History – Various Lands – Page 5 – education and deconstruction.com

The Age of Turbulence

The Book of the Week is “The Age of Turbulence” by Alan Greenspan, published in 2007. This is a career memoir / global macroeconomics overview in one tome. Perhaps it should have been split into two books so as to be more comprehensive, as the author, in describing the recent economic affairs of India, Russia and China, failed to mention major factors in connection therewith; such as the caste system, Jeffrey Sachs’ advice to Boris Yeltsin, and a detailed description of China’s one-child policy.

Born in 1926, Greenspan studied business and finance at New York University after WWII. While there, he spent two months on freelance work doing economics research. It involved pencil, paper and a slide rule. These days, it would take minutes and involve software.

In August 1974, the author was appointed chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors. He cited President Nixon’s price and wage controls as an example of government action that leads to resistance from the market. The first quarter of 1976 saw the U.S. economy grow at 9.3% and the second quarter, at less than 2%. Greenspan was not alarmed by this kind of extreme swing; however, the slowing economy caused voters to choose Jimmy Carter over Gerald Ford for president in 1976. During Carter’s term, economists learned that the way for a country to achieve long-term prosperity is to control inflation. The reason Carter caused financial havoc was that his economic goals contradicted each other.

In summer 1987, Greenspan became chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank. In 1993, Bill Clinton chose to reduce the federal deficit rather than keep his campaign promises that necessitated increasing spending on various items. He could not afford to do both. The result was a budget surplus by 1998.

In late 1994, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve had to take action to prevent Mexico’s financial collapse. Otherwise, the southwestern states would be adversely affected, and immigrants coming into the U.S. would double.

In 1996, more and more households were exposing themselves to equity risks. Even so, introduction of the World Wide Web appears to have been an innovation that temporarily increased the economy’s ability to expand on an unusually grand scale. Approximately during the Web’s first decade, the economy wasn’t in a normal business cycle. The Web’s ability to make information available instantaneously, thus reducing uncertainty, provided a major boost to corporate America. The Fed, therefore, raised interest rates to curb inflation only in autumn 1998, what with the dire financial straits of the Russians, and hedge fund Long Term Capital Management’s bailout.

In the autumn of 2002, the Republicans turned a deaf ear to the author when he tried to tell them why it was important to rein in spending and renew the Budget Enforcement Act. He already had a difficult job, as he explained, “But too often we have to deal with incomplete and faulty data, unreasoning human fear, and inadequate legal clarity.” Nevertheless, Greenspan is optimistic about the future because the level of worldwide commerce and living standards can continue to rise indefinitely. He believes the presence of wholly competitive free markets and ever-improving technology are what drive them.

Read the book to learn about the two major elements required for a market economy and two others that are essential for growth and prosperity; the factors involved in predicting the health of the U.S. economy in 2030; three important influences on global growth; about the nature of economic populism, and much more.

A Reporter’s Life, Peter Jennings

The Book of the Week is “A Reporter’s Life, Peter Jennings” edited by Kate Darnton, Kayce Freed Jennings & Lynn Sherr, published in 2007. This is a compilation of selected contents of interviews with the late ABC anchorman and documentary writer Peter Jennings, of people who knew him.

Peter Jennings’ father was a famous Canadian radio broadcaster. He mentored and primed his son to be the larger-than-life information provider he became to millions of TV viewers. In 1963, Jennings began to co-anchor a fifteen-minute TV news show at dinner time, but his lack of formal education and experience became apparent after a while. So in November 1967, he went on-location, gathering news globally. In 1970, he began to open the ABC bureau in Beirut, a cosmopolitan city until the start of its civil war in 1975. In the interest of fairness, Jennings got the Palestinian side of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He became an expert on the Middle East. This played a large role in why he was able to scoop the story of the hostage crisis at the Munich Olympics in 1972 and get a tremendous career boost.

Jennings was the consummate passionate, professional workaholic perfectionist. He politely cajoled people into answering his questions instead of interrupting them or aggressively pushing for a “gotcha” response. He was into fact-checking– he preferred to get a story right and be second reporting it than get it wrong and report it first. He had an insatiable thirst for knowledge, which he acquired through reading and talking to everyone, everyone he met. This gave him background on any and all stories he gathered and reported on. In summer 1983, ABC’s ratings caught up to NBC’s and CBS’s, and overtook them for a long time.

In 1994, Jennings made people pay attention to the genocide in Bosnia. He hated tabloid stories. When he was pressured to do them, he would try to educate rather than just gossip. During the O.J. Simpson trial, he showed the race relations aspect of the story. Read the book to learn a wealth of additional information about one of TV’s best journalists of a bygone era.

CNN, The Inside Story

The Book of the Week is “CNN, The Inside Story” by Hank Whittemore, published in 1990. This volume tells the history of CNN, Cable News Network. The point of CNN was to create an alternative to the then-three networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, that monopolized American TV.

In 1976, Ted Turner owned a company that provided cable TV via satellite, consisting of games of the professional sports teams owned by him, and movies. By the end of the 1970’s his goal was to start a 24-hour cable network of just news. He was like the American president Donald Trump in that “…Turner had set the goal and the deadline and the sense of mission; and now, as he always did, he was putting together the people who knew how to make it happen.” However, the entertainment industry in the United States is a completely different animal from the federal government.

Nevertheless, a headquarters– a previously decrepit structure, gutted and created from scratch– for the new cable channel in Atlanta, had been readied sufficiently to provide minimal functionality in six months. The secretary of Reese Schonfeld, a high executive in the venture, had this to say, “… they had sketched out the whole newsroom one night on the back of a grocery bag…”

Launched in mid-1980, CNN evolved into a “revolving door” station (viewers tuned in periodically to see whether there was breaking news; they didn’t watch it every second) because it had to do things on the cheap and fill 24 hours of airtime every 24 hours. The big three networks practiced cartelizing behavior in order to shut CNN out of information-sharing. So CNN sued all parties involved, not just the networks.

Read the book to learn of what became of CNN, up until the book’s writing.

Live From the Battlefield

The Book of the Week is “Live From the Battlefield” by Peter Arnett, published in 1994. This is the career memoir of a Darwin Award candidate.

Arnett was a war correspondent for wire services and then on TV for CNN. He had “nine lives.” He was the first to report on Laos’ August 1960 coup because he swam across the Mekong River to get to Thailand to file his story. Reporting the story before all other competing news outlets was his employer’s major goal. For the rest of the 1960’s– more than eight years– he was stationed mostly in Jakarta and Vietnam. He braved thick, slimy swamps, snipers, red ants, napalm, violent antiwar street protests, wiretapping and censorship.

General William Westmoreland and his ilk had hubris syndrome. Unfortunately, they were originally provided with the power to orchestrate how they wanted the U.S. to fight the Vietnam war. Needless deaths resulted because Westmoreland failed to break the enemy’s will. In late 1967, “In the year end assessment the AP asked me [Arnett] to provide, I seemed to describe a war on another planet…” compared to the propaganda released from the General’s public relations team. After the author witnessed and reported on the damage and casualties of the Tet Offensive in early 1968, Westmoreland “… confidently proclaim[ed] that American forces were on the offensive and the enemy was on the run…”

In the autumn of 1981, videos of news stories had to be shipped from El Salvador to Atlanta for editing about every two days while Arnett was at CNN, so he couldn’t report live. However, CNN scooped the three major TV networks on stories in the United States.

Fast forward to the beginning of 1991. CNN was able to do live reporting. During the first Gulf War, it was the only news organization allowed to have a special conference-call setup between Baghdad and its headquarters in Atlanta, thanks to its special relationship with the Iraqi government. However, most of its staff left before the war started; there was a scary rumor afoot that the luxury al-Rashid hotel in Baghdad where they were stationed would be hit by friendly fire. The journalists were also afraid they would be taken hostage, tortured or killed on false charges, such as spying– because Iraq was the enemy. The Pentagon’s press office reported the official start of the war 27 minutes later than CNN. Even so, Iraq banned Arnett from using CNN’s high-tech equipment shortly after the war’s first bombs fell. He had to use a (voice-only) satellite phone instead, that had been smuggled into Iraq. Making the complicated calls involved using a gasoline generator, satellite dish, keypad, modem, and a ground station in Norway.

Read the book to learn of the controversy over the bombing of a factory that made powdered milk for babies and/or was a war communications center in Iraq; how the United States’ aid affected the state of political and military affairs in Afghanistan during the 1980’s Russian occupation and afterwards, and much more.

Curfewed Night

The Book of the Week is “Curfewed Night” by Basharat Peer, published in 2010. This is a personal account of someone who grew up in the 1980’s in Kashmir– a region that is partly in India and partly in Pakistan. The author’s village was in the Indian portion. The people grew rice, mustard and apples. His grandfather was the headmaster of the local school.

The author’s family was Muslim but espoused some modern, Western values. His grandfather allowed him to read American comic books of superheroes. He also read Urdu and Farsi poetry, and played cricket with other boys.

In early 1990, militants killed hundreds of pro-Indian Muslims and Pandits in Kashmir. The militants were teen boys agitating for Kashmir independence. At fourteen years old, the author got caught up in the excitement of fighting for the cause. His family convinced him not to join in. They wanted him to be a civil servant. He kept his impulsiveness in check, but knew some young men who did not– who died or returned alive from the war, but ran into some serious problems.

The men who were eager to fight had to go to Pakistan for training in small arms, land mines and rocket-propelled grenades for a year or two. They learned to use an assault rifle– an AK-47 (aka Kalashnikov) and throw a hand grenade. By 1992, wealthy families were sending their kids to other continents to get them out of the war zone. Although the author’s family couldn’t afford to do that, it did send him to boarding school in Delhi.

Read the book to learn what happened to Peer, about religious conflicts in Kashmir, and the violence of the separatist movement, which continued for more than a decade.

Fischer Spassky, The New York Times Report

The Book of the Week is “Fischer Spassky, The New York Times Report on the Chess Match of the Century” by Richard Roberts, with Harold Schoenberg, Al Horowitz and Samuel Reshevsky, published in 1972.

This short paperback describes “… Channel 13’s exhaustive television coverage of the Bobby Fischer-Boris Spassky match…” which consisted of “analyses, interviews, demonstrations and illuminating asides.”

The world’s top chess players can analyze, say, six moves ahead. Each of those moves, has, say, six possible moves, so they play their moves pursuant to a complex decision tree.

Here is one simple tip to remember about the how the rook moves as opposed to how the bishop moves: The rook moves only from side to side and up and down because it is too wide to move diagonally, whereas the bishop’s slim waist means it moves only diagonally.

The best tournament players are called “grandmasters” and at the book’s writing, there were about ninety of them in the entire world. The international central authority for chess, Federation Internationale des Echecs (FIDE), based in Paris, was started in 1924. At the tail end of the 1960’s, FIDE held an “Interzonal” competition to determine the next chess champion of the world. The Interzonal games were played in places like Palma de Mallorca, Spain; Vancouver, Canada; Seville, Spain; the Canary Islands; Sochi, on the Baltic Sea in Russia and Buenos Aires, Argentina. Boris Spassky, a 32 year old journalist from Leningrad, became the new champion. The champions had been of Soviet origin since 1948.

The title had to be defended every three years. Thus in early 1971, countries started to bid on the prize money, and on the chance to host the final round of championship games. The setting up of the physical environment for play was taken very seriously. There was a 300 pound mahogany table, and “… hand-carved John Jacques & Sons chess pieces that had been flown in from England.” There were about 2,500 spectators at the event.

A soap opera transpired for months prior to the actual competition. That took place in the summer of 1972, between Fischer and Spassky, who both behaved like drama queens in negotiating where and when they would play their approximately twenty-game series. The former was a bit more demanding and exacting about various issues– such as the prize money, and cameras and noise in the room– as he was paranoid and had extreme control issues. The latter was under tremendous pressure by the Soviet government to win, as a win would show the Soviets’ continuing superiority in the world. Read the book to learn all the details, including who won.

From Exile to Washington

The Book of the Week is “From Exile to Washington” by W. Michael Blumenthal, published in 2013. This tome describes the historical times of the author, with some autobiographical bragging thrown in.

Blumenthal, born in 1926 in Germany, happened to have a Jewish last name when Hitler came to power. He endured the hardships of living in Shanghai as a refugee when his family fled Germany on the eve of WWII. After the war, as a Displaced Person, he waited years for permission to live in the United States. When the Jews in Shanghai learned of the atrocities that had been committed against their fellow religionists, they considered the terms “Germany” and “Germans” anathema. No one wanted to go back to Europe. The most sought after destinations were Palestine, America, Australia or South America.

The author became Americanized but his life experiences gave him a unique perspective on his homeland and China that not many people had. In 1960, he, like many other Americans, was inspired by President Kennedy’s language of idealism and sacrifice to volunteer to help his country through government service.

Read the book to learn about the lofty corporate and government positions held by the author, and the historical backdrop of his life.

Man of the World

The Book of the Week is “Man of the World” by Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., published in 1959. This autobiography discussed the life of a member of one of Newport, Virginia’s prominent, wealthier families.

Vanderbilt had a childhood typical for economic royalists of his generation– he was raised by governesses, lived in an opulent Fifth Avenue mansion (in New York), and in Europe during certain months of the year. His father, an engineer, had an army career. For his fifteenth birthday, Vanderbilt received a 29-foot sailboat which he took around New England.

Since he was in Germany and England so much, Vanderbilt learned about the coming of the Great War (WW I) before most Americans did. After doing his war service, having been exposed to poison gas in Ypres, he wasn’t quite the same youngster “… who had rushed off to save bleeding Belgium and make the world safe for democracy.”

Against his parents’ wishes, Vanderbilt entered the field of journalism, reporting for the New York Times on California labor troubles in the early 1920’s. Back then, there were more Japanese farmers than white farmers. Heirs of super-rich families in the mid 1920’s felt a sense of entitlement about their inheritance, but also filial piety– most obeyed their parents in making major life choices, such as careers. Vanderbilt’s father thought “A newspaperman was a low creature dedicated to invasion of privacy, digging away at scandals like a dirty dog.” The buyers of most newspapers at that time were the unwashed masses, and therefore unworthy of his father’s esteem.

After encountering financial problems running his own newspapers, and family inheritance problems, Vanderbilt appealed to his celebrity friends in Hollywood for cash. “I took the actual bills to the bank in a taxi and dumped them on the desk of the vice president.”

The author interviewed Hitler a few times in the 1930’s, and in 1936, with a crew, shot film footage secretly in Germany. The film was shown at the Mayfair Theatre in New York. Hundreds of residents of Manhattan’s Yorkville section (German at the time), protested, necessitating police reserves to keep the peace. “These were the years during which … swastikas were scrawled on subway walls in the East Eighties.”

Vanderbilt claimed that when he visited with Hitler, he conveyed personal messages from President Franklin Roosevelt (FDR), asking Hitler to stay peaceful. Yes, dear reader, Vanderbilt almost saved the world. According to Vanderbilt, FDR was supposed to have a meeting in 1939 (that never took place) with Hitler, Stalin and Churchill that might have avoided the war altogether.

Businessmen were at once anti-war and anti-FDR. The president proposed imposing a trade embargo on Germany. However, this would provoke hostility from the German people, as their standard of living would fall even further. Wealthy businessmen had no idea of the deprivations the Germans had suffered.

Vanderbilt was a foreign correspondent for Liberty Magazine, and an international spy for FDR. He was supplied with a short-wave radio set and a Zenith TV engraved, “Made expressly for and stolen from Neil Vanderbilt.” In August 1939, in Poland, he found Heinrich Himmler in his hotel room when he returned one evening. Nevertheless, he refrained from using his gas gun– a pen-shaped weapon containing a gas cylinder.

After the war, FDR’s son Jimmy Roosevelt ran for California governor. “He spoke sensibly on world affairs and important state issues, but lacked the funds to pay for the sort of publicity the other side was given for free.” Sadly, advertising agencies and their clients prompted censoring of free and open discourse of editors and publishers on TV, in newspapers and magazines. As usual, people were controlled by money. The author observed that this was more commonly the case in America than in Europe.

Amusing Side Note: The author’s father had enemies, so during distasteful episodes prior to his death, his father hired different attorneys through the years to update his will and add codicils.

Read the book for additional intrigue (“Although a shipload of Jewish refugees might seem an unlikely place to look for Nazis, actually it was a fine place for them to hide.”), and once again, see that there is nothing new under the sun.

The Outsider

The Book of the Week is “The Outsider” by Frederick Forsyth, published in 2015. This is the autobiography of a British adventurer. Born on the eve of WWII, passionate about airplanes, he joined the Royal Air Force in his late teens. The National Service– British military– was a great leveler of young men from all walks of life, as it brought them together, fostered their bonding and helped unify the nation.

The multi-lingual author chose to become a foreign correspondent. He had become Reuters’ bureau head stationed in East Germany at the time John F. Kennedy was killed in November 1963. The Germans were scared there would be a war. He met many Eastern European characters, including one whom he suspected had served the Nazis as a law enforcement officer, and then switched to the Communists after the war, simply learning Russian while keeping his sadistic persona. “West Berlin was teeming with spy agencies, agents, infiltrators and defectors.”

By the late 1960’s, Forsyth had to adjust his career ambition and settle for becoming a freelance journalist after he acted in accordance with his own moral compass while covering the 1967-68 Nigeria/Biafra war for the BBC. Later, he went to Israel, where he interviewed David Ben Gurion. This first prime minister of Israel came from a Russian shtetl to Palestine in 1906. Ben Gurion said that at that time, his people spoke Yiddish and Russian, not Hebrew, because Eliza Ben Yehuda had yet to create the Hebrew dictionary.

“The thing about journalists is that they lie well.” In the early 1970’s, the author lied his way into getting his first novel published, even though he was 100% ignorant about publishing, royalties and contracts. Read the book to learn the details of Forsyth’s adventures in flying, journalism, intelligence work, and publishing.

Coconut Latitudes – Bonus Post

This blogger read “The Coconut Latitudes” by Rita M. Gardner, published in 2014.

Until her early twenties, the American author was a shrinking violet. Throughout her childhood in the 1940’s and 1950’s, she was verbally abused by her alcoholic father, suffering physical symptoms of anxiety, thinking she had no recourse. This could partly have been due to the culture of her generation and unusual place of residence– the Dominican Republic, to which the father moved her, her mother, and old sister when she was five. Ironically, the father, an electrical engineer-turned coconut farmer, believed in education for his daughters. After a series of traumatic events in her two decades of existence, she says, “It hasn’t occurred to me that I might have a say in how I’m treated.”

Another aspect of the author’s coming-of-age environment was the unstable political situation in the Dominican Republic. At her fifteenth birthday party (1961), her friend told her about five men who were spying on them behind the shrubbery outside their house, in a rural village (like a small town) called Miches, many miles from the capital (currently called Santo Domingo). The teenagers thought it was “special government forces” looking for subversives.

Incidentally, around the same time, under J. Edgar Hoover’s watchful eye, the United States’ own citizens were under scrutiny even though Joseph McCarthy’s systematic effort to purge the country of “Communists” was long over. Nowadays, it is no secret that the latest spying method is electronic surveillance through the World Wide Web. Spies no long have to go through the trouble of planting listening devices in people’s homes. In America, citizens are supposedly “innocent until proven guilty.” When the government is spying on its own citizens through electronic or other means without probable cause, it is treating them as though they are already guilty.

Anyway, the author writes, “I don’t worry that anyone will think Daddy is a Yanqi imperialista or that our family is in any kind of danger. We’ve been here too long.” It is ironic that the author was unconcerned that the government would oppress her family for perceived seditious utterances. For, her father was the one who tyrannically kept her family’s embarrassing incidents secret by suppressing any talk of them and forcing her to lie to anyone who asked about her sister’s whereabouts; she felt internal pressure to lie about her own well-being.

The author’s family was sufficiently “street-smart” to stay mute about politics. There had been stories in the news about deaths of certain people who spoke ill of the dictator who ruled the country. Nevertheless, the family was not harassed for dispensing with attending the Catholic church on Sunday. Other than that one episode of spying and surveillance of their mail, the family had basic freedoms.

The author’s mind was opened to career possibilities when she was living with her friend’s family (which was significantly less dysfunctional than her own) near Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In 1966, the Apollo-Saturn projects and the race to land a man on the moon were creating jobs in the region. At that time, she was in the “eye” of the metaphorical hurricane that was her life. The calm eye “…has the lowest sea-level atmospheric pressure on earth” but it is ephemeral.

Read the book to learn of the author’s sister’s whereabouts, and the numerous “storms” in her life.