October 14, 2005
Don’t Just Sit There, Do Something! Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:00 PM EST Ellen Feldman writes that post-election fatigue is an unlikely reason for President Bush’s recent troubles, given “the amount of time he spent vacationing at his ranch before Katrina.” I’ve taken a few cheap shots myself over the years, so I don’t much mind this rather gentle one, especially as I’m sure that Ms. Feldman realizes full well that Presidents don’t get to take anything that the rest of us would consider a vacation at all. The daily briefings, the endless consultations, the telephone calls with foreign leaders, the reading of important but deadly dull reports, goes on relentlessly whether he is wearing a coat and tie in the Oval Office or shorts and a T-shirt in Crawford, Texas.
With modern communications and Air Force One parked on a nearby tarmac ready to take him wherever he needs to go at a moment’s notice, why on earth should the President of the United States have to sit in the miasmal swamp that is Washington, D.C., in August, if he prefers to be in the searing heat of Texas instead? Washington in August, after all, is largely deserted by Congressmen, Senators, Cabinet members, diplomats, and lobbyists. But many think that the President is somehow goofing off if he isn’t in the White House, drumming his fingers on the Oval Office desk, waiting to handle a crisis.
This attitude is nothing new. The proverbial Martian, coming to Earth and reading the mainstream media, would return to his home planet to inform his fellow Martians that Republican Presidents since World War II have always been either lazy or stupid or both (except Nixon—he was evil). Only Democratic Presidents, it seems, work hard and have smarts, even if they spend much of August frolicking with the mega-rich on Martha’s Vineyard or keep to themselves the awesome power of deciding who gets to use the White House tennis court at what times, as Jimmy Carter did.
Eisenhower was forever playing golf and couldn’t utter a simple declarative sentence spontaneously. Gerald Ford couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time. Reagan was only an actor with a good staff and a tendency to nod off. He took afternoon naps! George H. W. Bush was an amiable preppy without a clue. And, of course, George W. Bush is famously unglib (unlike his Democratic predecessor who wagged his finger at the American people and proceeded to glibly tell us a shameless, bald-faced lie.)
The fact that Eisenhower had organized and successfully executed the largest and most complex military operation in history was of no moment to those who made fun of his syntax. He was obviously a fool and a lazy one to boot. Howell Raines, the former executive editor of The New York Times, wrote that it was impossible to imagine that John Kerry’s grades at Yale weren’t far better than George Bush’s, given that he was so much smarter. It turned out, however, that Bush had had the better grades at Yale and was smart enough to convince a majority of the American people to vote for him, not John Kerry.
In fact, of course, no one in this day and age gets anywhere near the Oval Office (even by inheritance from the Vice Presidency) without being very, very smart; willing to do a lot of very hard, very boring work campaigning; and willing to suffer fools gladly (and handle them adroitly) in countless media interviews. Nobody who has been President since Warren Harding, Republican or Democrat, has been anything resembling stupid or lazy. (Harding, of course, was both.)
The root of this is that liberals tend to be intellectuals and intellectuals can forgive almost anything except the crime of not being an intellectual. And they never seem to grasp the idea that being intellectual and being smart are not at all the same thing. You can be both, neither, or one of the two. Successfully carrying off D-Day didn’t require a deep interest in abstract ideas; it did require that Eisenhower be smart. And being a workaholic doesn’t make you a great President. Jimmy Carter is on no one’s list of even average Presidents.
Since Republican Presidents are rarely intellectual (Theodore Roosevelt was a notable exception), intellectuals think they must be lazy and/or stupid. But that is an idea, to quote George Orwell, “so stupid only an intellectual could have conceived it.”
October 14, 2005
Black Man in Blackface Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 10:50 AM EST I just received the following correspondence from David Lander, a friend of and frequent contributor to American Heritage, and thought I'd share it: “Joshua Zeitz, in his piece on The Jazz Singer that went up on AmericanHeritage.com on October 6, refers to the assimilationist aspirations of the movie’s Jewish protagonist and asks rhetorically, ‘Who, but a white man . . . needed to black up to play an African-American?’ “As the cover photo of the Winter 2005 issue of American Legacy shows, the seminal black actor Bert Williams felt he did. In the accompanying story, the late Ralph Allen, who wrote Sugar Babies and other musicals, noted that Williams and an African-American partner named George Walker developed an act in the 1890s that was ‘similar to those of the white comedians who wore burnt cork. Billing themselves as “the Two Real Coons,” they took whatever jobs were offered them [and] appeared in small-time minstrel shows, in medicine shows, and in honky-tonks. Along the way they encountered all the difficulties that black men, performers or not, [then] suffered.’ “Allen called Williams a forgotten man of his profession, emphasized that he helped create today’s ‘colorblind stage,’ and said ‘his mournful but unsentimental manner introduced a new tone into comedy.’ W. C. Fields was a great fan, and Eddie Cantor considered Williams his mentor. “Bert Williams died wealthy and famous in 1922, five years before The Jazz Singer married movies to sound. He was 46 years old, and the fact that he, a black man, had risen to prominence portraying a white man caricaturing a black man is one of American history’s ironies.”
October 13, 2005
Second Terms Posted by Ellen Feldman at 10:30 AM EST I think John Steele Gordon is onto something in his remarks about our genetic need to tell stories. Though second-term blues have been common throughout our history, the reasons for them, as both he and Fredric Schwarz point out, are wildly disparate. A glance at three recent presidents reveals just how varied the problems can be and how diametrically opposed the underlying causes often are. Frederic Schwarz speaks of post-election fatigue and depression. In the case of Clinton, I think we can add boredom to the list, plus a flair for shooting himself in the foot to relieve the boredom. After achieving a first term and reelection, what was this superachiever to do but raise the stakes for what he could do, or get away with? One can argue that FDR’s second term presents a different set of conditions, because he was the cause, not the victim or beneficiary, of the 22nd amendment. But a convincing case can and has been made that early in his second term FDR had no intention of running for a third, and that only the threat of war persuaded him to stand again in 1940. In other words, in his own mind he might have been in his final term. Perhaps that was why, buoyed by his 1936 landslide, he set out to make permanent in his second term the achievements of his first. He not only attempted to pack the court, he also sought to streamline the administration, which he had helped make so unwieldy, and purge his own party of conservatives in the 1938 election. The current President Bush’s case has certain similarities to those of both these predecessors. Though not reelected by anything close to a landslide, he chose to perceive his return to office as a mandate and set out to solidify the achievements or failures (depending on your point of view) of his first term, not the least of which would be the undoing of FDR’s Social Security plan. But whether suffering from post-election fatigue (which seems unlikely in view of the amount of time he spent vacationing at his ranch before Katrina), depression, boredom, or, more likely, hubris, Katrina and the downward spiraling war in Iraq seem to have caught him, and his appointed cronies, napping. Perhaps the real question is not whether second-term misfortunes are unavoidable, or why they occur, but how serious they are in the long run. An impeached Clinton still remains wildly popular at home and even more so abroad. FDR did not succeed in packing the court, streamlining the administration, or purging his party, but he did go on to a third and even fourth term. Stay tuned for President Bush’s final chapters.
October 12, 2005
Why Presidents Have Lousy Second Terms Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:00 AM EST (The editor of AmericanHeritage.com asked for our thoughts on why Presidents’ second terms so often go badly, and whether it has anything to do with the 22nd Amendment, which limits them to two terms.) Several factors are involved. The first is simple regression toward the mean. To get reelected, you have to have good luck in your first term. During the second term, chances are your luck will be merely average, so it will look like you did a worse job. (This also explains why the Red Sox didn’t win the World Series this year.) A related factor, similar in concept but less random, is the business cycle. If the economy goes well in your first term, it will probably get worse sometime during the second, and people will blame it on you. Another factor is postponement. Scandals tend to come up in the second term because they can usually be put off until after the election. The Watergate burglary happened in Nixon’s first term, but no serious investigation could be started until his second one. Paula Jones had been after Bill Clinton for years, but his lawyers managed to keep her at bay until he was reelected. The same goes for tough decisions, like getting involved in a war. Smart Presidents wait until their second term. Wilson and LBJ understood this, but Madison didn’t, and he nearly got kicked out. Similarly, short-term economic fixes like large deficits, overzealous budget cutting, or messing around with the currency or interest rates (to the extent that the President can influence these things) can be used to shift trouble into the second term. Simple fatigue may also be a factor, as well as post-election depression. Plus lots of your staff and cabinet will resign, so you have to bring in the benchwarmers. In addition, a President often exhausts his bag of tricks and reforms and initiatives in his first term and spends the second one trying to look busy. Then there’s the seven-year itch; it’s hard to stay in love with any President for two whole terms. None of these things are directly related to the 22nd Amendment, which limits Presidents to two terms; they would apply equally well without it. And in fact, Presidents have had shaky second terms going all the way back to Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. As far as I can tell, the amendment itself comes into play mainly because people are less inclined to do your bidding (or cover up for you) when they know you’ll be out of office in a couple of years. Instead, they concentrate on securing their own future, which may require them to make a show of independence—especially if the President has already started looking weak.
October 11, 2005
Why Do Presidents’ Second Terms Go Sour? Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:30 PM EST The Bush Administration right now is going through a major bad patch. Hurricane Katrina, the rising cost of oil, the Miers nomination, and the undropped shoe of the Valerie Plame investigation are but some of its troubles. As a result, Bush’s approval ratings are at the lowest point of his Presidency. And Democrats—and their minions in the media—are whispering excitedly about the Bush White House sliding into terminal lameduckness and even taking back Congress in 2006. I’d recommend holding off on ordering the champagne just yet. Political situations, like a game of backgammon, can be reversed by a single good roll of the dice. Katrina is under control, with opportunities for changing the Administration’s big-spender image with the Republican base opening up. The worst of the oil-price increases seems to be over for the moment, being down ten dollars from the Katrina high. Harriet Miers may acquit herself well in the hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee (and she’s suffered such abuse in the week since she was nominated, she’s almost bound to do better than expected). The Iraq election on Sunday could be a resounding success. And the Valerie Plame investigation might well end with a whimper, not a bang. But why is it that Presidential second terms always seem to get into trouble? Clinton’s handling of the exposure of his affair with Monica Lewinsky got him impeached. Reagan had the Iran-Contra scandal. Nixon had Watergate and was forced to resign. Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams, had to quit after he accepted gifts from a businessman pursuing government contracts. Franklin Roosevelt, having just carried 46 states, tried to pack the Supreme Court and suffered a major political defeat as a result. Even in the nineteenth century, Presidents often had major second-term troubles. Grant was hit by the Credit Mobilier scandal in the year following his reelection. Jefferson forced the disastrous Embargo Act through Congress and faced a near revolt in New England because of it. I see three possible explanations for this. One, of course, is mere coincidence. History is full of seeming patterns that don’t turn out to predict the future. The most famous in American history, I suppose, was the fact that beginning in 1840 every President elected in a year ending in zero died in office (Harrison, Lincoln, McKinley, Harding, Roosevelt, and Kennedy). Then Reagan, elected in 1980, finished out his term (despite John Hinckley’s best efforts, to be sure). Perhaps George Bush’s bad patch will be just that, a bad patch. He has run a remarkably clean White House up to now, after all. And his political fortunes are still a long way from a crisis stage. Another possibility is what might be called buyer’s remorse (or, in this case perhaps, Miers remorse). Presidents pull out all the stops to get reelected and, having done that successfully, are subject to hubris if they won in a landslide (such as Reagan in 1984 and Roosevelt in 1936). If the President won more modestly, with a deeply divided electorate, such as George Bush in 2004, the leftover discontents are just waiting to kindle trouble at the first opportunity. In either case, the possibilities of a public reaction against the incumbent—now familiar after four years in the White House—are strong. I personally prefer a third possibility. Human beings are natural-born storytellers, with a narrative instinct that is deep in our genes. There are few things we like better than telling and hearing stories. And all stories have a dramatic structure, often of the boy-meets-girl, boy-pursues-girl, boy-wins-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl-back form. The boy-loses-girl phase of a story is known among dramatists as “the second act problem.” First acts almost always end on a high note (in musicals this is called the first-act closer, often a rousing production number or a highly dramatic song, such as the famous “Soliloquy” in Carousel). But the second act invariably opens with a major problem that has to be resolved for a happy ending: Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan are now clearly both candidates for Mount Rushmore. Or, of course, the problem is not resolved, for a tragic ending: Nixon and Clinton will both be most remembered for their second-act problems, not their real achievements. Every two-term administration is, in effect, a two-act play in which the first act ends on a high note with the President’s reelection. Perhaps second terms always seem to start with a major problem simply because our story-loving genes demand one, and the media, therefore, try even harder than usual to find one. In anything so complex and vast as a modern American administration, with so many highly competitive reporters examining its every move, they can almost always find one. Then it soon takes on a life of its own. Perhaps the second term crisis to which American administrations seem so prone is merely a case of life imitating art.
October 10, 2005
O.J., Again Posted by Audrey Peterson at 01:00 PM EST As if we didn’t get enough of the moronic circus that was the O. J. Simpson trial the first time around, now we’ve been forced to observe its tenth anniversary. But does it really deserve notice? After the verdict came down, on October 3, 1995, I remember my dad, who grew up black in Alabama during the 1920s and 1930s and who witnessed more than his share of racism up close and personal, saying, “Now they know how we feel.” This was in reference to the absurd trials, held mostly in the first half of the twentieth century, that saw Klansmen and the like walk off scot-free from murder indictments, the blood still fresh on their hands. One in particular springs to mind, since it occurred 40 years nearly to the month before the O.J. trial. In August of 1955, Emmett Till, a 15-year old black boy from Chicago, whistled at a white woman named Carolyn Bryant in a grocery store in Money, Mississippi. He was lynched by the woman’s husband, Roy Bryant, and an associate, J. W. Milam, and then thrown into the Tallahatchie River. That September an all-white jury found the two men innocent, even though eyewitnesses and evidence said otherwise. Afterward, Bryant and Milam lit cigarettes and posed for pictures with their wives outside the courthouse. When I look at the images of both events, O.J.’s smiling face after his acquittal doesn’t look much different to me from Bryant’s and Milam’s did after they were found innocent (maybe O.J. looked a little more relieved and a little less smug, but not by much). His announcement that he would spare nothing in finding the real killer was ugly in its lack of sincerity and conviction, but not nearly as criminal as Bryant and Milam, after their acquittal, bragging about how they had killed Till in the January 24, 1956, issue of Look magazine. My mother, a white woman who was born in Nazi Germany two weeks before Hitler invaded Poland (she will kill me if I don’t add that she has been a proud citizen of the United States for more than 40 years), knew more than a little about what racism can do. Having married, against her German father’s wishes, a black American 14 years her senior, then coming, in 1962, to America, where it was still illegal to marry outside of your race in 17 states, she also understood why my father jumped up out of his chair and shouted when the O.J. verdict was read. The O.J. trial was the same kind of terrible farce as the trial of Bryant and Milam. Even as my dad shouted, I think he knew the acquittal was a Pyrrhic victory. Blacks weren’t gaining anything by letting a murderer go free. I resent that 10 years later we’re still hearing only about the African-Americans who thought the trial and verdict was fair (one exception is a Frontline episode that aired last Tuesday, an excellent in-depth look at the trial and verdict). There were a lot of us out there—including me—who believed O.J. to be guilty as sin. But as one woman, Linda Burnham, the head of the Black Women’s Resource Center in Oakland, said in an October 3 article in the British newspaper The Guardian, “I didn't believe in his innocence. But, like most black people I knew, I wasn’t interested in talking to white people about it unless they had sorted themselves out around the issues.” I couldn’t have put it better. Still, for a hot second my father and I, and I suspect many other African-Americans, felt that white people were finally experiencing the same type of helpless frustration blacks have felt toward our justice system since the time our ancestors were brought here on slave ships. In May 2004 the Justice Department decided to reopen the Emmett Till case based on evidence, much of which was dug up by an amateur filmmaker from Louisiana named Keith Beauchamp, that there were others, still alive (Milam and Bryant both died of cancer, in 1981 and 1994, respectively), who may have taken part in the crime. That group includes Carolyn Bryant, now Carolyn Donham, 71 years old and living in Greenville, Mississippi. Some may ask what good come out of sending any elderly person to prison so long after the fact. For me, it is not so much the actual sentence, as the record that comes with it, the one that says, at last, justice was done.
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