Charlie Munger, weatherman.
Posted: November 28, 2023 Filed under: America Since 1945, business, California Leave a comment
“Like Warren, I had a considerable passion to get rich,” Munger told Roger Lowenstein for Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, published in 1995. “Not because I wanted Ferraris — I wanted independence. I desperately wanted it. I thought it was undignified to have to send invoices to other people.”
from Bloomberg.
Munger never stopped preaching old-fashioned virtues. Two of his favorite words were assiduity and equanimity.
He liked the first, he said in a speech in 2007, because “it means sit down on your ass until you do it.” He often said that the key to investing success was doing nothing for years, even decades, waiting to buy with “aggression” when bargains finally materialized.
He liked the second because it reflected his philosophy of investing and of life. Every investor, Munger said frequently, should be able to react with equanimity to a 50% loss in the stock market every few decades.
The Financial Times has the best obituary, noting stuff others miss like Munger’s role in funding abortion rights, here’s a link that will work for the first three lucky readers.
Munger on horse race betting, from his most famous (or second most famous?) speech:
How do you get to be one of those who is a winner—in a relative sense—instead of a loser? Here again, look at the pari-mutuel system. I had dinner last night by absolute accident with the president of Santa Anita. He says that there are two or three betters who have a credit arrangement with them, now that they have off-track betting, who are actually beating the house. They’re sending money out net after the full handle—a lot of it to Las Vegas, by the way—to people who are actually winning slightly, net, after paying the full handle. They’re that shrewd about something with as much unpredictability as horse racing. And the one thing that all those winning betters in the whole history of people who’ve beaten the pari-mutuel system have is quite simple. They bet very seldom. It’s not given to human beings to have such talent that they can just know everything about everything all the time. But it is given to human beings who work hard at it—who look and sift the world for a mispriced bet—that they can occasionally find one. And the wise ones bet heavily when the world offers them that opportunity. They bet big when they have the odds. And the rest of the time, they don’t. It’s just that simple. That is a very simple concept. And to me it’s obviously right—based on experience not only from the pari-mutuel system, but everywhere else.”
One day Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger visited the set of The Office to film a comedy video for the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. Everyone swarmed around Buffett but nobody really knew Munger. When the lunch break came I had the opportunity to take my plate and sit right down across from him.
From reading his Wikipedia page that morning I’d learned that Charlie Munger had been a weatherman during World War II, so I asked him about that. “It was kind of a humdrum job,” he said, modest. “A lot of people had humdrum jobs in the war.” His job was hand-drawing weather maps to predict the best times to fly planes across the Bering Strait to our Soviet allies in such a way that the engines wouldn’t ice up and kill the pilots. It seems like that might teach you something about probability and decision-making under uncertainty.
We talked about Clifton’s Cafeteria in downtown LA. He expressed admiration for that institution.
In 1931, Clinton leased a “distressed” cafeteria location at 618 South Olive Street in Los Angeles and founded what his customers referred to as “The Cafeteria of the Golden Rule”. Patrons were obliged to pay only what they felt was fair, according to a neon sign that flashed “PAY WHAT YOU WISH.” The cafeteria, at the western terminus of U.S. Route 66, was notable for serving people of all races, and was included in The Negro Motorist Green Book.
The conversation itself wasn’t that profound, but it launched me on a project of learning about more about Munger and his thinking that’s really changed my life.
“You don’t have a lot of envy.
You don’t have a lot of resentment.
You don’t overspend your income.
You stay cheerful in spite of your troubles.
(this from a guy whose first child died of leukemia).
You deal with reliable people.
And you do what you’re supposed to do.
And all these simple rules work so well to make your life better. And they’re so trite.”
His prescription is logical, he says.
“Staying cheerful” is “a wise thing to do,” Munger told Quick, adding that in order to do so, you have to let go of negative feelings.
“And can you be cheerful when you’re absolutely mired in deep hatred and resentment? Of course you can’t. So why would you take it on?” Munger said.
from 2019. (Struck by a resemblance to the mantra Liam Clancy gave Bob Dylan: “no fear, no meanness, no envy.”) He was committed to being rational, and he was witty, he expressed a lot of wisdom in a fast and punchy way. You could listen to him talk for a long time and not get bored. (And he could talk for a long time too.)
On getting the first $100,000, the hard part:
Munger holding forth in February, 2022 with a rare stock pick:
But I would argue that if I was investing money for some sovereign wealth fund or some pension fund with a 30,40, 50-year time horizon I buy Costco at the current price.
Here’s Costco vs. S&P 500 over that timeline:
(although my guy was talking 30-50 years.)
Posting about Munger has led to some interesting real life connections. The Mungerheads search out every scrap on the man. They’re interesting people to talk to, and you usually learn something
pic from the Daily Journal Co. website.
In appreciation of Munger’s life and wisdom, here are references to the man over the years at Helytimes:
Munger Speaks, 2019. On stagnation, and some life advice.
Munger and Lee Kuan Yew. There was a Confucian streak in Munger, maybe a little anti-democratic.
Buffett Bits, and Munger, from the 2020 annual meeting.
Munger and Buffett highlights from the 2021 annual meeting.
Charlie Munger Deep Cuts, my most thorough look at the guy and his wisdom (some funny ones, too, see what he says about Al Gore.
Ominous Remark from Charlie Munger, 2018.
“I’ve mellowed because I consider it counterproductive to hate as much as both parties now hate, and I have disciplined myself,” Munger said. “I now regard all politicians higher than I used to. I did that as a matter of self-preservation.” He said that he had re-read “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” and it made him “feel a lot better about the current political scene. We’re way ahead of the Romans at the end.”
That’s a pretty low bar, I pointed out.
“It’s very helpful — I suggest you try it,” Munger replied. “Politicians are never so bad that you don’t live to want them back. There will come a time when the people who hate Trump will wish that he was back
Free Samples, from 2023, a look at a commonality in Buffett-Munger businesses.
I’m All Right on That One, a few quotes from the bros of Omaha, 2023:
CHARLIE MUNGER: I used to come to the Berkshire annual meetings on coach from Los Angeles. And it was full of rich stockholders. And they would clap when I came into the coach section. I really liked that. (LAUGHTER) (APPLAUSE)
How the Chevalier de Méré met Blaise Pascal, a look at the origins of probability theory.
Obviously, you’ve got to be able to handle numbers and quantities—basic arithmetic. And the great useful model, after compound interest, is the elementary math of permutations and combinations. And that was taught in my day in the sophomore year in high school. I suppose by now in great private schools, it’s probably down to the eighth grade or so.
It’s very simple algebra. It was all worked out in the course of about one year between Pascal and Fermat. They worked it out casually in a series of letters.
More.
You know what? I wish they’d build the giant near-windowless dorm he proposed for UC Santa Barbara.
Scialabba
Posted: November 26, 2023 Filed under: writing 1 CommentGeorge Scialabba is no wild man. A soft-spoken, introverted soul, he doesn’t drink or smoke; no alcohol, tobacco, or recreational drugs. Healthy, moderate eating (no red meat, and “a kind of cerebral Mediterranean diet”) keeps Scialabba, at age 67, lean to a degree that is downright un-American. He has never married nor fathered children, and lives alone in a one-bedroom condo he has occupied since 1980. He doesn’t play sports (“I don’t exercise — I fidget”). For 35 years, Scialabba, a Harvard College alumnus, held a low-level clerical job at his alma mater that suited his low-profile style. For the past decade, his desk has occupied a windowless basement in a large academic building.
from the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Scialabba toiled for thirty-five years at a desk job in the windowless basement of Harvard’s Center for Government and International Studies, writing book reviews in his spare time; he has much to say about the economic conditions that enable or disable the life of the mind. (A sufferer from chronic depression, Scialabba credits his union for enabling him to take several paid medical leaves. “This is one of many ways in which strong unions are a matter of life and death,” he writes in How To Be Depressed.) And yet, for Scialabba, the essence of intellectual and creative exchange remains a gift economy: “When we’re young, our souls are stirred, our spirits kindled, by a book or some other experience,” he once said, “and in time, when we’ve matured, we look to pay the debt, to pass the gift along.” Gratitude, deeply felt, enables generosity. And never has a writer of such enviable talents displayed such undiminishing patience for his reader, such evident and unpretentious pleasure in the pedagogical function of good prose.
Commentary on Scialabba often makes much of his marginal status in relation to the more glamorous—or, at least, more lucrative—centers of intellectual life. As Christopher Lydon once put it, he has “no tenure…no tank to think in, no social circle, no genius grant (yet), no seat in the opinion industry or on cable TV—‘no province, no clique, no church,’ as Whitman said of Emerson—not even a blog.” In this, there was always a note of condescension: the working-class boy from Sicilian East Boston made good (but not good enough for the academy).
That from Commonweal.
Both note that his office is “windowless.” Love that the interesting work at Harvard is coming not from a professor but from a guy who’s working as a building manager. Lee Sandlin vibes. We love an amateur.
loneliness
Posted: November 25, 2023 Filed under: actors, writing Leave a commentAll the great plays [are] about loneliness,” [Tom Hanks] says, recounting an insight delivered to him by the theatre director Vincent Dowling. “It’s about the battle we all have to be part of something big.” It was only as an adult, says Hanks, that he realised “that’s the reason I would go to the [movie] theatre by myself as an 18-year-old kid, to be exposed to that language of loneliness”.
so says Hanks having lunch with the Financial Times, free link provided for you here. Always a little disappointed when the lunch with FT guest opts for expensive bottled water instead of a nice white wine.
Current Pro Bull Riding Top Ranked Bulls
Posted: November 22, 2023 Filed under: America Leave a comment- Flyin Wired
- Man Hater
- UTZ BesTex Legend
- Preachers Kid
- Mike’s Motive
- Ricky Vaughn
- Red Demon
- Big Bank
- Flapjack
- Salty Brindle
(let’s note too that tied for 11 are Reba McEntire’s The Hammer and UTZ BesTexSmokestack. Reba McEntire’s The Hammer’s name is presumably promotion for the movie of that title?)
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.
USC-UCLA
Posted: November 18, 2023 Filed under: sports, the California Condition Leave a commentAhead by three scores, taking a knee or running up the middle would have been the humane thing to do, even against those terrible Trojans.
Cade McNown leaned into the huddle and relayed the play. As the clock ticked below 20 seconds, the Bruins quarterback stepped behind center and took the snap. He faked a pitch and took off in the other direction, no one there to protect him.
It was a naked bootleg, and a timeless kick in the rear.
“I mean, I still f— hate Cade McNown,” former USC fullback Petros Papadakis said this week with a hearty laugh.
Enjoyed this LA Times article by Ben Bolch about the 1998 USC-UCLA game. A 1998 time capsule:
Some might say the Bruins were cursed before kickoff. A large swath of the team had wanted to wear black wristbands in protest of Proposition 209, a state constitutional amendment that prohibited affirmative action in state programs and university admissions.
As for Cade McNown:
McNown later worked for UBS in the private wealth group before joining JPMorgan Chase Private Bank. In 2013, McNown joined capital management firm Lourd Murray as a vice president. In 2016, McNown joined Kayne Anderson as a senior managing director. In June 2022, McNown joined The Carlyle Group as a Managing Director and Client Relationship Manager.
Of course. The Carlyle Group is so odd:
In the late 1980s, Carlyle raised capital deal-by-deal to pursue leveraged buyout investments, including a failed takeover battle for Chi-Chi’s.
Chi-Chi’s was a Midwestern sensation that flopped on expansion:
Chi-Chi’s is noted in the Sentinel as specializing in Sonoran food. Sonora, a state in the northwestern region of Mexico, features cuisine known for having “subtle, less spicy seasoning.” For a chain that formed many Americans’ first impression of Mexican food, Chi-Chi’s likely understood the need to ease diners’ palates into the new fare. It was a savvy approach…
Despite having made over $2 million in revenue in its first year, Chi-Chi’s didn’t manage to replicate its Midwest popularity in other regions as it attempted to expand. Multiple locations in New York and the New England region failed, as well as locations in Atlanta, Texas, New Mexico, and San Diego.
Then came the Pittsburgh hepatitis outbreak, which killed at least four people.
Nostaljack took that one for Wikipedia. The last surviving Chi-Chi’s is in Vienna, Austria.
Today USC and UCLA will play in the Rose Bowl. Both teams underperformed expectations this year. Pride will be on the line.
Shelby on Shiloh (and more)
Posted: November 18, 2023 Filed under: War of the Rebellion Leave a comment
Naval History: I know that the Battle of Shiloh is near and dear to your heart. Why is that?
Foote: For one things, the Shiloh battlefield is within 100 miles of me. The other reason is even better. Shiloh is, to my mind, unquestionably the best-preserved Civil War battlefield of them all.
It has been singularly fortunate in many ways. It’s not so close to a large city or populated area, so it is not clogged with tourists all the time. But the main thing is, it has had only five or six superintendents, I believe, and each one has been thoroughly conscious to keep the place the way it was when the battle was fought. It’s not surrounded by hot dog stands the way Gettysburg is. In the Official Records Pat Cleburne’s report of the attack on what had been [Major General William T.] Sherman’s headquarters describes going through a blackjack thicket and then across marshy ground and up a hill. You can go there today, and the blackjack thicket, the marshy ground, and the hill are still there. It’s a beautiful experience.
Shelby Foote interviewed by the Naval Institute Press in 1994.
on the blockade:
The blockade, tenuous and penetrable as it was, still had an enormous effect on little things. Nobody really knows the effect the blockade had on the people of the Confederacy.
The rarity of little items that you don’t ordinarily think of was hugely important. They didn’t have needles for sewing; they had to improvise thorns to use for needles. They didn’t have nails to repair their ramshackle houses. By the time the war was over, after four years of being without nails, half the houses in the South were being shaken to pieces. Things like that you don’t normally think about, but the North’s naval blockade caused it.
how about this:
Naval History: As much as any other historians, you and David McCullough are responsible recently for popularizing history, as opposed to doing formal academic studies.
Foote: Yeah.
More:
What I’m calling young historians are people at least in their 40s or 50s. You have to reach that age before you have enough life experience to be a historian. I don’t think you can have a 22-year-old historian. You can have a 22-year-old mathematical genius. You can have a 22-year-old poet. But I doubt you can have a 22-year-old historian.
Contemplating possible transition to historian, in my 50s.
(Shelby’s views on the Confederate flag seem less clear, to me)
The Retake Room
Posted: November 17, 2023 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
There used to be a bar near the MGM studio in Culver City called The Retake Room. Referenced in some Hollywood history or another, I found these photos of it on Martin Trumbull’s blog, a fantastic resource for now-gone LA places.
Stephen King on TV
Posted: November 15, 2023 Filed under: America Since 1945, TV Leave a comment
from this Rolling Stone interview, old:
You mentioned watching a lot of TV. What’s the best show of the past 15 years?
Breaking Bad. I knew it was great from the first scene you see him wearing jockey shorts. I thought it was amazingly brave since they look so geeky.Do you think if you had been born at a later time you would have wanted to work as a TV showrunner?
No. Too much time for too little payoff. I don’t mean in terms of money. Also, showrunning is a thing where you have to work with tons of different people. You have to schmooze people, you have to talk to network people. I don’t want to do any of that.
economics of literature
Posted: November 13, 2023 Filed under: writing Leave a commentfrom The Guardian’s profile of Andrew Wylie:
Later in their conversation, the editor worried about what to do with the latest novel by an award-winning British writer. “The modest offer you are waiting to make will be accepted, maybe with a small improvement,” Wylie told her. He suggested €6,000.
“It’s not going to work, since he only sold 900 copies of his last book,” the editor replied.
“This is the weakest argument I’ve ever heard in my life,” Wylie teased. “The flaws are transparent and resonant.” He pointed out that a publisher’s greatest profitability comes before an author earns back their advance, then he suggested €5,000.
“More like €4,000,” the editor said.
“Forty-five hundred? Done.” Wylie announced, pleased but not triumphant.
As meagre as that amount was, if the agency could make 20 such deals around the world for a writer, and earn a similar amount just in North America, a writer might, after the 15% agency fee and another 30% or so in taxes, afford to pay rent on a two-bedroom Manhattan apartment for a couple of years. How they would eat, or pay rent after two years if it took them longer than that to write their next book, was another question.
Lee Atwater
Posted: November 7, 2023 Filed under: America Since 1945 2 Comments
I can give you an Atwater anecdote. After Atwater became chairman, I went down to his office one day, he was RNC [Republican National Committee] chairman and I walk in and the television is on and there are two guys in a ring wrestling on television. I say,
Atwater, why are you watching that stuff? That’s fixed.He said,What do you mean?I said,You’re watching wrestling.He said,I’m not watching wrestling.I said,You’ve got two half naked guys in a ring, groping each other, that’s called wrestling.He said,I’m not watching wrestling.I said,What are you doing?He said,See the audience? That’s the swing vote in November.And he really believed that the wrestling audience and the stock car racing audience epitomized the swing vote in America. And this is a guy that understood, maybe only Bill Clinton understands as well as he did. And maybe only the three of us believed insee me, touch me, feel mepolitics as much as Lee. But he understood completely what we were doing in New Hampshire and really just reinforced everything.
That’s John Sununu talking to the Miller Center. Here’s Karl Rove being interviewed:
Riley
Is it your judgment that if Lee had lived, that he would have made a difference in anything?
Rove
Yes. I think if Lee had lived, 41 would have been reelected and 43’s rise would have been impossible.
Milkis
Because of his political feel?
Rove
Lee’s political feel would have caused him to say, in ’91, you’ve got to be careful about this, and he would have. Even if Bush 41 had said I’m going forward with this, he would have found a way to better handle the campaign than it ultimately was handled. Talk about a dysfunctional campaign. In preparing for 2004, I went back and talked to [Michael] Deaver and Baker and everybody else who played a significant role in the reelect campaign, and the ’91, ’92 Bush effort is too late, too disorganized, no clarity of structure, no clarity of message, and a candidate who allowed himself to come across as distant and disinterested. The campaign ill-served the man.
Here’s Timothy McBride, Bush 41’s personal aide:
Perry
Just one question before lunch about Lee Atwater. He’s such a colorful figure.
McBride
Yes, a great guy.
Perry
What were your thoughts about him?
McBride
I loved Lee Atwater. He was completely missed in ’92. I think that’s one of the key factors. The President missed him personally. I’m not sure we really know how much we missed him politically. I think he had a great deal of influence over the selection of Dan Quayle, ████ ███████ ███████ ███ ███ ███ ████ ████ ███ █████ ██████████ ███ he had influence in the sense that he helped the Vice President to imagine the baby boom generation as important to go after. That was a transformational idea for the Vice President. ███ ███ ████ ███ █████████ ███ ████ ███ ██ ██████ ███████ ██ ████ ███ ██████ █████ ████ █████████ ███ ███ ████ ██ █████ ████ ████ █████ ███████
There is a lot we can discuss about Lee Atwater, but what I noticed after Mr. Bush became President was that Lee would come to visit the President—I think he was RNC chair at the time. He would come into the Oval Office and just sort of let the President have it on some issue. You’re wrong on this, you need this, this, or this. Lee would get literally thrown out of the office, Get out of here. Forget it. The President would call Lee up later and say, You know, you’re right. Let’s figure this out.
Lee had a great deal of influence over the President (the Vice President)—on him, not over him—and had the ability to speak very directly and very frankly, which is something many Presidents miss. Most Presidents don’t have that, and I think increasingly George Bush didn’t have it after Lee’s death, particularly on the politics. He had more of that with [Brent] Scowcroft but that’s a different issue. But in the politics it was missing, and it was completely absent in ’92. Lee would have made a difference, I’m sure.
Riley
That was an odd pairing, wasn’t it? I mean generationally, temperamentally?
McBride
Yes. He was W’s age, his son’s age. Temperamentally he was a funny guy, in many respects outlandish, really, Lee Atwater was. But George Bush had the ability to recognize that he was helped by many points of view, many perspectives. He wasn’t of the mind in all things that if it’s not like me, if it’s not comfortable, that it must be wrong. I think that’s what Lee demonstrated.
Now, he had to earn his trust. He won the primary, got through the primaries. Lee had built the South Carolina strategy as the road to Super Tuesday. Lee had been the architect of that. He had demonstrated success, so that trust was built. Generationally he was very different on so many levels. Lee wasn’t afraid to just tell it like he saw it. That is a challenge for many Presidents. Without that, you can start to believe your own stuff, and that’s where they run into trouble, and we ran into trouble in ’92 as a result of that.
Riley
Okay, why don’t we break for lunch.
Craig Fuller, chief of staff to HW Bush when he was VP:
In some ways has become almost a legendary figure, at least amongst politicos. Could you talk a little bit about Lee Atwater, his attributes?Fuller
He was just a remarkable individual in touch with what was on the minds of people. Exactly how he got there was sometimes a mystery to me. There would be times in the campaign, for example, and even the run-up to the campaign, where he wouldn’t feel right about our message or what we were doing. He’d just go off to California or go spend some time talking to people and try to listen to what they were thinking about. He’d read the kind of newspapers they sell at the check-out counter at supermarkets, to see what people are tuning into and paying attention to.
Yet with all these quirks of personality, he was a really brilliant strategist. He really did understand how extraordinarily vital South Carolina was going to be. When I mentioned earlier that we came from different regions—I mean, pretty remarkably, Vice President Bush had assembled Lee Atwater from South Carolina, Bob Teeter from Michigan, Roger Ailes from New York, Fuller from California, Mosbacher from Texas. Our life experiences had tied us all to different regions, and all those regions that covered the country were, needless to say, important. Lee certainly moved well beyond just a strategist for the South, but he certainly was good at that.
He also had a remarkable candor about what was helping Vice President Bush and what was hurting him. He was probably, by any measure, more outspoken and certainly more irreverent than I was. Definitely told better jokes than I did. So he was somebody that the Vice President just simply enjoyed being around. Lee knew this, so it’s not telling stories that he wasn’t aware of. He would at times drive the Vice President crazy. He would appear in print with something the Vice President would be upset about, and yet mostly it was me who would call Lee and say,
Okay, we’ve got a little problem, Lee.
I know, I know. Is he mad at me? What’s the man saying?He’d always say,What’s the man saying?Well,I’d say,He’s not very happy, but don’t worry. Come on over for lunch.He’d say,What should I say at lunch?Just ignore it.So as I said, I started my mornings getting,
Have you seen what’s in the newspaper?from the Vice President. By lunch, it was Lee and stories about this Senator or that Congressman, and it all went away. It was very good for George Bush. I think that if you could point at one thing—others have suggested this, not just me—if you could point at one thing that was distinctly different in the reelection campaign, it was the absence of Lee Atwater, who really didn’t allow any of us to get lost in theinside the beltwaythinking. He was just constantly forcing us to look at realities.
some of those realities were pretty dark. There’s a documentary about Lee Atwater.
when you cut into an onion
Posted: October 30, 2023 Filed under: the California Condition 1 Comment
and it turns out to be two onions? that’s a small pleasure
Two case studies in narrative shaping from Bill Clinton’s career
Posted: October 29, 2023 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
It’s 1990. Bill Clinton is planning his presidential run. But he has a problem. He has to get reelected as governor of Arkansas.
In 1990, Clinton has a very difficult primary. He’s clearly wanting to look toward running for the Presidency. He’s now been in office—I think it’s ten years. I can’t remember the exact number of years, but he was in the fifth term. Anyway, the justification for another term was hard to figure. He had a difficult primary and he was running against a former Democrat in the general. It was a real question as to whether he could, indeed, lose. Obviously, if he lost the Governor’s race, his presidential ambitions were done.
This is pollster Stanley Greenberg, remembering in the first of his two oral histories for UVA’s Miller Center. What can possibly be the case for a fifth term? Greenberg and Dick Morris run polling and focus groups:
I figured out a rationale that centered around not going back. It’s not important to your overall narrative, but it was focused on things he had done, including sex education, which surprised everybody, that sex education was popular in Arkansas. The Republican running was against all this and many of the education reforms.
Turn the clock backbecame the symbol, and it was all around the idea of, rather than him having a new agenda for his eleventh year in office—whatever it was—it was focused on not allowing the clock to be turned back on a modern Arkansas. It was effective and he won the election.
Cut to 1992, the New Hampshire primary. The Gennifer Flowers story breaks. Greenberg describes the situation:
It was James’ decision that everybody get to New Hampshire, and that we have to throw every resource—
Anyway, James at this point says,
Everybody in New Hampshire.Riley
Is that because you want to have resources to deploy there, or because there is an efficiency in having all the heads in one place to figure out how to deal with this?
Greenberg
There’s a sense that this entire candidacy could crash in a second. If we don’t do everything conceivable to save it, it’s gone. And so, enough of these conference calls all over America. Everybody get to New Hampshire.
Here’s James Carville describing the situation:
George Stephanopoulos called me. It was early in the morning and he said, “Why don’t you meet us? Why don’t you come to the airport? The governor wants you to come . . . thinks that something’s going to break today about some woman.” And I said, “Aw, shit, every day something’s going to break about some woman.” You know what I mean? I was not at all fired up about getting on a plane in January. And he said, “I think you’d better come.”
So I went. As the incoming started coming, they were out campaigning. I was in between. They were trying to tell Mrs. Clinton, who was in Georgia at the time, that the story was going to break. . . . From then until the primary, the dominant memory I have is fatigue–just being so tired and not sleeping. And the story broke, and of course they had the sort of press conference, the Gennifer Flowers press conference and the stuttering John thing. . . .
Right after that, we went on a tour down south. . . . My dominant memory in all of that is being tired. We had an event in Boston, Massachusetts. . . . I know what it feels like if you’re at a soccer game and you lose control. The media throng there was so intense that I got pinned. Maybe it was three seconds; I don’t want to exaggerate it. But I didn’t have any control. I thought I was going to be crushed. I was just sort of lifted off my feet. There was this radio guy with a little tape recorder and a mike, and he was screaming and he was crawling over the top of the crowd. And I was sitting there, and my arms were pinned, and I couldn’t move my legs. Like I said, for two or three seconds, I panicked that it was out of control–that I wasn’t just going to lose the election, but I was going to lose my life–as they say, I was going to be “taking a dirt nap” pretty soon.
The day that Mandy Grunwald went on Nightline, you had a strategy session. What was the strategy?
I think the “cash for trash,” was the sort of main thing. . . .
Who came up with the phrase “cash for trash?”
I wish I could say it was me, but I honestly don’t know.
In your book, you said it actually was Bill Clinton.
Okay, then it was. . . . The book supercedes my memory.
What was the strategy, and who came up with it?
The strategy was to say that there was a lot of money that was passing hands here. It was all odd that this was coming up around 10 days before the election. The strategy was pretty obvious, and I think the strategy worked pretty good.
When Mandy went on Nightline that night and you all were watching, what was the reaction in the campaign?
“Attagirl! Way to go!” It was good. We had pretty good points to make, and people really resent it. At one event in New Hampshire, someone there asked the question, and it was actually a journalist who sort of posed–they didn’t identify themselves — and there was a time when I thought the crowd could have turned physical.
Against the reporter?Yes, against the reporter. If you did focus groups, if you did events, if you did anything, there was a real backlash to the whole thing
When Governor and Mrs. Clinton went on 60 Minutes, you had prepared an extensive memo for that interview. What were you trying to accomplish?In that environment, if you let the story take its own course, it was going to be bad for you. You had to get in the middle of the story. Governor Clinton, myself, and most of the people in the campaign all shared this one thing — we were not just going to let people do what they wanted to do. If they were going to give us a chance to get on there, by God, we were going to get on there. We were going to get in the middle of it. There’s a lot of times when people have a strategy to say, “We’re just not going to participate in that sort of witch hunt here,” or something like that. That doesn’t work for very long in presidential races in the United States.
You have to fight back.You’ve got to fight back. Yes, sir. And our strategy from day one was to contest it at every point, and to have them out there… The best person to explain what happened … was then-Governor Clinton and Mrs. Clinton. And that’s why we did the 60 Minutes thing, because it was the biggest deal out there. You had to show that you were out there, taking it on.
fine use for a Herend dish
Posted: October 15, 2023 Filed under: America Since 1945, presidents, the California Condition Leave a comment
Knott
You mentioned Jacques Chirac at lunch. I don’t know if you want to tell the story about that.
Kuhn
Oh yes. When Mitterrand was President, Chirac was Prime Minister. Prime Minister of France is a very limited role, but he was there for a meeting at the White House. It was a small plenary session in the Cabinet room. I recall afterwards that Chirac came into the Oval Office just to spend some brief time with the President alone. Photos were taken in the Oval Office and then it was just the two of them. I happened to be in there and was about to leave so they could spend some time together. And Chirac pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and just lights up a cigarette in the Oval Office like it’s an everyday thing. I had never seen anybody smoke in the Oval Office before. At that time I don’t even think people were smoking in the West Wing. I think they had stopped that, staff-wise.
President Reagan wasn’t at all upset that he lit up, he was fine with that. His big concern was, what do we do for an ashtray? Like, Jim, we’ve got to find—he’s looking frantically and I’m looking because we want to be hospitable. We couldn’t find anything. Finally we found, there was a nice Herend dish on the coffee table that was there and never got used for anything. I thought, well, why not? We’re going to make this a practical piece now, and gave it to him. That Herend dish just became an ashtray. But it was funny, he just fired that cigarette up like—he didn’t offer Reagan one because he knew he didn’t smoke. That was an old fashioned thing to do in the old days.
tales from the Reagan oral histories at UVA’s Miller Center, that is James Kuhn.
in good news
Posted: October 8, 2023 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentIn good news, we saw Reba McEntire at Terroni
Boston as Mecca and Medina
Posted: September 30, 2023 Filed under: Boston, Kennedy-Nixon, New England Leave a comment
Globe reporter and editor Martin Nolan, towards the end of his interview for the Miller Center on the life and career of Edward “Ted” Kennedy:
Knott
How would you explain to somebody reading this transcript, hopefully 100 years from now or so—that’s our goal here, to create an historical record that will last. How would you explain the hold of the Kennedys, particularly on the people in Massachusetts, that would allow somebody like Senator Kennedy to have a 44-year career in the United States Senate, as we speak today?
Nolan
In Massachusetts we do indeed revere the past. There’s nothing wrong with that. In the 1970s, during the great energy crisis, a guy I knew, Fred Dutton, was the lobbyist for the Royal Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He had been another guy doing well by doing good. He came to work for Jack Kennedy in the White House as Assistant Secretary of State and worked for Bobby Kennedy and McGovern and all this. He landed on his Guccis with this job. He says,
Look, there’s this Minister of Petroleum, Sheikh [Zaki] Yamani.Do you remember Sheikh Yamani? He says,He’s coming to town and I’d like him just to get a flavor. Would you like to get an exclusive?Yes, geez, he was the biggest guy going.He takes me to lunch at the Watergate Hotel, just the two of us, wonderful, because I kind of knew the subject. Oil is very important for furnaces in New England. He’s talking about OPEC [Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries] and stuff like that. He’s giving me a big Churchill Havana cigar, sitting there like he’s got all day, and he said,
You know, Mr. Nolan, we have oil running under the sands of Saudi Arabia. We have a lot of oil, but it is a finite resource. We all know that,he says.But we have Mecca and Medina and we will never run out of Mecca and Medina.I probably put it in at the bottom, if I put it in at all, because it didn’t relate to the price of oil.But that’s what we have in Boston, Massachusetts. Yes, we’ve got hospitals and universities and all that, but we have history, and you never run out of history. That is the great contribution Jack Kennedy made with Profiles in Courage. He knew that the history he learned just by walking around—I used to take the Harvard fellows on a tour, my little walking political tour. You don’t have to go far; it’s all around the State House. I would show them the statue of William Lloyd Garrison, the liberator. Jack Kennedy had remembered the statue and sent a guy to take the—in his last speech in America he said he wanted to have this before he went on to see Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna. I was covering it at the Commonwealth Armory. It was a great time and he said,
I take with me an inscription on a statue of a distinguished and vigorous New Englander, William Lloyd Garrison: ‘I am in earnest….I will not retreat a single inch and I will be heard.’Another time, Kennedy was walking along—He’s got this apartment over there on Bowdoin Street. This is where Jack Kennedy’s mattress was, I mean, that’s his voting address. Right there at about Spruce Street, James Michael Curley, for the 300th anniversary of the founding of Boston, has this wonderful relief. It’s an Italian sculptor and a Yankee architect and an Irish mayor, and the words are from John Winthrop:
For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.Reagan took it, as you know. In fact, we were flying in over Dorchester Bay. The Reagan people are smart. You have the local guy go in with the candidate. He said,
Now what is that?I said,Well that’s actually Dorchester Bay, but that’s where the Arbella lay anchored when John Winthrop, you know, the guy with the ‘city on a hill’? Kennedy used that in his speech to the Massachusetts Legislature long before you got it.He said,No kidding, really?I said,January 9, 1961, Governor, ‘For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.’Kennedy took that and thought that sentiment should be spread to the Massachusetts Legislature. What he meant was, please don’t steal, or don’t steal as much as you have been doing, and they all thought, Ah, isn’t it great that Jack Kennedy was elected? The message went over their heads.You see all that sense of history just living, going back to Honey Fitz and Curley, and these people all had it. He is the essence of a Boston politician. They’re all rooted and it’s a phenomenal thing to have this. We have the myth, Damon and Pythias. There was not a third guy in there, right? Just think of what Edith Hamilton could have done with this, you know? You’ve got one martyred guy and then another martyred guy, and then the third guy turns out to be the greatest United States Senator in history by a measuring of accomplishment, involvement, whatever—what Adam Clymer’s book said. It’s pretty much every issue except the environment, which is not a New England issue, in a way. But there’s no issue that it does not affect. I mean, civil rights, labor law, education, health—what are we missing? Foreign policy? Vietnam.
What a remarkable thing. There’s nothing like it in American history certainly and I’m unaware of another family like that—the primogeniture. One guy dies in the war, the other guy is kind of diffident and not too keen on running, but he runs. He gets killed and then the brother, not too keen on politics, but he runs and he gets killed, and then the guy who’s really good at politics survives.
Was the US Civil War fueled by lack of athletic contests?
Posted: September 24, 2023 Filed under: War of the Rebellion 1 Comment
that from:
It sounds crazy but Bruce Catton knew Civil War veterans.
The big early Civil War battles were probably the largest gatherings in American history up to that time. The biggest tent revival meeting was probably 1/10 the size of Shiloh. Something big was finally happening. Shelby Foote speaks on this as well.
Is history driven as much as anything by the desire to “make history”?
Stone Town
Posted: September 17, 2023 Filed under: Africa Leave a commentAn interview in the Financial Times with Nobel Prize winning novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah got me interested in the Stone Town area of Zanzibar.
I went for a walk around there via Google Maps and ended up tailing this guy:
Lost him somewhere around the Balinese Spa. I hope he had a great day!
Reno
Posted: September 16, 2023 Filed under: Uncategorized 1 Comment
Reno, Nevada named for Jesse Lee Reno:
He was brought by stretcher to Brigadier General Samuel D. Sturgis’s command post and said in a clear voice, “Hallo, Sam, I’m dead!” Sturgis, a long-time acquaintance and fellow member of the West Point Class of 1846, thought that he sounded so natural that he must be joking and told Reno that he hoped it was not as bad as all that. Reno repeated, “Yes, yes, I’m dead—good-by!”, dying a few minutes later.
Jesse Lee Reno made an impression at the time. There was a Fort Reno as well that turns up in reading on the Plains. Nothing suggests Jesse Lee was related to the unfortunate Marcus Reno of the Little Bighorn incident.
I learn in Tom Hanks interview on Rick Rubin’s podcast that Hanks spent some of his boyhood in Reno. In this interview I think Rick asks Tom about four questions, that’s enough to generate two hours of interesting content.
Trevor Bexon took that photo of Reno (the city) for Wikipedia. We were not enamored of Reno, the city on our visit there last summer. The best thing you can do in Reno is drive away to Lake Tahoe.
Acheson on Truman (and Lincoln)
Posted: September 9, 2023 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a commentWILSON: Well, I think the question that you’ve answered in great part in your book, that I would like to put a little differently. You indicated that you were working for a remarkable man, Harry Truman.
ACHESON: Oh, yes.
WILSON: And I wonder how much again the contrast between the previous man’s administrative efforts had to do with your obvious admiration and ability to work with Truman?
ACHESON: You mean FDR?
WILSON: Yes. It was so much better.
ACHESON: Truman was straight, above board, straight in line.
Two days ago, Monday, former President Sachar of Brandeis University was here and talked about President Truman. He started off by saying, “Let me read you two or three paragraphs here about Mr. Truman, criticize that.”
And I said, “All right.”
And he began about how with totally inadequate preparation, education, and everything else, Mr. Truman was turning out to be one of the best Presidents, and went on and said, “What do you think of this?”
I said, “I think it’s the goddamndest collection of cliches I ever heard in my life, and none of it is true.”
Well, he said, “You agree that he didn’t have any education.”
I said, “I don’t agree to that at all; he had a remarkable education.” My younger daughter had TB at 19, after she had been in college one month, and just been married and her husband went off to the war, and she spent five years in Saranac and lost her lung; and in the course of that time she spent in bed she read and read and read and talked to all kinds of people. And she’s far better educated than I am. I went to the best school, the best college, the best law school. That isn’t the way you get educated. The point is what enters into your innards.
Suppose somebody sits under John Kenneth Galbraith for three years to get an education; a hell of a waste of time. Mr. Truman read every book in the Independence library, which had about 3,500 to 5,000 volumes including three encyclopedias, and he read them all the way through. He took in a hell of a lot more out of that effort, which he took out of farming when he did it, than he would listening to all of this crap that goes on at Yale and Harvard, and perhaps in other places–Harvard Law School education.
I sit here and talk about his preparation. I would think he did more preparation by being on the County Court or whatever it was called in Jackson County, than he would have being a Justice of the Supreme Court, a hell of a lot more. See how people work, how the thing runs, what makes it tick, what are the important things, what are the unimportant things. And it’s sort of significant comparing to other Presidents. Well, I think I said Washington should have been President. Tom Jefferson I would give a very low rating, too; he was a man of words, and was a poor Governor, a poor Ambassador to France. The only thing as President that he really did that was really worth a damn was the Louisiana Purchase. And that was contrary to everything that he was . . .
MCKINZIE: That he believed in, yes.
ACHESON: Well, he said, “What do you think about Lincoln?”
I said, “The best thing that can be said about Lincoln are the Trumanesque qualities that he had.
“He said, “That’s the damndest thing I ever heard, you usually think it’s the other way, the thing that is good about Truman is the Lincolnesque.”
I said, “That isn’t what he had at all; he didn’t have Lincolnesque qualities. Lincoln had Trumanesque qualities. He did things that were contrary to the baloney that he talked; he didn’t believe his own book. A house divided against itself doesn’t fall if you stand up and fight, the house stands up, and he proved it. All these things–it isn’t true that a drop of blood drawn by the lash has got to be paid for by one drawn by the sword, or that the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous–poetic talk, that’s fool talk. Dr. Johnson said to Boswell, “You can talk foolishly, but don’t think foolishly.”
from Dean Acheson’s oral history at the Truman Library. I was looking for the source of Truman’s “cry-baby” remark re: Oppenheimer, as dramatized in the popular film. There were only three people at that meeting, so how do we know what happened? How does that story come down to us?
from American Prometheus.
The authors cite as their source a memo in the Truman Library:
If any of my readers pass through Independence, Missouri, grab me a photo of that memo in box 201, will ya?
Helytimes 