June 8, 2007
The Partly Cloudy Crystal Ball Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 02:15 PM EST Dean Martin’s favorite hangover cure was simple: “Stay drunk.” In similar fashion, the best way to reduce the stress of moving is never to unpack. I should know that by now, because office changes have been lamentably frequent at American Heritage in recent years. Still, there are benefits to opening up your archives every now and then. Recently, in the course of moving to a new office two doors down the hall, I found myself sorting through boxes and bags and piles of assorted stuff that I had saved for one reason or another. Amid the dusty Pez dispensers, cryptic smudged notes about long-forgotten projects, and spare floppy disks saved against a possible shortage, I found scores of photocopied pages from newspapers, magazines, and books that had struck me as worth saving. Many of these pages contain predictions, which automatically become interesting once they reach a certain age, whether they’re right or wrong. Some are amusing, like this, from the Washington Post shortly after the 1946 elections: “One of Massachusetts’ most eligible bachelors--handsome, 6-foot John F. (Jack) Kennedy--will be one of the youngest members of the new Congress. But the social lions of the Washington ‘Cocktail Circuit’ may be in for a disappointment, for the serious-minded 29-year-old son of the former Ambassador has little time for anything but work.” All work and no play would have made Jack a dull boy, so he seems to have found time to do a bit of dating. Others are more grim, like this, from Harper’s Weekly in 1899, during the anti-Semitic Dreyfus affair in France: “It is immensely to the credit of our present civilization that such an atrocity cannot be committed by any people with impunity. The world did not care, a few centuries ago, what any particular country did with its Jews. Now no nation can deny to one Jew even, the means of justice, and escape the condemnation of her sisters, so sensitive is the world-mind, and so closely knit have humanity become.” Some prophecies are harder to evaluate. Consider this editorial from the New York Times on December 31, 1899, looking back over the previous century and making predictions for the one ahead: “Through agitation and conflict European nations are working toward an ultimate harmony of interests and purposes, and bringing awakened Asia into the sweeping current of progress. Light has been let into the ‘Dark Continent’ beyond the ancient borders and is rapidly spreading. America is facing westward and beginning to take its part in carrying the regenerating forces of popular government to the uttermost parts of the earth. Notwithstanding the bloody conflicts through which some of the steps of progress must still be made, the ‘vision of the world’ grows clearer toward the time when ‘The war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled / In the parliament of man, the federation of the world / There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe / And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.’” (The quote is from Tennyson, “Locksley Hall,” 1842.) Whoever wrote that editorial should make up horoscopes, because it’s ambiguous enough to fit just about any outcome. The world will experience more fighting, it says, but eventually war will become obsolete. That’s pretty much what happened in Western Europe in the 20th century, though I suspect that they spilled more blood getting there, and that the rest of the world has been much slower to get with the program, than the editorialist would have thought. A quarter-century later, following the industrial-scale slaughter of World War I and the false hope of its aftermath, Aldous Huxley wrote in Along the Road (1925): “A drive from the Belgian frontier to the Mediterranean puts life and meaning into those statistics from which we learn, academically and in theory, that France is under-populated. Long stretches of open road extend between town and town . . . even the villages are few and far between . . . Driving through the fertile plains of Central France, one can turn one’s eyes over the fields and scarcely see a house. And then, what forests still grow on French soil!” Meanwhile, Huxley continues, “every three years a million brand new Teutons peer across the Rhine, a million Italians are wondering where they are going to find room, in their narrow country, to live. And there are no more Frenchmen. Twenty years hence, what will happen? The French Government offers prizes to those who produce large families. In vain; everybody knows all about birth control and even in the least educated classes there are no prejudices and a great deal of thrift. Hordes of blackamoors are drilled and armed; but blackamoors can be but a poor defence, in the long run, against European philoprogenitiveness. Sooner or later, this half-empty land will be colonized. It may be done peacefully, it may be done with violence; let us hope peacefully, with the consent and at the invitation of the French themselves. Already the French import, temporarily, I forget how many foreign labourers every year. In time, no doubt, the foreigners will begin to settle: the Italians in the south, the Germans in the east, the Belgians in the north, perhaps even a few English in the west. Frenchmen may not like the plan; but until all nations agree to practise birth control to exactly the same extent, it is the best that can be devised.” Like the Times editorialist, Huxley got enough right to avoid looking foolish, but not enough to qualify as a prophet. Within Huxley’s twenty-year time frame, France was indeed “colonized” by its friends from across the Rhine, and today, as predicted, citizens from all over Europe live and work in France (and vice versa). But birth control has overcome philoprogenitiveness all across the continent, and in France the population shortage has been made up by admitting large numbers of the “blackamoors” Huxley derided, along with their Muslim cousins from North Africa, leading to social strains he never envisioned. Moreover, the great majority of these immigrants have settled not in la France profonde but in the cities. All this ties in with what Fred Smoler wrote about in his review of Max Boot’s latest book. In the late 19th and early 20th century, all the world’s problems seemed to be caused by nations acting badly, and the only hope for a solution was to make them behave better and then spread their good habits to the heathen. Even the Harper’s Weekly writer saw anti-Semitism as something that was committed by nations and would be eradicated by them. There is much truth in this. The pacification of large parts of the world has, indeed, come about largely through international agreements and global bodies. Yet trends that the Times writer and Huxley could not foresee--terrorism, widespread birth control in Europe, mass migration--have occurred through the individual choices of millions of people, usually against the wishes of governments, and often through allegiances based not on geography or nationhood but on religion, ancestry, ideology, and shared hatreds. Even when you know a change is coming, though, it’s hard to tell how it will affect the world in the long run. Will the Internet turn us into a single worldwide community, with everybody giggling at the same cheesy videos? Or will it splinter us further, creating transnational enthusiast groups whose members never have to talk to anyone else? It’s hard to say. I could conclude with a long-range prediction, secure in the knowledge that I will be dead by its effective date, except there’s no telling how long we’ll all live with modern medicine. So instead I will take the advice of George Eliot, who wrote in Middlemarch: “Among all forms of error, prophecy is the most gratuitous.”
June 8, 2007
Normandy and Anti-Americanism Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:00 AM EST I appreciated Fred Smoler’s reflections on his visit to Normandy in June of 2004 for the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day. I can only imagine what a moving experience that must have been. In his post, Mr. Smoler effectively unpacks and dismantles some of the European editorial criticism of the United States’s war in Iraq. Specifically, he rebuts the charge that the United States is essentially an occupier, an invader, and a supporter of fascism, less like the force Eisenhower led on June 6, 1944, than the one he fought against. Mr. Smoler also notes the relative lack of anti-American criticism visible on this week’s D-Day anniversary: “This year, no one is making noise about how we are betraying our legacy, nor, for that matter, about the legacy itself.” If I’m not misreading him, I take it that Mr. Smoler sees this situation as a mixed bag. On the one hand, no one is unfairly deriding the United States; on the other, few are remembering its greatest hours, either. Again, if I’m reading his sentiments correctly, I sympathize. A few days ago, in a post about John Kennedy’s ninetieth birthday, I wrote that the occasion wasn’t “especially significant this time around just because it includes a round number.” Unfortunately, when it comes to remembering events like those of June 6, the roundness of anniversary years is all too pivotal in determining how strong our memories are. On Mr. Smoler’s final point, I’d like to briefly put forward some thoughts aimed at explaining the relative dearth of anti-American criticism related to the D-Day anniversary this year. In addition to the fact that the anniversary has been observed less widely, in general, I’d suggest two other explanations, both related to the use and abuse of historical memory. The first is that, while critics of American policy are apparently less willing, this week, to twist the stories of World War II in order to assail the United States, so are boosters of American policy more timid in their creative employment of the same stories. In 2004, Le Monde editorialists were not the only ones misusing the history of the Second World War. At the Republican National Convention, Rudy Giuliani likened George Bush to Winston Churchill, and in an interview with “Good Morning America,” Dick Cheney seemed to liken himself to FDR while answering a question about the relationship between military service and presidential leadership. What’s more, at least as early as 2002, Donald Rumsfeld was likening the Bush administration’s global attitude to that of Churchill in 1938 and implying, less than subtly, that its liberal critics had more in common with the hapless Neville Chamberlain. Whatever you think of the President and his policies, such historical analogies seem a little imprudent. Casting one’s own, highly contested policy decisions in the stark moral terms of the Second World War is a recipe for brewing resentment among one’s opponents. It almost invites comparisons of equal and opposite absurdity, such as the one in Le Monde. This doesn’t excuse the French paper’s anti-American sentiments, but it does put them in the context of a trans-Atlantic exchange of simplistic historical analogy. Since then, as the situation in Iraq has continued to worsen, the Churchill/FDR talk here in the United States has become far less strident. And, in a kind of mutual disarmament, Europeans seem less bent on linking the current American administration to the Third Reich. The second point I’d like to make on this subject, and more briefly, is that the D-Day anniversary has also inspired less reflection on World War II and less related name-calling because a more apt historical analogy has developed for the Iraq war: Vietnam. These days, when people talk about Iraq, they are far more likely to refer to the Tet Offensive than the Normandy invasion. Even supporters of the war have fallen into this habit, with David Petraeus winning plaudits for his competence in the form of comparisons not to Eisenhower, but to Creighton Abrams. I tend to think this analogy is also imperfect (the consequences of defeat in Iraq are, for example, far worse than the consequences of defeat in Vietnam) but it’s something of an improvement.
June 7, 2007
Presidential Longevity II Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:00 AM EST Two days ago, John Steele Gordon made a post, “Presidential Longevity,” that got me thinking. His entry raises an intriguing thesis, that the drop-off in Presidential life spans during the nineteenth century was a byproduct of industrialization and population growth, and that the elongation of the life spans of late twentieth-century Presidents was principally the result of modern medical advances. There can be no doubt about the second point. As Mr. Gordon observes, Ronald Reagan would likely have perished at John Hinckley’s hand if the doctors at George Washington University Hospital had been using the same methods that their medical predecessors used as they tried to save William McKinley from another assassin’s bullet, 80 years earlier. Additionally, even some recent Presidents who lived more briefly lived far longer than they would have a hundred years before. Without the advice and care of modern physicians, Lyndon Johnson might have died from a heart attack before ever reaching the Oval Office. Dwight Eisenhower might have died there from one of his own. On the question of the short-lived leaders of the nineteenth century, the evidence is considerably murkier, and resists simple conclusions. Looking down a list of presidential life spans, there is indeed a long stretch of shorter-lived Presidents between Martin Van Buren and Herbert Hoover. But can the cleanliness (or lack thereof) of their times effectively explain this? I doubt it. If you look beyond the birth and death dates of the individuals concerned, it is clear that many of them died early for reasons unrelated to changes in America’s living conditions. William Henry Harrison, for example, the first President after Van Buren, fell ill of pneumonia after riding through the bitterly cold streets of Washington at his inauguration. He was 68. Franklin Pierce, who only lived to 64, died from liver problems related to alcoholism. Benjamin Harrison, like the earlier President Harrison, succumbed to pneumonia in the wintertime at age 67. Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley were all shot (at 56, 49, and 58, respectively). Furthermore, with patterns like these, it matters an awful lot how one arranges the numbers. Mr. Gordon sees a pattern in the lives of Presidents from John Adams to Calvin Coolidge, excluding James Buchanan. But what happens if one includes George Washington, who died at 67? Or what if one adds in Vice Presidents, including Hannibal Hamlin, who lived to 81, and the amazingly durable Levi Morton, who died at 96? Mr. Gordon asks, “what accounts for the fact that four of the first six Presidents lived to be 80 or more?” But one could just as easily ask, what accounts for the fact that only two of the five Presidents who served between 1932 and 1968 reached the age of 65? There are easy answers to the question, but they are rooted in individual circumstances rather than sweeping trends. Mr. Gordon suggests that “[w]ith so small a sample [of people], of course, it could be mere coincidence” that presidential life spans appear to change over time as he describes. This suggestion seems like the right one. A few early Presidents were unusually long-lived, most of their successors varied in life span within a predictable range, and a few recent Presidents have benefited from important developments in medicine. Beyond that, time and chance happeneth to them all.
June 6, 2007
Normandy Beach, 2004 Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:20 PM EST Three years ago I had the privilege of attending the sixtieth anniversary of the Normandy invasion in the company of some American veterans of the invasion. Three years on, not too much of a fuss is being made about June 6. This may be a mild improvement on the sixtieth anniversary itself, at least in Europe, where in 2004 there was a lot of noise about a supposed paradox of June 6, of which more below. That day, after the ceremony, one of my most vivid memories is of bumping into a lively, sturdy octogenarian accompanied by two gigantic and affable middle-aged sons, the older guy a veteran of the 16th Infantry, one of the two regiments that first landed on Omaha Beach. He was an obviously Polish-American retired auto worker with a sense of humor: “It’s an Irish name,” he explained of his mass of consonants. When queried, he announced that he’d been in F Company—which I happened to know took 91 percent casualties—and he’d hit the beach in the first wave: “Nothing in front of me except a fish, pal!” Bumping into him and his sons a couple of days later, you learned a bit more. Within a very few minutes he was the only survivor of his platoon. He was skeptical about films of men running up the beach to attack the German fortifications—he thought it had taken him 10 hours to crawl 10 yards—and proud of the fact that to the best of his knowledge, sick with swallowed seawater, amid omnipresent shelling and machine-gun fire, he’d been the first American to relieve himself in France, although those were not his precise words. It was a cheerfully self-mocking and in part antiheroic story, yet according to his sons, when he saw current members of the First Infantry Division at the cemetery, he pumped his fist and shouted “Big Red One!” And they pumped their fists too, and shouted back: “Big Red One! Wahoo!” Maybe pumping your fist, grinning, and shouting is mere theatricality. Or maybe that’s the real part, and joking about how frightened you were is the theater. The man seemed impervious to what the French commentariat had taken to calling the paradox of June 6. It wasn’t always entirely clear what they meant by this, but the paradox seemed to result from a collision of the lingering (sometimes grudging, sometimes palpably sincere) French enthusiasm for being liberated with the broad French loathing of the American and British attempt to extend what was described as a similar favor to the Iraqis. The French commentariat insisted that these efforts had nothing whatever in common, and that the two Americas—Bush’s and Roosevelt’s—had nothing in common either. That same week Le Monde ran a headline speculating on the date for the construction of an American gulag, and one striking proposal sought to deny Bush access to France on the sixtieth anniversary: Bush led an America that “does not chase out an occupier, but occupies, does not crush oppressors, but oppresses, does not chase out an invader, but invades, does not crush fascism, but nurtures its ‘Islamist’ form.” To most Anglo-American eyes this list of antitheses, while disturbing, was imperfectly persuasive: The Americans and British had crushed one form of Iraqi fascism at the risk of abetting another; they had removed an Iraqi oppressor while at least a few of them had resorted to some shameful oppressive tactics themselves; etc. But these smaller paradoxes did not aggregate to a vast and paralyzing paradox of June 6. The Anglo-American mind may be less supple than the Gallic journalistic mind tends to be—these paradoxes were troubling, rather than dispositive, and they were less airily entertaining to the reader than they’d probably been to the writer—but after fuller consideration, they did not seem irresolvable. Speculation about an imminent American gulag suggested an imperfect familiarity with Mogadan, Vorkuta, and Kolyma. And the paradox of June 6 lost some of its tension in the face of the trouble various European opponents of the Iraq war had in getting their story straight. Up the beach at Arromanches, then-Chancellor Schroeder was insisting that Germany, too, had been liberated on D-day. None of the vets on my tour remembered the Germans welcoming this liberation with any great enthusiasm; a number of them still carried scars, and a few shrapnel, which they thought testimony to the imperfect German appreciation for their efforts. In ’44 and ’45, the Germans had resisted their liberation much more strenuously than the Iraqis had in 2003, and if thousands of Iraqis were trying to blow up their liberators a year on, and mutilate their corpses, this may have been because the liberators didn’t have any French troops with them. Back in ’45, the French had replied to terror aimed at their occupation force with extremely effective mass reprisals. That day in Normandy, a darker thought intruded: Maybe there was no German insurgency after the war because the British and Americans had taken fewer pains to spare German civilian lives during it, and those civilian deaths may have finally soured the Germans on war. When truly aroused, the Americans and British practiced terror wholesale. Retail terror as a resistance tactic may not have seemed a very promising approach in 1945. In any case, Schroeder seemed to think that Germans could be liberated despite their striking lack of cooperation in the process, although he did not seem to have worked out that this was a dangerously suggestive argument, one capable of extension from the Rhine to the Euphrates. And as it happened, not all the civilian dead had been German. Many thousands of French civilians had died in the course of the Normandy invasion and the subsequent fighting. Perhaps this was some part of what the French meant by the paradox of June 6. But while some of the European commentators made a few attempts to imply that those civilian deaths dissolved any moral credit that might otherwise have attended the American and British destruction of a tyranny, this move did not seem to catch on. Most of the French, at least, seemed to understand that freeing France was worth civilian casualties. They were at least as confident that freeing Iraq from Saddam wasn’t. Maybe that was because the French and Germans had grown more tender-hearted over 60 years (although the Algerians, the Tutsi and the Bosnian Muslims, among others, might have doubted this interpretation). Or maybe they just cared less about other people’s liberty than they did about their own. A most ingenious paradox, that French paradox of June 6, but it resisted easy unpacking. Now it seems to have disappeared. This year, no one is making noise about how we are betraying our legacy, nor, for that matter, about the legacy itself. In Northern Lebanon, the Lebanese army is crushing some terrorists hiding amidst civilians with tactics at least as indiscriminate as any the Americans were using in 2004. No great paradox is being observed about that event either.
June 5, 2007
Smoking Is the New Smoking Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 12:45 PM EST Has anyone mentioned that Josh Zeitz has a new book out? Oh, they have? Well, I’ll do it again. The book is called White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics, and the Shaping of Postwar Politics, and it shows an exquisite understanding of the intertwining currents of religion, national origin, culture, and global affairs. The passage that caught my attention, though, has nothing to do with any of those things. It occurs during a discussion of the restrictive rules that governed college students’ personal lives in the 1960s: “At Barnard—Columbia University’s all-women’s affiliate—a man could visit a woman’s dormitory room at set hours, but three of the couple’s four legs had to be touching the floor at all times as a preventative against premarital sex.” Three legs on the floor? I’m not sure I can even picture that. And the rule seems pointless in any case, since you can get the job done with four legs on the floor if you use a little imagination. I asked our editor, Richard Snow, a 1970 Columbia graduate, whether he has any recollection of this rule. He says he doesn’t, though he also admits that he spent distressingly little time in Barnard dormitory rooms. The days of in loco parentis are long gone, of course. Today colleges give away condoms (to students paying $50,000 tuition) and hire speakers to demonstrate sex toys. You can bring anyone you want to your room and put all four legs on or off the floor, or even six, and the only thing that will get you in trouble is the cigarette afterwards. That’s because smoking is now completely prohibited in all Barnard campus buildings—and outdoors too, except in a couple of small, marked areas (though students usually just step onto the sidewalk outside the college’s gates). Back in the 1920s things were different. As explained a while ago in our “Time Machine” column (scroll down), in 1922 most colleges prohibited smoking by women. Even liberated Wellesley, Vassar, Bryn Mawr, and Smith expelled students who smoked, with the punishment in all cases assessed by a tribunal of fellow students. (Josh Zeitz probably has a section on smoking in his book about flappers, but I don’t have a copy of that handy.) New York City actually enacted a law banning public smoking by women, though it was quickly abandoned. At Barnard, however, smoking was permitted without restriction. As late as the 1970s, the ideal of empowerment through tobacco formed the entire marketing approach of one pseudo-feminist cigarette brand, and a dangling cigarette was part of the Barnard uniform, along with the leather jacket, black velvet dress, and mesh stockings with a hole in one knee. But today on Barnard’s campus, you might just as well wear a Rush Limbaugh T-shirt as light up a smoke. Across the street at Columbia, things are more relaxed: You can smoke in most outdoor locations and even in your dormitory room. With etchings out of style, this freedom could provide a new pick-up approach for Columbia men, who, if Richard’s and my experience is any guide, need all the help they can get.
June 5, 2007
Presidential Longevity Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:15 AM EST In my last post I noted that pipe-smoking Gerald Ford now holds the record as the longest-lived president, having lived to be 93 years, 4 months, and 12 days. That surpassed Ronald Reagan—who died at 93 years, 3 months, and 30 days—by less than two weeks. This brings up an interesting statistical anomaly among the Presidents, for the previous record holder in the presidential longevity sweepstakes was the second President, John Adams, who was 90 years, 9 months, and 4 days old when he famously died on July 4, 1826. He held the record for an astonishing 176 years. Presidents in recent decades have been doing pretty well in the longevity department. Since Lyndon Johnson left the White House nearly 40 years ago, every subsequent occupant has lived to see 80, and in two cases 90, or is still alive. Nixon lived to be 81, Ford 93, Carter is 82, Reagan was 93, and Bush senior is 82 (he’ll be 83 on June 12). Clinton and Bush junior are both 60 and, so far as I know, going strong. The miracles of modern medicine account for much of this, of course. Clinton would probably not have survived his recent heart troubles in earlier decades, and Ronald Reagan would certainly not have survived the assassination attempt in 1981 were it not for some very fancy doctoring. Better diet, better lifestyles, and a cleaner environment have also helped, I’m sure. But what accounts for the fact that four of the first six Presidents lived to be 80 or more? After the first six, things went downhill, and not a single one of the 23 Presidents between John Quincy Adams and Herbert Hoover lived to be 80. Andrew Jackson, who followed J. Q. Adams, was 78 at his death, and his successor, Martin Van Buren 79, but after that only James Buchanan lived to be 75 (he died at 77), until Herbert Hoover lived to be 90 and presidential longevity finally began to increase. With so small a sample, of course, it could be mere coincidence. But I suspect that late colonial and early republican America was simply a much healthier place than the country would be for the next century and more as industrialization and burgeoning population brought pollution and communicable diseases to much higher levels. Now if someone would only explain why four of the last six Presidents (Ford, Reagan, Bush senior, and Clinton) have been left-handed while only three of their 36 predecessors (Garfield, Hoover, and Truman) were.
June 4, 2007
Thank You for Smoking IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:50 PM EST Joshua Zeitz wrote, “A small quibble with John Steele Gordon’s post on smoking. Mr. Gordon writes that ‘Franklin Roosevelt (dead of a stroke at 63) was the last President to smoke in public.’ I’m not sure that’s correct. Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson smoked to one degree or another. All three men were more discreet than FDR about being photographed with tobacco products in hand, though at least in the case of LBJ, there is extant footage of the President with a lit cigarette. Gerald Ford, however, made little pretense about his habit. He was frequently caught on camera with a lit pipe. I’m not sure whether the MPAA’s new guidelines apply only to cigarettes or to cigars and pipes as well, but it’s probably more accurate to identify Gerald Ford as the last unabashed smoker to occupy the West Wing. Ironically, he lived longer than his predecessors. Maybe it had something to do with golf.” Mr. Zeitz is quite correct. I was imprecise in my language in that I meant cigarette smoking. I don’t believe Eisenhower smoked in public when he was President, and certainly not after his 1955 heart attack. Lyndon Johnson, likewise, stopped smoking after his 1955 heart attack. Obviously that was a bad cardiac year for high government officials. Johnson apparently started smoking again after he left the White House (I don’t think he much cared in his sad last years if he lived or not). Kennedy smoked an occasional cigar, and there are a few pictures of him doing so, but they were not really a part of his public persona as they were for, say, Al Smith (and I imagine that Kennedy smoked far higher quality cigars than Smith did). Gerald Ford did indeed smoke a pipe, but since he now holds the longevity record for Presidents, I guess the habit didn’t do him much harm. While cigars have had a renaissance in recent years—there’s even a high-end magazine called Cigar Aficionado—pipes seem to have virtually disappeared. It’s been years since I’ve seen someone smoking one. Personally, while I thought they were sort of dashing in a Gregory Peck kind of way, the paraphernalia a pipe smoker has to carry around would have driven me nuts. As for cigars, they have the most pleasant family memories for me. My grandfather would smoke one after dinner every night, and being designated the grandchild to go to the humidor and bring him back the type he wanted was a mark of the highest favor. Cigar smoking did him no more apparent harm than pipe smoking did Gerald Ford: He lived to be 96. But while I have always liked the smell of good cigar smoke, probably because of my grandfather, they were never an option. Smoking one has always made me sick as a dog. Since good cigars can now cost well north of $10 a pop, just think of how much money my recalcitrant stomach has saved me.
June 4, 2007
Midway at 65 Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:50 PM EST John Steele Gordon’s lead piece on this website today, “The Miracle at Midway,” echoes the title of Gordon Prange’s celebrated 1983 book on the battle, and recounts the great story economically and I think with perfect accuracy. Was Midway a miracle in the modern sense of the word, meaning a vastly improbable event? The improbability of the outcome is somewhat diminished by writers who stress the successes of the American code-breakers, but superior intelligence on the enemy’s plan cannot alone explain the outcome; the British had that at Crete. The outcome at Midway was certainly a stroke of great luck. The U.S. Navy, which fought against great odds, inflicted savage, irreplaceable, and disproportionate losses, did so with inferior aircraft and less experienced pilots, and seized the strategic initiative from Japan. Had the Japanese sighted American ships at different times, or had different types of planes been airborne or below deck at different moments, it is certainly possible to imagine the destruction of the U.S. Navy’s fleet carriers and the preservation of the Japanese carriers. Reading about Midway tends to reduce one’s sense of the miraculous because it gives a sense of the vast role of luck in that particular naval battle, one of the handful of carrier battles ever fought, in most of which luck seems to have had significant sway. Luck was imagined to have less of a role when admirals modeled surface engagements in the age of ironclad battleships—the hitting power of guns versus the effectiveness of armor seemed to make the thing a pretty pure science—but there were not too many battles between ironclad fleets, any more than there would be a lot of carrier battles, and at one of the most famous of them, Jutland, luck again had a pretty large role. There was also, of course, a lot of luck on Hitler’s side in the Battle of France—probably more than the Americans enjoyed at Midway—and one lesson of military and naval history is that we may be inclined to understate the role of luck in shaping the outcomes of great events. Historians enjoy explaining outcomes, and acknowledging a very large role for luck does not do much for developing a system of explanation that looks like a science. Neither generals, admirals, nor historians have much of a bias in favor of luck as an explanation of events. There are, of course, exceptions to that rule. Napoleon, who was not without faith in his own skill, was nonetheless interested in the role of fortune on battlefields, and famously asked of any general proposed for a command, “Is he lucky?” But if Midway saw a lot of luck on our side, it is not, I think, too easy to imagine a resulting Japanese victory (or stalemate) in World War II had the luck run the other way. I remember hearing more than once that the United States built (from the keel up) and launched more than a hundred major surface combatants over the course of the war, and the comparable number for Japan was zero. I am not absolutely certain of those numbers, but they are at least close to correct. We were also making steadily better weapons, training better pilots, developing better doctrine. Luck could decide battles in the Pacific, but no plausible amount of battlefield luck could save Japan; if we were willing to see it through, we were going to win. That, of course, is probably true of almost all the wars we have fought: Iraq may be an exception, but Vietnam, although it is very unfashionable to say so, probably wasn’t. Japan was convinced that American willingness to absorb casualties in a war fought thousands of miles from our shores was relatively slight and would be the key to their victory. They got that wrong, of course. In retrospect, their decision to risk so much on that assumption seems mad. Iran and Syria, which arm Iraqis with specialized weapons to kill Americans, and in the case of Iran send advisers to assist, make a similar calculation, yet no one calls them mad for doing so. That seems strange, in its way stranger than the outcome at Midway.
June 4, 2007
Thank You for Smoking III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:40 AM EST A small quibble with John Steele Gordon’s post on smoking. Mr. Gordon writes that “Franklin Roosevelt (dead of a stroke at 63) was the last President to smoke in public.” I’m not sure that’s correct. Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson smoked to one degree or another. All three men were more discreet than FDR about being photographed with tobacco products in hand, though at least in the case of LBJ, there is extant footage of the President with a lit cigarette. Gerald Ford, however, made little pretense about his habit. He was frequently caught on camera with a lit pipe. I’m not sure whether the MPAA’s new guidelines apply only to cigarettes or to cigars and pipes as well, but it’s probably more accurate to identify Gerald Ford as the last unabashed smoker to occupy the West Wing. Ironically, he lived longer than his predecessors. Maybe it had something to do with golf. Mr. Gordon speculates that while movies may have encouraged past youth generations to take up smoking, today’s teens are savvier about media imagery. I think Mr. Gordon is a little hard on those young people with (his words, not mine) “rings in their noses and their hair dyed puce. One suspects a certain insufficiency of parental authority, not coolness.” In my limited experience as a college instructor, I’ve found that many such young people, in addition to being very bright and respectful, are non-smoking vegans. Why fault them for what Mr. Gordon and I probably agree is a tragic fashion error? (They surely wouldn’t think much of our apparel decisions either.) I’ve also found that many of my straight-laced, button-downed students are chain smokers. It’s hard to go on appearances alone. Whether today’s youth generation is driven by media imagery, I don’t know. Presumably there are many studies on precisely this question. Historically, the first generation of American filmgoers claimed to be very much under the influence of their favorite Hollywood stars. In the 1920s the Payne Fund conducted a survey of teenagers and college students in Chicago and found that most respondents freely admitted to imitating what they saw on the silver screen. “I believe that watching the actions of people in the movies (the actors I mean) have led me to take up drinking and smoking,” confessed a male undergraduate at the University of Chicago. “I sort of got the desire to smoke from watching some actor inhale a cigarette.” Another undergrad admitted that by watching romance films, he was able to give “considerable . . . attention” to the “technique of making love to a girl. . . . I learned to kiss a girl on her ears, neck and cheeks, as well as on the mouth, in a close huddle.” It wasn’t just the young men who found their passions roused and techniques improved by the motion picture shows. Young women claimed to learn from their favorite onscreen flappers when to close their eyes during a kiss. “After I see a love picture,” a 16-year-old high school junior confessed, “it just leaves me rather dopey. I always try to imagine myself in a like situation. Instead of making me feel like going out on a party with some men, I generally feel more ready to be loved. . . . The only benefit I ever got from the movies was in learning to love and the knowledge of sex.” Furthermore, a study of delinquent girls in the late 1920s revealed that three quarters of them tried to boost their sex appeal by mimicking the way onscreen stars dressed, applied makeup, and fixed their hair. What this says about today is anyone’s guess.
June 3, 2007
From Jamestown to Jerusalem Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:50 PM EST Yesterday I enjoyed reading this weekend’s homepage feature, a piece by Jon Grinspan about the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem. Mr. Grinspan traces an interesting story of Americans abroad and makes an alluring case for visiting the hotel. The first sentence of the piece caught my eye: “Few people associate Jerusalem with American history.” For the last 60 years of the American-Israeli relationship, this has been becoming less and less true, as the focus of U.S. foreign policy has repeatedly turned toward the various struggles and peace processes in Israel. Yet Mr. Grinspan is undoubtedly right that most people do not think of Jerusalem, and indeed the Mideast more broadly, as a central part of American history—at least until around 1948. There’s one historian, though, who sees things rather differently. A fellow at Jerusalem’s Salem Center, and a former visiting professor at two Ivy League universities, Michael Oren recently published an expansive history of American involvement in Western Asia, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present. Released this year to positive if slightly mixed reviews, Oren’s history traces the relationship between the United States and the Middle East back to long before the United Nations recommended the partition of Palestine. Oren’s history features early American explorers, like John Ledyard, who reported with unease that “the Arab language has no word for ‘liberty.’” It includes New England missionaries attempting religious and civic education in the Middle East, and in the process founding the Syrian Protestant College, now the American University of Beirut. Christopher Hitchens explored some of the early actions of the American government in that region in his brief book on Thomas Jefferson. Oren’s work, approximately 700 pages long, is a far more thorough survey. In a recent post on this blog regarding the twentieth-century relationship between America and Israel, Joshua Zeitz wrote that the Six-Day War has been seriously misinterpreted as a spur for the rightward migration of American Jews. This episode, writes Mr. Zeitz, “laid the foundation of an inaccurate but still resonant charge that blames American Jews for so many of the world’s woes, even as it fundamentally misreads American Jewish political culture.” For those who believe America’s present-day engagement in Middle Eastern affairs is largely a product of Jewish influence, and for those who are interested in the history of American foreign relations more generally, Oren’s scholarly work, including Power, Faith, and Fantasy, is a useful contribution.
June 3, 2007
Thank You for Smoking II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:30 PM EST I doubt that smoking in movies induces a single teenager to smoke these days. That might have been true in the mid-twentieth century, when Humphrey Bogart (dead of lung cancer at 58) was a leading movie star, Edward R. Murrow (dead of lung cancer at 57) did his television interviews wreathed in smoke, Franklin Roosevelt (dead of a stroke at 63) was the last President to smoke in public—even using an iconic cigarette holder—and every party and restaurant was blue with the smoke of cigarettes. In those days, smoking cigarettes was a quintessentially adult thing and thus something that teenagers wanted to do. I can remember quite consciously, at age about 16, imitating the way my father (dead of a stroke at 58) held his cigarette. Today I suspect that about the only thing that induces teenagers to smoke is peer pressure, and that, I bet, is declining fast. As a totally unscientific bit of evidence, the local high school students I see smoking are invariably the ones with rings in their noses and their hair dyed puce. One suspects a certain insufficiency of parental authority, not coolness. Instead, I imagine the real motive behind the MPAA’s action is public relations, trying to make the movie industry look socially responsible (now, now, no sniggering please). There is also, I suppose, a touch of one of this country’s less attractive cultural traits, the urge to control other people’s behavior, strictly for their own good, of course. Prohibition is exhibit A, but New York’s Mayor Bloomberg succeeded in banning smoking, even in private clubs, and would dearly love to control the fat content of meals in restaurants. The drinking age, once a state responsibility, was made national, using the states’ dependence on federal highway funds as the lever (no age-21-drinking law, no funds). This made Congress look socially responsible (hey, I said no sniggering!), but it also makes the United States the only country in the world, at least where alcohol is legal, that does not set the drinking age at the age of majority. Instead adults are supposed to wait three years after they can vote, sign a contract, join the army, etc., before they can have a beer. Guess what. They don’t.
June 3, 2007
Knocked Up Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:55 PM EST I saw Knocked Up last night, a summer comedy movie yesterday released to enthusiastic reviews, and one prompting a short thought about cultural history. Knocked Up has a simple premise: Katherine Heigl, an actress who looks like the sort of girl who runs out on Menelaos, plays a newly-hired TV interviewer of celebrities, one who is impregnated in the course of a drunken one-night-stand with Seth Rogen (she is celebrating her hiring). Mr. Rogen looks like an ordinary mortal, and his character’s idea of entrepreneurship is to develop a commercial website identifying all the nude scenes ever played by all actresses, with special attention to which bits of each actress were undraped at which precise moment in each film (he is regrettably unaware that such a service already exists). His friends, also his roommates and business partners, are other youngish men of comparable ambition and discipline and possess a similar fondness for marijuana. Mr. Rogen’s character seems fantastically unsuitable for the role of fatherhood, but this initial appearance is misleading. Knocked Up is a very bawdy, very funny, and in the last analysis very sweet love story. There is a tendency to describe history, cultural and otherwise, as cyclical, an alternation between opposed tendencies. More precisely, the depiction of sexuality in comedy is sometimes imagined to be the alternation of a dishonest and priggish vision, one punishing non-reproductive sex as mere lubricity and celebrating self-restraint, with a libertine vision, one less moralistic and more honest about the body’s pleasures, but perhaps indifferent to the moral claims of the familial, sometimes tending toward the heartless and dishonest in its own way. By this theory the vision of Cheaper by the Dozen, as Ellen Feldman criticized it, yields to the most Saturnalian elements of Animal House, and then things swing back again, forever and ever. Knocked Up suggests that this is silly. Knowledgeable vulgarity about the adult body and its claims does not mean a movie cannot serially attend to a loftier sense of human sexuality; comedy can be the enemy of asceticism and idealism without becoming the friend of the darkest cynicism. People who greatly dislike America tend to say we are peculiarly likely to be monsters of amoral carnality, or else mad prigs. On the evidence of one summer comedy at least, we are a little more interesting than that.
June 3, 2007
Thank You for Smoking Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:00 AM EST Last week Fred Schwarz posted about the Motion Picture Association of America’s new restrictions on the portrayal of smoking on screen. In his post, Mr. Schwarz quoted a National Review article that turns on its head the idea that smoking in films causes smoking off screen by making the habit seem fashionable. Instead, this article argues that “people [smoke] in movies because it’s cool.” I don’t think I totally buy this, or at least I don’t buy that there’s not a connection between behavior in movies and behavior out of them. An often cited example of imitated on-screen behavior is Macaulay Culkin’s arm-pumping victory motion in Home Alone, usually accompanied by a hissed, “Yesss,” which took elementary schools by storm at approximately the same time I was learning to read. If one movie could so quickly popularize this silly action, I don’t see why a similar thing couldn’t happen with the far more ubiquitous cinematic activity of smoking. A second point in Mr. Schwarz's post, and one I find totally convincing, is that the main dramatic function of smoking on screen is to “inject some movement . . . into what otherwise would be a static scene of talking heads: ‘It draws attention inexorably to the smoker and away from whatever mediocre dialogue he or she is forced to say.’” Incidentally, cigarettes, cigars, lighters, and other smoking items are also among the only accessories male characters can carry with them. James Bond could not have disguised a microfilm reader inside a purse. Instead, a cigarette case and lighter had to suffice. Today, admittedly, there are iPods, cell phones, and PDAs as well, options Sean Connery and Roger Moore would never have considered. What will replace smoking, if the MPAA regulations have the desired effect? Mr. Schwarz suggests drinking, rock/paper/scissors, dance motions, or knitting. I’d like to add another option, perhaps slightly more serious, to this list: eating. A popular piece of trivia about the 2001 version of Ocean’s Eleven is that Brad Pitt’s character is constantly eating. According to the Internet Movie Database, “This was because the whole gang (his character in particular) would be so busy that they’d rarely be able to eat.” Accidental though this character choice may have been, it strikes me as appropriate that nervous eating would replace smoking as the American film character’s casual habit of choice. I believe the sentiment was best expressed by Christopher Buckley in his novel Thank You For Smoking, in which his main character is a successful tobacco lobbyist. At one point the lobbyist, Nick Naylor, goes into an ice cream parlor and reflects on the irony that his country judges smoking so harshly while devouring such a decadent (and, might I add, delicious) dessert.
June 2, 2007
FDR and Breaking Coalitions Posted by Fredric Smoler at 07:30 PM EST A few days ago I wrote that Franklin Roosevelt’s margins of victory had steadily increased, a piece of misinformation I’ve carried around in my head since reviewing and presumably misreading a book on FDR and the press in 1991. John Steele Gordon politely pointed out the error, and Alex Burns wrote an interesting response about the remarkable stability of FDR’s vote totals over time, noting that Roosevelt’s political genius included keeping a large and potentially fragile coalition intact for more than 12 years. Of course, some of this success was the result of the Republicans not taking aim at a few of the most vulnerable fracture lines in the New Deal coalition. As Mr. Burns writes, “In 1940, for example, Republicans nominated Wendell Willkie, who refused to drum up the nation’s spirit of anti-interventionism until the last weeks of his campaign. Charles Peters, in his snappy little volume Five Days in Philadelphia, has suggested that Willkie’s restrained campaign saved Roosevelt’s agenda but doomed his party’s fortunes at the ballot box.” Willkie toyed with exploiting isolationist and antiwar sentiment—in the election campaign of 1940 he supported conscription, then changed his mind, in pursuit of electoral advantage—but his heart wasn’t in it. Willkie was a liberal internationalist; after he lost the 1940 election, he passionately supported Lend Lease, and in the summer of 1941 he supported unlimited aid to the United Kingdom while it was fighting Hitler. He seems to have known what he was doing: his Wikipedia entry asserts that “Shortly before Willkie died, he told a friend, that if he could write his own epitaph and had to choose between ‘here lies a president’ or ‘here lies one who contributed to saving freedom,’ he would prefer the latter.” I hope Willkie really said that, because there is some evidence that it was true. Clay famously claimed that he’d rather be right than President, and as a wag noted, he was neither. Willkie, at least, was batting .500. Failing to effectively exploit a political adversary’s weakness, inhibited in doing so only by one or another scruple, is not the sort of story we tend to tell about our politicians nowadays. One of the better political novels written over the last couple of decades, Joe Klein’s Primary Colors, told the opposite story: Politicians want to win, will do whatever it takes, and are by implication the clear moral inferiors of journalists, novelists, academics and whoever else writes about them. Primary Colors had the grace to seem sad about this alleged state of affairs, in which it makes a fairly striking contrast to the posture assumed by most political commentators I read in the daily or monthly press. It is interesting to speculate about just how archaic an example Willkie may be. Commentators on the Democrats’ refusal to politick more resolutely against a clearly unpopular war tend to explain that diffidence as simple cowardice, but it occurs to me that in some cases there may be something more Willkie-like at work. To take only joy from a disaster damaging to one’s country as well as to one’s political adversaries is scarcely unknown in American politics—to pick a single example, Nixon’s advisers in 1968 were allegedly gleeful when they heard the news of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia—but it is not the only possible response to bad news, and assuming that it is seems perverse.
June 2, 2007
Paranoia, Bias, and Outspokenness Posted by Alexander Burns at 05:10 PM EST Of the less history-based discussion topics on this blog, media bias has to rank among the most popular. I think I’ve made it clear on previous occasions that I tend to think the whole subject is wildly overblown, and that any media bias that exists is mostly toward the sensational. As much as I might hope, however, the issue isn’t going away any time soon, and part of the reason for that is people like Laura Ingraham. As Talking Points Memo already noted this morning, there was a rather bizarre confrontation yesterday on CNN’s American Morning. Ingraham was discussing the Senate’s current immigration reform proposal with CNN host John Roberts. Ingraham, who dislikes the White House–backed plan, suggested that President Bush might be alienating right-wingers with this plan with the expectation that “he’s going to be saved by the liberal elites at CNN.” When Roberts balked at his guest’s comment, Ingraham got snippy: “By the way, John, how did you introduce me for this segment before the break? ‘The outspoken Laura Ingraham.’ Do you guys introduce liberal commentators that way? I’m going to check.” This is, needless to say, strange behavior from someone who is, by all accounts, exceedingly and literally outspoken. It’s symptomatic of an attitude that’s epidemic among some conservatives, who believe that sneaky, left-wing media barons are somewhere plotting to destroy them, in between rounds of croquet with Ted Kennedy and karaoke with Barbara Streisand. Perhaps more useful than what Ingraham’s outburst indicates about conservatives and the media, however, is the reflection that it inspires about the word in question. Taking Laura Ingraham’s question all too seriously, I wondered: Okay, who do our news sources describe as “outspoken”? A brief search of CNN’s website yields a curious list. In the last month, CNN has used the word to refer to a wide array of characters, including Chuck Hagel, Gore Vidal, Nicolas Sarkozy, Alexander Litvinenko, and Marie Osmond. Not exactly a who’s who of the conservative movement. Fox’s website seems at first to present a somewhat more coherent list of “outspoken” people: Theresa Heinz Kerry, Cindy Sheehan, John Murtha, Jimmy Carter, et al. At the same time, though, this network still uses the label loosely, also tagging conservatives Sam Brownback and Tom Tancredo and non-politicians Lance Armstrong and José Mourinho. There’s not much of a pattern that emerges from either of these networks, so perhaps the best-supported conclusion one can draw is that television commentators use the label with little method or deliberation. For organizations that aspire to some degree of neutrality, outspokenness is not a value-laden quality. For other media outlets, though, like the liberal Nation magazine and the conservative Weekly Standard, outspokenness seems to be a positively commendable quality. In The Nation, the word is almost entirely reserved for references to admired figures to the left of center: Sen. Jim Webb, Lieberman foe Ned Lamont, Rep. Jim McGovern, comedian Lewis Black, Harvard president Drew Faust, and more. Last February in The Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol published an editorial imploring Republicans to show “a little more courage and outspokenness” in defending the Iraq war. Far from value-neutral description, outspokenness is treated as an admired attribute among those who have agendas to promote.
June 1, 2007
JFK, Myths and Countermyths Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:05 PM EST A shrewd and suggestive post by Alex Burns (“Kennedy at 90”) ponders the fate of a JFK who had not been assassinated at in 1963 and runs over a few published alternate histories in which the assassination did not happen, at least one of them very sunny. I fondly remember a darker counterfactual published in the sometimes nasty, often tasteless, and occasionally brilliantly funny National Lampoon. In it, unless my memory is off, JFK evades Oswald’s bullet, then withdraws the troops from Vietnam but sends them to Northern Ireland to expel the British, which prompts protests and civil disobedience from the graying parents of the now-indifferent children who protested the Vietnam War of actual history. JFK also gives away enough government money to every American teenager to fund a year of subsidized globetrotting, thus ensuring no youth revolt; repeals the Twenty-Second Amendment; and is still President in the late 1970s, at which time he makes a stoned pass at his own daughter. The 1960s upheavals have been averted, which in the late or mid ’70s, when the piece was published, was considered a nasty outcome by the sort of people who read the Lampoon. One point of that joke, I think, was to remind Kennedy-worshipping baby boomers that the President they mourned had been anything but a utopian radical and rather had sprung from a sometimes parochial American political subculture and had an imperfectly attractive libertine side. Another point of the joke was the simple pleasure of blasphemy. JFK was still worshipped by much of the culture. But blasphemy can have a point, and in this case, did. Mistaking a man for a god is an error, one the Lampoon’s joke sought to correct. Alex Burns writes that the historian Nigel Hamilton’s alternative history “usefully emphasizes the historical influence of chance events like the assassination.” Of course, that thought cuts many different ways. It is possible that JFK would never have had the vision and courage to ram through the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. As Mr. Burns notes, JFK certainly wasn’t very bold about civil rights in the years he did serve as President. It is possible that a Kennedy Presidency (Maybe JFK, maybe RFK) would have fought the Vietnam War more vigorously, and for that matter, won it (no bombing pauses, which on one theory lost us the war, by allowing North Vietnam to learn to cope with us, and maybe much more). Fear of a Chinese reaction restrained LBJ and possibly Richard Nixon from certain escalatory possibilities in Vietnam, but that might not have restrained JFK, who was willing to risk nuclear war—after all, he did it in Cuba. He was a Cold Warrior, and at times a reckless one. One oddity of the myth of JFK, and specifically of the myth that all our ills sprang from his premature death, is that it created a counter-myth, in which only his vices were on view. I remember reviewing in the early 1990s a venomous and I thought madly one-sided biography of Kennedy by a formerly-besotted historian at the University of Wisconsin. Kennedy was the last President to cast a durable glamour over a large portion of the press and the academy, and the reaction, when it came, was a little ugly. Now, I think, the reaction is over, at least in the case of Kennedy, but it may have had a long half-life encompassing new objects. The reaction to the unmasking of JFK may included the fact that American journalists and academics are nowadays far more likely to take a mechanically antiheroic view of public men than succumb to the blind worship of any political hero. This is sometimes seen as a great improvement, but my hunch is that stupidity inverted is still a kind of stupidity.
June 1, 2007
Kennedy at 90 II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:55 AM EST I agree with Alexander Burns that a major part of the Kennedy mystique, like that of Achilles, lies with his early death. We did not see him grow old, and so he is forever young, vital, and unblemished by the vicissitudes of life, which have a nasty habit of crowding into the later years. This idea, that early death is not without its compensations, has engaged the thoughts of some of the greatest poets. John Keats hints at it in “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” And A. E. Housman addresses it directly in perhaps his most famous poem, “To an Athlete Dying Young.” I imagine President Kennedy, who was a literate man, knew them both well. Regarding alternative histories had any of a thousand minor events thwarted Lee Harvey Oswald, I am reminded of a historical anecdote I have heard often but cannot vouch for. I hope it is true, but it seems a little too good to be so. Someone is supposed to have asked Mao Tse-tung, several years after Kennedy’s assassination, how the world would have been different had it been Nikita Khrushchev who had been killed rather than Kennedy. Mao puffed on his cigarette for a minute and then said, “I don’t know, but I don’t think Aristotle Onassis would have married Mrs. Khrushchev.”
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