He seemed to want only to be left alone. His behavior took me back to a fictional account of another veteran returning from an earlier American war. In The Best Years of Our Lives, a 1946 gem of a movie about reentry into civilian life, all three GIs find it hard to speak, or to remain silent, about the things they have done and witnessed, but one homecoming scene is almost unbearable to watch. The sailor Homer Parrish, who has lost both his hands, and who was played by Harold Russell, a veteran who really had lost both his hands in the war, sits in the living room of his childhood home with his parents, his girlfriend, and her parents. The group watches him nervously as he struggles with a glass of lemonade, which the movie makes clear he would have had no trouble handling under less scrutiny. Their seemingly solicitous comments range from fatuous to offensive. Unable to bear the pressure of their attention, Homer bursts from the room and flees to his uncle’s bar with a heartfelt cry. “Why can’t they just leave a guy alone?”
October 21, 2005
Plame Again Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:40 AM EST I did not mean to imply that Alger Hiss passed atomic secrets to the Russians. I used the atomic secrets image only as an example of a serious disclosure of classified information, as opposed to the trivial “outing” of someone who has had a desk job at Langley for the last several years and is such a hush-hush, super-secret spy that she sat for a photo spread in Vanity Fair.
And I am perfectly aware of what crime Alger Hiss went to jail for. I merely said that the pumpkin-papers scandal ended up putting him in the slammer. By the way, Mr. Zeitz says that reasonable people can disagree as to whether Alger Hiss was guilty or not. If I understand things correctly, the Venona Project’s recently opened archives show that the Russians certainly thought that Alger Hiss was one of their assets. If that is the case, it would seem that only unreasonable people could think him innocent.
As for whitewashing the perpetrators of Plamegate, I did no such thing. I said only that unless there is some major unknown component to this “scandal,” there is not much of a scandal here.
My point, which Mr. Zeitz never bothered to address in his rush to blackwash the presumed perpetrators of this presumed scandal, was that using the justice system for political purposes is a really, really lousy idea, regardless of which party holds the White House (or counts the majority leader of the House among its members—another current “scandal” that appears to be nothing but politics by means of the justice system). It is a political tactic that is very likely to lead to serious trouble for the Republic—for which I care a great deal more than I do for any political party or individual politician (or all of them collectively, for that matter: I frankly don’t like politicians of whatever stripe very much). Jacob Weisberg gave chapter and verse on why that is.
Perhaps Mr. Zeitz would like to comment on the actual subject of my original post: the use of the justice system for political purposes. That does not depend on the present imbroglio and it is a matter that even two people far apart on the political spectrum could agree entirely about. Provided, that is, that both are willing to leave their partisanship at the door and search for truth, not political advantage.
October 20, 2005
Plamegate, Again Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:30 AM EST Incapable as I am of distinguishing between the trivial and the profound, I can only stick to the finer points of American history (this is still a history Web site, right?) and reiterate my previous point: Alger Hiss was not, as Mr. Gordon suggested, found guilty of turning over data from the Manhattan Project to Joseph Stalin. He was found guilty of perjury—on one count of lying about his contact with Whittaker Chambers after January 1, 1937, and on a second count of falsely denying that he had given Chambers classified government documents (the famous “Pumpkin Papers”). Importantly, whatever papers Hiss did or did not hand over to Chambers he handed over in 1937 or 1938—four or five years before the inception of the Manhattan Project. Hiss, in fact, never enjoyed access to atomic secrets. His meteoric career spanned the departments of Agriculture and State, and he was a key adviser at Yalta. But he wasn’t especially in the know about the A-bomb. Perhaps Mr. Gordon is thinking of Klaus Fuchs, who was arrested six days after Hiss was convicted. Fuchs was indeed guilty of atomic espionage. But I digress. Back to whitewashing the perpetrators of Plamegate, on whom we shouldn’t pass judgment until the special prosecutor has his say, unless we wish to exonerate them in advance, in which case we should freely speculate about closed-door grand jury proceedings.
October 19, 2005
The Plame Game II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:30 PM EST I was going to write a spirited retort to Messrs. Smoler and Zeitz, who can’t seem to see the difference between the trivial and the profound, between revealing classified information, if anyone did, that was already widely known and of no importance anyway, and turning over data from the Manhattan Project to Joseph Stalin. Happily, Jacob Weisberg over at Slate (not exactly the Pravda of the vast right-wing conspiracy) has done the job for me, and I commend his article to one and all: http://www.slate.com/id/2128301/
October 19, 2005
The Baby Boom Today Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 11:25 AM EST American Heritage celebrates the baby-boom generation with the cover story of its October issue, “Boomer Century,” which will appear as the main feature on AmericanHeritage.com next Tuesday, October 25. The article’s subtitle asks, “What’s going to happen when the most prosperous, best-educated generation in history finally grows up?” The magazine answers one way; the following list, suggesting new lyrics for old baby-boom hit songs (which I received from a friend), answers another: 1. Herman's Hermits: “Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Walker”
2. The Bee Gees: “How Can You Mend a Broken Hip?”
3. Bobby Darin: “Splish, Splash, I Was Havin’ a Flash”
4. Ringo Starr: “I Get By with a Little Help from Depends”
5. Roberta Flack: “The First Time Ever I Forgot Your Face”
6. Johnny Nash: “I Can’t See Clearly Now”
7. Paul Simon: “Fifty Ways to Lose Your Liver”
8. The Commodores: “Once, Twice, Three Times to the Bathroom”
9. Marvin Gaye: “I Heard It Through the Grape Nuts”
10. Leo Sayer: “You Make Me Feel Like Napping”
11. The Temptations: “Papa’s Got a Brand New Kidney Stone”
12. Abba: “Denture Queen”
13. Tony Orlando: “Knock Three Times on the Ceiling if You Hear Me Fall”
14. Helen Reddy: “I Am Woman, Hear Me Snore”
15. Willie Nelson: “On the Throne Again”
16. Leslie Gore: “It’s My Procedure and I'll Cry if I Want To”
October 18, 2005
Miers Machine Music Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:30 PM EST I’ve always thought of George W. Bush as the Lou Reed of Presidents. Well, maybe that isn’t quite true, though it would be if you substituted “never” for “always.” But it is true that when I heard about President Bush’s latest Supreme Court nominee, Lou Reed is who I thought of. After his days in the Velvet Underground, Reed made a series of solo records that attracted a small but fanatical group of fans. Then in 1975 he released Metal Machine Music, an hour-long double album of nothing but unlistenable distortion and feedback—no lyrics, no melodies, just electronic noise. When his fans got over their shock at seeing their beloved proto-punk rocker, whose songs usually dealt with death and heroin addiction and sadomasochism, all of a sudden turning weird, their reaction to the record was just like the reaction of today’s Republicans to Harriet Miers: A few pretended to like it, some loyally tried to defend it, and others said that we’d all appreciate it a lot more in 10 or 20 years. But most Reed fans thought, and said, that it was terrible—which it was. (I base this on having heard 30 seconds’ worth, but those who have subjected themselves to the whole thing say 30 seconds is plenty.) Three decades later that assessment still holds, except among hard-core devotees of experimental sound. But you know what? Lou Reed shrugged off the negative reaction, continued his solo career, and is now a widely respected and beloved elder statesman of rock ’n’ roll. Reed’s music is still widely played and enjoyed; if anything, his fan base has grown. (And as long as our bloggers are making nominations, I’ll propose him for the Nobel Prize.) Most of Reed’s fans from back in the day are willing to overlook Metal Machine Music, while his newer ones know it only by reputation. And I suspect that’s what will happen with Harriet Miers. However bizarre the choice may seem to the President’s supporters, in the end they will give him a pass and write her off as an unaccountable but temporary aberration. After all, that’s what fans are for.
October 18, 2005
Further Thoughts on Plamegate Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:10 PM EST John Steele Gordon asserts that there is some profound difference between the Valerie Plame affair and all previous Washington scandals, that there is no scandal because “no one has endangered the Republic,” and that if Fitzgerald indicts anyone, this will be a case of the criminalization of normal politics. This seems premature at best, since unlike some special prosecutors’ investigations Fitzgerald’s does not seem to leak like a sieve, so we do not know what charges, if any, he will make, or what indictments he will seek. But the odds seem pretty good that he is thinking about obstruction of justice, making false and possibly perjurious statements, illegal disclosure of classified information, and conspiracy. In other words, some of the possible charges sound a lot like the ones that fueled the Watergate and Monica Lewinsky scandals, and the ones that differ seem more serious than any crime President Clinton(or Sherman Adams) can be plausibly accused of having committed. Whatever anyone thinks of the merits or applicability of the law the CIA first thought had been violated, obstruction of justice is not a trivial charge. Criminalizing normal politics is a admittedly a serious and dangerous business, and to a majority of the electorate, it looked as if that was what the Republicans were up to during the Clinton administration, when they pursued impeachment charges. It seems odd to say that this is what Fitzgerald is doing now, or what he will be doing if he seeks indictments on the charges enumerated above. John Steele Gordon does wisely warn that “a fully enfranchised people” can, “when roused, take their sovereign power seriously” and slap “down their misbehaving public servants sooner rather than later.” Indeed, that is what a fully enfranchised people did to the Republicans in the 1998 Congressional elections, and for that matter in the 1974 Congressional elections. Current polling data suggest that it is at least possible that they will do so yet again to the Republicans, in the 2006 Congressional elections. But the chance that the electorate will turn against the Democrats because Republican White House aides are accused of, for example, obstruction of justice, seems derisory. In retrospect, there are some ‘90s lessons about criminalizing politics that might have been acted on. When the Supreme Court assumed that President Clinton could defend himself against civil litigation while discharging the duties of his office, it appears to have been grievously mistaken. It would be good if the Republican Congress and commentariat had admitted that and sought to change it. The use of litigation as a political weapon by Paula Jones’s lawyers might also have set off some alarms. It didn’t. There are a lot of lessons we might have drawn and acted on—but none of them seem relevant to the current investigation of the Valerie Plame affair.
October 18, 2005
Re: Plamegate Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:40 AM EST On one point John Steele Gordon, in his post yesterday about the Valerie Plame affair, and I are in complete agreement. As Mr. Gordon wryly notes, whatever the outcome of the special grand jury investigating Plamegate, the “Washington punditocracy is throwing out predictions by the ton based on little more than tea-leaf reading.” Well said. I’ve actually stopped following the inside-game coverage. It seems pointless to engage in baseless speculation. Within ten days the grand jury will either indict someone or close up shop. We’ll all find out more at that date. In the meantime, I can handle the suspense. But I part ways with Mr. Gordon in his ultimate assessment of the underlying scandal. He writes, “This is not a hands-in-the-cookie-jar scandal like Teapot Dome, which sent an attorney general to jail. It is not a serious breach-of-national-security scandal like the Pumpkin Papers, which sent Alger Hiss to jail. It is not an old fashioned corruption scandal like the vicuna coat affair that cost Eisenhower’s chief of staff his job. It is not a hanky-panky-in-high-places scandal like Monicagate, which got a President impeached. Instead, it has been basically a scandal about politics as usual.” First, a note about history. Alger Hiss was not jailed for breaching national security. He was convicted of perjury for denying (under oath) that he had handed government documents over to Whittaker Chambers, and for denying (again, under oath) that he had had any contact with Chambers after 1937. Whether he shared classified documents with Soviet agents remains a hotly contested subject on which reasonable people can disagree. Furthermore, Bill Clinton was not impeached for hanky-panky. He was impeached for allegedly committing and suborning perjury. History aside, how does Plamegate not represent a “serious breach of national security?” If someone within the White House leaked the name of an undercover agent–and this, mind you, in the midst of a perpetual war on terror that the Bush White House has invoked time and again to widen executive authority–then we are indeed facing a grave situation. Either we take national security seriously or we don’t. Either it’s illegal to out a covert operative or it’s not. I fail to see the gray area here. I agree with Mr. Gordon that Plamegate represents a sordid case of “politics as usual.” But whereas Mr. Gordon sees the Bush administration as the wronged party–in other words, he argues that the Democrats have cynically criminalized mundane political actions for strategic gain–I’d argue, instead, that the scandal has revealed the dangers of unchecked executive power. Just as in the Nixon administration, which routinely used federal agencies like the FBI and IRS to quell constitutionally protected dissent, high-ranking officials in the Bush administration may have violated federal law and compromised the safety of covert operatives to discredit a political opponent. This isn’t a sin specific to the Republican party; indeed, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations also misused presidential powers to play hardball against their political opponents. It’s more likely a problem of the postwar imperial Presidency. Still, as since 1968 Republicans have controlled the Presidency more often than not, Republicans are by implication more culpable. But Plamegate also lays bare a particular sin of the current Republican regime in Washington. It’s a crisis of due process and democratic procedure. Simply put, the modern-day GOP doesn’t seem to take either very seriously. Earlier this month the House of Representatives extended a routine five-minute vote for almost a half-hour, while party leaders–including the ethically challenged once-and-future majority leader Tom DeLay–browbeat a wavering congressman into changing his vote. (The legislation in question would generously subsidize oil companies.) Such procedural chicanery has become routine in George Bush’s and Tom DeLay’s Washington. Once upon a time, five minutes meant five minutes.
How could it be otherwise? A regime that came to power in part by bending the rules–intimidating minority voters in key Florida precincts; busing in congressional staffers to intimidate ballot counters in Palm Beach county–has taken its disrespect for democratic process to its most logical extreme. In 1999 Bill Clinton faced savage criticism from those in the center and on the left. Many moderates and liberals didn’t believe that his trespasses rose to the level of impeachment, but they were plenty disgusted with the President’s conduct, and they said so. So where’s the outrage today? Conservatives rail about law and order, the war on terror, the evils of moral relativism. Except when it concerns them. In a few days’ time, the special prosecutor may very well exonerate the Bush administration. But then again, he may not. When all the facts are on the table, maybe John Steele Gordon and I will have occasion to revisit this question.
October 18, 2005
The Plame Game Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:00 AM EST The grand jury investigating the Valerie Plame affair is scheduled to go out of existence on October 28. Presumably at some point before then the special prosecutor will take one of two actions. He could indict one or more significant government officials. Then we would have a major scandal on our hands, one that could severely damage the Bush administration and its ability to govern effectively. Or he could merely file a report of his findings with the court, findings that would not include criminal conduct serious enough (or provable enough) to warrant indictments. Then we would have a one-day story.
Whichever it turns out to be—and the Washington punditocracy is throwing out predictions by the ton based on little more than tea-leaf reading—it seems clear to me that there is something very, very wrong with what is going on here.
This is not a hands-in-the-cookie-jar scandal like Teapot Dome, which sent an attorney general to jail. It is not a serious breach-of-national-security scandal like the Pumpkin Papers, which sent Alger Hiss to jail. It is not an old fashioned corruption scandal like the vicuna coat affair that cost Eisenhower’s chief of staff his job. It is not a hanky-panky-in-high-places scandal like Monicagate, which got a President impeached.
Instead, it has been basically a scandal about politics as usual. Unless there is some blockbuster revelation to come from the special prosecutor, no one has endangered the Republic. No one has sought pecuniary profit from his position in the government. No one has disgraced himself and the country by his personal behavior. Instead it would appear from what we know now that some person or persons may have leaked for political purposes classified information that half of Washington already knew and/or may have been less than totally forthcoming or completely consistent when questioned about it afterwards.
Well, if everyone in Washington who was guilty of those actions was currently in jail, a nuclear blast above the Washington Monument would not harm a soul. It is a good measure of how serious this “scandal” is in the real world that while people inside the Beltway and the political chattering classes generally are obsessed by the Plame Game, polls show that the American people at large couldn’t care less. It is, to them, the ultimate in political inside baseball. In other words, it is boring, and real scandal is never boring, almost by definition.
Essentially then, it would seem that whatever the special prosecutor does in the next few weeks, this is one more instance of a Washington trend in recent years that does indeed endanger the Republic in the long term: the criminalization of politics.
Using the tools of justice for political ends will not give us justice and it will certainly not give us healthy politics. It will, if it continues and gets worse, give us a situation resembling Rome in the first century B.C. In that century, the republican form of government of the world’s superpower slowly collapsed when the members of the political class began more and more to put their individual and short-term interests above the long-term interests of Rome itself. One means of doing so was to use the justice system to achieve the ruination of opponents. It is not a pretty history. The British author Tom Holland, in his marvelously readable and deeply learned Rubicon: The Last Days of the Roman Republic, writes that the “law was not something distinct from political life but an often lethal extension of it. There was no state-run prosecution service. Instead, all cases had to be brought privately, making it a simple matter for feuds to find vent in the courts. The prosecution of a rival might well prove a knock-out blow.”
The party out of power has an obvious interest in making the administration look bad. If it places no limits on how it does so—and tit-for-tat inevitably sets off a race to the bottom—American politics will get dirtier and dirtier. The press, often highly politicized itself, always has a powerful interest in magnifying any scandal in order to sell newspapers. The result is great pressure on the investigators to find something. And special prosecutors are like all prosecutors: they have a deep self-interest in nailing scalps to the wall. When they have only one case to pursue and unlimited funds and time with which to do so, the instinct to make the trivial serious can be overwhelming. This combination of self-interests, pursued without regard for the general good, can lead to disaster.
Every educated Roman in the first century B.C. knew the legal maxim de minimis non curat lex, the law does not concern itself with trifles. But too many of them ignored it in pursuit of power, and there was nothing to stop them. Fortunately, the American Republic has something the Roman Republic did not: a fully enfranchised people who, when roused, take their sovereign power seriously. I hope the sovereign slaps down their misbehaving public servants sooner rather than later.
October 17, 2005
Sports Update Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:10 PM EST On October 1, after dubiously assessing Syracuse University’s chances of attracting football fans in New York City (trust me—it all had to do with history), I wrote: “Rutgers has even less of a shot, not least because their team is so lousy.” For the record, on Saturday Rutgers won at Syracuse to raise their record to 4-2. Syracuse is now 1-5. I appreciate the forbearance of our fellow blogger Audrey Peterson, a Rutgers graduate, in not pointing this out herself.
October 17, 2005
The Nobel Prize Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:45 AM EST The Nobel Prize for Literature has just been awarded to the British playwright and screenwriter Harold Pinter. The good news, I suppose, is that at least I knew who he was when I learned about his prize. That is a good deal more than can be said for Elfriede Jelinek, John Maxwell Coetzee, and Imre Kertész, his three predecessors as Nobel laureates in literature.
Pinter wrote several plays that have had continuing worldwide success since they were written, mostly more than 40 years ago, and several distinguished screenplays. That includes one of my all-time favorite movies, The Go-Between, which has for some mysterious reason never been released on DVD. (It is taken from a wondrous novel of the same name by L. P. Hartley, and Pinter had the good sense to use Hartley’s unsurpassable opening line: “The past is a foreign country: They do things differently there.”) But in recent years Pinter seems to have written little but anti-American screeds so ludicrous they would make Noam Chomsky wince (okay, probably not; Professor Chomsky’s anti-Americanism can only be described as pathological). And it is hard to believe that that was not a distinct plus with the Swedish Academy, which seems to have made more and more overtly political, rather than literary, choices in recent decades.
Now, I couldn’t care less what a writer’s politics are unless I’m reading him for political reasons. Gabriel García Márquez (who won the Nobel in 1982) is way over the horizon to my left, but his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the great works of the twentieth century, and it is far from the only great book he ever wrote.
Let me offer the Swedish Academy some free advice: Lay off the politics already! With a very few exceptions—such as George Orwell, who never won a Nobel—explicit politics and enduring writing don’t mix. Agitprop is not literature. Great politicians are seldom great professional writers, although there are exceptions such as Theodore Roosevelt and Sir Winston Churchill (the only writer of nonfiction to win a Nobel, in 1952). And certainly great writers are hardly ever great politicians. Benjamin Disraeli wrote several successful novels in his youth, but they are read today only by serious students of early Victorian literature.
Perhaps the Academy should try something totally out of the box next year.
To that end I nominate Stephen Sondheim for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Over a 50-year career he has plumbed the depths of the human soul with words that range from the witty (“Is he saintly/Even faintly?/No./ But who needs Albert Schweitzer/When the lights are low?”) to the wise (“Advancing art is easy./Financing it is not.”) to the achingly sad (“I dim the lights/And think about you,/Spend sleepless nights/To think about you./You said you loved me,/Or were you just being kind?/Or am I losing my mind?”) to the exuberant (“I like the shores of America!/ Comfort is yours in America!/Knobs on the doors in America!/Wall-to-wall floors in America!”) to the redeeming (“Hard to see the light now/Just don’t let it go./Things will come out right now/We can make it so./Someone is on your side/No one is alone.”)
He can even toss off a literary allusion in a song about women with too much money and not enough self-awareness:
Here’s to the girls who stay smart—
Aren’t they a gas?
Rushing to their classes in optical art,
Wishing it would pass.
Another long exhausting day,
Another thousand dollars,
A matinée, a Pinter play,
Perhaps a piece of Mahler’s—
I’ll drink to that.
And one for Mahler.
And, despite being familiar with the overwhelming majority of what Stephen Sondheim has written, I don’t know what his politics might be, or even if he has any. I do know that 300 years from now, people will still be listening to him in wonder, for his art, while inescapably of the twentieth century, is really without time or place. It speaks to us all and always will.
Can the same be said for Elfriede Jelinek, John Maxwell Coetzee, and Imre Kertész?
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