Spoonful
Posted: February 7, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, music Leave a commentHave been listening to Spoonful as recorded by Howlin Wolf lately.
The lyrics relate men’s sometimes violent search to satisfy their cravings, with “a spoonful” used mostly as a metaphor for pleasures, which have been interpreted as sex, love, and drugs
Chester Arthur Burnett was born in White Station Mississippi, near West Point, in the “Black Prairie” (later remarketed as the “Golden Triangle“). JD Walsh digs up a photo, source undescribed, of our guy working on a horse’s hoof while he was in the 9th Cavalry.
Howlin Wolf was an apprentice/student to Charlie Patton. I first heard about Charlie Patton from R. Crumb’s comic, which was reprinted in an anthology of underground comics they had at the Needham Public Library.
The Library also had a cassette of some of these blues guys. Living walking distance to the library, a life-changer.
Blues research is a famous graveyard for the curious – we’ve gone about as far as we dare on this topic, see previous coverage. Listening to Charlie Patton especially with the warble of the old recordings sounds spooky, and there’s a desire to see this as emerging from some mysterious beyond, but the turth might be more interesting, these people were modern. Elijah Wald shed some light on Delta blues in his book Escaping the Delta:
If someone had suggested to the major blues stars that they were old-fashioned folk musicians carrying on a culture handed down from slavery times, most would probably have been insulted.
Mississippi was legally dry until 1966, at least in theory, a factor in blues history.
It is startling to thank that all of the evolution from the first Bessie Smith record to the first Rolling Stones record took only forty years. When Skip James and John Hurt appeared at the Newport Folk Festival, they were greeted as emissaries from an ancient, vanished world, but it was only three decades since they had first entered a recording studio – that is, they were about as ancient as disco is to us today.
The Mississippi Delta at this time was actually kind of a dynamic region, crisscrossed with railroads, you could quit your job and move and get another one.
Wald tells of an anthropological team from Fisk University and the Library of Congress that visited the Delta in 1941 and 1942. They reported:
There are no memories of slavery in the delta. This section of the delta has little history prior to the revolution of 1861
Howlin’ Wolf was on to health insurance for musicians long before Chappell Roan was born:
After he married Lillie, who was able to manage his professional finances, he was so financially successful that he was able to offer band members not only a decent salary but benefits such as health insurance. This enabled him to hire his pick of available musicians and keep his band one of the best around. According to his stepdaughters, he was never financially extravagant (for instance, he drove a Pontiac station wagon rather than a more expensive, flashy car).[48]
That Sun Records link reports that Howlin’ Wolf was 6’6″ and close to 300 lbs.
reviewing some news in The Wall Street Journal
Posted: February 3, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, business, food 3 Comments
I don’t care for Applebee’s, it’s sub Friday’s and way sub Chili’s, but I do like living in the United States of America. All told this was a nice story. The conclusion:
Common Side Effects, Sunday Feb 2 11:30pm on Cartoon Network, streaming on MAX Feb 3
Posted: January 31, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, drugs, the California Condition Leave a comment
Our attitude towards critics is influenced by the Duke of Wellington, who supposedly didn’t let his troops cheer for him because that meant they could also boo him.
While he is said to have disapproved of soldiers cheering as “too nearly an expression of opinion”,[247] Wellington nevertheless cared for his men
(He did call them the scum of the earth but w/e).
But hey, these reviews are terrific and we must celebrate our wins in a business full of heartbreak. Making a TV show is so difficult and time consuming, Resistance fights the work of art at every stage, very blessed to have worked with this amazing team on this project.
Here is The New York Times. And we’ll take this one:
A treat and a half says Margaret Lyons!
Here’s a funny one, a pharma ad embedded right in there:
(I don’t think the reporter here edited his AI transcript.) Neil Postman would’ve predicted if you made a TV show satirizing pharmaceuticals they would use it to sell pharmaceuticals. In Amusing Ourselves to Death he predicted The Daily Show.
Anyhoo watch, stream, and spread the word, we’ll return to amateur history and digestions here on Helytimes as time permits! I’ve been meeting to write up the Atlanta Cyclorama, where Van Gogh bought his paints and the role of the aluminum tube in art history, Lester Hiatt’s Arguments About Aborigines, Dan Levy’s Maxims For Thinking Analytically, Randall Collins Violence, the Santa Barbara Channel, and more!
The Chumash people of the region have traditionally known Point Conception as the “Western Gate”, through which the souls of the dead could pass between the mortal world and the heavenly paradise of Similaqsa.[4]
It is called Humqaq (“The Raven Comes”) in the Chumashan languages.
Carter’s, congealed electricity, AI and Needham
Posted: January 30, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, business, children, New England, Uncategorized Leave a comment
If you have a little kid in the US you will have some clothes from Carter’s. They sell them at Target and Wal-Mart as well as 1,000 or so Carter’s stores, and they cost $8.
Before I had a kid it didn’t occur to me that kids outgrow their clothes so fast they can’t cost too much.
When I see the Carter’s label, I think of my home town.
William Carter founded Carter’s in Needham, Massachusetts in 1865. Textiles were a big business in New England. Two inputs, labor and electricity, were cheap. Labor from excess farm children, and electricity from running streams? That would’ve been the earliest mode, what were they using by 1865? Coal?
One of the biggest buildings in Needham, certainly the longest, is the former Carter’s headquarters, which stretches itself along Highland Avenue. A prominent landmark, it took a long time to walk past.
The story of Carter’s is a global economic story in miniature.
Old Carter mill #2, found here.
The Carter family sold the company in the 1990s. It went public in 2003. In 2005, Carter’s acquired OshKosh B’gosh, a company famous for making children’s overalls. This company started in 1895 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin (the name comes from an Ojibwe word, “The Claw,” that was the name of a local chief).
The term “B’gosh” began being used in 1911, after general manager William Pollock heard the tagline “Oshkosh B’Gosh” in a vaudeville routine in New York.[4] The company formally adopted the name OshKosh B’gosh in 1937.
OshKosh B’Gosh’s Wisconsin plant was closed in 1997. Downsizing of domestic operations and massive outsourcing and manufacturing at Mexican and Honduran subsidiaries saw the domestic manufacturing share drop below 10 percent by the year 2000.
OshKosh B’Gosh was sold to Carter’s, another clothing manufacturer for $312 million
The headquarters of Carter’s moved to Atlanta. Labor and electricity were cheaper in Georgia, Carter’s had been opening mills in the South for awhile. Now the clothes are made overseas. I look at the labels on Carter’s clothes: Bangladesh, India, Cambodia, Vietnam. If you factor in the shipping and the markup how much of that $8 is going to your garment maker in Bangladesh? Then again maybe it’s the best job around, raising Bangladeshis out of poverty, and soon Chittagong will look like Needham.
The former Carter’s headquarters, now vacant, became a facility for elder living. My mom worked there, briefly. Carter’s today is headquarted in the Phipps Tower in Buckhead, Atlanta, which I happened to pass by the other day.
The loss of the mill and the company headquarters was not a crisis for Needham. Needham is very close to Boston, an easy train ride away, and along of the 128 Corridor. There are growth businesses in the area, hospitals, biotech companies, universities. TripAdvisor is based in Needham. Needham is a pleasant town, there are ongoing talks to turn the former Carter’s building into housing. It would be close to public transport and walkable to the library and the Trader Joe’s. That seems to be stalled.
Needham has brain jobs, attached to a dense brain network, while brawn jobs are being shipped overseas. There are many other towns in Massachusetts where the old run down mill is a sad derelict as production moved first south and then overseas. These towns are bleak. Oshkosh, Wisconsin seems ok, but the shipping of steady jobs overseas is of course a major factor in our politics, Ross Perot was talking about it in 1992 and no one did anything about it and now Trump is the president.
A similar story lies in the history of Berkshire Hathaway – the original New Bedford textile mill, not the conglomerate Warren Buffett built on top of it using the same name. Buffett talks about this, I believe this is from the 2022 annual meeting:
CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, I remember when you had a textile mill —
WARREN BUFFETT: Oh, god.
CHARLIE MUNGER: — and it couldn’t —
WARREN BUFFETT: I try to forget it. (Laughs)
CHARLIE MUNGER: — and the textiles are really just congealed electricity, the way modern technology works.
And the TVA rates were 60% lower than the rates in New England. It was an absolutely hopeless hand, and you had the sense to fold it.
WARREN BUFFETT: Twenty-five years later, yeah. (Laughs)
CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, you didn’t pour more money into it.
WARREN BUFFETT: No, that’s right.
CHARLIE MUNGER: And, no — recognizing reality, when it’s really awful, and taking appropriate action, just involves, often, just the most elementary good sense.
How in the hell can you run a textile mill in New England when your competitors are paying way lower power rates?
WARREN BUFFETT: And I’ll tell you another problem with it, too. I mean, the fellow that I put in to run it was a really good guy. I mean, he was 100% honest with me in every way. And he was a decent human being, and he knew textiles.
And if he’d been a jerk, it would have been a lot easier. I would have probably thought differently about it.
But we just stumbled along for a while. And then, you know, we got lucky that Jack Ringwalt decided to sell his insurance company [National Indemnity] and we did this and that.
But I even bought a second textile company in New Hampshire, I mean, I don’t know how many — seven or eight years later.
I’m going to talk some about dumb decisions, maybe after lunch we’ll do it a little.
Congealed electricity, what a phrase. In the 1985 annual letter, Buffett discusses the other input, labor, which was cheaper in the South, and why he kept Berkshire Hathaway running in Massachusetts anyway:
At the time we made our purchase, southern textile plants – largely non-union – were believed to have an important competitive advantage. Most northern textile operations had closed and many people thought we would liquidate our business as well.
We felt, however, that the business would be run much betterby a long-time employee whom. we immediately selected to be president, Ken Chace. In this respect we were 100% correct: Ken
and his recent successor, Garry Morrison, have been excellent managers, every bit the equal of managers at our more profitable businesses.… the domestic textile industry operates in a commodity business, competing in a world market in which substantial excess capacity exists. Much of the trouble we experienced was attributable, both directly and indirectly, to competition from foreign countries whose workers are paid a small fraction of the U.S. minimum wage. But that in no way means that our labor force deserves any blame for our closing. In fact, in comparison with employees of American industry generally, our workers were poorly paid, as has been the case throughout the textile business. In contract negotiations, union leaders and members were sensitive to our disadvantageous cost position and did not push for unrealistic wage increases or unproductive work practices. To the contrary, they tried just as hard as we did to keep us competitive. Even during our liquidation period they performed superbly. (Ironically, we would have been better off financially if our union had behaved unreasonably some years ago; we then would have recognized the impossible future that we faced, promptly closed down, and avoided significant future losses.)
Buffett goes on, if you care to read it, to discuss the dismal spiral faced by another New England textile company, Burlington.
Charlie Munger, in his 1994 USC talk, spoke on the paradoxes here:
For example, when we were in the textile business, which is a terrible commodity business, we were making low-end textiles—which are a real commodity product. And one day, the people came to Warren and said, ‘They’ve invented a new loom that we think will do twice as much work as our old ones.’
And Warren said, ‘Gee, I hope this doesn’t work because if it does, I’m going to close the mill.’ And he meant it.
What was he thinking? He was thinking, ‘It’s a lousy business. We’re earning substandard returns and keeping it open just to be nice to the elderly workers. But we’re not going to put huge amounts of new capital into a lousy business.’
And he knew that the huge productivity increases that would come from a better machine introduced into the production of a commodity product would all go to the benefit of the buyers of the textiles. Nothing was going to stick to our ribs as owners.
That’s such an obvious concept—that there are all kinds of wonderful new inventions that give you nothing as owners except the opportunity to spend a lot more money in a business that’s still going to be lousy. The money still won’t come to you. All of the advantages from great improvements are going to flow through to the customers.”
Is something similar happening with AI? Who will it make rich, and at what cost? To whose ribs will the profits stick?
I’m not sure we could call AI congealed but it is more or less just more and more electricity run through expensive processors. Who will win from that? So far it’s been the makers of the processors, but if DeepSeek shows you don’t need as many of those the game is changed. Personally I’m unimpressed with DeepSeek – try asking it what happened in Tiananmen Square in June 1989.
How does Carter’s itself continue to survive? Target’s own brand, Cat & Jack, is right next door on the shelves. Could another company shove Carter’s aside if they can cut the margins even thinner, get the price down to $7? Here’s what Carter’s CEO Michael Casey has to say in their most recent annual letter:
Hard to build the operational network Carter’s has over 150+ years. There will be a challenge awaiting the next CEO of Carter’s as Michael Casey is retiring. Carter’s stock ($CRI) is pretty beaten up over the past year, down 30%. A possible macro problem for Carter’s is that the number of births in the United States appears to be declining.
It is powerful, when I’m changing my daughter, to contemplate my home town, and global commerce, and the people in Cambodia who made these clothes, and the ways of the world.
Gizmodo interview
Posted: January 25, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, the California Condition Leave a comment
As Matt at the office put it, they came out SWINGING with Luigi as the first question:
I declare the event both “upsetting” but also “cool”? Maybe I do need media training. Here’s a link.
Here’s what matters:
Streaming next day on MAX. Is it still called HBO Max in Australia? I know they’ve got Max in Europe and LatAm.
Occurs to me this site has been lax on one of our missions, reporting news from Helys around the world. There’s just too much!
Living Room on the tracks
Posted: January 16, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, railroads Leave a comment
A photo by O. Winston Link, at the Smithsonian. That is Lithia, Virginia.
Stuart Spencer (1927-2025)
Posted: January 14, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, presidents, the California Condition 2 Comments
I read in The LA Times that Stuart Spencer died. His Miller Center Oral History interview is one of the most vivid on the rise of Ronald Reagan, California, politics in general:
After many discussions with [Reagan], we realized this guy was a basic conservative. He was obsessed with one thing, the communist threat. He has conservative tendencies on other issues, but he can be practical.
When you look at the 1960s, that’s a pretty good position to be in, philosophically and ideologically. Plus, we realized pretty early on that the guy had a real core value system. Most people in my business don’t like to talk about that, but you know something? The best candidates have a core value system. Either party, win or lose, those are still the best candidates. They don’t lose because of their core value system. They lose because of some other activity that happens out there. But the best candidates to deal with, and to work with, are those who have that. A lot of them have it and a lot of them don’t, but Reagan had it.
The power players of Southern California:
Holmes Tuttle was a man of great . . . He was a car dealer, a Ford dealer in southern California and he also had some agencies in Tucson, I think. Holmes was a guy that came from Oklahoma on a freight car. He had no money and he started working—I don’t think he finished high school—for a car dealership, washing cars, cleaning cars. He’s a man of tremendous energy, tremendous drive and strong feelings—which most successful businessmen have—about how the world should be run, how the country should be run as well as how their business should be run and how your business should be run. They’re always tough and strong that way. That was Holmes’ background.
In the southern California—I won’t say California because we have two segments, north and south—framework of the late ’30s and the ’40s, there were movies made about a group. I can’t remember what they were called, but there were 30 of them. In this group were the owner and publisher of the L.A. Times, the [Harry] Chandler family top business guys, Asa Call of what is now known as Pacific Insurance. It was Pacific Mutual Insurance then, a local company. Now it’s a national company. Henry Salvatori, the big oil guy; Holmes; Herbert Hoover, Jr.; the Automotive Club of Southern California; that type of people, they ran southern California. They had the money. They had the mouth, the paper. They ran it. [William Randolph] Hearst was a secondary player. He had a paper, but he was secondary player. He wasn’t in the group. Hearst was more global.
These guys worried about everything south of the Tehachapi Mountains. That’s all they worried about. They worried about water. They worried about developments. They’ve made movies about that. Most of it’s true. The Southern Pacific was the big power player, but these guys were trying to upset the powers of the Southern Pacific to a degree. Holmes Tuttle came out of that power struggle, that power group.
He was a guy who would work hard. Asa Call was the brains. Holmes was the Stu Spencer, the guy that went out and made it happen. He was aggressive and he played a role. He started playing a role in the political process in the ’50s, post Earl Warren. None of these guys were involved with Earl Warren to any degree. But after Earl Warren and Nixon, they were players there. They never were in love with Nixon, but they were pragmatic. The Chandlers were in love with Nixon, and a few others, but with these bunch of guys, Ace would like Nixon. Holmes was the new conservative and Nixon was a different old conservative.
There were little differences there. Holmes emerged in the new conservative element and was heavily involved in the Goldwater campaign of ’64. Of course that’s a whole ’nother story. When Nixon went down the tube all of a sudden—it was lying there latent in the Goldwater movement and they were waiting for Nixon to get beat and when he did [sound effect]—here they were up in your face.
Reagan was the first legitimate person that Holmes was absolutely, totally, in synch with, and who he totally loved.
On Ron and Nancy:
Here’s an important point in my story. We met with the Reagans. The Reagans are a team politically. He would have never made the governorship without her. He would have never been victorious in the presidential race without her. They went into everything as a team.
It was a great love affair, is a great love affair. Early on I thought it was a lot of Hollywood stuff. I really did. I could give you anecdotes of her taking him to the train when he had to go to Phoenix because they didn’t fly in those days, or to Flagstaff to do the filming of the last segments of that western he was doing. We’d be in Union Station in L.A. at nine o’clock at night. They’re standing there kissing good-bye and it goes on and it goes on and it goes on. I’m embarrassed and I’m saying,
Wow.It was just like a scene out of Hollywood in the 1930s, late ’30s, ’40s. I tell you that, but then I tell you now twenty-five, thirty, forty years later, whatever it is, it was a love affair. It was not Hollywood.At that time I thought, oh, boy. It’s not only a partnership, it’s a great love affair. She was in every meeting that Bill and I were at with Reagan, discussing things, us asking questions, with him asking us questions. The curve of her involvement over the years was interesting because she was in her 40s then probably. She always lied about her age so I can’t tell you exactly, but she was somewhere around 45, I’d guess. She was quiet. With those big eyes of hers, she’d be watching you. Every now and then she’d ask a question, but not too often.
As time went on—I’m talking about years—she grew more and more vocal. But she was on a learning curve politically. She learned. She’s a very smart politician. She thinks very well politically. She thinks much more politically than he thinks. I think it’s important that Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan were the team that went to the Governor’s office and that went to the White House. They did it together. They always turned inward toward each other in times of crisis. She evolved a role out of it, her role. No one else will say this, but I say this: she was the personnel director.
She didn’t have anything to do with policy. She’d say something every now and then and he’d look at her and say,
Hey, Mommy, that’s my role.She’d shut up. But when it came to who is the Chief of Staff, who is the political director, who is the press secretary, she had input because he didn’t like personnel decisions. Take the best example, Taft Schreiber, who was his agent out at Universal for years, and Lew Wasserman. After we signed on, Taft was in this group of finance guys and he said to me,Kid, we’ve got to have lunch.I had lunch with Taft and he proceeded to tell me,
You’re going to have to fire a lot of people.I said,What do you mean?He said,Ron—meaning Reagan—has never fired anybody in his life.He said,I’ve fired hundreds of people. He’s never fired anybody.I laughed. I said to myself, Taft’s overstating the case. Taft was right. I fired a lot of people after that.Reagan hated personnel problems. He hated to see differences of opinion among his staff. His line was,
Come on, boys. Go out and settle this and then come back.You’re going to have a lot of that in politics. You’re going to have a lot of that in government. That’s what makes the wheels go round. It doesn’t mean that they’re not friends or anything. They have differences of opinion, but Reagan didn’t like that too much, especially over the minutia, and it usually happens over the minutia.
The sum total of Reagan:
The sum total of him is simply this: here’s a man who had a basic belief, who thought America was a wonderful, great country. I don’t think you can go back through 43 Presidents and find a President of the United States who came from as much poverty as Reagan came from; income-wise, dysfunctional families. I can’t quite remember where [Harry] Truman came from, but you’re not going to find one.
This guy came from an alcoholic family, no money, no nothing. He was a kid who was a dreamer. He dreamed dreams and dreamed big dreams and went out to fulfill those dreams with his life and he did it. As he moved down his career and got really involved in the ideological side of the political spectrum, which is where he started, he had real concerns about all this leaving us because of communism.
You look back—some of it sounds a little silly—but at the time there was perceived all kinds of threats, all over the world about communism moving into Asia, moving into Africa. That was the driving force behind his political participations. It was the only thing that he really thought about in depth, intellectualized, thought about what you can do, what you can’t do, how you can do it.
With everything else, from welfare to taxation, he went through the motions. Now, this is me talking, but every night when he went to bed, he was thinking of some way of getting [Leonid Ilyich] Brezhnev or somebody in the corner. He told me this prior to the beginning of the presidency. Because I asked questions like, What the hell do you want this job for?
I’d get the speech and the program on communism. He could quote me numbers, figures. He’d say, We’ve got to build our defenses until they’re scary. Their economy is going down and it’s going to get worse. I’m simplifying our discussion. He watched and he fought for defense. God, he fought for defense. He cut here, he cut there for more defense. He took a lot of heat for it. All the time he delivered, in his mind, the message to Russia, we’re not going to back off. We’ll out-bomb you. We’ll out-do everything to you.
His backside knew that we have the resources, this country has the resources and the Russians don’t. If they try to keep up with us defensively, they’re going to be in poverty. They’re going to be economically dead and an economically dead country can only do one of two things, either spring the bomb or come to the table. He was willing to roll those dice because he absolutely had an utter fear of the consequences of nuclear warfare.
Again he was lucky. He couldn’t deal with Brezhnev. He was over the hill and out of it. [Yuri Vladimirovich] Andropov was gone, dead. Reagan lucked out. In comes this guy [Mikhail] Gorbachev who was smart enough to see the trend in his own country. He started talking with Reagan about cutting a deal. That’s what it got down to. In that context Reagan was very benevolent. He was willing to give up a lot. If this guy was serious and willing to go down this road, he was willing to give up things to get the job done, which was to get rid of the cold war. To him the cold war was the threat of nuclear holocaust in this country and other countries.
That was a dream that he had before he was in the presidency. These words I’m giving you and interpreting for you were given to me prior to his election to the presidency. If you do a lot of research, you’ll see that he was always asking questions of the intelligence people, What’s the state of the economy in Russia? He must’ve had a Dow Jones bottom line in his mind—what he thought it was going to take to do it—because he always knew how many nukes we had and where they were. He was really into this.
Young
Does that mean that Reagan was a visionary?
Spencer
I don’t know. He was a dreamer. He was a dreamer. He dreamed that he was going to be the best sportscaster in America, that he was going to be one of the better actors in Hollywood. You know he got tired of playing the bad guy alongside Errol Flynn, who got the women all the time. But he still dreamed big dreams. That’s the way he was.
On Reagan’s interpersonal style:
Young
He was good at communications obviously. How was he at working the room with politicians?
Spencer
Terrible. Ronald Reagan is a shy person. People don’t understand this. He was not an introvert. Nixon was almost an introvert and paranoid. That’s a bad combination. Reagan was shy. People who I met through the years said to me,
I saw President Reagan at this,orI saw President Reagan one-on-one, two or three people in the Oval Office,or something. He never talked about anything substantive. He just told jokes.Ronald Reagan used his humor and his ability to break the ice. He wasn’t comfortable with you and you coming in the Oval Office with strangers and talking.
Number one, he’s not going to tell you about what he’s doing. He doesn’t think it’s any of your damn business. Secondly, he’s not comfortable and so he uses his humor. He can do dialects. I mean the Jewish dialect, a gay dialect. He can tell an Irish ethnic joke. The guy was just unbelievably good at it and he’d break the ice with it. You’d listen to him. But if you were that type of person, you’d walk out of there and you’d say,
What the hell were we talking about? He didn’t tell me anything.“
The Reagans had very few friends:
The Reagans never had a lot of friends. I cannot sit here today and tell you of a good, close, personal friend. They had each other and a lot of acquaintances. Maybe Robert Taylor was, maybe Jimmy Stewart was, some of those people. Maybe Charlie Wick and his wife, but other than that, I don’t know of any that they had. The Tuttles? They were not what you’d call close friends of theirs. They did things together but . . . it was he and Nancy.
An aside on Jimmy Carter:
The primary campaign for Jimmy Carter, 1976, was one of the best campaigns I’ve ever seen in my lifetime. They did an outstanding job. The guy in January was nine per cent in the polls in terms of his name ID. He ends up getting the nomination. Lots of things had to go right for them. Lots of breaks they had to get, breaks that they didn’t create, but they got them.
All that considered, the primary campaign was just an outstanding one. It was a lot of Jimmy Carter’s effort. He worked his tail off. Things kept setting up for him. The Kennedys kept vacillating and going this way and that. Everything kept setting up for him. They ran an outstanding campaign.
They had problems in ’80 because issues caught up with them. Their governance was not as good as their ability to run, which happens. I attribute most of it to his micromanagement. All of the Reagan people learned a lot from watching that because we had the opposite. [laughs]
The whole thing is great, on Bush, Dan Quayle, Clinton, Thatcher, it’s like 129 pages long.
Two items to note from the obituary, by Mark A. Barabak:
and:
Spencer voted third party in 2016, for Joe Biden in 2020 and for Kamala Harris in 2024.
Some final advice from Spencer:
Finally I gave some major paper interview. It was on the plane. Marilyn [Quayle] was there and Dan Quayle was there. I was here and the press guy was here. The press guy starts out kind of warm and fuzzy and he says,
Who are your favorite authors?He looks at Marilyn, and he says,Who are my favorite authors?Oh, God.The second question is something about music. My position is, if you really haven’t thought about it in your own life, about who your favorite authors are, you can always say [Ernest] Hemingway. There are some names out there that you can use. If it’s music, you can say the Grateful Dead. Say anything you want to and think about it afterwards.
I was wrong, I like this guy better.
Jimmy Carter reconsidered
Posted: January 6, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, politics, presidents 1 Comment
Tyler Cowen didn’t like him. George Will didn’t like him. Ken Layne made me laugh:
Aren’t we always interested in the history that came right before we appear?
Delta Airlines has not one but two documentaries about Jimmy Carter available to view: Carterland and Jimmy Carter: Rock and Roll President. (Do these movies make money? Who is funding them?) I was able to watch most of both of them (without sound, with subtitles) on recent transcontinental travels. Rock and Roll President was particularly interesting, for example how Carter did not turn on Gregg Allman even after he was busted for and then testified in a case involving pharmaceutical cocaine, or the role John Wayne played in helping the Panama Canal treaty to pass
All this has me to prepared to somewhat revise my view of Carter’s presidency. His inability to “do something” about the Iranian hostage crisis was because he was unwilling to start a war or kill a lot of innocent Iranians. Though his temperament may not have suited him to win reelection, he improved life in the United States, made a lot of difficult choices on tough problems, avoided war (Panama could’ve been one). His presidency was devoted to peace, and helped heal the United States.
The contradictions are endless but was it not good for us, in that moment, to have a prayerful man of peace and leadership that reached for the spiritual?
Similar to the way Gerald Ford was later honored for his courage (?) in pardoning Richard Nixon, should Jimmy Carter be honored for absorbing political consequences of hard decisions and hard efforts that kept the peace?
At the Carter Library the fact that Carter never dropped a bomb or fired a missile during his presidency is highlighted. He’s the last president of whom that can be said. The American people don’t seem to want that.
Perhaps his story is a Christian story, of the martyr, the saint, who suffers as he absorbs our sins. A traveling preacher who came to town.
Perhaps all post-1945 US presidents should be judged on one standard only: whether there was a nuclear war on their watch. We must give Carter an A!
In his Miller Center interview, Jimmy Carter notes several times that the governor of Georgia is very powerful – more powerful, relative to the legislature, than the president is to Congress:
Fenno
Mr. President, I just wanted to follow up one question about the energy preparation. In your book you note that when you came to present the energy package, you were shocked, I think the word was shocked, by finding out how many committees and subcommittees this package would have to go through.
Carter
Yes.
Fenno
I guess my question is in the preparation that you went through, didn’t Congressmen tell you what you were going to find? Why were you shocked?
Carter
Well, I don’t know if I expressed it accurately in the book. I don’t think it was just one moment when all of a sudden somebody came in the Oval Office and said there was more than one committee in the Congress that has got to deal with energy. I had better sense than to labor under that misapprehension. But I think when Tip O’Neill and I sat down to go over the energy package route through the House, I think Jim Wright was there also, there were seventeen committee or subcommittee chairmen with whom we would have to deal. That was a surprise to me, maybe shock is too strong a word. But in that session or immediately after that, Tip agreed as you know to put together an ad hoc committee, an omnibus committee, and to let [Thomas Ludlow] Ashley do the work.
That, in effect, short-circuited all those fragmented committees. The understanding was, after the committee chairmen objected, that when the conglomerate committee did its work, then the bill would have to be resubmitted, I believe to five different, major committees. There were some tight restraints on what they could do in the way of amendment. So that process was completed as you know between April and August, an unbelievable legislative achievement.
In the Senate though, there were two major committees and there had to be five different bills and unfortunately, Scoop Jackson was on one side and Russell Long was on the other. They were personally incompatible with each other and they had a different perspective as well. Scoop had been in the forefront of those who were for environmental quality and that sort of thing, and Russell represented the oil interest. That was one of the things that caused us a problem. But we were never able to overcome the complexities in the Senate. In the House, we did short circuit the process. I never realized before I got to Washington, to add one more sentence, how fragmented the Congress was and how little discipline there was, and how little loyalty there would be to an incumbent Democratic President. All three of those things were a surprise to me.
Truman
Were those in sharp contrast to the experience in the Georgia legislature?
Carter
Well, there’s no Democratic-Republican alignment of the Georgia legislature. It’s all Democrats, and therefore, there is no party loyalty. You had to deal with individual members. The Governor is really much more powerful in Georgia than the President is in the United States. As Georgia Governor, I had line-item veto, for instance, in the appropriations bills. And, as you also know, in Georgia and in Washington, most of the major initiatives come from the executive branch. There’s very seldom a major piece of legislation that ever originates in the legislature. I think that there is a parallel relationship between the independent legislature confronting an independent Governor or the independent Congress confronting an independent President. At the state level, the Governor, at least in Georgia, is much more powerful than the President in Washington.
Neustadt
Did you have the same kind of subcommittee structure?
Carter
No. It’s not nearly so complicated.
Neustadt
That helps you too.
Carter
The seniority and the guarding of turf and so forth is not nearly so much of a pork barrel arrangement in the state legislature. Also, the Georgia legislature only serves forty days a year. They come and do their work in a hurry, and then they go home.
Truman
A simple legislature doesn’t have much staff either.
Carter
They are growing rapidly in staff, but nothing like the Congress. And you don’t have the insidious, legal bribery in the Georgia legislature that is so pervasive in the Congress. That’s a problem that’s becoming much more serious and I don’t believe that it’s going to be corrected until we have a major, national scandal in the Congress. I think it’s much worse than most people realize.
The reviews all focus on the presidency but Carter was an extremely effective governor of Georgia.
wish I could read this redacted story:
The ex-presidency of Carter is often cited as admirable, the work on guinea worm is undeniable. James Baker contacted Carter frequently. He helped convince Daniel Ortega to leave office. But then:
In the run-up to the 1991 Gulf War, Carter’s relationship with President Bush turned sour. Carter felt passionately that Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait wasn’t worth going to war over, even though Bush cited the Carter Doctrine in justifying it. The former president said so publicly, then took matters a fateful step further, writing each member of the UN Security Council and urging them to vote against the United States on the resolution.
That is wild! Brian Mulroney told the Bush White House about it and they were unsurprisingly pissed!
The Carter/ Bill Clinton relationship is funny, Alter says Carter’s freelance riffing with North Korea made Clinton apoplectic. Bill and Jimmy, could make an almost not boring play.
Maybe I will stake out the take that Carter was a great president and a mixed bag as an ex-president. Could be fun!
Consider this:
In 2016, the squabbling children of Martin Luther King Jr. needed Carter to mediate. They were at one another’s throats over their family’s possessions, including an old pool table. Brothers Marty and Dexter teamed up to sue sister Bernice, who had possession of their father’s Bible (used by Barack Obama to take the oath of office) and his Nobel Peace Prize. Carter’s approach was the same as at Camp David: both sides would agree at the end of the process to one document. This time, the document went through six or seven drafts, with the parties finally agreeing that Carter’s decisions on what would be sold or kept were to be final. One night Carter would be hard on Bernice; the next, on Dexter or Marty. Carter finally determined — and a judge soon ratified that Marty, as chairman of the estate, had control of the Bible and the Nobel, but they would be displayed at the King Center in Atlanta, not sold.
The one document method might be something practical we can all learn from Jimmy Carter. I haven’t felt like time spent studying this American original has been wasted. The more I learn about him the more complex he becomes.
(photo of Dolly and Jimmy borrowed from Parton News instagram)
His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life by Jonathan Alter
Posted: December 31, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
If you’re wondering why he’s wearing watchface facing in, submariner’s habit, so you could tell time while working the periscope.
As a preteen he castrated hogs, ploughed a field with a mule (Emma), sheered sheep, pulled boil weevils from cotton by hand. By the time he was a teenager he was a slumlord, renting out tenant cabins to black farmers. After he graduated the Naval Academy he went to work for Admiral Rickover, who was inventing the nuclear navy. “Life is a constant fight against stupidity,” Rickover used to say. When the classified Chalk River Laboratories – National Research Experimental reactor nearly melted down, he led a group of twenty four who donned primitive “anti-C” suits and rehearsed removing as many flanges and turning as many valves as possible in an allotted ninety seconds before entering the contaminated space. Their urine and feces was examined for six months afterwards (they turned out to have no ill effects). When his father died, he agonized about what to do, but decided to quit the Navy and go back home without telling his wife, who was furious.
“No matter what happened – if it was a beautiful day or my older son made all As on his report card… underneath it was gnawing wawy because I owned twelve thousand dollars and didn’t know how I was going to pay it,” he would say about the next two years. Around this time he joined the Lions Club, as his father had:
Any time Jimmy wanted a toehold in some distant community, he would speak at one of Georgia’s 180 Lions Clubs, most in small towns.
He became obsessed with the poetry of Dylan Thomas, and it was his efforts that started a movement that led to a stone for Thomas being placed in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey.
In Georgia at this time, there was a state requirement that busses carrying black kids to black schools had to have their fender painted black. Jimmy Carter was not a leader on integration. “This was a time, I’d say, of very radical elements on both sides,” he would say while he ran for president.
In 1962 the Supreme Court ruling in Baker v Carr enshrined a “one man, one vote” principle. Previously Georgia was organized on a “county unity system,” which meant Fulton County got only three times as many votes as a small rural county, even though it was 200x bigger.
Carter saw that by curbing the power of old courthouse politicians, Baker v. Carr would make a career in politics possible for a moderate like him.
The first time he ran for governor of Georgia he lost. “Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser,” was how he felt about that. He resolved to never lose another election. In 1970 he ran again, against Carl Sanders, who had helped bring major league baseball, football and basketball teams to Atlanta for the first time. Carter needed to win both racist George Wallace voters and liberal and black voters.
His solution was to avoid explicit mention of race in favor of class based populist appeals to Wallace voters, as well a overtures to moderates on education, the environment, and efficiency in government.
A research paper about southern populism by 25 year old Jody Powell affected his thinking. Powell would be a close aide all the way to the White House.
Carter shared his technique: “Notice how I didn’t ask for his vote. I said: ‘I want you to consider voting for me.'” At small and midsized campaign events, he would arrive early and park himself by the door so that he shook hands with every person entering the room – a simple and effective gesture neglected by many politicians.
During his inaugural speech as governor, he declared “the time for racial discrimination is over.” About a dozen conservative senators who had supported him walked out. But the speech got him on the cover of Time magazine.
During his term as governor he expected his team to work eighty and ninety hour weeks. He was aggressive, unrelenting, confrontational. Hunter S. Thompson would call Jimmy Carter one of the three meanest men he ever met – the other two being Muhammed Ali and Hells Angels president Sonny Barger.
“The conventional image of a sexy man is one who is hard on the outside and soft on the inside,” Sally Quinn wrote in the Washington Post. “Carter is just the opposite.”
When he ran for president his family was a tremendous advantage. During the Florida primary, Rosalynn and Edna Langford, her son’s mother-in-law, would drive into a town, look for the tallest antenna, and ask the station manager if someone wanted to interview them. Carter’s dynamic mother Lillian, who joined the Peace Corps at age sixty eight, would become a frequent guest on The Tonight Show.
Dick Cheney was working for Carter’s opponent Gerald Ford:
“Everybody knows about Plains Georgia and Lillian. Nobody really knows Ford,” Cheney wrote in a memo. “He never had a hometown. He never had a mother. He never had a childhood as far as the American people are concerned.”
Meanwhile:
Cutting the other way, Billy Carter crisscrossed Texas telling enthusiastic audiences that the Carers had always been conservatives, and that he would shoot Cesar Chavez, leader of the United Farm Workers of America union, if he came on his property.
It was a narrow win. If Ford hadn’t chucked Nelson Rockefeller, if Ford hadn’t said the thing in the debate about Eastern Europe, if.. if…
Exit polls showed that Carter won on pocketbook issues… The improbability of Carter’s victor struck speechwriter Rick Hertzberg who said later that electing him was as close “as the American people have every come to picking someone out of the phone book to be president.”
Hertzberg’s quote does not ring true to me. This was not a random guy. A nuclear engineer, a canny politician, a furious worker, a poet, rigid, deeply strange. As Alter says, comparing his post-presidency to the Clintons and Obamas, Carter was “built differently.” But then again Hertzberg knew him and I didn’t.
The parts of this book about the Carter presidency are mostly quite sad. Frustrations, bad luck, endless problems, prayers, defeats. An almost desperate search for spiritual answers, not even political ones. The great triumph, the Camp David Accords, took up enormous amounts of time and energy. Sadat had already visited Jerusalem, were Israel and Egypt on the road to peace anyway? I don’t know enough about it.
A good man, but not a good president, was and is a widely held opinion. Was he not a good president because he was a good man? Does dealing with the Ayatollah (or Congressional committee chairs) require a nasty operator on the level of Johnson or Nixon? Consider Reagan’s team, who got their hands on Carter’s debate prep book, and almost certainly cut a secret deal with the Iranians that involved selling weapons for the war with Iraq which killed more than a million people.
Was Carter caught between the pious Sunday school teacher and the tough engineer with not enough of the jolly, dealmaking, wink and a handshake stuff you need in our system?
Carter vocally committed the US to “human rights” as president. The resulting hypocrisies are not hard to spot. The Carter administration was effectively advising the Shah of Iran to shoot protestors, to take one example. Can human rights really be a presidential interest in this soiled world?
Can a true follower of Jesus ever be an effective US president?
Maybe the biggest way the Carter presidency ripples through daily life in 2025: deregulation. Trucking, rail, airlines, natural gas. Southwest Airlines, Wal-Mart, Amazon, the shale boom, none of these would be the same without Carter-era deregulation. The consequences are many and mixed, and the result may not have matched the vision. The main stated goal was to fight inflation, massive problem and major part of Carter’s undoing.
Biographies have to make the case for the subject’s significance (otherwise why am I reading?). So they might be biased towards showing a master shaping events. Alter’s Carter doesn’t come off like that, he seems blown about by winds beyond his control.
The book is great by the way, I was very absorbed. Something I should learn more about would be Carter’s relationship to unions, organized labor. In Passage of Power Caro, reporting on LBJ’s first presidential weekend mentions several calls with labor leaders like Walter Reuther. By the next Democratic presidency I hear almost nothing about labor. Jimmy was a business owner, manager and employer. Georgia was not a union friendly state. Maybe there’s a bigger story to be told about the collapse of US labor power between 1963 and 1976. Maybe Carter is a part of that story.
While he was governor Carter launched the Georgia Film Commission, which has had a significant impact on my life, as my friends are always flying to Atlanta to shoot stuff. Los Angeles is being outcompeted as a filming location.
Carter was friends with James Dickey, and helped arrange Georgia as a shooting location for Deliverance and The Longest Yard (using Georgia inmates).
On a recent visit to Atlanta* I had a chance to visit the Carter Library. I thought I might buy my daughter a present at the gift shop. After all, at the Reagan Library the gift shop is enormous, mugs, toys, models, posters, DVDs. At the Carter Library, not so:
Very sparse, not even all of Jimmy’s books.
There’s a replica of the Oval Office as it existed in Carter’s time. A recording of Carter says that tough, strong-willed people he’d known in Georgia would come to see him in the Oval Office, and the aura of the room would strike them dumb, they’d forget what they came to see him about.
I was very struck by this photo of Amy:
So vulnerable.
*Trip unrelated to Georgia Film Commission, although related to the Ted Turner cable empire, a tentacle of which will air Common Side Effects, premiering Feb. 2, 11:30pm, first airing on Cartoon Network/Adult Swim, streaming on Max next day. Don’t miss!
Jimmy Carter and Bob Dylan
Posted: December 8, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a commentJimmy Carter bonded with his son Chip over Dylan:
In 1969 Chip and his father hadn’t spoken for a year, mostly because of Chip’s drug use. They reconnected through Bob Dylan, whose album The Times They Are A-Changin’ they had enjoyed together. “We talked on the phone in Dylan verses because of the tensions,” Chip remembered. Struggling at Georgia Southwestern, Chip drove home to Plains at two in the morning, went to the foot of his parents’ bed, and informed them he was addicted to speed. Jimmy’s response was to tell his nineteen-year-old son to cut his hair, put away his bell-bottom jeans, and buy a suit. After promoting Powell, he assigned Chip to be his part-time driver in the campaign; that way, he could be with him often enough to make sure he wasn’t abusing drugs. Chip’s decades of substance abuse had only begun, but he said later that his parents’ intervention in 1969 saved his life.
Talking to Hunter S. Thompson:
The governor first impressed Thompson when he said that after theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, “the other source of my understanding about what’s right and wrong in this society is from a friend of mine, a poet named Bob Dylan.” He explained, “I grew up a landowner’s son. But I don’t think I ever realized the proper relationship between the landowner and those who worked on the farm until I heard Dylan’s record ‘I Ain’t Gonna Work on Maggie’s Farm No More?” Carter’s easy familiarity with Dylan’s work would harvest young votes once the 1976 primaries began.
Dylan enthusiasm culminated in a meeting while Carter was governor of Georgia:
From Jonathan Alter, His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life. I shared this story with Dylan enthusiast Vali, who told me posting it would be a service to the Dylan community. But the Dylan community being what it is, all connections to Carter are thoroughly covered in a post on flaggingdown.com, where I find this photo of Chip, Dylan, Jimmy and Jeff Carter.
Concerts became an important part of Carter’s early presidential campaign. It was not Dylan but another musician Carter considered indispensible:
October 1975 was when the campaign began to cohere. Rafshoon filmed Carter in a Florida pulpit and turned the sermon into two ads that began running in Iowa. Because each spot was five minutes long, Iowa voters saw them as news pieces, and they began breaking through. In the ads, Carter says, “T’ll never tell a lie. I’ll never make a false statement. I’ll never betray the confidence you have in me, and I won’t avoid a controversial issue. Watch television. Listen to the radio. If I do any of those things, don’t support me.” The ads were paid for in part by a series of inspired concerts arranged by the “godfather of rock” Phil Walden, president of Capricorn Records and a friend of Carter from Georgia. The first, by the Marshall Tucker Band, was held at Atlanta’s Fox Theatre. Soon Carter would raise money with the help of Charlie Daniels, Willie Nelson, Lynyrd Skynyrd, John Denver, Jerry Jeff Walker, Jimmy Buffett, and the Allman Brothers.* “If it hadn’t been for Gregg Allman, I never would have been president,” Carter said after Allman died in 2017.
The political risks of being associated with a druggy counterculture never concerned the candidate, even when he saw handmade “Coke Fiends for Carter” signs at his rallies. His admiration of the long-haired musicians was real and reciprocated, with many saying later that they felt a deep, almost mystical connection to him. And the fund-raising advantage offered by the rock concerts was significant. Each ticket stub was used as a receipt to show a contribution that could later be used for matching federal campaign funds.
Carter was also pals with Elvis. Elvis called Carter on the phone one day at the White House, apparently fucked up, shortly before he died.
Carter was smart at these concerts:
Carter understood just what to do onstage. “I’m gonna say four things,” he said at a rock concert in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1975. “First of all, I’m running for president. Secondly, I’m gonna be elected. Third, this is very im-portant, would you help me? Fourth, I want to introduce to you, my friends and your friends, the great Allman Brothers!” This was followed by thunderous applause. A politician who knew better than to make a speech at a rock concert was guaranteed to win the votes of thousands of grateful fans.
[Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson with U.S. Representative Victor Anfuso and his daughter (right) at a party at the Shoreham Hotel, Washington, D.C.] / MST. digital file from original
Posted: November 18, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
source. I’ve been listening to Caro’s Years of Lyndon Johnson: Passage of Power. Very calming in a way.
Caro makes much of the cruel “Rufus Cornpone” nickname (although he never says who made that up). JFK had his own nickname for LBJ. He called him “Riverboat.”
A tactic LBJ used was getting people to feel sorry for him:
Having observed Johnson close up for more than twenty years, Rowe was aware, he says, that Johnson would always use “whatever he could” to “make people feel sorry for him” because “that helped him get what he wanted from them.” But that awareness didn’t help Rowe when, in 1956, the person from whom Johnson wanted something was him. Having observed also how Johnson treated people on his payroll, he had for years been rejecting Johnson’s offers to join his staff, and had been determined never to do so. But Johnson’s heart attack in 1955 gave him a new weapon—and in January, 1956, he deployed it, saying, in a low, earnest voice, “I wish you would come down to the Senate and help me.” And when Rowe refused, using his law practice as an excuse (“ I said, ‘I can’t afford it, I’ll lose clients’ ”), Johnson began telling other members of their circle how cruel it was of Jim to refuse to take a little of the load off a man at death’s door. “People I knew were coming up to me on the street—on the street—and saying, ‘Why aren’t you helping Lyndon? Don’t you know how sick he is? How can you let him down when he needs you?’ ”
Johnson had spoken to Rowe’s law partner, Rowe found. “To my amazement, Corcoran was saying, ‘You just can’t do this to Lyndon Johnson!’ I said, ‘What do you mean I can’t do it?’ He said, ‘Never mind the clients. We’ll hold down the law firm.’ ” Johnson had spoken to Rowe’s wife. “One night, Elizabeth turned on me: ‘Why are you doing this to poor Lyndon?’ ”
Then Lyndon Johnson came to Jim Rowe’s office again, pleading with him, crying real tears as he sat doubled over, his face in his hands. “He wept. ‘I’m going to die. You’re an old friend. I thought you were my friend and you don’t care that I’m going to die. It’s just selfish of you, typically selfish.’ ”
Finally Rowe said, “Oh, goddamn it, all right”—and then “as soon as Lyndon got what he wanted,” Rowe was forcibly reminded why he had been determined not to join his staff. The moment the words were out of Rowe’s mouth, Johnson straightened up, and his tone changed instantly from one of pleading to one of cold command. “Just remember,” he said. “I make the decisions. You don’t.”
Amazing. But:
Now this technique was used with Jack Kennedy. At meetings, the soft voice was coupled with a face that varied between sullen and sorrowful—the look of a very sad man. And if pressed particularly pointedly by the President for an explanation or a recommendation, he would say, “I’m not competent to advise you on this,” sometimes adding that he didn’t have enough information on the subject, statements that Kennedy viewed, in Sorensen’s phrase, as being Johnson’s “own subtle way of complaining to the President” about his treatment. With Kennedy, however, the tactic had no success at all. “I cannot stand Johnson’s damn long face,” the President told his buddy Smathers. “He just comes in, sits at the Cabinet meetings with his face all screwed up, never says anything. He looks so sad.… You’ve seen him, George, you know him, he doesn’t even open his mouth.” Smathers suggested foreign travel. “You ought to send him on a trip so that he can get all of the fanfare and all of the attention … build up his ego again, let him have a great time”—and also, although Smathers didn’t say it, get him out of Kennedy’s hair. “You know, that’s a damn good idea,” Kennedy replied—and at the beginning of April sent him to Senegal, which was celebrating the first anniversary of its independence.”
Here they are the return from that trip. The man in the middle is listed as “Unidentified.”
Years of Theory
Posted: October 25, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945, everyone's a critic Leave a comment
Here’s an anecdote. One of Sartre’s closest friends in school was Raymond Aron, a conservative, pro-American political scientist. In those days, the French government had scholarships to various foreign countries. They started a whole French school in Brazil. Lévi-Strauss himself taught in that school and his early work is the result of that contact with Brazil. Roland Barthes taught on this scholarship in Egypt, because the French had a teaching fellowship in Cairo. There was one in Berlin, and when Aron had just gotten back he said, “There’s this thing called phenomenology. What does it mean?” He is sitting in a cafe with Sartre and Beauvoir, and Aron says, “What it means is: you can philosophize about that glass of beer.” Suddenly, the whole idea that phenomenology allowed one to think, write, and philosophize about elements of daily life transforms everything. As historically reconstructed by participants, the drink turns out to have been a crème de menthe, but that doesn’t matter too much. That’s the lesson that these people got from phenomenology, and that’s what seems to me to set off this immense period of liberation from philosophy, a liberation toward theory.
What is postmodern? Structuralist? When someone’s making a Marxist critique of like semiology, what’s happening?
Deluze. Sartre. Levi-Strauss. Lacan. Barthes. Foucault: who were these guys? what’s up here? What is the meaning of these names both as signifiers and signified and as referent?
Theory, structuralism, might not sound important. Academic stuff. Easy to dismiss. But guess what? Theory Thought has real, practical, worldly impact. These ideas are powerful.
The great sentence is not pronounced by Sartre but by Simone de Beauvoir: “On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.” 8 You aren’t born a woman: you become a woman. You are constructed and you construct yourself as a woman.
Interrogating, politicizing, gendering, queering, these are Theory ideas. Lived experience. My truth. The fathers of both Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg were Theory-adjacent professors, does that have any meaning? And DJT? The Theorists would say of course, a media figure whose words have no meaning and every meaning? who cannot be taken literally or seriously yet must only be taken literally and seriously? who seems to break reality by his very existence? create experiences across which no translation is possible? That was exactly what we’re talking about. This was the inevitable outcome. Don’t be mad at us for calling it.
Anxiety is: you can’t be free, and you can’t really be authentic, unless you feel anxiety. The French word is angoisse, so the translator is tempted to use the word “anguish,” which is the false friend, the immediate cognate of angoisse. Anguish, that makes it too metaphysical. In French, angoisse is an everyday word. At least angoissé( e). It means, I don’t have any cigarettes—can I go out? I’m waiting for a phone call. Then you’re angoissé( e). That doesn’t mean you’re in anguish, like one of the saints. It just means you have anxiety, and anxiety is an everyday experience.
Making thoughts actions, and words tools of power. Now, Theory would argue, twas ever thus we’re just pointing it out. Language has always been a tool of power. (But Theory would say that, wouldn’t it?)
Karl Marx was a Theorist. The master Theorist. His theory infected and took over huge portions of the world. Many millions died. There are places named after Karl Marx in Cuba Vietnam Russia China etc. All that from a theory he worked out over pints at a pub after doing his reading at The British Museum.
The Years of Theory: Lectures on Modern French Thought aka Postwar French Thought to the Present by Frederic Jameson may be one of the highest value books I ever bought. It is dense. But it’s less dense than Jameson’s other books, because it is transcripts of the guy talking.
If you’re very good at skipping/skimming huge parts of books, it’s fantastic. The drag may be sections where the ideas are so big, weird, vague or complicated that this reader found themself often saying “ok I’m moving on here because my mind is already blown and my circuits are fried.”
Now let’s look at this from a different point of view. We have said that each of these philosophical periods—Greece, the Germans, and now the French—are characterized by a problematic, but a changing problematic, a production of new problems. This is, in effect, Deleuze’s whole philosophy, the production of problems. But, if you put it that way, if you say philosophy’s task is the production of problems, what problems could there be if philosophy has come to an end? These problematics always end up producing a certain limit beyond which they are no longer productive.
The book functions pretty well as a history of France since WW2. Jameson quotes Sartre talking about the Occupation:
Never were we freer than under the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to speak. We were insulted to our faces every day and had to remain silent. We were deported en masse as workers, Jews, or political prisoners. Everywhere—on the walls, on the movie screens, in the newspapers—we came up against the vile, insipid picture of ourselves our oppressors wanted to present to us. Because of all this, we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped into our very thoughts, every accurate thought was a triumph. Because an all-powerful police force tried to gag us, every word became precious as a declaration of principle. Because we were wanted men and women, every one of our acts was a solemn commitment.
On the power and demise of the French Communist party:
The minute Mitterrand includes them in his government, they disappear. That’s the end of the Communist Party. After 1980, the Party is nothing. Of course, it is even less than nothing after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. There is still a Communist Party in France, of course, but its power is broken. Mitterrand’s political act here is a very cunning tactic of cooptation, which does them in as rivals to his socialist government, which itself ends up being not very socialist. But, in this period, the Party is a presence; it can irritate all these intellectuals. They revolt against it in various ways.
An idea: Theory begins for real after Camus. Camus says, man’s search for meaning? Forget it. No meaning. You’re pushing a rock up a hill. It’s absurd. Consider Sisyphus happy, live, move on.
Theory maybe says, sure ok but what even is Being? What is it that “we” (?) are experiencing? Jameson:
I’m alive in this moment when the sun is dying, or when climate change is destroying the planet, so many years from the big bang. So also with the body. I have a tendency to fat. Okay, that’s my situation. But I have to live that in some way. I have to choose that. So I keep dieting; I keep struggling against it. Or I let myself go completely. Or I become jolly like Falstaff. We are not free not to do something with this situation. Freedom is our choice of how we deal with it, but we have to deal with it, because it is us. But it’s not us in the way a thing is a thing. We are not our body. We are our body on the mode of not being it. We want people to understand that we are different, that we have a personality, that we’re not exactly what our body seems.
Here’s another one:
Everything we are we have to play at being, even if we don’t feel it that way. That’s a social function, so, of course, you have to rise to the occasion and play at being that social function.
Terry Eagleton, reviewing the book in the LRB, says:
and:
Theory was a big Yale and Duke and Brown thing. There was some of it at Harvard, but it’s not so easy to buy Theory when you remember Cotton Mather and John Adams and John Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt.
I once interviewed an East German novelist who was quite interesting at the time, and we asked him the then-obvious question: “How much of an influence did Faulkner have on you?” As you know, after the war, all over the world, it is the example of Faulkner that sets everything going, from the Latin American boom to the newer Chinese novel. Faulkner is a seminal world influence at a certain moment. But what does that mean, “Faulkner’s influence”? So he said, “No, I never learned anything from Faulkner—except that you could write page after page of your novel in italics.”
Any time Jameson says “here’s a story for you” or “start with a bit of biography” I perk up. What would the narratologists say about that? Why are stories so addictive? So much more popular than Theory? To answer those questions would be to Theorize stories. Should you spend your time Theorizing stories? Or telling stories?
Why is this detail included in Jameson’s Wikipedia page?:
Both his parents had non-wage income over $50 in 1939 (about USD$1130 in 2024)).[12][15]
Church & state
Posted: October 23, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a commentFrom 1940 to 2000 — through rock ’n’ roll, through the sexual revolution — an eerily stable 70-ish per cent of Americans belonged to a church. From the millennium, that share started collapsing to what is now less than half.
Janan Ganesh in FT. He’s trying to reason through why every US election ends up 50/50.
The stabilisation of the west after 1945 is really a story of dominant parties, such as the Conservatives in the UK, the Christian Democrats in Germany, the right in France and to some extent the Democrats in the US, who ran Congress for much of the second half of the 20th century. The ascendant party could afford to be magnanimous, while the other had every incentive to appeal beyond its base. Veering too far from the centre brought Goldwater-style annihilation. Competition between equals is beautiful in theory. In practice? Well, how edifying have you found the past couple of decades?
(is that true?)
Drop the Trop
Posted: October 10, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945, archaeology, architecture Leave a commentThey imploded The Tropicana in Las Vegas, clearing room for a potential future stadium for the former Oakland As.
The strangeness of The Tropicana had my fascination.
Doomed for a long time, it was near vacant inside, adding to the odd effect.
On a visit to Las Vegas a couple years ago for Badlani’s birthday I took a walk through there. I was certain I’d taken a set of photos of the place, but today I couldn’t find them. The problems of archiving and curating remain, maybe even more challenging, in the age of infinite photos. What happened to them? Did I delete them as unsatisfactory? Are they lost in the cloud?
I can reconstruct some of the atmosphere from found pieces. Those above are from UK site Freedom Destinations. Here’s one from Oyster.com:
Those strange white couches. The Tropicana seemed like it had given up years ago, and yet the whites were kept close to spotless. A bleached aesthetic. The place was like a 1960s idea of the 1990s, or a 1990s idea of the 1960s. A coherent incoherence.
I find a fine set of photos of the lost Tropicana at, of course, reddit/r/LiminalSpaces:
The most times I ever heard the word “liminal” was in a debate between two professors that broke out during Sue Bell’s masters’ presentation in public art.
Strangely, for whatever reason the one photo of The Tropicana my phone seems to have preserved is this one:
Robert Coover
Posted: October 8, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945, baseball, writing 1 Comment
The postmodernist Robert Coover died at 92. The Universal Baseball Association is the only one of his I’ve read. This is how the NYT describes it in Coover’s obituary:
Mr. Coover’s many other books included “The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop.” (1968), about an accountant who invents a fantasy-baseball game and is driven mad by it
That’s accurate enough I guess. I loved reading the book. It’s the only one of Coover’s I read, and although it’s sort of fantastical, the plot’s kinda straightforward and the setting is vivid and lived-in. I went looking for the back cover copy that was on my old edition:
He eats delicatessen.
In new editions that’s updated to “take-out,” a mistake in my opinion. I remember Fener laughing out loud when he read that off the back cover when he found it in my office. The term “b-girl” was also dated by the time I read it, it seemed to mean something like this.
Spoiler below as I recall the plot:
Waugh is playing out a season of a dice based fantasy baseball game of his own invention. A star player, a wonderful pitcher, freakishly good emerges, and Henry comes to love him. Then one night he rolls the dice and can’t believe the outcome. The player is killed by a pitch. Henry can’t believe it. It shatters his world. It seems to be sort of a metaphor for God and Jesus (J. Henry Waugh/Yahweh).
The idea of going home to your own private world was on my mind at the time I read the book, when I was a young single man in LA, I’d leave work at 6pm or whatever and walk home to my one bedroom apartment and read or work on writing scripts or novels. It spoke to me, and what spoke to me about it wasn’t the postmodernism (in fact the metaphorical stuff kinda made me roll my eyes) but the realism, the portrait of a life, the investment and absorption into a private entertainment, the sadness and loss of having the game shattered.
So, salute to Robert Coover.
Presidential Dad Trivia
Posted: September 21, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
(source)
George W. Bush, interviewed by David Rubinstein of the Carlyle Group in his book The Highest Calling: Conversations on the American Presidency.
This is not accurate. There was Joseph Kennedy:
who outlived three of his sons. Nathaniel Fillmore lived to be 91, and saw all of son Millard’s presidency. George Harding outlived son Warren, he died in Santa Ana, California.
In his biography of Warren G. Harding, Charles L. Mee describes Tryon Harding as “a small, idle, shiftless, impractical, lazy, daydreaming, catnapping fellow whose eye was always on the main chance”.
The W. Bush interview is frustrating to those of us who think he ruined everything:
How about this:
Well, I’m glad it was nice for you. (Genuinely, I am. The guy has charm, despite the catastrophes. What does that tell us? How can we profit from knowing that a president will come along the consequences of whom are awful and we still are lured in?)
W. does seem to take some responsibility here, on the bank bailouts:
W. Bush seems like a guy who says, well, I made the best decision under the circumstances and then shrugs at the consequences. That was the vibe I got from his book, Decision Points. Just because the consequences are appalling, doesn’t mean it was a bad decision. They no doubt taught him that at Harvard Business School.
In his Miller Center interview, Karl Rove tells a story from the transition meeting with Bill Clinton:
Riley
So this was the one personal thing. Who came up with the line, “When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible”?
Rove
Him.
Riley
Him?
Rove
Yes. As he’s also the author—He stole the idea—of “compassionate conservatism.” When we saw Clinton after the election, he said [imitating Clinton], “When I heard you say that phrase, ‘compassionate conservatism,’ George, I knew we were in deep trouble. That’s brilliant, it was just brilliant.”
W communications guy Dan Bartlett tells another:
When they had their transition meeting, as always happens, he asked him. “How’d you get better at it?” Clinton said, “Two things. First, you’re going to give a lot of speeches, so just practice. Practice more than anything else is going to make you better. Secondly, I learned how to take my time and to pause.” He told him a trick. He said, “On every other sentence or maybe every third sentence, it was one or the other, when I hit a period I would count in my head—one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three—before I’d read the next sentence. It will be hard for you to pull that off, because it feels like an eternity.”
I don’t know if you’ve done public speaking. I do it now. To master the pause, which Clinton now is brilliant at. He said, “Pacing is everything in speechwriting.” So he took that to heart. He took it, but what Clinton was good at, which Bush was never good at, was that while he was not a gifted speaker, he was an authentic communicator. It was always up to us to make sure that he really believed—Clinton could make the signing of a post office bill like the Gettysburg Address. He could take anything and at a moment’s notice turn it around. You knew when Bush was mailing one in.
Glimpses of Robert F. Kennedy (Senior)
Posted: August 25, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945, Kennedy-Nixon Leave a comment
(source: MO 2021.4.249 at the JFK Library)
from Herb Caen’s column, January 5, 1968:
At 12:45 p.m. on Wednesday, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was standing curbside on Sacramento St. near Montgomery, dripping charisma all over the place. He was chatting with two of his henchmen (Democrats have henchmen, Republicans have aides) and his mere presence had an electrifying effect. Motorists slowed down to gape at him. A chubby, giggling Japanese waitress emerged from a coffee shop to wait, shivering, for an autograph.
An elderly Japanese in a black overcoat asked for one, too (you know how these Easterners stick together). Four men emerging from the Red Knight suddenly stopped, transfixed, to stare at him as they picked their teeth with toothpicks. The Senator glanced at them with a tentative smile. They moved on, still picking their teeth.
“Lunch,” he said, jaywalking toward Jack’s with a young henchman, Peter Edelman. We went upstairs to Private Dining Room One, a one-windowed cubicle barely big enough for three. The Senator-it’s hard to refrain from calling him “Bobby” although his friends call him “Bob” —stared at the buzzer on the wall. “To summon the girls,” I said. He looked nervous till I explained that it USED to be possible to take girls upstairs at Jack’s. “Now then,” I went on, “let’s light up cigars and nominate a Vice-President” (I forgot to tell you, I’m great fun at parties). He smiled a tiny one. The waiter whispered nervously in my ear: “How do I address him?” “Senator,” I whispered back. “Sir,” said the waiter, clearing his throat, “would you like a drink?” The Senator ordered a beer-“Coors.” …
In casual conversation, the celebrated toughness isn’t apparent. In 90 minutes, he made only one bitter remark—while talking about an Air Force decision (made over McNamara’s objec-tions) that cost us nine planes in Vietnam. He went on to the “futil-ity® of bombing North Vietnam, and recalled how, during World War II, German production had actually increased under heavy bombing. “The Air Force,” he snapped, “is never right.”…
We ordered fresh cracked crab. “This is wonderful,” he enthused.
With a glance out the window: “What a beautiful city.” Helping himself to more mayonnaise: “I could sit here all afternoon, eating cracked crab.” He asked about Joe Alioto and (a note of concern here how Eugene McCarthy is doing in California, but he wouldn’t be drawn out on the subject. Hunters Point came up and I mentioned that Eastern newsmen were always saying that our slums are garden spots compared to theirs. He nodded: “It’s better to be poor in San Francisco than rich in New York.”
“If the war is still on when your oldest son reaches the draft age,” I said, “what will you tell him?” He took evasive action. “Well, we’d talk about it, all about it, and then I guess it would be his deci-sion.” Then he told, with apparent approval, an anecdote about a friend of his who had been “a terrific hawk” before he went to Viet-ham and who is now “a terrific dove.” “He has an 18-year-old son,” Kennedy went on, “and he told me ‘If that kid doesn’t burn his draft card, I’ll do it for him!'”
***
We stepped outside and he was immediately engulfed by auto-graph-seekers. “Senator,” somebody called out, “your helicopter is waiting”— just like in the movies, and he drove away with a wave and that shy smile. Would I vote for him for President? Well, a man who likes our cracked crab and thinks it’s better to be poor in San Francisco than rich in New York …
Steve Shapiro took these photos:
They’re sometimes cited as being from RFK’s presidential campaign, but the one above is from a 1966 trip to California, where he did some campaigning with Pat Brown.
That one New York, Senate campaign.
I found them in Shapiro’s book, American Edge.
California again. That must be the Berkeley Greek Theater. Here’s how The New York Times reported on that speech (front page):
Pat Brown lost that election to Ronald Reagan.
From Ted Kennedy’s memoir True Compass:
(source)
from a Miller Center interview with Reagan campaign aide Stuart Spencer in November, 2001:
I did a thing at Annenberg School last week. It’s a journalism school at University of Southern California communications center. Ed Guttman is involved with it. He was one of Bobby’s guys, and he was there that night. I said to Ed, Maybe you don’t want to answer this question, but one thing that’s always in my mind: politically, why did Bobby, once he became Attorney General, decide to go after the people his father had put together to finance some of this effort? It was a lot of the hoods and Chicago guys that he’d done business with when he was a bootlegger. There’s been references to it, but did Bobby not know that this transpired? Or did Bobby say to his dad, The hell with it, this is good politics. The hell with it—I believe this—these are bad people. He went right to the heart of what thirty years before were Joe Kennedy’s business associates.
There are conspiracy theories out there that cost him his life. I don’t know if they’re true or not, but God, that’s a fascinating triangle. He wouldn’t answer the question. He said, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never seen that before in our life. It’s like you have the support of the National Rifle Association or the National Environmental Council and you get into power and you gut them. I’ve never seen that before. But he went after them tooth and toenail.
(source: https://www.loc.gov/item/98509265/ )
In Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger, Bobby Western talks to his lawyer, Kline. Kline gets going on the Kennedys (the bold is mine, long but intriguing):
You didnt have some connection with the Kennedys.
No.
I worked with Bobby in Chicago in the early sixties. Briefly. We were working with a guy named Ed Hicks who was trying to get free elections for the Chicago cabdrivers. Basically Kennedy was a mor-alist. Before long he was to have an amazing roster of enemies and he prided himself on knowing who they were and what they were up to. Which he didnt, of course. By the time his brother was shot a couple of years later they were mired up in a concatenation of plots and schemes that will never be sorted out. At the head of the list was killing Castro and if that failed actually invading Cuba. In the end I dont think that would have happened but it’s a sort of bellwether for all the trouble they were in. I always wondered if there might not have been a moment there when Kennedy realized he was dying that he didnt smile with relief. After old man Kennedy had his stroke the Kennedys for some reason felt that it would be all right to go after the Mafia. Ignoring the longstanding deal the old man had cut with them. No idea what they were thinking. All the time Jack is schtupping Sam Giancana’s girl-friend—a lady named Judith Campbell. Although in all fairness-quaint term—I think that Jack saw her first. Or one of his pimps did. Some guy named Sinatra.
What are you going to say about the Kennedys? There’s no one like them. A friend of mine was at a houseparty out on Martha’s Vineyard one evening and when he got to the house Ted Kennedy was greeting people at the door. He was dressed in a bright yellow jumpsuit and he was drunk.
My friend said: That’s quite an outfit you’ve got on there, Senator. And Kennedy said yes, but I can get away with it. My friend-who’s a Washington lawyer-told me that he had never understood the Ken-nedys. He found them baffling. But he said that when he heard those words the scales fell from his eyes. He thought that they were probably engraved on the family crest. However you say it in Latin. Anyway, I’ve never understood why there is no monument anywhere to Mary Jo Kopechne. The girl Ted left to drown in his car after he drove it off a bridge. If it were not for her sacrifice that lunatic would have been President of the United States. My guess is that with the exception of Bobby they were just a pack of psychopaths. I suppose it was Bobby’s hope that he could somehow justify his family. Even though he must have known that was impossible. There wasnt a copper cent in the coffers that funded the whole enterprise that wasnt tainted. And then they all died.
Murdered, for the most part. Maybe not Shakespeare. But not bad Dostoevsky.
Castro was no part of this.
No. In the end as it turned out he wasnt.
When he took over the island he threw Santo Trafficante in jail and told him that he was going to be shot as an enemy of the people. So of course Trafficante just said:
How much? You hear different figures. Forty million. Twenty million. It was probably closer to ten. But Trafficante wasnt happy about it. The Mafia had a long history of running the casinos for Ba-tista. Castro should have treated them bet-ter. The Mafia. He’s lucky to be alive. The odd thing is that Santo ran three casinos in Cuba for another eight or ten years after that. Language is important. People forget that Trafficante’s first language is Spanish.
Anyway, he and Marcello have run the Southeast from Miami to Dallas for years.
And the net worth of this enterprise is staggering. At its height over two billion a year. Bobby Kennedy wouldnt have deported Marcello without Jack’s okay, but by now the whole business was beyond disentanglement. The CIA hated the Ken-nedys and were working at cutting themselves loose from the administration al-together, but the notion that they killed Kennedy is stupid. And if Kennedy was going to take the CIA apart piece by piece as he promised to do he’d have had to start about two administrations sooner. By his time it was way too late. The CIA hated Hoover too and Hoover in turn hated the Kennedys and people just assumed that Hoover was in bed with the Mafia but the truth was the Mafia had endless files of Hoover as a transvestite-dressed in ladies’ underwear-so that was a Mexican standoff that had been in play for years.
There’s more to it of course. But if you said that Bobby had gotten his brother-whom he adored —killed, I would have to say that was pretty much right. The CIA hauled Carlos off to the jungles of Guatemala and flew away waving back at him. Hard to imagine what they were thinking. They left him there-where he held a counterfeit passport-and his lawyer finally showed up and then the two of them were frogmarched off into the jungles of El Salvador and left to fashion new lives for them-selves. Standing there in the heat and the mud and the mosquitoes. Dressed in wool suits. They hiked some twenty miles until they came to a village. And, God be praised, a telephone. When he got back to New Orleans he called a meeting at Churchill Farms-his country place-and he was foaming at the mouth over Bobby Kennedy. He looked at the people in the room-I think there were eight of them-and he said: I’m going to whack the little bastard. And it got very quiet. Everybody knew it was a serious meeting. There was nothing on the table to drink but water.
And finally somebody said: Why dont we whack the big bastard? And that was that.
I’m not sure I understand.
If you killed Bobby then you had a really pissed off JFK to deal with. But if you killed JFK then his brother went pretty quickly from being the Attorney General of the United States to being an unemployed lawyer.
How do you know all this?
Right. The thing about the Kennedys was that they had no way to grasp the in-appeasable war-ethic of the Sicilians. The Kennedys were Irish and they thought that you won by talking. They didnt really even understand that this other thing existed. They used abstractions to make political speeches. The people. Poverty. Ask not what your country blah blah blah.
They didnt understand that there were still people alive who actually believed in things like honor. They’d never heard Joe Bonanno on the subject. That’s what makes Kennedy’s book so preposterous.
Although in all fairness there’s some question as to whether or not he ever even read it. I’m having the chicken grande.
All right.
You want to pick the wine?
Sure.
Michael Herr talking about the Kennedys in Las Vegas in The Big Room;
Because even then his kid brother was around like a mongoose on Benzedrine, watching, keeping tabs and running the connections down to their root-ends, to see exactly who was friends with who, and who to play up, or down, or chop completely. The older brother’s playground was the younger brother’s nightmare. Still, the action was invigorating. It’s possible that more of the New Frontier was inspired here at the Sands than back on the Massachusetts bedrock or looking dreaming out of the office window at the Jefferson Memorial.
One more from Brother Edward:
Reedy, Twilight of the Presidency
Posted: August 18, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945, politics, presidents Leave a comment
It’s time to revisit George Reedy, Twilight of the Presidency.
I can’t do better as a summary than this 1970 review by William C. Spragens in The Western Political Quarterly found on JSTOR:
The edition I read is updated for the Reagan administration. Some choice passages:
In talking to friends about the presidency, I have found the hardest point to explain is that setbacks often impel presidents to redouble their efforts without changing their policies. This seems to be perversity because very few of us have the opportunity to make decisions of colossal consequences. When our projects go wrong, it is not too difficult for most of us to shrug our shoulders, cut our losses, and take off on a new tack. Our egos may be bruised. But we can live with that. It is a different thing altogether when we can give orders that can lead to large-scale death and destruction or even to economic devastation. Such a situation brings into play psychological factors that are virtually unconquerable.
Suppose, for example, that a president gives the military an order that leads to the deaths of several soldiers in combat. Can any human being who did such a thing say to himself: “Those men are dead because I was a God-damned fool! Their blood is on my hands.” The likely thought is: “Those men died in a noble cau and we must see to it that their sacrifice was not in vain.”
This, of course, could well be the “right” answer. But even if it is the wrong answer, it is virtually certain to be the one that will be accepted. Therefore, more men are sent and then more and then more. Every death makes a pull out more unacceptable.
Furthermore, when a large amount of blood has been spilled, a point can be reached where popular opposition to a policy will actually spur a president to redoubled effort in its behalf. This is due to the aura of history that envelops every occupant of the Oval Office. He lives in a museum, a structure dedicated to preserving the greatness of the American past. He walks the same halls paced by Lincoln waiting feverishly for news from Gettysburg or Richmond. He dines with silver used by Woodrow Wilson as he pondered the proper response to the German declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare. He has staring at him constantly portraits of the heroic men who faced the same excruciating problems in the past that he is facing in the present. It is only a matter of time until he feels himself a member of an exclusive community whose inhabitants never finally leave the mansion. When stories leaked out that Richard Nixon was “talking to the pictures” in the White House, it was taken by many as evidence that he was cracking up. To anyone who has had the opportunity to observe a president at close range, it is perfectly normal conduct.
(This may be a problem beyond presidents. Do we all have a tendency to double down on our most consequential decisions, even if the results are obviously disastrous?)
The life of the monarch:
As noted, an essential characteristic of monarchy is untouchability. No one touches a king unless he is specifically invited to do so. No one thrusts unpleasant thoughts upon a king unless he is ordered to do so, and even then he does so at his own peril. The response to unpleasant information has been fixed by a pattern with a long history. Every courtier recalls, either literally or instinctively, what happened to the messenger who brought Peter the Great the news of the Russian defeat by Charles XII at the Battle of Narva. The courtier was strangled by decree of the czar. A modern-day monarch-at least a monarch in the White House-cannot direct the placing of a noose around a messenger’s throat for bringing him bad news. But his frown can mean social and economic strangulation. Only a very brave or a very foolish person will suffer that frown.
Some ways in which this effect takes shape:
In retrospect, it is almost impossible to believe that John Kennedy embarked on the ill-fated Bay of Pigs venture. It was poorly conceived, poorly planned, poorly executed, and undertaken with grossly inadequate knowledge. But anyone who has ever sat in on a White House council can easily deduce what happened without knowing 34 THE I any facts other than those which appeared in the public press. White House councils are not debating matches in which ideas emerge from the heated exchanges of participants. The council centers around the president, himself, to whom everyone addresses his observations.
The first strong observations to attract the favor of the president become subconsciously the thoughts of everyone in the room. The focus of attention shifts from a testing of all concepts to a groping for means of overcoming the difficulties. A thesis that could not survive an undergraduate seminar in a liberal arts college becomes accepted doctrine, and the only question is not whether it should be done but how it should be done.
Reedy on White House aides as courtiers, and how Vietnam could’ve happened (he was there!):
Unfortunately, the problem is far deeper than the machinations of courtiers. They do exist in large numbers but most of their energies are absorbed in grabbing for personal favors and building havens of retreat for the future. Generally speaking, they play the role in the White House of the court jesters of the Middle Ages and may even be useful in that they give the chief executive badly needed relaxation. Paradoxically , it is the advisers who are not sycophantic, who are not looking for snug harbors, and who do feel the heavy weight of responsibility who are the most likely to play the reinforcing role. It is precisely because they recognize the ultimacy of the office that they react the way they do.
However they feel, the burden of decision is on another man. Therefore, however much they may argue against a policy at its beginning stages, once it is set they become “good soldiers” and devote their time to making it work.
Those who disagree strongly tend to remain in the structure in the vain hope they can change it coupled with the certainty that they would become totally ineffectual if they left.
This is the bitter lesson we should have learned from Vietnam. In the early days of that conflict, it might have been possible to pull out. My most vivid memories are the meetings early in Lyndon Johnson’s presidency in which his advisers (virtually all holdovers from the Kennedy administration) were looking to him for guidance on how to proceed. He, on the other hand, felt an obligation to continue the Kennedy policies and he was looking to them for indications of what steps would carry out such a course. I will always believe that someone misread a signal from the other side with the resultant commitment to full-scale fighting. After that, all the resources of the federal government were devoted to advising the president on how to do what it was thought he wanted to do.
Reedy on the White House as Versailles:
Sir Thomas Malory seems to have missed the true significance of King Arthur’s Round Table. As long as his knights ate at it every day under King Arthur’s watchful eye and lived in his palace where he could call them by shouting through the corridors, they were his to ensure that the kingdom would be ruled the way he wanted it ruled. Louis XIV did not build the Palace of Versailles as a tourist attraction but as a huge dormitory where he could keep tabs on the nobles who were disposed to become insubordinate if they spent all their time on their own estates. Peter the Great downgraded the boyars whose power rested on their distance from Moscow and brought the reins of government into his own hands by making all the top officials dependent on him. And the Turkish sultans reached the ultimate in the creation of personal force by raising young Christian boys captured in combat as Janissaries who lived solely to defend the ruler.
Reedy has a great chapter titled “What Does The President Do?”:
A president is many things. Basically, however, his functions fall into two categories. First, and perhaps most important, he is the symbol of the legitimacy and the continuity of our government. It is only through him that power can be exercised effectively-but only until opposition forces rally themselves to counter it. Second, he is the political leader of our nation. He must resolve the policy questions that will not yield to quantitative, empirical analysis and then persuade enough of his countrymen of the rightness of his decisions so that they are carried out without disrupting the fabric of society.
At the present time, neither of these functions can be carried out without the president.
He notes that the idea of the President “working” is confusing:
Despite the widespread belief to the contrary, there is far less to the presidency, in terms of essential activity, than meets the eye. The psychological burdens are heavy, even crushing, but no president ever died of overwork and it is doubtful that any ever will. The chief executive can, of course, fill his working hours with as much motion as he desires. The “crisis” days (the American hostages held in Iran or the attempted torpedoing of American navy vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin) keep office lights burning into the midnight hours. But in terms of actual administration, the presidency is pretty much what the president wants to make of it. He can delegate the “work” to subordinates and reserve for himself only the powers of decision as did Eisenhower, or he can insist on maintaining tight control over every minor detail, like Lyndon Johnson.
Presidents on vacation:
It is impossible to take a day and divide it with any sure sense of confidence into “working hours” and “nonworking hours.” But it is apparent from the large volume of words that have been written about presidents that in the past few decades, the only one who seemed able to relax completely was Eisenhower. He was capable of taking a vacation for the sake of enjoying himself, and he disdained any suggestion that he was acting otherwise.
Franklin Roosevelt apparently had little or no time to devote to relaxation. He was notorious for using his dinner hours as a means of lobbying bills through Congress. Once Harry Truman had made a decision he was able to put it out of his mind and proceed to another problem. Furthermore, he too disdained any pretensions of working when he wasn’t. But those who were close to him made it clear that he really didn’t know what to do with himself when he took a holiday. His favorite resort was Key West, Florida, where he would “go fishing” but he would hold a rod only if someone put it in his hands, and about all he really enjoyed was the sunshine and the opportunity to take long walks.
John Kennedy was described as a “compulsive reader” who could not pass up any written document regardless of its relevance to his problems or its contents. Many of his intimates reported that any spare time would find him restlessly prowling the White House looking for something to read. Lyndon Johnson anticipated with horror long weekends in which there was nothing to do. He usually spent Saturday afternoons in lengthy conferences with newspaper reporters who were hastily summoned from their homes to spend hours listening to Johnson expound the thesis that his days were so taken up with the nation’s business that he had no time to devote to friends.
The real misery of the average presidential day is the haunting knowledge that decisions have been made on incomplete information and inadequate counsel. Tragically, the information must always be incomplete and the counsel always inadequate, for in the arena of human activity in which a president operates there are no quantitative answers. He must deal with those problems for which the computer offers no solution, those disputes where rights and wrongs are so inextricably mixed that the righting of every wrong creates a new wrong, those divisions which arise out of differences in human desires rather than differences in the available facts, those crisis moments in which action is imperative and cannot wait upon orderly consideration. He has no guideposts other than his own philosophy and intuition, and if he is devoid of either, no one can substitute.
Reedy summarizes something Robert Caro goes into some detail about (how did an obscure Texas congressman obtain power?):
The office is at such a lonely eminence that no standard rules of the political game govern the approaches to it. Johnson told fascinating stories about the tactics he had used, while still a member of the House, to extract favors from FDR. He made a practice of driving Roosevelt’s secretary, Grace Tully, to the White House every morning. This gave him an opportunity to drop words in her ear, give her memoranda knowing she would pass them on to the “boss,” and learn personal characteristics that he could exploit at a later date. He once filed away in his memory the knowledge that Roosevelt was passionately interested in the techniques of dam construction. A few months later, he wangled his way into the White House with a series of huge photographs of dams that had been supplied to him by an architectural firm in his home district. Roosevelt became so absorbed in comparing the pictures that he absentmindedly okayed a rural electrification project that Johnson wanted but that had been held up by the Rural Electrification Administration for a couple of years.
None of this makes me very sanguine about either Presidential candidate, but over here at Helytimes we consider it better to look truth in the face, best we can, no?
Martin Anderson, a Reagan aide, endorsed the book in a Miller Center interview:
There’s a wonderful book called The Twilight of the Presidency by Reedy. You ever read that?
Young
George Reedy.Anderson
In which he says, If you try to understand the White House—most people make the mistake, they try to understand the White House like a corporation or the military and how does it look, with the hierarchy. He said, The only way to understand it, it’s like a palace court. And if you can understand a palace court, then you understand the White House. I think that’s probably pretty accurate. But those are the things that happen. So anyway, I didn’t go back. So I missed Watergate.Asher
Darn.
First look at Common Side Effects
Posted: July 27, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945, art, comedy, drugs, film, hely, how to live, pictures, plays, screenwriting, story, the world around us, Wonder Trail Leave a commentFor the past couple of years I’ve been working on this animated show I co-created with the great Joe Bennett. Even adjusting for my personal bias, I believe it came together in an amazing way and will be an incredible show. Coming in 2025.
Ed Ruscha at LACMA
Posted: July 10, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945, art history Leave a comment
The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, 1968
photo taken in Ireland, 1962:
Helytimes 