June 24, 2007
Okinawa University, 1946 Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:25 PM EST I posted three days ago about the battle of Okinawa, which ended on June 21, 1945. By a fluke, the following day, cleaning out one office in the course of moving to another, I found a sheaf of papers from Okinawa. A friend’s father, an artilleryman, had fought there. Stuck on Okinawa for a while—there was a shortage of shipping—he’d helped found and become one of the instructors at the Okinawa University Instruction Center, which the forward to its typed-out curriculum (my copy is dated January 1946) describes as “an institution of learning for servicemen; an institution founded on democratic and civilian principles, as close to the American prewar pattern as possible.” Everyone at the university—it began with 800 students and what looks like a few score faculty—was in the armed forces, and almost all of them were very eager get out. A remarkable number of them decided to pass the time doing intellectual work rather than the more grimly practical and physical tasks they had been doing a few months before. The university’s head, a first lieutenant, was titled its commandant rather than its president, but otherwise the proudly asserted closeness to a prewar American university is often persuasive. The sheaf of typed paper lists a captain with an M.A. as dean of admissions, along with a registrar (a corporal with a B.S.), other administrators, and chairmen of fairly conventional academic departments (agriculture, business, economics, English, foreign languages, history and government, mathematics, something called mechanical-technical, music and art, natural sciences, and social sciences). The chairmen themselves, and their credentials, look a little odd by modern standards—for one thing, they are identified by military ranks rather than academic ranks, and no one had a doctorate. The chairman of the Department of Foreign Languages, Private First Class Faulkner, had a Baccalaureat de l’Ensignement Secondaire and a Certificat de License, both from France (there is no further information). The chairman of the Mathematics Department, a corporal, had a B.A. and an M.A., as did the chairman of the Economics Department; a couple of the others had masters of science degrees, and one an M.F.A. Some of the courses were offered for high school credit, others were at university level; some were practical—my friend’s father taught a course in reading blueprints (five hours of lectures a week, a minimum of another hour of academic work a day)—and others less so (Latin, an advanced course in harmony, etc.). The main texts for each course are listed, and they look pretty orthodox (a physiology course uses Gray’s Anatomy, Cunningham’s Textbook of Anatomy, by Jamison, and Applied Physiology, by Best and Taylor). I found this sheaf of paper oddly moving, and it also established some historical distance. In these documents the adults of my childhood, when almost everyone’s father had fought in the Second World War, look more like the most flattering depictions of them deployed in New Deal propaganda than like any later and allegedly more realistic portrayals. They look like citizen soldiers with a flair for improvisation, an explicit commitment to democracy, and a determination to better themselves. They must have had their share of the ordinary vices, and I suppose most of them had some traditional vices no longer strikingly conspicuous among academics—various unpleasant attitudes about race and gender—but to be blunt, I do not know if the faculty of any place I have taught, left to their own devices and unemployed, would be able to found and administer a university, despite having done little else in their lives other than attend or work at universities. I fear that in many cases my colleagues would decline to do their jobs on a purely volunteer and wholly unpaid basis. Nor, as it happens, am I am entirely confident that they could successfully invade Okinawa. John Maynard Keynes, at one time the bursar of a Cambridge college where I was several times a temporary member of High Table, argued against professionalizing the post he then held, asserting that it was “much easier to make a Bursar of a Fellow than a Fellow of a Bursar.” Maybe so, but on the strength of this evidence, I have the uneasy suspicion that it may also be easier to make a professor of an artilleryman, than it would be to nowadays work the reverse transformation.
June 23, 2007
Free Trade and Inequality III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:05 PM EST John Steele Gordon makes several arguments against a recent article in Foreign Affairs that describes increasing opposition to globalization and recommends steps to decrease what the authors take to be evidence of increasing inequality in the United States, as an attempt to defuse that increasing opposition. For now, I’ll address just one of his arguments. He writes that “the ongoing integration of the world economy is unstoppable, whether we like it or not. Trying to stop it would be like trying to stop the Industrial Revolution in, say, 1830. American participation in the process might, at enormous economic cost, be delayed, but, with 30 percent of the world’s GDP, not for long. The last serious attempt to wall off the American economy from global influences was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930. It was one of the major reasons an ordinary recession turned into the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression, as American exports in particular and world trade in general collapsed.” I am skeptical about the analogy with industrialization in 1830, because while no one ever succeeded in reversing the Industrial Revolution, people did manage to very effectively roll back globalization during and after the First World War. The world economy was much more globalized in 1914 than it was in 1990. There would of course be a great economic cost to such a reversal, but as Mr. Gordon points out, there may have been a very great cost to Smoot-Hawley, and we did it anyway. The evidence for authoritarian and totalitarian regimes persisting in self-destructive economic policies is superabundant, and while democracies may be less likely to persist in self-destructive policies, the historical record suggests that they can do it for quite a while, and opposition to free trade has been impressively tenacious. Europe, which expresses vast sympathy for Africa, persists in protectionist policies that devastate Africans while costing Europeans a lot of money. Australians, now pretty committed free-traders, sought to protect manufacturing for decades, during which time they succeeded in devastating that sector of their economy. India was also protectionist for decades, which cost it vast potential growth. Etc. A web interview with economist Bryan Caplan, the author of a recent book titled The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, suggests that American voters are more than capable of making very bad choices about economic policies. I do not share anything like all of the views expressed by Professor Caplan, but I am curious about what Mr. Gordon makes of his position.
June 22, 2007
Free Trade and Inequality II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:45 AM EST Fredric Smoler refers to an article regarding increasing opposition to globalization, despite globalization’s many and profound benefits to the economy, and a proposed solution to the problem, in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. I agree that it is a most interesting article, but I don’t agree with either the analysis of the situation or the proposed solution. A few points. 1) Globalization. The ongoing integration of the world economy is unstoppable, whether we like it or not. Trying to stop it would be like trying to stop the Industrial Revolution in, say, 1830. American participation in the process might, at enormous economic cost, be delayed, but, with 30 percent of the world’s GDP, not for long. The last serious attempt to wall off the American economy from global influences was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930. It was one of the major reasons an ordinary recession turned into the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression, as American exports in particular and world trade in general collapsed. 2) Redistributing payroll taxes. First, political quid pro quos don’t work, at least not for long, unless there is a very tight nexus between the two parts. The idea that a change in the domestic tax structure that would benefit many people who perceive their economic interests to have been adversely impacted by globalization would result in a change of heart on their part regarding globalization strikes me as highly unlikely to put it mildly. This seems to me to be an example of the sort of political naiveté that is all too common in ivory towers. Instead, they would take the increased income, say thank you very much, and go right on opposing globalization. Second, the payroll tax that the authors of the article would make progressive—i.e. higher rates for higher incomes—is not, in theory, a tax at all. It is instead a mandatory contribution to one’s Social Security account and to Medicare. The initials in the acronym FICA, after all, stand for Federal Insurance Contributions Act, and individuals get a statement every year showing how much they and their employers have contributed to their individual accounts. The authors would have the FICA of those earning below the median drop to zero while sharply increasing the FICA of those above it, either by eliminating the cap or increasing the rate on higher incomes. How would this be accounted for in the annual statement? Politicians are, of course, masters of euphemism, but this would be a challenge. 3) Wages. The authors refer to the stagnation and even decline in wages and “money income” for most American workers in recent years, especially in the period 2000–2005. I don’t doubt the truth of the statistics they rely on, but I question how accurately those statistics reflect the real-world experience of most employed Americans. First, 2000–2005, with the end of the stock market bubble and 9/11, is perhaps not a good period to use, and five years is too short a period in any event. Second, money income is not the same as compensation, and whenever I see “wages” (or “money income,” which, I presume, would be wages plus investment income) being used as the sole measure of economic wherewithal, I get wary. For while wages have been lagging, noncash perks have not. For instance, The Wall Street Journal reports that of employers with 20 or more workers, 85 percent provide tuition assistance to employees, 45 percent provide adoption assistance, 74 percent paid sick leave, 57 percent flex time and 77 percent paid vacations. Most pay for or help pay for health insurance, many offer in-house medical services, in-house food services, and even in-house day care. None of this shows up in statistics on “wages,” but it shows up nonetheless in workers’ wallets in terms of increased disposable income. If you aren’t paying to take a course at the local junior college or paying the babysitter you would otherwise have to hire, that money can be spent on other needs. The fact that these forms of noncash compensation are not taxed might, of course, account for why they are increasing much faster than wages.
June 21, 2007
Okinawa Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:45 PM EST Today is the anniversary of the American victory on Okinawa, the largest and last amphibious invasion of the Second World War. The invasion began on April 1, 1945, and 82 days later Okinawa had become the bloodiest battle of the island campaign in the Pacific. Okinawa was one of the few islands the Japanese were able to extensively fortify before the Americans hit the beaches, and the only island where they had a lot of artillery and armor. The Japanese flew 1,900 kamikaze missions, sinking dozens of ships and killing around 5,000 American sailors. The Japanese army inflicted more than 72,000 American casualties on Okinawa itself, more than 12,000 of those casualties killed or missing in action; the Japanese army itself suffered around 66,000 dead. More than 140,000 Okinawans, a quarter of the civilian population, died in the battle, many of then used as human shields by the Japanese (others were simply murdered, either to prevent their surrender to the Americans or for other reasons). Around a third of the surviving Okinawan population was wounded in the battle. A 1995 memorial on Okinawa lists the 237,318 fatalities known at that point to have died as a result of the battle. Most of the elements that made Okinawa so ghastly a battle would have been reproduced in any invasion of Japan, along with some new and worse possibilities, and a desire to avoid another Okinawan campaign on a much vaster scale was almost certainly among the most powerful American motives for using nuclear weapons against Japan. To read even a terse summary of the battle is to understand that American policymakers had other things on their minds in the summer of 1945 than the problem of dealing with Stalin, and that having those more pressing concerns, they are unlikely to have used nuclear weapons for the sole or even primary purpose of intimidating Stalin. To teach in a liberal-arts college, however, is to discover that the belief that intimidating Stalin was in fact our main or even sole motive has become an article of faith for an amazing number of nominally educated Americans. Almost all of my students, a self-selected and generally very impressive group, had acquired this misinformation somewhere along the road. In most cases, they were apparently taught it in school, where they were not taught much, if anything, about the battle of Okinawa. The conventional wisdom about American motives for bombing Hiroshima, like the conventional wisdom about the criminal idiocy of British commanders on the Western Front in World War I, is one of the cases where professional opinion among specialists has been moving in the opposite direction from non-specialist “educated” opinion for almost a generation, but has made almost no headway outside the tiny worlds inhabited by military and diplomatic historians. This is dispiriting, and instructive.
June 21, 2007
Japanese Attacks on the U.S. Mainland Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:45 AM EST Jack Kelly’s lead piece on the website today, “Forgotten but True: Japan Attacks the American Mainland,” details the handful of attempts by Japan to strike at the continental United States during the Second World War. Today is the anniversary of the most dramatic, when a Japanese submarine, the I-25, fired 17 shells at Fort Stevens, at the mouth of the Columbia River on the Oregon coast. The I-25 managed to damage a baseball backstop; as a reply to the shock of the Doolittle Raids, the I-25’s first foray was a damp squib, as was a follow-on raid with a sub-launched seaplane a couple of months later. Late in the war, incendiaries launched by balloon from across the Pacific did manage to kill three Americans, a mother and two children who found a balloon bomb and picked it up; this was a couple of months before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These events have had a long afterlife as Second World War trivia questions and bar bets, and I think they usually divert American audiences made privy to them because of the fantastic disproportion between the horrific effectiveness of American attacks on the Japanese Home Islands and the contrastingly comical ineffectiveness of the Japanese attacks on the lower 48. I do not have the impression that people feel sympathy for the Japanese on the strength of the contrast. People who take an interest in Second World War trivia usually know that scores of millions of civilians died as a direct or indirect result of Japanese actions during the Pacific War. The comic effect seems to be a very old and perhaps morally coarse one: We laugh at the impotence of our enemies. To my ear, our laughter is morally palliated by a parallel knowledge of how much harm our enemies could do on other occasions (the Rape of Nanking, or the Bataan Death March, or the mass murders in Manila, for example). The laughter is in any case a rare and unrepresentative portion of our response to the adversaries we fought during the Second World War, even more than 60 years on. Most wartime attempts to ridicule the Axis, the sort that got into Hollywood shorts and second features, look bizarre nowadays, and not too much anti-Axis humor has matured with the passage of time. All wars are ironic, a famous critic once asserted. Not that one—not yet, or at least not too often.
June 20, 2007
More on Humility and History Posted by Alexander Burns at 05:00 PM EST Back in January I wrote a post, “Humility and History,” that chided Barack Obama for promoting comparisons between himself and Abraham Lincoln a little too openly. Reacting to a couple of self-important comments by his campaign, and to his decision to announce his campaign in Springfield, Illinois, I wrote: “While Obama might be a promising candidate, he’s hardly earned the right to claim Lincoln’s mantle, and it comes off as awfully arrogant when he and his surrogates try to do so.” Five months later, there’s another presidential candidate who’s fashioning himself after a historically significant leader, and he’s doing it a little more gracefully than Obama. According to one ex-Reagan aide backing him, this contender, “like Ronald Reagan, is a man of tremendous substance. There is a sense in the party that none of the candidates is quite ‘it.’” Whatever that “it” might be, there are an awful lot of Republicans anxiously hoping that this supposedly Reagan-like figure will bring “it” to an otherwise uninspiring field of men vying for their party’s nomination. This man, former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson, recognizes this yearning among the GOP faithful and is coyly trying to walk in the footsteps of the fortieth President. Unlike Obama, Thompson hasn’t, to my knowledge, compared himself with a revered former President. In fact, at an event in Missouri he refused when an audience member asked him if he would. But while Thompson hasn’t publicized historical comparisons as openly as Obama, he’s clearly chased them all the same. This week, he flew to London to deliver a speech to the Policy Exchange think thank and meet with former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. There’s no real reason for Thompson to do this—Thatcher is hardly an influential figure in American politics, and Policy Exchange has little transatlantic influence—except to court further comparisons to Thatcher’s old friend Reagan. His speech at Policy Exchange was nothing surprising, mostly full of the platitudinous slogans that make up campaign speeches (Thomas Dewey’s “Our future lies ahead,” surely remains among the greatest.) It was an evidently sincere call for deeper cooperation between the United States and England, and it ended with an anecdote about Winston Churchill that sounded almost like a veiled apology for recent American blunders. My attention was caught by a few phrases: First, when Thompson denounced America’s “evil” enemies, I wondered whether it was an intentional allusion to Reagan’s 1982 speech to Parliament, discussed here last week. Second, when he sang the praises of the Anglo-American leadership duos “of Churchill and Roosevelt, of Thatcher and Reagan, and Blair and Bush,” it seemed like he was inviting his audience to add a fourth pairing: Thompson and Cameron. These rhetorical turns alone are not especially meaningful, but they accentuate the overall theatricality of Thompson’s trip to Britain. Posing for photographs with Baroness Thatcher, drumming up enthusiasm for Britain and America’s “special relationship,” castigating America’s foes in unambiguous and even simplistic terms—for a candidate whose observers are already likening him to Ronald Reagan, these are actions bound to yield further flattering comparisons. Like any good actor, Thompson knows the difference between telling his audience something and showing them the same thing. Obama’s campaign has employed historical analogy with little finesse, pompously telling his fans that their favored candidate is like Lincoln. The Thompson campaign is deploying a similarly pompous historical analogy, but, more cleverly, they are doing so by orchestrating suggestive, Reaganesque events. This method of exploiting historical memory seems more than a little disingenuous—Thompson’s, “What, me Reagan?” lines are particularly insincere—but it’s also more than a little clever. I expect, though, that it will backfire when Thompson finds that he’s created unbearably high expectations for himself.
June 20, 2007
The Victorians Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:25 AM EST The lower-left corner of the homepage of this website always features a “Today In History” section, and today it notes that this is the anniversary of Victoria’s accession to the throne. When I was a boy, Victorian was a word of cheap and easy abuse. It seemed to mean a combination of madly priggish, moralistic, absurdly formal, hostile to pleasure, phobic about sex, and broadly hypocritical. While always depicted as inevitably dying, Victorianism was simultaneously imagined to be very much alive, because it was still worth attacking. In my high school, a much-loved English teacher would recommend Lytton Strachey’s 1918 classic Eminent Victorians as a delicious and deadly attack on a common foe. Victorianism was despised without being feared; in most cases, Victorian was a word one used with a sneer or a snigger; we knew of no other culture to which we felt so lazily (rather than earnestly) superior. In 1969, when I was 18, George MacDonald Fraser published Flashman, taking off from a Victorian classic, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), a copy of which existed in my parent’s house, although unread by me. The book, marketed as a deadly comic attack on the Victorians, was an immense success and had a long series of sequels. Read with even modest care, though, it was simultaneously an attack on the Victorians and a loving and very knowledgeable celebration of them: Fraser’s Victorians had some vices we lacked in the same form—pretty gross sexual hypocrisy, for example, and remarkably ill-regulated workplaces, also more overt racism—but they also possessed astonishing virtues—courage, earnestness, prodigious energy, and moral seriousness. The books, copiously footnoted, jokey, at times sexy, quite learned, usually adventure stories in exotic settings, became a bit more formulaic as the series went on, but that mix of attitudes about the Victorians stayed mixed, and if anything it was the joking about Victorian vices that aged first. Meanwhile, the libertine spirit of the early 1960s, which made such easy jokes about Victorian sexual prudery, developed some neo-pruderies of its own, and the Victorians seemed more and more an irretrievable past, hence less worth mocking. Inside the academy, truly loathing the Victorians became a more specialized passion, one pursued most industriously by post-colonialists, for whom Victorian imperialism was the worst of crimes, and by the occasional harder-line Marxist preserved in amber, for whom Victorian famines were the moral equivalents of Hitler’s and Stalin’s industrial-scale killing sprees. In 1995, the science-fiction author Neal Stephenson wrote a novel, , The Diamond Age, that included a much-admired subculture called neo-Victorian. This year a development deal was announced: George Clooney is producing a six-part miniseries. This seems to me to be a sign of the times. The Victorians, still alive and vigorously despised in my adolescence, and more or less vanished during my adult life, are suddenly something we can look at with admiration. It is not that they are finally conceded to be gone, so that we can look at them with dispassion. Watching their fate evolve through their treatment in popular cultural materials, it turns out that there is a case to be made for missing them.
June 20, 2007
Free Trade and Inequality Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:15 AM EST In an interesting article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, “A New Deal for Globalization”, Kenneth F. Scheve, professor of political science at Yale University, and Matthew J. Slaughter, professor of economics at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, survey some very recent history and argue for redistributing income to preserve free trade. They suggest doing this by making payroll taxes, now flat, progressive, and their argument goes like this: Americans are becoming more protectionist, there are already policy changes in response to the trend, and this is happening because increased income inequality has accompanied globalization, and the latter is blamed for the former. Scheve and Slaughter are decidedly in favor on globalization, pointing out that “trade and investment liberalization over the past decades has added between $500 billion and $1 trillion in annual income—between $1,650 and $3,300 a year for every American. A Doha agreement on global free trade in goods and services would generate, according to similar studies, $500 billion a year in additional income in the United States.” But they note that while globalization has been increasing aggregate American wealth, “real income growth has been extremely skewed, with relatively few high earners doing well while incomes for most workers have stagnated or, in many cases, fallen. Just what mix of forces is behind this trend is not yet clear, but regardless, the numbers are stark. Less than four percent of workers were in educational groups that enjoyed increases in mean real money earnings from 2000 to 2005; mean real money earnings rose for workers with doctorates and professional graduate degrees and fell for all others. In contrast to in earlier decades, today it is not just those at the bottom of the skill ladder who are hurting. Even college graduates and workers with nonprofessional master’s degrees saw their mean real money earnings decline. By some measures, inequality in the United States is greater today than at any time since the 1920s.” And they note that “public support for engagement with the world economy is strongly linked to labor-market performance, and for most workers labor-market performance has been poor.” By their account, free trade is the golden goose, increasing income inequality the ax poised to kill it. I suspect they are right about that, not least because other than Anglo-American economists and a small portion of the political class, very few people seem to be enthusiastic free traders: European Union electorates are not instinctive free traders, nor are Chinese policymakers, nor, in my experience, are the majority of the Americans I have ever heard opine on the subject. Scheve and Slaughter seem to think that people may in fact have made a legitimate inference on the relationship between growing inequality and free trade, but I do not think you have to believe that to support their proposal. If they are wrong about the plausibility of the connection between inequality and globalization, that does not mean voters will stop making that connection, and they seem likelier to do it when they feel most pressed and stressed. The history of support for free trade suggests that the passion does not go from strength to strength; it waxes and wanes. American democracy is good at turning changing popular sentiment into changing policy. Europe is different. Widespread popular support there for the death penalty, for example, has yet to make an impression on the political class. And as it happens, the European elite does not need to bribe its electorates into supporting free trade, because much of the elite is itself hostile to free trade. We’re different, which means bribery may be a good investment for everyone.
June 17, 2007
Nixon’s Uniforms Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:15 PM EST Josh Zeitz and John Steele Gordon are united in ridiculing Richard Nixon’s burst of enthusiasm for snazzier uniforms for the White House police. As Mr. Gordon remarked, Nixon had been “impressed with the uniforms worn by the presidential and royal guards who had greeted him on a European tour,” but “the entire nation collapsed as one in helpless mirth. The new uniforms soon disappeared, beginning with the hats, which were never seen again. If the United States is to have an imperial Presidency, it seems it will have to be clothed in workaday, republican garb.” I think this is absolutely right. The most vivid and deadly word used to mock those uniforms at the time was “Ruritanian,” which tells you something about what Americans didn’t like about Nixon’s new uniforms. Ruritania was originally an imaginary German state invented by Anthony Hope as the scene for the action in The Prisoner of Zenda, first published in 1894. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines Ruritanian as “of, relating to, or having the characteristics of an imaginary place of high romance,” which describes The Prisoner of Zenda very nicely but misses the reason the word was a devastating crack at President Nixon’s sartorial ambitions for the White House police. The fact is that over the decades the word changed its connotation, and another and I think more accurate Web dictionary defines Ruritanian as “of, relating to, or having the characteristics of a mythical place of high, typically comic-opera romance: ’designed Ruritanian uniforms for the honor guard.’” Ruritanian came to connote slightly goofy, jokey escapism and a kind of Eurotrashy pompousness and triviality. Old and fading powers clung to their plumes, punctilio, and protocol; we were, in one image of ourselves, brusque, direct, and possessed of the fact of power rather than the elaborate poses of the formerly powerful. To call Nixon’s new uniforms Ruritanian cruelly distinguished them from the stern dignity and lack of swank associated with an idealized vision of the Republic. This did not mean we were not imperial, it meant we were not comic-opera types. We could still be Roman, which meant very imperial indeed, but Romans in their great days scorned excessive pomp and were the more impressive for that fact. This points, I think, to a peculiarity of the United States, which is that while we are a society with significant economic inequality, we are in cultural terms a remarkably egalitarian society, and few of us are particularly enraptured by the symbols of traditional European social hierarchy. Shooting is in much of Europe a gentleman’s amusement, but in America it is a sport of both would-be gents and rednecks, with the latter more numerous. The same is true of fishing, and in most of the country, golf. In 1970 the American President had more or less unchallenged imperial power, which was not yet the subject of Schlesinger’s polemic but was not forgiven monarchical pretensions. President Bush, in some ways possessed of much more imperial power than Nixon ever had, comports himself as an imaginary plebeian, with a rustic accent and a frontier tone, and for four years he inspired considerable affection on the strength of this demeanor. He had gone to Andover and Yale, but few made much reference to those details. Nixon, painfully aware that he had gone to neither Andover nor Yale, was briefly seduced by wicked old Europe, falling for a vision that would never have caught Bush’s eye. One lesson is that while in 2007 it may or may not be useful to speak of an American empire, one has not settled the question by pointing to the absence of pith helmets.
June 17, 2007
Imperial Presidencies IV Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:55 AM EST I’m glad Mr. Gordon mentioned the flap over Richard Nixon’s introduction of new uniforms for the White House police, as this was indeed one of the stranger but more entertaining moments in his already bizarre Presidency. The New York Times noted that the “head gear vividly resembles that worn by American drum majors and West German traffic policemen.” When he learned that various newspapers, including the Times and the Chicago Daily News, had mocked the pomposity of the new uniforms, Nixon scribbled out instructions to his chief-of-staff: “I want our staff to take RN’s position on this regardless of their own independent views. . . . Have [Communications Director Herbert] Klein take the offensive on the slovenly W.H. police we found.” These ruminations were not unusual for Nixon, who spent an inordinate amount of time attending to minutiae. He wrote memos to staff members about the “pretty uncomfortable” chairs in the Cabinet Room, rearranged seating charts for state dinners, and drafted job assessments of the butlers, gardeners, and sommeliers. He also issued a memorandum specifying the placement of a trash can in the Oval Office bathroom and took time out of his day to specify, “I don’t want salad served as a separate course at a state dinner of eighty people or less.” Tragically, in his last six months in office Nixon also spent hours upon hours reviewing the Watergate tapes and plotting his legal and political strategy to remain in office. No matter what one thinks of his politics, there is little arguing that he wasted away too many precious hours of his Presidency on matters that should never have concerned him.
|
