CommentaryFEBRUARY 2016 Bob Woodward’s Sins of Omission JAMES ROSEN

The University We Need WARREN TREADGOLD

I’m OK, You’re a Rage-a-Holic IS A NEW REPUBLICAN CHRISTINE ROSEN F O R E I G N P O L I C Y The Bernie Sanders EMERGING? Blackout

Commentary MATTHEW BY MAX CONTINETTI BOOT Letters on

FEBRUARY 2016 : VOLUME 141 NUMBER 2 ‘The Jewish Future’ $5.95 US : $7.00 CANADA $7.00 : US $5.95

February 2016 Cover.indd 1 1/14/16 4:08 PM Start Spreadin’ the News

HIS MONTH’S cover boys, Donald Trump and decided he was unacceptable. As I write, national Ted Cruz, were duking it out after Trump ques- polls have Trump leading the field with 35 percent to T tioned the constitutionality of Cruz’s presidential Cruz’s 19 percent in the wake of Trump’s seven-month bid when Cruz mounted a surprising counterattack. run at the top of the charts and what must be judged “Donald comes from New York,” Cruz said dismissively, the most spectacular primary bid of our time. These “and he embodies New York values.” polls are problematic, but at the very least what they New York values? There was a time, not too long suggest is 65 percent of the Republican electorate ago, when the United States was awash in admiration is actively opposed to Trump. They know he’s pro- for “New York values”—the qualities of perseverance and choice, they know he supports Democrats, they know equanimity that characterized the city’s reaction to the he’s crude and ugly and insulting, and they know September 11 attacks. We were all New his foreign-policy views are at best Yorkers, it was said. The Republican inconsistent. Party even staged its convention in From the Editor The base doesn’t need the “New Manhattan in 2004. Rudy Giuliani was John Podhoretz York values” dog whistle Cruz is blow- for years the most popular figure in the ing in its direction. The base is politi- GOP. I can recall traveling throughout cally and ideologically literate. Which the country in the years that followed 9/11 and having means, maybe, Cruz and everybody else have had it people practically demand the right to buy me a drink entirely backwards. The Trump voter is a challenge to the simply because I had come to their towns from New York. Republican base as we’ve understood it since the Reagan Cruz was betting that this view has faded to era, not a member of it. Indeed, the Trump voter may rep- such a degree that he could implicitly (and maybe resent a potentially new Republican base—and one that consciously, as he is knowledgeable about pop culture) embraces Trump’s version of “New York values.” echo Woody Allen’s famous New York-centric line Those values aren’t the ones Woody Allen was teas- from Annie Hall and have it resonate with the voters ing. Nor are they the values of 9/11. They are the values of he’s trying to reach: “The rest of the country looks the New York of caricature—the Walter Winchell–Ralph upon New York like we’re left-wing Communist Jew- Kramden–Archie Bunker–Andrew Dice Clay–Spike Lee ish homosexual pornographers. I think of us that way New York, the city of pushy, obnoxious, informal and sometimes, and I live here.” unpretentious loudmouths who get in your face and “tell After months trying to remain in Trump’s down- it like it is.” draft so that he might quietly pick up the frontrunner’s Donald Trump is the apotheosis of the carica- supporters along the way, Cruz found his own rising for- ture—he’s the zillionaire with the guts to say what tunes had placed him in Trump’s gun sights—and that he the average Joe says, the guy in the $10,000 suit who was no less vulnerable to the man’s sniping than anyone prefers hot dogs to caviar and doesn’t like losers or else had been before him. And so, belatedly, Cruz sud- cripples or captured soldiers, the world leader with denly wanted the GOP rank-and-file to know what every the outerborough accent who loves a winner even if other wounded candidate has wanted the GOP rank-and- the winner is a monstrous dictator. Jeb Bush released file to know—that Trump is not one of them, not one of a commercial in January openly calling Trump a jerk. us. He is a man with “New York values,” not our values. Like Cruz, Bush seems to have misread the Trump ap- The idea is that once the Republican base really knows peal. An ad like that is an ad for Trump. A great many the truth about Trump, the base will take him out. people in America in 2016 appear to think that an out- Cruz is operating from a false premise here. and-out, unapologetic jerk from the Big Apple is just In point of fact, the base has had months to evalu- what this country needs. After all, as the song says, if ate Trump, and one can argue that the base long ago he can make it there, he’ll make it anywhere.q

Commentary 1

EDITOR.indd 1 1/14/16 3:24 PM

February 2016 Vol. 141 : No. 2

Articles

Max Is a New Republican Foreign Policy Emerging? 11 Boot

James Bob Woodward’s Sins of Omission 18 Rosen His new book raises fresh questions about the role of America’s most famous journalist in the scandal that made his name.

Warren The University We Need 27 Treadgold Reforming higher education requires the founding of a new institution of learning.

Stephen The Disastrous New Urban Disaster 33 Eide Unable to spend their way into a progressive future, Democratic mayors have turned to regulation as a panacea.

Tara Why Hamilton Matters 37 Helfman The Broadway triumph is the antidote to our identity-obsessed culture.

Fiction

Joseph Epstein The Bernie Klepner Show 41

Contents.indd 2 1/14/16 12:58 PM

Politics & Ideas

Naomi Don’t Take Me to Church 49 Schaefer Riley Soul Mates, by W. Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas Wolfinger

Sohrab A Reformer Reformed 52 Ahmari Until We Are Free, by Shirin Ebadi

David Unto the Generations 54 Wolpe The Pater, by Elliot Jager

Culture & Civilization

Terry Tap, Look, and Listen 56 Teachout The decline of a great American art.

Fernanda This Was a Man 60 Moore The Complete Works of Primo Levi, edited by Ann Goldstein

Matthew Mediacracy: 64 Continetti The Bernie Sanders Blackout

From the Editor 1 The Way We Live Now: I’m OK, You’re a Rage-a-holic, by Christine Rosen 4 Letters 6

Contents.indd 3 1/14/16 12:58 PM I’m OK, You’re a Rage-a-holic

S THERE any trope in American life more endur- women’s reported anger is slightly higher than white ing than the “angry white male?” He is a staple of men’s (53 percent versus 44 percent). Democrats are I pop culture from Archie Bunker and Taxi Driver angry, too. A recent Rasmussen Report on the “Angry in the ’70s to Michael Douglas’s Falling Down in the American Voter” concluded: “A lot of voters are angry. 1990s to Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino in 2008, and Very angry. In fact, a lot of voters have been angry for A recent editorial indulged in a standard more recently he has been fueling the fever dreams some time. The phenomenon that we call ‘negative of liberal political pundits. The New York Times’s Gail partisanship,’ antipathy on the part of Democratic and bit of outrage-peddling by blaming Collins frets about how Donald Trump has “cornered Republican voters toward the opposing party and its ‘years of overheated antigovernment the anger franchise” while her col- leaders, has been on the rise since league Frank Bruni calls Trump the 1980s, and today it is arguably statements by right-wing politicians and and Senator Ted Cruz “unabashedly The Way We the most salient feature of the po- media figures’ for ‘outbursts’ such as the mean.” David Von Drehle, of Time, litical scene in the United States.” writes with barely concealed glee Live Now Nor is anger exclusively an current standoff between local ranchers that the GOP finds itself “in bed be- American problem. Writing in Christine Rosen and law-enforcement agents in Oregon. tween a bombshell and a kamikaze.” Bloomberg View, John Micklethwait So dire is the anger of these an- notes, “There’s also plenty of evi- gry white men that the Canadian writer Stephen Marche dence that across the Western world, voters are furious even sensed hostility in a Midwestern man’s facial hair. with the established parties and choices—and much In a piece for The Guardian, he described one white male more willing to consider extreme solutions, especially Trump supporter he spoke to as Angry Mustache: “Angry when put forward by politicians who ‘tell it like it is’ and Mustache quoted a statistic, which I later check and seem genuine.” The Man of the Moment says so, too. turns out to be bullshit, that all congressmen become There is “a great anger out there,” quoth Donald Trump. millionaires by the time they’ve been in office for a year,” “A lot of people say that my campaign has picked up on Marche wrote, as if he’s just exposed a terrorism plot. that, and I didn’t do that intentionally.” Angry Mustache isn’t the only one nursing a As always, present-day intensity can blind us to grievance. A recent Esquire/NBC News poll found the fact that there is nothing new under the sun. An- that “half of all Americans are angrier today than ger has long had a place in our political life, and this they were a year ago.” And it isn’t just the men; white is on balance a good thing. Anger prods politicians to respond to the public mood, which ultimately moves Christine Rosen appears monthly in this space. Last debates on important issues in new directions. month’s column was about “safe spaces” on campus. But in recent years, another phenomenon has

4 February 2016

TWWLN.indd 6 1/14/16 1:29 PM emerged. Some forms of anger are now considered curious human trait: When we do something good, we more culturally legitimate than others. As a result, then give ourselves license to do something bad. One we spend less time examining the sources of people’s Canadian study found that people who bought envi- anger and more time arguing over which people have ronmentally conscious products were more likely later the “right” to be angry. to lie, cheat, and steal, for example. “Purchasing green This is especially true with controversial issues. products may produce the counterintuitive effect of li- Announcing his recent executive actions on gun control, censing asocial and unethical behaviors by establishing President Obama wiped away angry tears as he said of moral credentials,” researchers told CBC News. the victims of gun violence, “Every time I think about Similarly, by pointing out the supposedly irratio- those kids, it gets me mad.” The media swooned; Matt nal and dangerous anger of their political opponents Lauer, of the Today show, praised the president’s “rare (and thus establishing their “moral credentials”), cul- display of emotion” and columnist Nicholas Kristof tural mandarins of the left can then readily indulge in tweeted, “We should all be crying about 32,000 Ameri- their own vitriol without ever having to figure out what can gun deaths a year.” Obama’s angry tears supposedly might be stirring these other people. placed the president above politics, in the realm of the Although Trump’s rage against the Republican spirit—and elevated those machine is an easy thing who admired his display of to lampoon, he is tapping feeling. “I think any of us A recent editorial indulged in a standard into a mistrust of authority who sort of covered that bit of outrage-peddling by blaming and sense of betrayal that is story, any time I think about felt among a wide swath of Sandy Hook, you feel that ‘years of overheated antigovernment the electorate. The angriest as well,” said Today’s Willie statements by right-wing politicians and people are middle-aged and Geist, thus suggesting that middle class. Why? More professionals who “covered” media figures’ for ‘outbursts’ such as the than half (52 percent) of the the shootings at the school current standoff between local ranchers people polled by Esquire felt in Connecticut simply felt that the American Dream more deeply about it than and law-enforcement agents in Oregon. no longer existed; a similar the rest of us hoi polloi. “It number (54 percent) said, doesn’t mean his policies are “The U.S. was once the most going to fix the gun problem, it doesn’t even mean they’re powerful country but isn’t anymore.” The same percent- the right thing, I’m just talking about that emotion right age felt that they were worse off than they had expected there.” they would be when they were younger. And they aren’t But when people on the other side of the aisle wrong. express anger, it’s not emotionally inspiring. It’s scary. But there is an upside to anger. It motivates “Anger and alienation have been simmering in Repub- people. A Rasmussen report analyzing the 2012 lican ranks since the end of the George W. Bush ad- elections found “a very strong relationship between ministration,” the New York Times noted recently (and political involvement and anger.” Nor is anger always ominously), while failing to note the similar rise in Dem- irrational. “Our research indicates that voter anger ocratic anger. A recent editorial indulged in a standard has a clear rational basis,” the report noted. “To a large bit of outrage-peddling by blaming “years of overheated extent, this anger appears to be based on ideological antigovernment statements by right-wing politicians disagreement: the greater the disagreement with the and media figures” for “outbursts” such as the current opposing party, the greater the anger.” standoff between local ranchers and law-enforcement There is something both brilliantly instrumen- agents at a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon. Meanwhile, tal and stunningly condescending about the efforts these same observers describe expressions of anger from of the self-appointed cultural and media elite to dis- the left (bullying campus activists, Occupy Wall Street) qualify the emotions of the majority of Americans. In as righteous manifestations of the fight for justice and doing so they suggest not only that their opponents treat their excesses like the overenthusiasm of an excit- are wrong on the facts, but also that they are irratio- able puppy. nal, immature, and possibly dangerous, like a child In other words: I’m OK. You’re a rage-a-holic. having a tantrum. This makes serious conversation— It’s an emotional version of what behavioral econ- and useful political debate—impossible. And it makes omists call the “licensing effect.” The term describes a people very, very angry.q

Commentary 5

TWWLN.indd 7 1/14/16 1:29 PM Letters Jewry in 50 Years

To the Editor: looks down on the “exotic strin- English “passably well.” If that was N SUMMING up his thoughts gencies and haberdashery” of it all. ever true, it is certainly no longer Ion the future of American Jewry Dan Smokler calls Haredi interests so. Today there are many articulate [“The Jewish Future: A Sympo- “parochial.” Both Dennis Prager Haredi leaders, thinkers, and rab- sium,” November 2015] John Pod- and David Ellenson find Orthodox bis: Aaron Feldman, Chaim Dovid horetz writes: “The respondents believers “insular.” And Eric Yoffie Zweibel, Rabbi Moshe Wolfson, portray a Jewish future very much sees them as “coercive.” Rabbi Nosson Scherman, Rabbi Dr. transformed from the Jewish pres- These writers are responding David Gottlieb, and Rabbi Simcha ent, especially in the United States. to cartoons of Haredim. Their Bunim Cohen, to name a few. Why Most agree that the most signifi- characterizations suggest that they aren’t these brilliant people, and cant aspect of this transformation have never met a real, live Haredi. their peers, better represented in will be the increased size and If they have, they would know that your symposium? centrality of Orthodox Jewry.” And Haredim include highly educated Commentary is a conservative as Jay Lefkowitz notes in his en- doctors, lawyers, professors, pro- organ. The best conservative think- try, the ultra-Orthodox “constitute fessionals, and business leaders ing on politics, society, business, about 70 percent” of the Orthodox who are very much at home with and education appears in your community. “Already, in New York American life while choosing to pages. What about conservative City,” he writes, “more than half of live as Haredi Jews. religion? Viewed properly, Haredi Jewish children under 18 are being Perhaps we should not be sur- Jews and Judaism represent the raised in Haredi homes.” prised to see sectarian leaders lash finest example of the actualization One might expect at least out as they contemplate their own of conservative principles. Hare- grudging respect for the segment irrelevance to “The Jewish Future.” dim strive to practice the religion of American Judaism most likely As this was a symposium, I of their ancestors in the same way to further the Jewish enterprise. grant that Commentary cannot their ancestors practiced it for That, however, is not the view of be held accountable for the of- thousands of years, without modi- many of your contributors, who fensiveness of some participants. fiers, such as “modern,” “open,” or demean Haredi Jews and the Juda- The bias in the magazine’s choice “nationalist.” What could be more ism they practice. Some examples: of contributors, however, was sur- conservative? David Wolpe dismisses Haredi be- prising. Mr. Podhoretz recognizes The Jewish religion has been liefs as “fundamentalist” mani- the centrality of Haredi Judaism practiced in exile under every festations of “medievalism.” Paul to the Jewish future, yet only one possible condition—ranging from Berman refers to them as mere self-acknowledged Haredi, Jona- bad to unspeakable. How has it “rabbinical fantasies” and men- than Rosenblum, appears in the survived and prospered? In your tions their “Islamic counterparts.” symposium. In the introduction to symposium, Jack Wertheimer cites Jeremy Kalmanofsky groups Hare- Commentary’s 1966 symposium “strong pro-natal norms and com- dim with the “Amish” and pro- on “The State of Jewish Belief,” mitments to perpetuating Jewish nounces them “irrelevant.” Eliot editors wondered if the Orthodox life.” Those are, indeed, necessary, Cohen characterizes Haredi prac- were underrepresented owing to a but they are far from sufficient. tice as “absurd.” Moshe Koppel resistance among some to writing As Michael Medved points out,

6 Letters : February 2016

Letters.indd 6 1/14/16 1:48 PM many once vibrant American eth- nic communities have virtually disappeared. While other factors may play a role, there is one central explanation: Judaism in its classic, unmodified, halachic form has al- ways provided the optimal answer February 2016 Vol. 141 : No. 2 to the question: “Which way of life is best and most satisfying for a John Podhoretz, Editor Jewish person?” It is inconceivable b that Jews and Judaism could have Abe Greenwald, Senior Editor survived unless classic, Conserva- b tive Judaism satisfied the deepest, Jonathan S. Tobin, Senior Online Editor the most profound, human needs. Noah C. Rothman, Assistant Online Editor As more Jews discover this simple b truth, there will emerge a glorious Carol Moskot, Publisher Jewish future. Kejda Gjermani, Digital Publisher Jerome Widroff New York City Leah Rahmani, Publishing Associate b Ilya Leyzerzon, Business Director 1 Stephanie Roberts, Business Manager Salli Walker, Customer Service Manager To the Editor: b FOUND Commentary’s sym- Terry Teachout, Critic-at-Large I posium on the Jewish future b informative, but it failed to include Board of Directors an adequate portion of Israeli opin- Daniel R. Benson, Chairman ion. It would have been beneficial Meredith Berkman, Roger Hertog to hear the predictions of Israeli thinkers such as Yoram Ettinger, Paul J. Isaac, Michael J. Leffell, Jay P. Lefkowitz Moshe Sharon, and Caroline Glick. Steven Price, Gary L. Rosenthal The Israeli perspective on the Jew- Michael W. Schwartz, Paul E. Singer ish future is vital. For a variety of reasons, many Israeli analysts think differently Cover Design: Carol Moskot b Photo: AP/Corbis from their American peers. For starters, Jewish Israeli foreign- To send us a letter to the editor: [email protected] policy analysts and journalists, like We will edit letters for length and content. the rest of Israel’s Jews, live in the To make a tax-deductible donation: [email protected] Arab world. Many Israeli scholars For advertising inquiries: [email protected] and journalists fought in one or more of the wars against Arab armies and coped with terrorism Commentary (ISSN 0010-2601) is published monthly (except for a combined July/ August issue) by Commentary, Inc., a 501(c)(3) organization. Editorial and business offices: while in the IDF. 561 Seventh Avenue, 16th Floor, New York, NY, 10018. Telephone: (212) 891-1400. Fax: (212) Among the symposium’s con- 891-6700. Subscriptions: (800) 829-6270. One year $45, two years $79, three years $109, tributors, only Ruth Wisse gave USA only. For subscriptions outside USA, please go to www.commentarymagazine.com. Peri- odicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing ofces. Subscribers who would like due credit to the IDF for Israel’s to receive electronic announcements of forthcoming issues: Please send an email message to survival. It is the IDF that especial- [email protected], providing your full name and writing “Updates” in the Sub- ly befuddles the rest of the world. ject line. Single copy: U.S. is $5.95; Canada is $7.00. All back issues are available in electronic form at commentarymagazine.com. Postmaster: Send address changes to Commentary, P.O. Box For 2,000 years, after the Romans 420235, Palm Coast, FL, 32142. Unsolicited manuscripts must be accompanied by a stamped, conquered Jerusalem, Jews had no self-addressed envelope. Letters intended for publication may be edited. Indexed in Reader’s Guide, history of military prowess. Yet in Book Review Digest, and elsewhere. U.S. Newsstand Distribution by COMAG Marketing Group, 155 Village Blvd, Princeton, NJ, 08540. Printed in the USA. Commentary was established in 68 years, Israelis have built a pow- 1945 by the American Jewish Committee, which was the magazine’s publisher through 2006 and continues to support its role as an independent journal of thought and opinion. Copyright © 2016 by Commentary, Inc.; all rights reserved under International and Pan American Copyright Conventions. Commentary

Letters.indd 7 1/14/16 1:48 PM erful army, tank corps, air force, life in America 50 years from now. suppose that America Jewry, as intelligence corps, and a small Lawrence I. Gould Jewry, will survive. It remains to powerful navy. It was still a stretch, Pepper Pike, Ohio be seen how Eric Cohen’s progno- of course, for Wisse to suggest that sis for conservative orthodoxy in the IDF would be awarded the 1 America pans out. I’ll be long gone Nobel Peace Prize 50 years from 50 years from now, but others will now. The Nobel judges are no more To the Editor: find out. likely to experience a philosophical APPRECIATED the symposium Ira Silverman sea change than Arab nations are I offering by Eric Cohen, who New York City to disregard ancient Islamic tenets noted that in the future a smaller that define Jews as second-class Jewish population will be more Or- 1 citizens who must remain in sub- thodox in their religious practice, servient roles. more conservative in their politics, To the Editor: While a few of the writers al- and, therefore, strongly opposed to HAVE SOME criticism of (and luded to the contribution Israeli Jewish liberalism. Ia word of praise for) your sym- industry has made to the success Having turned 80 last Veterans posium. Peter Berkowitz writes: “It of the Jewish state, only Dan Senor Day, I’ve seen more than my share will not be enough for Jews to make provided detail. It would have been of Jewish liberalism in America. sure that their children receive nice to hear more about Israel’s The Orthodoxy of my grandpar- a Jewish education. . . . Jews must dynamic economy and its high- ents’ and parents’ generations also construct private educational tech industry, for example. That failed to grab me. But as a kid, I was institutions that teach students dynamism is in fact connected to instinctively drawn to Zionism and the principles that support free the success of the Israeli military, nationalism, even if others around and democratic governments.” The as Unit 8200 of the Israeli Intel- me were not. I recall people at the question is: Do we Jews favor such ligence Corps demonstrates. After Beth Shraga Institute in the Bronx principles enough to send our chil- leaving service, members of the arrogantly dismissing the Arab dren to schools that are not favored unit bring high-tech concepts to offensive during the Yom Kippur by college admissions boards? Or the private sector and contribute War. They were proved wrong. must we also, at huge expense, to the sustained high growth rate When I worked in the court build colleges tolerably friendly of Israel’s economy. system, I became the go-to contact to freedom, democracy, and Jews? None of the writers adequately for secular Jews who knew nothing And how, moreover, could we make discussed the increasing reluc- of religious matters. I was also the colleges stay that way? We failed tance of world leaders to respect one some bigoted Gentiles officers with Brandeis University. the success of Israeli Jews and and clerks asked: “Why are all Jews We’ve also failed with regard to what that might mean for the Communists?” ethnicity and identity. Jon D. Lev- future. Israeli success deserves There is no denying, howev- enson writes: “Evidence is mount- respect, when one considers that er, that liberalism is collectivism. ing . . . that throughout the West, the ancestors of many Israeli Jews And to this day, American Jews ethnicity and nationalism in gen- were spread around the world for are overwhelmingly liberal. They eral are now themselves in sharp 2,000 years as citizens of other na- turned out twice to vote for Barack decline.” This is not so. Every year tions, with no experience in build- Obama, and the rabbinate is afraid racial discord grows uglier, at least ing an economy and defending a to tell their congregations that be- in the United States. With ever nation of their own. It seems that ing a modern-day liberal or Demo- fewer exceptions, all interaction is Pentagon officials, alone among crat means adhering to a message monitored for compliance to eth- Western leaders, respect Israeli ac- on Israel that blends with rank nic preferences. Punishments for complishments. anti-Semitism. The 2012 Demo- deviations get more extreme, and In thinking about Jewish life cratic convention, with its platform protections for the accused are and Israel 50 years from now, I am amendment on Jerusalem, made eroding. reminded of something said by Jo- that much clear. Speaking of extreme punish- sef Goell, a writer with the Jerusa- Given that American Jews are so ment, Morton A. Klein writes that lem Post: “One thing sure about the liberal (and considering the rising “in the wake of radical Islamic ter- Middle East is its unpredictability.” intermarriage rate and dropping rorists’ brutality toward Christians That also likely applies to Jewish birthrate), there is little reason to and others, Christians and others

8 Letters : February 2016

Letters.indd 8 1/14/16 1:48 PM will increasingly see Israel as their is still overwhelmingly committed which rightly criticized Ameri- only true friend in the Middle East.” to Jewish insularity.” I have no can Jews for aiming “to escape He adds: “The Jewish people—and disagreements with Mr. Prager on anti-Semitism by helping to create the world—will have also real- this. He gets to the central problem a nation where religion played ized that appeasement of radical we face. a less and less important role.” Islamic terrorists only encourages J. Aaronson Citing Seymour Siegel’s visionary more terror.” Similarly, Ruth R. Address Withheld teachings, he warned that block- Wisse writes: “Sobered finally by ing public recognition of religion the expansion of anti-Jewish hate 1 would result in the weakening of propaganda, terrorism, and cyber- Judaism. Abrams counseled that warfare, and Iran’s intention of To the Editor: American Jews are doomed unless making Israel a “one-bomb state,” OST OF the offerings to your “they still believe they are above all Jews [will have] realized that God Msymposium on the “Jewish else members of a religious com- protects only those who do it them- future” are either from a “through munity.” He felt that they should selves.” Why, I ask, aren’t Jews, the looking glass” or a “rear- engage in study, ritual practice, Christians, and others sober now? view mirror” perspective. There and synagogue attendance if for no And if they can’t see the truth now, are many shades of Lewis Carroll other reason than to preserve an why will they see it after 50 more in the discussion both of American openness to religion which is good years of the same experiment? Can Conservative Judaism and conser- for society in general and Jewish we only hope, or can we help open vative American-Jewish politics. life in particular. What, then, are people’s eyes? Both those who support Ameri- we to make of Abrams’s curt ref- Perhaps we could start with the can Conservative synagogues and erence to Judaism “in whatever eyes of William Kristol. He writes those who oppose them (some- form” in the symposium? about the coming of “democratic times the same people) envision William Kristol prophesies a China and India as key [American] total decline of American Juda- crisis for “rabbinic and prophetic allies in maintaining a world order ism except for Orthodoxy. Jack Judaism” but predicts that “thanks that is friendly to liberty. “ Israel, he Wertheimer, a Jewish Theological to a renaissance of several older Ju- claims, will “enjoy strong regional Seminary faculty member, foresees daic traditions—biblical Judaism, allies in liberal democratic Iran “the descendants of Conservative historical and Zionist Judaism, and Egypt.” Mr. Kristol’s confidence and Reform Jews, who will fash- and philosophic Judaism among that any nation can become a lib- ion eclectic Jewish identities.” Yet them—what will be called ‘New eral democracy in 50 years, and David Wolpe, a Conservative rabbi, Judaism’ will be a vibrant and that our most despotic enemies will chirps with confidence that “the compelling force in the civilized do so, is extraordinary. But since he faithful of Lakewood, New Jersey, world.” But not among Jews? This mentions it, notice how few people are educating the next genera- is like predicting that the Constitu- now profess that all states should tion’s conservative Jews, after all.” tion and the Bill of Rights will have be liberal democracies. At one The strategy should be to combat expired, but that the Federalist Pa- time, nearly all Americans agreed the worst-case scenario, in which pers, American history, American that government is illegitimate lapsed Haredim become what so- patriotic literature, and American without consent of the governed. ciologists now call the “nones,” political philosophy will then be Many Americans today, especially those who no longer identify with universally and eagerly studied. bureaucrats and students, doubt religion at all. Do the “through the looking that even America should be a lib- I look to political conservatism glass” contortions of the Abrams eral democracy. as a necessary curative for our and Kristol statements confirm Last, I was struck by Dennis politically correct society, so I see Jon Levenson’s concern about Prager’s big-picture assessment: no harm in the realization of Mor- “Jewish conservatives who hold “The purpose of the Chosen People ton A. Klein’s forecast that Jewish an instrumental view of religion, is to bring the world to the God of conservatives will in time equal treating it as useful to their causes the Torah, more specifically, the the numbers of Jewish liberals. and avoiding the nettlesome ques- God of the Ten Commandments. But I am disappointed with what tions of theological meaning and Unless we do, the future is bleak. our Jewish conservatives do with personal practice”? Fortunately, But who will do this? The only vi- Judaism. In 1997, Elliott Abrams the symposium included some en- brant Jewish group, the Orthodox, published a book, Faith or Fear, gaging “rabbinic Judaism” homi-

Commentary 9

Letters.indd 9 1/14/16 1:48 PM lies, especially those of Jacob J. chants for old-fashioned optimism and comforting when he warned Schachter and Motti Seligson. and pessimism. More than one that demographically speaking, Then there is the “rear view mir- respondent branded the Haredim Judaism could lose its world-reli- ror” approach. Reading Yossi Klein as “Amish.” Is that a helpful way to gion status and remain, at best, a Halevi’s assertion that Jewish re- refer to a vital Jewish community regional or First World religion but ligious institutions will be centers and culture? Joshua Muravchik that, whatever we contemporary for spiritual growth, focusing on refreshingly provides a vision re- Jews allow or don’t allow, “the fear the refinement of one’s personality spectful of the role of Haredim that Judaism might not survive and traits, with special emphasis in Israeli life and Jewish life in will help ensure that it does.” on Jewish meditation techniques, general. One respondent blames The Talmud states that only I wonder whether he really wants “defunct American heterodox Moses among the Prophets beheld to perpetuate the stylized spiritual movements” for “roiling” things the divine through an illuminated, drills of our era. in Israel, much as the Palestinians rather than a dim aspaklaria, While it is not clear whether or blame Israel for Arab internecine which can mean “glass,” “mirror,” not Lynn Schusterman is interest- fighting. or “window pane.” According to ed in preserving classical Jewish Inspiring pieces by Joseph I. the sages, this illuminated glass observance, it does seem that she Lieberman, Dan Senor, and Avi revealed the fewest specifics about sidesteps traditional Jewish vo- Weiss were all distinguished by the divine reality and about Torah cabulary, preferring New Age con- pluralistic visions presented with and Israel. The ancient Rabbis cepts. She predicts that “conscious strong convictions. Haskel Look- prodded us forward by urging that Jews will vastly outnumber strict stein’s historical perspective, be- we seek out God, Torah, and our adherents of religious Judaism.” ginning with Commentary’s past, fellow Jews through window, mir- Will private foundations bypass was most heartening, as was Na- ror, and prism alike, with the kind classic Jewish beliefs, practices, tan Sharansky’s visionary and elo- of work that Elliott Abrams urged and vocabularies by glorifying New quent charge to the State of Israel in his book, if not in November’s Age catchwords in their “Jewish to demonstrate the importance Commentary. continuity” stereopticons? and potential of nation-states. Jon- Rabbi Elliot B. Gertel And then there are the pen- athan Sarna was both motivating Chicago, Illinois

10 Letters : February 2016

Letters.indd 10 1/14/16 1:48 PM I S A N E W R E P U B L I C A N F O R E I G N P O L I C Y EMERGING? BY MAX BOOT

VER SINCE THE END of the Cold Paul emerged as the standard-bearer for this new GOP War, pundits and self-styled sages isolationism with a grassroots presidential campaign have predicted that isolationism that raised an astonishing $38 million from small do- would emerge as a potent force in nors. After 2012, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky took the Republican Party. Those expec- the baton from his father, and in October 2014, Time tations were heightened after the put Rand on its cover with the question: “Can he fix early disasters of the Iraq War, which what ails the GOP?” Little more than a year later, we gave rise to a powerful anti-inter- know the answer is no. Whatever ailments the Repub- ventionist tide that swept Barack lican Party may have, Rand Paul isn’t going to fix them. Obama into the White House. In His 2016 presidential bid never reached takeoff speed. 2012, the Texas congressman Ron What happened? ISIS happened. Having seized

Max Boot, a regular contributor to Commentary, is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and author, most recently, of Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guer- E rilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present Day. He is advising, without pay, the campaign of Marco Rubio. Commentary 11

BOOT_FINAL.indd 11 1/14/16 2:12 PM the Iraqi city of Mosul and having proclaimed itself bate that “I’m the only person up here that fought a caliphate, the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq began against going into Iraq,” there is no record that he beheading American hostages on television in the opposed the Iraq War when it started any more than summer of 2014. The public immediately forgot that Cruz did. But Trump did eventually become a vitriolic it was supposed to be war-weary and began calling for critic. In 2007, while President Bush was implement- a vigorous response. Even President Obama, who had ing the troop surge that changed the course of the staked his presidency on pulling back from the Middle conflict, Trump said, “The war is a total disaster, it’s a East, was forced to begin bombing ISIS and to send catastrophe, nothing less.” He advocated getting out American troops back to Iraq to train security forces immediately: “How do you get out? You know how you that would fight the terrorist group. get out?” he told Wolf Blitzer on CNN. “Declare victory But while the rise of ISIS put paid to Rand Paul’s and leave.” But Trump, like Cruz, has made quite clear stand on behalf of what he calls “non-interventionism,” that, in spite of his opposition to the Iraq War, he is no it has not compelled the party’s other presidential can- pacifist: “I’m a very militaristic person, but you have didates to coalesce around the foreign-policy ideals to know when to use the military,” he said in another that have characterized the GOP since the rise of Ron- GOP debate. ald Reagan—the full-throated assertion of America’s To assert his “militaristic” credentials (Trump role as a champion of freedom and democracy, a pillar must be one of the few people on earth who thinks of military strength, and the leader of the Free World. that “militaristic” is a positive word), the billionaire Indeed, if one measures by the polls taken candidate has been vying with Cruz to see which man through early January, the two leading Republican can issue the most blood-curdling threats against presidential candidates—Donald Trump and Ted ISIS. Echoing the late General Curtis LeMay, Cruz has Cruz—have been carving out for themselves a radically vowed to bomb ISIS “back into the Stone Age” and to different foreign-policy niche. Now, Trump and Cruz “carpet-bomb them into oblivion.” He has even hinted do not agree on everything. But for the most part they that he would nuke ISIS: “I don’t know if sand can have been in sync, if for no other reason than Cruz’s de- glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out.” When termination to woo Trump’s voters if and when Trump challenged to explain how “carpet-bombing” would be himself fades from the scene. It is therefore possible to either humane or effective, since most of those killed detect the outlines of what might be called a Trump- would be ISIS’s victims, Cruz backpedalled. In a De- Cruz foreign policy. Cruz has outlined the more intel- cember 15 debate, he compared his plan to the bomb- lectual and nuanced version of this approach, while ing of Iraqi forces in the Gulf War: “The object isn’t to Trump has been more emotive and extreme. level a city. The object is to kill the ISIS terrorists.” If It is something new—and something very old. that’s the case, then he actually favors precise airpow- One central element of both campaigns is an er of the kind every president has employed since the opposition to nation-building or democracy promo- early 1990s, not “carpet-bombing.” This highlights a tion in favor of using force quickly, antiseptically, and certain slipperiness in Cruz’s rhetoric, which tends to decisively. shift with the popular sentiment and comes with more It is not clear how long the two men have es- caveats than Trump’s blunter pronouncements. poused this view. In 2004, when Cruz was solicitor gen- Cruz has not, at least until recently, advocated eral of Texas, he proclaimed his support for George W. sending any U.S. troops to fight ISIS. Instead he has Bush’s reelection campaign: “President Bush is proud called for arming the Kurds in Iraq as America’s proxy to defend America, to stand up for her values, and to army, even though the Kurds are already receiving confront enemies wherever they may lurk.” But by weapons and are the first to admit they cannot evict 2012, when he was running for a Senate seat in Texas, ISIS from Arab areas. “I don’t believe in sending boots Cruz was already saying of Iraq and Afghanistan: “It on the ground,” Cruz said on November 18. More re- made sense to go in, and we stayed there too long.” In cently, in a December 10, 2015, speech at the Heritage a June 2012 debate, Cruz voiced his opposition to “na- Foundation, Cruz showed a little more openness to the tion-building” and to America acting as “the world’s possibility of using “whatever ground troops are neces- policeman.” The job of the U.S. military, he argued, sary to kill the terrorists and then come home.” But he is to “hunt down and kill our enemies, not to build still makes clear that he wants to avoid any long-term democratic utopias around the world.” When we have deployment. succeeded in hunting and killing, “we should get the For his part, Trump has refused to rule out heck out.” the use of nuclear weapons against ISIS. Although As for Trump, in spite of his claim at a 2015 de- opposed to the use of ground troops—he criticized

12 Is a New Republican Foreign Policy Emerging? : February 2016

BOOT_FINAL.indd 12 1/14/16 2:12 PM Obama’s deployment of 50 Special Operations Forces vember: “Well, I’m not looking to [create a] quag- to Syria, saying “now those troops have a target on mire. I’m looking to take the oil. The Middle East is their head”—Trump also promises to inflict devasta- one big, fat quagmire. If you look at the Soviet Union, tion: “We will be defeating ISIS big league,” he said in it used to be the Soviet Union. They essentially went December. As part of his “big league” strategy, Trump bust and it became Russia, a much smaller version, has embraced the torture of terrorist suspects even if it because of Afghanistan. They spent all their money. doesn’t elicit any information (“they deserve it anyway Now they’re going into Syria. I’m all for Russia going for what they do to us”) and the killing of terrorists’ in and knocking and dropping bombs on ISIS. As far families even if it violates international law (“I would as I’m concerned, we don’t have to have exclusivity be very, very firm with families”). on that.” Like Cruz, Trump wants to rely primarily on air- Trump has also advocated supporting the dicta- power. His contribution is to focus on ISIS’s oil fields: tor Bashar al-Assad as the lesser evil in Syria: “I don’t

TRUMP HAS DENOUNCED NATION-BUILDING, WHICH HE, LIKE BARACK OBAMA, SEES AS A WASTE OF RESOURCES THAT WOULD BE BETTER SPENT AT HOME.

“I would bomb the hell out of those oil fields. I wouldn’t like Assad. Who’s going to like Assad? But, we have no send many troops because you won’t need them by the idea who these people [are], and what they’re going to time I’m finished.” In a policy gambit that Cruz wisely be, and what they’re going to represent. They may be has refused to join, Trump has promised to “take the oil” far worse than Assad. Look at Libya. Look at Iraq.” from Iraq and give the proceeds to wounded veterans. Like Cruz, Trump has denounced nation-build- Unfortunately for Trump, oil fields cannot be lifted out ing, which he, like Barack Obama, sees as a waste of of the ground with a crane and shipped back to Amer- resources that would be better spent at home: “We’ve ica. Actually taking Iraq’s (or ISIS’s) oil would require spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people that stationing a large number of troops to occupy not only frankly, if they were there and we could’ve spent that the oil fields but also the oil transshipment routes out $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our of Iraq—something that Trump, as an opponent of pro- bridges, and all of the other problems, our airports and longed ground wars, presumably would oppose. all the other problems we’ve had, we would’ve been In addition to their affinity for employing mili- a lot better off. I can tell you that right now.” In other tary power at long range, Trump and Cruz share a words, as Obama so often says, “nation-building be- common distaste for getting involved in the compli- gins at home.” cated politics of the Middle East. Trump has made Cruz has spoken in virtually identical terms. “In clear that he has no objection to letting Russia take my view, we have no dog in the fight of the Syrian civil the lead in Syria—and this was before Putin praised war,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg. “If the him, which then led Trump to praise the Russian dic- Obama administration and the Washington neocons tator in return and to defend him from the charge succeed in toppling Assad, Syria will be handed over to that he had murdered reporters. Trump said in No- radical Islamic terrorists. ISIS will rule Syria.” This, of

Commentary 13

BOOT_FINAL.indd 13 1/14/16 2:12 PM course, ignores considerable evidence that Assad has men said the ban would apply to U.S. citizens who were not only been complicit in the rise of ISIS (he spon- Muslims but later said it wouldn’t.) sored its predecessor, al-Qaeda in Iraq, when it was Cruz has not gone that far. Indeed, he differs attacking U.S. forces in Iraq) but that he has also col- with Trump in one major respect. Cruz has argued for luded in its survival by buying oil from ISIS, providing reigning in government surveillance on civil-liberties it with electricity, and refraining from attacking it. As grounds. In 2013, just before the rise of ISIS, he sup- long as Assad remains in power, ISIS will have a con- ported Rand Paul’s filibusters against the National stituency among the country’s alienated Sunnis. Security Agency’s metadata program (which allowed Cruz has also spoken nostalgically of the de- NSA to monitor phone numbers dialed, not the con- posed and dead autocrats of the region—Egypt’s Hos- tent of conversations) and against the use of drones to ni Mubarak, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, and Iraq’s kill U.S. citizens such as terrorist mastermind Anwar Saddam Hussein. The Middle East, he suggests, was al-Awlaki. While being careful to say that he does not better off with those dictators in power. “I under- agree 100 percent with Paul, Cruz publicly thanked stand this flies in the face of conventional wisdom the Kentucky senator for his “passionate defense of that holds that America must always promote de- liberty.” mocracy at all costs,” Cruz said in a Heritage Founda- Cruz was a leading supporter of the USA Free- tion speech, even though no one actually says that we dom Act, passed in June 2015, which ended the gov- must “always promote democracy at all costs.” Not ernment’s ability to keep a phone-records database. even the most perfervid democracy advocates sug- And, like Rand Paul, he continues to warn of the loom- gest overthrowing friendly dictators like the kings ing threat of Big Brother—“some on both the right and of Jordan or Saudi Arabia. But that didn’t stop Cruz the left,” he has warned, darkly, “want to exploit the from engaging in a hyperbolic attack on a carica- current crisis by calling on Americans to surrender tured “neocon” position that could have been lifted our constitutional liberties as the only way to ensure straight from the writings of Paul Krugman, Patrick our safety.” In the wake of the Paris and San Bernardi- J. Buchanan, and Glenn Greenwald. He has inveighed no attacks, however, Cruz took to arguing that the against “these crazy neocons” who supposedly want USA Freedom Act actually enhanced the government’s to “invade every country on earth and send our kids ability to monitor terrorist threats. This prompted a to die in the Middle East.” At the same time, in a scathing retort from Representative Mike Pompeo, head-spinning display of intellectual incoherence, a well-respected member of the House Intelligence Cruz has cited Jeane J. Kirkpatrick—a neocon if ever Committee who has endorsed Marco Rubio: “Those there was one—as one of his primary foreign-policy who today suggest that the USA FREEDOM Act, which inspirations. gutted the National Security Agency’s (NSA) metadata program, enables the intelligence community to bet- HILE ADVOCATING a minimal- ter prevent and investigate threats against the U.S. ist strategy in the Middle East— are lying.” bombing from afar, supporting Trump hasn’t engaged in similar efforts to mas- local dictators—Trump and Cruz sage his positions. He has never expressed any ethi- also share a commitment to a cal or legal qualms about taking “much tougher” and new kind of Fortress America. “much stronger” steps to fight terrorism. Trump led the way with his While he has not called for a ban on all Muslims promise to deport all 11 million undocumented im- entering the United States, Cruz has not been willing migrants W and to build an impregnable wall between to criticize Trump for his proposal, either, and he has the United States and Mexico that he would somehow joined in Trump’s call to build a wall along the south- get Mexico to pay for. He has also called for creating a ern border. Cruz has focused his ire not on Muslim visi- database of Muslims in the United States and for moni- tors in general but specifically on the supposed threat toring mosques. “We’re going to do things that were from Syrian refugees: He has said the U.S. should ad- frankly unthinkable a year ago,” Trump promised. mit Christians but not Muslims. He also made a big He wasn’t kidding. In early December, after the San point of criticizing Obama for not labeling the enemy Bernardino terrorist attack, Trump came out with a as “radical Islamic terrorism,” allegedly for reasons of shocking and probably unconstitutional proposal for a “political correctness,” ignoring the fact that George W. “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the Bush, whom no one would ever accuse of being politi- United States until our country’s representatives can cally correct, was also reluctant to label the terrorist figure out what’s going on.” (Initially Trump’s spokes- enemy in such terms.

14 Is a New Republican Foreign Policy Emerging? : February 2016

BOOT_FINAL.indd 14 1/14/16 2:12 PM HAT DO THESE VIEWS add up exceed any charges issued against the NSA today. to? Cruz has claimed that his But however disruptive the views of Cruz and foreign policy is Reaganesque. Trump are, they are not unprecedented. In fact, they But on democracy promotion, are part of a long tradition in American history that government surveillance, free Walter Russell Mead has traced back to the Indian- trade, and other matters, he has fighting general and president Andrew Jackson. An taken stands directly at odds article Mead published in 1999 in the National Inter- with Reagan’s.* While Cruz argues in favor of backing est about “The Jacksonian Tradition” makes for fasci- Wdictators—even odious, anti-American dictators like nating reading for anyone seeking to understand the Assad—Reagan helped to ease out of power pro-Amer- Trump and Cruz campaigns. ican dictators in El Salvador, South Korea, Taiwan, and Mead notes that Jacksonianism is an “instinct the Philippines. Reagan was also an ardent free trader. rather than an ideology,” one that has historically

WHEN CHALLENGED TO EXPLAIN HOW ‘CARPET-BOMBING’ WOULD BE EITHER HUMANE OR EFFECTIVE, SINCE MOST OF THOSE KILLED WOULD BE ISIS’S VICTIMS, CRUZ BACKPEDALLED.

And while Cruz excoriates the National Security been “associated with white Protestant males of the Agency, many of its most expansive grants of authority lower and middle classes—today the least fashionable date back to a 1981 executive order signed by President element in the American political mix.” Jacksonians, Reagan. Reagan also defended the intelligence com- Mead writes, oppose “humanitarian interventions” or munity in the 1970s after revelations of abuses, such as interventions designed to promote democracy. Jackso- widespread wiretapping and letter-opening, that far nians only want to go to war when America is directly attacked, but then they want to fight all-out: “Indeed, * Trump and Cruz have come out against free trade. Trump has called the Trans-Pacific Partnership a “horrible deal” that “is go- of all the major currents in American society, Jacksoni- ing to lead to nothing but trouble.” He claims that the TPP will ans have the least regard for international law and in- allow “China to come in, as they always do, through the back ternational institutions.” The Jacksonian view of war- door and totally take advantage of everyone,” even though China is not a party to this treaty. Trump supports a 45 percent tariff fighting was embodied by Curtis LeMay, who said: “I’ll on all Chinese-manufactured goods. He also opposes the North tell you what war is about. You’ve got to kill people, and American Free Trade Agreement of 1993. While most econo- when you’ve killed enough, they stop fighting.” But, mists say NAFTA has succeeded in bolstering the economies of Canada, the U.S., and Mexico (thereby decreasing incentives for while willing to slaughter the enemy, Jacksonians are Mexicans to immigrate to the U.S.), Trump calls it a “disaster.” wary of enduring military commitments: They want He advocates “fair trade” (code words for protectionism) instead “to impose our will on the enemy with as few American of “free trade.” Indeed, Trump has emerged as the most forceful advocate of tariffs and trade barriers that the Republican Party casualties as possible,” and then bring our forces home. has seen in the post-1945 era. Cruz doesn’t go quite that far. Just Jacksonians are also “instinctively protectionist,” as on immigration, he accepts the basic tenets of Trumpism while Mead continues, and “skeptical, on both cultural and presenting himself as slightly more moderate and reasonable. Thus he claims to support free trade in theory while rejecting the economic grounds, of the benefits of immigration, which TPP, the biggest free-trade pact in the world. is seen as endangering the cohesion of the folk communi-

Commentary 15

BOOT_FINAL.indd 15 1/14/16 2:12 PM ty and introducing new, low-wage competition for jobs.” tionism until the attack on Pearl Harbor). And, even There is, according to Mead, one other impor- though as recently as 2013 he advocated legalizing un- tant part of the Jacksonian worldview: “The fear of a documented immigrants as part of a comprehensive ruthless, formidable enemy abroad who enjoys a pow- immigration reform, he has now vowed to oppose le- erful fifth column in the United States.” For a century, galization “today, tomorrow, forever,” echoing George Jacksonians saw “Papists” (i.e., Catholics) as that en- Wallace’s call for “segregation now, segregation tomor- emy. After 1945, it was Communism. Writing after the row, segregation forever!” Cruz partisans claim that end of the Cold War and before 9/11, Mead noted that these historical associations are unintended, but Cruz the Jacksonian “paranoid streak” lacked an outlet save is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law in opposition to “globalization.” But since the rise of School: It is hard to imagine he uses such evocative al-Qaeda and now ISIS, Jacksonians have found a new phrases without knowing what they evoke. group that they believe to be an “emissary of Satan on Cruz has also trafficked in the kind of crude es-

BOTH MEN HAVE TURNED THEIR BACKS ON DECADES OF REPUBLICAN FOREIGN POLICY, WHICH HAS BEEN INTERNATIONALIST, PRO-FREE TRADE, PRO-IMMIGRATION, PRO-DEMOCRACY, AND PRO-HUMAN RIGHTS.

earth”: radical Muslims or, sometimes, in their cruder tablishment-baiting that has always been a hallmark moments, all Muslims. of Jacksonians—without, it should be noted, the anti- While many Republican presidents have em- Semitism that has usually been an unsavory accom- bodied elements of the Jacksonian worldview—in par- paniment. (Cruz says he is a strong friend of Israel, al- ticular, the emphasis on fighting wars to win—none though this does not square with his support of Assad, has so comprehensively advocated this populist vision who is in league with Iran and Hezbollah.) Mead notes as have Cruz and Trump. Both men have turned their that Jacksonians believe that “corrupt movements and backs on decades of Republican foreign policy, which elites of the Old World” are “relentlessly plotting to de- has been internationalist, pro–free trade, pro-immi- stroy American liberty.” Their bogeymen, Mead contin- gration, pro-democracy, and pro–human rights. In- ues, include “the Trilateral Commission, the Council stead, they have embraced a Jacksonian weltanschau- on Foreign Relations, the Bilderbergers, the Bavarian ung that in the past has been championed by the likes Illuminati, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers.” As if on of Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, George Wallace, and Jesse cue, during his 2012 Senate campaign in Texas, Cruz Ventura. The followers of all these men, Mead wrote, denounced the Council on Foreign Relations (where wanted “a popular hero to restore government to its I work) as a “pernicious nest of snakes” that is “work- proper functions.” Both Ted Cruz and Donald Trump ing to undermine our sovereignty.” He did not mention look in the mirror and see just such a hero. that his wife, Heidi, was a term member of the Council. Cruz has been fairly explicit in identifying him- Donald Trump, billionaire scion of a New York self with these earlier Jacksonians. He has called for an real-estate dynasty, makes an even more unlikely tri- “America First” foreign policy, echoing the demands of bune of the people than Ted Cruz, the Ivy League–edu- the America First Committee (which advocated isola- cated former Supreme Court clerk who is married to

16 Is a New Republican Foreign Policy Emerging? : February 2016

BOOT_FINAL.indd 16 1/14/16 2:12 PM a Goldman Sachs managing director. Their shrillness, ing ISIS precisely what it wants by alienating Muslims one suspects, is in direct proportion to their fears that from non-Muslims and creating a sense of aggrieve- their populism might otherwise be judged inauthentic. ment of the kind that has already driven a small but significant minority of European Muslims to embrace HIS, THEN, IS THE CHOICE confront- radicalism. It is no surprise to learn that al-Shabaab, ing Republican primary voters in 2016: the Islamist insurgency in Somalia, has been using im- Whether to continue the traditional, ages of Trump in its recruitment videos. Other terrorist Reaganesque foreign policy that has groups are likely to follow suit. been championed by every Republican If the Republican Party were to embrace Jackso- presidential nominee for decades or to nianism as its governing creed, it would be calling into opt for a Jacksonian outlook that is as question the internationalist credentials that it labori- crude and ugly as it is beguiling. ously reestablished after World War II—and that made TCruz and Trump claim they can project power, possible its return to respectability after the dismal keep America safe, and destroy our enemies without decade of the 1930s. It is neither wise nor effective to putting troops into harm’s way or getting embroiled in try to withdraw behind our homeland defenses while long, costly occupations or nation-building exercises. intermittently and violently lashing out at enemies They argue that they can defeat our foes simply by kill- abroad. As we have learned repeatedly, no defense is ing lots of people, without worrying about setting up perfect, and long-range bombing by itself cannot keep more stable governments that will ultimately become us safe. Jacksonianism was bad enough in the 19th American allies. century; it is all the more irresponsible in the 21st cen- If only all this were true. But long experience tury, when the oceans provide scant protection and de- shows that America has been most successful in velopments half a world away can affect communities achieving its objectives in precisely those places—such as small as San Bernardino and as large as New York. as Germany, Japan, Italy, South Korea, Bosnia, and The Republican Party would be wiser to stick Kosovo—where it has kept troops for decades and fos- with the foreign policy that has worked since 1945, tered new regimes to replace the old. Occasionally, as and that is advocated by all of its leading presidential in Grenada or Panama, the U.S. can achieve its objec- candidates except Trump and Cruz. This means pro- tives and pull out. But in numerous other instances, viding American leadership to the world, maintaining such as Haiti, Somalia, Lebanon, and Iraq, an overly our military strength, policing the global commons hasty pullout has sacrificed whatever gains U.S. troops (seas, skies, space, cyberspace), engaging in both short have sought to achieve. Airpower, the favorite tool of and long-term interventions if necessary, promoting both Cruz and Trump, has never been decisive on its free trade, spreading democracy, championing hu- own, especially not against an insurgent foe such as man rights, defending our allies, and subverting our the Vietcong or ISIS that lacks significant infrastruc- enemies. America must continue to play an active role ture to defend. In counterinsurgencies such as Viet- in shaping the international system in ways conducive nam or Iraq, the indiscriminate use of firepower ac- to both our interests and our ideals. It must remain tually backfires by killing lots of innocent people and a beacon of hope for the world, rather than become thus creating more enemies than it eliminates. a grim, foreboding fortress. If the United States ab- The Trump/Cruz tendency to demonize Muslims dicates its international responsibilities, it will pay a as “the enemy within” is also dangerous: It risks giv- heavy price in lost prosperity and security.q

Commentary 17

BOOT_FINAL.indd 17 1/14/16 4:51 PM Bob Woodward’s Sins of Omission His new book raises fresh questions about the role of America’s most famous journalist in the scandal that made his name By James Rosen

T 73, BOB WOODWARD—the would give him an opportunity to come clean about the Pulitzer Prize–winning sleuth of less than savory parts of that story, which have attracted Watergate legend and America’s growing attention from Woodward’s peers in journal- premier nonfiction author, with ism and the more dispassionate precincts of academia. 17 bestsellers to his name—is The Last of the President’s Men* attempts, trans- nearing the end of one of the parently, to cement Woodward’s special status in most celebrated careers of the American journalism and thereby makes for a curious media age. His latest book, The Last of the Presi- entry in his canon: one of the shortest, yet the most dent’sA Men, is his fifth about Watergate and in some scholarly, of his works, an important contribution to ways his best. Yet it also underscores the need for the literature of the Nixon era that is nonetheless fa- him to get cracking on the last Bob Woodward book tally flawed by the classic Woodward sins of omission our times still demand: a candid autobiography. and avoidance. In such a work, the famously slow-talking Mid- The book presents a profile of Alexander P. But- westerner could relate, with clarity unattainable from terfield, the White House staffer who oversaw the in- thousands of cagey TV interviews, the inside story of stallation and operation of President Nixon’s secret how this former naval intelligence officer achieved his taping system and who, in July 1973, disclosed the sys- unique stature in journalism and publishing. And it tem’s existence to Senate Watergate committee inves- tigators. In so doing, Butterfield was the cameo player James Rosen is chief Washington correspondent for who dealt the deathblow to the Nixon presidency. Fox News and the author, most recently, of Cheney One on One. * Simon & Schuster, 304 pp.

18 February 2016

ROSEN.indd 18 1/14/16 2:32 PM The book’s major revelation—the nugget on which the Washington Post and other media lavished the Woodward Treatment—concerns the Vietnam War and not Watergate.

Woodward and his researcher recorded 46 There is something wrong with the strategy or the hours of interviews with Butterfield between 2011 Air Force and 2015, the year he turned 89. They also mined an unpublished autobiography Butterfield had long tin- I want a barks off – study – no snow kered with and a small archive of documents he took job – on my desk in 2 weeks as to with him at the end of Nixon’s first term (when one of what the reason for the failure is. Butterfield’s duties was to compel other White House staffers to turn over their papers). Otherwise continued air operations The Butterfield Papers are rich with detail and Make no sense in Cambodia, Laos etc. after enable Woodward to make, at this late date, his most we complete withdrawal – substantive contribution to the history of the Nix- on presidency. This is evidenced in the fact that the Shake them up!! book’s major revelation—the juicy nugget on which the Washington Post and other media, during publica- This note is extraordinary: It shows a command- tion week, lavished The Woodward Treatment—con- er in chief who has already dropped 3 million tons of cerns the Vietnam War and not Watergate. Moreover, bombs on Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, and who the book includes 93 pages of source notes and appen- was destined within the next 12 months to drop an dices—rarities in Woodwardia!—reproducing three additional 1.1 million tons, acknowledging that these dozen letters and memoranda. Heavily annotated by operations were accomplishing “zilch,” and that they President Nixon, sometimes missing from official ar- represented “a failure” it made “no sense” to continue. chives, these are important documents. It is refresh- As Woodward notes, just the evening before he wrote ing to see Woodward using the written record to ad- these words, Nixon had conducted an hour-long pri- vance the story of the policies of the first Nixon term metime interview on CBS during which Dan Rather rather than selective snippets from interviews, con- had asked the president to assess “the benefits” of ducted in garages, to rehash the oddball obstructions extensive bombing of North Vietnam. “The results,” of justice that unraveled the second. Nixon said, “have been very, very effective.” Yet here again, as so often since 1972, Woodward Now, reasonable people can stipulate that the omits much about the context of his scoops, and his exigencies of war might justify a military command- own motivations in pursuing and publishing them. er, such as Nixon, lying to a reporter, such as Rather, about the efficacy of a given military campaign, par- HE CROWN JEWEL of Alex Butterfield’s ticularly if the commander was convinced the alter- archival treasures is a code-worded “TOP native would jeopardize American lives by somehow T SECRET-SENSITIVE” memorandum that na- minimizing the chances for ultimate success in the tional security adviser Henry Kissinger sent to Presi- conflict, undermining the morale of the rank and dent Nixon on January 3, 1972. The one-page memo file, or otherwise vitiating pressing national-security updated the commander in chief about the military objectives. Nixon may have been motivated by such situation in Laos and a North Vietnamese rocket at- considerations. As Woodward notes, “The ‘zilch’ con- tack on the U.S. air base at Da Nang, which wounded clusion had grown over three years. In what way and an American airman and damaged three Air Force when did Nixon realize this? History may never know. planes. What makes the document remarkable—aside Maybe Nixon never knew.” Woodward overstates from the fact that no copy exists at the Nixon presi- when he asserts the need for “a fresh examination of dential library—is Nixon’s scrawl, sideways up the the entire Vietnam record” in light of the “zilch” note, left-hand side, boldly across Kissinger’s typed font: but he is correct to ask: “What is to be said about a wartime leader who goes on with war knowing a key K – We have had 10 years of total control of the air part of the strategy is not working?” in Laos + V. Nam. The result = Zilch – What’s missing from Woodward’s account,

Commentary 19

ROSEN.indd 19 1/14/16 2:32 PM Even before Nixon was sworn in, Pentagon leaders had begun using their small liaison office to the National Security Council to spy on the White House.

however—as Woodward surely knows—is the context Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam of Nixon’s relationship with the Pentagon in Janu- (1997), H.L. McMaster chronicled in unsparing detail ary 1972. Critical here is Nixon’s underlined sugges- the machinations by which the wily Texan, “distrust- tion that what was “wrong” with our air operations ful of his military advisers,” patronized and circum- in Southeast Asia could be found either in the strat- vented the chiefs. egy “or the Air Force.” That sentiment of Nixon’s is “Uninterested in the chiefs’ advice, but unwilling reinforced by his closing demand, underlined twice, to risk their disaffection,” McMaster wrote, “Johnson seemingly more important to him than his order for a preserved a façade of consultation, concealed the fi- “no snow job” study, which was in any case never per- nality of his decisions on Vietnam policy and. . . got the formed: namely, to “shake them up!!” military advice he wanted.” By August 1967, the chiefs Why would a hawkish commander in chief teetered on mutiny. After congressional testimony by harbor such low esteem for the Pentagon’s top brass, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara on the efficacy such that he expected them to attempt a “snow job,” of U.S. air operations undercut the chiefs’ own, they and why would he order his national security advis- met, according to historian Deborah Shapley, “in com- er to “shake them up”? Such distrust was not new, plete secrecy, late into the night,” and agreed to resign either to Nixon or to his predecessors in the Viet- en masse. Only the withdrawal of the chairman, Army nam era. As George Lardner Jr. disclosed in a De- General Earle Wheeler, who suffered chest pains over- cember 1998 Washington Post article that reported night, caused the plot to collapse. on declassified Nixon tapes, the president had long Even before Nixon was sworn in, Pentagon lead- been wary of the chart-flipping presentations of ers fearful of continued exclusion from the policy- the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Thomas making process had begun using their small liaison Moorer. “I don’t want any more of this crap about office to the National Security Council, housed in the the fact that we couldn’t hit this target or that one!” Executive Office Building across from the West Wing, Nixon thundered in April 1971, two months after the to spy on the White House. Nixon’s defense secretary, taping system had been installed. “Goddamn it, the Melvin Laird, a longtime congressman with appro- military, they’re a bunch of greedy bastards! They priations oversight of the Pentagon, told me in a 1997 want more officers’ clubs and more men to shine interview that at the dawn of the Nixon administra- their shoes. The sons of bitches are not interested tion, he privately urged that the JSC-NSC liaison office in this country.” be shut down. “The Johnson administration had had In substantive and rhetorical terms, Nixon here such a problem there, and I knew about it,” Laird told sounded a lot like John F. Kennedy, another Navy vet- me. “I don’t think [LBJ-era defense secretaries] Clark eran whose view of the Pentagon deteriorated mark- Clifford or McNamara really realized it, but I knew edly over his tenure in the Oval Office. “Those sons of what they were doing. . . . So early on, I said, ‘You better bitches, with all the fruit salad, just sat there nodding, watch that very carefully.’” saying [the operation] would work,” JFK sneered on Laird’s prophecy came true. Nearly three years his own tapes after the Bay of Pigs. In late 1962, when later, on December 21, 1971—13 days before Nixon the Department of Defense slow-walked Kennedy’s scribbled the “zilch” note—his top aides convened for request for troops during the integration of the Uni- a rare nighttime session in the Oval Office. There the versity of Mississippi, the president snapped: “They commander in chief was informed of a stunning de- always give you their bullshit about their instant reac- velopment: Federal investigators had discovered that tion and split-second timing, but it never works out. the JCS-NSC liaison office had been spying on Nixon No wonder it’s so hard to win a war.” and Kissinger for 13 months. Navy Yeoman Charles Under Lyndon Johnson, this schism between Radford, a 27-year-old stenographer who traveled ex- the commander in chief and the uniformed leader- tensively with Kissinger overseas, including on the se- ship of the armed forces only worsened. In Derelic- cret flight to Pakistan that paved the way for Nixon’s tion of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the historic trip to China, had all the while been stealthily

20 Bob Woodward’s Sins of Omission : February 2016

ROSEN.indd 20 1/14/16 2:32 PM Why would Woodward omit mention of the monumental— and critically timed—rupture between the commander in chief and the Joint Chiefs of Staff?

rifling Kissinger’s briefcases, “burn bags,” and waste- ITH THAT BACKDROP, do we not attain a baskets. He then secretly—and illegally—routed an much better understanding of Nixon’s jaun- estimated 5,000 classified documents to the chairman W diced view of the efficacy of the Pentagon, of the Joint Chiefs, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral and the president’s demand, 13 days later, for a “shake Elmo Zumwalt, and other top officers. The uncover- up” of the Air Force? Why would Woodward omit men- ing of the Joint Chiefs spy ring was the one legitimate tion of the monumental rupture between the command- accomplishment of Nixon’s much-reviled Plumbers er in chief and the Joint Chiefs of Staff that erupted on group, which would eventually execute the Watergate the eve of the “zilch” note? Was the Washington Post ace, break-ins. when he wrote The Last of the President’s Men, somehow The “Moorer-Radford affair,” as scholars now unaware of the Moorer-Radford affair? Assuredly not. call it, was ultimately exposed by the press—though For decades now, brave historians have been questioning not by Woodward and Bernstein—in early 1974. Chief- Woodward’s strange avoidance of the subject matter. ly due to the wishes of Kissinger, who by that time was Most notable was the 1991 bestseller Silent Coup: secretary of state, only pro forma congressional hear- Removal of a President, co-authored by Len Colodny ings were held and the affair was allowed to recede and Robert Gettlin and denounced by Woodward and amid the larger bombshells of Watergate.* Bernstein as “trash.” Yet Silent Coup marshaled im- The importance of the affair is hard to overstate. portant new archival evidence of its own to advance a “This was Seven Days in May,” declared Defense De- number of claims about Woodward. The first was that partment investigator Donald Stewart, referring to one of his Watergate-era sources was General Alexan- the 1962 thriller about a military coup d’état in the der Haig, Kissinger’s NSC deputy. Silent Coup estab- United States. Nixon called the spying “a federal of- lished that Woodward had met Haig during the first fense of the highest order” and demanded Moorer be Nixon term, when Woodward served as a Navy intelli- tried for espionage. As the White House tapes make gence briefer to senior White House officials. A former clear, Attorney General John Mitchell calmly took Vietnam commander and Pentagon loyalist, Haig held control of the situation, advising against public dis- his own boss, Kissinger, in low regard and was deeply closure in any forum and prevailing upon Nixon to complicit in the JCS spying: It was Haig who hand- banish Yeoman Radford to a remote outpost and keep picked Yeoman Radford to travel with Kissinger. By Admiral Moorer where he was, perhaps weakened and the time Haig became Nixon’s chief of staff, succeed- more pliable. ing Haldeman as the Watergate scandal mushroomed As Nixon told an aide in May 1973: “Admiral in the spring of 1973, Haig worked tirelessly behind Moorer, I could have screwed him on that and been a the scenes to bury the Moorer-Radford affair and his big hero, you know. I could have screwed the whole Pen- own role in it. Silent Coup detailed how Haig had en- tagon about that damn thing. . . . Why didn’t I do it? Be- joyed the compliance of Woodward and Bernstein, cause I thought more of the services.” It was, indeed, to who knew of Moorer-Radford yet passed on it as a Nixon’s everlasting credit that he never made political news story. The clear implication was that Woodward hay of the Moorer-Radford affair—to this day a neglect- had protected Haig, a key source. ed chapter in American history, an unprecedented Cold All these years later, even with the “zilch” note in War constitutional crisis that no one has treated at book hand, Bob Woodward is still steering clear of Moorer- length—even when his political life depended on it. Radford. Such sins of omission do not detract from the historical importance of the “zilch” memo and the other archival discoveries in the appendices to Last of the Pres- * Not until October 2000 did I become the first researcher to obtain from the National Archives the tapes of the December 21 ident’s Men. But they do show that the author’s agenda evening session, as well as the tapes of all of Nixon’s follow-up remains suspect, or at least worthy of closer scrutiny meetings and telephone calls relating to the Moorer-Radford than is typically accorded by the Post and other media so affair. The contents of these tapes I published in a lengthy article for the Atlantic Monthly, entitled “Nixon and the Chiefs,” in April eager to give each new Woodward book The Woodward 2002. Treatment.

Commentary 21

ROSEN.indd 21 1/14/16 2:32 PM Researchers have growing doubts about the accuracy of Woodward’s reporting on Watergate, and particularly his account of his relationship with his Watergate source.

UCH SCRUTINY would begin with the simple tive editor who oversaw that coverage. question: Why did Bob Woodward choose now Rummaging through Bradlee’s papers for an S to seek out Alex Butterfield, who was nearing 90, authorized biography, Jeff Himmelman—himself a and write a book about him? trusted former researcher to Woodward—came across The fact is that Woodward’s journalistic repu- an unpublished 1990 interview in which Bradlee had tation has been under assault for some time, starting confided his misgivings about Woodward’s reliability. with the controversies surrounding his books about “Did that potted [plant] incident ever happen?” Bra- John Belushi (1985’s Wired) and Reagan-era CIA direc- dlee mused about the notion that Woodward moved a tor William Casey (1987’s Veil), and most thoroughly in flowerpot on his balcony to signal for meetings with Silent Coup. But the worst hits have come in just the Deep Throat. Likewise, about the purported rendez- last few years. vous in the garage, Bradlee wondered: “One meeting The sale of the Woodward-Bernstein papers to in the garage? Fifty meetings in the garage? I don’t the University of Texas in 2003, and the 2005 death know how many meetings [there were] in the garage.” of Mark Felt, the former FBI official whom Woodward He added: “There’s a residual fear in my soul that that has identified as Deep Throat, have led researchers to isn’t quite straight.” ever larger doubts about the accuracy of Woodward’s Nor did Himmelman’s archival discoveries reporting on Watergate, and particularly his account stop there. He also found contemporaneous notes of his relationship with his much-heralded, and often showing that contrary to four decades of flat denials inaccurate, Watergate source. on the point by Woodward and Bernstein, the latter The first domino to fall was Woodward’s conten- had indeed approached and interviewed a Watergate tion that Deep Throat was Felt and Felt only, and not grand juror—a violation of law—and had deliberately a composite character based on numerous sources. misled the readers of All the President’s Men to portray The journalist Ed Gray demolished this myth when the grand juror as an employee of the Nixon reelection he completed In Nixon’s Web (2008), the posthumous campaign. Indeed, Himmelman exposed half a dozen memoir of his father, L. Patrick Gray III, the acting FBI lies, evasions, deceptions, misrepresentations, and director during Watergate. In this the Grays benefited other journalistic sleights of hand on a single page of from access not only to Woodward’s notes and papers All of the President’s Men. at the University of Texas but also from Pat Gray’s own The final product was Yours in Truth: A Personal FBI archive (45 boxes’ worth). In Nixon’s Web exposed Portrait of Ben Bradlee (2012). Were it up to Wood- how Woodward’s reporting attributed information ward, the book’s explosive contents would have been to Deep Throat that Mark Felt simply could not have suppressed. Writing in New York magazine, Himmel- known in November 1973, at the time of their last (al- man recorded how Woodward sought to intimidate leged) meeting in a garage in Rosslyn, Virginia. The his former protégé: book also showed that Woodward’s Deep Throat file included notes from an interview he had conducted I had worked for [Woodward]; he had given an im- not with Mark Felt but with another source at the promptu toast at my wedding. You know me and the time, whom the Grays confirmed to be Justice Depart- world we live in, he said. People who didn’t like him ment official Don Santarelli. Pressed on such matters, and didn’t like the Post—the “fuckers out there,” as Woodward dismissed them as “technical, wiring-dia- Ben had called them—were going to seize on these gram issues.” comments. “Don’t give fodder to the fuckers,” Bob More recently, we have learned that among said, and once he lit on this phrase he repeated it a those harboring deep skepticism about Woodward’s couple of times. The quotes from [Bradlee’s 1990] account of Deep Throat—so critical to the Washington interview...were nothing more than outtakes from Post’s coverage of Watergate, and to the Woodward Ben’s book, he said. Ben hadn’t used them, and so I legacy—was the man to whose memory The Last of the shouldn’t use them, either. President’s Men is dedicated: Ben Bradlee, the execu- That argument didn’t make sense, and I said

22 Bob Woodward’s Sins of Omission : February 2016

ROSEN.indd 22 1/14/16 2:32 PM Geoff Shepard laid bare the contortions that were required for Sirica to overlook Woodward and Bernstein’s brazen interference with the grand-jury process.

so. Bob told me it was his “strong recommendation” a handsome new Watergate book, its title echoing that I not use the quotes, then that it was his “em- his greatest triumph, the text delivering the nug- phatic recommendation.” Then, when that got no gets we’ve grown accustomed to expect from Official truck: “Don’t use the quotes, Jeff.” Woodward Product? Nixon doubted the efficacy of U.S. bombing in Vietnam! Nixon clumsily patted a secre- Finally, earlier this year, former Nixon White tary’s leg! Crank up the machine—Woodward’s back House staff lawyer Geoff Shepard, in his groundbreak- on Watergate! ing book The Real Watergate Scandal, chronicled the What the author does not do is engage the grow- secret and highly improper ex parte meetings be- ing controversy surrounding his conduct and moti- tween John J. Sirica, the presiding judge in both major vations in his Watergate-era reporting. The bright, Watergate trials, and various relevant parties, most shining object here, meant to distract, is Butterfield, notably the Watergate prosecutors. Drawing on hun- treated until now as a bit player in Watergate but de- dreds of pages of previously unpublished documents, picted this time as a major figure of the Nixon presi- Shepard laid bare the contortions that were required dency. It is true that as Haldeman’s deputy, controlling for Sirica to overlook Woodward and Bernstein’s bra- the flow of men and memoranda into the Oval Office, zen interference with the grand-jury process. Butterfield might have seen more of the president than These were largely performed in still more ex any other staff aide. But was he ever really one of “the parte meetings with Edward Bennett Williams, the president’s men”? fixer who just happened to serve simultaneously as Again Woodward omits much. As Butterfield the lawyer for the Democratic National Committee himself recently told the Post, Woodward is “sort of (burgled and wiretapped in the Watergate operation), the master of being vague. . . . He can be vague more the lawyer for the Washington Post (chief chronicler of smoothly than anyone!” Presumably those who point Watergate and prime offender in violating the integ- such things out, as here, will be dismissed as members rity of the Watergate grand jury), and as godfather to of the malevolent tribe of “fuckers” to whom no cre- Sirica’s daughter. Really, could a cozier situation, more dence is ever to be accorded. thoroughly marinated in collusion, be dreamed up? Had a judge of integrity presided over the Wa- ORN IN 1926 to a Navy family in Pensacola, tergate trials, or had the actions of Woodward and Butterfield attended UCLA and there be- Bernstein been exposed in real time, or something like B friended H.R. (“Bob”) Haldeman, later the it, the two reporters, at a minimum, would have been all-powerful chief of staff in the Nixon White House. hauled before the grand jury themselves, and the in- While their sorority-sister wives kept in touch, But- dictments of several Nixon aides challenged credibly terfield and Haldeman lost contact for over 20 years, on due-process grounds. At worst, the famous scribes until November 1968, when Richard Nixon was elected would have found themselves, along with all the presi- president. Butterfield, an Air Force colonel, was the dent’s men, criminally charged. top U.S. military officer in Australia. Early on in these To these revelations of the last decade, so dam- pages, Woodward covers in detail the unsolicited letter aging to the Woodward-Bernstein legacy, The Last of Butterfield sent his old acquaintance after the elec- the President’s Men represents the closest thing to tion, seeking employment in the new administration. a substantive response from Woodward that we are But the author relegates to a footnote on the second- likely to get: an exercise in misdirection. The author’s to-last page of his main text, and even there leaves power in American media ensures that whenever he unexplored, the strange circumstances surrounding publishes, on any subject, Thinking America will sit that letter. up and pay attention, and when he publishes on Wa- When Butterfield appeared before the House tergate, the effect is doubly resonant. So who will fo- Judiciary Committee in July 1974, a year after he had cus on the slow and steady erosion of Bob Woodward’s exposed the existence of the taping system to Senate Watergate brand when the legend has just produced investigators, he testified that it had been Haldeman

Commentary 23

ROSEN.indd 23 1/14/16 4:54 PM If Butterfield is important enough to focus on at book length, wouldn’t his lies about inserting himself into the inner orbit of the president warrant the author’s attention?

who had reached out to him with an out-of-the-blue Butterfield observed a restriction placed by Nixon telephone call to Australia. Butterfield also testified himself: Don’t use the military (no surprise there). So that Haldeman had insisted, as a hiring condition, Butterfield turned to the Secret Service, whose techni- that Butterfield resign from the Air Force. Both claims cal division agents placed all the microphones in the were false. It was Butterfield’s letter that came out of Oval Office and Nixon’s other taping locations; hooked the blue, and Haldeman told his old acquaintance he the microphones up to state-of-the-art voice-activated could keep his military commission and be “detailed” recorders; wired the system to a blinking-light tracker to the White House, a common practice. It had been for the president, which notified agents whenever Nix- Butterfield who insisted on resigning from the Air on moved from room to room; changed each reel-to- Force. Butterfield’s lies went unchallenged until 1978, reel tape as it filled up with recorded material; hastily when Haldeman—by then serving a prison sentence labeled the tapes; and kept them in a West Wing of- for his convictions in the Watergate cover-up case— fice. The system operated in this way until Butterfield published his memoir, The Ends of Power. “It didn’t spilled the beans to the Senate Watergate committee. make sense to me,” Haldeman wrote. “Why does he In Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and distort the facts now unless he has something to hide?” the CIA (1984), Jim Hougan reported the previously Readers imagining Woodward would get to the unpublished account of William McMahon, a CIA bottom of this mystery, somewhere in his 46 hours of technician who was detailed to the Secret Service unit taped interviews with Butterfield, will be disappoint- that managed the taping system. According to McMa- ed. In the footnote, Woodward says Butterfield “omit- hon, the agency was aggressively “lending” techni- ted” from his testimony the fact that he had contacted cians to the unit, which was already fully staffed. “I Haldeman first. But that is false. Butterfield didn’t don’t know what they were up to,” McMahon said, “but “omit” his initiation of contact with Haldeman; he lied the fact of the matter is you had these guys from [the and claimed Haldeman had been the initiator: “I was CIA’s] Office of Security working in the White House surprised to receive the phone call,” Butterfield had under Secret Service cover.” As Hougan noted, this testified, with a flourish. situation “amounted to the calculated infiltration of “Butterfield told me that he had asked Halde- a uniquely sensitive Secret Service unit: the staff re- man to omit that part of the story,” Woodward writes sponsible for maintaining and servicing the presiden- here. So why, exactly, did Butterfield seek Haldeman’s tial taping system.” Indeed, the CIA’s inspector general collusion in a lie? Woodward offers no elaboration. If reported in 1975, after Nixon had resigned, that CIA Butterfield is important enough to focus on at book agents had been placed in “intimate components of the length, wouldn’t the lies he has told about how he in- Office of the President.” serted himself at the last minute into the inner orbit of Could Butterfield have been one of them? The the president warrant the author’s attention? years preceding his successful approach to Haldeman Haldeman had his own ideas. “Was the White hadn’t seen Butterfield toiling exclusively in the obscu- House filled with plants from other agencies, most rity of Australia. In the Air Force, Butterfield spent two particularly the CIA?” he asked in Ends of Power. “The years as an intelligence officer in Vietnam, command- overwhelming evidence is that it was. But was Butter- ing all low- and medium-level reconnaissance flights. field one of them? It’s hard for me to believe it—but the “We were really intelligence collectors in every sense ‘facts’ in the story he constantly gives the press discon- of the word,” Butterfield would say of this period, in an cert me.” Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s longtime secre- hour-long interview with me in October 1994. He add- tary, also harbored suspicions about Butterfield, origi- ed: “I ran another program I can’t talk about. I ran one nating with the way he vaulted himself into one of element, or one facet, of a program…in the Far East, the most sensitive positions around the man she had which was a CIA program.” By late 1964, Butterfield served for two decades and ending with the betrayal of was detailed to the policy directorate of war plans in Nixon’s most explosive secret: that he taped himself. the Office of the Secretary of Defense. There his duties In installing the taping system in February 1971, included counterinsurgency planning and manage-

24 Bob Woodward’s Sins of Omission : February 2016

ROSEN.indd 24 1/14/16 2:32 PM The Washington Post’s leading Watergate reporter was recommending personnel and witnesses to the investigative staff of the Senate Watergate committee.

ment of the program that resettled Cuban veterans of late Fred Thompson, who served as the Watergate the Bay of Pigs invasion. This latter project Butterfield committee’s minority counsel two decades before inherited from his new colleague at the Pentagon: Lt. he was elected senator from Tennessee, wrote in his Col. Alexander Haig. Watergate memoir, At That Point in Time (1975), that Butterfield told the authors of Silent Coup, in he “more than once . . . accused Armstrong of being four hours of taped interviews, that he performed “a Woodward’s source” for committee leaks to the Post. lot of undercover stuff” at the Pentagon—during a pe- In later years, Armstrong acknowledged that he “was riod when he was spending, by his own account, 20 designated as Woodward’s point of contact on the hours a week “minimum” at the Johnson White House committee.” One of Armstrong’s fellow Senate inves- and “was like a fly on the wall in all these meetings up tigators, James Hamilton, later recalled, “Woodward in the president’s bedroom at one a.m.” When he left was of the opinion” that the panel needed to call Alex- the Pentagon in 1967, assigned to Canberra as the se- ander Butterfield as a witness. Nowhere does the au- nior U.S. military officer in Australia, Butterfield again thor pause to ponder the ethical considerations that enjoyed frequent dealings with the CIA as the Defense arise when the Washington Post’s leading Watergate Department liaison to the agency in-country. “I was reporter is recommending personnel and witnesses the point of contact, the principal point of contact, for to the investigative staff of the Senate Watergate com- the CIA,” Butterfield told me. mittee. What did that mean, exactly? “Well, I can’t tell That Scott Armstrong should subsequently you any more than that. . . . If someone wanted to get have emerged as one of the two committee investi- in touch with the CIA, they could come to my office.” gators who elicited the momentous testimony from In short, if Butterfield wasn’t a plant in the Nixon Butterfield (in executive session, three days before White House, his experiences in the Johnson adminis- the televised testimony of July 16, 1973, that stunned tration make clear the buttoned-down Air Force colonel the nation) is, presumably, another “wiring-diagram was well suited—if not trained—for such a mission. Of issue” that Woodward sees no need to reckon with. this history of his subject, his peculiar background and Ditto for the decision by Woodward and Bernstein agency connections, Woodward mentions nothing. to take a pass on reporting Armstrong’s astonishing discovery. In All the President’s Men, they admit hav- N TRUTH, Bob Woodward was a player, not a ing learned from “a senior member of the committee’s chronicler, in Watergate. Never was this clearer investigative staff” about the taping system a full two I than in the crucial role he played in the making days before Butterfield gave his televised testimony. of Butterfield’s bombshell testimony about the White Their decision not to reveal what they had learned al- House tapes. lowed Butterfield’s bombshell to drop on live TV un- In Last of the President’s Men, Woodward ac- impeded—and thereby deprived President Nixon of knowledges that it was his recommendation of his an opportunity to seek to curtail his aide’s testimony childhood friend Scott Armstrong that landed the lat- by invoking executive privilege. ter a plum job as an investigator for the Senate Water- Here is still another subject Woodward skirts gate committee. As Woodward explains it, he himself in Last of the President’s Men: the decision by Nixon’s rebuffed a job offer from the committee’s Democratic counsel and top aides, including the ubiquitous Al- majority counsel, Sam Dash. A former federal pros- exander Haig, to withhold from the president their ecutor and ardent liberal opponent of the Nixon ad- knowledge that Butterfield was fully cooperating with ministration, Dash told the authors of Silent Coup the Senate committee. One of the most impressive that Woodward had also told “us to talk to certain chapters in Silent Coup, entitled “Five Days in July,” secretaries” in the Nixon White House and reelection examined in minute-by-minute detail the chronology campaign. of the deathblow. It was on July 12 that Butterfield was Woodward does not address longstanding al- called to testify (summoned on Woodward’s recom- legations about his relationship with Armstrong. The mendation); it was the next day, a Friday, that Butter-

Commentary 25

ROSEN.indd 25 1/14/16 2:32 PM It requires a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the Nixon presidency just to know what’s not in Woodward’s book, and why such omissions are telling.

field dropped his bomb, in executive session, to GOP HERE IS STILL more that Woodward chooses investigator Donald Sanders and Armstrong (hired on to ignore in his book about Alexander But- Woodward’s recommendation); it was over that week- T terfield—such as Butterfield’s conclusion that end that Butterfield notified his superiors in the Nixon Alexander Haig, while turning over documents to White House of what had transpired (and Armstrong investigators in the summer of 1974, sought to replace tipped off Woodward, who sat on the tip); it was over a Butterfield memorandum from 1970 with a forged that same weekend that Nixon’s aides and lawyers copy that redacted several incriminating references met with him repeatedly but never saw fit to mention to Haig in the original. (“He was the chief suspect,” to him anything about Butterfield and the committee; Butterfield told the authors of Silent Coup about and it was on that Monday, July 16—shortly before the forgery.) The substance of the 1970 memo, and Butterfield was to testify in open session, on live tele- the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the vision—that those aides finally, belatedly informed the forgery, are not important in this context; I mention it president of what was to happen, by which time Nixon simply by way of asking how an author can aspire to a no longer held any options for averting it. comprehensive portrait of a U.S. official yet show zero Since the bulk of Woodward’s book focuses on interest (zilch!) in an episode in which his protagonist this turning point in the Nixon presidency, shouldn’t discovered himself to have been the victim of a forg- the author have exhibited some interest in credible al- ery, with the original and the fake both reproduced legations, backed up by archival documentation, that in the official volumes of evidence published by the Nixon’s aides conspired to tie his hands, preventing House Judiciary Committee. him from moving to block Butterfield’s testimony? In short, The Last of the President’s Men war- Was Nixon unentitled to due process and a chance to rants careful handling. It requires a near-encyclope- press an executive-privilege claim over Butterfield’s dic knowledge of the Nixon presidency just to know testimony and the tapes whose existence he was dis- what’s not in it, and why such omissions are telling. closing? Suffice to say that whoever undertakes someday to Or would thorough exploration of such matters write the definitive biography of Bob Woodward will lead to uncomfortable questions about Woodward’s have much to decipher and unravel, and that the leg- seminal role in the events that led to the Butterfield end’s own books—absent a candid autobiography— bombshell? will be of only limited value in the enterprise.q

26 Bob Woodward’s Sins of Omission : February 2016

ROSEN.indd 26 1/14/16 2:32 PM The University We Need Reforming higher education requires the founding of a new institution of learning By Warren Treadgold

AVE AMERICAN universities tors who are still interested in traditional education declined beyond hope of re- are becoming steadily fewer and less visible. Most of covery? Of course not. Their those with traditional training and scholarly inter- decline has lasted only about 50 ests are near retirement and anyway have learned years, and in another 50 years to keep quiet, since otherwise they would prob- they might well improve. Right ably have been forced out of the profession long ago. now, however, the signs are not The universities are making progress in impos- good. Almost all American universities have grown ing their ideas off campus as well. Many recent uni- Hless interested in education and more interested in versity graduates tend to believe that well-educated ideology. While their ideology has variants, its goals people can hold only left-wing views, and academic are always “diversity,” “inclusivity,” “equality,” and opinion has moved the attitudes of most Americans at “sustainability” and its aim is the defeat of “racism,” least slightly to the left. “sexism,” “heteronormativity,” and “elitism,” without Meanwhile, as universities turn away from tradi- examining the merits of these principles or tolerating tional education, American college degrees have never dissent from them. The professors and administra- cost more and have never meant less. Students have grown much less interested in the postmodernist sort Warren Treadgold is National Endowment for the of liberal-arts education offered to them, more attracted Humanities Professor of Byzantine Studies and profes- to pre-professional programs, and more distracted by sor of history at Saint Louis University. His A.B. and sports, drinking, drugs, and sex. While several, mostly Ph.D. are from Harvard, and he has also taught at UCLA, small, colleges and universities stand apart from cam- Stanford, Hillsdale College, UC Berkeley, and Florida In- pus leftism, most of their students are just as interested ternational University and has held research fellowships in these distractions, and in any case such places have at All Souls College, Oxford, the University of Munich, the next to no influence on other universities or on public Free University of Berlin, and the Woodrow Wilson Inter- opinion. Even if a few conservative colleges offer a good national Center for Scholars in Washington. education—and it has to be said that most do not—the

Commentary 27

TREADGOLD.indd 27 1/14/16 2:36 PM degrees they provide are less valuable than those of the for halting and ultimately reversing the dismal trends more prestigious universities. we now see. What can be done? Critics have called attention The great work involved in founding such a uni- to the problem in articles and books for more than 40 versity means it would not be possible to complete years, with no obvious effects. Cutting state spending such an endeavor in a year or two. But before we can on higher education has also been tried, and its main even begin, we need a conceptual blueprint. This es- effects have been a vast increase in student debt and say is a thought experiment of sorts, a way of thinking wholesale replacement of regular faculty with wretch- through how such an institution could be created and edly paid and often underqualified adjunct profes- what practices would best ensure its success. sors. The spread of adjuncts has partly achieved an- A moment’s reflection should confirm how other proposed solution: the abolition of tenure. The strange it is that no leading university has been main results of this weakening of tenure have been to founded in the United States since Leland Stanford endanger the remaining profes- sors who hold minority views and to shift still more power to People familiar with the glorious history administrators opposed to tra- of the Western university tradition are ditional education. By now too few dissenting administrators increasingly troubled by the inability of and professors are left to make reform from within a realistic these schools to provide a good education. option. In 1987, a group of pro- fessors founded the National Association of Scholars endowed one in Palo Alto in 1891. American educa- with all the right principles, but it and similar orga- tion has expanded exponentially during that time. nizations have barely slowed the trends they oppose. Before founding his university, Stanford had a for- Donors who have tried to use their money to encour- tune that, adjusted for inflation, would not even put age traditional education or a free exchange of ideas him among Forbes’s 400 richest Americans today, have seen their donations either refused or spent con- when the country has more and richer donors than trary to their wishes. The problem has grown too big ever before. In 2014, donors gave about $38 billion to and systemic for small or gradual solutions. higher education, more than the total endowment of Yet elements of a potential solution exist. The Harvard (about $36 billion) and almost double the en- growing dissatisfaction with the current regime could dowments of Princeton or Stanford (about $21 billion serve as the foundation for a new type of university each). Many donors are troubled by the general cam- altogether. People familiar with the glorious history pus hostility to free speech, capitalism, religion, and of the Western university tradition are increasingly traditional education, but, with no good university of troubled by the intolerance on campus and inability another kind to support, they give either to their alma of these schools to provide a good education in litera- mater, to existing schools, or to other causes. ture, history, the arts, and the sciences. The universi- These frustrated donors could find a cause in a ties have moved so far to the left that they are now new leading university with a full range of academic condemning views held by most citizens, parents, stu- programs. dents, and donors. Even most professors are dissatis- The university would not need to be larger than fied with their pay, their lack of prestige, their over- Princeton, which has around 1,000 professors, 5,000 bearing administrators, and the exploding numbers of undergraduates, and 2,500 graduate students. (Princ- adjunct professors. (The adjuncts, who now constitute eton’s administrative staff of roughly 1,000 is much well over half of the American professoriat, are unhap- larger than it needs.) Above that minimum, size ceases pier still.) The fashions that have shaped today’s uni- to be an advantage: Princeton is a far more important versities have resulted not from a reasoned debate but university than Arizona State, which has ten times as from a herd instinct, a sense of inevitability, and intel- many students and faculty. An initial donation of sev- lectual intimidation. These fashions began at a hand- eral billion dollars, a sum within the means of many ful of leading universities—especially Harvard, Princ- wealthy Americans, would probably attract enough eton, Yale, Berkeley, and Stanford—and have spread additional donations to make a new leading university through their influence. a reality. Paying for such a university would become A new university, standing apart from the cul- still easier if it were founded (as Stanford was) as part ture of this failed system, would offer the best hope of a new town planned by developers who would help

28 The University We Need : February 2016

TREADGOLD.indd 28 1/14/16 2:36 PM fund the institution and create a pleasant place for its might well be the metropolitan area of Washington, students and faculty to work and live. D.C., which now has no leading university. Washing- Yet a donation of just several million dollars ton has unique connections to the news media and would be needed to form a planning group, with of- government agencies that could give a new university fice space, a small staff, a travel budget, and fees for much-needed visibility and influence in public affairs outside consultants and fundraisers. It could include (and opportunities for internships). Washington also professors from the National Association of Scholars has major academic resources, such as the Smithson- and other experts on higher education who favor the ian Institution, the National Gallery, the National Ar- project. This group could be given a deadline of a year chives, and especially the Library of Congress. With to prepare and publish a plan for a new university, access to the Library of Congress and the large and with a deadline of five years to found the university if growing number of books and periodicals available sufficient funds were pledged for it. The group’s plan online, a new university could forgo the full expense of should include a statement of principles (but not a assembling a great research library and could manage “mission statement,” which at universities has become merely with a good library of its own, which should the last refuge of the scoundrel). Besides estimates of be affordable now that used books are becoming rela- the basic costs of each stage of the university’s devel- tively cheap. The Washington exurbs are also a prom- opment and a proposed location for it, the plan should ising location for a new college town, which could include an administrative structure, an undergradu- attract people not directly connected with the univer- ate curriculum, and procedures for faculty hiring and sity. There are suitable sites for such a town within 50 student admissions. miles of Washington. (Since the 1960s, the successful America’s leading universities share some char- planned towns of Reston, Virginia, and Columbia, acteristics worth emulating. For one thing, their lo- Maryland, have both been developed within 25 miles cations fit what might be called the Oxbridge model: of Washington, closer than Stanford is to San Francis- They are within reach of an important metropolis but co.) No comparable locations are available near, say, not so near as to be overshadowed by it. Just as Oxford New York City. and Cambridge are about an hour and a half away Since almost all major universities now discrim- from London, so Princeton and Yale are within an inate systematically against moderates, conservatives, hour and a half of New York, while Harvard, Stanford, religious believers, and people interested in tradition- and Berkeley are closer to the centers of the smaller al education, a university that put academic freedom metropolitan areas of Boston and San Francisco. All and quality first could attract excellent professors and these universities dominate college towns of their own students from leading universities, lesser universities, that range in population from Princeton’s 29,000 to and more conservative institutions where academics are undervalued. The universi- ty’s professors would on average The new university’s professors would be more independent-minded, be more independent-minded, more more interesting, and more ac- complished than professors at interesting, and more accomplished than today’s leading schools, and un- like them would represent the professors at today’s leading schools. views of the majority of educat- ed people outside academia. Oxford’s 160,000. And all these towns have some at- A concentration of moderate and conserva- tractive neighborhoods that combine the benefits of tive professors at a university that encouraged and small towns with the amenities of big cities and (of rewarded them could form a real intellectual com- course) of major universities. Accordingly, Oxford, munity from professors now scattered at different Princeton, and Berkeley have more distinct and cohe- institutions across the country. The national media, sive academic communities than universities located who now look for experts and opinion leaders at Har- within major cities such as the University of London, vard, Princeton, and Berkeley—but not at conserva- Columbia, or UCLA. On the other hand, universities tive schools such as Hillsdale College, Baylor Univer- that are too far from major cities are at a disadvantage sity, or Ave Maria University—might well seek experts in attracting national attention and the best students and opinion leaders at a new leading school, if only to and faculty. make news through a lively debate. Given all this, the best place for a new university The new university should be traditional in

Commentary 29

TREADGOLD.indd 29 1/14/16 2:36 PM character but not specifically “conservative” in poli- tribution requirements, encourage tutorials and sur- tics. It should seek faculty and students who are inter- vey courses, allow some courses to be prerequisites ested in academics as such, not just as a vehicle for ide- for others, but otherwise leave students discretion to ological expression and activism. The only ideologies plan their own courses of study. it should deliberately exclude are postmodernism, Students should be admitted on the basis of deconstructionism, and other relativistic doctrines academic criteria. Along with grades, essays, and test that insist nothing is objectively true and everything scores, interviews in person or by telephone or Skype is an instrument of power. Although the university can be especially useful for determining whether stu- should welcome students and faculty of any religion dents show real signs of intellectual life. While admit- or none, it would do well to dedicate itself formally ting all applicants with the finest overall academic to traditional Christianity and Judaism. Recent years qualifications, the university should also admit some have shown that an absence of religion in public life with extraordinary abilities in particular academic can quickly decline into outright hostility to religion, and that many of the main groups de- In order to avoid a bloated administrative fending the right to hold moral structure, the new university should have views outside the leftist con- sensus are religious. The new no vice presidents, few deans, and no university should nonetheless defend the rights of all students associate or assistant deans. and citizens to express unfash- ionable views, even without invoking religion. This fields even if they are not necessarily “well-rounded.” would require a strong legal department to contest Students should also be selected to ensure a variety of the growing body of government regulations that are majors, as determined by the interests they mention incompatible with free speech and academic quality. when they apply. Since a university is among other Except for a language requirement restricted things a social community, some attention should be to languages with important literatures, the univer- given to students’ personalities, at least to the extent sity’s curriculum should avoid “distribution require- of holding antisocial applicants to higher intellectual ments,” which force students to choose from lists of standards than others. Again for social reasons, the specialized courses in various fields. (For example, university should make an effort to keep the student students at Harvard can satisfy their general require- body from being lopsidedly male or female. Such ad- ment in “Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding” justments, however, should not lead to rejecting any with such courses as “American Dreams from Scar- outstanding students or to admitting any undistin- face to Easy Rider.”) These requirements now make guished students. Easily offended students, or stu- a coherent education almost impossible because they dents who insist on saving the world before learning force students to take overly specialized and doctri- about it, should be encouraged to go elsewhere. naire courses. If all students should know something about a subject, they should be required to take a IRING THE RIGHT people to be the univer- general survey course on it. The main outlines of a sity’s president, provost, deans, and depart- good program in general education should be obvi- H ment chairmen would be essential, but the ous to anyone without a bias against Western civiliza- administration should remain as small and inexpen- tion; examples can be found in the required program sive as possible. Bloated administrative structures can at Columbia and the Common Core required until in time elevate bureaucratic considerations over edu- recently at the University of Chicago. The courses cational policy. This means the new university should should include great books that every educated per- have no vice presidents, few deans, and no associate or son should have read, and the reading lists should be assistant deans. Special care should be given to hiring similar for all students to give them a common foun- the dean of admissions and the department chairmen, dation of knowledge. Contrary to present practice at who should be not only distinguished scholars but most universities, the new university should encour- also gifted talent scouts. Although ideally the presi- age survey courses on basic subjects and discour- dent should also be a distinguished scholar, an excep- age idiosyncratic courses on narrow topics. The new tion could be made for a figure with special talents as university should also adopt guidelines for its under- a fundraiser and as a public spokesman. The provost graduate majors, which could ban departmental dis- and deans should, however, be professors in the uni-

30 The University We Need : February 2016

TREADGOLD.indd 30 1/14/16 2:36 PM versity’s departments, with ranks corresponding to be a good teacher of good students and will probably their academic achievements, and with salaries never also be heard outside the university. more than one and a half times those of the best-paid Professorial salaries at the new university professors outside the administration. In order to dis- should be on average somewhat higher than salaries courage the growth of a special class of professional paid at established leading universities. This would al- administrators, professors should frequently move in low professors hired away from the leading universi- and out of the university administration. ties to be compensated for moving to a new institution Department chairmen should have the primary with a still-developing reputation. The salary scale responsibility for hiring faculty in their departments, should be made public, with clearly defined ranks and not just at first but permanently. A major problem the same salary for every professor at each rank, rang- with academic hiring today is that no single person ing, for example, from Assistant Professor I to Full is really responsible for any department as a whole. Professor XII. Each professor’s rank should be based Professors end up choosing their colleagues not in on his academic and intellectual accomplishments. the interests of the university, department, or stu- Significant deficiencies in teaching, particularly giv- dents, but on the basis of their own likes and dislikes ing inflated grades, should be penalized. (Inflated and to avoid being overshadowed by superior col- grades can be detected through a statistical compari- leagues. Finding excellent scholars who are eager to son of the grades professors give with their students’ hire other scholars as good as themselves or better is overall grade-point averages.) Adjunct professors always hard, but it needs to be done only once for each should be few (and mostly not academics), and paid department if the department chairman is in charge regular professorial salaries adjusted for their teach- of hiring. The administration should study each de- ing loads and qualifications (around ten times what partment chairman’s hiring recommendations care- most adjuncts are paid now). Faculty committees, fully and veto proposed offers to scholars who are less which at most universities provide many distractions than distinguished. The administration should also and few advantages, should be kept to a minimum. always be ready to replace the department chairmen, Since the university would soon grow too large who would naturally remain professors after being re- to be a single community where everyone knew ev- placed as chairmen. eryone else, it would need smaller units. Such units in Each advertised position should be broadly American universities, including Harvard houses and defined, usually leaving the professorial rank open, Yale colleges, have failed to develop the sense of com- in order to attract the largest number of applicants. munity of Oxford and Cambridge colleges because the The department chairmen should actively recruit American units lack a real function in the process of outstanding scholars who might otherwise not apply, education, which is run instead by academic depart- ments. The best solution would probably be to have departmen- Professors today choose their colleagues tal colleges, with residences, not in the interest of the university, dining halls, classrooms, and faculty offices organized around department, or students, but on the departments or groups of re- lated departments. Some junior basis of their own likes and dislikes. faculty and graduate students would serve as tutors and live including scholars from foreign countries with a good in the departmental colleges with the undergradu- command of English. Positions should also be created ates. There should be no vocational departments—in for any truly great scholars who could be recruited. other words, there should be a department of econom- The speaking and teaching skills of applicants should ics, but not a department of business administration. be judged from guest lectures rather than from teach- There should be no programs of women’s or ethnic ing evaluations by students, which can be manipulat- studies, which usually turn out to be ideological rath- ed by easy assignments and lenient grading. er than academic. All students should have private The main grounds for hiring professors should rooms to keep roommates from disturbing one an- be their records of research and publication, judged other’s studying or sleeping. Residential entryways by originality, importance, accuracy, rigor, and clarity. should be segregated by sex and subject to sensible A professor who has written original, important, ac- visiting hours. Students should be required to live on curate, rigorous, and lucid works will almost certainly campus.

Commentary 31

TREADGOLD.indd 31 1/14/16 2:36 PM Every student should be required before enroll- or Asian. In fact, today’s academic hiring and ad- ing to subscribe to an honor code, which should in- missions usually favor only blacks, Hispanics, and clude pledges never to engage in cheating or fraud and women who hold views that the universities favor. never to obstruct the free speech of others. Serious And those women, blacks, and Hispanics who want violations of the honor code should be enforced by ex- to study subjects unrelated to the group identities pulsion. Deciding exactly what to do about underage that they are supposed to share are seldom hired at drinking, misdemeanor drug use, and sexual activity leading institutions and are given little preference in is admittedly difficult for universities today, when our admissions. The new university should therefore be laws consider most college-age students responsible able to recruit significant numbers of good female, enough to vote but too irresponsible to drink a glass black, and Hispanic professors and students. In any of beer. But as a rule, the university should avoid turn- case, the university should resist the dogma that ing every form of behavior into either a crime or a civil something is wrong with a society unless every activ- right. Rape is a serious crime and should be investigated and punished not by the university The university should resist the dogma but by the police and the courts. that every activity and profession must If misguided regulations force the university to try rape cas- have the same proportion of each race and es, specially hired lawyers and retired judges should handle sex as the population as a whole. them in a setting as much like a courtroom as possible. If the university does its job ity and profession has the same proportion of each well, most students should have little time for alcohol race and sex as the population as a whole. Discrimi- or drugs, and those who let drugs or alcohol affect nation against women and minorities is practically their studies would soon be suspended or dismissed nonexistent in American higher education today, and for academic reasons. The university should limit its it is certainly negligible in comparison with the mas- athletic programs to intramural teams and to provid- sive discrimination in favor of women and minorities ing students and professors with facilities for exercise and against moderates and conservatives. and recreation. The leading universities enjoy three great ad- Some might also argue that starting a new univer- vantages: money, prestige, and a lack of competition. sity would be more difficult and expensive than reform- Yet these institutions spend most of their money on ing an old one. In theory, no doubt, enlightened trust- things that contribute nothing to academics, such ees at an existing university could name a determined as bloated and overpaid administrative staffs, per- and forceful new president, who could then select new petually hoarded endowments, unnecessary new fa- deans and department chairmen, introduce a rigorous cilities, lavish intercollegiate athletics, and ideologi- curriculum, reform hiring and admissions, and even cal programs of no academic value. A recent survey reorganize the university around departmental colleg- found that Harvard spent 40 percent of its budget on es. In practice, however, such a president would surely administration and just 29 percent on instruction. face a student and faculty revolt over the new curricu- The minute percentage of money the leading univer- lum and the new program of hiring and admissions. A sities spend on bidding for professors usually goes to newly founded university could choose administrators, candidates chosen for their ideology, race, or gender. professors, and students who supported its goals, but Growing public awareness of the decline in higher attempting reforms at an existing university would cre- education has damaged the prestige of its leading in- ate discord that would last for years and disrupt any stitutions but hasn’t hurt their ability to get students, changes. On the other hand, the example and compe- professors, and donations, because most of the less tition of a successful new university would eventually prestigious schools have declined even more. This make reforms easier to promote at other universities. lack of competition is in fact the essential advantage Another argument against such a university today’s leading institutions possess. The way to break is that it would discredit itself among academics their stranglehold on the system is to create competi- and intellectuals because its faculty and student tion where none now exists. This plan for a new uni- body would be disproportionately male and white versity would do exactly that.q

32 The University We Need : February 2016

TREADGOLD.indd 32 1/14/16 2:36 PM The Disastrous New Urban Agenda

Unable to spend their way into a progressive future, Democratic mayors have turned to regulation as a panacea By Stephen Eide

EMOCRATS CURRENTLY gov- equality, we should expect increased stagnation and ern most major American cities growing inequality in the coming years. If Democrats and face no serious Republican continue to expand regulations, the urban economy challenges in any of them. Of the will be even less accommodating to small businesses 50 largest cities in the United and entrepreneurs than it is already. And as these States, only 13 have Republi- economic engines stall, opportunities for the poor can mayors. Surprisingly, while and immigrant classes will dry up. The liberal appe- urban areas have been turning deep blue, Demo- tite for the imposition of local regulation, like the ap- Dcratic city governments have not been increasing their petite for spending it has supplanted, will usher in a spending as much as most people think. Massive debt new chapter in the history of unintended policy conse- and poor revenue growth have forced urban Demo- quences. And, once again, the worst-off among us will crats to find a more austere pathway to satisfying their pay the highest price. progressive ambitions. They have found it in regula- tion. By legislating how businesses can conduct them- HE PROGRESSIVE CONQUEST of city gov- selves, whom they can hire, what they must provide, ernments came hard on the heels of a national and much else, Democrats in local governments are T urban renaissance—a renaissance led by many transforming the new urban progressive agenda into Republicans who sought to reverse the decline of a regulatory agenda. American cities through the judicious application of Because of this, even as these politicians tout conservative policies. During the 1990s, conservative their imposed correctives for sluggish growth and in- ideas had a profound and lasting influence on welfare policy, policing, and K–12 public education. Cities Stephen Eide is a senior fellow at the Manhattan that had appeared to be in a death spiral only years Institute. before began to see their populations stabilize and

Commentary 33

EIDE.indd 33 1/14/16 2:40 PM Even Democratic mayors with reputations as moderate technocrats tend personally to support all the bien-pensant views of their left-wing colleagues.

even start growing again. Republican mayors such government investment in housing has been modest. as Steven Goldsmith in Indianapolis, New York City’s No one is even taking a stab at locally funded public Rudolph Giuliani, and Los Angeles’s Richard Riordan housing. gained national renown for their successes. Welfare Progressives aren’t spending for one reason and rolls fell dramatically without the corresponding rise one reason alone: The money isn’t there. Unlike the in poverty predicted by liberal doomsayers. Crime federal government, cities are subject to balanced- rates plummeted. School choice gained broad support budget requirements, and thus every year must bring throughout low-income minority neighborhoods. expenditures in line with revenues. Detroit’s 2013–14 Their success spelled their doom. The Republi- bankruptcy highlighted the risk of insolvency run can Party’s inability to capitalize on the great Ameri- by blighted old industrial cities. Other cities are also can crime decline and the popularity of charter schools strapped for cash, even if they haven’t gotten the same ranks among the biggest political failures of modern attention. times. Republican mayors may have won Democratic In a September 2015 survey, the National League votes, but they did not make new Republican voters. of Cities found that, across the nation, city revenues Instead, like Churchill in Britain’s 1945 general elec- have yet to return to the levels of 2007–08, before the tion, conservatism found itself rejected—and even financial meltdown. On the other side of the ledger, more ironically, rejected in favor of Democrats who legacy costs related to pensions and other debt obliga- had lurched to the left. The two most prominent ur- tions continue to absorb much of what revenue growth ban progressives to be swept into office are Mayors is coming into cities’ treasuries. According to Census Ed Murray in Seattle and Bill de Blasio in New York. Bureau data, between 2004 and 2013, all local-govern- Others include Mayor Jim Kenney in Philadelphia, ment pension expenditures grew 107 percent, whereas Minneapolis’s Mayor Betsy Hodges, Boston’s Mayor local revenues generated by local taxation grew by Martin Walsh, and Oakland’s Mayor Libby Schaaf. only 43 percent. Had pensions grown at a normal bud- Even Democratic mayors with reputations as moder- getary rate, local officials nationwide would have had ate technocrats, such as Los Angeles’s Eric Garcetti $19.2 billion more to spend in 2013 on K–12, infrastruc- and San Francisco’s Ed Lee, personally support all the ture, and any number of other priorities. The capital bien-pensant views of their left-wing colleagues and debt burden of America’s localities stands at $1.8 tril- have their centrist impulses kept in check by local leg- lion, or 11 percent of national GDP, only slightly below islative bodies, who are even more extreme than local the 40-year peak of 11.7 percent in 2010. executives. White ethnic conservative Democrats, long Paying city workers is the key reason there’s no a staple of city politics, no longer figure among either money for more programs. Municipal government the electorate or political leadership. boasts a higher unionization rate than any other in- Urban progressive agendas are focused on so- dustry in the nation, and those unions have played cial liberalism, climate change, reining in the police key roles in the rise of the progressive mayors. There- (now that crime is down), and, above all, fighting in- fore, city officials feel obliged to keep employees’ pay come inequality. What is most remarkable, however, and benefit packages robust, even if it would be more is that the spending increases ordinarily character- authentically progressive to ramp up spending on ser- istic of progressive governance are nowhere in sight. vices that benefit those who don’t already have well- Universal pre-kindergarten, the only new program on paid jobs. This means cities can afford to take on only the progressive agenda, is modest in cost compared to so many new employees. Whereas the private sector what taxpayers already spend on public education. De workforce has grown beyond its pre-recession peak, Blasio’s pre-K expansion represents only 1.6 percent of local-government employment is still below where it the New York City Department of Education’s $22 bil- was in 2008, by at least 400,000 jobs. Cities won’t be lion operating budget. And while coastal-city mayors able to consider serious new spending commitments are under immense pressure to focus on housing, par- until they have brought back services to where they ticularly in New York and San Francisco, direct city- were before the financial crisis hit.

34 The Disastrous New Urban Agenda : February 2016

EIDE.indd 34 1/14/16 2:40 PM Since Bill de Blasio’s inauguration in January 2014, New York City politicians have targeted various businesses with a quiverful of regulatory proposals.

What about raising taxes? Tax-and-spend, it are new environmental initiatives. Practically every turns out, is not so easy for municipal governments. Democratic mayor in recent years has committed his The burdens on ordinary citizens are already high, or her city to the fight against climate change. Much of and states keep cities on a short leash when it comes to this, like the recent Paris climate agreement, amounts raising revenues (since state capitals want to reserve to gaseous posturing about “leadership” and “ambi- flexibility on their own to tax as needed). Additionally, tious targets.” But green building codes, which the U.S. volatile pension costs complicate efforts to dedicate Conference of Mayors has endorsed and which have new tax revenues for services. For example, because been adopted by Dallas, Boulder, and Boston, will raise New York City’s investments underperformed last costs on both residential and commercial real-estate year, pension expenditures must go up by more than development. Washington’s “Sustainable D.C. plan” $400 million over the next four years. That’s money proposed going still further by reducing emissions lost to other programs. via a local carbon tax that would “place a fee on all en- Even more startling, Chicago just passed the ergy use.” At a time when China produces over 9 bil- largest tax hike in its history—and of the $588 million lion metric tons of carbon emissions each year, urban raised, a staggering 92 percent will go towards pen- environmentalism will do nothing to thwart climate sions. change but is sure to cool the local business climate. Housing policy offers a clear picture of regula- INDING THEMSELVES UNABLE to eliminate tion as a supplement to limited funding options. Poli- income inequality by spending, local progres- ticians in Seattle and San Francisco, for example, are F sives are instead trying to regulate it away. The making regulatory pushes on mandatory inclusionary first bill Mayor de Blasio signed into law mandated zoning policies and exercising tighter controls over paid sick leave for businesses with five or more em- evictions and rent hikes. Democratic mayors are look- ployees. This putatively compassionate policy can im- ing to make landlords pick up the slack for a dearth of pose considerable cost burdens on small companies. public housing. (New York had passed a paid-sick-leave law a year But the focus of the urban progressives regula- before, but it had exempted business with fewer than tion agenda is on raising the minimum wage. It has 15 employees.) Paid sick leave was just the start. Since become a liberal obsession. In the past two years, Se- de Blasio’s inauguration in January 2014, New York attle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco have passed laws City politicians have targeted various businesses with phasing in a $15-an-hour minimum wage. Other cities a quiverful of regulatory proposals—nail salons and have stopped short of $15, with Oakland, for example, other cosmetology services, car washes, horse carriag- at $12.25 and Sacramento at $12.50. The number of cit- es, used-car dealerships, pet shops, industrial laundry ies raising the minimum wage would surely be larger operators, helicopter tours, grocery stores, and Uber were it not for the fact that about a third of state gov- and other “gig economy” businesses. The regulations ernments wisely prohibit such local regulations. That that don’t target specific commercial sectors instead hasn’t entirely stopped governments in Pittsburgh, cover them all. So-called ban-the-box legislation, for Portland, Rochester, and Buffalo, which have resorted example, is designed to restrict a business’s ability to imposing $15 minimums for city workers and gov- to deny job offers to applicants with an arrest record ernment contractors (sometimes referred to as “living- or criminal convictions. New York’s ban-the-box bill wage ordinances”), thus raising costs for taxpayers. passed a month after an earlier bill that deemed in- Even if phased in over the next five years, $15, in quiries about applicants’ credit history a form of job real dollars, would be significantly higher than histor- discrimination. ic wage levels. Doubtless that’s why even some liberal In cities beyond New York, the situation is much economists, such as Princeton’s Alan Krueger, have the same. Paid sick leave has been a top priority of become noticeably gun-shy about the sort of broad- progressive administrations in Philadelphia, Minne- based wage increase called for in the “National Pro- apolis, Newark, and elsewhere. Similarly widespread gressive Agenda,” drawn up by de Blasio and adopted

Commentary 35

EIDE.indd 35 1/14/16 2:40 PM Accommodating small-business growth requires a forbear- ance from economic regulation that big-city mayors and city-council members don’t seem to have these days.

by 10 other mayors. It is unfortunately the case that collapse. But accommodating small-business growth many products of our K–12 public education system requires a forbearance from economic regulation that are not worth $15 an hour to every employer. Classi- big-city mayors and city-council members don’t seem cal economic theory suggests that if you make cheap to have these days. labor more expensive, you’ll get less of it. In their 2010 In addition to creating jobs, small businesses book Minimum Wages, David Neumark and William have also, historically, played a pivotal role in im- L. Wascher exhaustively survey the empirical research migrant assimilation. Between 1990 and 2013, the and conclude: “The preponderance of evidence sup- foreign-born population in New York increased by 1 ports the view that minimum wages reduce the em- million, thus accounting for the entirety of the city’s ployment of low-wage workers.” The key progressive population growth during those years. As my col- solution to income inequality not only fails to benefit league Peter Salins has shown, immigration’s “growth the poor, it makes them worse off by reducing access share” of cities’ population gains from 1990 to 2013 has to employment. been even more substantial in Philadelphia (285 per- Here’s how. New York’s 421a property tax abate- cent), Chicago (160 percent), Boston (130 percent), and ment program for real-estate developers and San Fran- Minneapolis (129 percent). New regulations make it cisco’s “Twitter tax break” for large technology firms much easier to sue immigrant-owned bodegas and nail both attest that big businesses will do just fine under salons and thus put them out of business. This pro- progressive leadership. But a $15 minimum wage will gressivist indifference to the needs of small businesses present enormous managerial challenges for small suggests that the left has put little serious thought into businesses by forcing them to get by with fewer work- how to provide economic opportunity for our massive ers. In a 2006 study, the University of Georgia’s Joseph foreign-born population. Sabia analyzed 25 years of labor-market data and de- Liberal mayors seem utterly unaware of how termined that a 10 percent hike in the minimum wage poorly positioned cities are to address income dispari- corresponded with a 0.8 to 1.2 percent decline in em- ties. The deepest causes of inequality, such as global- ployment for small employers. All politicians profess to ization and cultural disparities, are entirely out of the be pro-entrepreneur, but the real test consists of what reach of city governments. They are seduced by mis- they do for, or to, small businesses. Several studies by sion creep. Progressive politicians are unwilling to urban economists have found striking correlations stick to their real work of improving the core functions between an area’s average firm size and long-term of municipal government, namely K–12 public educa- job-growth trends. Summarizing this research, a 2014 tion and public safety, and maintaining the basic infra- study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation structure and services—parks, libraries, and the like. noted that “nearly all of net job creation in the United The rise of 21st-century urban progressivism points States occurs in firms that are less than five years old.” toward a future characterized by shoddy local services, The less a city’s private sector resembles Big-Three-era increased regulation of city economies, and the con- Detroit, the better its chances at staving off economic solidation of inequality.q

36 The Disastrous New Urban Agenda : February 2016

EIDE.indd 36 1/14/16 2:40 PM Why Hamilton Matters The Broadway triumph is the antidote to our identity-obsessed culture By Tara Helfman

HIP-HOP OPERA about Ameri- sis over how to reconcile the realities of the past with ca’s first secretary of the treasury the ideals of the present. At its best, this crisis has led sounds like a hard sell, but Ham- to the sort of vigorous public debate seen in South Car- ilton has broken records for ad- olina, whose state legislature voted in June to remove vance ticket sales since its open- the Confederate flag from the grounds of its Capitol. ing on Broadway in the summer. At its worst, the crisis has taken an Orwellian turn at Its initial run off-Broadway in elite universities, where the complexity of the Ameri- the spring had already made it the most celebrated can experience is being consigned to a fate even worse theatricalA event of the century thus far. Hamilton’s than the dustbin of history: annihilation by academic writer and composer (and star), Lin Manuel Miranda, committee. Harvard Law School’s dean has appointed almost instantly became a major cultural figure in a committee to explore replacing the school’s seal be- the United States, and for good reason. I saw it in its cause it incorporates the family crest of a slaveholder unveiling, when it was a four-hour work in progress, who endowed the University’s first professorship of and again in September on Broadway, by which point law. At the same time, the heads of Harvard’s resi- it had been scrubbed, sanitized, and trimmed for dential colleges unanimously agreed to abandon the Broadway crowds. Both times Hamilton struck me as medieval academic title “Master” because it had also artistically important and insightful. It is also remark- been a slaver’s word. (Whether Harvard stops dispens- ably timely, in ways Miranda surely did not expect. ing Master’s degrees remains to be seen.) Hamilton is being performed as American insti- History is not a process of free association; nor tutions are being convulsed by a collective identity cri- can historical injustices be rectified by banishing offen- sive artifacts from view. History is a discipline—a gath- Tara Helfman is an associate professor of law at ering of evidence to reconstruct the past and a critical Syracuse University College of Law. exploration of its contradictions and complexities. If

Commentary 37

HELFMAN.indd 37 1/14/16 2:45 PM there is a single unifying theme in American history, it not. Race is conspicuous and salient, serving to under- is this nation’s ongoing struggle to live up to its found- score the paradoxes of a nation founded on ideals of ing ideals—a struggle that has played out on the battle- liberty and equality but in which both were denied to field, in the courtroom, in the political process, and in vast segments of the population. But at the same time, the shaping of popular sensibilities. the casting highlights the durability of those founding This is why Hamilton is so important. It both ideals. depicts and embodies the dynamism and synthesis at Just as the new nation has reinvented itself the heart of America’s founding. It does so primarily over time, the protean cast reinvents itself between through an artistic medium, hip-hop, in which synthe- acts. Act One’s Marquis de Lafayette, that great friend sis is an essential creative device. Hip-hop artists sam- of revolutionary America, becomes the Francophile ple musical refrains, lyrics, and dialogue in their work, Thomas Jefferson in Act Two. Revolutionary-era spy engaging in an ongoing discourse with musicians of Hercules Mulligan becomes political tactician and the past while creating something new in the process. theorist James Madison. And John Laurens, the abo- To be sure, the intellectual, political, and con- litionist son of the prominent South Carolinian slave stitutional synthesis at the heart of independence trader Henry Laurens, becomes Hamilton’s own young and nationhood ran far deeper than the sampling of son. This is called “doubling” in the theater, and in this a catchy hook here and there. But the rapid-fire lyrics case, doubling works to personify the transfer of Amer- of hip-hop in Hamilton manage to evoke the fast-and- ican ideals from war to peace, rebellion to governance. furious pamphleteering through which ideas were Miranda’s musical composition is likewise high- disseminated during the founding period, as well as ly suggestive of the synthesis of high and popular cul- the long historic provenance of those ideas. Colonial ture that occurred during the Revolution. The pam- appeals to principles such as political representation phlet battles of the imperial crisis are distilled into and due process of law were not fabricated from whole Purcellian counterpoint as the loyalist cleric Samuel cloth, but derived from historic rights under the Brit- Seabury and a teenage Alexander Hamilton confront ish Constitution dating back to Magna Carta. And each other (quite literally) in the bustling marketplace after those rights were vindicated on the battlefield of revolutionary ideas. This single encounter, in which of revolution, Americans forged a new government Seabury implores his listeners to throw themselves rooted in historical experience, not in abstract philo- upon the King’s love and mercy, yields to the thun- sophical principles. dering outbreak of war. With New York Harbor un- The government framed in 1789 represents a der relentless siege, General Washington takes stock synthesis of the best attributes of the British Consti- of his dwindling resources. Here, the guttural snarls tution with political principles refined during the En- of Missy Elliott’s hip-hop song “Lick Shots” (slang for “open fire”) punctuate the sound of heavy artillery. And as The ‘dead white men’ of the founding the British ultimately surrender generation are portrayed as complex, at the Battle of Yorktown, a cho- rus sings snatches of the Eng- imperfect individuals by a largely non- lish drinking song “The World Turned Upside Down.” white cast. Color-blind casting this is not. This last musical quotation is no mere artistic flourish. By the lightenment based on the lessons (both cautionary 1830s, “The World Turned Upside Down” had become and salutary) of ancient and modern republics. The part of American apocrypha, as it was said that Lord Constitution contained the mechanisms for further Cornwallis’s troops grimly sang the song as their com- dynamism and synthesis as the American experiment mander surrendered at Yorktown. While it is doubtful continued. The amendment process established un- that this actually happened, the significance would not der Article V yielded the Bill of Rights, the abolition of have been lost on earlier generations of Americans. The slavery, and other attempts to create “a more perfect song’s title conveys the historical import of America’s union” over successive generations. victory of Britain, but the lyrics themselves (which were The casting of Hamilton speaks to this dyna- written during the English Civil Wars a century earlier) mism. The “dead white men” of the founding genera- offer a cautionary tale of the excesses of revolution. The tion are portrayed as complex, imperfect individuals song laments the repression of Christmas celebrations by a largely non-white cast. Color-blind casting this is by a puritanical parliament: “Command is given, we

38 Why Hamilton Matters : February 2016

HELFMAN.indd 38 1/14/16 2:45 PM must obey, and quite forget old Christmas day:/ Kill a ters (a bit of creative license on Miranda’s part). thousand men, or a Town regain, we will give thanks Then there is the character of Aaron Burr, who and praise amain.” represents the greatest interpretive challenge of all. The American Revolution did not go the way of The show represents Burr as Hamilton’s fratricidal the English Revolution of the 1640s or, for that matter, twin—a man, like Hamilton, of boundless ambition most revolutions of the modern era. In America, ap- but, unlike Hamilton, devoid of principle. Indeed, peals to ancient rights and liberties did not end in to- Burr’s own contemporaries barely knew what to make talitarianism, zealotry, thoughtcrime, and repression. of him. His acquittal of treason in 1807 remains one of Rather, the American Revolution was founded in liber- American history’s greatest what-ifs, yet he will for- ty and has tended toward liberty ever since. The expan- ever be remembered as the man who killed Alexander sion of the franchise, the emancipation of slaves, and Hamilton. But did he mean to do it? Leslie Odom’s the extension of civil rights to women and minorities Burr seems shocked when his bullet hits its mark. And have all been part of the process through which successive gen- erations have tried to give force Hamilton succeeds in sending Americans and meaning to the Spirit of ’76. back to their roots at a time when too Hamilton is at its best when it addresses just how im- many among us are quick to tear them up probable it was that the Ameri- can experiment survived its first and cast them aside. few decades. The Confederation period before the election of the first president and did Hamilton intend to kill Burr? We will never know. the drafting of the Constitution barely get a passing Hamilton presents this ambiguity with great delicacy. mention. (A problematic number on Shays’ Rebellion But Hamilton is art, not history. Miranda omits of 1786 did not make it into the Broadway production.) Hamilton’s final excruciating hours during which But the Washington administration is treated with he pled for last rites from an Episcopal bishop, who great sensitivity and insight, revealing the singularity doubted that his was a soul worthy of redemption. of our first president’s leadership. Rap battles during The bishop eventually relented, and one of Hamilton’s Cabinet meetings signal the early emergence of sec- final acts was to forgive Burr. tional differences, the ticking political time bomb rep- Sticklers may bristle at the characterization of La- resented by slavery, and the precarious geopolitical fayette as a champion of freedom, at the fudging of the position of the young republic as Britain and France young nation’s financial history, and at the compression warred in the Atlantic. “Winning was easy,” Washing- of ideas and events over time. Nevertheless, Miranda’s ton tells Hamilton. “Governing’s harder.” masterwork captures in unlikely and innovative ways Hamilton’s treatment of the greatest scandal the electrifying synthesis that has animated American in Hamilton’s life is particularly ingenious. A prolific history since the Founding. To the extent that Hamil- writer, Hamilton was mindful that future generations ton succeeds in sending Americans back to their roots would judge him by what was written about him dur- at a time when too many are quick to tear them up and ing his own lifetime, so he spared no ink in challenging cast them aside, this work of art accomplishes more his detractors. When a blackmail scheme surrounding than a formal work of history ever could. his marital infidelities threatened to destroy his repu- Bernard Bailyn has written that history is a tation, he did what any modern PR guru would recom- craft, “never a science, sometimes an art,” in that it de- mend: He preempted his enemies by confessing the mands that the historian balance the scholarly quest scandal, publishing details of the sordid episode in a for objectivity with the subjective experience of mem- pamphlet. ory. He described this challenge in the context of the In the show, the pamphlet goes viral at a fren- study of the slave trade: “We can approach the subject zied 142 beats per minute, the sort of dubstep rhythm objectively, impersonally, but only up to a point, be- one would hear at a drug-addled rave. Electronic per- yond which we find ourselves emotionally involved. cussion is layered with an orgy of taunts, mockery, and The whole story is still within living memory, and not gasps of revulsion as a riveted public crisscrosses the only for people of African descent. We are all in some stage, pamphlets in hand. And in the quiet personal degree morally involved and must consider the rela- heartbreak that follows, Hamilton’s betrayed wife sits tionship of history and memory.” Bailyn’s artful his- alone on a dark stage, burning her husband’s love let- torian is mindful of this tension and responsive to it.

Commentary 39

HELFMAN.indd 39 1/14/16 2:45 PM This approach is not representative of the more derstanding of the nation’s past. It is little wonder, then, fashionable currents in American historiography that that campus protestors frequently fixate on artifacts, are responsible, at least in part, for the broader cultur- stripped of context, as symbols of ongoing injury: It is al crisis in which Hamilton appears. Over the course of easy to view a symbol as a direct personal affront when recent decades, American scholars have attempted to one is ignorant of its multivalence and complexity. transform the historian into a moral censor by conflat- Today’s controversies might be over the sheaves ing the craft of history with the experience of memory. of wheat on Harvard Law School’s crest, the statue By this account, it is not enough for the historian to of the slavery-preaching politician and theorist John attempt to reconstruct the past and understand it on Calhoun on Yale University’s campus, and the openly its own terms. Rather, the historian has a moral re- racist Woodrow Wilson’s name on Princeton’s School sponsibility to condemn the past and its role as the of Public Policy. But it is only a matter of time before progenitor of present injustices. The historiographical the Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial focus turns from sweeping narratives, which are char- come under fire as national celebrations of slavehold- acterized as triumphalist or morally obtuse, to narrow ers. The crowning achievement of Hamilton is that accounts of disenfranchised peoples—subjects worthy it encourages the audience to treat the past not as a of study to be sure, but not to the exclusion of all else. moral affront to the present, but as a challenge to it. Taken to the extreme, this approach compromises It forces the audience to view the founding generation not only the study but the teaching of American history. as neither heroes nor villains, but as individuals faced If the “dead white men” of the founding era are written with formidable choices in transformative times. off as hypocrites, then studying their achievements is What is more, it dares the members of the audience to tantamount to whitewashing their irredeemable moral imagine how they will continue the story that began defects. As the writing and teaching of American his- in 1776. The signal achievement of Hamilton is that it tory becomes more fragmentary and censorious, so too invites the audience to be part of the creative synthesis does the possibility of students achieving a genuine un- that the production represents.q

40 Why Hamilton Matters : February 2016

HELFMAN.indd 40 1/14/16 2:45 PM FICTION

The Bernie Klepner Show

By JOSEPH EPSTEIN

T WHAT POINT in life does it must have been at least beyond a decade, prob- one notice that one’s father is ably a lot more; it wasn’t a subject he was eager to unlike other fathers, and not talk about. If his treatment had been successful, you necessarily in a beneficial way? couldn’t have told by me, since his behavior in all the In my case, it must have been years I knew him—he died at eighty-three, when I around the age of four. Our was myself fifty-five—never changed a jot. In all that mother, A for whom I thank God, used to warn me, time, he did and said what it pleased him to do or say. my brother Howard, and my sister Melissa to stay Culture was one of the bees in my father’s bon- away when our father was in a bad mood, which net. He wanted me to play violin—the Jewish instru- was fairly often. “Leave Daddy by himself for a ment, he called it, “par excellence.” The problem here while,” she’d say. “He’s tired from working all day.” was that I hadn’t a scintilla of musical talent. After six Or: “Don’t bother Daddy just now, sweetie, he years of lessons and practice, he finally allowed me, at didn’t sleep very well last night.” Or: “Daddy’s not the age of fourteen, to quit. When I told my mother, feeling very good. Let’s give him some time to feel her eyes teared up. When I asked if my quitting the better.” And, most frequently: “Daddy’s just back violin made her sad, she said no, quite the contrary, from the doctor. You know how he’s sometimes a she was crying with delight at no longer having to little on edge when he gets back from the doctor.” listen to me scratching away at my instrument seven The doctor, I soon learned, was Louis Slotnik, days a week. then head of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. As the oldest of my father’s three children, I took I don’t know how long my father was in analysis, but the brunt of his nuttiness. Not that he was all that

Joseph Epstein has written for Commentary for half a century.

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consistent in his demands. He would often change I had a slump my sophomore year in high school. them without notice. “Just because the kid is Jewish,” For reasons too boring to go into here, I just stopped I heard him tell my mother, “doesn’t mean he has to turning in homework. My father was called into the play the goddamn violin.” Febrile is probably the word office of the guidance counselor, a Mrs. Miriam Gins- that best describes my father. He displayed every emo- berg, to decide on a course of action. I sat there next tion in the book except calm. to my father when Mrs. Ginsberg, after explaining my My father—Bernard Klepner is his name—had a conduct, said, “Maybe the boy is more role- than goal- late-night radio interview show on WMAQ in Chicago oriented.” I saw my father’s jaw set. “More role- than for many years. Before that he had taught political sci- goal-oriented?” he said. “So if I continue to let him get ence at Roosevelt University. His father, who had been away with this outrageous behavior, my role would be in the furniture business and with whom he hadn’t that of a schmuck, wouldn’t it?” I wanted to jump out spoken for more than a decade before my grandfa- the window behind Mrs. Ginsberg, but the point got ther’s death, died intestate. My father’s older brother, across, and I promptly returned to doing homework. Sam, had died from cancer years earlier, and so the On “The Bernie Klepner Show,” my father some- old man’s not-inconsiderable fortune—something just times spoke with local politicians, or mildly famous over a million dollars, a lot of money in those days— actors passing through Chicago, but chiefly his guests went to my father. When I asked my mother about my were authors flogging their books. “An interesting grandfather, she said that he was a man who seemed word, flogging,” I remember him saying, “suggesting to be angry full time. as it does a dead horse.” The show aired five nights a I never found out the cause of their falling-out, week, from 9 to 11 p.m., with the second hour devoted but with my father any of a thousand causes was pos- to calls from listeners. In any given week he might sible. In any case, the money freed him from teaching, interview an athlete, a nuclear scientist, a stand-up which he never really enjoyed. “Time to set the pearls comedian, a civil-rights leader, and a ballerina. Some before swine,” he used to say when he went off to Roo- of these people, innocently hoping for a little publicity, sevelt. “Sorry, swine,” he said in a self-toast at a small didn’t know what they were in for. retirement dinner given him by the three colleagues I stayed up one night as a kid to hear him inter- who still spoke to him, “no more pearls.” Soon there- view Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, recently retired from the after, and by what means I never quite understood, he Los Angeles Lakers. “Mr. Jabbar,” my father said, “what found himself with a radio show. does it say about our country that a man like you can My father had a thousand opinions, all of them become famous and a multimillionaire because he is strongly held, but even as a kid I never found it easy to inordinately tall and has acquired the knack of throw- make out exactly his point of view. On only two items ing a rubbery ball through a metal hoop?” I remember was this unmistakable: He was certain that we were a long silence followed, then a sudden break for a com- living in a time of momentous cultural debasement, mercial; and when my father returned he announced and he felt the world was out to get the Jews. “The bar- that Mr. Jabbar was called away by an emergency, and barians are no longer outside the gates,” he once told he would now replay an old interview he had done me. “They’ve had the gatekeeper on their payroll for with the novelist Nelson Algren, who had died three decades.” He also instructed me never to forget that weeks before. everyone keeps a cold place in his heart for the Jews. On the air my father once asked Mayor Daley— I remember the time I was ten years old and my the son, not the father—if corruption was absolutely father took me to buy a parka for the rough Chicago necessary to run a big city, or, as in the case of Chicago, winters. The salesman at Marshall Fields took a hood- was the rampant corruption instead only an Irish ed, khaki-colored coat off the rack and said, “Here’s a thing? In later years, I heard him begin an interview coat that’s been very popular this year.” To which my with Bill Clinton, then promoting his memoir, by father answered: “In that case we don’t want to see it. asking if he had any interests in life apart from sex, Show us something that isn’t so goddamn popular.” money, and power. He had the editor of Poetry Maga-

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zine on and asked him how he felt about his job now even by brutes. that poetry had become a mere intramural sport, read When the time came for me to go to college, my only by the people who were writing it. He asked Jesse father made plain that he would only allow me to go to Jackson how he had the gall to mount his own pulpit one school, the school he had gone to, the University after it was revealed that he had a child out of wedlock. of Chicago. Why people put themselves through my father’s buzz- “Let’s get this straight, kiddo,” he told me. “You saw by appearing on his show I never understood, but apparently have a good brain, and I’m not sending they did, five nights a week, for decades. you off to Brown or Tufts or Williams or Amherst, or On air or off, my father said whatever it occurred any other of these dumb designer colleges, and that to him to say. What was on his lung, as the old Yiddish includes Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.” phrase had it, was on his tongue. Was he candid, or “But, Dad,” I remember saying, “I was hoping to fearless, or merely nuts? Circumspection, like repres- get out of town for college.” sion, was, he held, for idiots. His ratings were high. As “It’s the U of C, or I don’t pay,” he said. “The many people listened to “The Bernie Klepner Show” school may have lots of flaws, and it’s probably not as because they hated him as because they liked him. But good as when I went there, but it’s still the only serious either way he had a steady following. joint in the country. The place was the making of me. My mother once told me that it was through his Case closed.” years of psychoanalysis that my father had learned The University of Chicago turned out to be far never to hold back. “Your father’s mother favored his from my idea of a good time. My father was right about older brother,” she said, “and made no bones about it. its seriousness, and maybe the problem is that I wasn’t The unfairness made it very hard for your father as he myself serious enough, at least not at age eighteen, was growing up. This was made worse by the fact that for it. I also fairly quickly sensed that there was a not- he could never get along with his father. Talking about so-hidden agenda at the University of Chicago, and it it with Dr. Slotnik relieves some of the pressure he still was that there were four things, and four things only, feels from being unwanted as a child.” worth being in life: an artist of some kind, a scientist, My father was short, 5'5'', 5'6'' tops, muscular, a statesman, and (the loophole) a teacher of artists, with heavy forearms and a low hairline of dark wavy scientists, or statesmen. I had neither the talent nor hair that he brushed straight back. He had to shave temperament nor even mild interest in becoming any twice a day: once in the morning, and then again of those things, which meant that, by the school’s stan- before going off to do his show downtown. There was dard, I would be just another peasant, no matter how something of the scrapper about him, not just men- much wealth I might acquire, raking gravel under the tally but also physically. Once, when I was nine years sun. That I didn’t take to the place, though I managed old, he took me to a White Sox–Cleveland game. At the to graduate from it, was, I suppose, another reason for game, two rows behind us, two drunks began taunting my father’s disappointment in me. Al Rosen, the Indians’ third baseman, yelling anti- Semitic remarks at him. WAS AT the end of my first year at the Uni- “Excuse me a moment, kiddo,” my father said. versity of Chicago when my mother died. I watched him make his way to the drunks, bulky Ovarian cancer took her in less than a year. working-class guys, and, moving in close to the one sit- My father was solicitous through his wife’s ting on the aisle, I heard my father say: “Shut the fuck illness, but he didn’t seem thrown by her up, or I’ll see you jagoffs are thrown out of the park.” I death.I “Life goes on,” he said more than once. He gave thought for sure they would punch him out then and the eulogy at my mother’s funeral, and it was quite there. Something in the intensity of the way he said it as much about him as about her, about his not being must have cowed them, and they stayed quiet for the able to have attained what he had in life without her, rest of the game. My father had made himself into a about how extraordinarily generous she was to him, man not to be trifled, or otherwise fooled, with, not about how sorely he and his children would miss her.

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Less than a year later, he married a woman he Street. My father dropped the Armani, Charvet, and knew from intermissions at the Chicago Symphony, Ferragamos, and returned to his sport-jackets, gray where they both had Friday-afternoon tickets. Clar- trousers, and loafers. I wasn’t part of any of this, since isse Froehlich was a German Jew, more German than my father and I had had a falling out that blasted our Jewish, from Alsace-Lorraine. She was also roughly relationship. six inches taller than he. Her pretensions were ex- At twenty-one, in my last year in college, I found treme. When told that I was a university student, she I needed to marry. I told my father in the hope that said that she hadn’t herself gone to university, add- he would offer to help me financially to bring it off. ing there was really no need to, for her gymnasium “Let me get this straight.” he said. “You don’t education was quite complete. “We studied Goethe, have any money, your education isn’t finished, you Schiller, Rilke in gymnasium,” she said. “Very seri- don’t have a job or any prospects for one. And now ous. Not like here.” you want to marry some lucky girl. Sounds to me like Her influence on him was immediate, and first a splendidly well-thought-out move.” showed up in his wardrobe. Married to my mother, he “I was hoping you might help me out,” I said. showed no special interest in clothes, went around in “Forget about it,” he said, “I would only be help- slightly rumpled sport-jackets, baggy gray trousers, ing you to destroy your life. Your marrying at twenty- and loafers. Now he began wearing Armani suits and one is preposterous.” Charvet bowties and Ferragamo shoes. When I asked This didn’t seem like the best time to tell him him what was going on, he replied, with a smile: “I’m that I myself didn’t think my marrying was such under new management.” a hot idea either, but that I had no choice, having At twenty-one, I was pretty much out of the made pregnant Jessica McNeil, the girl in question, house, and so suffered my father’s second wife’s re- a serious Catholic and hence implacably opposed to gime only glancingly. Things were tougher for my abortion. brother and my sister. Howard called her—behind “You were only five years older than I when you her and my father’s back, of course—the Krautessa. married mom. You were twenty-six, right?” What he saw in her, or she in him, was a mystery. She “But I’d finished school. I was employed. I knew didn’t need his money; she was a widow, and her first what I was doing.” husband had had a contract with Nike, for whom he “Dad,” I said, “it’s complicated.” made athletic socks, and had left her well off. Maybe “Not as far as I’m concerned it isn’t. Marry this her Europeanness attracted him. My father, for all his girl and we’re finished. Done. Kaput. Expect no help brusqueness, not to say neurosis, seemed to attract of any kind. Not now, not ever.” women who wished to look after him. My mother did “I see,” I said, and walked out of the room. so in a quiet, the Krautessa in a more aggressive, way. Two weeks later, Jessica miscarried; a blessing, Neither could finally change him. I realized even then. But I had already made my deci- My father sold our house in the suburb of High- sion to cut things off with my father. I couldn’t put up land Park and moved the family into the Krautessa’s with any more of his bullying. My tuition was paid large apartment, on east Lake Shore Drive, two build- through the end of the term, my final quarter at the ings down from the Drake Hotel. Howard, two years university. I had friends I could move in with, at least younger than I, was about to go off to the Northern temporarily. I could go it on my own. Illinois University (an uninterested student, he I rousted about for a year or two at various couldn’t get into Chicago) and Melissa, with two jobs, then I found real estate, for which it turned out years to go in high school, was transferred to the I had a knack. I began by selling homes on the North Latin School. Shore, then went into commercial real estate in the My father’s marriage to the Krautessa lasted a Loop. With two partners, I bought an eight-story little less than two years, after which the Klepners apartment building on Sheridan Road. That led to moved into a far less grand building on Pearson my acquiring, this time on my own, three graystones

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on the Gold Coast, which I was able to renovate and come an accountant. You hire an accountant.” How- flip fairly quickly. Suffice to say that, against all I ard kept me up to date on my father’s doings, not the was taught at the University of Chicago, I’ve made least notable of which was, at age sixty-six, a third a lot of money, and, peasant-raking-gravel-in-the- marriage, this time to a personal-injury lawyer, Teri sun though my old professors and classmates might Rabin, who specialized in spousal-abuse cases. She think me, I don’t have any regrets. I may not be able was in her mid-fifties. to create a poem or make a scientific discovery, but I “Her aggressiveness,” Howard reported, “makes enjoy putting together and making a deal, and I hope Dad look like Peter Pan. Her name’s Rabin but it to continue doing so for years to come. could more accurately be Rabid. Our dad doesn’t Twelve years after my non-marriage, I wed seem to mind. He finds it amusing.” Susan Levinson, a pediatrician. My brother Howard “Sounds like a woman dangerous to divorce was my best man, Melissa was one of Susan’s maids of from,” I said. honor; my father wasn’t invited. We hadn’t spoken in “Maybe we better set up a trust fund for him,” all this time. I had thought maybe this was the right Howard said, “just in case.” occasion to make things up between us, but then I Four years later, Teri acquired early-onset Al- decided it was his, not my, place to make the first zheimer’s and had to be put into a nursing home. I move toward a reconciliation, and in all that time he never met her. My brother told me that our father never made such a move. From time to time I asked attended to her well past the time when she could my brother if my father mentioned me. The answer any longer remember his name, continuing to visit was always negative. her in the dementia floor at the Northwest Home on I listened to “The Bernie Klepner Show” at odd California and Rosemont. She lived on, in a cloud of times: driving home from a movie or play or dinner obliviousness, for nine more years. with friends, in the bathroom while brushing my He could be rough, verbally brutal, tyrannical, teeth, up at night paying bills. One night I heard but my father wasn’t a skunk. And he didn’t have an him ask Edward Albee how he had come to hate the easy run. There were three marriages, none of which American family so much. Another night he asked gave him enduring satisfaction and two of which the president of Northwestern University, a Jew at a ended with him a widower. One of his sons turned school that once had strict anti-Jewish quotas, how out to be an accountant, which, by his University of it had come about that the Jewish presidents of so Chicago standards, fell on the prestige scale some- many American universities were just as mediocre where between a garbage man and a child molester. as their Gentile predecessors. He told an advocate of His other son, with whom he hadn’t spoken in more gay marriage that he was for gay marriage because he than twenty years, he had long ago written off as a didn’t see why, as a divorced man himself, gay men coarse money man. and lesbians should be spared the legal complica- Saddest of all was Melissa, who never really tions and nightmares of formal legal divorce. He had got over our mother’s death. She had two kids from an environmentalist on one night I had tuned in, and her first marriage to a man she had to chase for child promptly asked him what the hell the environment support after their divorce. After having a child with ever did for humanity, apart from floods, landslides, a second husband in her early thirties, she was di- earthquakes, tornados, monsoons, droughts, and agnosed as bipolar. She drank when depressed, and raging fires. A famous rapper came on, and the host hung around with all the wrong people when manic. asked him when he first realized there was a good Her husband left her, in part to save himself and save buck to made composing songs hating white people. the children, including the two that were not his own; Wild, like I say. with her assent, he promptly took them off to live in My brother Howard eventually came to work Oregon. Melissa moved in with our father, and con- for me. When he told him he was planning to become tinued her terrible cycle of highs and lows. an accountant, my father said: “Dope, you don’t be- Through all this sadness and chaos, “The Ber-

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nie Klepner Show” kept going. My father had once recited the Kaddish, I looked across the grave to see if had hopes of a local television talk show, but he was my father was crying. He wasn’t. But he seemed bent, deemed too harsh for television, at least for the televi- old, vulnerable. sion of that day, which called for an agreeable placid- As my father and Howard and his wife and ity. Agreeable and placid he wasn’t. daughter got into the limousine to return to town, my So he plugged away, expressing skepticism father rolled down the window. when he talked with women who wrote about the “Next time you come out here will be to bury child abuse they had undergone, making mincemeat me,” he said. “Try to remember to be respectful.” of pacifists, poking fun at people who wanted to legal- Before I could answer, the window closed and the ize pot, or end gun control, or “liberate” some class limousine pulled away. of people—anyone who was looking for a bit of free publicity or liked a good fight. HE WORLD continued to strip him bare. After forty years, the people at his station de- WMAQ cancelled “The Bernie Klepner cided that my father’s show was to be cut down from Show” and replaced it with sports talk, two to a single hour. “Their dumbing down the whole which somehow made it seem all the damn station,” he told my brother, “goddamn goyim.” more degrading to him. “Chewing up Only a few weeks later, our sister died in an accident staleT items about preposterous athletic salaries and on the Eisenhower Expressway, when the motorcycle trades and last night’s game,” he told me. “If that’s of the guy she was riding behind jumped the median what the morons want, screw ’em, let ’em have it.” and ran head on into a truck headed east—a Jewish We were back in touch, because, after thirty-two woman, forty-four years of age, on a Harley driven by years and the burial of my sister, I offered to take him one Steve Woszjewhawski. to lunch at the old Tavern Club, where I was on the The funeral was at Weinstein-Piser on Skokie board. It was awkward, and at first he hadn’t much to Boulevard and Church Street. I sat with Howard and say. Then, after a while, he found his voice. And then he his family and my wife and our two sons in the front remarked, out of the blue, that he thought it interesting row. Melissa’s coffin was closed. Her children were not he had fallen out with his father just as I had fallen out flown in for this horrendously sad occasion. My father with him. sat next to Howard. It had been thirty-two years since “Maybe we have more in common than either our break. He still had all his hair, but it had turned of us thought,” I said. white; he wore glasses; his stockiness was gone; he “I doubt it,” he replied. “Your brother tells me walked with a slight limp. He was near eighty. you’re a wealthy man.” “The plutocrat returns,” he said. “I suppose I am,” I said. “How are you?” I asked. “I gather you sit around all day conjuring up “Fine, apart from being broken-hearted,” he deals. I’ll bet you drift off to sleep thinking up how said. “I loved that poor girl. I hope you know that.” you can make still more money?” “Of course I do. It was good of you to take her in “Actually I don’t,” I said. “But I sometimes wake after her divorce.” up with terrific ideas about how to do so. “And here I am, like my father, a member of that “Fact is,” I continued, “I do spend a lot of time saddest of all fraternities, parents who have buried a thinking about money—about how to make it, about child. I don’t like it, not a damn bit.” how to keep it safe, about to make more out of what I Somehow we got through the funeral: the already have. You find that objectionable?” platitudes of a rabbi who had never known her about “No,” he said, “I find it unimaginable. I can’t the early death of a woman who had been plagued concentrate on money long enough to balance my by mental illnesses, the long ride out to Westlawn checkbook, let alone read financial reports.” Cemetery, the sad lowering of my sister’s casket into “Are you saying your mind is on higher things?” the grave that was next to our mother’s. As the rabbi “Yep,” he said, “that’s what I’m saying.”

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“I’m pleased you are able to feel so good about of contemporary society: physicians, lawyers, profes- yourself.” sors, businessmen, civil servants, diplomats, and so “We can’t all be luftmenschen, I understand that. on, until there is no one left for whom he doesn’t feel I might envy you your dough, but I don’t admire you.” contempt but himself. Soon after he dies. I think I’m “I on the other hand might admire you your about there.” freedom, but I don’t envy you at all, so I guess we’re As we were leaving the Tavern Club, on the el- even, or pretty close to it,” I said, feeling as if I were evator down from the twenty-fifth floor, my father, not sitting opposite him with a microphone in front of my looking at me, said: “I apologize. I regret the years we face in his studio. missed out on.” “You’re not as dumb as you look,” he said with a “I’m equally to blame,” I said. “No apology smile. needed.” We began meeting every six weeks or so, and Had we been different men, we might have talked about the great world. Or rather he talked hugged. Instead we both kept our eyes on the floor about it, and I listened. He felt everything good in life until the elevator arrived at the lobby. was slipping away, all politicians were crooks, aca- Three weeks later, he had a stroke. I visited him demics hopeless, current novelists unreadable, poets at Rush Medical Center. His left side was paralyzed. nonexistent, plays not worth paying the outlandish His face seemed frozen, his speech greatly slurred. sums asked to see them, social scientists mostly full I approached his bed, grasped his hand. “Visit,” of crap, journalists whores. These were rants, but he said, very slowly, with long pauses between the fairly impressive ones. words. “Teri. Wife. All. Alone. Sad.” “You’ve probably never heard of a writer named His death made the front page, below the fold, Umberto Eco,” he said at our last lunch together. “Eco of the Chicago Tribune: “Controversial Radio Host somewhere writes that as a sapient man grows older Bernard Klepner Dead at 83.” he gradually develops contempt for whole segments The Bernie Klepner Show was over.q

Commentary 47

EPSTEIN.indd 47 1/14/16 2:52 PM Commentary ebooks

Elliott Abrams Douglas J. Feith & Seth Cropsey Bill Gertz Abe Greenwald James Kirchick John Podhoretz Bret Stephens

OVER THE PAST FIVE YEARS, America has been little more than a spectator to a perilous global breakdown. Under President Barack Obama, the United States has failed to pursue its interests, stand up for its values, reassure its allies, and intimidate its antagonists. As a result, industrial-scale killing has gone unpunished, Islamist terrorists have declared statehood, our worst enemy has pulled within striking distance of a nuclear bomb, and Europe stands on the brink of war. The Obama Foreign Policy Disaster, featuring articles by Bret Stephens, Elliott Abrams, and others from Commentary magazine, details the failures of American leadership in the Obama age and fi nds the cause of our present danger in the very ideology of the 44th president.

AVAILABLE AT DOWNLOAD IT TODAY!

Politics&Ideas.indd 48 1/14/16 3:07 PM Commentary ebooks

Politics & Ideas Elliott Abrams Douglas J. Feith & Seth Cropsey Bill Gertz Don’t Take Me Abe Greenwald James Kirchick to Church John Podhoretz Bret Stephens Soul Mates: included this: “Observers report ful decline even while African Religion, Sex, Love, and that the Negro churches have all Americans remained the most Marriage among African but lost contact with men in the religious group in the country. Americans and Latinos Northern cities as well. This may And while church attendance has By W. Bradford Wilcox and be a normal condition of urban life, typically been a reliable bulwark Nicholas Wolfinger but it is probably a changed condi- of marriage and responsible child- Oxford University Press, 218 pages tion for the Negro American and rearing for white Americans, its ef- cannot be a socially desirable de- fects on blacks in recent years have Reviewed by velopment.” been much weaker and in some Naomi Schaefer Riley He reported that the only reli- cases nonexistent. OVER THE PAST FIVE YEARS, America has been little more than a spectator to a gious group to whom these men This is among the findings in perilous global breakdown. Under President Barack Obama, the United States has HALF century ago, seemed to be gravitating were Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love, failed to pursue its interests, stand up for its values, reassure its allies, and intimidate when Daniel Pat- Black Muslims, “a movement based and Marriage Among African its antagonists. As a result, industrial-scale killing has gone unpunished, Islamist rick Moynihan was on total rejection of white society.” Americans and Latinos, a new terrorists have declared statehood, our worst enemy has pulled within striking compiling his ex- The loss of church, particularly as a book by sociologists W. Bradford tensive list of prob- factor helping to teach responsibil- Wilcox at the University of Virginia distance of a nuclear bomb, and Europe stands on the brink of war. The Obama Foreign lemsA contributing to the break- ity and middle-class values to black and Nicholas H. Wolfinger at the Policy Disaster, featuring articles by Bret Stephens, Elliott Abrams, and others from down of the black family, he men, led Moynihan to conclude University of Utah. Commentary magazine, details the failures of American leadership in the Obama age that “the tangle of pathology is The two begin their book with and fi nds the cause of our present danger in the very ideology of the 44th president. Naomi Schaefer Riley is tightening.” an account of how changes in the the author of ’Til Faith Do Us It is among the most bitter American family have adversely af- Part: How Interfaith Marriage Is ironies of this story that the black fected all racial groups in America, Transforming America. family experienced a uniquely aw- but blacks and Latinos dispro- AVAILABLE AT DOWNLOAD IT TODAY! Commentary 49

Politics&Ideas.indd 49 1/14/16 4:56 PM portionately so. “In 1960, only 5 pendence on the government and percent of children were born out Citing “penalizing marriage among the of wedlock; in 2011, 41 percent of i poor and working class.” For Blow children were,” they write. “From the and many on the left, the problem 1980 to 2011, the percentage of legacy of slavery is that government is not giving children born out of wedlock rose the poor and working class enough for blacks from 56 to 72 percent does not explain money, not that it has given them and for Latinos from 24 to 53 per- too much. Indeed, later in the same cent; by comparison, for whites it why black column Blow writes, “I don’t buy rose from 9 to 29 percent.” More marriage rates into the mythology that most poor than two-thirds of black children people are . . . happy to live with the lived outside of a married, two- were higher help of handouts from a benevo- parent family in 2011. and single lent big government that is equally The authors argue that both happy to keep them dependent.” economic and cultural factors have motherhood Happy might not be the right led to lower rates of marriage, rates were lower word—but dependence is depen- higher rates of divorce and, most dence. important, higher rates of out- in the first half The real contribution of Soul of-wedlock childbearing. Scholars of the 20th Mates comes in its analysis of such as Andrew Cherlin and Rob- the marital habits of blacks and ert Putnam have made the case century. Latinos and how religious life has that the decline in the family was and has not affected them. The due in large part to the under- first set of statistics that stand out employment and falling wages of while Wolfinger is single, liberal, are the ones regarding infidelity. working-class men in the late ’60s and secular. For every cultural Twenty-nine percent of black wom- and early ’70s. Without the skills argument they offer for the prob- en report “infidelity or suspected necessary to earn a good living, lems of the family, they advance infidelity” in their relationships, non-college-educated men became an economic one. They are always compared with 22 percent of La- less desirable marriage partners. sure to suggest that racism, segre- tina women and 7 percent of white Not only that; women’s entry into gation, or even the historic legacy women. And those are among the workforce meant that women of slavery could be among the the ones who are married. When needed men’s contributions less. causes of the problems they see. In one looks at partnerships among Or thought they did. addition to changing the culture never-married adults, the patterns And that in turn also weakened of the ghetto, they suggest things become even more stark. Thirty-six marriage. As Wilcox and Wolfinger like eliminating jail sentences for percent of black men have had two write: “Even as women’s labor- nonviolent drug offenders. or more sexual partners in the past force participation began to rival Their effort to be bipartisan year, compared with 23 percent of men’s they still found themselves sometimes results in the disin- Latino men and 21 percent of white doing the lion’s share of housework genuous use of quotations from men. and child care. This threatened sources. For instance, they say they Forty-two percent of unmar- marriages by producing more do- agree with the New York Times’s ried black women say that “most mestic strife. Accordingly, men Charles Blow when he says that of the single men I know are not and women, especially in working he “takes enormous exception to earning enough money.” But 55 class and poor communities where arguments about the ‘breakdown percent of them say, “men cannot women’s relative gains have been of the family,’ particularly the black be trusted to be sexually faithful.” strongest, became less likely to get family, that don’t acknowledge While there are those who claim and stay married.” that this country for centuries has that these findings are the result of The authors go to great pains endeavored, consciously and not, the legacy of slavery in which black to show that they have not ap- to break it down.” families were forcibly broken up, proached their subject from a par- But on the next page, the au- such theories do not explain why ticular political perspective—Wil- thors cite the changes in welfare black marriage rates were higher cox describes himself as a married, policy in the 1960s that had the and single motherhood rates were conservative, religious person, unintended effect of increasing de- lower in the first half of the 20th

50 Politics & Ideas : February 2016

Politics&Ideas.indd 50 1/14/16 3:07 PM century than they are now. hold true across the board. Sur- “Whatever their historical roots,” Only the prisingly, the researchers find that note Wilcox and Wolfinger, “con- i “regular church attendance sub- cerns about infidelity and distrust church stantially decreases divorce rates, come up frequently in our inter- is working but only for whites.” views.” Keisha, one of the women Perhaps, the authors pro- they spoke with, explained: “I was against the pose, this is a selection problem. in a relationship for a long time. . . . It Whites who attend church are ended because I was cheated on; so trend of familial already less likely to believe that I don’t think I don’t [sic] really value instability. divorce is acceptable; indeed, relationships anymore either.” that may be why they want to go The authors speculate that Unfortunately, to church. But for blacks, attend- there may be other cultural causes for blacks, the ing church is “the expected thing of this instability: “Since the 1960s, to do.” For whites, on the other American popular culture has church seems to hand, churchgoing has become taken an increasingly hedonistic have a weaker “less conventional.” turn, such that consumers . . . are For many blacks, church is exposed to an ethic of immediate effect than it has more of a social or even a politi- gratification . . . that encompasses a on whites and cal institution than it is a place to range of behaviors from drug use hear messages about personal sin. to sexual infidelity.” Since blacks Latinos. Wilcox and Wolfinger sample the and Latino children consume al- messages at churches in a number most twice as much television as of black and Latino neighborhoods whites, this may be having some Regular attendees are also less and find that they are fairly wa- effect on their behavior. likely to believe that a single moth- tered down. As one black woman But the bottom line is this: Even er can bring up a child as well as reports about her Baptist church if all the Great Society policies two parents can. But in both cases in Harlem, her pastor “doesn’t talk that conservatives see as contrib- the effects of churchgoing seem about [sexual conduct] often.” The uting to these problems were to to be stronger for whites than for one time he did, the many single end tomorrow, the legacy of these minorities. mothers and unmarried couples decades of family breakdown and So what about marriage? Regu- were very uncomfortable. mistrust would be hard to erase lar church attendance increases The authors write: “We suspect any time soon. the odds by about two-thirds that that the abundance of nontradi- The only institution that is someone will be married. For black tional families in black and Latino working against these trends is the women, though, the odds go up congregations has often left their church. Unfortunately, for blacks, only about 50 percent. And for clergy and lay leaders disinclined the church seems to have a weaker Latina women, there is only a 17 to address questions of sex and effect than it has on whites and percent increase in marriage rates. out-of-wedlock childbearing. This Latinos when it comes to all sorts Church attendance can actually may help explain why religion is of problems afflicting the commu- move couples away from the altar, less likely to guide the sexual and nities. For instance, “Churchgoing according to the authors, if one reproductive behavior of blacks whites are about half as likely as partner (usually the woman) is and Latinos.” their less religious peers to have attending and the other is not. In All of which is to say that the used drugs in the last month, com- other words, a woman’s standards situation is even worse today than pared to about one-third less likely may rise by being a regular church- it was when Moynihan wrote his for Latinos and approximately 15 goer and she may be more inclined report. It’s not simply that not percent less likely for African to reject the available options. enough black men are attending Americans.” The same is true for Marital happiness tends to in- church—a decline he had already binge drinking. crease with churchgoing for all rac- begun to see. It’s that the people Similarly, there is a strong as- es. And usually it tends to increase going to church are not getting sociation between regular church marital stability. But the old adage the messages they used to get. The attendance and the belief that that couples who pray together tangle of pathology is indeed tight- premarital sex is always wrong. stay together does not necessarily ening. q

Commentary 51

Politics&Ideas.indd 51 1/14/16 3:07 PM THE COMMENTARY A Reformer STORE Reformed WOOL FLANNEL Until We Are Free: My Fight The scheme bore all the hall- BASEBALL for Human Rights in Iran marks of the Islamic Republic—de- HAT By Shirin Ebadi ception, paranoia, and a fondness .99 $44 Random House, 304 pages for secret confession. While they may appear hamfisted and absurd, Reviewed by Sohrab Ahmari these tactics have kept the regime in power for nearly four decades. N DECEMBER someone Indeed, the Islamic Republic has claiming to be a producer for solidified its rule to such an extent Manoto, a popular new Per- that it’s hard to imagine a viable, sian-language TV station, broad-based opposition emerging in contacted me on Twitter. the foreseeable future. Our timeless, navy blue, wool “My colleagues and I are soliciting That depressing thought ani- flannel baseball hat features I Commentary’s embroidered logo. feedback from media personalities mates the Iranian jurist Shirin Eba- A classic 6 panel, low profile, fitted and experts such as yourself to help di’s revealing new memoir, Until We cap with a rounded shape. Great for all weather. Made in the USA. improve our programming,” he Are Free. After the ayatollahs seized AVAILABLE IN S/M AND M/L. wrote. Would I have a few minutes to power in 1979, Ebadi was demoted complete a survey over Skype? Hav- to a clerk in the court over which she ing recently appeared as a panelist had presided as Iran’s first female on one of Manoto’s roundtable judge under the Shah. Most would shows, I agreed. have escaped the country at that I should have known better. Days point. But Ebadi, who initially sup- earlier, Bloomberg reporter Kambiz ported the revolution, resolved to Foroohar had exposed this “survey” stay and would go on to build a sec- 100% COTTON PIQUÉ as a fishing expedition on the part ond career as a lawyer representing POLO of Iranian intelligence. Someone us- some of Iranian society’s most vul- T-SHIRT ing the same fake Twitter account nerable groups: women, children, $ .99 had attempted to ensnare Foroohar refugees, minorities, and dissidents. 42 and a slew of other Iranian writers Ebadi’s activism briefly landed working for major Western outlets. her in prison in 2000. Three years Our classic white 100% cotton piqué Foroohar had accepted the invita- later, she won the Nobel Peace Prize. polo T-shirt features Commentary’s embroidered logo. It has a tapered tion, and posted a video of his Skype Although her bravery was never in knit collar and cuffs along with conversation to Facebook. The man doubt, Ebadi was not an unequivo- double-stitched seams for a great fit throughout. AVAILABLE IN XS, S, M, on the other end didn’t seem to know cal enemy of the regime. She stood L, XL, XXL SIZES. a thing about London, where Mano- squarely in Iran’s reformist camp. to is based. When Foroohar pressed Throughout the 1990s, the reformist To place your order, him about his location, the inter- movement attempted to introduce contact Salli Walker viewer fell silent. Then he mumbled: pluralistic elements into the Iranian at swalker@ “Wimbledon Stadium.” The imposter system without rocking the Kho- commentarymagazine.com was almost certainly lurking some- meinist boat. “Islamic democracy” or call us 212.891.6733. where in the bowels of Iran’s security was the watchword, and some re- Please allow 6 to 8 weeks for delivery. We ship only within apparatus, Foroohar concluded. formists went so far as to claim they the continental U.S. were recovering Khomeinism’s toler- Sohrab Ahmari is an editorial ant essence. It was a delusion. Commentary writer for the Wall Street Journal The United States had already in London. invaded Iraq when she received the

52 Politics & Ideas : February 2016

Politics&Ideas.indd 52 1/14/16 4:59 PM Nobel, and the Norwegian Commit- fessions, but the humiliation they tee was known to be against the war. The cause is deeply scarring. At her lecture in Oslo, Ebadi deliv- i The mullahs didn’t stop. They ered the ideological goods. “Why is mullahs confiscated Ebadi’s Nobel medal, de- it that in the past 35 years, dozens of confiscated tained her sister, forced the Ebadis to UN resolutions concerning the occu- sell most of their assets to pay an ar- pation of the Palestinian territories Ebadi’s Nobel bitrary tax on her Nobel cash award, by the state of Israel have not been and barred the septuagenarian Ja- implemented promptly,” she asked. medal, detained vad from traveling abroad to see his “Yet, in the past 12 years, the state her sister, and family. The implosion of the Ebadis’ and people of Iraq… were subjected loving marriage under regime pres- to attack, military assault, economic forced family sure makes for the book’s most poi- sanctions, and, ultimately, military members to sell gnant, heartbreaking chapters. This occupation.” Then Ebadi articulated is the stuff of Arthur Koestler novels the basic reformist idea. Islam, she most of their and Krzysztof Kies´lowski films. Only, said, “cannot be in conflict with assets to pay an it’s real life in modern Iran. In 2013, awareness, knowledge, wisdom, the couple divorced. Ebadi lost her freedom of opinion and expression, arbitrary tax on eyebrows from the trauma, and Ja- and cultural pluralism.” her Nobel cash vad was left a broken man. The Shiite Islamists who run Iran These ordeals, some of which disagreed with her. In the years since award. Ebadi is disclosing for the first time, her Nobel triumph, they have set out have clearly forced her to reconsider. to destroy Ebadi—and have mostly Unlike many of her reformist allies, succeeded. Until We Are Free is rigged 2009 presidential election. for example, she puts little stock in Ebadi’s account of the devastation. It Ebadi had traveled to Europe just President Hassan Rouhani’s “moder- is a revealing and dark work, notable before the Green uprising against ate” inclinations, noting how some for the author’s frank reassessment the re-elected Mahmoud Ahmadine- of his cabinet appointees are notori- of some of her earlier positions. jad, and it soon became clear that ous human-rights violators and how It is also a flawed book, with a she couldn’t return home as the the “climate for women, especially, baggy narrative full of banalities regime’s crackdown intensified. Ira- [is] deteriorating by the day, despite and disjointed events. Ever since the nian security forces had already Rouhani’s election.” She still clings success of Azar Nafisi’s wonderful restricted her activities in various to some of the old misty nonsense, Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), ways and even added her name to a however, as when she claims that Americans have taken a special in- list of dissidents marked for extraju- this or that barbarous Iranian law terest in first-person accounts that dicial assassination. But she had, up is a “distortion of true Islamic le- shed light on Iranian citizens and until then, evaded the worst of their gal principles.” What I think Ebadi their quest for freedom and self- machinations. means is that her own humane ver- fulfillment. But while the raw mate- In August 2009, Ebadi, then liv- sion of the faith—the one practiced rial can be compelling, these books ing in The Hague, received a call by millions of middle-class, urban are often missing a big idea or a from her husband, Javad. He was Iranians who pray a little and booze cohesive story. Such is the problem despondent. A former lover had se- a little—is preferable to Khomeinist with Until We Are Free. There are too duced him—and it was a setup. Once doctrine. I agree, but she doesn’t many empty passages like the one the two were naked in bed, regime marshal much evidence to suggest describing how Ebadi’s daughter agents poured into the room. They that the more humane version is also “would often spread her law books had been filming the whole scene. the more authentic one. out on the table in the evenings, and Finally the regime had something Ebadi has a point, though, we would work together side by side, in hand that could diminish the when she says that liberal Muslims one of us occasionally rising to pour Nobelist’s moral stature. Threaten- should learn the “subtleties of more tea or bring out a bowl of dried ing Javad with execution, the Intel- Sharia law, philosophy, and tradi- mulberries.” ligence Ministry coerced him into tion,” since “well-trained and eru- It isn’t until more than halfway denouncing Ebadi as a foreign agent dite students would be equipped through that the story comes to- (and a tyrannical wife). Few Iranians to argue for fresher and more gether, amid the drama of Iran’s believe these Soviet-style forced con- modern angles and approaches to

Commentary 53

Politics&Ideas.indd 53 1/14/16 3:07 PM Islamic laws.” It’s fine to embrace “cultural Islam,” or relate to the faith like Jack Mormons and lapsed Unto the Catholics, as many liberal Iranians do. But so long as Islamists can project textual authority, they will dominate an important front in the Generations battleground of ideas. There is also a refreshing hones- The Pater: My Father, My Israel, had a traditional upbring- ty to how Ebadi sees her own work. Judaism, My Childlessness ing that allows him to comb Jew- Openness in Iran, she concedes, By Elliot Jager ish literature with ease and arrive “rests largely on the political condi- The Toby Press, 206 pages at insights that are both shrewd tions of Iran, not on my abilities as and disturbing. To find answers, a lawyer.” About those conditions, Reviewed by David Wolpe he also seeks out Jewish scholars, Ebadi is now largely pessimistic. explores the sociological literature, Reflecting on the 2013 election that LLIOT JAGER’S new and invokes everyone from Camus brought Rouhani to power, she book has a particu- to Mother Ann Lee, the founder of notes: “Iranians’ demands for free, larly provocative sub- the Shakers in America. democratic elections had been so title: “My Father, My The Pater is not an anthology of far reduced, their expectations so Judaism, My Child- wisdom, however, but the record of diminished, that they were glad- E lessness.” The kicker there is at the a journey. Jager’s meditations on dened by vote counting that was end, of course: childlessness. Both his childlessness are spun around not fraudulent, in an election pro- father and Judaism somehow im- the story of his relationship with cess that had vetted candidates so ply children. Jager’s trinity seems his father, who abandoned his fam- stringently that it could hardly be to stop us in our tracks. These ily not once but twice. After the considered a competition.” On Ira- days, there is a popular genre of second disappearance, 30 years nian social media, the democratic writing about people who come to passed before Jager saw or spoke consciousness of 2009 is fading understand their parents through to his father again. When he did, away. Taking its place is an ugly their own experiences raising chil- his father was full of recommenda- Persian-Shiite chauvinism, mostly dren, not through an absence of tions to cure his son’s childless- directed against Sunnis and Arabs. offspring. And Judaism, with its ness. The irony was painful for Perhaps the Tiananmen effect re- first commandment to “be fruitful Jager, and for us. ally has set in, as the country’s most and multiply,” its anxiety about Jager’s ruminations alternate pessimistic observers argue—that is, numbers and continuity, and its between anguish, reflection, and the Tehran regime has, through a central prayer, the shema, com- wry lament. “If you’re feeling combination of bloody repression manding us to “teach these words forlorn on a Saturday night—and and co-optation, managed to perma- to our children”—Judaism doesn’t want to keep it that way,” he writes, nently pacify its people, as the Chi- merely imply progeny. It obsesses “here’s a movie streaming sugges- nese Communist Party did after the on it. tion: Children of Men.” In addition 1989 massacre in Beijing. As Ebadi What, then, does it mean to be to that droll reflection on a film points out, by underwriting Bashar a learned, searching, married Jew about a world in which no one has al-Assad’s slaughter in next-door Syr- who is unable to have a child? One had children for a half-century, ia, the ayatollahs telegraphed to their of the accomplishments of Jager’s Jager offers up some surprising own people that they would sooner engaging book is that he has statistics that help quantify child- set Iran on fire than give up power. thought through that question— lessness in general. In America, That message has been received. even felt through it—from almost about 20 percent of women will Then again, as my own recent every conceivable angle. Jager, An never have children. The birthrate brush with Iranian spooks shows, American-born journalist living in fell by 6 percent between 2007 a regime that goes to such lengths and 2010 among U.S.-born women. to dig dirt on a TV network that David Wolpe is the rabbi of And for those who are trying to runs beauty pageants and reruns of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and get pregnant with medical help, LipSync Battle can’t be feeling all the author, most recently, of Da- the results are not as encouraging that invulnerable.q vid: The Divided Heart. as we may think. In Israel, a na-

54 Politics & Ideas : February 2016

Politics&Ideas.indd 54 1/14/16 5:06 PM tion that leads in both scientific me children or I am dead.” What is “the pram in the hall.” Some ar- advances and childbearing, the in must such texts mean to a woman gue, therefore, that artistry should vitro fertilization failure rate is “a or man who cannot conceive? trump biology when it comes to staggering 75 percent.” Jewish tradition, however, has creation. We read about the ordeal of its consolations—even if they don’t Such arguments have an unend- the Jager family’s unsuccessful at- always manage to soothe. The full ing quality to them, and The Pater tempts to get pregnant: the treat- sting of Jager’s discouragement is does not tie up the matter with ments, the disappointments, and felt in the title of one particular a bow. Rather it leaves readers the stunning expense. Above all, chapter: “The Small Matter of the with Jager’s pain and questioning. there is the emotional toll of de- Meaning of Life.” While Judaism There is pleasure to be found at the feat. Jager ultimately abandons instructs that teaching someone is depth of the Jewish tradition, but his religious orthodoxy as a sort of equivalent to giving birth to him, also anguish over its smug certain- “reprimand to God.” If the Jewish Jager notes that many people say ties. In the end, perhaps the book tradition is about children, and it is having children, more than is the author’s stand-in creation, God refuses to cooperate, how can anything else, that gives their own not a biological descendent but one maintain reverence? Jager’s lives meaning. undoubtedly an instrument for urge to reprove God is more deeply We know there are many ways passing on knowledge. Jager may understood when one considers to contribute to the world, and not have a child but he has enabled the Talmudic attitude toward his there are far fewer people who can those who do have children to situation. Rabbi Joshua ben Levi paint or write than can conceive understand better the trials of the says, “A man who is childless is a child. And as the critic Cyril childless, and he has given both accounted as dead,” quoting the Connoly pointed out, the most for- voice and comfort to others like matriarch Rachel who said, “Give midable obstacle to great writing himself. q

C $29.95 C

Commentary 55

Politics&Ideas.indd 55 1/14/16 5:06 PM Culture & Civilization

Tap, Look, and Listen

The decline of a great tion, which ran for 575 performanc- American art es, this one received lukewarm re- Kelly had the lower center of grav- views and closed after two months. ity, the muscular torque in form- By Terry Teachout What was tap dancing like in its revealing costumes, the manly cultural heyday? Until now, there sex appeal, and the strength to HROUGHOUT much has been only one book of any do Douglas Fairbanks stunts, of the 20th century, substance about the history of tap, but, as a tap dancer, he was the tap dancing was the Marshall and Jean Stearns’s Jazz lightweight . . . . His rhythms were quintessential style of Dance (1968). But Jazz Dance has utterly predictable, with an Irish American theatrical finally been supplemented and to lilt and a triplet feel. In the age of T dance. Edwin Denby, America’s a considerable extent superseded swing, he seldom swung. foremost ballet critic, wrote in 1943 by Brian Seibert’s What the Eye that “tap dancing is what we think Hears: A History of Tap Dancing, Above all, Seibert understands of as a natural way of dancing in this a primary-source study that is very that tap is an intimate and insepa- country.” But while it continues to well written and—for the most rable fusion of movement and mu- be seen on Broadway, it is no longer part—accessible to the lay reader.* sic. Indeed, his title is adapted from predominant in theatrical choreog- Seibert, a New York–based dance a remark about tap dancing made raphy and is now all but invisible critic and amateur tapper, does by one of its noted practitioners, (and inaudible) in movies and on not shy away from using technical Paul Draper: “What the eye sees is TV. The diminished cultural status language to parse the routines of sharpened by what the ear hears, of tap was underlined by the 2015 which he writes. But his engagingly and the ear hears more clearly that Broadway revival of Dames at Sea, a conversational style helps make the which sight enhances.” In that fusion 1966 homage to the tap-oriented rough places plain, and readers can lies the enduring beauty of the best movie musicals of the 1930s. Unlike view on YouTube the film and TV tap dancing. the original off-Broadway produc- appearances by many of the dancers Tap is a multicultural amalgam of whom he discusses, making it easier folk dance styles that are percussive: Terry Teachout is Commen- to see what he is talking about. The sound of a dancer’s feet hitting tary’s critic-at-large and the drama Moreover, one need not know any- the floor is not only intended to be critic of the Wall Street Journal. He thing about dance in order to ap- audible but is central to the total will make his professional direct- preciate his vivid descriptions of effect of his dancing. (In classical ing debut in May with Palm Beach tap dancers, such as this trenchant ballet, foot sounds are not normally Dramaworks’ production of his first analysis of the differences between play, Satchmo at the Waldorf. Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire: * Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 612 pp.

56 February 2016

Culture & Civ.indd 56 1/14/16 3:21 PM supposed to be heard by the audi- Black tap dancers, unlike their ence.) They include African tribal At some white counterparts, were not al- dance, Irish “step dancing” and i point lowed to play leading roles (other English jigs, hornpipes and clog than in all-black shows). But a dancing, the last of which was per- early in the 20th handful of them did appear in formed in the wooden-soled “clogs” featured solo spots in big-budget worn by farmers and mill workers century, clogs movies, foremost among them Rob- in the 19th century. At some point were adapted for inson and, later, the Nicholas Broth- in the early decades of the 20th cen- ers, whose best-remembered film tury, clogs were adapted for theatri- theatrical use performance, “The Jumpin’ Jive” cal use by replacing the wood with by replacing the in Stormy Weather (1943, accompa- metal taps, which make a sharp, nied by Cab Calloway’s band), is a penetrating click when they strike wood with metal riotous explosion of joy whose acro- a stage floor. taps, which batic climax, in which the two danc- These styles were commingled ers perform a series of seemingly when their practitioners emigrated make a sharp, impossible splits on a staircase, is at or were brought as slaves to Amer- penetrating once comic and thrilling. ica, in much the same way that Ap- Even though it was a popular art palachian folk song and the blues click when they form, critics began taking tap seri- came together to form country strike a stage ously early on. John Martin, Ameri- music. The new dance style that ca’s first full-time dance critic, wrote resulted was disseminated by min- floor. about it from the beginning of his strel-show troupes. Ragtime and tenure at the New York Times in jazz were simultaneously shaped 1927. But it was not until the advent by these troupes, and their dancers note of tap dancing with the coming of Fred Astaire (1899–1987), the (most of them black, though whites of synchronized sound in 1928. “The most admired and creative of all quickly became part of the creative beat of dancing feet” was promi- tap dancers, that it became more process, as was the case with jazz) nently featured in such early Hol- than merely an opportunity for in- developed a more syncopated style, lywood musicals as Busby Berke- dividual technical display. also called “step dancing,” that was ley’s 42nd Street (1933), although Not long after he began mak- the immediate forerunner of tap. Berkeley was more interested in ing films in Hollywood in 1933, Minstrelsy fed directly into mass visual effects than dance per Astaire seized artistic control of all vaudeville, and while the latter was se and made no contributions to the aspects of the dance numbers in a primarily white enterprise, some art of tap. his films, starting with the chore- black tap dancers became vaude- Vaudeville was on the way out ography (which he worked out in ville stars. The most important of when sound film was introduced, collaboration with “dance directors,” them was Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and tap dancers thereafter mainly most frequently Hermes Pan, but (1878–1949), a light-footed, brilliant- worked in clubs. But tap continued for which the imaginative impetus ly precise performer who tapped up to be popular on Broadway as well was mainly his own). In addition, and down a staircase in his signature as in Hollywood, and it caught he insisted on having them photo- routine. His wooden-soled style was the eye and ear of choreographers graphed in full-figure shots in which described by Robert Benchley in trained in other disciplines. One he and his partners filled the screen. 1930 as “indescribably liquid, like a of them, George Balanchine, incor- A first-class singer as well as an ac- brook flowing over pebbles.” Start- porated tap into the original stage complished pianist and drummer ing in 1934, Robinson co-starred versions of On Your Toes (1936), in whose dancing was deeply informed with Shirley Temple in a series of which he choreographed “Slaughter by swing-era jazz, Astaire also played films that brought him to the notice on Tenth Avenue” for Ray Bolger, a key role in selecting the musical of white moviegoers. As a result, he who later played the Scarecrow in numbers to which he danced, as well was the first great tapper to leave The Wizard of Oz, and Babes in as in developing their orchestral ar- behind enough film footage to make Arms (1937), which featured Fa- rangements. No popular theatrical it possible for today’s dance lovers to yard Nicholas (1914–2006) and his dancer has ever been so intensely, understand why he was so admired. brother Harold (1921–2000), a pair comprehensively musical. The American film industry took of black tap prodigies. Above all, Astaire insisted that

Commentary 57

Culture & Civ.indd 57 1/14/16 3:21 PM his dances be related to the emo- ballet I’m Old Fashioned (Astaire tional arcs of the films in which Gene Variations). he starred. “Every dance ought to i Network television continued to spring somehow out of the charac- Kelly provide a modest amount of sup- ter or the situation,” he explained. was primarily port for tap dancers with its variety “Otherwise, it is simply a vaudeville shows, many of whose hosts had act.” And while some of them were interested in come out of vaudeville. Milton comic, others were unabashedly dance not for its Berle’s Texaco Star Theater and romantic. This necessitated a wider The Ed Sullivan Show, for example, dance vocabulary, since the percus- own sake but as featured tap throughout their runs. sive language of tap did not lend an extension of But the creative center of the genre itself to romanticism. To this end, started moving toward dancers who he incorporated ballroom dancing acting, whereas performed to the accompaniment of and certain aspects of ballet (radi- Fred Astaire, small-group jazz, starting with Baby cally transformed, but present and Laurence (1921–74), a miraculously visible) into his style, most notably though he had fleet soloist who worked in clubs in the pop-culture pas de deux that other highly with Charlie Parker and in 1959 re- he danced with Ginger Rogers and corded tap solos accompanied by an his other screen partners. developed all-star jazz combo (as Astaire had After Astaire—and undoubtedly done before him in 1952). because of his example—the role talents, was at These music-oriented dancers, of tap in cinematic dance began to bottom a pure unwilling or unable to work in change. Gene Kelly (1912–96), who theatrical contexts, lacked mass made his first film in 1942, was ini- dancer. appeal. Significantly, Laurence tially known for his tap work, but was “discovered” by Whitney Bal- like Astaire, he was also a fine singer liett, the jazz critic of the New and actor who deliberately sought lywood dance director in 1944. Cole Yorker, who claimed that “what to diversify the dance vocabulary was immensely influential in devel- Laurence is, essentially, is a great of his films. In any case, Kelly was oping the modernized movement drummer.” But even the best tap- primarily interested in dance not for vocabulary of what is now known as pers—and Laurence was one of its own sake but as an extension of “jazz dancing,” and he left his mark them—did not have access to the acting, whereas Astaire, though he on such later choreographers as Bob timbral variety that can effort- had other highly developed talents Fosse and Michael Kidd. But, as Seib- lessly be summoned up by even a that were essential to his perform- ert explains, he derived his eclectic second-rate jazz drummer. Merely ing identity, was at bottom a pure style from “East Asian, Caribbean, to hear a tap dancer at work, even dancer. Eleanor Powell (1912–82), Harlem swing, everything but tap.” Laurence, is not quite to miss the a superlative star tapper who, un- Meanwhile, the Broadway point, but one must see tappers like Astaire and Kelly, lacked those musical had undergone a root- to fully appreciate their myriad additional talents, declined sharply and-branch transformation at the subtleties. in popularity after 1942 and retired hands of Richard Rodgers and Once rock-and-roll pushed from the screen three years later. Oscar Hammerstein II. Their “inte- golden-age popular song out of And though Astaire continued to tap grated” musicals left little room for the limelight, tap dance came to be in his films, his broader dance inter- show-stopping tap soloists whose viewed by the baby boomers as the ests were increasingly salient by the presence on stage could not be jus- apotheosis of squareness. The col- ’50s. Indeed, the leggy, ballet-trained tified by the plot. Agnes de Mille, lapse of the Hollywood studio sys- Cyd Charisse, with whom he part- who choreographed their first two tem simultaneously choked off the nered in The Band Wagon and Silk shows, Oklahoma! (1943) and Car- production of old-fashioned big- Stockings (1957), did not tap at all. ousel (1945), was a ballet dancer budget film musicals, in the pro- Equally indicative of the shifting who rarely used tap. Neither did Je- cess truncating the screen careers postwar role of tap was the career rome Robbins, Broadway’s most in- of such noted Hollywood choreog- of Jack Cole (1911–74), who started fluential choreographer-director, raphers as Gower Champion and working in clubs and on Broadway though he greatly admired Astaire, Charles Walters. Then, starting in in the early ’30s and became a Hol- to whom he paid tribute in his 1983 the mid-’60s, a new generation of

58 Culture & Civilization : February 2016

Culture & Civ.indd 58 1/14/16 3:21 PM theatrical dancers embraced tap, Sometimes I am disappointed most successfully in Dames at Sea, TKIt may or exasperated or bored by tap the 1971 Broadway revival of No, i dancers. Why can’t they use No, Nanette (which featured Ruby be that their bodies with fuller and more Keeler, the star of 42nd Street), and tap is merely articulate expressiveness and co- such all-black revues as Bubbling ordination, as in other forms of Brown Sugar (1976), Sophisticated dormant, dance? Why can’t they be more Ladies (1981), and Black and Blue waiting for poetically suggestive and struc- (1989). tually sophisticated, as in other Two genuine stars came out of the advent forms of choreography? these revues, Gregory Hines (1946- of a dancer- 2003) and Savion Glover (born These are not nit-picking ques- in 1973). Glover in particular is choreographer tions, and they go a long way toward now universally regarded as tap’s of genius who explaining why Astaire took great greatest technician, an Astaire-like care never to limit himself to tap. innovator who transplanted it into is primarily We remember him not just for the the age of hip-hop in Bring In ’da interested in the electrifying “Say It with Firecrack- Noise, Bring In ’da Funk (1995), ers” number in Holiday Inn (1942) which ran for 1,135 performances show as a whole but for the poetic lyricism of his on Broadway. But Bring In ’da ballroom-based love duets, as well as Noise was the only one of these rather than his for his elegant, musician-like singing shows to move decisively beyond own boundless and charming acting. Glover and the constricting ambit of nostalgia, Hines, by contrast, were dancers pastiche, and camp, and to date it virtuosity. first and foremost, and were no more has had no successors. able to establish themselves as “act- It is revealing that Stephen ing” dancers than they could create Sondheim, the most forward- HY HAS so delightful effective theatrical contexts for their looking figure in postwar musical and exhilarating a dance dancing. comedy, used tap in Company W style as tap been so resis- None of this, however, means (1970) and Follies (1971) only for tant to revival? that there will never be another Fred the purpose of making ironic com- Part of the problem is that Astaire (though it is unlikely that the mentary on the past. And even tap is probably best suited to the next Astaire, whoever he or she may though tap continues to be seen in individual dancer or very small be, will flourish in Hollywood). The mainstream Broadway musicals, performing units. Large-chorus “crisis” of tap dancing is at least as re- its expressive function has altered unison tapping is both visually and flective of the crisis of the Broadway accordingly. In Seibert’s words: audibly spectacular—few dance musical as it is of the restrictiveness When period-appropriate, [mu- techniques can clinch the climax of the form itself. It may be that tap sical] revivals included tap. There of a stage show more effectively— is merely dormant, waiting for the were crafty, capable choreogra- but narrow in emotional scope. advent of a dancer-choreographer phers—Kathleen Marshall, Casey And as musicals moved away from of genius who, unlike Glover, is pri- Nicholaw, Jerry Mitchell, Warren the ramshackle plots of the ’20s marily interested in the show as a Carlyle, and the savviest, Susan and ’30s to emphasize story-based whole rather than his own boundless Stroman—but their conception of character development, tap lost its virtuosity. tap was mainly restricted to evoca- theatrical raison d’être. From then But even if tap continues to re- tions of Broadway’s faded glory. on, it could exist only as a solo art, main marginal to American popu- As for the revivalists, none of and once Hollywood musicals and lar culture, we will still have the stu- the companies that they launched the TV variety show vanished, it dio-system film musicals in which had more than modest success or had no sufficiently remunerative its possibilities were documented produced any new work of last- places to flourish. for all time. To see Astaire, Bill Rob- ing interest. For all their earnest Beyond all this, Seibert claims, inson, or the Nicholas Brothers per- efforts, tap dance today is as mar- the language of tap is expressively forming on screen is to know that ginal to popular culture in America restrictive—though underdeveloped tap dancing at its best is not merely as it was in 1960. may be a better word: a skill but a true art.q

Commentary 59

Culture & Civ.indd 59 1/14/16 3:21 PM riodic Table, and one collection of short stories herself; she and the This Was a Man remaining nine translators, per- haps infected by Levi’s character- istically modest style, have made themselves so transparent that The Complete Works into the ever repeated scene of the the end result feels seamless. One of Primo Levi story told and not listened to?” can read the collection straight Edited by Ann Goldstein The urge to tell compelled Levi, through without once being jolted Liveright, 3,008 pages who was a chemist by profession, by a change in voice. to write If This Is a Man. After its Even the secondary texts—af- Reviewed by Fernanda Moore publication in 1947, he wrote, “I re- terwords, scholarly commentar- alized that I had a new instrument ies, a chronology enhanced by HILE impris- in my hands, intended to weigh, to helpful maps—stand back and let oned in Aus- divide, to verify—like the ones in Levi speak. The only essay with a chwitz, Primo my laboratory, but flexible, quick, personal touch comes from Stuart Levi had a re- gratifying.” Woolf, who worked closely with curring dream: The Truce, published in 1959, Levi in 1958 on the first English “HereW is my sister, with some un- takes up where If This Is a Man translation of If This Is a Man identifiable friends of mine and left off, describing Levi’s Odyssean (originally released in the United many other people. They are all journey home to Italy after the States under the title Survival in listening to me and it is this very Russian army liberated the camp. Auschwitz). Woolf’s revision of story that I am telling: the three- Later works established Levi’s pre- this translation opens The Com- note whistle, the hard bunk, my eminence among Italian writers plete Works, and his account of neighbor whom I would like to and were widely read all over the their collaboration—the two met move but am afraid to wake be- world. Yet “in international cul- in Levi’s apartment “every Tues- cause he is stronger than I am. I ture”, as Monica Quirico writes in day and Thursday evening for also speak at length about our hun- an appendix to the newly released the best part of a year”—is deeply ger and about how we are checked Complete Works of Primo Levi, “the moving. Levi was fanatical about for lice, and about the Kapo who image of Levi as witness has come his translations, and he seems to hit me on the nose and then sent to dominate not only his status as have ridden his young colleague me to wash because I was bleeding. a great writer but other essential rather hard. Yet he comes across, It is an intense pleasure, physical, aspects of his personality and his in Woolf’s essay, as unfailingly po- inexpressible, to be at home, work.” Levi was an astonishingly lite, generous, and kind. “He put to among friendly people, and to have brilliant memoirist, but he was good use his remarkable memory so many things to recount, but I also a poet, a short-story writer, when he was not fully convinced can’t help noticing that my listen- a novelist, a critic, a translator, that I had adequately rendered ers do not follow me. In fact, they and an essayist of genius. As Ann the precise weight of his word- are completely indifferent. . . .” Goldstein writes in her editor’s ing,” Woolf recalls, without a trace The dream, which Levi discov- introduction, The Complete Works of remembered rancor. “When…I ered to his amazement was shared seeks to “enable English-speaking explained to him that I did not feel by many other prisoners, always readers to encounter for the first capable of translating his powerful ended in anguish: “A desolating time the entire range of his versa- and essential introductory poem, grief now rises in me, like some tile, inventive, curious, crystalline he reassured me and translated barely remembered pain of early intelligence.” it himself . . . And soon afterward, childhood. It is pain in its pure These three heavy, lavish vol- although, as he explained to me, state…the kind of pain that makes umes contain all of Levi’s published he regarded himself as outside the children cry….Why does it happen? work, translated or retranslated Turin Jewish community, Primo Why is the pain of every day so con- under Goldstein’s supervision. accepted my request that he be my stantly translated, in our dreams, Goldstein, an editor at the New best man when [my wife] Anna Yorker who has also translated and I had a religious marriage.” Fernanda Moore writes in Elena Ferrante and Pier Paolo Pa- Ernesto Ferrero’s chronology, this space monthly about fiction. solini, took on The Truce, The Pe- which carefully tracks Levi’s ca-

60 Culture & Civilization : February 2016

Culture & Civ.indd 60 1/14/16 3:21 PM reer, is an invaluable resource intense wish to understand, I was alongside The Complete Works. In Other constantly pervaded by . . . the cu- (Toni Morrison’s bewilderingly in- i People’s riosity of the naturalist who finds apt introduction is the collection’s himself transplanted into an en- nadir.) Using pithy snippets from Trades, Levi vironment that is monstrous, but interviews and essays, Ferrero as- new, monstrously new.” sembles a portrait of the artist’s holds forth on Levi wrote If This Is a Man in intellectual, moral, political, and everything from 1946. “If I hadn’t had the experi- spiritual development. Levi’s own ence of Auschwitz, I probably words are given pride of place, linguistics to would not have written anything,” though his home life is scarcely beetles to family he later wrote. After the war, for mentioned. (“He marries Lucia nearly 30 years, Levi worked full Morpurgo,” reads a typical “per- forebears. Each time as a chemist in a paint fac- sonal” milestone in its entirety.) At essay glitters like tory; yet writing about the Lager age 14, Levi says, he became meta- (as Levi called Auschwitz) loosed physically smitten with chemistry, a gem. He was a a general urge for self-expression. enthralled by its orderly promise true polymath, The Complete Works presents that human beings “live in a con- Levi’s writing in chronological or- ceivable universe, comprehensible and his curiosity der, rather than grouping works to our imagination.” It especially knew no by genre or theme. If This Is a thrilled him to see “the anguish Man and The Truce, published of the darkness [give] way before bounds. sequentially, are properly read one the ardor of research.” The racial after the other; it’s lovely to feel laws, promulgated in 1938 when the leaden despair of the first book Levi was already at the University stayed with me. By making me give way to the giddy exuberance of Turin (Jews previously enrolled feel Jewish, it inspired me to of the second. What Levi published were permitted to graduate), con- retrieve, afterward, a cultural after them, however, comes as a stituted, for him, “the reductio ad patrimony that I hadn’t had surprise. Natural Histories (first absurdum of the stupidity of fas- before. published under a pseudonym) cism.” Levi’s family had originally and Flaw of Form contain several adapted to fascism “with some Italian Jews were peculiarly dozen whimsical, slightly goofy annoyance”; he found the racial situated: “We Italian Jews didn’t tales reminiscent of Isaac Asimov laws “providential” precisely be- speak Yiddish; we were foreigners or Ray Bradbury. (Goldstein calls cause they precipitated a break. to the Germans and foreigners also them “gentle science fiction.”) “I would say that for me, and for to the Eastern European Jews, who They’re not at the level of Levi’s others, the racial laws gave us had no idea that a Judaism like significant work, but they’re fun to back our free will,” he later wrote. ours existed . . . . We and the Greeks read and provide delightful proof In December 1943, he and several were the lowest of the low; I would of their author’s wit and ingenuity. friends were arrested as partisans; say that we were worse off than the And the drafting of these stories after a month in a transit camp Greeks, because the Greeks were in clearly showed Levi the way to his near Modena, they were sent to large part habituated to discrimi- next book: The Periodic Table, a Auschwitz. And “at Auschwitz,” he nation . . . . But the Italians, the Ital- brilliant amalgam of science and famously said, “I became a Jew.” ian Jews, so accustomed to being memoir that solidified Levi’s repu- considered equal to everyone else, tation at home and abroad. The consciousness of feeling were truly without armor, as naked The Periodic Table was pub- different was forced upon me. as an egg without a shell.” lished in 1975, the same year Levi Someone, for no reason in the Stripped of his shell, Levi be- retired from chemistry to write full world, decided that I was dif- came exquisitely attenuated to his time. His subsequent novels (The ferent and inferior: my natural surroundings: “I remember having Wrench and If Not Now, When?), reaction was, in those years, lived my Auschwitz year in a condi- short stories (Lilith and Other to feel different and superi- tion of exceptional spiritedness…I Stories), and an assortment of me- or . . . . In that sense, Auschwitz never stopped recording the world diocre poems take up much of the gave me something that has and people around me. I had an second and third volumes of The

Commentary 61

Culture & Civ.indd 61 1/14/16 3:21 PM Complete Works. After The Periodic ters like a little gem; all are erudite, Levi got lucky with his transla- Table, they feel a bit anticlimactic. bewitching, and droll. Levi was a Totor, the an Editor: “anomalous German” with RememberingHowever, Levi’s two late volumes of true polymath, and his curiosity perfectWISH Italian Terry who Teachout spent would the war re- nonfiction—Other Peoples’ Trades, knew no bounds. Ihidingconsider from a(and line towardfighting) the the end Na of- a diverse collection of essays orig- The Drowned and the Saved hiszis article in Padua. about Their Billie collaborationHoliday: “But Ladyinally published Day in the Italian (1986) is entirely different. It falls thosewas intense, who believe and her ultimately later work Levi to newspaper La Stampa, and the somewhere between memoir and bedeemed superior it ato success; the recordings shortly of after her Toutterly the Editor: magnificent The Drowned ingphilosophical range was smaller treatise, than and that func of- youththe translation make the mistakewas published, of assuming let- and Ythe AND Saved LARGE,—are among I agree the withbest thetions average as an female excursus singer, on butIf This within Is thatters began the unselfconscious to arrive. Roughly simplic 40- BthingsTerry he everTeachout’s wrote. assessment of thea Man, octave written her voice after filled, decades she, better of ityGermans of ‘I Must wrote Have to him, That all Man’ but wasone BillieIn HolidayOther People’s [“The Two Trades Billie (1985), Holi- thancontemplation. anyone else, The could second find chapter,quarter somehow“polite, civil less correspondents, ‘mature’ than the mem in- days,”Levi holds September]. forth on She everything overcame toneswhich and dissects eighth “the tones gray in zone”between of flatedbers ofpseudo-profundity the population of that ‘Strange had manyfrom linguisticsproblems but to beetlessabotaged to famher- theprotekcja piano (privilege) keys and and subtly collabora play- Fruit.’”exterminated The profundity mine.” Their of “Strange letters, selfily forebears in other whoways. apparently I was surprised didn’t aroundtion within with the them camps, before is justifiablysliding in Fruit”and Levi’s is so queasy,basic that guarded it tricks replies, many toquite learn make that the it intojazz pianistThe Periodic Teddy oncelebrated. key. She wasBut themasterful eeriest at and this. most So ofare us extraordinary into thinking to that read. it is, as Mr. WilsonTable: “One was was also an a anarchist member of. . . thean- masterfulfascinating that essay I can’t in the listen book—per to what- TeachoutIn early says, April “pseudo.” 1987, Thisless thansong isa Communistother was a party—butrenowned onesculler can andlike shehaps sang in allin the of Levi’s1950s. work—comesBy then, she actuallyyear after so profound the publication that it is ofa great The ana neuropath, artist’s music while without one (theliking story his hadnear become the book’s a sad, end. raspy “Letters shadow from of songDrowned with and or without the Saved Lady, Levi Day. wrote Mr. politics.was told With in whispers Wilson and and with in tones Les- herself.Germans” begins when Levi learns, Teachoutto a friend: did, “I however, am suffering perceptively from a terof horror), Young, Billiewhen Holidaystill in the made care her of in 1959, that a GermanRichard publisher Rollo notesevere how depression, Holiday tendedand I am to strugcroon- besta wet records. nurse, Whathad been made eaten her singing in his has bought the Montebello,translation California rights to “lagginggling to farno behindavail to the escape beat.” it . . . Let memorablecrib by a pig.” was Paramecia that she sang seen slowly un- If This Is a Man. “I was overcome by us see what Lawrencethe next months Brazier will andder asavored microscope the notes. are “streamlined, Yes, her sing- a violent new emotion,1 that of hav- bring to all of us, Friedberg,but my present Austria nimble, twisted like old slippers.” ing won a battle,” he writes. “I had situation is the worst I ever ex- He writes about chess, duels, squir- indeed written the book in Italian, perienced, Auschwitz included.” rels, sidewalks, and his lifelong ter- for Italians, for their children, for On April 11, Levi died, a suicide. ror of spiders, for which he blames those who did not know . . . . But its The Complete Works, a thought- “the engraving by Gustave Doré il- real audience, those at whom the ful, thorough, and impressive feat lustrating Arachne in Canto XII of book was aimed like a gun, was of collaborative scholarship, suc- [Dante’s] Purgatory, with which I them, the Germans. And now the ceeds as both tribute and monu- collided as a child.” Each essay glit- gun was loaded.” ment to his life and work.q

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1062 Culture & CivilizationLetters :: DecemberFebruary 20162015

Culture & Civ.indd 62 1/14/16 3:21 PM Mediacracy

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 64 in $20 if you agree. es. There are more than a dozen candidates. Travel is The lefty blogosphere takes its criticism a step expensive. Better to spend dollars and energy on the further. “ABC, CBS, and NBC News made an inten- men and women with the most likely chance of win- tional decision to ignore Bernie Sanders,” claims ning, as measured by polling, and shift expenditures writer Jason Easley of Politicususa.com, a website of and column-inches to other candidates if an upset “real liberal politics.” A lack of evidence cannot stop does occur. In the meantime, of course, readers and Easley’s “real liberal” breathless accusations: “The viewers will have missed a large part of the story that corporate owned profit first network news divisions might otherwise have affected their votes. have made the editorial decision that they are going It’s a dilemma. Still, this explanation of editorial to lavish airtime upon the presidential candidate who decision-making is too simplistic and too self-serving. most fits their corporate owners’ ideology.” According Obviously the media focus on who’s ahead—it would to Easley, that candidate is—I am not making this be a travesty if they did not. What really powers the up—Donald Trump. spotlights on Trump and A less heated version Clinton, though, isn’t their of this argument says the poll numbers. It’s their ce- media boost Trump and Hillary Clinton is ratings lebrity. They are two of the ignore Sanders not be- most famous Americans in cause of ideology or an- kryptonite. Half the country can’t the world. One is a televi- imosity but because of stand to watch her. Yet she runs sion star and bestselling profit. “Media executives author and hotel magnate. view Trump’s outrageous laps around Bernie Sanders in The other is a former first antics as good for their earned media. Why? lady and U.S. senator and bottom line,” Jilani con- secretary of state. The me- cludes. The candidate dia are as obsessed with the himself, in an interview stars as the rest of us. Think with CNN’s Chris Cuomo, said the media aren’t “so of the trees that have been killed in order to print the interested in the serious issues facing this country” newspaper and magazine articles written about these and prefer Trump’s “bombastic” verbal eruptions. two over the last three decades. Forget about the presi- No argument that Trump is good for ratings and dential campaign. Trump and Clinton are news if they advertising revenue—a fact he reminds us of on a daily walk down the street. basis. The profit motive may help explain why Trump So celebrity is a factor. But it is also the case that receives more coverage than Sanders. What it does not the media are in Clinton’s corner. No matter the talk explain is the difference in coverage of Sanders and about how the media aren’t biased because they’ll al- Clinton. Trump’s not running in the Democratic pri- ways go wild for a dustup, they don’t want her to have mary. And Hillary is ratings kryptonite. Half the coun- a tough race, and they’re keeping a lid on Sanders try can’t stand to watch her. Yet she runs laps around news. Remember the relief with which they covered Sanders in earned media. Why? her performance in the first Democratic debate: Clin- The rather simplistic yet telling answer from the ton “dominated” that matchup, according to the Wall media: Trump and Clinton are in first place. Hence Street Journal, “showcasing her sharp rhetorical skills they deserve the most attention. “Trump is winning,” and broad policy expertise.” She delivered a “poised, wrote the Christian Science Monitor last October. polished performance,” according to CNN. Clinton “That means his every twitch makes news.” Clinton “cut through months of noise about her emails and has led national polls for months, and “in the modern trustworthiness,” according to Time magazine. media world it takes more than a twitch—or a new pol- Behaving as though Clinton is the only candidate icy paper—to catch the camera’s eye.” A writer for the on the Democratic side is meant to ease her ascent Washington Post agreed: “Winning matters.” The press to the presidency. But it’s had an unintended side ef- tells the most urgent stories, the stories that will have fect. Sanders has used the media blackout to rally his the most impact. “Sanders, still, looks like a long shot.” supporters and lobby for more favorable coverage. Stands to reason. The media have scarce resourc- And, as this column proves, it’s working.q

Commentary 63

Culture & Civ.indd 63 1/14/16 3:21 PM The Bernie Sanders Blackout

T WAS BOUND to happen sooner or later. The and a gas giant will exert, or should exert, the same other day I read something on the far-left, pro– gravitational pull. I Edward Snowden website The Intercept I found The relevant comparison is between Sanders and genuinely enlightening. Afterward I felt like taking his chief opponent: Clinton. Here, too, Sanders falls a shower. short. The blogger Andrew Tyndale, who obsessively The story was about Bernie Sanders. Since the records the contents of the three nightly newscasts, senator from Vermont and avowed democratic so- reports that during 2015, the former secretary of cialist announced his campaign state ran second to Trump in for the Democratic nomina- overall coverage. Clinton got tion last May, he has drawn 121 minutes. Sanders got 20. Joe crowds ten times the size of Mediacracy Biden received more attention Hillary Clinton’s. He’s received Matthew Continetti than Sanders—and Biden was a record number of small-dollar never a candidate! donations—more than Barack Nor have the most storied lib- Obama in 2011. As I write, in mid-January, a poll has eral outlets covered Sanders to the left’s satisfaction. him tied with Clinton in Iowa. He’s ahead of her in Responding to criticism from readers, last Septem- New Hampshire. ber the public editor of the New York Times wrote a And yet, as far as the traditional media are con- column headlined “Has the Times Dismissed Bernie cerned, Sanders is a nonentity. Zaid Jilani of The Sanders?” She concluded, “The Times has not ig- Intercept searched the Lexis-Nexis database for nored Mr. Sanders’s campaign, but it hasn’t always mentions of Sanders on news shows during a 30-day taken it very seriously.” MoveOn.org, which seems period. Sanders, he discovered, had been discussed to have plenty of time on its hands these days, or- 20 times. Donald Trump was discussed 690 times ganized a petition to “Tell NPR to stop ignoring and over the same period. minimizing Bernie Sanders.” It had 8,395 signatures Then Jilani performed a headline search using at the time of writing. the Google Trends web tool. “On an average day, the What’s behind the neglect? The Sanders cam- ratio of Trump-to-Sanders mentions was 29 to 3,” he paign has an easy answer typical of left-wing found. “On December 9, in the wake of Trump’s call populists: a conspiracy of the money power. “The to block Muslims from entering the U.S., the ration corporately owned media may not like Bernie’s anti- [sic] was 100-to-5.” Now, putting up Sanders against establishment views but for the sake of American Trump distorts the results. It’s like saying a moon democracy they must allow a fair debate in this pres- idential campaign,” his campaign manager said in a Matthew Continetti, who appears monthly press release. “Bernie must receive the same level of in this space, is editor in chief of the Washington Free coverage on the nightly news as the other leading Beacon. candidates.” Chip CONTINUED ON PAGE 63

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