Politics – Miscellaneous – Page 21 – education and deconstruction.com

onassis (sic)

The Book of the Week is “onassis” (sic) by Will Frischauer, published in 1968. The biographer immediately resorted to a disclaimer on his Acknowledgements page. In compiling this volume, he sourced twelve books in his Bibliography, claimed he drew upon interviews, and fifteen years’ worth of his readings on his subject, conceding that “… in many instances the dividing line between fact and fiction is so blurred…”

Nowadays, an equally vague author, whether authorized or unauthorized– to write about a wealthy alpha male (especially a politician) whose crack public-relations mythmakers gloze over unpleasant details– usually has the goal of rewriting history. That did not appear to be the case, at least with this book.

Born in 1906 in Smyrna, Onassis was of Turkish extraction. He was six years old when his mother passed away. His father lucratively sold tobacco, grain and hides. Sent to a Greek Orthodox (Christian) school, Onassis excelled at water polo and, already fluent in Turkish and Greek– became so in English, French and Italian.

In September 1922, when hostilities flared up between the Turks and Greeks, Onassis helped his family (except for his father, who was arrested early on) survive by playing well with parties on both sides of the conflict. His good relationship with the United States Vice Consul (a neutral party) allowed him to reunite with his older sister, two younger half-sisters and stepmother in Athens, and then travel to bail his father out of jail.

The father was furious that Onassis wasted money to bribe the authorities to get him sprung, as he would’ve been released anyway. The Turks froze foreign bank accounts of the family’s business when they took over Smyrna.

In 1923, taking advice from friends, Onassis got a job with a telephone company. He got away with lying about his age (said he was older) and birthplace to obtain an ID card. Then he felt the need to strike out on his own. His persistence paid off after a number of frustrating weeks, when he was finally able to sell his father’s Oriental tobacco to the Argentinians, who had been importing it from Brazil and Cuba.

Onassis was eventually able to get both Argentinian and Greek citizenship with the use of his dishonest identity-document application. After presiding over a failed cigarette business, in the next five or so years, he made his first million dollars. It was unstated exactly how. It was stated that he made business contacts wherever he went, some of whom he obviously inherited from his father.

Onassis was appointed a trade diplomat for the Argentinian government, and got into the shipping business. He started with used ships with Greek registration, then, in the early 1930’s, to avoid petty bureaucrats, switched to Panamanian registration. Other advantages with the latter included financial transactions that were permitted to be made in any currency, that were tax-free.

Onassis revolutionized the industry by ordering the construction of monster-sized oil tankers– with unprecedented capacities of tens of thousands of tons. The Swedes built the boats, and J. Paul Getty shipped the oil to Japan. Onassis, unlike the competition, also built comfortable living quarters for his ships’ crews, to foster employee loyalty.

During WWII, Onassis broke into the whaling industry, selling whale meat to mink farms and whale livers to the Borden food outfit. After the war, he took a bride; she was seventeen, he was forty. They raised their family in Oyster Bay, Long Island.

Yet another unique shipping-related activity Onassis pioneered, involved a risk-management contractual arrangement for international shipping. Prior to its implementation, he thought he had done his due diligence.

Onassis consulted an attorney to make sure he would be complying with maritime law– as he was purchasing surplus vessels of the United States, but registering them under other countries’ flags for purposes of deregulated operations and tax evasion. Nevertheless, by the mid-1950’s, the American Maritime Commission questioned its legality, anyway.

Read the book to learn additional specifics on how Onassis became rich and famous, and stayed that way.

Counselor

The Book of the Week is “Counselor, Life At the Edge of History” by Ted Sorensen, published in 2008. This was the autobiography of a political consultant best known for most closely advising JFK for eleven years.

Born in May 1928 in Lincoln, Nebraska, Sorensen considered himself a Danish Russian Jewish Unitarian. His father, appointed Attorney General beginning in 1929, was the oldest of ten surviving children. He helped pass a law that created one nonpartisan legislative body in the Nebraska statehouse. That way, there were no fights, delays or blaming.

Sorensen himself was one of five children. He grew up in an agricultural community with a harsh climate in Nebraska, not unlike that of George McGovern’s South Dakota. There were: droughts, floods, hailstorms, blizzards and grasshoppers.

In summer of 1951, after graduating from a special five-year university law program, Sorensen sought a job by personally walking into law firms to speak with the hirers. He began his career at the Federal Security Administration, which has come to be known as the Department of Health and Human Services. He became depressed when he started to wise up and witness more of the culture of Washington, D.C.: “… more hypocrites than heroes, more sinners than saints.”

At the suggestion of the joint committee staff director, Sorensen lied about his age– put down 25 instead of 24 on his resume because men of 25 were viewed as better job candidates, having more experience. In 1952, he became a speechwriter, advisor and personal assistant to then-Senator John F. Kennedy, his opposite. Sorensen was a plain ol’ country boy, rather than a Northeastern elitist. He didn’t run with JFK’s crowd.

Sorensen claimed that JFK himself actually did the writing of the book “Profiles in Courage” despite rumors that others did. He and others helped with the research. Sorensen mentioned various of the book’s rumored ghostwriters but failed to mention the most commonly named one– Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Upon becoming president, “John F. Kennedy’s speeches stood out because they revived idealism, eloquence, and progressivism, after a decade of Eisenhower’s bland, dry approach and Joe McCarthy’s evil tirades.”

Unfortunately, JFK was afraid of being criticized for being “soft on Communism”– a common fear in those days among politicians who wanted to get reelected. So JFK continued Eisenhower’s actions; by late 1963, he had sent sixteen thousand American military advisors to South Vietnam. In 1968, Sorensen became a campaign advisor to Robert F. Kennedy in his presidential bid; sadly, not for long. Then he practiced law.

Read the book to learn of Sorenson’s adventures with the famed senator and president; his views on what would have happened had JFK not been assassinated; his other endeavors; the toll taken on his health by years of severe sleep deprivation and nonstop (no downtime) international business travel; and much more.

Bitter Scent – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Bitter Scent, The Case of L’Oreal, Nazis and the Arab Boycott” by Michael Bar-Zohar, published in 1996.

The complicated history that led up to the situation which monster-sized international health-and-beauty-aids company L’Oreal faced in 1989 was most ironic. It dated back to the start of WWII, when two future executives of L’Oreal and Francois Mitterand (future president of France) became good friends, Nazi collaborators– pro-Vichy propagandists and sabotage-plotters, and then, when the tide of the war changed in 1943, allies of the Allies.

In March 1989, Jean Frydman (Israeli and French citizen, Jew, and former member of the WWII French Resistance,) was vice president of Paravision, his film distribution company. Unbeknownst to him, he resigned from the board of directors of Paravision in a fait-accompli by L’Oreal executives. He was ousted in absentia because he had business dealings in Israel.

Various business entities had significant financial interests in others, among them, Paravision, L’Oreal (based in a Paris suburb) and its international subsidiaries, Columbia Pictures, Nestle and Coca-Cola. L’Oreal executives felt the need to comply with a troublesome policy called the “Arab boycott” — considered ethically repugnant by non-Arab industrialized nations. L’Oreal executives were willing to go through a tremendous amount of trouble (most of which they didn’t anticipate) to comply with the boycott to enhance their business interests, but also arguably, because they were anti-Semitic.

The boycott imposed by the Arab League began in 1948 to financially strangle Israel by banning companies that did business with Israel, from doing business with any Arab countries. L’Oreal needed to get Frydman out of the way so it could say it did no business with Israel. But besides, there was a big-name cosmetics company called Helena Rubinstein located in Israel, with which L’Oreal was affiliated. The Arabs were pressuring L’Oreal to dispose of that asset as well, before it allowed lucrative trade with their side.

When Frydman was gobsmacked by his fellow executives and learned that top people at L’Oreal (including its founder) had been Nazi collaborators, hilarity did not ensue. Instead, an orgy of litigation, fishing expeditions, political machinations, palace intrigue, and of course, a propaganda war did.

Read the book to learn the details of this suspenseful, sordid story.

Menachem Begin

The Book of the Week is “Menachem Begin, The Battle for Israel’s Soul” by Daniel Gordis, published in 2014. This career biography described how Begin advanced from Zionist pioneer to Israeli prime minister. It was redundant in spots- as though the author thought the reader might have memory loss or distractions while reading, or perhaps it was just sloppy editing.

Anyway, Begin was born in 1913 in Brest-Litovsk– then a region in Poland. In the 1920’s, he joined a youth group called Betar, a Zionist group led by Vladimir Jabotinsky. While there, Begin developed his speaking and writing skills. In 1939, Jabotinsky appointed him Commander of the group’s seventy thousand members in Poland.

For his anti-Communist political activities, in 1940, Begin was arrested by the Soviet secret service and sentenced to eight years of hard labor. He had just gotten married, too. There, but for the grace of WWII, by September 1941, Begin was out of prison and starting the next chapter of his life. He joined the Free Polish Army (a military group from Poland, not no-cost cleaning fluid).

Just before Begin turned thirty, he was already making his way to Palestine. In the first half of the twentieth century, scholarliness on Jewish statehood was all the rage. Three major documents outlined three different possibilities for what to do with Palestine in the future. They were: the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the 1937 Peel Commission’s paper, and the 1939 MacDonald White Paper. Zionists were conflicted. The British were their enemy in Palestine but would be their ally fighting against the Nazis.

Begin decided the British were foes because they opposed allowing Jewish refugees– which included his own parents– to flee to Palestine, or settle there after WWII. Toward the end of the war, he led an armed rebel group (the Etzel, aka Irgun) who rivaled David Ben Gurion’s (the Haganah). The latter thought that the Jews would be unable to achieve statehood without help from the British.

Begin planned a bomb attack on a British-intelligence-documents storage area (namely, the King David Hotel) in Jerusalem in July 1946. The two other major underground resistance groups called off the operation. Due to a cluster screw-up, the explosion occurred, anyway. Civilians of various ethnic groups died, including tens of Englishmen, Arabs and Jews; 92 civilians in all.

Ben-Gurion caused a days-long international incident, when he ordered his henchmen to intercept a Palestine-bound, refugee-and-arms smuggling ship that had sailed from France. Begin knew about the ship but there was miscommunication over where the ship was, when. Ben-Gurion launched a vicious propaganda attack on Begin for atrocities his own men committed while trying to comply with the law against Palestine’s accepting arms and refugees. Jews killed Jews (!) Begin told his men not to be vengeful– to cede to Haganah’s demands.

Ben-Gurion used draconian means to consolidate the several military outfits into one Israeli military, and successfully slurred Begin’s name in the process. This hampered Begin’s ability to raise funds for his new political party, Herut (Freedom).

Read the book to learn of major issues on which Begin and Ben-Gurion disagreed; how Begin’s political career progressed; his views on Israel’s people and lands; his aggressive action with regard to Lebanon, and Iraq’s nuclear program; and the consequences of his always dogmatically “playing the Jewish card” to keep Israel in existence.

Adlai Stevenson

The Book of the Week is “Adlai Stevenson, His Life and Legacy, A Biography” by Porter McKeever, published in 1989.

Born into a cultured, literate, wealthy family in February 1900 in Los Angeles, CA, the subject of this tome was named after his grandfather, Adlai (“Ad-lay”). The family, which lived primarily in Bloomington, IL ran farms inherited from their ancestors. Stevenson had an overprotective mother: “…she would pick up Adlai in her electric car to ‘rescue’ him from his ‘rowdy’ companions.”

Stevenson’s interest in politics was sparked in 1912 by his meeting presidential candidate Woodrow Wilson when his family summered in New Jersey. Besides that, his father was a politician in Illinois.

Stevenson volunteered to serve in the Army toward the end of WWI. Upon graduation from Princeton University, he attended Harvard Law School under the duress of his father, but failed out after a year. He next went to work for the family’s newspaper, then returned to school and graduated. He became a workaholic in Chicago for the next three decades. Sadly, he hardly ever saw his three sons, born in the early Depression years, and his wife, who developed paranoid schizophrenia.

Stevenson was appointed to various diplomatic positions in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. By 1948, in a pleasant surprise, he was elected by a large margin, Democratic governor of Illinois. His strong suit was peace negotiations, and civil rights advocacy.

If anyone in the last hundred years in American politics had a reputation for honesty, it was Stevenson. He truly “drained the swamp”– eliminated partisan patronage in Illinois law enforcement. He gave teachers a raise, funded highway maintenance, and enacted desegregation in various areas, among other liberal causes.

Despite Stevenson’s intellect, eloquently expressed prophetic insights, and sense of humor– his non-competitive temperament meant that his supporters had to push him hard to run for president in 1952. And they did. So when he lost to Eisenhower, he wasn’t particularly aggrieved. In fact, he congratulated his opponent.

Nevertheless, he took the big bucks that “Look” magazine paid him to write a series of articles on his travels in Europe and Asia. Speech making and selling compilations of his speeches were also lucrative for him. He was then able to honestly pay off his campaign debt of $800,000.

By 1954, Stevenson conveyed to the world what he had learned: “Nations and peoples do not respond like unthinking dominoes. But it took a terrible toll of lives and treasure to find that out, and there is great uncertainty that the lesson has yet been really learned.” The aggressors and colonialists in the world’s hot spots were bad at “Vietnamization” even then.

On the Cold War home front, “… Eisenhower was willing to pay the price of sacrificed careers and political turmoil for the votes of pro-McCarthy senators.” The upshot of this was that a few thousand federal employees were fired, of 72 million, for being potential subversives, but only one true Communist was found.

By 1954, even the Republicans agreed with Stevenson that McCarthy had to go. Two years later, popular as ever among young, idealistic voters, but still more focused on trying to influence long-term policy than achieve personal gain, Stevenson explicitly said he did not want to run for president again. But he did. Even though in private he yelled at someone, “Campaigning like this makes a whore out of you!”

In January 1960, Stevenson met with Soviet ambassador Mikhail Menshikov, who gave him a handwritten note from Khrushchev saying the USSR fervently hoped that Stevenson would run for president that year; they wanted him more than anyone else to lead the United States. Stevenson declined to run.

Even so, as though to tease competing candidates John F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey and Stuart Symington– Stevenson appeared at the Democratic National Convention anyway. Thousands of his supporters were still hoping to rally sufficient delegates to get him nominated as the final Democratic candidate.

Read the book to learn of the major changes in American politics that Stevenson made, and much more.

how to rig an election (sic) / Team of Vipers

American politics has boiled down to the worst traits of human nature. Here are two books that put them in a nutshell.

The First Book of the Week is “how to rig an election (sic), Confessions of a Republican Operative” by Allen Raymond with Ian Spiegelman, published in 2008.

The author, originally from New Jersey, started his political career in the early 1990’s. He worked on a Republican campaign there in which “… we smeared them [the opposing candidates] as Trenton insiders who fired people, screwed you out of your money, and gave kickback deals to people who donated to their campaign.” Creativity in committing evil is an essential trait for a political operative. This author had it in spades.

For, the smearing part was outrageous lies in the form of attack ads. And they were cleverly timed, spread far and wide and believed by voters so that the victims couldn’t defend themselves or strike back easily. This is now what American campaigning is all about.

By 1995, the author had done his sleazy job so well, he was named chief of staff of a freshman New Jersey Congressman. He was one of the youngest of his kind, with blank-check security clearance in the Capitol. His boss was assigned to the Transportation Committee. Members of that Committee preside over an industry with big-money political donors who pay to play.

Raymond dodged a bullet when he wasn’t convicted for launching a robocall campaign that misled voters with slurs that completely misrepresented the candidates opposing his client, at a politically sensitive time period.

The author’s philosophy, when he was caught committing what was considered a crime by the Justice Department, was this: Everyone in politics can behave (or misbehave) as they please, as long as they don’t get caught breaking the law. The author didn’t (!) consider himself unethical when he “… obstructed a political party’s ability to contact voters.”

More specifically, during an election, his political-telemarketing business jammed phone lines of Democratic candidates. To his credit, beforehand, he checked with an attorney to learn whether that act was legal, and was initially told that it wasn’t illegal.

Read the book to learn the details (hint– Raymond didn’t pass Go, and he didn’t collect $200).

The Second Book of the Week is “Team of Vipers, My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House” by Cliff Sims, Former Special Assistant to the President, published in 2019.

Sims was born in Alabama. His father was a Baptist pastor. He started as a blogger writing on politics. In 2016, his influential “Yellowhammer” was instrumental in ousting Alabama’s governor for having an affair.

The author founded a media company before going to work for the Trump administration. In August 2015, Sims hosted a radio interview with the future president. This was two months after the candidate had thrown his hat into the ring.

Sims asked tough questions such as what had led Trump to change his views, since “He [Trump] had come under scrutiny for his many contributions to Democratic candidates over the years– including the Clintons…” And his utterances had been on the liberal side of the political spectrum. Trump waffled in answering that question, and in a downright cringeworthy way when asked about abortion.

Nevertheless, Sims’ communication skills and contacts led him to be tapped to become a close aide to Trump prior to election day. In October 2016, with the surfacing of a horribly embarrassing 2005 video clip featuring a Trump who was shamelessly, crudely expressing his sexist views– his election chances were suddenly judged to be almost nil. Sims proved to be particularly loyal to the candidate, anyway.

Sims described his West Wing workplace as easy in one way. Trump had a hands-off management style because he trusted his minions’ judgement to take action pursuant to his agenda. They could do so without having to get approval from a hierarchy of bureaucracy.

But its internal politics were like a chaotic corporate ladder– not unlike Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice”– a bunch of mean-spirited, petty, vengeful people jockeying for power, who spread vicious rumors, and publicly dressed each other down for their own selfish ends.

The root of the problem was that “Roles, goals and objectives weren’t clearly defined.” The workers had titles without job descriptions. They cooperated to help their employer only insofar as they helped themselves. Trump didn’t want to hear about employees’ petty squabbles. He didn’t care whether valuable people left for nicer pastures. He just wanted to see loyal people.

Admittedly, Sims himself took part in the adolescent antics. Clearly, such an environment is unsustainable in the long run for anyone; it is psychologically exhausting.

Read the book to learn the ugly details of Sims’ West-Wing-insider experiences attempting to do the president’s bidding while trying to avoid the social manipulation of his colleagues borne of jealousy of him– due to his disproportionately high amount of face time with the big boss.

Halliburton’s Army – LONG BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Halliburton’s Army, How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War” by Pratap Chatterjee, published in 2009.

This slightly sloppily proofread volume was also slightly redundant and very disorganized. Nevertheless, it was extremely well-documented and detailed. The author personally visited various sites and personally interviewed various people– in addition to sourcing information from documents– about which and whom he wrote.

In the late 1930’s, president Franklin Roosevelt, Congressman Lyndon Johnson and the company Brown & Root (BR) formed a public-private partnership to build the Marshall Ford Dam in Texas. In the early 1940’s, the company built the naval air station Corpus Christi. Taxpayers way overpaid for those projects. The reason was partly because the sweetheart terms of its contract guaranteed it a profit.

BR also built warships for World War II. It allegedly financed Lyndon Johnson’s run for the U.S. Senate in 1948. It built military bases during the Vietnam War. In August 1966, U.S. Congressman Donald Rumsfeld contended that, due to conflicts of interest, the federal government had signed contracts with BR that were “illegal by statute.” Of course, Rumsfeld hated President Johnson.

In October 1966, Rumsfeld and Bob Dole reported that BR had refused to let any government officials see documents associated with a BR construction site. The company and its subcontractors had lost track of $120 million and had thefts of millions of dollars of equipment by the end of its ($1.9-billion-in-costs) ten-year contract.

After the First Gulf War, a company named Halliburton pioneered the user-friendly assembly of cheap, prefab structures on military bases that were comfortable for soldiers in global hotspots. In early 1998, Dick Cheney assisted with the creation of Kellogg, Brown & Root when M.W. Kellogg was added to BR. Then Halliburton took over the whole kit and caboodle.

Through the 1990’s, Halliburton finagled $167.7 million worth of contracts from the U.S. government in Rwanda, Haiti, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Italy. “But it’s hard to convince people that the company had no influence when your entire upper management once worked for the very agencies that awarded the contracts.”

Halliburton’s tentacles also reached into Somalian and Nigerian territory through bribery. It had fun in the Balkans with “… double-billing, inflating prices and providing of unsuitable products.” By the late 1990’s, thanks to Halliburton and Chevron, the previously unspoiled, tourist-filled beaches in Angola’s Cabinda province had turned black.

Donald Rumsfeld was named Secretary of Defense in the United States beginning in 2001. Just prior to 9/11, “Rumsfeld said that the Pentagon was wasting at least $3 billion a year.” In the next eight years, he proceeded to eliminate most of the military’s in-house operations, including payroll, warehousing and sanitation.

Rumsfeld was adding one more area of American life– the military– to the privatization trend of recent decades. It has already gained traction in education, prisons, government entitlements, student loans, spying and courier services. Curiously, healthcare is going in the opposite direction. Why is that?

Well, medicine has undergone a major cultural change in the last fifty years. The family doctor who made house calls used to be a trusted family friend who charged a reasonable rate for his services. Now depersonalized medicine whose costs are sky-high due to technology and specialization is the norm. Healthcare is a mature industry.

Some aspects of healthcare have become capitalism gone hog-wild, especially those that are a matter of life and death. They have become as out of control as Halliburton.

That is why Americans are welcoming the intervention of government regulation to stem the incompetence, fraud, abuse and waste that have inevitably resulted from too much capitalism. Yes, capitalism is good– up to a point.

Anyway, the George H.W. Bush administration initially signed a military-services contract of a few million dollars with Halliburton. Dick Cheney served as CEO of Halliburton from late summer 1995 through 2000.

In those years and beyond, Cheney successfully spurred specific American foreign policy initiatives to win more lucrative contracts for Halliburton. By January 2002, in one of several nefarious policy changes, he got President George W. Bush to lift economic sanctions against the Muslim country of Azerbaijan, human rights and environmentalism be damned. On Halliburton’s behalf, Cheney engaged in friendly dealings with such oil producers as Iran, Libya, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and prior to the war, Iraq.

Azerbaijan’s president, Azeri Aliyev came to the United States for prostate cancer surgery in February 2002. A year later, he ran for reelection and won. As a quid pro quo, in November 2003, President George W. Bush got him a World Bank loan for an oil pipeline.

Of course, in February 2003, the fix was in and Halliburton was automatically awarded the contract that spelled out the terms of the fait accompli restoration of Iraq’s oil fields after the fait accompli war, ethics be damned. To top it off, the contract guaranteed a hefty profit for Halliburton. The company argued that there was no time for a fair, sealed-bid process before the war.

The “… contract would effectively make Halliburton the biggest recipient of Iraq’s oil money, with no input from the Iraqi people.” More than half of the billings for Halliburton’s oil-related services that the U.S. government would presumably pay for, were actually paid with Iraq cash. In other words, the proceeds of Iraq oil sales were used to pay Halliburton.

An organization that studied the quality of Halliburton’s work in Iraq calculated that “… the potential revenue lost from reduced oil production and exports” was $14.8 billion. Gross incompetence, fraud, abuse and waste were not isolated incidents. The holding company’s entities had a few contracts whose epic failures were hushed up until their projects’ entire budgets were spent, at which time those contracts were cancelled.

For example, there were many inexcusable episodes of oil smuggling by corrupt Iraqi officials, right under the noses of U.S. contractors. Halliburton was supposed to be the party responsible for preventing those episodes until it was fired in mid-2005.

In early 2004, due to public outcry over the no-bid, rigged Halliburton contract, there was new bidding, which was still rigged. The military, politicians and top employees of Halliburton were all co-conspirators in the illegality.

Workers of Halliburton’s subsidiaries and its subcontractors have hailed from a range of nations, including but not limited to: Fiji, Uganda, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Bosnia, India and America. Both non-American and American hirees are lured by the promise of high pay.

But often that promise comes with a price; the workers are subjected to mean living quarters, do hard manual labor for long hours, such as twelve hours a day, seven days a week in dangerous conditions, get no health insurance and no paid time off, and might go for months with no pay.

If they’re non-American, workers can’t complain because they’ll likely be threatened with dismissal. They likely borrowed money to travel to their expatriate work in the first place. If they quit their jobs, they would be greatly indebted, and their families back home would be made even more impoverished.

Just a few of the kinds of functions the worldwide network of cheap labor fulfills include: food delivery, preparation and catering, lodging, golf course maintenance, civil engineering, motor vehicle transport of the United States Air Force, United States customs inspection and security.

Read the book to learn the details of numerous Halliburton-related outrages in addition to the aforementioned, and how in 2003 and later, the voices of the handful of people who might have had the power to stop the corruption were eventually drowned out by political actions imposed by the powers that were.

For Jersualem

The Book of the Week is “For Jerusalem, A Life” by Teddy Kollek, with his son, Amos Kollek, published in 1978. Kollek was best known for his mayorship of Jerusalem from 1965 to 1993.

Born in a small village near Budapest in May 1911, Kollek was an athletic bibliophile as a child. When he was eleven, he began joining Zionist youth movements and for the next decade, traveled to Czechoslovakia, Romania and Germany. His grades in high school were poor; he graduated only at the behest of his parents. His father had been an Austrian army officer during WWI, then became an operations manager for the Rothschilds. Most of the Jewish bourgeoisie voted for the Social Democratic party in Austria.

As a true Zionist, Kollek wanted to move to Palestine. He put his name on the waiting list of the Zionist Organization, and was finally granted permission to go the promised land in spring 1935. Once he got there in 1936, he almost had “buyer’s remorse” after suffering a series of illnesses– typhus, malaria, sandfly fever and typhoid, almost dying in a British hospital.

Nonetheless, Kollek was granted Palestine citizenship. Shortly thereafter, he bestowed the same on his Austrian girlfriend by marrying her. He served as village headman in the kibbutz of Ein Gev in the Jordan Valley for a little more than a year. Playing well with the British, he would ride a horse around the mountains all day. Nearby tribes included the Bedouins and Cherkessians. The new Zionist settlers lived in shacks and had a communal shower.

In autumn 1938, Kollek supervised a different youth group in England. He also acted as an intermediary between the German and British authorities to let a few thousand Zionist teenagers become farm workers in England, as there was a shortage of them. He did the same for Austria and the British, negotiating with Adolf Eichmann.

Due to the Anschluss in March 1938, Kollek’s parents and brother moved to Palestine. At the start of WWII, Kollek assured the safe transport of contraband arms and people from Syria to Palestine. For the rest of the war, Kollek worked in British intelligence, and then coordinated smuggling operations for the Jewish Agency.

In 1941, David Ben-Gurion thought that Jews in the United States, rather than those in Great Britain, would provide the major impetus ideologically and financially to spur the creation of a Jewish state. He turned out to be correct.

The date May 14, 1948 saw legalization of transport of arms and people to Israel, as it officially achieved sovereignty. Prior to that, there was honor among thieves, according to the author. “In those days, everybody lived frugally and was so utterly devoted, without thinking of himself that we had complete confidence in one another.”

Even so, in the early 1950’s, the new nation had to rob Peter to pay Paul to fund itself, selling bonds and obtaining loans from American banks. And the FBI tailed all of the Jewish freedom fighters, even after independence.

Thanks to a business loan secured with Kollek’s assistance, the Israeli government was able to own and operate a retail chain store, Maskit, which sold handicrafts made by Israelis, co-founded by Moshe Dayan’s wife.

In summer 1952, Kollek was appointed to a position with a lofty title, to serve as a coordinator among government ministries in Prime Minister Ben-Gurion’s administration. In the mid-1950’s, the country obtained financing from gentiles for agricultural research and social and educational projects.

A decade later, Kollek was elected mayor of Jerusalem. His Labor party displaced the Mapai party, which had been the dominant one for years. The mindset of the older generation of (federal) Cabinet members could not shaken– even by Kollek– that they were the caretakers of agricultural collectives, rather than a nation that had become more than three quarters urbanized.

About once a month, Mayor Kollek wanted to resign. Nevertheless, he claimed to have made Jerusalem a better place in numerous ways. The previous mayor had failed to stop Orthodox Jews from throwing rocks at the Mandelbaum Gate because Jordanian Christians in buses en route to religious journeys were disrupting their Sabbath. Kollek’s solution was to bar traffic around Jewish houses of worship on Saturdays.

Perhaps Kollek accomplished so much and was reelected so many times because he lacked the politician’s mentality of expecting the kind of reciprocity that leads to patronage. He truly cared about improving the lives of his fellow Jerusalemites, rather than horse-trading only insofar as to acquire more power or funding.

In sum, Kollek wrote, “Being mayor is the most varied, absorbing, sometimes aggravating (sic), but still the most satisfying job in the world, and while I’m at it, I’ll work as hard as I can, eat as much as I want, and shout at whomever I please.”

Read the book to learn the role radio played in the 1950’s in the lives of Egyptians and Israelis; what Kollek did: for Israel’s tenth anniversary celebration, in the founding of the Israel Museum, during the Six Day and Yom Kippur Wars, with regard to the Western Wall, and much more.

Hold On, Mr. President – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Hold On, Mr. President” by Sam Donaldson, published in 1987. This is the career memoir of an aggressive TV journalist who covered politics.

Donaldson was born in 1934. By his mid-thirties, he had an all-consuming career, working seven days a week for about a year at ABC-TV in Washington D.C. He covered the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, Vietnam on-location for three months in 1971, the Watergate scandal, and, glutton for punishment that he was– president Jimmy Carter in 1976. He asked hard questions of presidents, especially president Ronald Reagan, on whom he spent a lot of time reporting.

Donaldson felt that Reagan’s unwavering stance on all issues was a liability because it resulted in “thoughtless and false certainty… Deciphering Reagan-speak is a constant in the White House press room… But give Reagan a TelePromTer (sic)… and he can communicate without ambiguity and, in the process, sell you a defense budget that will reduce you to rags or a Nicaragua policy that will curl more than your hair.” Countless erroneous facts and figures emanated from Reagan’s mouth, of which Donaldson provided numerous examples.

In the late 1980’s, Reagan held political rallies whose attendees “… had to apply for tickets from local Republican organizations, and people who were not already true believers, didn’t get them.” Some things never change.

Read the book to learn a wealth of additional details on Donaldson and his generation of TV journalism in Washington, D.C.

Strong of Heart – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Strong of Heart, Life and Death in the Fire Department of New York” by Thomas Von Essen, published in 2002.

The bulk of the book recounted 9/11 through the author’s eyes. At the time, he was the Fire Commissioner of New York City, overseeing about sixteen thousand firefighters, emergency medical technicians, paramedics and civilians at the then-240 fire stations across the city. The deaths of firefighters on 9/11 numbered 343.

Additional workers passed away due to illness in the months and years following that disastrous day. The author admitted that the men who aided in the recovery effort refused to wear equipment that would have prevented their exposure to toxins at Ground Zero– the location of the tragedy. Goggles, masks, hard hats and respirators were uncomfortable and hindered communication.

The fire department consists of two divisions: the ladder company, which searches for and rescues victims, and the engine company that operates the hose that puts out the fire.

In 1970, at Ladder Company 42 in the South Bronx, the author began firefighting at 24 years old, but still wasn’t sure he wanted to make that his career. The alarms were nonstop every shift in those days; many fires were made worse by fire-code violations of slumlords, and the proliferation of poorly constructed wooden buildings.

The author soon realized he enjoyed the unpredictable nature of the job, and the ego satisfaction he got from saving lives. He got elected president of his union in 1993. This allowed him to get to know every borough’s firehouse and politician in the city and state.

Read the book to learn of the author’s trials and tribulations in his chosen profession; what he was able to accomplish as an officeholder in the fire department with the help of his ultimate boss and friend, then-mayor Rudy Giuliani; and why firefighters were less than thrilled with the late former mayor Ed Koch in the late 1980’s.