June 29, 2006
I’m Smiling Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:10 AM EST Let me take up Mr. Zeitz’s points one by one. 1) I’m afraid we’re just going to have to disagree on Ed Markey. I think he’s at least as far off into the bulrushes of the left as, say, Rep. Tom Tancredo is on the right. I think Mr. Zeitz has Chuck Schumer’s sense of political geography. Senator Schumer loves to describe conservatives, but never liberals, as being “out of the mainstream.” Fine, but Senator Schumer’s idea of the mainstream is a river that is wide and deep on his left, with enough room for the Queen Mary to sail majestically by. But on his right, the mainstream does not have room for a canoe to pass. Be two inches to the right of Senator Schumer and you are out of the mainstream. 2) He writes, “To recap, my statement—that the program was a ‘sweeping, warrantless probe of private bank accounts in the United States’—is entirely accurate.” Mr. Zeitz must have studied truth under Bill it-depends-on-what-the-meaning-of-is-is Clinton. Monitoring international bank transactions is not the same as probing bank accounts in the United States. SWIFT is located in Belgium, which was not one of the fifty states the last time I checked. As for “warrantless,” please. The very use of the word makes the reader wonder why no warrants were obtained. Let me illustrate: If I were to write “The unindicted Joshua Zeitz . . . .,” would not the reader wonder what nefarious deed Mr. Zeitz had been up to but had somehow escaped the clutches of the law? Calling Mr. Zeitz unindicted is (I presume!) entirely “accurate,” but hardly truthful. Calling this program “warrantless” gives the inescapable impression that warrants should have been obtained. The Supreme Court has said no warrants are needs to examine bank records. I guess that’s not good enough for Mr. Zeitz. 3) Mr. Zeitz’s third point is almost too weak to bother with. Of course people discussed whether it was legal. And, as Mr. Zeitz admits, herds of lawyers in both Justice and Treasury decided that it was. The fact that somebody somewhere somehow decided that it wasn’t should be filed in the who-cares? pile. I’m sure a paper with the vast resources of The New York Times could find someone who has doubts about whether it is legal to get out of bed in the morning on the right side. 4) He writes that I “defended—on this website—the leaking of the identity of a covert CIA operative, Valerie Plame. That leak jeopardized the lives of Plame’s contacts.” Bullfeathers. First, Ms Plame was not a covert agent at all under the definition of the law (not too many covert CIA agents sit for photo spreads in Vanity Fair, obviously lapping up every drop of publicity). Second, it is unlikely that her contacts who might be at risk could be identified because the name of someone who was driving a desk in Langley, Virginia, became public. Did they have autographed pictures of her in their apartments? Third, despite nearly three years of work, millions of dollars, unlimited resources, and one reporter tossed in the hoosegow, no one has been indicted for any crime committed before the Fitzgerald investigation began. That probably is because no crimes were committed. 5) He objects to my phrase “his fellow travelers at The New York Times,” comparing it to the use of “fascist,” an epithet hurled around by the left with gay abandon. To me, both of these terms have long lost all substantive meaning because both fascism and communism are, thankfully, on the ash heap of history. Nowadays liberals call anyone who has the lèse-majesté to disagree with them “fascist.” It is no more to be taken literally than calling someone an SOB implies that his mother has a wet nose and wags her tail. Frankly, I would bet that 99% of the American population could not now tell you what a “fellow traveler” used to mean fifty, sixty, and seventy years ago. In this case I meant no more than “those of the same opinion.” If Mr. Zeitz thought I was calling him a commie sympathizer, I wasn’t. If he was offended, I apologize, for I didn’t mean to offend him. I promise that were I to decide to insult him, I would be quite direct about it, no fancy historical allusions. Finally, he writes, “Mr. Gordon is very conservative.” I beg to differ. (See above about the “mainstream.”) For one thing, American political nomenclature these days is inverted. Those who call themselves liberal are, in fact, deeply conservative in that they want to conserve the status quo and even revert to some earlier way of doing things. Oh, for the glory days of the New Deal, when men were men and government was the solution! The people now called conservatives are mostly those who would like to change things, sometimes radically. You may not agree with the changes they want to make, but it is the right half of the political spectrum that wants change. The left half wants, at most, to change things back to the way they were (if Barbra Striesand will forgive me). That just might have something to do with why the American left can’t get itself elected dogcatcher these days: it is the greatest obstacle standing between the country and the future. I would like to change many things: the tax system, education, the armed forces, the legal system, the health care system, etc. etc. etc. I have seen many interesting and promising ideas about how to do so. Not a single one of them has come out of the left half of American politics in the last forty years. Personally, I’ve always liked the late Stewart Alsop’s description of his politics. He called himself “a man of the extreme center.” That’s where I’d put myself.
June 28, 2006
American Philanthropy Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:55 PM EST This week, Warren Buffett, the world’s second-richest man, pledged to give away 85 percent of his $44 billion fortune, the greatest act of eleemosynary generosity in the history of the world. (Before you weep for his three children, reflect that 15 percent of $44 billion is $6.6 billion, enough to keep the wolf very comfortably away from their doors.) Most of his money, in $1.5 billion annual increments, is going to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which already has assets of $29 billion, making it nearly three times as large as the second-place Ford Foundation. Mr. Buffett will require the foundation to spend the annual gifts by the end of each year rather than treat them as additional capital.
The sheer size of Mr. Buffett’s gift is awe-inspiring. Even allowing for inflation, it is orders of magnitude larger than any previous charitable gift. Andrew Carnegie, who once wrote that “a man who dies rich dies disgraced,” gave away perhaps a total of $500 million in his lifetime. That might be very roughly equal to $7.5 billion in today’s money. Nathan Rosenwald, of Sears, Roebuck, gave away more than $60 million in his lifetime. Much of John D. Rockefeller’s staggeringly large fortune has gone to such good works as the University of Chicago, Rockefeller University, and the national parks at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
But Buffett’s great gift to the world is just the latest instance of a long American tradition, a tradition that is largely unknown in Europe, of the very rich giving large sums of money away to worthy causes. George Peabody (1795-1869) and Peter Cooper (1791-1883) began the tradition. Peabody, who was a banker in London for the last thirty years of his life, established the Peabody Institutes in Baltimore and Peabody, Massachusetts (Peabody’s birth place and named in his honor), the Peabody Museums at Yale and Harvard, and the Peabody Education Fund to help the devastated South after the Civil War. Further he built tenement housing for London’s working poor. Queen Victoria offered to make him a baronet, virtually unprecedented for someone who was not a British subject, but he modestly declined the honor. When his body was returned to the United States for burial, the ship was accompanied with an honor guard of British and French warships. Peter Cooper invented the idea of night school so that working people could continue their educations and established the Cooper Union in New York, one of the country’s premier engineering schools and just about the only four-year college in the United States that charges no tuition.
One need only stroll down New York’s Fifth Avenue from the Museum of the City of New York at 103rd Street, past the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Neue Galerie (which, thanks to its founder, Ronald Lauder, has just acquired Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, for which he paid $135 million), the Metropolitan Museum, the Frick Collection, The Museum of Modern Art (just off Fifth at 53rd Street), to the New York Public Library at 42nd Street, the largest library in the world not owned—and funded—by a sovereign government, to get a sense of how great this American tradition has been. Most other American cities have been enriched as well by this tradition.
Not every rich American, of course, has been known for his generosity. When a group of men approached John Jacob Astor for a contribution to some worthy cause, he rather grumpily wrote out a check for $50. One of the men, looking with some dismay at this paltry sum from the richest man in the country, said, “But Mr. Astor, even your son William gave us a hundred dollars.”
“Ah, well,” said Astor. “But William has a rich man for a father. I am a poor man’s son.”
Even so, Astor paid for the magnificent reredos behind the altar at Wall Street’s Trinity Church and, on his death, left $400,000—a huge sum at the time—to found the Astor Library, now part of the New York Public Library.
June 28, 2006
The Persian Wars Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:30 AM EST This blog is supposed to be tied to American history, so it’s a bit of a stretch, to put it mildly, to write about a book concerning events that took place two millennia before Columbus sailed out of the port of Palos, seeking a new route to the Indies, and bumped into the New World. Undaunted, I will try to make the necessary connection. The events are the Persian Wars, fought in the early years of the fifth century before Christ between the Persian Empire and Greece. The story, told and retold endlessly ever since, can hardly be beat, a classic David-and-Goliath tale. The superpower of the day, stretching from the Aegean to India, able to efficiently command and deploy its bottomless resources, decides to absorb a group of impoverished and politically divided city-states on the fringes of the known world. It should have been a slam dunk. It wasn’t. In a series of battles whose names are still familiar—Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, Plataea—the Greeks defended their homeland, their gods, and their way of life, and triumphed. The consequences for world history could hardly have been more far-reaching. As Plato wrote 150 years later, those who defeated Persia “were the fathers not merely of children, of mortal flesh and blood, but of their children’s freedom, and the freedom of every person who dwells in the continent of the West.” The Persian Wars gave the West its sense of self, and the history of the world ever since could well be titled, as the great historian William McNeill did title it, The Rise of the West. The history of the United States is but the latest chapter in that long, long story and in a very real sense we, too, are the children of those men who fought at Marathon and Salamis. Had they lost, it is hard to imagine how the United States could ever have come into existence. Most of us, I imagine, remember the Persian Wars only from some long-ago ancient-history course in high school. That is why I recommend so highly Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West, by Tom Holland.
Mr. Holland writes as well as the best of novelists and never forgets for a minute that narrative history is first and foremost story-telling. But, with a Ph.D. from Oxford, he is a thoroughly trained historian who handles the often sketchy and always contradictory source material with great professional skill. He not only tells the story with wit, grace, and perfect pacing, he brings the long-lost world in which it happened back to vivid life, as he does the major characters, who are, to most of us at least, little more than names, such as Xerxes, Themistocles, and Leonidas. Importantly, he gives the same attention to both sides, showing us their virtues and vices equally. Persian Fire is history writing at its absolute, thrilling best.
June 27, 2006
Retaking the House Posted by Alexander Burns at 04:55 PM EST For the last few months, much media attention has focused on the potential consequences of the congressional elections in November. This attention will continue until the campaign season is over. I enjoy speculating about election results as much as the next political junkie, but something has been bothering me about the way newspapers and magazines are describing the election cycle currently underway. Many of them, from The New York Times to the Washington Times, have discussed the contingency of the Democrats “retaking control” of the House of Representatives. While it is certainly possible that Republicans will lose their majority in Congress’s lower chamber, I find it puzzling that so many commentators are analyzing the election in terms of the Democrats’ opportunity to “retake” or “win back” the House of Representatives. It has been more than a decade since Democrats lost their longtime hold on the House. If Republicans continue to retain the majority past the end of the 109th Congress, at what point will the Democrats have to simply “win” or “seize” power? Twelve years after the 1994 elections, why do we still discuss congressional politics as though G.O.P. control is some kind of temporary condition? One possible reason for this is that, in spite of the Republicans’ continuing power, a fairly high proportion of Democratic representatives first came to Washington in the days of Democratic control. By my rough count, approximately 95 members of the Democrats’ 203-member caucus were elected in 1992 or earlier. This number includes congressmen like John Dingell, the longest-serving member in history, who joined the House after Eisenhower’s first midterm elections. For a man like Dingell, the years since Newt Gingrich became speaker comprise a fairly small portion of a House career otherwise characterized by Democratic preeminence. Dingell’s is an exceptionally long career, but there are more than a few others like it. Even with this explanation, however, the terminology used in reference to the midterm election does a disservice to both parties. It tricks Democrats into thinking that they are still considered the natural governing party, when the American people are far from convinced of that. And it deludes Republicans into imagining that they are still an insurgent minority, preventing them from fully becoming a functional and responsible majority.
June 27, 2006
When You Call Me That, Smile Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:50 AM EST In response to John Steele Gordon’s post yesterday, a few points. 1. Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) is not, as Mr. Gordon bizarrely claims, a member of the “loony-left,” whatever that term is supposed to mean. He is a veteran House Democrat who was first elected to Congress in 1976 and who has been an advocate of stronger environmental and consumer rights laws and a leading voice against political torture. He is, to be sure, conventionally liberal, but unless Mr. Gordon is writing off the entire center-left position on the political spectrum as “loony,” Markey is no more “loony” than Sen. John McCain—who is, of course, not “loony,” but merely a committed conservative. You can find a good rundown of Markey’s positions here. A website devoted to history would do better to characterize and analyze the political positions of lawmakers past and present, rather than write them off as “loony” if they should happen to disagree with one of our writers on matters of public policy. 2. A propos of my characterization of the Bush administration’s bank surveillance program, which I called a “sweeping, warrantless probe of private bank accounts in the United States,” Mr. Gordon writes: “[T]hat is a grotesque—I’m tempted to say propagandistic—mischaracterization of the program under discussion.” But, in fact, it isn’t. The program has monitored thousands of bank transactions, which by any reasonable definition makes it sweeping. Several lines later, Mr. Gordon continues: “Sweeping? Well, I would certainly hope so.” I suppose, then, that he concedes the point. Furthermore, the operation was carried out without court warrants. Which makes it warrantless. Finally, it targeted private bank accounts. To recap, my statement—that the program was a “sweeping, warrantless probe of private bank accounts in the United States”—is entirely accurate. 3. Mr. Gordon writes: “Joshua Zeitz is correct in that I inaccurately characterized what The New York Times wrote regarding the legality of the federal government surveilling international bank records in order to track terrorist cash flows. They did not say it was legal; they raised questions and quoted ‘experts’ (if Ambrose Bierce were alive today, he’d define ‘expert’ in this context as anyone who agreed with The New York Times) who had ‘doubts.’ . . . a major newspaper can always find an ‘expert’ who has ‘doubts’ about whether the sun rose in the east this morning, let alone a necessarily clandestine intelligence program.” Now, I know that in this faith-based age we’re living in, it’s unfashionable to invoke ideas like “expertise” and “facts.” But call me a sucker for the reality-based world. Among those experts who have voiced concerns about potential illegalities in the program are officials at the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), the Brussels-based financial consortium that was responsible for forking over private records to the U.S. government; lawyers in the Treasury and Justice departments, who debated the program’s legality but ultimately concluded that it was legal; L. Richard Fischer, a Washington-based lawyer who specializes on banking privacy law; and numerous unnamed officials in the federal government who worked on the program. These individuals would know far more about American and international banking law than I would, and I daresay they know more about it than Mr. Gordon, too. 4. Mr. Gordon cites a letter by a soldier currently serving in Iraq, who points out that many of the insurgents firing on American servicemen may have been financed with money that terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda launder through American banks. Fair enough. It’s a point worth discussing—as, I might add, it’s worth discussing how Iraq ever became a breeding ground for Al Qaeda operatives in the first place. It sure wasn’t before the U.S. invaded that country. But it does not follow from this debate that (in Mr. Gordon’s words) “there is blood-American blood-on the hands of The New York Times.” This is a strange and somewhat hysterical statement, especially coming from someone (Mr. Gordon) who defended—on this website—the leaking of the identity of a covert CIA operative, Valerie Plame. That leak jeopardized the lives of Plame’s contacts. Which is why we have laws against knowingly leaking the names and identities of covert operatives. Mr. Gordon seems to write off leaks by Bush administration officials as acceptable, and leaks by the NYT as criminal and murderous. Which is why it’s sometimes difficult to take his posts seriously. 5. Finally, Mr. Gordon writes: “What would Mr. Zeitz and his fellow travelers on West 43rd Street want? That we ask Osama Bin Laden if it would be all right (please, pretty please) to take a peek at what accounts he’s sending large sums of money to in the United States?” Readers of this website are, by definition, interested in history, so most of them don’t need me to remind them what the term fellow traveler means. But for those who may not be familiar with the peculiar history of American anti-Communism, it’s worth noting that fellow traveler was a widely invoked term in the 1940s and 1950s referring to associates of, and aiders and abettors of, Communism. In short, a fellow traveler was a domestic dupe of the Soviet regime in Moscow. It’s unclear whether Mr. Gordon is calling the folks at the NYT offices on West 43rd Street my fellow travelers, in which case I am the totalitarian blood-letter and the NYT staff are simply the dupes. That would seem a little harsh, but it’s the grammatical implication of his sentence. Or, Mr. Gordon could be calling us all fellow travelers, in which case, we are all dupes of Osama bin Laden. Either way, the implication is unfair. Mr. Gordon will, of course, respond that he wasn’t comparing me to a totalitarian or totalitarian-apologist, but if he has proved himself a rather ungracious sparring partner in his last post, he is still a smart man with a wide-ranging knowledge of history, and he knows what these words mean. There are other loaded terms in American political history, like fascist. In the popular parlance of the Popular Front era (roughly the 1930s through the early 1940s), many people on the left casually wrote off conservatives of every stripe as fascists. Mr. Gordon is very conservative, but I would never, even jokingly, call him a fascist, because a) to do so would be puerile; b) such terms only coarsen the public discourse; and c) there is obviously no moral equivalence between a 1930s fascist and a regular, homegrown American conservative. The same applies in the other direction. I hope that in the future, Mr. Gordon will be more circumspect in his choice of words.
June 26, 2006
McCormick III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:55 PM EST Joshua Zeitz is correct in that I inaccurately characterized what The New York Times wrote regarding the legality of the federal government surveilling international bank records in order to track terrorist cash flows. They did not say it was legal; they raised questions and quoted “experts” (if Ambrose Bierce were alive today, he’d define “expert” in this context as anyone who agreed with The New York Times) who had “doubts.” Do a thought experiment: If the program were flatly illegal or there were any even half-way serious question as to its legality, would that have been buried deep in the article where these “doubts” were? What the Times wrote is pure, unadulterated journalistic PYB. In a country of 300,000,000, a major newspaper can always find an “expert” who has “doubts” about whether the sun rose in the east this morning, let alone a necessarily clandestine intelligence program.
The fact that no one in Washington, except the loony-left Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, leapt on this bandwagon after the NYT published the story indicates that any “doubts” about its legality are trivial at best. And, indeed, before the Times decided to take the law into its own hands, it was not only the administration that asked it not to publish. It was both the chairman and vice chairman of the 9/11 commission (Republican Tom Kean, Democrat Lee Hamilton), and the chairmen (Republicans) and vice chairmen (Democrats) of the congressional intelligence committees who asked as well. But no, we’re The New York Times and to hell with the country.
Joshua Zeitz writes that, “I part ways with Mr. Gordon over his characterization of the NYT’s recent story on the Bush administration’s sweeping, warrantless probes of private bank accounts in the United States.”
Speaking of characterization, that is a grotesque—I’m tempted to say propagandistic—mischaracterization of the program under discussion. The proverbial man from Mars reading it would conclude that the program involved the Bush administration’s nefarious poking about in people’s private affairs in order to find out how much Mr. Zeitz paid his plumber last month. That might charitably be described (on a family-friendly website) as rubbish.
Sweeping? Well, I would certainly hope so. What’s the point of it being otherwise? Warrantless? Of course it’s warrantless; no judicial warrants are required to search banking records. The Supreme Court has ruled over and over (United States v. Bisceglia, California Bankers Association v. Schultz, United States v. Miller) that people have no expectation of privacy with regard to banking records and that no judicial warrant is required to access them. Nonetheless the government required administrative warrants (which can be fought in court) and hired an outside firm to monitor what records of international transactions (not “private bank accounts in the United States”) were searched. What would Mr. Zeitz and his fellow travelers on West 43rd Street want? That we ask Osama Bin Laden if it would be all right (please, pretty please) to take a peek at what accounts he’s sending large sums of money to in the United States?
Further he writes, “More to the point, the NYT has done nothing that jeopardizes American servicemen or compromises America’s military operations.” That, too, is (being self-censoring again to save the editor of this blog the trouble) rubbish. I would refer Mr. Zeitz to a letter from a soldier now serving in Iraq (courtesy of Powerline): -------------------- Dear Messrs. Keller, Lichtblau & Risen [the executive editor of the Times and the reporters who wrote the story]: Congratulations on disclosing our government’s highly classified anti-terrorist-financing program (June 23). I apologize for not writing sooner. But I am a lieutenant in the United States Army and I spent the last four days patrolling one of the more dangerous areas in Iraq. (Alas, operational security and common sense prevent me from even revealing this unclassified location in a private medium like email.) Unfortunately, as I supervised my soldiers late one night, I heard a booming explosion several miles away. I learned a few hours later that a powerful roadside bomb killed one soldier and severely injured another from my 130-man company. I deeply hope that we can find and kill or capture the terrorists responsible for that bomb. But, of course, these terrorists do not spring from the soil like Plato’s guardians. No, they require financing to obtain mortars and artillery shells, priming explosives, wiring and circuitry, not to mention for training and payments to locals willing to emplace bombs in exchange for a few months’ salary. As your story states, the program was legal, briefed to Congress, supported in the government and financial industry, and very successful. Not anymore. You may think you have done a public service, but you have gravely endangered the lives of my soldiers and all other soldiers and innocent Iraqis here. Next time I hear that familiar explosion—or next time I feel it—I will wonder whether we could have stopped that bomb had you not instructed terrorists how to evade our financial surveillance. And, by the way, having graduated from Harvard Law and practiced with a federal appellate judge and two Washington law firms before becoming an infantry officer, I am well-versed in the espionage laws relevant to this story and others—laws you have plainly violated. I hope that my colleagues at the Department of Justice match the courage of my soldiers here and prosecute you and your newspaper to the fullest extent of the law. By the time we return home, maybe you will be in your rightful place: not at the Pulitzer announcements, but behind bars. Very truly yours,
Tom Cotton
Baghdad, Iraq -------------------- I would also suggest readers take a look at the column of Michael Barone, one of the most highly respected (by both sides of the aisle) journalists and pundits in Washington. Its title: “The New York Times at War With America.”
There is blood—American blood—on the hands of The New York Times. Why Joshua Zeitz would want to defend the indefensible is beyond me.
June 26, 2006
McCormick II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:50 AM EST John Steele Gordon’s last post comparing Robert McCormick, the legendary publisher of the Chicago Tribune, with the current regime at the New York Times was interesting. While I agree with Mr. Gordon that McCormick’s story dated June 7, 1942, concerning Japanese battle plans in the Pacific, was damaging to the Allied cause, I suppose my nomination for worst-ever McCormick leak was the Tribune’s article on December 4, 1941, revealing key elements of the government’s Victory Program, including proposed troop levels, potential theaters of engagement in Europe and the Pacific, and estimated war costs. But I guess it’s a toss-up. Either way you look at it, McCormick was a reckless and irresponsible publisher. I part ways with Mr. Gordon over his characterization of the NYT’s recent story on the Bush administration’s sweeping, warrantless probes of private bank accounts in the United States. Mr. Gordon claims that the article “endanger[ed] the national security of the United States and injure[d] the war effort.” But I just don’t see the parallel between McCormick, who blatantly leaked military plans for all of America’s friends and enemies to see, and the NYT, which exposed a sweeping covert policy of questionable legality. Mr. Gordon writes “The Times’s own story reports that the program is perfectly legal,” but nowhere does the NYT say this. The article cites administration officials who say the program is legal, but that is quite a far stretch from endorsing that position. In fact, the article outlines many of the legal gray areas and quotes numerous past and present government officials who are concerned about possible constitutional and statutory violations in the program’s conception and application. More to the point, the NYT has done nothing that jeopardizes American servicemen or compromises America’s military operations. Robert McCormick did precisely these things, and on several occasions.
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