April 14, 2006
Brokeback Mountain Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 04:30 PM EST I finally saw Brokeback Mountain last night. I found it a beautiful and moving film, as everything I had heard about it led me to expect; I was more surprised at what a great classic love story and classic Western it was too, in its way. The very greatest, most mythic love stories have been tales of love that is taboo. Heloise and Abelard, Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet are all loves that are too big and wayward for civilization itself. Brokeback Mountain is the same. The story couldn’t be older, but in an age where being a member of the enemy clan or a celibate religious order won’t do anymore for setting love against all of society, homosexuality is a natural (though it is a taboo that has rapidly eroded, and for that reason the story begins back in 1963). And it’s also very much a tale of the dream of the American West. In Brokeback Mountain as in so many Westerns, the glorious mountainous West is itself a central character, the unspoiled land beyond the confinements and contradictions of the cramped settled world. The high country where the two lovers’ romance is born is rapturously beautiful, unsullied and unpeopled, with gorgeous, soaring mountains, pure streams, and endless skies almost too blue to believe. The mundane land that the two must descend to from there is unrelievedly flat and desolate and stuffy and squalid in every scene. These two worlds are played off each other for the entire film—right down to its very last frame. The symbolism is straightforward and unapologetic; it works because it is presented with utter conviction, no less than, say, the symbolism of liberating night versus soul-deadening day in Tristan und Isolde. The open West is the ideal of spiritual redemption and liberation, exactly as in so much of American literature and in so many Western movies. The movie brought two great American novels immediately to mind for me. The first is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. If that is a love story at all, it is a muted, chaste, preadolescent one, with race standing in for sex. But race was the defining taboo of Huckleberry Finn’s time as surely as homosexuality is of ours, and Huck and Jim, like Ennis and Jack, repeatedly escape, with limited success, into a primeval American Western landscape, in that case the wide Mississippi River. The second novel is Lolita. Vladimir Nabokov, in his dark comedy, had the genius to choose a love that not only was forbidden when the book was written but will and should remain forbidden, and that is, in fact, unforgivable. Again the love sends the lovers (only one of whom truly loves) fleeing into an American dream landscape, one that covers almost the whole nation, East and West, North and South, one where the conceit of the purity of the open land (like the purity of love itself) is mocked even as it is evoked, since the escape is to motel after motel after motel. F. Scott Fitzgerald, at the rhapsodic end of The Great Gatsby, writes of “the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world.” That is the same vision of prelapsarian perfection, but in a feminized incarnation that has been ravaged by man and time. The West of the imagination, and the Western, has always been about a rugged, tough masculine landscape, and about man trying to live up to it, and being tested by it, rather than overwhelming it. How strangely appropriate, then, that the Western, in its latest apotheosis, should get a tale of monumental, mythical love that is love between two men.
April 11, 2006
Abraham Lincoln and Iraq Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 01:30 PM EST John Steele Gordon and I should probably take this act on the road (maybe a USO tour?). I say ying, he says yang. I say black, he says white. Go, stop. Left, right. Up, down. It makes for a good intellectual exchange—usually. But in his zeal for a spirited argument, Mr. Gordon has waded into some fairly shallow waters. Let’s consider his objections to my prior post comparing the relatively open access accorded to journalists and photographers during the Civil War with the situation in the current war in Iraq, whose human toll the Bush administration has worked overtime to keep hidden from the American public: 1. Mr. Gordon objects to my comparison of Antietam to Iraq on the grounds that the great Civil War battle remains the bloodiest day in American combat history, whereas Operation Iraqi Freedom has been, in his words, “a remarkably low-mortality war.” Point taken, but so what? To a mother who lost her son or daughter in Iraq, or a spouse who lost a husband or wife, or a child who lost a parent, the aggregate number of dead in each conflict is an abstraction. 2. Mr. Gordon counters that Mathew Brady’s famous Civil War photographs were hardly as jarring and dramatic as color photography and film. Again, so what? In fact my point is that, ironically, even given the technological deficiencies of the nineteenth century, Americans living in the 1860s saw more visual imagery of war—and of its human toll—than do Americans living today. At least Mathew Brady and his staff were permitted to roam the fields at Antietam to photograph the dead. Today’s journalists aren’t even permitted to photograph sealed coffins being loaded off of jet planes. 3. Mr. Gordon writes that “the mainstream media is overwhelmingly liberal and, judging by their actions so far, would put political injury to the President above the interests of the country.” First, this is a baseless charge. Can Mr. Gordon prove that the media is “liberal”? And by prove I don’t mean simply saying that it’s so. In any event, I would remind Mr. Gordon that America’s leading liberal journal, The New Republic, supported this war, whereas leading conservatives like Pat Buchanan and neoconservatives like Francis Fukuyama opposed it. The world’s a complex place, and yelling “liberal media” hardly helps to clarify matters. Mr. Gordon’s point is not, however, just intellectually lame. It constitutes a serious and offensive charge. Mr. Gordon confuses dissent with disloyalty. Is it not in the interest of the country to know the full impact of this war? The Bush administration, I would remind Mr. Gordon, has tried on several occasions to slash servicemen’s benefits and to cut funding for the Veterans Administration. The Republican Congress, on almost straight party-line votes, shot down Democratic party proposals to commit $3.6 billion to quality-of-life programs for servicemen and servicewomen and their families, and to provide $1,500 bonuses for each service member in Iraq and Afghanistan in fiscal year 2004. Our armed forces are bleeding enlisted troops and officers. Unless we start treating our soldiers, airmen, and sailors with more respect, we’ll emerge from this war a decidedly weaker military power. And we won’t start doing right by our troops until the American people are confronted with the realities of the war in Iraq. Sorry, Mr. Gordon. But conservatives have no lock on patriotism. 4. Mr. Gordon writes that “almost all Northern papers wanted the Union to win the war. I am not at all certain that is the case with this war, at least with CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, The New York Times, etc.” What utter nonsense. Again, Mr. Gordon obtusely confuses criticism with disloyalty. People who write about the trials and tribulations of American servicemen, Mr. Gordon, probably support those same American servicemen. Moreover, let’s try to get our history right. The nineteenth-century press was fiercely partisan. Many of the North’s leading Democratic newspapers, particularly by 1863, were aligned with the party’s Copperhead faction and were sharply critical of the President. So, too, were several leading Republican papers, like the New York Tribune, whose influential editor, Horace Greeley, was a constant thorn in Lincoln’s side. In fact, Lincoln was a deeply unpopular President well into the fall of 1864, and many of his problems owed to miserable press coverage. Did Horace Greeley want the Union to lose? Hardly. Does The New York Times want America to “lose” in Iraq? Does it enjoy seeing America humiliated or hurt? Only in the fantasy world that is Fox News (and, it would seem, John Steele Gordon’s vivid imagination). 5. Mr. Gordon writes, “As for what would Lincoln do, he gave the answer to that in the greatest speech in American-perhaps world-history, the Second Inaugural: He would ‘with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, . . . strive on to finish the work we are in . . .’ That, it seems to me, is what George Bush is trying to do.” Again, we could argue that point until we’re blue in the face, but it’s irrelevant. The question I posed was about press access, not the winning strategy in Iraq.
April 11, 2006
Whose Prize Is It Anyway? Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 11:15 AM EST The historian D. M. Giangreco, and friend of and contributor to American Heritage, tells us about a rather spectacular mishap, if that’s what it is, that has just happened with the Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize, which is awarded annually by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Ferrell is an esteemed diplomatic historian and professor emeritus at the University of Indiana; the prize was established in his honor in 1991. Giangreco wrote to us: “As you know Tsuyoshi Hasegawa is receiving SHAFR’s Robert H. Ferrell Prize for Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan. . . . Around Christmas, I suggested to Ferrell that he move his comment on Hasegawa’s book from a footnote and up into the text in his own new book, Harry S. Truman and the Cold War Revisionists. Bob’s response: ‘A footnote is all it deserves.’ “Well, I’d thought that Bob’s book would not be out for a little while yet, but I found it in my mailbox a few moments ago. How ironic. The gentleman for whom the award is named says in a note on page 114 that the Hasegawa book is an ‘unfortunate contribution’ to the atom bomb debate and castigates it mightily in a 24-line endnote. It’s too bad that someone on the awards committee didn’t touch base with Bob first. Now they have a bit of an embarrassment on their hands if this attracts any attention (and, being in a Ferrell book on a rather contentious subject, it very likely will).” This was soon followed by another message from Giangreco: “It’s quite a mess, really. Bob didn’t know that Hasegawa was getting the prize until I called to tell him about it. Prompted quite a belly laugh. Laughed even harder, and harder, as I read to him the note I sent to you. He finds this all extremely amusing, but I rather doubt that some at SHAFR will find it very funny. Since sending the note to you, I’ve been informed that the good Dr. Ferrell is being honored at the same conference. Oh, my! “Anyway, in Bob’s book, he notes that ‘The literature in English regarding the effect of Soviet entry upon [Japan’s World War II] surrender is slight’ and adds that Hasegawa maintains the surrender came ‘because of the shock of the Russian entry.” Ferrell, however, gently suggests that ’Hasegawa may have speculated in this regard.’ He goes on to say: ‘The Hasegawa book seems an unfortunate contribution in another way, for it places the responsibility for use of nuclear weapons evenly on Japan, Russia, and the United States. The author ignores the behavior of the Japanese Army in its conquests beginning with the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, in which the death toll of prisoners and civilians alike ran into the millions; the United Nations figure is seventeen million, the Chinese thirty. For the Americans this meant the Bataan death march, among many other hostilities. In 1945, with the imminence of the attack on Kyushu, the vice minister of war sent out an order that when the first American landed on one of the home islands there should be the immediate execution, by any means, of all Allied prisoners held within the empire, whose numbers were estimated at one hundred thousand.’”
April 11, 2006
Re: What Would Lincoln Do Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:00 AM EST Just a few points.
1) The casualties on that single day at Antietam were 10 times the deaths we have suffered in three years in Iraq. It remains to this day the bloodiest single day in American military history. Partly, to be sure, that is due to the infinitely better and more powerful medical care that soldiers receive today. But even so, this has been a remarkably low-mortality war.
2) Mathew Brady photographs, haunting and gut-wrenching as they were, are not 24/7 color footage in your living room, any more than a wind-up gramophone playing 78s is an iPod. 3) Mr. Zeitz, it seems, would like President Bush to hand the media a club with which the media would, without a doubt, proceed to beat him mercilessly. The President is not stupid, and certainly not that stupid. The mainstream media is overwhelmingly liberal and, judging by their actions so far, would put political injury to the President above the interests of the country. Endless pictures of flag-draped coffins would suit them just fine. For instance, Mr. Zeitz mentions the awful New York Times story of the family that was told it could not see their son’s remains, told to them by an ill-informed or incompetent officer. With 2,352 deaths and thus 2,352 instances of an officer with the grim and thankless duty of personally informing the families of the fallen, the chances that one of these visits would be botched is pretty near a certainty. The vast reportorial powers of the Times uncovered this story, but I wonder how much reportorial effort was put by the Times into finding a case where the officer informing the family went above and beyond the call of duty. My bet: not five seconds worth of effort.
Another for instance. The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, which I watch almost every night and which I feel is pretty “fair and balanced,” to coin a phrase, often ends the show with the pictures, names, home towns, and ages, of the most recent deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. But has the NewsHour reported that battle deaths in Iraq have been falling every month for the last six months and were in March less than a third of those in October? Not that I’ve heard. I would think this trend would be big news: fewer and fewer American soldiers are dying in Iraq. But I have not seen it anywhere, except on a few right-of-center blogs. Why? And this has been a war almost entirely without heroes. Again, why, because there haven’t been any? Of course not. It’s because the media just can’t find the room to report any. 4) I think the either-or of Lincoln’s way or Bush’s way is a false choice. Lincoln, although frequently excoriated by unfriendly papers, also had friendly papers. And all papers reported stories of extraordinary heroism, not just stories of extraordinarily botched operations (of which, heaven knows, the Civil War had its share, starting with Antietam, which should have been a crushing defeat for the Confederacy). Almost all Northern papers wanted the Union to win the war. I am not at all certain that is the case with this war, at least with CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, the New York Times, etc. 5) As for what would Lincoln do, he gave the answer to that in the greatest speech in American—perhaps world—history, the Second Inaugural: He would “with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, . . . strive on to finish the work we are in . . .” That, it seems to me, is what George Bush is trying to do.
April 10, 2006
Julia Child Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:30 PM EST More than any single person, in my opinion, Julia Child sparked the revolution in the American attitude towards food that has so characterized the last 40 years and so greatly improved and enlarged American cuisine. Partly, I suppose, it was a case of a tide taken at the flood, the country was ready for it. But Julia’s cheerful, you-can-do-it attitude toward serious cooking (“if you can read, you can cook” was her motto) and her willingness to allow the occasional, sometimes hilarious misstep to remain in her TV shows, humanized her and the art of which she was the master. If Julia (she is one of those people who are always called by their first name, even by those who never met her) could drop the lettuce on the floor or have the omelet slide off the plate, and take it in stride, so could the rest of us. She gave people both the courage to try and, with her meticulous instructions, the means to succeed. Her latest and, alas, last book has just been published, completed by her grandnephew, Alex Prud’homme. Called My Life in France, it is not a cookbook but a memoir of her early days in France after the Second World War. When she first arrived, the wife of a diplomat, she could barely butter toast unassisted and knew no French beyond bonjour and merci. She fell in love instantly with French cooking (a simple, perfect sautéed sole did it) and soon resolved to master the art herself and later to lead her fellow Americans to the gastronomic promised land. Her success was enormous. Mastering the Art of French Cooking, published in 1961, has sold more copies than any book Alfred A. Knopf has ever published, with the exception of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, which, published originally in 1923, had a 38-year head start.
Julia’s new book reminds me of a favorite from my long-ago childhood, long before the American food revolution got under way, and when those who, like my mother, were lovers and practitioners of la cuisine française were few and far between. Clementine in the Kitchen is by Phineas Beck, a pseudonym for Samuel Chamberlain. The Chamberlain family spent 12 years in France before World War II and they, too, fell in love with French cooking and with their cheerful peasant cook, Clementine. When the war seemed imminent they returned to America with Clementine in tow. There she tackled the vagaries of the American marketplace and kitchen with Gallic good humor and occasional incomprehension. I loved it as a child when I was just beginning my career of making frightful messes in the kitchen, and I still have my mother’s stained and even mouse-nibbled copy. It is a classic of food writing, right up there on the shelf with M. F. K. Fisher and Elizabeth David, and I commend it. It is nearly as comforting as butterscotch pudding and a lot less fattening, at least until you start testing the recipes.
April 10, 2006
What Would Lincoln Do? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 01:30 PM EST Last evening, I was channel hopping (as is my habit), when I came across the History Channel’s new series Ten Days That Unexpectedly Changed America. My friend Steve Gillon, the History Channel’s resident historian and a former professor at Yale and Oxford, has written a fine companion book for the series, also titled Ten Days That Unexpectedly Changed America, and so I decided to watch for a few minutes to see how the documentary was assembled. The installment that I happened across was on Antietam, the great and bloody Civil War battle that saw Union forces repel a rare Confederate invasion of Northern soil, thus giving Abraham Lincoln an opportunity to issue his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. The series’s narrator reminded viewers that in the aftermath of Antietam, Mathew B. Brady, the famous photographer, shocked polite society by displaying photographs of the wounded and dead at his New York studio. (Contrary to popular legend, Brady did not take most of the Civil War photographs credited to him; his staff shot most of them.) As The New York Times noted at the time, “Mr. Brady has done something to bring us the terrible reality and earnestness of the war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along [our] streets, he has done something very like it.” Popular convention holds that the Vietnam War was the first major American conflict in which the gore and violence of battle were brought home to the American public, and that watching these scenes unfold on television led many Americans to lose their stomach for armed conflict. But this can’t have been so. Brady’s photographs were widely disseminated during and immediately after the Civil War, and work by the historian James McPherson and others has demonstrated that Civil War soldiers frequently wrote home with vivid, graphic accounts of the horrors of battle. In other words, the Civil War generation knew and even witnessed what war looks like. All of this contrasts sharply with the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war. Reporters have been barred from Dover Air Force Base, where most of the dead are flown back to the United States for burial. And a New York Times article this weekend even revealed that some military handlers have inaccurately informed the parents of deceased servicemen that they could not open their children’s caskets and view the remains. (In fact, they do have that right.) At last count, 2,352 American servicemen have died in Iraq, and most Americans have been sheltered from any visual reminder of this fact. When pundits compare Lincoln and George W. Bush, two “wartime Presidents” who are faced with seemingly tough decisions that weigh national security and civil rights against each other, they might do us a favor and extend the comparison. Is it possible that the Vietnam War, which was fought without major restrictions against press coverage and photojournalism, was not the exception to the rule but rather perfectly in step with American tradition? And if so, how can we continue to allow the current administration so much leeway in hiding from the public the real costs of its war in Iraq? What’s the right way to handle with sensitivity and honesty the impact of war—Abraham Lincoln’s way, or George Bush’s? I’m sure readers know my answer to this admittedly rhetorical question. But maybe some of my colleagues will have some thoughts on the matter.
April 10, 2006
Leaks, and the Leaking Leakers Who Leak Them Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:15 PM EST Last week the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame case, Patrick Fitzgerald, released grand jury testimony by Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s former and currently indicted chief of staff, that he had been authorized by President Bush to pass on previously classified information to Judith Miller, then a reporter for The New York Times. Washington and the liberal press were shocked—shocked!—that President Bush would actually practice politics by declassifying information favorable to his position and releasing it. They accused the President of telling Libby, via Cheney, to “leak” the material, the word used in the headlines in both USA Today and the Times. First, of course, if everyone in Washington who is guilty of having leaked material to the press for his or her own political purposes were in jail, the District of Columbia would be a ghost town. I’m not quite sure why the President—who is merely the most powerful politician in Washington by virtue of occupying the White House—should not do what everyone else does. To be sure, President Bush has often deplored leaks and threatened dire consequences for those in his administration caught doing the leaking. But just as everyone in Washington leaks when it suits their purposes, so everyone in Washington deplores leaks that are not in their political interest. Hypocrisy is not exactly an endangered phenomenon on the Potomac. Second, is President Bush guilty of leaking? By definition, a leak is the unauthorized release of information. But unless it contravenes law (as intentionally revealing the name of a “covert agent” for the CIA would), the President can authorize the release of whatever information he chooses to release, as the President is the fount of authority in the Executive Branch of the federal government. Indeed, he is the Executive Branch. The Constitution could hardly be clearer: The first sentence of Article II reads, “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States.” It is axiomatic that what the President has the power to do, he has the power to undo, even if that is not in the interests of his political opponents.
Patrick Fitzgerald, in fact, did exactly what the President did. Revealing grand jury testimony is against the law, unless you happen to be the prosecutor presenting a case to that grand jury, in which case you can release whatever suits your legal (and, often, political) purposes. Leaking in politics probably goes back at least to Pharaonic Egypt, but it entered the big time with two nineteenth-century developments: democratic politics and modern media. The very word, in fact, was coined by the man who, above all others, brought the modern newspaper into being, James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald. I wrote about Bennett’s remarkable contributions to journalism in American Heritage three years ago. In 1848, the Mexican War successfully concluded, the Senate was considering the Treaty of Guadeloupe-Hidalgo that would end it. Bennett obtained a copy of the treaty, which the Senate had kept secret, and printed it in full. The Senate, outraged, ordered the sergeant at arms to arrest the Herald’s Congressional correspondent and have him grilled to reveal his source. Bennett, of course, had a field day editorializing on freedom of the press, and after a month in jail the correspondent was released, his source still anonymous (which is a good deal more than can be said of Judith Miller). A few days later, Bennett, to demonstrate that this sort of thing was now business as usual, published a table of “leaks,” listing a dozen newspapers, their Washington correspondents, and the “leaky Senators” who regularly supplied each with inside information. As far as I know, this is the first time the word leak was used in the political sense.
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