The Book of the Week is “Half-Life, The Divided Life of Bruno Pontecorvo, Physicist or Spy” by Frank Close, published in 2015. The author himself was a physicist, so he interspersed physics concepts with the evolution of the development of nuclear technology and its major players. This book was written for readers who would like to learn some nuclear physics, and/or those readers curious about the people involved in Cold War / nuclear physics mysteries.
However, Close made an error, spelling “Lise Meitner” as “Lisa Meitner.” Additionally, since the author was neither a historian nor American (he was British) he was mistaken in declaring, “For supporters of communism in the West, this [the autumn 1956 Hungarian uprising which was bloodily crushed by the Soviets] was probably the most serious crisis of conscience since the Soviet pact with the Nazis in 1939.” Actually, in early 1956, Khrushchev revealed Stalin’s horrific crimes to the world. Americans, especially those who considered themselves Social Democrats, were thrown for a loop ideologically, and became bitterly conflicted in their own minds, and with each other.
Anyway, born in Italy in August 1913, Pontecorvo was the fourth of eight children. In 1931, he transferred from the University of Pisa to that of Rome for his third year of physics studies, mentored by Enrico Fermi. Knowledge of particle physics was in its infancy. Pontecorvo and other scientists jointly filed a patent in autumn 1935 in connection with experiments with neutrons and hydrogen.
The year 1936 saw Pontecorvo flee to Paris after Mussolini cracked down on Jews’ liberty. He studied with Frederic and Irene Joliot-Curie. He was turned on to Communist ideology by his cousin. They attended meetings and rallies.
By the late 1930’s, physicists (and governments) of different nations such as Germany, France, Italy, the USSR, etc. started to realize how important nuclear processes were for creating future weapons of mass destruction– instrumental for their respective homelands’ national security. Beginning in the summer of 1940, nuclear research became secret in the United States. Scientific journals would no longer publish articles on that topic.
The USSR did not lack for brains, but for uranium in the early 1940’s. Beginning in summer 1942 in Moscow, the Soviets worked on an atomic bomb. But scientists in the United Kingdom had a head start, having begun their work the previous year. In December 1942, the United States started the Manhattan Project.
By the end of the 1940’s, having done nuclear research in Tulsa in Oklahoma, the Northwest Territories in Canada and in Harwell in England, Pontecorvo was planning to move himself, his wife and three sons to Liverpool to become a physics professor. The British intelligence service MI5 secretly pushed him in that direction. As is well known, the United States was gripped by anti-Communist hysteria, with the arrests of spies Klaus Fuchs, David Greenglass and the Rosenbergs.
The summer of 1950 saw the Pontecorvo family take a summer vacation in France, Switzerland, and the Italian countryside. There is circumstantial evidence that he met with his Communist cousin and suddenly, all bets were off.
Read the book to learn the fate of the family, the contributions made to science by the scientist, learn why he neither won the Nobel Prize nor collected royalties on the aforementioned patent, and much more.
The First Book of the Week is “Killers of the Flower Moon, The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI” by David Grann, published in 2017. This volume described in suspenseful anecdotes– a political, social and cultural system suffused with evil– and it highlighted what happened to just one of countless families whose members were victims of the conspiracy.
In 1870, the Osage Native Americans were forced by light-skinned Americans to flee from their homeland in Kansas, to wasteland in northeastern Oklahoma. In 1893, the United States government’s Indian Affairs Department ordered that all children on the Osage reservation attend school. One consequence was that the young people in the area adopted the ways of the “white man.”
On September 16, 1893, the U.S. government shot a gun to kick off a land-grab. The Cherokee Outlet, territory bordering on the Osage’s that was bought by the U.S. government, was handed over to the Cherokees on a first-claimed via physical presence, first-owned basis.
About 42,000 members of the Cherokee nation waited on the border for days until the appointed time of the free-for-all. The fight for land ended in a massacre galore. The government didn’t bother to repeat the above process with the Osage reservation.
Yet, by the very early 1900’s, oil was discovered on the Osage’s land; this opened a Pandora’s box. In 1912, the Department of the Interior auctioned off the then-super-valuable parcels, to which the Osage had mineral rights. The Osage became millionaires overnight, paid royalties by the oil barons.
The local (white) politicians of the oil-rich lands stuck like leeches to the Osage residents, under the guise of regulating commerce. They deemed that (white) guardians of the property be appointed for full-blooded Osage people, as the Native Americans weren’t sufficiently educated or competent to manage their own money. Unsurprisingly, the guardians were thieves and worse.
Read the book to learn about a statistics-defying (but not uncommon among the Osage) rash of deaths (by poisonings, shootings and explosives) that occurred in one Osage family due to the “system” and the growing-pains the Wild West experienced as it evolved into a civilized, law-abiding society with the help of a national law enforcement organization now known as the FBI.
A more recent example of exploitation of Native Americans was described in the Second Book of the Week, “Heist, Superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, His Republican Allies, and the Buying of Washington” by Peter H. Stone, published in 2006. Yet again, the hypothetical board game “Survival Roulette” could be applied to this scandal: Native American Exploitation Edition (See “Highly Confident” post).
There have been countless ultimate winners of this game through the centuries: all the people never caught for committing crimes against Native Americans. The vast majority have gone unpunished, including several people mentioned in the book, whose names have already faded from the public’s memory.
However, the most famous hypothetical losers of the game in this book were lobbyists Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, and Congressman Tom DeLay. Instead of a Monopoly board, in keeping with the casino theme, the central structure of the game could be an actual roulette wheel, whose ball could land on spaces that describe the financial crimes of: bribery, money laundering, fraud, disclosure failures and influence peddling. Plus tax evasion. Just for good measure.
In short, with Abramoff as the ringleader, during the course of three years, the gang milked six Native American tribes for $82 million– that paid for political bribes, funding for a school, lavish gifts, and entertainment and recreation expenses– disguised as lobbying and public relations services on behalf of the tribes.
In this slim volume, the author dispensed with suspense by revealing up front that, when they got caught, Abramoff and his sidekick Scanlon accepted plea deals for their unethical opportunism, unconscionable greed and unmitigated hubris. The author then failed to explain why the Texas state government closed a casino run by the Tigua Indians in February 2002, but did explain later on.
Nevertheless, the story thereafter unfolded in more or less chronological order, starting with backstory from the 1990’s. The Tigua casino actually stayed closed, despite Abramoff’s fat fee, part of which he circuitously funneled through nonprofit organizations that ended up as political donations, and paid for a luxurious golf vacation in the United Kingdom for himself and his cronies.
Abramoff’s shamelessness knew no bounds. He had his friends, in order to service one of his tribal clients, marshal support from the likes of the Christian Coalition to convince the U.S. government that gambling was against their religion, and a reason to close the Tigua casino. At the same, he was lobbying on behalf of the Tiguas through illegal means, to reopen the casino (!) For that, he made megabucks from both sides.
Abramoff also helped to quash legislation that would have taxed his Choctaw client, and would have imposed tougher labor laws on his offshore client that manufactured clothing in the Marianas.
Kevin Sickey, who represented an Indian tribe that hired Abramoff, described the lobbyist’s propaganda thusly: “They exaggerated political threats and they exaggerated economic threats. Then they exaggerated their ability to deal with threats.”
Read the book to learn what led to the start of investigations by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee and the Justice Department; Abramoff’s and Scanlon’s early-career adventures; and details of their and others’ punishments, among other nothing-new-under-the-sun type political opportunism, greed and hubris.
As an aside, the dollar value of political wrongdoing has reached dizzying heights in the past few decades, and it has been the same kind of wrongdoing, over and over again– committed mostly by alpha males. People who have an insatiable need for power and money apparently never learn from others whose stories have been well-publicized!
The Book of the Week is “A Great Wall, Six Presidents and China: An Investigative History” by Patrick Tyler, published in 1999.
In this tome, the author recounted the history of the relationships between and among the United States, China, Taiwan and the former Soviet Union beginning in 1969. In March of that year, the Chinese started a border skirmish with the Soviets, killing a few tens of them.
American president Richard Nixon realized that it would be advantageous to play the Soviets off of the Chinese or vice versa, by becoming friendly with one or the other before the end of his administration. His eventual secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, insinuated himself into foreign policy matters early on by marginalizing the then-main adviser, William Rogers.
The socially manipulative Kissinger, by spring 1970, working in the White House, then proceeded to convince Nixon to take the State Department out of the loop on conversations the United States was having with China through the Pakistanis, and other players in the diplomacy game– Taiwan, Japan and the USSR. Nixon feared being criticized for betraying the democratic Taiwan by flirting with the Communists. It was completely antithetical to his past rabid anti-Communist ideology and vicious behavior against them.
Nixon’s desire for reelection in 1972, however, overrode any shred of morality he ever had and any consistent political behavior he ever displayed. In early 1971, after a few telling incidents, he relaxed: travel restrictions on Americans who wanted to go to China, and the trade embargo on products from China. That spring, as a goodwill gesture, the Chinese sent their ping-pong team to Japan to compete against that of the United States.
The major issues Nixon had to tackle in order to get reelected included the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, the Vietnam War, making nice with both China and Taiwan (a very tall order), plus the Pentagon Papers; not to mention the Watergate break-in.
Kissinger tried to generate hysteria by claiming that the Soviets had designs on China, so that’s why it was a bad idea for China to officially swallow Taiwan as part of its property. China was a sworn enemy of Taiwan because its efforts to take it over had been frustrated for decades.
China’s leader, Mao Tse Tung wanted China to take over Taiwan’s seat on the United Nations Security Council. Nixon was in a tough spot because in order to become friendly with the Chinese, he needed to bow to Mao’s wishes– help to oust Taiwan from the UN and terminate all diplomatic relations between Taiwan and the United States. George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley, Pat Buchanan and others disagreed with Nixon’s rejecting Taiwan to court China.
“Nixon’s credibility with America’s allies in Asia and the Pacific would depend on his reassurance that he was not making deals behind their backs…” But with Kissinger as Nixon’s point man, the secret proposed agreements kept on coming, making Nixon one of the biggest liars in the world. The ridiculously phony Kissinger deserved an Academy Award for his performances; telling the Chinese one thing, and the Taiwanese the opposite, secretly wooing the other.
The Chinese and Soviets had their complicated, internal power struggles, too. Mao got rid of his second-in-command in the second half of summer 1971 for trying to argue against fostering harmony with the Americans. For, flirting with the Americans would displease the Soviets. “Even a partial break with Moscow wasn’t popular in the Chinese military, which had been trained and equipped by the Soviets.”
The plot thickened in November 1971 when the Soviet-backed India picked a fight with the Chinese-backed Pakistan. The United States imposed economic sanctions on India. Eventually, East Pakistan became Bangladesh despite Kissinger’s United States’ failed attempt to butt into the fray.
In February 1972, Nixon became the focal point of the universe when he visited Beijing. He made headlines again when he gave a standing ovation at a musical show that had the Communists beating the capitalists (that was actually a PR gaffe).
It might be recalled that former American president Dwight Eisenhower signed the Mutual Defense Treaty, which was supposedly still in effect when Kissinger arrived on the scene. That document asserted that the United States would defend Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai Shek (in exile on Taiwan) and the territory of Taiwan in the event that China got militarily aggressive.
Therefore, Kissinger had to backpedal on a new communique he and Zhou Enlai of China were hammering out. The final version omitted any reference to the protection of Taiwan altogether. It was the least bad compromise Kissinger could muster, as many Nixon administration officials were furious that the president had sold out Taiwan.
Meanwhile, the Americans agreed with the Soviets that they didn’t want the Chinese to develop nuclear weapons, which were in the offing for China by the early 1990’s, according to futurists.
However, Kissinger whispered to China that American military contractors such as General Electric and Westinghouse might license their jet-engine manufacturing and nuclear-reactor technologies to China via Great Britain or France. But he told them the United States would publicly have to say it couldn’t do that because the sellers weren’t supposed to be offering dangerous war tools to Communist nations. However, the United States believed that helping modernize China would be economically beneficial for itself, so it did want to help.
In summer 1973, Mao was livid at Kissinger’s empty promises when the United States announced an agreement with the Soviet Union on reducing nukes and protecting the other in the event of third-party aggression. Besides, the Watergate investigation was raging. Zhou was dying of cancer. Soon, the Arabs and Israelis would be going at it. That’s good times.
In November 1973, amid the full-on palace intrigue in both the United States and China, Kissinger showed himself to be a pathological liar upon his return from personal talks with Zhou. He prepared a thirteen-page memo for his boss, the president, in which he called those talks a “positive success on all fronts.” No joke.
In late 1974, when China’s new negotiator Deng Xiaoping outed Kissinger on his dishonesty, Kissinger responded with indignation, like the hubris-syndrome plagued alpha-male that he was.
President Jimmy Carter needed the support of Congress for his Panama Canal Treaties, so he trod lightly (and contradictorily as had all his predecessors) on the China / Taiwan / Soviet conundrums.
In 1979, Deng received bad publicity for perpetrating human rights abuses even though his were not nearly as harsh as Mao’s. Nevertheless, this new political football led to criticism of Carter’s failure to call him out on them. Also that year, the United States helped China start a secret spying operation in China that monitored the Soviets from Central Asia to the Far East.
The 1980’s saw other complicated issues come into play that involved the usual needless deaths and ruined lives, like the war in Afghanistan and the continuing pesky presence of the Vietnamese in Cambodia.
American president Ronald Reagan was as bad as Kissinger in his doublespeak. Not fooled, the Chinese started meeting with the Soviets. “The pro-Taiwan faction [in the U.S. government] feared that every weapon or high-tech system sold to China would end up in Moscow.”
The American president’s negotiators spent much of the 1980’s in arms-sales talks with China and Taiwan, trying not to anger one or the other. By May 1989 in China, however, dissatisfaction among university students over the authorities’ treatment of themselves and dissidents reached critical mass.
Not coincidentally, the students– because they knew the whole world would be watching– launched a hunger strike and protests in major cities across China at the same time as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev visited Beijing. America’s diplomatic representatives who held their reality show in Shanghai, also had their scene stolen.
Deng was embarrassed and angry that he couldn’t control the students, so he ordered law enforcement officers to disperse them with deadly weapons, arrests and executions, instead of just tear gas, water cannons and cops in riot gear. The horror and bloodshed lasted for about a month, as Hong Kong activists donated millions of dollars to the students’ cause to keep it alive.
In January 1990, president Bush vetoed a bill sponsored by Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi that would have allowed Chinese students to stay in the United States as long as martial law stayed in effect in China. Further, he failed to express outrage at Deng’s tyranny because damage to America’s ties to China would result in a financial loss to America.
From a purely ethical standpoint, Deng’s behavior was horrifying. But from a purely economic standpoint, Bush was successful with the Chinese. And economics is what really matters in a reelection campaign.
Bush played a small part in convincing Deng to try some capitalist practices to see how they compared with China’s socialist ways. Also in January 1990, to distract his country from China, ironically, Bush ordered American law enforcement to arrest and try brutal Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, compliments of American taxpayers. Panama must no longer have been profitable for the United States.
The question in Bush’s administration that continued to rear its ugly head, though, was whether trade with China should have been conditional on whether China curbed its human rights abuses.
One argument that favored linking them was that: a country whose sociopathic leader ruled his people with fear and force and disregarded their health and welfare– would behave the same way– dishonestly– in business and trade.
Businesspeople in countries ruled by a dictator make a good living through the organized-crime tactics of bribery, racketeering, money laundering, etc. And low-level workers are always at risk for grave harm due to few or no health and safety laws. Yet imposing sanctions would be economically hurtful to both parties in some sectors.
So a trade agreement between or among nations is a microcosm of a political campaign (translation: propaganda war). The terms that are finally negotiated are always based on a barrage of anecdotal evidence. The specific industries that win or lose might or might not represent a significant sector of a country’s economy.
It’s an opportunity for the agreement’s signers to brag about (projected) job creation, the (projected) stimulation of domestic product purchases, and a (projected) significant resulting increase in wealth for their respective countries’ whole economy. According to them, everyone will live happily ever after with the trade agreement.
Attendant issues that might go unmentioned though, include the impact on labor unions, additional environmental pollution from the change in business practices, a numerical estimate of the rise in prices of specific products affected by additional tariffs (if any are imposed), and whether the signers or the constituents of the signers have any direct financial interests in the terms of the trade agreement (as did Kissinger late in his career, with regard to a U.S. / China joint venture).
Anyway, read the book to learn:
the details of the aforementioned nations’ leaders’ major power struggles that led to minor changes in policy (and more blustery talk than anything else)
of the propagandizing
of the conversational and arms-deals shenanigans, etc., plus
whether president Bill Clinton did any better than his predecessors at taking decisive action that would strike a balance among the complex political, economic, cultural and social issues surrounding the United States, China, Taiwan, the former Soviet Union and their neighbors in the diplomatic game.
The Book of the Week is “No Excuses– Concessions of A Serial Campaigner” by Robert Shrum, published in 2007. Shrum was a political consultant for various Democratic candidates for more than four decades.
Shrum perceived that the Washington Post was the sole newspaper that understood that the Watergate break-in wasn’t just an isolated incident. That is why it took so long for Americans to see how evil Nixon really was. Then again, political people are a vengeful lot.
Beginning in 1992, the Republicans launched a “… nonstop, eight-year campaign to destroy his [Bill Clinton’s] presidency. Everything was fair game in a witch hunt on a tireless search for an offense.” Ken Starr was coming up empty on the Whitewater investigation, so after three and a half years, he convinced the three-judge panel to “… widen his mandate to include possible perjury charges against the president related to his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.”
During the 2000 presidential campaign, Shrum was an advisor to candidate Al Gore, during which there was rigorous fact-checking of everything Gore said in debates. Even so, he got a few minor details wrong. The Bush camp jumped right on the errors, accusing Gore of “sighing and lying.”
Voters have no idea how much cooperation (if any) there is behind the scenes of a candidate’s campaign, as media reports are distorted or exaggerated in this regard. But in September 2003, voters who believed the news, were focused on the supposed conflicts plaguing John Kerry’s staff instead of on John Kerry.
One of Kerry’s top aides, Jim Jordan was the source of the trouble. The press reported that Jordan was campaign manager. Jordan didn’t disabuse them of that notion. Howard Dean became a formidable competitor because he effectively raised funds via the Internet. Jordan didn’t believe that that fundraising channel would work, so he discouraged Kerry from trying it.
Jordan ignored political donors and couldn’t “… explain a coherent strategy for winning and we’re [the Kerry campaign] headed in the wrong direction — politically and financially.” Once Jordan was dismissed in November 2003, conditions improved. But not before the media trumpeted the turmoil and published Jordan’s negative utterances about the Kerry campaign.
Interestingly, Kerry enjoyed a small, unexpected boost in voter approval in late October 2004, when an unguarded cache full of American weapons was emptied by the enemy in Iraq. But Kerry’s advisers felt it was more important for their candidate to stay on-message than jump on Bush for this terrorist win; it would have been a distraction. It is such an irony that Americans are killed with their own weapons by terrorists through alleged anti-terrorist actions by the U.S. government.
So the way America’s enemies have acquired American weaponry hasn’t always been secret arms deals. Sometimes it has been. Other times, it has been caused by a raw, evil, greedy power grab perpetrated by a president who stokes fear that his country’s people will be victims again. Might makes right is never a good thing. It is simply a vicious cycle of needless deaths and ruined lives.
Anyway, read the book to learn of numerous other details of the fun insiders have in dealing with difficult: people, issues and publicity while advising a political candidate during an election campaign. So much fun.
The First Book of the Week is “Harry Belafonte, My Song, a Memoir” with Michael Shnayerson, published in 2011.
Born in March 1927 on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the singer best known for the “Banana Boat Song” actually did a lot more in his lifetime than give concerts and act. He was instrumental in helping fund and organize the civil rights movement.
Belafonte’s older relatives were interracial; they hailed from Jamaica in the Caribbean; the light-skinned ones living there were Scottish. Growing up dirt poor, he lived alternately between upper Manhattan and Jamaica for years at a time, bounced among them.
For Belafonte, it was one psychological trauma after another. He had undiagnosed dyslexia, in addition to having accidentally with sewing scissors, as a toddler, blinded himself in one eye.
Fortunately, Belafonte’s mother, an illegal immigrant, had survival skills. But she practiced spousification with him in his early years. When he was five years old, he was tasked with taking care of his baby brother while she worked. She instilled in him a love of music, taking him to see the great singers of the 1930’s and 1940’s at the Apollo Theater in upper Manhattan.
The author’s mother hired someone to give him piano lessons. However, he played hooky from them because the teacher cruelly beat his fingers, just like the nuns at his parochial school. He ended up quitting school for good in the middle of ninth grade.
Belafonte’s father, an abusive, mean drunk, was frequently out of town– either acting as head chef on a banana boat in the Caribbean, or philandering. But there were a few occasions of quality time, playing marbles.
Belafonte was able to pay for drama school with the G.I. Bill, after his Navy service during World War II. He befriended the politically-active, drama and jazz crowds, many of whom, like him, would later became world famous.
By the early 1960’s, the nation was violently divided. Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded Belafonte that “… compromise was a crucial tenet of nonviolence. If compromise got you closer to your goal, then it was worth any loss of face.” As is well known, there was excessive bloodshed throughout the 1960’s– so there must have been a lot of men who couldn’t stand to swallow their pride for the good of the nation.
Anyway, read the book to learn why Belafonte, even after becoming fabulously famous and wealthy, never did lead a charmed life. He did, however, raise funds for Shirley Chisholm.
The Second Book of the Week is “Shirley Chisholm, Catalyst for Change” by Barbara Winslow, published in 2014.
Born in Brooklyn in 1924, Chisholm had a grandfather who worked on the Panama Canal, whose construction spurred the upward mobility of sugarcane slaves from Barbados. Her ancestors believed in education and home ownership.
Chisholm spent roughly three and a half years of her early childhood in Barbados; the rest, in New York City. She experienced culture shock moving from a rural, agricultural village to big, scary, crime-ridden neighborhoods– Brownsville, and then Bedford-Stuyvesant, both in Brooklyn.
Chisholm’s goal was to become an elementary school teacher but she couldn’t get hired because she was black. With her master’s degree in early childhood education, Chisholm eventually became a consultant to the day care department of New York City’s welfare agency, supervising tens of employees. She “… would always have to face men who tried to infantilize, patronize or demonize her.”
In 1964, Chisholm won an assembly seat in New York State. She worked with three other black politicians in New York: Charles Rangel, David Dinkins and Percy Sutton. She was very prolific; eight of the fifty bills she sponsored were passed.
In 1968, with the slogan, “Vote for Shirley Chisholm for Congress– unbought and unbossed” she became the first African American woman elected to Congress. When she expressed her intention to run for president in 1972, men bristled.
Chisholm had a particular reason for rescinding her plan to personally campaign in Wisconsin, involving public relations. She disappointed a bunch of dedicated grass-roots volunteers. But she would have visited the state for only two or three days anyway, and not have gotten significant support over and above her loyal followers’. So by not visiting, she could brag that she got, say, 5% of the vote without even campaigning there– that’s how much people loved her.
In May 1972, after racist presidential candidate George Wallace was shot, Chisholm behaved compassionately, visiting him in the hospital.
Read the book to learn more about Chisholm’s life and times, including why she was actually bossed, but not bought.
The Book of the Week is “Thomas E. Dewey and his times (sic), The First Full-Scale Biography of the Maker of the Modern Republican Party” by Richard Norton Smith, published in 1982.
As early as the 1820’s in New York City, there were political nefarious goings-on via the Democratic machine. Judges chosen by the big boss William Marcy Tweed, “…swore in new citizens [newly arrived immigrants] a thousand a day in the weeks before a crucial election.”
When Thomas E. Dewey was born in March 1902 in Michigan, major American cities had been seeing political shenanigans from both Democrats and Republicans, for decades.
From a young age, Dewey was active in Republican clubs. In early 1931, he became an assistant U.S. attorney. He developed a reputation for investigating organized crime among politicians, labor leaders and the criminal justice system. He launched a sting against vice in order to expose the corruption in the system. About a hundred prostitutes and madams were arrested for the purpose of serving as witnesses who testified against racketeers, in exchange for lesser punishment. In 1936, a jury deemed Lucky Luciano guilty of 559 different crimes.
The Mob owned the garment and trucking industries. Local business owners were forced to pay protection money to racketeers or they or their families would face serious injury or death. They passed on this higher cost of doing business in the form of significantly higher prices, to consumers. Thus, all city dwellers became victims of the scourge.
In 1937, Dewey ran for the law enforcement office of district attorney in New York City. To voters around Manhattan, he showed a highlights reel of his crime-fighting prowess, and made radio broadcasts.
In 1940 in Denver, when Dewey was running for U.S. president, he proclaimed “Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the National Debt.” Unfortunately, that line has borne repetition for the last 80 years.
As New York State governor in March 1945, Dewey achieved approval via the state legislature, of a bill that outlawed anti-black practices in housing and employment. A fellow Republican believed that the three major issues of the day were: international relations, race relations and labor relations, respectively.
In the 1948 presidential campaign, the incumbent Democrat Truman mongered fear among farmers and labor unions that the nation would experience an economic downturn if voters changed direction, and elected a Republican to the White House.
As is well known, some people were shocked that Dewey lost the election. “Dewey was ahead until the last two weeks of the campaign, [Samuel] Lubell concluded [referring to a poll from the University of Michigan], when millions of voters switched their allegiance.”
No doubt, presidential campaigns are all about the propaganda war. But because voters have short memories, ten months before an election is like the first quarter of a football game. It will be a loooong time before a winner becomes official.
Anyway, Dewey continued to serve as New York State governor. In September 1949 in Peekskill, Paul Robeson sang at a concert at which fifteen thousand fans were victimized by rabid anti-Communists. The latter seriously injured the former with stone-throwing and head-bashing with clubs. State troopers failed to keep order. Dewey called in the sheriff and district attorney to investigate. Dewey said that although Communists had a reputation for being subversive and oppressing other people, the concert-goers had rights to free speech and assembly– which were violated.
Dewey prepared for the 1952 Republican convention for president that would nominate Dwight Eisenhower, by ordering fourteen bullhorns from a Pennsylvania company, just in case the microphones there unexpectedly cut out. Incidentally, there was a dispute between competing Republican candidates Eisenhower and Robert Taft, over how delegates chose their candidates, or vice versa.
As a result, in early 1954, Dewey instituted New York State’s first code of ethics for public officials. It would regulate conflicts of interest of legislature members and other office holders. Apparently (or rather, unsurprisingly), there were loopholes in the law. In the 1960’s, the Republican governor of New York State, Nelson Rockefeller was “…funding grandiose building projects… brilliant subterfuges in which independent agencies acted as surrogate spenders for the state. Rocky’s state budget was five times that of Dewey’s administration.
Anyhow, read the book to learn a wealth of additional details about Dewey and his times.
The Book of the Week is “Whittaker Chambers” by Sam Tanenhaus, published in 1997. This large volume described a situation that lends itself to the hypothetical board game “Survival Roulette: Alleged Commie Edition” (See “Blind Ambition” post).
Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers were just two of thousands of people starting in the late 1940’s who were losers of this game. The winners actually won only temporarily: Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon and other bullies.
The board’s spaces could describe wiretapped conversations of such evil Commie fronts as the Boy Scouts, and dossiers acquired through the Freedom of Information Act in which every word of every page has been redacted (blacked out) except the names of the 205 guilty State Department officials.
Of course, there could be spaces such as “Go to the Electric Chair” and “IRS Audit.” A “Commie Chest” (rather than Community Chest) card, for instance, could say “Collect $1 in a libel suit while your attorneys collect $50,000.” By the way, any player wearing a red necktie is a Commie.
Chambers, born in 1901 in Brooklyn, was accepted to Columbia University in 1920 through, at that time, simply passing an intelligence test rather than taking entrance examinations. He was fluent in several languages and was a skilled writer. As a commuter from Lynbrook in Long Island, New York, he paid only the school’s annual tuition of $256. The following year, living on campus, he also paid room and board of $400.
As a sophomore and rebellious intellectual, Chambers penned an offensive, blasphemous piece for one of a few campus publications for which he wrote. Fierce critics forced him to take a leave of absence from the school.
In the next several years, he traveled around Europe, came home, held short-term odd jobs he obtained through friends, returned to school, rode the rails out West, etc. in an effort to find himself; also in an attempt to escape his dysfunctional family. According to the author, Chambers suppressed his homosexual urges by having affairs with women.
In the course of his voracious reading– a lifelong passion– Chambers discovered a speech of Vladimir Lenin called The Soviets at Work. In it, Lenin advocated violent authoritarianism. Curious factoid: a line in the speech is reminiscent of a line in the Elton John song “Yellow Brick Road” paraphrased: “… where the dogs of society howl… I’m going back to my plow…”
Anyway, in February 1925, Chambers joined the Workers Party of America, a then-illegal political party that espoused Communist ideals. Its American members numbered about sixteen thousand. He also joined the International Workers of the World.
In the spring of 1927, Chambers was found to have stolen tens of books from Columbia University’s libraries and various other libraries. He was proud rather than ashamed. He wrote articles for The Daily Worker and other Communist publications, got a short story published in The New Masses, that was turned into a play performed internationally.
Some Americans became Communists because they felt that capitalism was the cause of the Great Depression— with its breadlines, labor unrest, suicides, protests, etc. In spring 1932, Chambers joined the OGPU– the Soviet agency that eliminated anyone who expressed the least negative thoughts about Comrade Stalin or his ilk.
Chambers was a valuable addition, as he had experience in bureaucracy, was fluent in German and Russian and literate in the Classics. The American chapter of the Party forced him to become a secret agent man.
But it was fun to play adolescent-boy spy games. And the pay was really good. He played well with others. He and his comrades got secret messages in invisible ink and microfilm from the Germans in their safe house on Gay Street in Greenwich Village. They spied on businesses and the military. He helped steal blueprints for weapons to be built by military contractors, and sent them to the Soviets.
In summer 1934, Chambers was relocated by the Soviets to Washington, D.C. to become a New-Deal advocate for sharecroppers and tenant farmers, who were opposing landowners and big growers in the agricultural industry.
Then Chambers started assisting with generating false passports to be used by his comrades. The initial step was to comprehensively extract information (such as birth dates and names) from the archives of obituaries of babies, in the research branch of the New York Public Library (yes, the one with the lion statues in front).
A birth certificate was then the only proof of citizenship that was required to obtain an American passport, which allowed the easiest travel. The above information (reflecting the then-age and gender of the agent who traveled internationally) would be used to apply for a fraudulent birth certificate, which could then be used to obtain a fraudulent passport.
The Party headquarters was in the U.S.S.R., though, and was the ultimate boss. It could shut down a cell if it saw little productivity. For example, an agent was reassigned to Riga (equivalent to Siberia). But before the transfer, the agent did win the handball championship at a YMCA in the closed Tokyo cell.
Across the United States, there were plenty of organizations posing as Communist fronts, such as a literary agency in San Francisco, the Unemployed Council in Queens county in New York State, and the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians. Chambers used a series of aliases for himself, his wife and daughter with each new assignment.
Changes were always afoot. In the mid-1930’s, the OGPU became the NKVD. Chambers’ boss was purged by Stalin. His highly-strung new boss reflected the Soviet mentality of proactively engaging in an act of generosity to butter up his new office in Washington, D.C. He therefore gave it a large cash gift that was used to purchase Oriental rugs to be given to the top operatives there.
In December 1936, the Soviets considered Germany, Italy and Japan their fascist enemies. The United States, France and England were passively standing on the sidelines. Chambers’ new mission was to, with the help of comrades, procure stolen original State Department documents, take photos of them, and return them, turn the photos into microfilm, and send it to Moscow. Although the documents usually didn’t contain anything world-shaking.
Nevertheless, circumstances were getting dangerous for Chambers. He was considering withdrawing from the Party, but then he and his family would have to disappear. He didn’t want to end up like Ignace Reiss, a “…well dressed corpse, perforated with bullet holes.” In spring 1938, he took the plunge and went into hiding. About a year later, he was able to get a job through a friend at Time, Inc.
Chambers knew the NKVD could kill him or harm his family at any time. Besides that, he could be convicted and imprisoned for treason, and he couldn’t afford to flee. So in September 1939, he turned state’s evidence instead. He named names of Treasury Department and State Department members and discussed the U.S. military’s Communist spy ring.
Into the 1940’s, Chambers continued to work around the clock at Time, Inc., where he received an obscenely high salary for his new rabidly anti-Communist editorial bent. His intuitions were correct, however. He knew that the Soviets had designs on world domination.
In August 1948, Chambers was subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Reputable officials and journalists were angry that in a public hearing, Chambers claimed that Alger Hiss, a high-level State Department official had been a Communist in the 1930’s. Hiss’s integrity had been irreproachable up to that point. The then-freshman Congressman Richard Nixon (R., CA) was the only member of the Committee who insisted on continuing the case against Hiss.
Initially, Chambers couldn’t name anything Hiss had done that was illegal. For, Party membership hadn’t been illegal in the previous decade. Neither had paying Party dues, nor meeting with other Communists.
However, with circumstantial evidence that Chambers produced in his own sweet time, he was able to convince the authorities that Hiss had lied under oath. Another crime that Hiss might have been punished for, was espionage. Fortunately for Hiss and Chambers, the three year statute of limitations on that had expired.
Political accusers always seem to scream about risks to national security!!! But it has become a cliche that more often than not, documents have been labeled top-secret, not to become declassified for decades– in order to cover up government’s bad, embarrassing behavior, NOT because American lives are at risk.
For approximately the last seventy years, on and off, vicious political vengeance has been the norm– best interests of the country be damned. However, the punishments haven’t fit the crimes. The most guilty and least punished perpetrators have acted in ways that have resulted in needless deaths and ruined lives.
Who knows what else Hiss did– making love to an intern in the Old Executive Office Building? He did get caught lying under oath.
Based on lies, the most guilty perpetrators have led the United States to attack other countries and smeared their political opponents for their own selfish political and financial ends. At least they didn’t get caught lying under oath.
Anyway, as is common with these kinds of situations, different government agencies are fighting to grab glory for bringing the perpetrators to justice. In the Hiss case, it was the Justice Department, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, and HUAC.
Individuals such as Nixon and Robert Stripling, the chief investigator of HUAC, were also jockeying for power and bragging rights. Then-Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter testified on behalf of Hiss, an unprecedented move, and possible conflict.
Read the book to learn why Chambers wasn’t also tried for lying under oath, even though he was the biggest liar in the world; every ugly detail of the Hiss case, and much more about Chambers’ life.
The Bonus Book of the Week is “Yeager, An Autobiography by General Chuck Yeager and Leo Janos” published in 1985.
Born in February 1923 in West Virginia, Yeager was the second oldest of five children. He was raised as a Methodist Republican.
When his older brother was six and Yeager was four and a half, the two accidentally killed their two-year old sister while playing with their father’s twelve-gauge shotgun. The family never spoke of the incident. But Yeager wrote, “By the time I was six, I knew how to shoot a .22 rifle and hunted squirrel and rabbit.” Which the family ate. Later, he went on trips with his father’s buddies, hunting deer, bear, quail and wild turkeys. Having field-independent vision gave him a great advantage at that, and at flying.
In spring 1943, Yeager signed up for a Flying Sergeant program in the Army Air Corps in California. He became a passionate fighter pilot. In March 1944, he was shot down by a Focke Wulf 20 millimeter cannon over southern France. His situation was rather uncertain for a while, but he survived, due to a long story of great good luck and one sympathetic individual who literally pointed him in the right direction.
Acting against the rules of the War Department, Yeager got special permission to continue flying combat missions. Theoretically, the American president, as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, had ultimate authority to decide that.However, if the president has sole control over the military and it obeys only him, is loyal only to him, including in connection with all top-secret foreign policy matters– THERE IS POTENTIAL FOR THE PRESIDENT TO BECOME A DICTATOR.
Anyway, of the thirty original fighters in the squadron who arrived in Leiston, England, four, including Yeager, were left by the end of the war.
Yeager became one of the best pilots in the Air Force, spending time as a maintenance officer, air-show performer and aircraft tester. His expertise allowed him to skirt other rules and weasel out of flight test school and other training classes.
Instead, he risked his life for hours every day in the air. When he was gearing up to break the sound barrier, his aircraft was “… carrying six hundred gallons of LOX and water alcohol on board that can blow up at the flick of an igniter switch and scatter your pieces over several counties.”
By the end of his career, he had spent some ten thousand hours in the air in 180 different military (including aerospace-related) aircraft built by various nations.
Read the book to learn how Yeager got out of WWII alive, and numerous other tough situations alive, his (almost non-existent) personal and family life, and his global adventures with other crazy characters.
The Book of the Week is “Blind Ambition, The White House Years” by John Dean, published in 1976.
Investigations of politicians accused of wrongdoing at the highest level of the U.S. government, are complicated, because officials must at least make a pretense of complying with due process.
There is document gathering and analysis, subpoenas that compel witnesses to testify, endless debates on various interpretations of various sources of laws pertaining to the federal government, etc.; not to mention the most important aspect of the whole kit and caboodle: public relations! Plus, nowadays, the media and social media keep the constant barrage of inane comments coming.
In fact, there ought to be a board game, “Survival Roulette” that tests players’ ability to weasel out of legal trouble through shaping public opinion using claques, flacks, sycophants and attorneys.
Of course, Survival Roulette could be tailored to the Nixon White House; it could be the Politician Edition. The game could be structured like Monopoly, with players rolling dice and moving pieces onto spaces that describe financial crimes, illegal-surveillance crimes and damage-control speeches. The most famous space could be “Go To Jail” and there could also be “Cash In Political Favors.” The ultimate winner could be Rich Little.
In the Tabloid Celebrity Edition, the object of the game is to become the ultimate winner, Marc Rich. Other players (the losers) end up as other notorious figures who face different punishment scenarios: Jimmy Hoffa, Jeffrey Epstein, O.J., Bernie Madoff, Bill Cosby and Martha Stewart. The board spaces could describe financial crimes, sex crimes, violent crimes, and social media postings.
The Teenage Edition could feature more recent celebrities– simply spreading vicious rumors about them, rather than confirmed offenses– like in the case of Dakota Fanning.
In Survival Roulette: Politician Edition, John Dean could be one of the worse losers. He was one of various attorneys and consultants who: a) aided and abetted President Richard Nixon’s nefarious attempts to wreak vengeance on his political enemies (whom Nixon believed were revolutionaries and anarchists who used dirty tricks on him in the 1968 presidential election) and b) help Nixon keep his job as president (which Nixon believed was to play God).
In the summer of 1970, Dean’s career took a leap from the Justice Department up to the President’s side, as one of his legal advisors. He thought of his new department as a law firm, so he solicited legal work in all practice areas to make it grow; it did, to five people.
Dean quickly began to feel uneasy about his new position, even though it carried luxurious perks. The White House was fraught with politically incorrect goings-on. There was friction with various federal agencies, such as the FBI.
The FBI was dominated by J. Edgar Hoover, whom it was thought, possessed the means to blackmail the administration. He supposedly had evidence that the president had ordered the secret wiretapping of both the media and leakers on his staff.
As became well known, such wiretapping turned out to be the tip of the iceberg. Nixon recorded himself— every conversation he ever had in the White House! He had listening devices planted to spy on protestors against the Vietnam War, and his other political enemies, which appeared to be almost infinite in number.
Nowadays, the equivalent would be a “loose cannon” with hubris syndrome, addicted to: Tweeting / posting on Facebook but keeping a private profile / texting and emailing, who didn’t destroy his electronic devices.
In July 1971, Dean encountered his first major ethical conflict. He felt obligated to appeal to presidential aide John Ehrlichman to restrain Special Counsel Chuck Colson from orchestrating a break-in to steal Pentagon-Papers documents at the offices of the Brookings Institution. Nonetheless, Dean did sic the IRS on Brookings, and suggested that its contracts with the Nixon administration be cancelled.
Dean got so caught up in the excitement of helping the president get reelected in 1972 that he proposed expanding the collection of intelligence, which was already sizable. Yet he was also disturbed by reelection-committee director G. Gordon Liddy’s crazy plots to steal the 1972 election via burglary, spying, kidnapping, etc.
Dean attempted to remain willfully ignorant of Liddy’s actions thereafter so that he would have the defense of plausible denial in the future. However, after the Watergate break-in June 1972, he rationalized that he was protected by the attorney-client relationship and executive privilege.
One meta-illegality of the coverup of the administration’s various, serious crimes involved the distribution of hush money to hundreds of people who knew too much. By the late summer of 1972, seven individuals were found to have committed the Watergate break-in. Nixon basically said in his communications to the world that those perpetrators were the only ones responsible for that incident, which he claimed was an isolated one. Of course it wasn’t.
The president’s men held their breaths and crossed their fingers counting down to re-election day, as the White House was still the target of inquiries, and a party to legal skirmishes with the FBI, Department of Justice, Congress, the General Accounting Office and journalists. Immediately after election day, Nixon ordered a Stalin-style purge (merely job termination, actually) of all sub-Cabinet officers he had previously appointed.
As the palace intrigue continued into late 1972, Dean, through his own research, learned that he himself could be criminally liable for obstruction of justice. He would inevitably be forced to choose between betraying his colleagues (who hadn’t been all that friendly to him) or perjuring himself to save others insofar as it helped save his own hide.
A true “prisoner’s dilemma” existed among the several indicted bad actors. No one would receive immunity for tattling on the others, but no one knew of any deals made with prosecutors except their own.
Dean wrote of early spring of 1973: “He [Nixon] is posturing himself, I thought– always placing his own role in an innocuous perspective and seeking my agreement… The White House was taking advantage of its power, and betting that millions of people did not wish to believe a man who called the president a liar.”
The Book of the Week is “Believer, My Forty Years in Politics” by David Axelrod, published in 2015. This book is mostly about Axelrod’s role as a political campaign consultant and close aide to Barack Obama.
Born in February 1955 in New York City, the author became passionate about politics at the age of five, when his nanny took him to a political rally for JFK. At nine, he volunteered to assist with RFK’s New York State Senate run.
Axelrod began a career in journalism, covering politics for a number of years. His mother’s cousin introduced him to powerful political figures in Washington, D.C. This gave Axelrod a leg up in co-founding a political consulting firm located in major American cities, serving various mayoral candidates.
In addition to having friendly contacts of all stripes, the best and brightest consultants ought to be extremely well-read in history, politics, psychology, law and economics. Life-experience and cynicism, too, can help with opposition-intelligence and creative messaging.
During the last days of the presidential election in 2008, “[vice-presidential candidate– thought by many to be the presidential candidate– Sarah] Palin ramped up the ferocity of her attacks, to the delight of angry throngs who streamed to greet her… some chanted vile epithets about [presidential candidate Barack] Obama… resented taxes, reviled gun control and eagerly parroted right-wing tripe questioning whether Obama was even a citizen…”
In 2016, it was deja vu all over again, with Donald Trump’s copying Sarah Palin in his targeting and messaging. Trump copied the late president Ronald Reagan too, with his tax cut and also, with taking an active role in foreign policy, some of which for Reagan at least, did not end well. Axelrod commented that performing was Reagan’s forte. However, Obama was not as willing a performer. Trump is neither good at reading scripts nor good at speaking off the cuff.
Unlike Trump, Obama was principled and ideologically-oriented rather than reelection-oriented. He was his own man as much as he could be, given that he was forced into extremely difficult situations. He inherited a slew of problems from his predecessor George W. Bush, including a crashed economy and two wars. In 2009, then-Harvard law professor and bankruptcy specialist, Elizabeth Warren, helped Obama create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Axelrod claimed that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., KY) started the obstructionist attitude in which the party ruling a house of Congress pettily blocks all legislation the opposing party is trying to pass. There have been previous periods of American history in which each side engaged in shenanigans to thwart the other– such as during the impeachment debate surrounding president Andrew Johnson in the 1860’s (!)
However, nowadays, angry and mean-spirited polarization becomes viral at the speed of light, as the easily brainwashed who have access to social media become easily outraged by the finger-pointing hypocrisy, hypocritical finger-pointing, and poison propaganda spewed by one side or the other.
Axelrod wrote, “Fear too often trumps reason.” Read the book to learn about the kinds of situations Trump has reason to fear, and Obama’s campaigns and administration.