Power and The Presidency
Posted: November 19, 2023 Filed under: America Since 1945, politics, presidents Leave a comment
These are a series of essays based on lectures given at Dartmouth. David McCullough introduces us:
In a wonderful old photograph, the three workmen who did the installation sit together quite comfortably in Taft’s giant tub.
Is this the photo he’s talking about?
Doris Kearns Goodwin on FDR’s power of persuasion:
At the Democratic Convention in 1936, Roosevelt answered the attacks in dramatic form. He admitted he had not kept his pledge. He admitted that he had made some mistakes in the early years. But then he quoted the famous line: “Better,” he said, “the occasional faults of a government guided by a spirit of charity and compassion than the constant omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.” As he was making his way up to the podium to that “Rendezvous with Destiny” speech, leaning on the arms of his son and a Secret Service agent, his braces locked in place to make it seem as if he could walk (he really could not on his own power), he reached over to shake the hand of a poet. He immediately lost his balance and fell to the floor, his braces unlocked, his speech sprawled about him. He said to the people around him, “Get me up in shape.” They dusted him off, picked him up almost like a rag doll, put his braces back in place, and helped him up to the podium. He then somehow managed to deliver that extraordinary speech.
There weren’t that many fireside chats:
He delivered only thirty fireside chats in his entire twelve years as president, which meant only two or three a year. He understood something our modern presidents do not: that less is more, and that if you go before the public only when you have something dramatic to say, something they need to hear, they will listen. Indeed, over 80 percent of the adult radio audience consistently listened to his fireside chats.
FDR truly swayed public opinion towards what he wanted:
And somehow, through his ability to communicate, he educated and molded public opinion. At the start of this process, the people were wholly against the idea of any involvement with Britain. By the time the debate finished in the Congress and the Lend-Lease Act was passed, the majority opinion in the country was for the lend-lease program. That is what presidential leadership should and must be about. Not reflecting public opinion polls, taking focus groups to figure out what the people are thinking at that moment, and then simply telling them what they’re thinking, but rather moving the nation forward to where you believe its collective energy needs to go.
Life in the FDR White House during WWII:
He became a part of an intimate circle of friends who were also living in the family quarters of the White House during the war, including Franklin’s secretary, Missy Lehand, who had started working for him in 1920, loved him the rest of her life, and was his hostess when Eleanor was on the road; Franklin’s closest adviser, Harry Hopkins, who came one night for dinner, slept over, and didn’t leave until the war was coming to an end; Eleanor’s closest friend, a former reporter named Lorena Hickock; and a beautiful princess from Norway, in exile in America during the war, who visited on the weekends.
Michael Beschloss on Eisenhower:
To hold down the arms race as much as possible, he worked out a wonderful tacit agreement with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev wanted to build up his economy. He didn’t want to spend a lot of money on the Soviet military because he wanted to start feeding people and recover from the devastation of World War II. But he knew that to cover this he would have to give speeches in public that said quite the opposite. So Khrushchev would deliver himself of such memorable lines as, “We Soviets are cranking out missiles like sausages, and we will bury you because our defense structure is pulling ahead of the United States.” Eisenhower dealt with this much as an adult deals with a small boy who is lightly punching him in the stomach. He figured that leaving Khrushchev’s boasts unanswered was a pretty small price to pay if it meant that Khrushchev would not spend much money building up his military. The result was that the arms race was about as slow during the 1950s as it could have been, and Eisenhower was well on the way to creating an atmosphere of communication. Had the U-2 not fallen down in i960 and had the presidential campaign taken place in a more peaceful atmosphere, I think you would have seen John Kennedy and Richard Nixon competing on the basis of who could increase the opening to the Soviets that Eisenhower had created.
Eisenhower pursued almost an opposite strategy to Reagan re: the USSR.
On one of the tapes LBJ made of his private conversations as president, you hear Johnson in 1964. He knows that the key to getting his civil rights bill passed will be Everett Dirksen of Illinois, Republican leader of the Senate. He calls Dirksen, whom he’s known for twenty years, and essentially says, “Ev, I know you have some doubts about this bill, but if you decide to support it, a hundred years from now every American schoolchild will know two names—Abraham Lincoln and Everett Dirksen.” Dirksen liked the sound of that.
I don’t think that worked. I’ll quiz the next American schoolchild I encounter.
On JFK:
What’s more, he had been seeking the presidency for so long that he had only vague instincts about where he wanted to take the country. He did want to do something in civil rights. In the i960 campaign, he promised to end discrimination “with the stroke of a pen.” On health care, education, the minimum wage, and other social issues, he was a mainstream Democrat. He hoped to get the country through eight years without a nuclear holocaust and to improve things with the Soviets, if possible. He wanted a nuclear test ban treaty.
Bay of Pigs:
People at the time often said Eisenhower was responsible for the Bay of Pigs, since it was Eisenhower’s plan to take Cuba back from Castro. I think that has a hard time surviving scrutiny. Eisenhower would not necessarily have approved the invasion’s going forward, and he would not necessarily have run it the same way. His son once asked him, “Is there a possibility that if you had been president, the Bay of Pigs would have happened?” Ike reminded him of Normandy and said, “I don’t run no bad invasions.”
Then Robert Caro comes to the plate with some classics:
Trying to understand why this relationship developed, I asked some of Roosevelt’s assistants. One of them, Jim Rowe, said to me, ‘You have to understand: Franklin Roosevelt was a political genius. When he talked about politics, he was talking at a level at which very few people could follow him and understand what he was really saying. But from the first time that Roosevelt talked to Lyndon Johnson, he saw that Johnson understood everything]! ^ was talking about.”
This young congressman may have been unsophisticated about some things, but about politics—about power—he was sophisticated enough at that early age to understand one of the great masters. Roosevelt was so impressed, in fact, that once he said to Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, “That’s the kind of uninhibited young politician I might have been—if only I hadn’t gone to Harvard.” Roosevelt made a prediction, also to Ickes. He said, ‘You know, in the next generation or two, the balance of power in the United States is going to shift to the South and West, and this kid, Lyndon Johnson, could be the first southern president.”
Hill Country:
It was also hard for me to understand the terrible poverty in the Hill Country. There was no money in Johnson City. One of Lyndon’s best friends once carried a dozen eggs to Marble Falls, 22 miles over the hills. He had to ride very slowly so they wouldn’t break; he carried them in a box in front of him. The ride took all day. And for those eggs he received one dime.
Hill Country women:
asked these women—elderly now—what life had been like without electricity. They would say, “Well, you’re a city boy. You don’t know how heavy a bucket of water is, do you?” The wells were now unused and covered with boards, but they would push the boards aside. They’d get out an old bucket, often with the rope still attached, and they’d drop it down in the well and say, “Now, pull it up.” And of course it was very heavy. They would show me how they put the rope over the windlass and then over their shoulders. They would throw the whole weight of their bodies into it, pulling it step by step while leaning so far that they were almost horizontal. And these farm wives had yokes like cattle yokes so they could carry two buckets ofwateratatime. They would say, “Do you see how round-shouldered I am? Do you see how bent I am?” Now in fact I had noticed that these women, who were in their sixties or seventies, did seem more stooped than city women of the same age, but I hadn’t understood why. One woman said to me, “I swore I wouldn’t be bent like my mother, and then I got married, and the babies came, and I had to start bringing in the water, and I knew I would look exactly like my mother.”
LBJ effectively nagged FDR until he got a dam built and then transmission lines extended that would electrify Hill Country:
This one man had changed the lives of 200,000 people. He brought them into the twentieth century. I understood what Tommy Corcoran meant when he said, “That kid was the best congressman for a district that ever was.”
Ben Bradlee on Nixon:
When he was detached, Nixon could see with great subtlety the implication of actions. The story about Chicago mayor Richard Daley delivering enough graveyard votes for Kennedy to win one of the narrowest victories in the history of presidential politics is well known. Some say that Nixon made a very statesmanlike, unselfish decision in not protesting voting irregularities. He felt, they suggest, that it could weaken the country to have no one clearly in charge while the dispute went on. But as someone who covered the story closely—I was the reporter who quoted Daley’s remark to JFK on election night: “With a little luck and the help of a few close friends, we’re gonna win. We’re gonna take Illinois”—I am not so sure of Nixon’s altruism. What actually happened was this: Nixon sent William P. Rogers, who would later become his attorney general, to check on the situation. Rogers reported back that however many votes were cast illegally by Democrats in Chicago and Cook County, just as many were probably cast illegally by Republicans in downstate Illinois. I am almost certain that Nixon would have found it irresistible to protest the illegal votes had it not been for the fact that his own party might have been doing the same thing. He made a political decision: The risk was too great. He certainly had the power to protest, but for not entirely statesmanlike reasons chose not to use it.
Edmund Morris in his lecture gives some of the clearest takes on Reagan I’ve seen him deliver:
In the last weeks of 1988, toward the end of his presidency, he let me spend two complete days with him. I dogged his footsteps from the moment he stepped out of the elevator in the morning till the moment he went back upstairs. Within hours I was a basket case, simply because I discovered that to be a president, even just to stand behind him and watch him deal with everything that comes toward him, is to be constantly besieged by supplications, emotional challenges, problems, catastrophes, whines. For example, that first morning I’m waiting outside the elevator in the White House with his personal aide, Jim Kuhn. The doors open, out comes Ronald Reagan giving off waves of cologne, looking as usual like a million bucks, and Jim says to him, “Well, Mr. President, your first appointment this morning is going to be a Louisiana state trooper. You’re going to be meeting him as we go through the Conservatory en route to the Oval Office. This guy had his eyes shot out in the course of duty a year ago. He’s here to receive an award from you and get photographed, and he’s brought his wife and his daughter. You’ll have to spend a few minutes with him, just a grip-and-grin, and then we’re going on to your senior staff meeting.” So around the corner we go, and I’m following behind Reagan’s well-tailored back, and there is this state trooper, eyes shot out, aware of the fact that the president is coming—he could hear our footsteps. And there’s his wife, coruscating with happiness. It’s the biggest moment of their lives. There, too, is their little girl. Reagan walks up, introduces himself to the trooper, gives him the double handshake—the hand over the hand, the magic touch of flesh—and expertly turns him so the guy understands they are going to be photographed. The photograph is taken, a nice word or two is exchanged with his wife. It lasted about thirty-five seconds. On to the Oval Office. By the way, Reagan said to me as we walked along, ‘You know the biblical saying about an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth? I sure would like to get both eyes of the bastard that shot that policeman.” In other words, he was as moved as I was. But he had magnificently concealed it. A president has to deal with this kind of thing all day, every day, for four or eight years. He therefore has to be the kind of person who is expert at controlling emotion, at not showing too much of it—containing himself; otherwise, he is going to be sucked dry in no time at all and lose his ability to function in public.
(Also an origin story to why he wrote about Theodore Roosevelt:)
Theodore Roosevelt was also a man of overwhelming force—a cutter-down of trees in the metaphorical sense. He was famously aggressive. There was nothing he loved more than to decimate wildlife. I first became aware of him as a small boy in Kenya, when the city of Nairobi, where I was born, published its civic history. The book contained a photograph of this American president with a pith helmet and mustache and clicking teeth and spectacles. He had come to Kenya from the White House in 1910 and proceeded to shoot every living thing in the landscape. I remember as a ten-year-old boy looking at this picture of this man and, as small boys do, saying to myself, “He looks as though he is fun. I’d like to spend time with that guy.” I was conscious even as a child not only of the sweetness of his personality but of this feeling of force that a smudgy old photograph could not obscure.
Reagan’s voice:
Now, Reagan’s voice, which was a large part of Reagan’s power, was indeed beautiful. Even in his teenage years it was unusual, a light, very fluid baritone, quick and silvery. It had a fuzzy husk to it, rather like peach fuzz. And there was something sensually appealing about it—so much so that people got physical pleasure out of listening to Reagan talk.
…
Dutch Reagan was an extremely successful sportscaster. His mellifluous voice beamed out over Iowa and Illinois and the central states, first from WOC-Davenport and then from WHO-Des Moines. It beamed to such a beguiling extent that Hugh Sidey, the presidential correspondent of Life magazine, once told me, ‘You know, I was a Dust Bowl brat in the early 1930s, living in Iowa. I used to hear Dutch Reagan’s voice coming through our loudspeaker, and I don’t remember anything he said, but that voice persuaded me that although life was terrible at the moment, somehow things were going to get better.” He said, “I cannot describe the quality of the voice; it just filled me with optimism.” And we saw this come to pass when Reagan eventually became president and filled us almost overnight with a sense of well-being and purposeful-ness.
A revealing visit to the ranch:
It perplexed me for at least a year until I was sitting with Reagan on the patio of his beloved Rancho del Cielo, “Ranch in the Sky,” in southern California. He had given me a tour of this surpassingly ordinary little house, a cabin that he’d put together practically with his own hands. It had phony tile flooring, an ugly ceiling, horse pictures hanging crooked, a Louis L’Amour novel by his bedside. He takes me out onto the patio and we sit down at a leather table pocked with food stains, beneath a flypaper with dead flies on it, looking out over the valley, and he says, “Isn’t it beautiful?” and I said, ‘Yes, Mr. President, it is very nice.” But you know, it was not naturally beautiful. It was a long, manicured—that’s the only word I can think of—manicured valley, open in the central part, but rising on both sides to a ridge that overlooked the Pacific. And all the madrona trees and live oaks that encircled this valley had been manicured to such an extent—I’m not talking topiary now, I’m just talking about trimming limbs and taking off dead leaves and undergrowth—had been pruned to such an extent that it was not quite real. It looked like a Grant Wood landscape. It was too clean.
The impossibility of changing Reagan’s mind:
Michael Deaver told me that once in 1973, when Reagan was still governor, they were talking to him across a table about the enforced resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew, who had had to step down for taking bribes and corruption in office. Reagan was saying, ‘You know, it’s really tough what they did to Agnew. I always liked that guy. It was very unfair what happened to him.” And Deaver said, “Governor, he took money in office. The guy was a sleazebag. He had to be thrown out.” Reagan was playing with a heavy bunch of keys when Deaver said this. He hauled back and threw the keys smack into Deaver’s chest—koodoomp! He was angry at being confronted with evidence that conflicted with his sentiments.
David Maraniss on Clinton:
And yet when you look at what he used his power for—at his achievements, particularly in domestic policy—I think a strong argument can be made that they are largely moderate Republican programs. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the balanced budget, and welfare reform are the central programs that have passed, largely through a coalition of President Clinton and the Republicans in Congress. That’s where his power went.
picanha
Posted: November 3, 2022 Filed under: advertising, politics Leave a comment
had to search that on Wikipedia after reading this:
these days everyone’s an armchair David Plouffe but “picanha politics” seems like a winning strategy
Who runs Bartertown?
Posted: July 18, 2022 Filed under: America Since 1945, business, politics Leave a commentWhen he gets to Bartertown, Max is taken up in the tower to meet Aunty (Tina Turner). She tells him she wants him to kill somebody. Who? Master Blaster.
Master is a little gnome who rides around on the giant Blaster. Aunty explains that the energy to run the lights and electricity of Bartertown comes from the underworld, a horrible factory-like place where pig shit generates methane.
Max goes down to the underworld under the guise of a pig-shit shoveler. While there, he meets Master Blaster, who is determined to show him who really runs Bartertown. Master Blaster turns off the methane to Bartertown. Everything goes dark. Master Blaster calls up to Aunty. His demand to turn the methane back on is that she answer the question: Who run Bartertown? Reluctantly, she answers: Master Blaster. He makes her say it publicly, over the PA system. Who run Bartertown? Master Blaster. Once she’s said this he smiles and turns the methane back on.
That’s all pretty early in the movie, we haven’t even gotten inside the Thunderdome yet. And since the movie is called Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, we know we’re barely getting started.
Did sugar ruin us?
Posted: January 26, 2022 Filed under: food, politics Leave a commentHere’s an excerpt from On The House, the memoir by former Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner:
Cheers to this tweet for calling my attention to this, via Marginal Revolution. I got Boehner’s book and read it, and found it very illuminating in many ways (his harshest words are for Ted Cruz).
This is from The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, by Edward E. Baptist:
The creation of the first slavery complex, with its “drug foods” – sugar, tobacco, tea, coffee, and chocolate – stimulated Western Europe’s desire to seek out and consume still more resources. The massive Atlantic slave trade required ships, trade commodities, and new structures of credit, and growth spilled over into sectors less directly linked to sugar. Many in Western Europe began to work longer hours in order to get new commodities, in what is sometimes called an eighteenth-century “Industrious Revolution.”
(boldface mine). Other scholars have written about the connection of sugar to capitalism, power, etc.
What if sugar has all of our balls in a vice, to use Boehner’s phrase?
“The brain is dependent on sugar as its main fuel,” says Vera Novak, MD, PhD, an HMS associate professor of medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. “It cannot be without it.” Although the brain needs glucose, too much of this energy source can be a bad thing.
so we learn over here from Harvard Medical School. My wise dentist called my attention to this as we were discussing why TV writers’ rooms are stocked with candy.
What if we’re trapped in a loop of feeding our brains sugar, and our brains getting bigger and trapping us in a sugar addiction loop? What if that’s what’s really driving capitalism, the whole mess we’re in?
Consider the Biblical tale of the garden of Eden. Adam and Eve are chilling happily there, and God asks them but one thing: don’t eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. What if, instead of being a metaphor, this was meant literally? God was telling the first people don’t eat too much sugar, or your brains will get too big and you’ll ruin everything?
When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
This is where it all went wrong. Recall that as punishment for this, Adam is cursed to work:
Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
And as for Eve:
I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;
with painful labor you will give birth to children.
Human labor is indeed very painful, and why? Because our heads/ brains are so big! Compare with a horse or goat, who can drop a baby and then scamper off, nbd.
Maybe humans never should’ve fucked with sugar, and Genesis actually contains a pretty straightforward origin story for the mistake that led to our predicament. Is it possible to observe the very mistake happening in chimps?
from Tao Lin’s blog:
Maybe our whole deal stems from being trapped in a species-wide sugar addiction.
Now that we’re stuck, we should at least get the good stuff!
Antwerp
Posted: January 5, 2022 Filed under: business, politics Leave a comment
Authorities have seized 88 metric tons of cocaine stashed in containers from Latin America this year, nearly 10 times the figure in 2014. It is far more than any other European port, as traffickers flood the continent with so much cocaine that it may now be a bigger market than the U.S., according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.
from “Inside Europe’s Cocaine Gateway: ‘A Repeat of Miami in the 1980s’ Antwerp, now the No. 1 port in Europe for cocaine busts, has seen a rise in gang violence and corruption” by James Marson in the WSJ.
The cash tsunami is distorting Antwerp’s economy, officials say, jacking up prices for real estate and existing businesses.
“Bad money drives out good money,” said Antwerp Mayor Bart De Wever. “They will chase out honest people.”
Some companies are used to launder money, from restaurants to luxury car dealers. Far more widespread and pernicious are companies that undermine and disrupt the legal economy, said Yve Driesen, director of the Federal Judicial Police in Antwerp.
Drug traffickers buy restaurants or shops to give the impression that their fortunes derive from legal commerce. Front companies also use legal activities to hide their illegal drugs-related work. For example, a transport company that extracts cocaine from shipping containers could also carry out legal transport on behalf of multinationals.
“They will win contracts because their prices are lower than competitors,” said Mr. Driesen.
Other companies have popped up to service the criminals. Resellers of encrypted phones depend on drug gangs who are the only ones able to afford contracts that can cost thousands of dollars a year, officials say. Companies rent out luxury cars for the equivalent of $1,000 a day and more.
My reaction to this is: time to legalize it? It seems clear that Europeans want cocaine really bad. What we’re doing isn’t working. If we imagine legalization causes a massive spike in cocaine use, can that be worse than the warping effect of trying to defy reality? The most urgent cocaine related problem here in Los Angeles at the moment is people dying from cocaine laced with fentanyl. Would that problem be made better or worse with legalization? Honestly some of the high octane coffee people consume around me seems as mind-altering as cocaine.
You can’t put law on people if it’s not in their hearts
as a Florida law enforcement official once put it to me, in a conversation about Key West.
Recalling what former mayor of London Ken Livingstone said during a campaign in 2012:
Equally, because I have been around for a long time, I’ve also learned how much of what you are told is bulllshit. And when I hear so many people in the City say they’re all going to go [because of higher taxes], the simple fact is we really only have one rival, and that is New York. You are not going to have major banks in the City relocate to Shanghai because there’s a degree of political uncertainty, perhaps decades ahead. They are not going to Frankfurt because young men want to go out on the pull and do a load of cocaine and they can’t really do that easily in Frankfurt. So you need to have a dynamic city. Our only real rival is New York.
(Livingstone lost that election, Boris Johnson won.)
Politics, Oct 2021
Posted: October 25, 2021 Filed under: America Since 1945, politics Leave a comment- On Youngkin and Trump: “You can’t run ads telling me you’re a regular ol’ hoops-playing, dish-washing, fleece-wearing guy, but quietly cultivate support from those who seek to tear down our democracy.”
Uh, you absolutely can, it’s the entire playbook. Whether you should is another question, but I don’t even think you can argue it doesn’t work.
- On fatigue among Dems: “I know a lot of people are tired of politics right now. We don’t have time to be tired. What is required is sustained effort.”
I don’t think “sustained effort from you!” is a winning message for a political campaign. Often I spot sustained effort from my elected officials, but I don’t know what the effort is towards? Most often it seems towards “not doing anything that would upset existing power structures but while avoiding the appearance of giving up, while also fundraising,” which must be exhausting indeed, and is no doubt effortful, but is not effective at improving outcomes.
Anyway, that was former President Barack Obama yesterday in the Virginia governors race, where Terry McAuliffe, a guy who was a Democratic party functionary for like 30 years, who was chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, and already was governor of Virginia, is running on a program of… change? Keep doing the same stuff? The alternative is worse? Seems like the third, but I haven’t been on the ground in Virginia for a couple years.
Any Virginians with takes please weigh in.
Reedy, The Twilight of the Presidency: From Johnson To Reagan
Posted: March 24, 2021 Filed under: America Since 1945, politics, presidents Leave a commentformer Nixon and Reagan aide has just told his Miller Center oral history interviewers a long story about the Nixon administration:
Young
So, what is the moral of that story?Anderson
The moral of the story, I think, is in the White House people don’t realize the extent to which the President of the United States is forced to delegate enormous authority. You know how busy you can get during the day, try multiplying that by 100 times, 500 times. The pressures that come in are incomprehensible. So when he says, Do something, he usually thinks, Well, maybe it will get done. Most of the time, it doesn’t get done, but he says, Maybe it will get done. And he doesn’t have time to follow up.He doesn’t have time to sit down and say, Ehrlichman, what happened with Anderson? And whatever Ehrlichman tells him, he may say, Well, Anderson wasn’t interested, which is probably what he told them. Now, he’s not going to pick up the phone and call me and say, What happened? and follow through on all this. You can talk to Dick Allen. Similar things happened to Dick Allen, in terms of he gave instructions to have Dick do certain things, and Dick was never told and then the President was told that Dick hadn’t done it.
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.
Reedy’s book is fascinating, Reedy was himself Press Secretary and a special assistant to LBJ.
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 could 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.
Reedy argues that the presidency is such a powerful and weird job that in effect it always creates something of a monarchy, dependent on the personality of the (so far!) man.
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.
The tone of Reedy’s book is pretty scholarly, but he’s also a skilled, entertaining presenter:
For many years, a corporation sold a popular mouthwash to the American people on the basis that it would inhibit bad breath. The slogan under which the product was merchandised – “Even your best friends won’t tell you” – meant that the subject was too delicate to mention and that a person could exclude the foulest odors without being aware of the fact. As far as the mouthwash was concerned, the slogan was somewhat misleading: not only your best friends but your worst enemies will tell you if you have bad breath. But the concept that “even your best friends won’t tell you” about unpleasant things applies with tremendous force to the president.
Reedy argues that, even in his boyhood, the President wasn’t really that important, or at least not a constant topic in national life:
For those who have lived long enough to have some political consciousness from the pre-Franklin Delano Roosevelt ere, there will be memories of local politicians who had far greater name identification than the president, even among educated people… the press spent very little time covering presidents.
What changed that? The radio, and TV cameras, and national level communication. Reedy mentions how the TV crews in the Johnson White House started keeping the cameras “warmed up,” a huge advantage that gave LBJ the power to give a TV briefing whenever he wanted. What would Reedy make of Twitter?
On the rise of Henry Kissinger:
When a crisis would break out anywhere in the world, Nixon would call his Secretary of State, who would promise to get “my people” together and report back. The president would then call Kissinger, who would give him at least ten answers before hanging up the phone. Presidents like answers.
Strange times
Posted: January 8, 2021 Filed under: politics Leave a comment
during the takeover of the Capitol by goons I went to see what Eric Trump, the President’s second son, had to say. Turns out it was his birthday so a graphic of balloons was going across his page on my phone
Napoleon meets Metternich
Posted: January 6, 2021 Filed under: politics Leave a commentIn the course of a face-to-face meeting in Dresden in June 1813, Metternich, by now the Austrian foreign minister, reminded Napoleon of the appalling human cost of his wars. ‘In ordinary times,’ Metternich observed, ‘armies are formed of only a small part of the population. Today it is the whole people that you have called to arms.’ This was a matter also of ‘future generations’, he remarked, in reference to the extreme youth of many in the latest cohort of recruits who had perished on the Russian campaign. Napoleon made an extraordinary reply. ‘You are no soldier,’ he barked, ‘and you do not know what goes on in the soul of a soldier. I was brought up in military camps, I know only the camps, and a man such as I am does not give a fuck about the lives of a million men’ – ‘un homme comme moi se f(out) de la vie d’un million d’hommes.’ Metternich sometimes wondered how Napoleon did not shrink from himself in horror at the pain and injury he had inflicted. Here was the answer. A lasting peace with such a man was not possible. That the Napoleon who turned up to meet Metternich the day after this chilling exchange was the soul of amiability and charm merely confirmed his intuition.
The Napoleon whom Metternich came to know resembled a Calabrian crime boss: tender to the point of indulgence with his family, formidably shrewd and utterly pitiless in his dealings with the wider world.
Must the history-makers be psychos? Reminded of the scene in Oliver Stone’s Nixon:
Politics and drama in ancient Athens
Posted: December 16, 2020 Filed under: actors, politics Leave a commentAll art has a political dimension, but tragedy actually began life in fifth-century Athens as a political institution, locked into the structures of the state. The authorities appointed an official to train and pay the Chorus, the city preserved play scripts in its archives, and there was a state fund which poor Athenians could draw on for the entry fee. Tragedy was a form of ethicopolitical education for the city state as a whole, not just a night off for the toffs.
Wild. What if the US government paid for movie tickets? They probably should! We were pretty close to a merger like this during World War II I suppose, when they’d show the GIs Mrs. Miniver and stuff.
That’s Terry Eagleton reviewing A Cultural History of Tragedy: Vols I-VI edited by Rebecca Bushnell in LRB back in February. Cleaning out my files!
BJ and Ursula
Posted: December 10, 2020 Filed under: food, politics Leave a comment
Struck by how much the visuals of these two, Boris Johnson and EU president Ursula von der Leyen, look like a Black Mirror version of Trump and Hillary.
The group dined on a starter of pumpkin soup with scallops; a main of steamed turbot, mashed potatoes with wasabi and vegetables; and a desert of pavlova with exotic fruit and coconut sorbet. It was fitting that fish featured on the menu, given arrangements for fisheries is one of three outstanding sticking points in the trade talks, and particularly scallops, which were the subject of clashes between British and French fishermen in 2018.
source. Love the idea of pointedly serving someone fish.
Ursula von der Leyen is interesting. She has seven children? And maybe plagarized her doctoral thesis?
Von der Leyen’s father’s grandparents were the cotton merchant Carl Albrecht (1875–1952) and Mary Ladson Robertson (1883–1960), an American who belonged to a plantation owning family of the southern aristocracy from Charleston, South Carolina. Her American ancestors played a significant role in the British colonization of the Americas, and she descends from many of the first English settlers of Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Barbados, and from numerous colonial-era governors. Among her ancestors were Carolina governors John Yeamans, James Moore, Robert Gibbes, Thomas Smith and Joseph Blake, Pennsylvania deputy governor Samuel Carpenter, and the American revolutionary and lieutenant governor of South Carolina James Ladson. The Ladson family were large plantation owners and her ancestor James H. Ladson owned over 200 slaves by the time slavery in the United States was abolished; her relatives and ancestors were among the wealthiest in British North America in the 18th century, and she descends from one of the largest British slave traders of the era, Joseph Wragg.
Boris Johnson for his part has been getting away with stuff his whole life. As with the naughty schoolboys of my youth, I have a desire both to see him “caught” and punished and also to see him get away with it. He seems to thrive in the space where, like, a Dec 31 deadline looms, and there’s lots of technical details to work out, and he’s barely started.
Interested by this developing story
Posted: November 19, 2020 Filed under: politics Leave a commentabout a possible job for Pete Buttigieg in a Biden administration:
(from Politico, 10/22). Low on reward and high on risk. Sounds like a job for a hero who’s interested in taking on tough problems.
But it sounds like, reasonably enough, Buttigieg wants an easier, more fun job. From CBS:
Buttigieg, meanwhile, is under consideration for U.N. ambassador. Aides to the military veteran and former South Bend, Indiana mayor were told that some transition officials envisioned him serving as secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs. But the mayor made clear, along with his team, his preference for representing the U.S. before the world body or in another Cabinet position, two people familiar with the Cabinet discussions explained. A representative for Buttigieg declined to comment.
One factor in picking a VA secretary will be finding someone with experience managing large organizations, according to people involved in the transition. The VA is one of the largest federal departments and one of the largest hospitals systems in the world, requiring management of hundreds of thousands of employees.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens!
a haiku
Posted: November 5, 2020 Filed under: politics, presidents Leave a comment
The interviewer is Jon Wiener, LA Review of Books, Sept 11, 2003
JW: Most pundits emphasized the unique and unprecedented qualities of the Bush v. Gore contest in Florida that ended the 2000 election – but you wrote that the events in Florida were “not entirely predictable, but entirely familiar.” What do you mean.
JD: It was entirely predictable: at the most immediate level, the election was that close because both candidates had run the same campaign directed at the same small number of people. Florida had a certain poetry to it; it was like a haiku of what the process had become.
The goal: being in power
Posted: April 6, 2020 Filed under: America Since 1945, politics Leave a comment
Baffled by politics in the last four years or so, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about this Bagehot column in The Economist from 21 Dec 2019.
It’s probably behind a paywall for non-subscribers, but I’ll try and give the jist. In the 20th and (so far) 21st centuries the UK Conservatives have been in power for longer than any other party. Why?
It’s because the Conservative Party views their job as being in power. That’s it. That’s their meaning and their purpose. The Conservative Party is not guided by any principles or beliefs or philosophies. It may pretend to be, individual members may be, that might be part of the whole stew, but the job of the party is to be in power.
Evelyn Waugh once complained that the Tories had never succeeded in turning the clock back for a single minute. But this is exactly why they have been so successful. The party has demonstrated a genius for anticipating what Harold Macmillan once called “the winds of change”, and harnessing those winds to its own purposes.
They keep their eyes on the mission:
The Conservatives have always been quick to dump people or principles when they become obstacles to the successful pursuit of power. Theresa May immediately sacked her two chief advisers, Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy, after the party’s poor performance in 2017, whereas Jeremy Corbyn is still clinging on to Karie Murphy and Seumas Milne after Labour’s devastating failure last week.
Mr. Johnson keeps with this tradition:
He succeeded in this where Mrs May failed because he possessed the other great Tory weapons. He has been willing to sacrifice anything in the pursuit of office. Beneath the bumbling exterior lies a ruthless, power-seeking machine. His withdrawal of the whip from 21 colleagues (some of them close friends) in September made Macmillan’s “night of the long knives” in 1962 look tame.
When I try to think about American politics, it helps to imagine that the Republican Party understands its job: getting power, keeping power, staying in power. The issues are irrelevant as long as they serve this goal. That’s why various attacks about the absolute hypocrisy of “pro life”ideas, or pretend deficit hawkishness, or “small government” –> enormous bailouts whenever necessary, etc etc just don’t stick or have any meaning. You’re falling for the game if you fall for that.
Now, what the point of the Democratic Party is I’m not sure. It might be “losing nobly,” or something, as evidenced by the career of this longtime Democratic operative and summed up by this speech. Or maybe it’s “not appearing too extreme.” Or “making people feel ok about themselves.” In any case, it’s not as focused a mission, and it’s not gonna be as successful until it gets figured out.
Maybe the Democrats need to remember what Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s supposed mentor, Saul Alinsky, put bluntly:
Horwitt says that, when Alinsky would ask new students why they wanted to organize, they would invariably respond with selfless bromides about wanting to help others. Alinsky would then scream back at them that there was a one-word answer: “You want to organize for power!“
Source on that.
cause a scene
Posted: March 26, 2020 Filed under: politics Leave a comment
You’re the Speaker of the House, you’re eighty years old, two trillion dollars on the line, and the problem is someone might “cause a scene.”
The idea of “causing a scene worth thinking about!
When I read about UK or USA politics
Posted: January 31, 2020 Filed under: America Since 1945, politics Leave a comment
sometimes I’m just like, haven’t we seen this before?
America as casino
Posted: December 29, 2019 Filed under: America Since 1945, politics Leave a comment
from visitpittsburgh.com
Now we finally have a former casino operator as our President. It was inevitable. Gambling is really at the heart of America, IMO. Even in the ancient myths of the desert Southwest we hear of The Gambler. The thing is, this isn’t really a country, it’s a casino. Anybody* can come here and take their chances. Any immigrant to America was weighing the odds and taking a big chance. If you win big, congratulations, if you crap out that’s on you. Maybe that’s why we don’t have nationalized health insurance, and why we tolerate rule by billionaires. It’s a feature, not a bug. Social safety nets for societies. Casinos don’t have a safety net.
Before Trump, Bill Clinton might have been our most casino-adjacent president. He liked to describe himself as the man from Hope, but he was really from Hot Springs, a kind of local Arkansas Las Vegas from before the age of Southwest Airlines. His mother spent her time at the race track and the house where young Bill spent his time had “a bar on which stood a rotating cage with two huge dice in it.”
I’m not saying I love that America is more of a casino than a country, but let’s accept that reality. Maybe a winning political messaging could come out of something like “MAKE THE CASINO FAIR” or “A FAIR CASINO FOR ALL!” It’s hard to look around and not think the casino is at least a little rigged, or at the very least that current management is crooked.
Or how about CLEAN UP THE CASINO! or EVEN THE ODDS!
These are your only options
Posted: August 21, 2019 Filed under: America Since 1945, politics Leave a comment
Shouldn’t you be allowed to vote for whoever you want?
I remember the anger at the people who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. I get it. I voted for Al Gore, I loved Al Gore, Al Gore is like my dream politician (boring experienced intellectual veteran centrist conservationist globalist). But the people who voted for Nader get to vote for Nader! Al Gore didn’t earn their vote. They don’t owe Al Gore a rotten fig. You can’t be mad at the people who voted for someone else for not cynically falling into line to vote for an establishment centrist they didn’t prefer.
Same deal with Susan Sarandon! She can vote for whomever she wants, cool for her for having interesting choices. You’re gonna blame her for Trump? Blame the woman who had an absolute slam dunk layup election on her hands, who had many advantages, enormous amounts of money, her husband was a very popular President of the United States two Presidents ago, for failing to convince enough voters to vote for her.
Dr. Jill Biden, in New Hampshire, says:
You have to swallow a little bit and say, ok, I personally like so and so better, but your bottom line has to be that we have to beat Trump.
If you check out the video you can also see Joe Biden’s first campaign ad, which highlights how “all the polls agree” Joe Biden is the best candidate to beat Trump.
Quit your thinkin’, voter, this one’s been decided for you. Who’re you gonna believe, your judgment or some polls we pulled together?
The whole premise of the Biden campaign makes me sick. This is a guy who was a weak, confused candidate who couldn’t stop himself from making stuff up and plagiarizing not just speeches but the family histories of other politicians when he was in his prime! And now he is… guess how old Joe Biden is.
Did you guess 72? 74?
Joe Biden is seventy-six years old! He will be seventy-eight if he takes the oath of office in Jan 2021. Eighty-two at the end of his first term.
What has Joe Biden done with his life? I get that he was Obama’s pretend best friend, but really, who is a person who in Joe Biden’s thirty-eight some years of public life he really helped? Uplifted?
(skimming his Wikipedia page)
OK I guess he did stand up for Delaware’s chicken farmers, Delaware’s banks, and in many ways benefitted the people of Delaware (by getting them federal taxpayer money). He was an advocate for Delaware, a state with a population of about one-quarter of the city of Los Angeles.
Where has he been on the big issues? He voted against the “good” Iraq War, the one we won, and for the bad one, the one that was a stupid, deceitful, horrible disaster from start to… finish? I guess it’s over? For us?
(Oh no wait we still have five thousand troops there.)
Joe Biden is sometimes said to know a lot about foreign policy but he was exactly wrong on the biggest American disaster of my lifetime.
Biden has said, “I consider the Violence Against Women Act the single most significant legislation that I’ve crafted during my 35-year tenure in the Senate.”[119]
OK, well that is cool, but didn’t the same bill also eliminate higher education for inmates and create new death penalty offenses?
The argument I hear for Joe Biden is that white Rust Belt working class men, who are alleged to have cost Hillary Clinton the election in Wisconsin, Ohio, etc, like him. Well, I don’t know if that’s true, I am not a white Rust Belt working class man.
I do think that:
1) the group credited with “swinging” the last election is never the group credited with swinging the next one
2) it’s not my job as a voter to put myself in the hypothetical mindset of some possible swing voter in another state and attempt to pander to their whims in order to take out the current whim-panderer.
It’s my job to choose the candidate who I try and suss out has the best character, judgment, and policy understandings and preferences to be the President of the United States.
For a campaign to suggest anything else, to suggest five months before the first primary/caucus that voters should shut up and get in line, that this is your only option, is so insulting I can scarcely believe it.
We try not to be all negative at Helytimes, so in the interest of saying something nice about Joe Biden he does have a great smile.
George HW Bush
Posted: December 5, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945, politics, presidents Leave a comment
Thought of this photo today.
(what’s David Gergen doing there? sometimes I’ve been that guy).
All posts related to any Bush.
Meanwhile in Australia
Posted: November 29, 2018 Filed under: Australia, politics Leave a comment
It started when Greens leader Richard Di Natale called Nationals Senator Barry O’Sullivan an “absolute pig”, after the Senator said there was a “bit of Nick Xenophon in” Ms Hanson-Young.
“He’s an absolute pig. He should be booted out. He’s a disgrace,” Mr Di Natale shouted across the chamber. “You grub.”
An emotional Senator Hanson-Young said Senator O’Sullivan and conservative independents Fraser Anning, Cory Bernardi and David Leyonhjelm were “cowards” who had spent months levelling slurs at her.
“You are not fit to be in this chamber. You are not fit to call yourselves men,” Senator Hanson-Young said.
She backed the Greens leader for calling out Senator O’Sullivan’s “reprehensible” remarks.
“That is what real men do. Real men don’t insult and threaten women,” Senator Hanson-Young said.
“You grub.”
Enjoy reading news stories about the goings-on in other English speaking countries, you usually have to fill in the gaps just enough to piece together what’s happening.
(thanks to our Sydney correspondent for the link and background)
Helytimes 
