Politician, Political Worker or Spy – An Account – Page 7

The Last Idealist

WARNING: This is a long post.

“They watched him bang away at Berkeley and other campuses, a man nearing eighty-one commanding the attention of student crowds usually scornful of anyone over thirty.”

NOT Bernie Sanders. Norman Thomas.

The Book of the Week is “Norman Thomas, The Last Idealist” by W.A. Swanberg, published in 1976.

Born in November 1884 in Marion, Ohio, Thomas began attending divinity school in 1908, pursuant to his parents’ wish for him to become a Presbyterian reverend, like his father. He espoused the political ideology of a socialist, believing that antisocial behavior could be eliminated if people the world over were provided with a decent standard of living, as there would be no class resentment.

However, Thomas’ marriage to an heiress allowed him to live better than those he aided financially. Initially, the couple lived on an ethnically mixed, high-crime block in East Harlem, among Irish, Jews, Italians and Hungarians. He ministered to parishioners and established social programs at various churches.

Thomas was a charismatic public speaker and a pacifist, keeping busy “eight days a week” with all kinds of political, social and religious groups. He rubbed shoulders with the political influencers of the day, including president Woodrow Wilson. During WWI, he asked the president to refrain from conscripting conscientious objectors– both the devout and those who held sketchy religious beliefs like atheists (and agnostics like himself).

Thomas got in trouble and was forced to resign from his various groups for pacifist speechifying and distribution of pacifist publications (which were censored)– a clear and present danger once America entered WWI. Conscientious objectors and pacifists like himself were getting arrested and jailed. He railed that all Americans had a right to free speech (and later helped found the ACLU); hypocritically, the country was fighting the war in order to combat the fascist Prussians.

Although in 1917 Thomas endorsed the Socialist Party candidate Morris Hillquit for mayor of New York City, Thomas actually delayed joining the Party until the end of the war. Hillquit thought Thomas could be instrumental in getting more Gentiles to join, as the New York City chapter was overwhelmingly Jewish.

Both the Socialist and Communist parties ran candidates for mayor even though they knew they would lose. Each hoped to convert the members of the other’s Party to join their own. The socialists’ enemies smeared them all as Bolshevists (though only a few were on the far left fringe), as the Russian Revolution heated up.

In the 1920’s, the ruling class committed a lot of violence against the working class when there occurred labor unrest. The Palmer raids resulted in beatings, arrests and jailings. The government reasoned that violence was a necessary (temporary!) evil in restoring democracy. That was the same thinking of the Communists in America who felt the Soviets were creating the right kind of political system, but that the oppression would eventually cease.

Thomas wisely stayed Socialist through the decades, as he saw that Communists were totalitarian. Nevertheless, he was conflicted, as he took heart in the fact that the Russians fought against Fascism: by aiding the Loyalists in Spain during its civil war, and during WWII. Some American Communists were thrown for a loop after Stalin made a pact with Hitler in 1939; others, when Khrushchev revealed Stalin’s human rights abuses and atrocities in 1956.

In 1920, New York State Assembly speaker Thaddeus Sweet, a Republican, took the undemocratic action of suspending five New York State Assembly members just for being in the Socialist Party. Their constituents included sixty thousand voters in New York City. The Assembly voted 145-2 to expel them altogether. They were accused of seeking to break up traditional families, being anti-religious, and opposing capitalism.

In 1933, membership in the Socialist Party reached its peak, numbering about nineteen thousand. But those who had been spellbound by the shrewd, entertaining Thomas, began to back FDR instead; the latter began to offer similar social programs and was already president. Many voters thought the evils of capitalism had caused the Great Depression. Others turned to hatred spouted by rabble rousers like Father Coughlin, Hitler and Mussolini.

In the 1930’s, there were heated discussions, debates and decisions that never pleased everyone, between and among all the different factions (Communists, Trotskyites, Old Guard, Militant-Centrist, etc.) in election years and at political conventions. Up until 1936, they used various communications outlets to spread their gospel: the Rand School, the Jewish Daily Forward, a radio station, publications like the New Leader, and a summer camp.

In 1940, the American Labor Party favored FDR, who supported capitalism and war. Thomas acted as a spoiler, as he was still an anti-capitalist and pacifist. He bristled at Britain’s colonialism in India. Jews in New York City felt the need to fight Hitler, so their allegiance lay with FDR, especially after December 1941.

Arguably, Thomas engaged in hypocrisy in his choosing to ally with the Nazi-friendly Charles Lindbergh, but only because the latter wanted America to stay out of the war. Lindbergh, and Joseph P. Kennedy were the kinds of individuals who attached themselves to Hitler because they thought Germany would win the war. That way, in the end, they’d be on the winning side. They would get the spoils. Fortunately, on WWII, they guessed wrong.

Fast forward to spring 1960. After the U-2 incident, Thomas wrote, “… in the widely played game of peacetime espionage, we lie and cheat like the rest of them– only better, we now boast, because of our technical skill. In the anarchy of sovereign nations there are no morals, there is no crime, except to be caught.”

In summer 1963, Thomas, a Princeton University graduate, got his article published in the alumni magazine. He expressed his dismay that the school received a bit more than half (!) of its total budget from federal grants. He wanted to know what proportion of those were made on behalf of the Pentagon. No word on whether anyone answered him. Later, Thomas was bothered that the younger generation was rooting for the NLF and the Vietcong rather than trying to lobby LBJ to stop the Vietnam War. He advised them to wash, instead of burn, the American flag.

In the mid to late 1960’s, Thomas was able to push his causes because his articles were printed in the national, high-circulation Life and Playboy and Esquire magazines; he also did TV interviews with highly rated shows. Unfortunately, publicity is only a small ingredient that is part of the planning process in getting people to adopt causes. Thomas, even with all his popularity, lacked the other ingredients on and off during the entire course of his career: funding and executing (actually getting elected to office).

Read the book to learn of the numerous elective offices for which Thomas ran as a Socialist and his adventures in connection therewith globally: speaking, publishing and socializing with diplomats; of the details of decades-long Socialist Party infighting; the shocking revelation that came to light about the CIA in 1967; and much, much more.

ENDNOTE: This blogger would like to clarify once and for all, what characterizes a few different economic and political systems.

First:

With SOCIALISM, the people collectively own entities, and share and share alike. These can be profit-seeking businesses. The government can own entities that provide essential services, that should not be profit-seeking (but some of their subcontractors are, anyway), such as libraries, welfare, healthcare, early childhood education, infrastructure, and social programs.

With COMMUNISM, the government owns profit-seeking entities (businesses) in whole or in part (as in the former Soviet Union and China). So yes, these include public-private partnerships in which there are clearly outrageous conflicts of interest that result in patronage and profiteering. So, arguably, the former Soviet Union and China have both Socialism and Communism to a large degree.

Also, see a bunch of this blog’s posts: Wikinomics, Here At the New Yorker (beginning with the 9th paragraph), Street Without A Name, Against the Grain, Crossing the River, and Patriot Number One. Lastly, see a bunch of excerpts from this blog’s posts:

Klima got a job with a construction crew [in Czechoslovakia in the 1950’s], where he got his first taste of socialism in action. “No one could earn more than was necessary for daily subsistence.” The government was stealing the economic surplus from the people. That was why corruption came into play. He was pressured into joining, surprise, surprise, the Communist Party. He said, “I was stunned by how the environment bubbled over with rancor, continual suspicion, malicious gossip, and personnel screening.”

Fast forward to 2007. Dubai’s small population of about a million citizens (mostly royal family members) allowed the government to adopt a socialist policy of generous entitlements, including an average annual $55,000 in stimulus money, and low-cost or no-cost: cooling of their lavish homes, car-fuel, food, education, healthcare, and water.

In late 1993, mayor Chirac [in Paris, France]– a socialist at heart– agreed to start a (no-charge) ambulance service for the homeless in Paris. By 1995, via the city council, against the wishes of the socialist (federal) government, he provided free medical care to 150,000 homeless people.

In the early 1920’s, “After 2 decades of debate and agitation, the rise and fall of Populist, Progressive and Socialist parties…” and lots of labor unrest, there was general consensus between government and American business “… that the role of government was not to supersede or control the corporation, but to legalize and legitimize it by regulating its excesses.” [As is well known, capitalism flourished until the late 1920’s.]

Because East Germany was a police state with a socialist mentality, the people availed themselves of a free university education. Merkel got hers, as well as a doctorate in nuclear physics. In exchange, she was required to work for the government for a specific period.

They examined democratic, autocratic and socialistic models of leadership. The most mature group was found in the first model. The second spawned a form of Nazism. The third model’s group members displayed resentment of lazy and non-cooperative individuals.

Although Communism preaches godlessness, the supervising Soviet government [in East Germany] allowed some religious activity among the local citizens. Merkel’s family was spied on by the Stasi- the secret police. It was cost-effective and efficient. For, all the socially dangerous elements (potential subversives) were in one place.

For four decades, Czechoslovakians forced to live under Communism had been told everything was great. In January 1990, Havel truthfully told his countrymen that the nation was in an economically, infrastructurally, environmentally and ethically horrible state. The younger generation who had been born into the Soviet mentality– unless they were dissidents– were obedient robots. So converting people to a capitalist, liberated, honest way of thinking was very difficult.

Blakely thought that bringing capitalism to them [Siberian people] would be a good thing. However, they soon developed an insatiable appetite for consumer goods. Once they were made of aware of their severe deprivation by the media and increased their connections with the rest of the world, they became depressed. Previously, they had been happy due to their ignorance of how materially poor they were.

After the Korean War, the Communist Party of North Korea oppressed business owners– who were considered evil capitalists, but praised farmers and peasants– who were considered virtuous; they served the Party. Adults were forced to attend self-criticism meetings every Saturday morning. The meeting leaders punished them by making them stand up against the wall while others stared at them. Around the time she started school, Jang and her mother went to a theater for the first time. They saw a movie written by their fearless leader, Kim il-sung. Of course, it ended happily because the peasants conquered the landlords.

Once in power [in 2000, Communist] Putin actually kick-started the Russian economy by nationalizing oil companies, and taking control of the gas industry and television.

In order for any native (Chinese) to prevail at a journalism career, joining the Communist Party was mandatory. This involved attending Party conferences on some weekends.

Under Vladimir Lenin in 1918 Russia, “The very notion of pleasure from flavorful food was reviled as capitalist degeneracy.” Millions died of starvation under [Communist] Stalin in 1927 when he took over the means of grain production.

It examines the issue of whether Berlusconi practiced Fascism, not necessarily through creating an atmosphere of fear and intimidation, but through monopolistically broadcasting propaganda in the guise of education, to the masses. He combined his business dealings with politics to amass a staggering amount of power, with the usual conflicts of interest that come with the territory.

He [Charles Koch] became a convert to it [Libertarianism] in its most extreme form. It espouses the belief that a purely capitalist society is the best economic system. This means total deregulation, no entitlements such as government-administered retirement or medical plans, no unions, no socialism of any kind, no income tax, and a government whose role is only to protect citizens and property from each other and outsiders, and from fraud. As a result of their political mentality, Charles and David could have cared less about the environmental destruction and wrongful deaths their company caused due to poorly maintained oil and gas pipelines. Perhaps to salve his conscience, David made huge donations to cultural institutions, especially in New York City. The liberals (hypocritically) gratefully accepted the money, notwithstanding David’s political activities that led to rack and ruin.

In the early 1990’s, [Soviet] leader Boris Yeltsin became a convert of [Jeffrey] Sachs. The result was mass corruption. On the other hand, this has helped the United States and other nations with already evolved [mostly] capitalist systems to maintain their economic dominance in the world. This blogger is not saying such a goal is right or wrong, but merely suggesting that this might have been Sachs’ goal.

***

Strom Thurmond’s America

The Book of the Week is “Strom Thurmond’s America” by Joseph Crespino, published in 2012.

Born in December 1902 in South Carolina, Thurmond grew up in the small-town farming community of Edgefield. His father was an attorney and his family was wealthy and aristocratic.

In 1929, Thurmond became schools superintendent in his hometown. He favored giving a teachers a raise and extending the academic year, funded by the state through a beer tax. He entered into a legal apprenticeship under his father, and in 1933, as a Democrat, was elected to South Carolina’s state senate. Three years later, he became a circuit-court judge, traveling around the state to preside over county-court cases.

During the Depression, the way Thurmond and his fellow southern Democrats defined themselves as “liberal” allowed them to support FDR’s New Deal in order to provide financial aid for white farmers and low-skilled industrial workers in their districts.

After fighting in WWII, Thurmond ran for governor as a Democrat. He was a white-supremacist, mudslinging, drama-queen, populist demagogue while campaigning. Although he did some good things, his actions were always politically expedient. In 1947, he actually delivered on a promise to have South Carolina law enforcement and FBI agents round up 31 (white) men who were suspects in the lynching of a black man. However, a jury of twelve white men acquitted the suspects.

At the time, the United States was helping to establish the United Nations– an international body that concerned itself with respecting human rights. There was pressure on the state of South Carolina to help America maintain a good reputation in that regard, so Thurmond spoke in favor of a federal anti-lynching law. Thurmond and his fellow Dixiecrats wanted to continue to prevent intermingling of blacks and whites so as to not contaminate the genes of the latter. He therefore denigrated every one of president Truman’s civil rights proposals.

And Thurmond was always arguing for state-level laws. To that end, in 1948, he ran for president on the States’ Rights ticket (a third party) in order to play the spoiler against Truman to kill civil rights legislation. But postwar, he returned to a lucrative law practice.

Thurmond then sided with corporate America and the kings of industry in oil, cattle, sugar planters, mercantile and shipping entities, steel, coal, and textiles, etc. He became rabidly anti-Communist and anti-union. Up until 1950 in South Carolina, voting for the Republican Party was NOT anonymous. If one wanted to do so, one had to request a ballot at the polls when he or she voted.

Thurmond ran for a U.S. Senate seat in 1954 as a write-in candidate (due to the previous officeholder’s death) even though his fellow Democrats were less than thrilled that he had disloyally run as a third-party candidate in 1948.

A litany of events and groups influenced voters in the South: the Korean War, the Democratic National Committee, the federal goings-on, the CIO, the NAACP, the national labor movement, the upward mobility of urbanites, and backlash (by whites) against southern blacks consequent to Truman’s civil rights legislation.

In the early 1960’s, Thurmond executed a series of far-right-wing campaigns that failed. For one, he pushed for the Nike-Zeus missile program that would help America respond to an attack by the U.S.S.R.; another had him holding hearings to stop JFK from scotching a military education initiative that would spew anti-Communist rhetoric. Finally, in September 1964, Thurmond announced he was a (Barry) Goldwater Republican.

Two prominent legal minds (William Rehnquist and Robert Bork) expressed their opinions that the 1964 Civil Rights Act would lead to a tattletale culture when it came to civil rights violations. Another indicator of the mentality of then-conservatives was that of blaming the Supreme Court for its pro-desegregation stance in a 1969 ruling in a major case, instead of blaming president Nixon.

Two years later, however, in 1971, Thurmond hired a black staffer (!) He needed to repair his reputation after he backed conservative Democrat congressman Albert Watson, who agreed with him on civil rights issues but ran a dirty campaign in 1970. Thurmond needed to woo moderate Republican voters to get reelected in 1972. Nevertheless, he stuck with Nixon until the end.

In sum, the current COVID face-covering issue in American schools is as controversial as desegregation-busing was from the mid-1960’s into the mid-1970’s. Shortly before he was reelected in 1972, Thurmond actually said, “If it [busing] improves the quality of education, then busing is good. If it doesn’t, then I think it’s bad.” According to their respective memoirs, busing was good for Vernon Jordan, but was socially traumatic and a hardship for Donna Brazile.

So letting local officials decide, pursuant to the majority of their constituents’ preferences, might have been a better policy. And if local officials acted against those preferences, then community organizing and political activism in neighborhoods that believed in education, would likely lead to some changes in the next election year. Dissatisfaction would reach critical mass eventually, in those districts.

Incidentally, in 1975, Senator Joe Biden listened to his constituents in his state of Delaware. He wrote a bill making race irrelevant to assignment of students and teachers to schools.

Read the book to learn of: the skeleton in Thurmond’s closet, his presidential-run results, his one-man filibuster, the historical events (Supreme Court cases and election campaigns) that compelled him to change with the times (or else he would see the end of his political career), the differences between his style of campaigning and that of Jesse Helms, and much more.

Tough Love – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Tough Love, My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For” by Susan Rice, published in 2019.

Rice– of Jamaican ancestry on her mother’s side, and African American on her father’s side– spent her childhood in Washington, D.C. She was a key player in foreign policy during the presidential administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

In economics and foreign policy, president Ronald Reagan truly led a “Revolution” that has lasted forty years. American political, economic, and even cultural hegemony began to be taken for granted. The way his administration papered over the downsides of the United States’ military intervention in the world’s hotspots (except for Lebanon), made “might makes right” acceptable again, less than a decade (!) after Vietnam.

Rice (post-Obama) had an awakening similar to that of Jeanne Kirkpatrick (post-Reagan) when she naively wrote, “At the time, the notion we could send U.S. forces to a faraway land to save innocent lives only to have our lives taken away was infuriating and bewildering.”

Yet Rice sometimes favored sending in troops (through the UN) during the many instances of bloody unrest (some genocidal) that reared their ugly heads on various continents in the 1990’s into the 2000’s. She put in her two cents in heated, emotionally stressful debates over civil wars in Somalia, Rwanda, Libya (which eventually became a quagmire– unsurprisingly), Syria, etc.

Often, the alleged initial mission of NATO was to stem the proliferation of deaths of civilians. But in the long run– even with all kinds of assistance (military, political, humanitarian) from democratic countries– civilians in the Third World cannot break their homeland’s vicious dictatorship cycle (See this blog’s categories containing the words, “Crushing Oppression”).

Another set of repeated epic fails through the decades (as recently as the 2010’s) has been the United States’ attempts at “Vietnamization.” During 2012, Rice and other high-level officials wrung their hands regarding Syria. Rice wrote, “President Obama decided in 2013 to join our Sunni Arab and Turkish partners in arming and later training vetted Syrian rebels who were fighting Assad [Syria’s leader]. Some were terrorists.”

A simple reason for the failure of “Vietnamization” is that the people are being given fish (short-term handouts) with too much emphasis on military operations. This quick fix is provided by short-sighted politicians who have their eye on reelection or political expedience. The alternative is teaching the people how to fish (a system of democracy that jives with their culture), which is expensive, and takes years or decades, and might not be worth doing, pursuant to the strategic interests of the “liberators.” Installing democracy is like installing new software– it’s initially problematic, and it will require frequent patches and updates, and occasionally third-level tech support, indefinitely.

Read the book to learn of the smear campaigns launched against Rice (including that led by Lindsey Graham after Benghazi), how she built her career and what she did, the different mentalities of the UN and U.S. government agencies that handled foreign policy, the different personalities of all kinds of people whom Rice encountered in her lifetime, and almost everything you ever wanted to know about her life.

Politics of Conscience

The Book of the Week is “Politics of Conscience, A Biography of Margaret Chase Smith” by Patricia Ward Wallace, published in 1995.

The author wrote,

“Or perhaps it was that after four years, the nation had witnessed his unseemly bullying, insulting, and humiliating tactics for too long…”

of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI). In the spring of 1954, the U.S. Army held hearings in order to give McCarthy a taste of his own medicine.

Senator Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME) took over her deceased husband’s U.S. Senate seat when he died, and was reelected in 1940. She received special treatment from Bangor Daily News columnist May Craig, in that Craig was assigned specifically to favorably cover Smith, but hardly ever, any other politician.

Smith was best known– aside from her gender, along with six other senators– for issuing a “Declaration of Conscience” in June 1950, that took McCarthy to task (even though she and he were both Republicans) for his dictatorial methods in rooting out accused Communists.

After Smith delivered an accompanying speech on the Senate floor, her group took no follow-up actions, ingenuously thinking that that one act of protestation would convince the rest of the government and ordinary Americans that McCarthy was violating people’s civil rights in capitalizing on Cold War hysteria. He retaliated against her, (as politicians of his ilk will) by pressuring senate-committee-leaders to deny her membership and assignments she wanted.

In 1952, the book U.S.A. Confidential was published. It was full of lies and smears against all parties who were automatically treated as guilty of associating with Communists (many through only the most tenuous of connections), or who were automatically Communists by virtue of a simple accusation (by their enemies, of course) against them, whether unfounded or not.

Smith sued the book’s authors and publisher for libel, as several of the book’s pages mentioned her. The defendants used every possible tactic to delay litigation, but finally agreed to settle the case in autumn 1956. It was a hollow victory for Smith.

In the 1950’s, some members of the United States government galvanized citizens to turn their fears of nuclear war into hatred of one enemy: the former Soviet Union. Nowadays, fears and hatreds are scattered between or among all kinds of groups, absent the threat of nuclear war.

One way American governmental authorities are again attempting to galvanize the people against one enemy is to direct it against a disease, through controlling the population in various ways.

And yes, the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 is soon to arrive, bringing with it threats to national security. But the government has known this anniversary would arrive, for the last twenty years; the most recent administration, for the last eight months. Just a thought.

Read the book to learn much more about Smith’s career, life and times.

Promise and Power

The Book of the Week is “Promise and Power, The Life and Times of Robert McNamara” by Deborah Shapley, published in 1993.

NOTE: The author (a journalist, not a historian) rambled on for pages and pages on certain events (perhaps those were from sources to which she had easy access), and omitted or provided scant coverage on others that were equally important. [Case-in-point: She completely neglected to mention that the Washington Post initially published an excerpt from the Pentagon Papers, and the New York Times printed additional excerpts. It is unclear whether the omission was intentional.] Even so, on another point– it is difficult for anyone to extract truth from accounts of any CIA- related activities unless they come verbatim from declassified documents, not the minds of media members or historians playing “telephone.” History during McNamara’s career was crowded with CIA incidents. The whole premise of spying-agencies is based on using dishonesty to gather information!

Born in 1916 in San Francisco, California, McNamara spent most of his childhood in Oakland. His parents doted on him. He attended high school in a good school district, and made additional contacts while attending University of California at Berkeley. He became active in campus social life, cozying up to the college president and provost. McNamara and a friend got their graduate-business degrees at Harvard, where they were already displaying the kind of arrogance that gets politicians in trouble.

SIDENOTE: Both politicians and voters can learn from previous, recent presidents’ mistakes of arrogance (but it seems they never do!):

Ronald Reagan’s secret, international military adventures;

George H.W. Bush’s ill-advised optics and messaging;

Bill Clinton’s poor impulse control in the face of the age of zero privacy for public figures;

George W. Bush’s history of failing upwards thanks to inheritance, that allowed him to ultimately gain maximum power that led to profiteering and good-enough optics and messaging to get him reelected, but that ultimately ruined his reputation– but he was too sociopathic to care about a legacy;

Barack Obama’s optics and messaging that caused most conservative Republicans to claim: he made the U.S. appear weak in the eyes of the world, and led America’s healthcare industry in the wrong direction; plus, the facts that health-plan applicants could not necessarily “keep their doctor” and initially, they had excessive trouble signing up; notwithstanding, most liberal Democrats would agree he did the best he could under the circumstances (which he inherited), and he will be remembered for continuing the national healthcare debate because he helped pass historic legislation on it;

Donald Trump’s —– [redacted, censored, protected by non-disclosure agreements or executive privilege].

Anyway, at the start of WWII, McNamara and his friend settled for being posted overseas so as not to begin on the lowest rung of the military ladder. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t play well with others. McNamara’s lifelong philosophy was always action-oriented– take risks, do something, even if it was the wrong thing. Unfortunately, the truth didn’t change just because he didn’t want to see it, hear it, or speak it. And it didn’t get any less complicated just because he oversimplified it.

By the end of the 1940’s, McNamara was helping turn around Ford Motor Company, where he and his leadership team created and implemented the cost-accounting system (a trendy new method for numerical tracking and analysis) he had learned in business school. The executives were credit-grabbers and tooted their own horns. In the Postwar Era, they and their families needed to keep up with the Joneses.

But, when asked by JFK what he could do for his country, McNamara made a snap decision to become defense secretary in December 1960. His sole goal was clearly only amassing power, because he had just been promoted to president at Ford– so he was relinquishing outsized compensation by becoming a public servant– and unlike in recent times, actually (ethically) put his assets in a blind trust.

Cold-War hysteria was rampant, fueled by propaganda put out by the Kennedy administration. The public-relations lies McNamara told about the missile gap with the Soviets were comparable to those told by George W. Bush on Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq after 9/11. Ordinary Americans were building fallout shelters, convinced that the Soviets could unexpectedly launch a nuclear attack against the U.S. at any time.

McNamara then whipped up anger against himself when he aggravated inter-service rivalry between the Air Force and Navy, on project-contracts. The American intelligence services failed to anticipate that the Soviets would build a Wall in Berlin in August 1961. America’s leaders changed their tune about using nuclear weapons if provoked– but only as a last resort. Twenty years later, McNamara flip-flopped like Jeanne Kirkpatrick on many political issues, including nukes.

In the early 1960’s, however, he whipped up anger against himself again (from England and France) when he spoke for his country’s government, saying the United States needed to centrally control nuclear weapons because the Soviets wouldn’t be deterred from committing aggression if inventories in other nuclear nations of NATO were fragmented and complex. McNamara also needed to explain to Soviet leader Khrushchev that the United States had a plan to avoid vaporizing the entire world ten times over by (graciously) avoiding attacking major Soviet cities and using conventional weapons instead.

By early 1963, McNamara had amassed a bloated staff of bureaucratic, numerical-data-oriented paper-pushers, who had no clue what was really going on in Vietnam. The Americans were supplying weaponry and military consulting, but South-Vietnam-leader Ngo Dinh Diem’s soldiers took care of their own, in only pretending to fight. Newsflash– “Using napalm and herbicides didn’t win the hearts and minds of the peasants, who disdained Diem.”

American journalists physically present at the conflict-site, such as David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan truthfully described what they saw. McNamara didn’t want to believe them, but for his own purposes, chose to believe reports (that said America was making great progress) from consultants he controlled. Nevertheless, in spring 1968, McNamara became head of the World Bank, apparently to salve his conscience through saving the world (by eliminating hunger) for getting his own country into a quagmire.

Over the course of more than a dozen years, he radically changed the organization– for the good in some ways, and bad in others.
After about a decade, however, the negative aspects of his leadership style proved detrimental more often than not, to the Bank. McNamara was shown to be a hypocrite, like so many other alpha males whose hubris syndrome leads them to believe they are allowed to preach, “Do as I say, not as I do.”

In 1972, McNamara claimed the Bank’s projects would be environmentally friendly. But in 1981, he approved road-building in the Amazon region in Brazil that destroyed the rain forest and the way of life of the native tribes there. He left at the end of that year because his wife was ill, so conveniently, he wasn’t there to answer questions about the Bank’s serious problems when it hit the fan.

Incidentally, three other American contemporary figures come to mind on the environmental front, who were like McNamara: Al Gore, John Kerry and Michael Bloomberg– telling ordinary Americans to save energy while their ginormous carbon-footprints grow every day, traveling around to their various mansions through the use of exclusive flights and gas-guzzling vehicles. Note to current president: Arrogant hypocrisy makes American voters mad.

Read the book to learn of additional ways McNamara’s head eventually got too big for the team everywhere he went, prompting him and his colleagues to engage in disastrous military action in Vietnam, causing needless deaths and ruined lives; and the major historical events in which he had a role, that ruined his own and others’ reputations.

Let the Glory Out

“Yet because of his gargantuan inheritance from one of America’s richest fortunes, permissible by our faulty tax laws, there he sat as chairman… a frequent guest at the White House… Many politicians, too equated money with brains and esteem.”

-written about early 1960’s economic royalist Henry Ford II

The Book of the Week is “Let the Glory Out, My South and Its Politics” by Albert Gore, Sr., first published in 2000 [but written in 1972]. The author (father of former vice president Al Gore), a U.S. senator from Tennessee, described his experiences in politics. Sadly, the nature of some politicians’ behavior has changed little since the 1950’s and 1960’s.

As is well known, the 1950’s saw several landmark U.S. Supreme Court Civil-Rights Movement cases. [As an aside, charter schools are the modern-day version of “separate but equal” situation in American education– when compared to the private schools attended by children of wealthy parents (See the second-to-last paragraph of this blog’s post “Vernon Can Read”)].

Anyway, Congressman E.C. Gathings of Arkansas thought that the move toward racial integration was a Communist plot (!) Other American politicians weren’t so zealous in spreading anti-Communist propaganda, but they did fight integration tooth and nail. These included among others, Strom Thurmond, Harry Byrd and Richard Russell. They wanted to maintain the then-status quo of white supremacy and States’ rights.

Read the book to learn many more ways in which the same political issues keep rearing their ugly heads again and again and again, because some people (such as those in the CDC [Centers for Disease Control]) under political pressure, will say anything in order to secure funding for, and/or keep their jobs at, their organizations. Along these lines, here’s a lamentation on the CDC of late:

CDC

sung to the tune of “Maybelline” with apologies to the estate of Chuck Berry.

CDC, is what you say true?
Oh CDC, is what you say true?
You flip-flop on all you advise us to do.

As the pandemic lockdown was a go
I saw CDC contradictions grow.

When deciding on a mask mandate for all,
you made a really confusing call.

On closing schools you went against the grain.
Partly why the country went insane.

CDC, is what you say true?
Oh CDC, is what you say true?
You flip-flop on all you advise us to do.

Well with orders, guidelines and mandates,
you influenced govs ruling our states.

You got cloudy on immigration.
You crossed boundaries, causing irritation.

The stress from your waffling affected neighborhoods.
We knew you were doing propagandists good.

CDC, is what you say true?
Oh CDC, is what you say true?
You flip-flop on all you advise us to do.

Well, the country calmed down, deaths went down.
We heard more of your untrustworthy sound.

Your messaging looked like politics again.
Who knows what your real motive was then?

We’re not listening, not sittin’ still.
We’re living our lives. You are a pill.

CDC, is what you say true?
Oh CDC, is what you say true?
You flip-flop on all you advise us to do.

Barbara Jordan

The Book of the Week is “Barbara Jordan, American Hero” by Mary Beth Rogers, published in 1998.

Born in Houston, Texas in 1936, Jordan was the youngest of three daughters. She was inspired to become an attorney after hearing Edith Spurlock Sampson speak at her high school. In 1962, when Jordan was running for a seat in the Texas legislature, the Democrat party was split between liberals and conservatives. The liberals were smeared as “radicals, integrationists, labor goons and nigger-lovers.”

The biggest tragedy of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency was that he wasted untold amounts of taxpayer money on the Vietnam War that could have been better spent on fighting poverty. As is well known, Nixon followed his lead, and in addition, had his own evil agenda. Fortunately, Jordan played well politically with others. So when she explained Nixon’s crimes in laypeople’s language, everyone listened.

Jordan said, “One should regret that it happened– then try to find out why. What is it about the American political system which allowed this kind of event to occur… then maybe we can prevent it in the future.” Sadly, human nature gets in the way, every time. It’s a vicious cycle. In 1990, after Ann Richards was elected governor of Texas, Jordan became chief ethics officer in the statehouse. Richards ordered ethics training (for the first time ever (!)) for her state-board and commission appointees, numbering about a thousand, during the course of her four-year term. As is well known, that’s a bygone era.

Speaking of ethics, here’s a parody on the latest tabloid punching-bag, Rudy Giuliani:

STEP UP, OLD RUDY

sung to the tune of “Wake Up, Little Susie” with apologies to the Everly Brothers.

Step up, old Rudy, step up.
Step up, old Rudy, step up.

Attorney-client privilege won’t fly.
Step up, old Rudy, don’t lie. It’s been two years, the jig is up.
Your own legal bills are high.
Step up, old Rudy, step up, old Rudy.

Well, what weren’t you gonna tell the State?
What dirt on Biden couldn’t wait?
What’d you tell your political friends to seal-that-ambassador’s fate?
Step up, old Rudy, step up, old Rudy.

Well, you told us that you were lobbying for Trump.
Well Rudy baby, your loyalty made you a chump.
Step up, old Rudy, step up, old Rudy.
You’re on your own.

Step up, old Rudy, step up.
Step up, old Rudy, step up.

Ukraine-trip put you on the spot.
Plus the Dominion-voting-machine plot.
You’re sell-ing the Brooklyn Bridge.
Your goose is cooked, your reputation is shot.
Step up, old Rudy, step up, old Rudy.

Anyway, read the book to learn much more about Jordan’s life.

Daughter of Destiny / Getting Away With Murder

The first Book of the Week is “Daughter of Destiny, An Autobiography” by Benazir Bhutto, published in 1989.

“If you do not appoint me president along with my team, then I’m afraid I’ll have to explore other options. I may even have to start my own party. I will be your biggest opposition.”

-said to Benazir in late 1984 by one of the Old Guard PPP members in exile in London

Upon the initial sovereignty of Pakistan in 1947, there was an egalitarian climate in terms of gender– women could join the country’s National Guard. Born the oldest of four siblings in June 1953 in Karachi, Benazir Bhutto began studying at Radcliffe College (the sister school to Harvard) in 1969. There, she made many friends who achieved high positions in the world, affording her political assistance through the years.

The Bhuttos were something akin to a royal family in Pakistan in the second half of the twentieth century. They were one of the largest tribes in Sindh. They were Muslim, and most of their members lived in Larkana where they had plantations of rice, sugar cane, cotton and guava. Females inherited land when their relatives died, but their marriages were arranged.

Benazir’s grandfather was progressive in permitting his female descendants to get an education. Ironically, many families didn’t educate their sons because the sons were almost guaranteed a living from supervising servants who worked the land.

Benazir’s father– Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a Sunni, studied abroad at the University of California at Berkeley, and then Oxford University’s law school in England. Benazir’s mother, a Shiite, was: a second-generation Iranian, allowed to forgo covering herself up with clothing, and allowed to drive a car.

As is well known, through the centuries, there has been almost non-stop tribal and religious warfare in the territory that has become Pakistan. In the 1960’s, the major sites of bloodshed included the Kashmir, the Punjab and Sindh. In 1967, Zulfikar (Benazir’s father), a wildly popular government minister experienced in various political areas, helped form the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). In 1974, Zulfikar, as a master diplomatic negotiator, participated in talks over the territory that was to become Bangladesh.

In March 1976, Zulfikar was elected president of Pakistan. He nationalized major corporations, re-allocated land to peasants and outlawed gender discrimination in employment and government. Pairs of groups engaged in constant conflict: separatists in certain regions of Pakistan fought with those who believed the people would be better served by a federal government; rich opposed poor; landowners tangled with the educated, etc. Surprisingly, most of Pakistan’s population was still illiterate.

In the first half of the 1970’s, Zulfikar and his ilk continued to anger the United States with their actions. The leader spoke out against the Vietnam War, made friendly overtures to China, and took the Arab side in the Yom Kippur War.

Beginning around the middle of 1976, the French were teaching the Pakistanis how to make nuclear weapons. The latter were having a little spat with India besides. So the following year, the newly elected president Jimmy Carter secretly sicced the CIA on Zulfikar. It collaborated with the PPP’s rival party, the PNA (comprised of thugs, arsonists and sociopathic sadists with weaponry) to commit black-market currency manipulation to lower the value of the American dollar. Predictably, there were ugly consequences.

Carter and Ronald Reagan after him, like all American presidents, had to decide the kinds and amounts of aid to give to, or withhold from nations such as Pakistan, with its human rights abuses and temptation from the Soviets to adopt Communist policies in exchange for financial aid and weaponry.

As is well known, Pakistan borders on Afghanistan, in which the Soviets militarily insinuated themselves in late 1979. There were complicated economic, trade and geopolitical considerations– including a huge number of Afghan refugees– which as usual, were favored over stemming abusive treatment of ordinary Pakistanis by their government.

In July 1977, Zia ul-Haq, a general, had finally gained sufficient sway over Pakistan’s military to arrest and jail Zulfikar. Zia canceled the elections and declared Martial Law when he saw that there was still huge support among common Pakistanis for the Party (PPP). In October 1979, the Bhutto family’s newspaper was shuttered. The remaining media outlets of course, were censored by dictator Zia. Political parties were outlawed.

Dissidents, including Benazir and her mother (who, for some years stayed and fought, and other years, fled the country until there was less danger of assassination) were subjected to the usual Third-World-country human-rights abuses.

There was the vicious cycle of arrests on false charges, jailings with horrible conditions, arbitrary releases and re-arrests on different, absurd charges; firing on protesters– killing hundreds or thousands (accurate documentation was hard to come by, as foreign journalists were censored or banned from the country during the worst years of the oppression). For, the government controlled the courts, the army, and the media.

By the 1980’s, Pakistan was making a transition from military dictatorship to theocracy, as Zia supported the Wahhabis. However, on and off through the years, Zia must have still cared about world opinion because international complaints prompted him to, among making other concessions, allow Benazir and her mother at different times to be released from jail to receive
treatment abroad for serious medical conditions.

Anne Fadiman, a writer for Life magazine recounted an interesting experience riding in a car with Benazir going to a political rally in August 1986. Benazir stood on the seat with her head through the open sunroof (or emergency exit) when police officers started spraying tear gas. Incidentally, that tear gas was made in America, by Smith & Wesson.

Read the book to learn a wealth of additional details on Pakistan’s political history from the 1970’s up until the book’s writing as seen through Benazir’s eyes and personal experiences (Hint– it involved the usual, repetitive dictatorial shenanigans), and how she portrayed herself as the new Mahatma Gandhi toward the end of the story, in the spring of 1986, amid riots in Karachi over identity politics, and identity cards for voting).

The second Book of the Week is “Getting Away With Murder, Benazir Bhutto’s Assassination and the Politics of Pakistan” by Heraldo Munoz, published in 2014.

The author wrote, “The commission soon encountered a country deeply skeptical of authority and the justice system because of widespread corruption , abundant behind-the-scenes political deal making, and the regular impunity that had met previous unsolved political assassinations [which included Benazir Bhutto’s brother; her father’s was a death sentence but an assassination nevertheless].”

From its founding in 1947 through the first decade of the twenty-first century, Pakistan has had a European-style / military / theocratic government, each of which has waxed and waned with the vicissitudes of geopolitical shenanigans.

In mid-2004, the United States persuaded Pakistan’s leader Pervez Musharraf (who was turning into a dictator) to plan to give up his generalship in the Pakistani military and exile himself at some future date at U.S. taxpayer expense (because he knew the tide was turning against him), rather than the alternative. Benazir was considering returning to Pakistan to run for the top leadership position in an election, when Musharraf’s latest term was supposedly going to expire.

Talks also dragged on for three years between Musharraf and Benazir over a proposed power-sharing arrangement. Always a bad idea. For, a co-prime-ministership would certainly have failed. In the vast majority of cases, with a more-or-less democratic government, there can be only one leader.

Two very different people such as they, unrelated by marriage or blood are highly unlikely to have enough common vision, complementary talents and skills, and strategic interests to cooperate enough of the time to make it work.

Elections to governing bodies and top leaders in Pakistan were scheduled for January 2008. Benazir Bhutto had, in the past, been at various times– top leader, party leader, jailed, in exile, and physically present– mentored by her father who led Pakistan before her in the 1970’s.

Conspiracy theories abounded surrounding the circumstances of Benazir’s December 2007 assassination in Rawalpindi. A few bullets allegedly penetrated her head (or not– she allegedly bumped her head on the lever controlling the sunroof / emergency exit of the vehicle in which she was standing up with her head exposed to rally-supporters / protesters / political enemies), plus a suicide bomber’s explosives detonated near her vehicle that might have contributed to her death.

However, the fact that she was killed should have come as no surprise. She knew she was at risk for harm, considering that all political leaders are surrounded by security at all times, even those from democratic countries. Ones from Third World countries like Benazir, are especially vulnerable to physical danger from political rivals.

Just one day prior, terror attacks against her supporters in the form of two explosions in Karachi left hundreds wounded and dead. The then-leader of Pakistan’s military dictatorship who had grabbed power in a 1999 coup– the aforementioned Musharraf– refused to allow the FBI or Scotland Yard to investigate, not wanting to appear to be a puppet of the West (though he so obviously was).

A year and half later (!!) (rather than the next day), in February 2009, the United Nations (UN) began an inquiry into Benazir’s death. It wasn’t meant to result in any trial or punishment, but was simply a way for the investigators to remain relevant, and counter the Pakistan government’s historical revisionism with their own.

The author was named to the UN Commission of Inquiry, which traveled three times to Pakistan. Read the book to learn much more about the history of Pakistan and his experiences in trying to get the facts on the events that led to Benazir’s death.

The Year I Was Peter the Great – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “The Year I was Peter the Great, 1956–Khrushchev, Stalin’s Ghost, and A Young American in Russia” by Marvin Kalb, published in 2017.

Born in 1930 in the Bronx, the nerdy author tutored Puerto Rican students for free at his high school, and in exchange, they became his bodyguards against the Irish kids who tried to bully him. The author attended City College and covered sports for its college newspaper. In the early 1950’s, a sting operation caught 32 basketball players from seven colleges across the country in a point-shaving (sports-betting) scandal.

Passionate about all things Soviet, after a two-year stint in the U.S. Army, the author was afforded the opportunity to do post-graduate, independent study in Moscow in 1956. He also became a translator of news articles for the American embassy there.

In February 1956, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, through delivering a famous speech, signaled that the political times were changing in the Soviet Union. The indoctrination of people born under the rule of his predecessor Josef Stalin, could be described thusly: “For much of their lives, they had been moored to rigid Communist dogma, trained to worship Stalin’s genius, dedicated to the Soviet system.”

At the time, the author was hopeful that Khrushchev’s speech was going to be ground-breaking, and reported to the American embassy, his personal observations of students’ rebellious behavior in Lenin Library and Historical Library. Unfortunately, it took about thirty-five (!) more years of the inhumane political system of pure Communism to collapse in a large portion of the world.

Read the book to learn much more about the author’s experiences during, and reminiscences of, a very exciting year in his life.

Man of Tomorrow

The Book of the Week is “Man of Tomorrow, The Relentless Life of Jerry Brown” by Jim Newton, published in 2020.

Born in April 1938 in San Francisco, Brown had two older sisters and one younger. His father, Pat, was Democrat governor of California in the early 1960’s. Jerry became a devout Jesuit while in college. In 1961, he began law school at Yale, where his tuition was paid via a foundation program that benefited children of California officeholders, run by philanthropist Louis Lurie.

In the mid-1960’s, California governor Ronald Reagan signed bills for laws for three different, moderately liberal causes. The first bill raised taxes. In July 1967, after a scary incident involving the Black Panthers, Reagan ratified the Mulford Act, which outlawed the carrying of a loaded firearm in public. Thirdly, the same year, Reagan (grudgingly) legalized abortion for pregnant Californians whose lives were endangered or who were victims of rape.

Helped by name recognition via his father, after getting elected as California governor in 1974, Brown, fatalist though he was, proved to be an environmentally friendly politician. In autumn 1976, he signed 21 bills intended to provide pollution protection for his state’s coastal areas. Yet, he cut spending and shrunk government– defying his party’s reputation.

During his religious phase as a student and thereafter, Brown spent long hours in philosophical contemplation in order to hash out his political views. He effected prison-sentencing reform that changed “doing time” from rehabilitation to punishment.

However, California’s whole criminal justice system is arbitrary– changing with the tenor of the times, and by imposing sentencing guidelines, as the new law did, at least judges would presumably have been less biased (differ less widely) in meting out punishment. And in his second time around as governor (he was elected again in 2010, and was reelected), he issued a lot of pardons and commutations because he still had faith in humanity.

One issue that affected others was an initiative in which the California government auctioned off quantities of the state’s polluters’ emissions, providing the state with revenues it could use for pet projects of the governor. In the 2010’s, Brown was planning a high-speed railway, wanted to protect poor communities from environmental damage, and (obviously) needed to do maintenance for forest-fighting prevention.

In his four terms, Brown mulled over whether to sign or veto more than twenty thousand potential laws. In 2018 alone, he deemed 201 out of 1,016 of them, unworthy of his support.

Read the book to learn of California history, the history of its popular culture, the forces behind the rise of Brown’s popularity there, and the issues that shaped his actions.