OCTOBER 9, 2017 • $5.99

CAN HE BE STOPPED? PETER J. BOYER on the state of America’s missile defense program ERIC EDELMAN & ROBERT JOSEPH on the sorry history of our North Korea policy THE EDITORS in praise of Trump’s sanctions

WEEKLYSTANDARD.COM Contents October 9, 2017 • Volume 23, Number 5

2 The Scrapbook The Plame game, homeless in California, & more 5 Casual David Skinner, poseur 6 Editorials A Blockade by Any Other Name The Editors

Tax Reform, at Last The Editors An Education in Civility by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch Articles

5 10 Make America Gipper Again by Fred Barnes Trump’s turn at tax reform

12 Moore Unmoored by John McCormack Alabama Republicans out-Trump the president

15 Overruled by KC Johnson & Stuart Taylor Jr. Campus kangaroo courts get a schooling in fairness

18 Getting Riled Up Over the Knee Jerk by Jay Cost Trump’s Kaepernick caper

12 19 The Kurds Get Under Way by David DeVoss The allure and risks of independence Features

21 Now More Than Ever by Peter J. Boyer The state of America’s missile-defense program

27 Cheney Was Right by Eric Edelman & Robert Joseph The sorry history of our North Korea policy

30 The Germans Turn Right by Christopher Caldwell Merkel’s immigration hangover 30 Books & Arts

34 The ‘White Rat’ by Max Holland The true motivation of Mark Felt, Watergate’s ‘Deep Throat’

40 Soulcraft as Statecraft by Adam J. White The many virtues of Scalia’s speeches

42 Good Writer’s Disease? by Barton Swaim Scalia the communicator

44 Water and Light by Dominic Green The scenes and portraits of John Singer Sargent

46 Chauvinist Racket by John Podhoretz The not-so-historic clash of Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs 44 48 Parody Trump loves Puerto Rico COVER: AFP PHOTO / KCNA VIA KNS / GETTY THE SCRAPBOOK Poverty and the Pyrite State

he Scrapbook visited Los An- this ranking, and the state’s high T geles for the first time around number of undocumented workers 20 years ago, and it was a delightful suggests that illegal immigration is experience in most every way. One likely a contributing factor. Still, it oddity stood out, though: the sheer strikes us as remarkable that the na- number of homeless people. We tion’s most progressive, left-leaning don’t mention this to denigrate the state also has more people in pov- needy, but the experience of being ap- erty, per capita, than any other state. proached on nearly every corner by California’s taxes are among the na- people asking for money—some of tion’s highest—the state consistently them, truth be told, not appearing all be in San Bernardino than Buffalo. ranks among the least friendly to that hard-up—is not easily forgotten. But the weather surely can’t ac- business—and it spends over a third We observed the same phenome- count for the fact that, as we learned of its total budget on welfare-related non on subsequent visits to San Fran- from a recent report by the Census programs, ranking fifth in the coun- cisco and San Diego and concluded Bureau, California has the high- try as of 2013 (the Census Bureau’s that the state’s perfect-year-round est poverty rate in the nation: A full latest data). climate is probably not unrelated to 20 percent of Californians live below If we didn’t know any better, we’d the phenomenon. Speaking only for the federal poverty line. start to think that maybe, just maybe, ourselves, if we were suddenly with- Readers may wish to quarrel the progressive welfare state doesn’t out shelter some January, we’d rather with the definition of “poverty” in actually work. ♦

The Plame Game band, Ambassador Joseph da all along. Just last month Plame Wilson, wrote a New York launched a fundraising effort to buy n September 22, ex- Times op-ed disputing the a controlling share of Twitter stock, O CIA agent Valerie intelligence the Bush ad- so she could kick President Trump Plame tweeted out a link to ministration relied on in off the platform. In the meantime, we an Internet article written deciding what to do about suggest that Plame lead by example by another notorious ex- Saddam Hussein. Plame and get off Twitter herself. ♦ CIA agent, Philip Giraldi. and Wilson were instant- The article was headlined ly embraced as the heroic Brighton, Rocked “America’s Jews Are Driv- opposition to the Iraq ing America’s Wars.” The war. They were featured ith all the drama of medieval article appeared on the Unz in countless glossy-maga- W jousting, or a good old fash- Review website, a dump- zine spreads. Two movies ioned tractor pull, liberal champions ing ground for anti-Semitic were made about their collided last week in separate con- nonsense. Among the ar- brave ordeal. They’ve tests: Buddhism vs. the environment ticle’s odious assertions: Jews dis- been dining out on the controversy and animal rights vs. art. cussing foreign policy on television ever since. These are conflicts, for socially should be identified as such, “kind- And yet, for all that, the real take- conscious justice warriors, as fraught of-like a warning label on a bottle of away from the imbroglio was one as Batman vs. Superman is for Com- rat poison.” relevant to the present moment: It ic-Con nerds: Who are you supposed It wasn’t the first time Plame has demonstrated, in the conviction of to root for? retweeted an anti-Semitic rant from Scooter Libby (who was innocent Two British Buddhists, in an effort the Unz Review, but this time people of outing Plame), how special coun- to keep lobsters out of the boiling pot, noticed. Plame publicly apologized sels run amok. got themselves into hot water. As part and resigned from the board of the Now might finally be the time to of ceremony meant to produce “good Ploughshares Fund (an organization admit that, whatever one thinks of karma,” they released hundreds of notable for its efforts to help sell the the Iraq war, embracing Plame and lobsters and crabs into the ocean at Obama administration’s Iran deal). Wilson as courageous truth-tellers the seaside town of Brighton. But, It’s been 14 years since Plame was was a mistake from the get-go. Theirs alas, they were American crustaceans,

outed as a CIA agent after her hus- has been a highly politicized agen- nonnative species said to pose a threat TOP AND BOTTOM:FIGURES AT BIGSTOCK; PLAME, LARRY D. MOORE

2 / The Weekly Standard October 9, 2017 to the local ecosystem. (In Brexit Brit- ain, it seems, even the eco-warriors are anti-immigrant.) According to the Guardian, a court fined the Buddhists some £15,000 to recoup costs borne by the government in its efforts to recap- ture the shellfish: To incentivize local fishermen, the crown put a bounty on their exoskeletal heads. Of the 361 lobsters released, 40 some are still at large and may—horrors!—be breed- ing. Ever willing to do its part, The Scrapbook stands at the ready with drawn butter. On this side of the pond, the con- flict involved modern art. The Gug- genheim Museum has decided to remove three works from an upcoming exhibit, works that activists claimed promote animal cruelty. The works are certainly weird and perhaps unset- tling—including a short video of dogs running at each other on treadmills, ready to fight, but unable to reach each other, and a large cage full of amphib- ians, reptiles, and insects that eat each other over time (as critters are wont to do). The outrage has been spectacular. Hundreds of thousands committed to insect-welfare have signed petitions; animal-rights activists swamped the museum with stern letters of disap- proval; some in the bunny-and-duck crowd have threatened to give curators a right thrashing.

said in a statement, expressing re- learned, are to receive $25,000 from gret “that explicit and repeated the foreign power, plus a retainer of threats of violence have made our $25,000 a month. In exchange for that decision necessary.” cash, the operatives schemed with the It isn’t just Nature that’s red in U.S. media to shape favorable cover- tooth and claw. ♦ age. Targets include journalists at pub- lications such as the Financial Times, Foreign Intrigue the Economist, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and t long last, The Scrapbook has Business Insider, as well as “top-tier A developed proof of foreign television and radio” such as CNN, meddling in our democracy. Justice Fox, and NPR; Sunday morning talk Department documents lay the plot shows; and “news programs such as The flabbergasted (and clearly bare: a secret deal between a foreign Charlie Rose.” feeble) Guggenheim backed down. power and two former administration Justice Department documents also “Although these works have been ex- officials at the highest echelons of the reveal the plot to plant favorable cov- hibited in museums in Asia, Europe, U.S. government. erage with newspaper editorial pages

and the United States,” the museum The officials, The Scrapbook has and blogs, which “have tremendous AND FRAME, BIGSTOCK LOBSTER

October 9, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 3 sway with policymakers.” The of- ficials confessed that they “use these pages regularly to influence legisla- tion, regulation and public opinion.” The Scrapbook reels at the enor- www.weeklystandard.com mity of it all. Stephen F. Hayes, Editor in Chief The two sometime government Richard Starr, Editor Fred Barnes, Robert Messenger, Executive Editors officials renting their names and their Eric Felten, Managing Editor connections are Anita Dunn, a former Christopher Caldwell, Andrew Ferguson, Lee Smith, Philip Terzian, Senior Editors communications director for President Peter J. Boyer, National Correspondent Obama, and Stephen Krupin, once Jonathan V. Last, Digital Editor Barton Swaim, Opinion Editor a senior Obama speechwriter. They Adam Keiper, Books & Arts Editor now work for SKDKnickerbocker, Kelly Jane Torrance, Deputy Managing Editor Mark Hemingway, Matt Labash, a political consulting firm. Their John McCormack, Tony Mecia, client is—gasp!—the government of decision to expunge from its histori- Michael Warren, Senior Writers Jenna Lifhits, Alice B. Lloyd, Staff Writers Ontario, Canada, which is seeking to cal narrative one of the most impor- Rachael Larimore, Online Managing Editor raise its Washington profile on trade tant African-American statesmen of Ethan Epstein, Associate Editor Chris Deaton, Jim Swift, Deputy Online Editors issues. Lobbyists working for foreign our time.” Hannah Yoest, Assistant Books & Arts Editor governments must register with the But The Scrapbook is in a gener- Priscilla M. Jensen, Assistant Editor Andrew Egger, Reporter Justice Department, and the details of ous mood and prefers not to think ill Adam Rubenstein, Grant Wishard, Editorial Assistants the arrangements are public records. of the nice people at the Smithsonian. Philip Chalk, Design Director You didn’t think we were talking We would hate to think that Thomas Barbara Kyttle, Design Assistant Contributing Editors about something else, was being shunned because he is a Claudia Anderson, Max Boot, Joseph Bottum, Tucker Carlson, Matthew Continetti, Jay Cost, now, did you? conservative or because he famously Terry Eastland, Noemie Emery, Joseph Epstein, There’s nothing overcame a vicious and toxic cam- David Frum, David Gelernter, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Michael Goldfarb, Daniel Halper, inherently criminal paign of calumny mounted by the left. Mary Katharine Ham, Brit Hume, Thomas Joscelyn, about representing Whatever the reason for its initial Frederick W. Kagan, Charles Krauthammer, Yuval Levin, Tod Lindberg, Micah Mattix, foreign powers. In decision, the Smithsonian has finally Victorino Matus, P. J. O’Rourke, John Podhoretz, Irwin M. Stelzer fact, it’s common in Washing- corrected its oversight by including a William Kristol, Editor at Large ton: The Justice Department label for Thomas along with the one MediaDC says there were 1,799 “foreign for Thurgood Marshall in its “Su- Ryan McKibben, Chairman agents” representing 527 inter- preme Court” exhibit. We now look Stephen R. Sparks, President & Chief Operating Officer Jennifer Yingling, Audience Development Officer national clients as of the end of forward to when the museum under- Kathy Schaffhauser, Chief Financial Officer September. That’s a lot of for- takes a thorough and fair-minded David Lindsey, Chief Digital Officer Alex Rosenwald, Director, Public Relations & Branding eign meddling—all of it (well, at least analysis of the justice’s thoughtful Mark Walters, Chief Revenue Officer Nicholas H. B. Swezey, Vice President, Advertising most of it) legal. ♦ and influential opinions. ♦ T. Barry Davis, Senior Director, Advertising Jason Roberts, Digital Director, Advertising Paul Plawin, National Account Director Redoubting Thomas Et Tu, Brute? Andrew Kaumeier, Advertising Operations Manager Brooke McIngvale, Manager, Marketing Services ustice Clarence Thomas isn’t Advertising inquiries: 202-293-4900 Jknown for being particularly Subscriptions: 1-800-274-7293 The Weekly Standard (ISSN 1083-3013), a division of Clarity Media Group, chatty on the bench, preferring to is published weekly (except the first week in January, third week in April, listen to arguments at the Court first week in July, and third week in August) at 1152 15th St., NW, Suite 200, Washington, DC 20005. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, rather than engaging in the noisy DC, and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to The Weekly Standard, P.O. 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American Express, Visa/MasterCard payments ly tandard accepted. Cover price, $5.99. Back issues, $5.99 (includes postage and the Smithsonian’s new National S ’s editor at large talks handling). Send letters to the editor to The Weekly Standard, 1152 15th Museum of African American His- with University of Virginia profes- Street, NW, Suite 200, Washington, DC 20005-4617. For a copy of The Weekly Standard Privacy Policy, visit www.weeklystandard.com or write to tory and Culture seemed to forget all sor Paul Cantor about Shakespeare’s Customer Service, The Weekly Standard, 1152 15th St., NW, Suite 200, about Thomas. Rome. How do politics contend with Washington, DC 20005. Copyright 2017, Clarity Media Group. All rights reserved. No material in The Weekly Last year Adam White lamented philosophy? Can a republic survive Standard may be reprinted without permission of the copyright owner. in these pages, “it’s a shame to see becoming an empire? Find out at The Weekly Standard is a registered trademark of Clarity Media Group. SPY FIGURE, BIGSTOCK the new museum marred by its own ConversationswithBillKristol.org. ♦

4 / The Weekly Standard October 9, 2017 CASUAL

who has wrestled the microphone Confessions of a Total Poseur away from the real singer. So I don’t sound so much like those karaoke wannabes with their bad Madonna imitations. Yes, I judge the karaoke few years ago, some more than any kind of big raconteur. people harshly, despite my own creep- friends of mine, weekend But here I am, without warning, a ing awareness that we are brothers musicians, started jam- full-blown exhibitionist. On the way and sisters in wannabeism, genuine ming together and formed home, I get the feeling that my daugh- fakes all of us—or something worse. Aa cover band called the Porch Lights. ter is waiting for an apology. A few nights ago my wife, Cynthia, To be honest, their big world tour is As a singer I have almost no train- told me that the singer I most remind a bit slow in developing. Conquer- ing, though one time, at a summer her of is William Shatner. I was, of ing the globe one backyard at a time, theater camp, I did take lessons. In course, devastated. Is it conceivable they haven’t quite made it outside of a recurring exercise, the teacher that after all we’ve been through, my our neighborhood, but in every other assigned other students to one of your wife doesn’t actually love me? respect they really do rock. Shatner is notorious for a And I confess that I enjoy series of spoken-word record- few things more than when ings he made, starting in their lead singer Jess—a soccer the late ’60s, in which he mom with two kids who lives applied the hammy overact- around the corner—calls me ing he made famous on Star on stage to help with the vocals. Trek to schmaltzy pop songs I can hardly describe the real- such as Elton John’s “Rocket ity-bending change that comes Man.” These covers are hilari- upon me at these moments. ous, unintentional parodies. A You would think I was being video of Shatner performing pulled from the shower and “Rocket Man” in 1978 at the thrust onto the stage of a late- Science Fiction Film Awards night talk show, so Ameri- is utterly cringe-inducing and cans in their living rooms can therefore very popular online. finally learn what they have Yet Shatner has, more recently, been missing. worked with various well- I greedily assault the micro- known artists to record some phone with my overemphatic very good music. In 2004, with voice. Singing as much with my eyes body parts. One kid would take your Ben Folds and Joe Jackson, he made and my body, I am full of intensity right arm and slowly move it to and a cover of “Common People,” a song but pretend to hesitate just a little, fro, another would handle the other by the English band Pulp. It is, by far, only to be urged onward by convic- arm, and another would gently swivel my favorite version of that song. tion and the primal need to let it all your head from side to side. Then If Cynthia is right and I do sound out. Whether it’s “Dead Flowers” by you would begin singing whatever like Captain Kirk, then my singing is the Rolling Stones or “Superman” warmed-over show tune you had been an unintentional parody of an unin- by R.E.M., the story takes over and working on. The goal was to distract tentional parody. So I probably need these songs of decadence and obses- you from your own body and thus to find another singer to unintention- sion become fatal truths that must release the breath and power locked ally emulate. Or I might even develop, be told. By me. Right now. Because I in your diaphragm and vocal chords though hard work and dedication, a really am superman. by self-consciousness and nerves. style I could ultimately call my own. Meanwhile, the nice people watch- With three or four of my classmates But this goes back to the reason I ing me, red Solo cups in hand, are playing puppeteer with my append- have not signed up for singing les- visibly unsettled. Suburban dads and ages, I never felt more silly, but my sons: I cannot imagine finding more PTA moms laugh nervously, with voice did sound pretty good. pleasure in singing than I already do. their kids dancing beside them, a cer- Sometimes I think of going for les- And if I did I would be so distracted tain quizzical expression on their faces sons now, at this point in my life, to by my singing career that I might that says, “Whoa, didn’t see this com- work on my technique. So when Jess never work an honest day again. ing.” Usually, I am one of the quieter calls me on stage I don’t sound so

BRITT SPENCER guys, a one-on-one conversationalist much like a drunken wedding guest David Skinner

October 9, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 5 EDITORIALS A Blockade by Any Other Name

anctions hurt everybody. That’s the problem with these sanctions attack the country’s very economy. Rather imposing them on a reckless and brutal regime. than sanctions, we might better call this a blockade. S Instead of pressuring the few in charge, you punish It’s a bold move by the administration, and we think the people as a whole. Sometimes that’s necessary, but it’s a shrewd one. If sanctions are going to incapacitate the never ideal. Kim regime and make it vulnerable to internal subversion, In the case of North Korea, however, economic sanc- they’ll have to hit hard—and these sanctions should hit tions chiefly hurt the rulers. Virtually all proceeds from very hard indeed. trade coming into the country are seized by Kim Jong-un’s Most of the companies and individuals likely to be kleptocracy and distributed to the military, the leadership, affected are Chinese. The vast majority of North Korea’s and the bureaucrats who run the police commerce—90 percent, at least—comes state. And so the Trump administration from China, which has long had an inter- was wholly in the right when on Septem- est in supporting the Kim regime. If the ber 21 it unilaterally imposed the severest DPRK collapses, Chinese leaders think, possible economic sanctions. If maintained destitute refugees will flood across the bor- rigorously, these could weaken the Kim der into their territory. Further, if the col- regime and hasten its demise. lapse of the Kim regime leads in time to The administration says that’s not the reunification with South Korea, China will goal. We assume it is. have a U.S. ally on its border—a disaster in We wonder, in fact, if sanctions is even the Chinese Communist mindset. the right word for the administration’s Whatever the reasons for China’s para- executive order. The multilateral, U.N.- noia, the fact that the Kims have remained brokered sanctions of the past have gen- in power as long as they have is almost erally targeted specific industries—oil, Kim Jong-un certainly a direct consequence of Chinese textiles—or tried to stop the regime from support. Even tight multilateral sanc- advancing its nuclear program. Those are good and nec- tions like the ones passed by the U.N. Security Council essary measures, and they have had the effect of limiting in August can only do so much damage if China looks the North Korea’s capacity to make war and slowing its devel- other way while its banks and manufacturers supply cash opment of missile technology. But multilateral sanctions are and goods to its tiny homicidal neighbor. If the Trump designed to pressure a targeted government into altering administration follows through on its promise to punish its behavior. Kim Jong-un will not be pressured to do any- those banks and exporters, though, or even if China feels thing; negotiation with his government is hopeless. Tradi- the threat is credible, we may see the situation change fast. tional multilateral sanctions have intrinsic weaknesses, too. There’s evidence that’s happening already. On the In the case of North Korea we’ve had to depend on China day he announced the new sanctions, President Trump upholding its obligations, which, of course, it hasn’t done; claimed that China’s central bank had issued a directive and U.N. sanctions haven’t stopped Venezuela and Iran to the country’s banks to “immediately” (Trump’s word) from supplying North Korea with oil, refined petroleum, cut off business with North Korea. We have not been able and perhaps even nuclear materials. to confirm that claim, but China has not denied it, and the These latest sanctions are designed not to hurt Kim’s Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post cites “four regime but to break it. The administration’s executive sources” saying that the country’s banks have been ordered order gives the U.S. government the power to shut out to cut financial ties with their North Korean customers. North Korean banks from the international banking sys- If true, the status quo just ended. tem. It can now freeze the assets of anyone—banks, compa- The danger, of course, is that “Little Rocket Man,” as nies, individuals—for doing any business at all with North President Trump has tauntingly dubbed him, will act in Korea. And it can ban ships from U.S. ports if they’ve been desperation and actually try to deploy a nuclear warhead to North Korea as of the date of the executive order. Rather against U.S. or allied targets. Certainly it’s folly to hope

than crippling the DPRK’s capacity to do this or that, that Kim will “denuclearize,” as U.S. diplomats like to NEWSCOM

6 / The Weekly Standard October 9, 2017 put it. He will not. And he may decide to go kinetic with Indian reservations, or renovate Boston’s Fenway Park. But the arsenal at his disposal. If so, America’s missile-defense the tax code is for taxing, and it should do so equitably. capability will be put to the test. As the “Repeal and Replace” fiascos in both houses of It’s costing Kim extraordinary sums of cash to build Congress showed, it’s much harder to agree on reform than nuclear weapons and missile systems and to conduct con- it is to oppose a broken system. As with Obamacare, Repub- stant military exercises in a vain effort to feign parity licans can’t count on any support from Democrats, who’ve with the U.S.-South Korean alliance. And cash is what steadily lurched leftward since the last tax reform go-round. Kim has less and less of. Not even forced labor can prop The 1986 reform—which included big cuts in corporate and up a government if that government has no access to individual tax rates and closed loopholes—passed the Demo- international markets. cratic House by a voice vote and the Republican Senate 97-3. King Jong-un is often said to be irrational. He may be. The new GOP plan has three main components: dra- But his military elite and party functionaries are probably matic cuts in business taxes, individual rate cuts aimed at not irrational, and as Kim brings his country closer to eco- the middle class, and tax simplification. There’s a lot to nomic ruin and nuclear annihilation, they may feel com- like, even if the first two are extremely precarious given the pelled to act. North Korean foreign minister Ri Yong-ho Republicans’ slim Senate majority and fractiousness. The likened Trump’s executive order to a “declaration of war,” Democrats are eager to stop anything they can deride as and we hope the administration thinks of it that way, too: “tax cuts for the rich.” not as a means to coerce the DPRK into more pointless Cutting the corporate tax rate—at 35 percent, ours is negotiations but as an attempt to bring the Kim dynasty to among the highest in the world—would drive economic a richly deserved termination. growth immediately. The GOP plan would lower that rate to What comes next may be a blessing to the world or a 20 percent, and small businesses paying the “pass-through” disaster. But continuing to appease a nuclear-armed psy- rate would be taxed at a rate no higher than 25 percent. chopath could bring about something immeasurably worse. Changes in how businesses depreciate equipment should —The Editors also spur investment. There’s plenty of political cover, too. The GOP plan can credibly be sold as “middle-class tax relief.” It nearly doubles the standard deduction, increases child tax cred- its, and makes those credits available to more taxpayers. There’s an option for congressional committees to keep the individual tax figure for millionaires at the existing Tax Reform, high rate of 39.6 percent. The popular deductions for char- itable giving and mortgage interest are preserved. The plan also honors the long-term conservative goals of at Last simplifying taxes and making them fairer. Eliminated are all but the most politically delicate deductions and credits. The he last time Republicans advanced a serious plan to change to the standard deduction would make itemization overhaul the tax code, Madonna had a No. 1 hit and less important for more people. The plan goes a long way T Back to the Future had just been released on VHS. toward getting Congress out of the business of using the tax The new Republican tax plan harkens back to Ronald Rea- code to induce allegedly desirable behavior. It would further gan’s 1986 reform package, promising a future of stronger eliminate the estate tax and the alternative minimum tax— growth with less economic puppeteering from Washington. although these two provisions look more like bargaining It’s not a perfect plan. It is less ambitious than various chips to be negotiated away to placate deficit hawks. overhauls that conservative candidates have floated in pres- Democrats will feign outrage at all of this. Fine. Let idential campaigns. But after years of abysmally low eco- them defend one of the highest corporate rates in the world. nomic growth thanks to Obama’s tax-and-regulate measures, Let them explain why the top 50 percent of U.S. households the Republican outline is a bold change. should pay 97.3 percent of all personal income taxes. If in But can they can pull it off? the process Republicans can agree to simplify the code and On paper, tax reform should be a gimme for a party eliminate more of its credits and deductions, they will have that gives consistent lip service to tax cutting and controls achieved something. They’ll have to work fast, though: The both houses of Congress and the White House. It is, more- longer this reform sits in committee, the more time lobby- over, desperately needed. Over the years, both parties have ists will have to persuade wobbly members to reinsert special been complicit in adding tax incentives to make the masses interests’ favorite provisions. behave the way Washington wants. Thanks to the generosity This is a worthy plan. If the party of free enterprise and of Congress, companies with expensive lawyers can get tax low taxes can’t pass it, it’s not clear what they’re there for. benefits to produce tuna in American Samoa, mine coal on —The Editors

8 / The Weekly Standard October 9, 2017 George Washington. He deliberately cultivated habits of civility at a young age, habits that later helped him become so effective at leading our new nation. As a teenager, we’re told, he had copied by hand the 110 Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation published An Education by the Jesuits in 1595. Many of these rules remain abso- lutely as true as ever. Take Rule 86: “In disputes, be not so desirous to overcome as not to give liberty to each one to in Civility deliver his opinion.” Some are pretty downright funny, too. Take Rule 12: “Bedew no man’s face with your spittle, by Excerpts from the keynote address by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch approaching him too near when you speak.” In other words, at a luncheon celebrating the 50th anniversary of the as my teenagers would say, “Say it. Don’t spray it.” . . . Fund for American Studies, Washington, D.C., September 28 Without realizing it, though, perhaps, the Jesuits who wrote them and the young man who copied them were out- s Justice Kennedy likes to point out, the word civ- lining and absorbing a system of courtesy appropriate to ics springs from the Latin word that was also the equals and near-equals. When the company for whom decent A same root for civility. And both civics and civil- behavior was to be performed expanded to the whole nation, ity are essential elements of civilization. Just consider the Washington was ready. Civility is essential for the treatment First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, free press, of people as equals in civilization. In no small measure, the free assembly. Those rights ensure that Americans can say character of our nation, which left such a deep impression on pretty much anything they want, for more or less any reason Tocqueville, was shaped by the character of Washington. He they want, more or less any time they want. It’s a wonderful was ready. Our next generation must be, too. . . . thing. But with every right comes a correlative responsibil- We should never lose sight that we live in the longest- ity, a duty. And to be worthy of our First Amendment free- standing republic in the world. We live with remarkable doms, we have to all adopt certain civil habits that enable success in a richly diverse nation, committed to the enjoy- others to enjoy them as well. When it comes to the First ment of the blessings of liberty by the rule of law for all Amendment, that means tolerating those who don’t agree persons. Americans have risen resiliently to challenges with us or those whose ideas upset us. . . . throughout our history, from our unlikely success in revo- Hamilton sought to remind us of all this, about the lution to defending our republic in the War of 1812, from duties of the First Amendment, in the very first of the Fed- the preservation of the union in the Civil War to the efforts eralist Papers. There he wrote that even “wise and of our civil rights movement to realize the Declaration’s good” people disagree on “questions of [the] first mag- promise of equal treatment for all persons. It is no wonder nitude”—and that fact, he said, should “furnish a lesson that so many people around the world rightly consider our in moderation” to us all. In a government by and for the republic a wonder of the world. people, we have to remember that those with whom we Now sometimes the cynic in all of us gets the upper hand. disagree even vehemently still have the best interests of Sometimes it’s hard to see the way forward for all the chal- the country at heart. We have to remember that democ- lenges that block the way so clearly before us. But when you racy depends on our ability to reason and work with find yourself in doubt, I encourage you to remember an old those who hold very different views than our own. We have story from G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton noted that an ordi- to learn not only to tolerate different points of view, but to nary man when asked on the spur of the moment to explain cherish the din of democracy. . . . why he preferred civilization to savagery would likely look It’s no exaggeration to say, I think, that to preserve our around wildly at object after object and would only be able to civil liberties we have to constantly work on being civil with explain vaguely: “Why, there is that bookcase, and the coals one another. Tocqueville, that great observer of American in the coal-scuttle, and pianos, and civilization needs its society, understood this connection exactly. He wrote that policemen.” But Chesterton reminded us that there’s some- the manners of Americans are “the real cause that renders times wisdom in the stuttering reply, for really the virtues that people . . . able to support a democratic government.” In of civilization are too numerous to count—almost so obvi- a very real way, self-governance turns on our ability to try to ous as to be too obvious to see. If asked to select, it’s hard to treat—to try at least to treat—others as our equals, as per- know where to begin. sons, with the courtesy and respect each person deserves, And so it is with our constitutional order today. We even when we disagree. Our capacity . . . for civility is in may not notice it every day, but what the Constitution calls this way no less than a sign of our commitment to equality our “blessings of liberty” are everywhere about us. They and in turn democratic self-government. are what allow over 300 million Americans to go about While we’re talking about the founding and civility, it their daily lives under rule of law. might not hurt to recall a little bit about the education of —The Honorable Neil M. Gorsuch

October 9, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 9 when he traveled to their states to tout tax reform. In Indianapolis last week, Make America he said, “if Donnelly doesn’t approve it . . . we will campaign against him like you wouldn’t believe.” Trump was Gipper Again smiling as he spoke. In his speech, Trump invoked Presi- dent John F. Kennedy for the first time as a model of a tax-cutting Democratic Trump’s turn at tax reform. president. Kennedy “championed tax by Fred Barnes cuts that surged the economy.” He quoted JFK as saying, “The right kind f the president’s tax plan is enacted, compromise with Democrats. Once of tax cut at the right time” is the it will go down in history as the that notion fades, as it surely will, best way “to spur our economy for- I Trump Tax Cut of 2017. And it he has a fallback position: secure the ward.” And “this is the right time,” should, for both the tax reductions and votes of three moderate Democratic Trump added. the strategy for enacting them reflect senators facing tough reelections His overall pitch—an appeal to his personal intervention and desires. in 2018—Joe Donnelly of Indiana, an unhappy middle class—is not a Trump considers himself an expert Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, novel one. But he added unexpected on taxes (especially on avoiding them). and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. touches. He didn’t call for cutting the He also has a phobia about being tax rate on capital gains or dividends, linked to tax cuts for high earners, hardy perennials of GOP tax legisla- including himself. He fears Democrats tion. Nor did he rule out calling for a will accuse him of seeking to enrich hike in the individual rate—possibly himself and the wealthiest of upper- to 37 percent or 38 percent—when class Americans. And that his tax ini- the House takes up the bill shortly. tiative will fail. Bannon would approve. This obsession has shaped the In his basic argument, Trump framework of his tax proposal. The insists the middle class will be the top rate on individual income would beneficiary of practically everything dip from 39.5 percent to 35 percent, in the bill, including reforms of the a far smaller reduction than in Presi- tax code. “By eliminating tax breaks dent Reagan’s two tax measures in and loopholes, we will insure that the the 1980s. And Trump would cut the benefits are focused on the middle corporate tax rate from 35 percent to class . . . not the highest-income earn- 20 percent. This is the rate often asso- ers,” he said in Indianapolis. ciated with wage gains. When it goes Special interests and the well-con- down, workers benefit. nected “can call me all they want,” he Just days before his tax plan was said. “It’s not going to help. I’m doing unveiled last week, the president the right thing, and it’s not good for was privately talking up a 15 percent me [financially]. Believe me.” And corporate rate, which he advocated simplifying the tax code will make fil- in last year’s campaign. And weeks ing on a postcard easy, he said. “H&R ago he had considered the idea of If two or three endorse his bill, Block will not be supporting Donald Steve Bannon, his now-departed aide, Trump would dub it bipartisan, Trump, I can tell you.” to raise the top income tax rate to which is a badge of popularity for the For what it’s worth, Trump is off to 44 percent. That would have sparked a moment. Even if they shun it, Trump a good start on tax reform. He’s already Republican rebellion on Capitol Hill. could claim credit for trying oh-so- played a bigger role than he did on So Trump took a pass. hard to win them over, then go ahead health care. The question is whether Republican advisers told him and exploit the current popularity of he will be a political asset or a liability Democrats would attack him as pro- bipartisanship anyway. Congressional in getting the bill passed. rich no matter what he proposed. Republicans would be relieved. They What’s required is what he’s never But Trump has a strategy in mind: have never wanted a compromise in exhibited in the past: discipline, He’s been daydreaming about a the first place. focus, reliability, coolness under fire, Trump is personally wooing the and political dexterity. These traits Fred Barnes is an executive editor three, having taken Donnelly and should sound familiar. They belonged

at The Weekly Standard. Heitkamp on board Air Force One to Reagan. And they were in play GARY LOCKE

10 / The Weekly Standard October 9, 2017 when he led the fight for sweeping tax cuts in 1981. Reagan had a bigger task than Moore Unmoored Trump does today. He had to explain supply-side economics and why tax rates should be whittled down from the Alabama Republicans out-Trump the president. top. Even his allies were leery. Senate majority leader Howard Baker called by John McCormack the Reagan cuts “a riverboat gamble.” The elder George Bush described he victory of Roy Moore, a movement conservatives against the Reaganomics as “voodoo economics.” populist and religious fun- GOP establishment. The same con- Though he changed his mind when T damentalist, in the Alabama servative-populist backlash that put Reagan made him vice president, I Senate primary last week can be seen conservative stars Mike Lee, Marco think he meant it the first time. in two different ways: continuity with Rubio, Pat Toomey, and Ted Cruz in In a televised speech from the the recent past of GOP politics and a the Senate also produced crankier Oval Office on July 27, 1981, Reagan radical break from it. nominees for statewide office like explained it all brilliantly. He used Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell, two charts. He didn’t shy away from Todd Akin, and Carl Paladino. details. He was in total command of Like the populist-versus-establish- the material and the political circum- ment races from 2010 to 2016, the out- stances. A few days later, bipartisan come in Alabama in 2017 depended tax cuts passed. significantly on issues unique to the Trump’s task is smaller than Rea- state and the particular candidates in gan’s in that he, politicians, and the the race. Moore is a hero to many reli- public are up to speed on how tax cuts gious conservatives in Alabama for can, if skillfully implemented, gen- having been suspended from the state erate private investment, economic supreme court twice: once for defy- growth, and job creation. (The media ing a federal court order to remove a still don’t have a clue.) But Reagan monument depicting the Ten Com­ had a tailwind. Trump doesn’t. He mandments and again for flouting the needs to create one. U.S. Supreme Court’s same-sex mar- Trump is capable of doing this, riage ruling. but not if he takes a week off to trade The establishment candidate insults with the NFL or contradicts Luther Strange was endorsed by the details of his own proposal. He Trump, but his greatest weakness was can’t afford to refer to it as “mean tax that he had been appointed by dis­ reform.” His speech last week was graced governor Robert Bent­ley, who close to flawless and was reminiscent Roy Moore resigned amid a sex-and-campaign- of Reagan’s great address to the nation. finance scandal that made Bentley the Reagan urged voters to tell Wash- On one hand, the seat left vacant by most unpopular governor within his ington of their support for his tax the Senate’s only true Trumpist, Attor- own party in the entire country. Ques- cuts. “Tell them you believe this is an ney General Jeff Sessions, will be filled tions of whether a corrupt bargain unequaled opportunity to help return by another Trumpist. When Moore, as had been struck between former attor- America to prosperity and make gov- is very likely, wins the December 12 ney general Strange and Bentley hung ernment again the servant of the peo- special election, the Trumpist caucus over the race. ple,” he said. And they did. of one will rise again in the Senate. But for all of the similarities to Trump’s windup was blunt but And Moore’s campaign against Luther the populist-establishment contests effective. “Call your congressmen,” he Strange, the former Alabama attorney of recent years, Moore’s victory also said. “Call your senators. . . . Let them general appointed to fill Sessions’s draws a stark contrast with the past. know you’re waiting. Tell them today is seat and backed to the hilt by Senate Jeff Sessions was a sober-minded the day for decision. . . . If you demand majority leader Mitch McConnell, is ideological Trumpist, while Moore is it, the politicians will listen. They will best viewed as yet another battle in the more of a temperamental Trumpist, answer, and they will act.” nearly decade-long intra-party skir- akin to the aforementioned populist Reagan won the day with a single mishing that has pitted populists and cranks O’Donnell, Akin, and Angle. speech. Trump may need a speech a The big difference is that those candi- day on lower taxes and jobs. If he rises John McCormack is a senior writer dates, prone to making extreme, out-

to the occasion, so will Congress. ♦ at The Weekly Standard. landish, or conspiratorial statements, SCOTT OLSEN / GETTY

12 / The Weekly Standard October 9, 2017 all lost their races; Moore will almost goes well beyond Trump’s campaign [sodomy] should be punished by certainly win in a state Trump carried pledge to enact a temporary ban on for- death. Do you agree with that?” by 28 points. And some of Moore’s eign Muslims traveling to the United “Well, I don’t, you know, I don’t— comments and beliefs are far more States. Republicans were rightly out- I’m not here to outline any punish- extreme than those of previous failed raged when Senate Dem­ocrats recently ments for sodomy,” Moore demurred. populist candidates. flirted with a religious test for a Cath- “I can’t help what some people say, The Constitution declares that “no olic judicial nominee. “The dogma what some people do.” religious test shall ever be required as lives loudly within you, and that’s of Democrats have a glimmer of hope a qualification to any office or public concern,” California senator Dianne that they might use Moore’s extreme trust under the United States.” Moore Feinstein told judicial nominee Amy statements to pull off a shocking upset wrote a column at the conspiracy- Coney Barrett at a hearing. The GOP in Alabama, as Republicans did in minded WorldNetDaily website after will now likely have its own senator Massachusetts in 2010, when Scott Keith Ellison of Minnesota in 2006 who supports an unconstitutional reli- Brown won Ted Kennedy’s seat in became the first Muslim elected to gious test for office. what amounted to a referendum on Congress: “Muslim Ellison Should Republicans running for office next Obama­care. Moore won his last elec- Not Sit in Congress.” year and in 2020, when Sessions’s origi- tion to the state supreme court in 2012 Moore’s argument went as fol- nal term expires, will likely be hounded with only 51.8 percent of the vote, run- lows: Some Muslims have argued that by the press to react to Moore’s extreme ning 9 points behind Mitt Romney’s their religious law should be imposed comments, just as candidates were in performance in the state. But Demo- on all people by the state; Ellison 2012 following Todd Akin’s unscien- crats seem to have squandered what is a Muslim; Ellison therefore can’t tific speculation that women couldn’t little opportunity they had by nominat- be trusted to uphold the Constitu- get pregnant from “legitimate rape.” ing a staunch liberal, Doug Jones, who tion. “Congress has the authority and In 2015, Moore, who has consist­ supports taxpayer-funding of abortion should act to prohibit Ellison from ently argued that homosexual con- and told NBC’s Chuck Todd on Sep- taking the congressional oath today!” duct should be illegal, was asked by tember 27 that he opposes any limits Moore concluded. an interviewer: “Some people who whatsoever on late-term abortion. This kind of rank religious bigotry interpret the Bible strictly say that So what does Moore’s primary

Clock Is Ticking for DACA Solution THOMAS J. DONOHUE in 2012, many of these young people residency and eventually citizenship. PRESIDENT AND CEO have enrolled in the program in good Now it’s up to our leaders to unite U.S. CHAMBER OF COMMERCE faith, gaining the legal ability to behind a single legislative solution. attend school and work. The clock is ticking as another Congress faces a jam-packed As a result, they have become deadline is fast approaching. This legislative schedule this fall, and even further integrated into our Thursday, October 5, is the last day that President Trump recently added a communities and our economy. DACA recipients are eligible to apply major item to the to-do list when he According to some estimates, for an extension of their legal status. rescinded the Deferred Action for approximately 700,000 are employed There are about 150,000 immigrants Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. in the U.S., performing a wide variety eligible to reapply for a renewable Congress has only a couple months to of jobs. If the DACA program is two-year work permit. For these come up with a permanent solution allowed to end, eventually none and all other Dreamers, a permanent for the young immigrants known of these individuals will be legally solution is desperately needed. as Dreamers, who once again find allowed to remain—let alone work— DACA recipients are our friends, themselves in legal limbo. It needs in America. This outcome would be neighbors, and co-workers. The to act quickly to protect these young contrary to fundamental American Chamber urges Congress to work people and preserve their contributions principles and the best interests of quickly through the details of a to our economy and our society. our country. legislative solution that treats these Approximately 800,000 individuals The U.S. Chamber of Commerce individuals with dignity and fairness. have had their legal status thrown is pleased to see strong expressions The Chamber stands ready to work into doubt by the elimination of of support within Congress and the with our leaders to ensure that the DACA. They were brought to the Trump administration for providing legislation is consistent with our U.S. illegally as children through permanent relief to DACA recipients. nation’s values and the best interests no fault of their own and have Both parties in Congress have offered of our economy. since lived here and become active ideas that would protect Dreamers members of our society. Since from deportation and put them on Learn more at President Obama established DACA a track toward lawful permanent uschamber.com/abovethefold.

14 / The Weekly Standard October 9, 2017 victory and likely ascent to the Senate mean for the future of the Republican party? There does seem to be a theme Overruled of action and reaction in the GOP civil war. The widespread success of conserv­ative-populist candidates in Campus kangaroo courts get a schooling 2010 was driven by backlash to the 2008 bank bailout, Obamacare, and the pres- in fairness. by KC Johnson & Stuart Taylor Jr. idency of Barack Obama. Establish- ment Republican candidates generally ducation Secretary Betsy decrees and the final adoption of new, succeeded in 2012 and 2014 primaries, DeVos on September 22 for- carefully considered regulations. partly in reaction against populist can- E mally rescinded the Obama DeVos and her team have good didates who lost general elections and administration’s commands that uni- reason for this two-stage approach to Tea Party-driven politics in Congress, versities use unfair rules in sexual- reforming enforcement of Title IX, including the 2013 government shut- misconduct investigations—rules the federal law prohibiting sex dis- down. In 2016, even as Donald Trump that had the effect of finding more crimination in higher education. rode a wave of media attention and She has vowed not to emu- populist sentiment to a plurality of the late the process used by the vote in the GOP presidential contest, Obama administration in Trumpist candidates were crushed in its now-notorious decrees of primaries by Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, 2011 and 2014, when it issued and John McCain. dozens of pages of detailed While Moore’s victory by itself “guidance” on Title IX com- is hardly clear-cut evidence that the pliance without prior notice party will take a more Trumpian turn and without giving the public in 2018, there are suggestive signs a chance to comment. that it may. In Arizona, Trumpist can- The Obama decrees flouted didate Kelli Ward, who lost her 2016 basic principles of sound poli- race against John McCain, leads Jeff cymaking and, in the view of Flake by a wide margin in the polls. many experts, violated the In Virginia, Trumpist Corey Stew- notice-and-comment provi- art, whose biggest issue is protecting Betsy DeVos announcing the new policies, September 7 sions of the Administrative Confederate monuments, lost to estab- Procedure Act of 1946. Cath- lishment Republican Ed Gillespie students guilty of sexual assault. And erine Lhamon, Obama’s second head in the gubernatorial primary by just she appears also to be preparing for far of the Education Department’s Office 1.2 percent. Stewart is now running more forceful due-process protections for Civil Rights, recently derided for the GOP Senate nomination. In down the road. those provisions as “essentially a pop- Tennessee, incumbent Bob Corker’s Those follow-on regulations could ular vote.” retirement raises the prospects of require schools to presume that The Education Department’s Trumpist success. accused students are innocent unless announcement on September 22 Establishment Republicans and proven guilty, to allow rigorous cross- was presaged two weeks earlier in a mainstream conservatives in Congress­ examination of accusers, and perhaps major address by DeVos at George no longer have the luxury of running also to grant the accused the unquali- Mason University’s law school, against Barack Obama or Hillary Clin- fied right to appeal adverse decisions, where she expressed grave concern ton. Congressional GOP failures may and more. about the unfairness of the Obama well fuel populist sentiment, as will Meanwhile, the modest improve- decrees and of many campus sex tri- simple partisan loyalty to President ments that DeVos included in the bunals and declared that “no student Trump. And the Trump presidency “interim guidance” of September 22 should be forced to sue their way to may also scare off the type of moder- let universities know how to com- due process.” Around 180 accused stu- ate, conservative, and more-educated ply with the Education Depart- dents have sued their schools since the voters that mainstream conservatives ment’s requirements during the Obama administration’s April 2011 need to defeat Trumpist candidates. time between the end of the Obama “Dear Colleague” letter. A populist fire has been smolder- The DeVos criticisms echoed those ing on the right for some time now. KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr. are of distinguished civil libertarians, law Republicans will either learn to tend it coauthors of The Campus Rape Frenzy: professors, and journalists. They have properly or watch the party they once The Attack on Due Process at America’s deplored the now-revoked Obama

J. LAWLER DUGGAN / WASHINGTON POST / GETTY DUGGAN / WASHINGTON J. LAWLER knew burn to the ground. ♦ Universities (Encounter Books, 2017). requirements that schools, among

October 9, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 15 other measures, use a very low bur- emphasizing the importance of Obama approach, Judge Saylor wrote: den of proof (“preponderance of the due process in a way that would “Whether someone is a ‘victim’ is a evidence”) for branding an accused have been inconceivable during the conclusion to be reached at the end student a rapist; all but abolish mean- Obama years. of a fair process, not an assumption to ingful cross-examination of accusers; The frenzied reactions of many be made at the beginning. . . . Put sim- and subject accused students to a form Democratic politicians and campus ply, a fair determination of the facts of double jeopardy by allowing accus- activists to DeVos’s carefully reasoned, requires a fair process, not tilted to ers to appeal not-guilty findings. balanced speech and to the Septem- favor a particular outcome.” These requirements dramatically ber 22 guidance show how difficult it The interim guidance, which will increased the chances of finding an will be to replace today’s systematic dis- remain in place until the Education innocent student guilty, as scholarly crimination against accused students Department conducts its notice-and- research by John Villasenor has con- with disciplinary systems that will be comment process and issues new reg- firmed. As a group of Penn Law School fair to accusers and accused alike. ulations, points universities toward professors stated, the Obama-era guid- The Education Department procedures designed to pursue the ance placed “improper pressure upon announcement included an apt quo- truth rather than presume the guilt of universities to adopt procedures that do tation from one of the nearly 70 state the accused. not afford fundamental fairness.” And and federal court decisions upholding Thus, for example, the interim as 28 Harvard law professors asserted, (often on preliminary motions) law- guidance allows a college to depart this led too many schools to establish suits filed by accused students. The from the Obama-required “preponder- procedures that “lack the most basic opinion, by Judge F. Dennis Saylor, ance” standard and to use instead the elements of fairness and due process, assailed a decision by Brandeis Uni- more rigorous “clear and convincing” are overwhelmingly stacked against the versity in which a student had been standard of proof, if that is the stand­ accused, and are in no way required by found guilty of “sexual violence” for ard that the school uses in non-sex dis- Title IX law or regulation.” such offenses as awakening his sleep- ciplinary cases. The “Dear Colleague” letter ing boyfriend with kisses. The interim guidance also gives rescinding the 2011 and 2014 guid- In an understated indictment colleges the option of allowing mean- ance quoted each of these passages, of the unfairness at the core of the ingful cross-examination, which the

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16 / The Weekly Standard October 9, 2017 hpe.com/supercomputing hpe.com/supercomputing

URL_HPE(ShipLong)_WeeklyStand_4CHPCS.indd 1 8/14/17 7:42 AM URL_HPE(ShipLong)_WeeklyStand_4CHPCS.indd 1 8/14/17 7:42 AM Supreme Court has described as “the chooses fairness to both accusers and investigator, prosecutor, judge, and jury. greatest legal engine ever invented for accused over presuming male guilt. But we hope to see such flaws fixed the discovery of truth,” and of giving If most schools, as we expect, reject in the final regulations. And if they accused students the right to appeal the Education Department’s invitation are not, the courts might have the without subjecting them to appeals by to abandon their current one-sided last word. In a major decision issued accusers of not-guilty findings. policies, what will Betsy DeVos do? September 25, a three-judge panel for But it seems likely that few col- We hope and believe that she and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, leges or universities will respond her team will issue strong new regu- including judges nominated by presi- to the interim guidance by creating lations specifying procedures that dents of both parties, ruled against the fairer procedures. University of Cali- schools must use to qualify as fair, University of Cincinnati because it fornia president Janet Napolitano, including those sketched above. failed to give an accused student any for example, who had castigated the During the months before new chance to cross-examine his accuser. Obama decrees in a 2015 article, has regulations can be adopted, probably The Sixth Circuit concluded that changed her tune since DeVos started the greatest impact of the interim in “he said/she said” cases that turn on championing due process. Napolitano rules will be felt by university law- the credibility of the two parties, a uni- claimed that DeVos was too focused yers, who can no longer argue in versity’s “failure to provide any form on “outlier” cases of unfairness and court ​—​as they have done with some of confrontation of the accuser made vowed that the UC system would success—​ that​ any unfairness in their the proceeding . . . fundamentally retain its current procedures​—​which procedures was mandated by the unfair.” This was an implicit rebuke to one state judge compared to a “kanga- Education Department. That dog the Obama policy and makes it more roo” court​—​no matter what the Edu- won’t hunt any more. likely that DeVos will not merely per- cation Department does. The interim guidelines still leave mit but also require cross-examination Accusers’ rights organizations much to be desired. For instance, the rights for accused students. roundly condemned DeVos’s move Education Department continues to For the most part, DeVos continues and doubtless would join their many allow schools to use a deeply prob- to move in the right direction, against faculty supporters in aggressively lematic, Obama-blessed system in overwhelming odds, to create a fairer attacking any college president who which a single person serves as lead system for all students. ♦

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URL_HPE(ShipLong)_WeeklyStand_4CHPCS.inddURL_HPE(ShipLong)_WeeklyStand_4CHPCS.indd 1 1 8/14/178/14/17 7:42 AM 7:42 AM URL_HPE(ShipLong)_WeeklyStand_4CHPCS.indd 1 8/14/17 7:42 AM Senate majority leader Mitch McCon­ nell’s) pick, Luther Strange. Sarah Getting Riled Up Palin, another major Trump supporter, also backed Moore. And so, for that matter, did Alabama’s primary voters. Over the Knee Jerk Moore cruised to an easy victory over Strange in the primary. These sorts of reverses, of course, will not do much for Trump’s image Trump’s Kaepernick caper. as a fantastic dealmaker who is work- by Jay Cost ing on behalf of the people. So lit- tle wonder that he injected himself ast week, President Donald precious little in these realms. into the NFL’s melodrama over the Trump picked a fight with the Obamac­are repeal stalled hopelessly national anthem. Never mind that L NFL, arguing that players like in Congress. While tax reform appears the president’s constitutional duties Colin Kaepernick who take a knee to be on track, ambitions for a thor- have nothing to do with opining on during the national anthem should be oughgoing reform have been scaled sports. It was a way for him to signal fired. As he has done so many his commitment to the val- times before, the president ues shared by his frustrated kicked up a hornet’s nest voters—without having to of controversy. Maybe the deliver any policy achieve- commotion will work to his ment of substance. short-term political advan- This kind of cheap show- tage. But whether it does or manship has been Trump’s not, he has once again dem- stock in trade since he onstrated how trivial our declared his candidacy back politics has become. in 2015. Recall that he really In his Vanity of Human took off during the prima- Wishes, the first-century sat- ries when, in response to irist Juvenal lamented that the San Bernardino shoot- the citizens of Rome, who ing, he first called for an out- used to “grant power, high right Muslim ban. Taken as office, the legions, every- a policy proposal, this was thing,” had become obsessed the height of irresponsibil- with just two things, “bread ity: How could we hope to and circuses.” The people, Trump’s targets: A demonstrator greets fans outside prosecute the global war on he argued, had forsaken the Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin, September 28. terror if we alienate Muslim duties of citizenship and allies? But Trump never cared only for spectacle. So it goes back to something resembling a typi- meant it as an actual policy. It was a in early-21st-century America, with cal Republican tax cut, focused on cor- marketing gimmick—intended to the president himself serving as porations and the wealthy. Trump has reframe the political debate around circus master. failed to get funding for his vaunted Trump himself, with the calculation The Trump agenda was thought border wall. Meanwhile, his admin- (correct, as it turned out) that Repub- by many to be about putting aver- istration has been beset by staff turn- lican primary voters would find it age people back in charge of the overs and political scandal. All in all, deeply appealing on a gut level. government. That was the clarion his tenure seems to be that of a fairly Even his campaign pledge to build call the president made in his stark typical, if more than typically incom- a border wall was a publicity stunt. As inaugural address in January. “Every petent, Republican. he told the New York Times in Janu- decision on trade, on taxes, on And it has seemed of late that the ary 2016, when he saw his audiences’ immigration, on foreign affairs,” he core Trump electorate is growing a lit- interest flagging, “I just say, ‘We will intoned from the steps of the Capi- tle restless. Steve Bannon, the former build the wall!’ and they go nuts.” tol, “will be made to benefit Ameri- head of his populist brain trust, had Talk to actual border-security experts can workers and American families.” barely left the White House when he who are committed to keeping ille- But so far, he has accomplished unleashed the Breitbart forces on the gal immigration to a minimum, and opposite side of Trump in the Alabama they’ll tell you that money is better Jay Cost is a contributing editor Senate GOP run-off. Bannon backed spent on other resources, especially

to The Weekly Standard. Roy Moore against Trump’s (and more agents. But Trump understood REVERE / GETTY STACY

18 / The Weekly Standard October 9, 2017 that a killer line like “big beautiful wall” is what actually plays in Pough- keepsie. And, not coincidentally, The Kurds Get Trump won 61 percent of the Pough- keepsie vote during the GOP primary. This is what Trump has always had Under Way a preternatural talent for—not business per se, and certainly not government, but marketing, himself specifically. Given the manifest disappointments The allure and risks of independence. of his administration, it was time for by David DeVoss Trump to remind his core voters why they fell in love with him. He knows urds in northern Iraq con- militias, called Popular Mobilization this demographic like the back of his trol their own land, maintain Units, and the Quds Force, which hand. Predominantly male, white, and K their own military, and share functions as Iran’s Foreign Legion, older, his voters overlap to a remark- a common culture and language. They roam Iraq with impunity. able degree with the NFL’s core audi- also have an overwhelming desire “We expected Iran to be hostile ence. They’re offended by protests to separate from Iraq and become an but hoped Turkey would take a more during the national anthem. Doubly independent state. But can a de facto nuanced view,” admits Bayan Sami so when the protesters are wealthy nation become a real country if it isn’t Abdul Rahman, director of the Kurd- athletes who make more money play- recognized by the diplomatic commu- istan Regional Government Liaison ing a single game than they’ll see in a nity and offered a seat in the U.N.? Office in Washington. “We did not decade. Meanwhile, the NFL is tak- That’s the question confronting declare independence; we declared a ing a hands-off approach—caught Kurdish Regional Government pres- referendum that empowers the gov- between the (mostly) African-Amer- ident Masoud Barzani this week in ernment to negotiate an amicable ican players who deeply sympathize the wake of a non-binding referen- split with Baghdad.” with Kaepernick’s cause and the dum in which the region’s 4.5 mil- The fiercest critic of Kurdistan’s (mostly) white fans who think he is lion eligible voters authorized KRG possible secession may be the U.S. ungrateful. It was a perfect opportu- leaders to initiate a process that State Department, whose diplomats nity for Trump, the consummate self- might lead to independence. Turnout are schooled from their first day at promoter, to transform it into a debate was over 70 percent, and more than the George P. Shultz National Foreign about himself. 90 percent voted yes. Affairs Training Center to believe little And if the cultural elites are out- The exercise of direct democracy good can happen when a nation-state raged—all the better! It helps him did not please Sunni and Shia neigh- splits up. “Back in the early 1960s when reinforce the notion that he stands bors in Turkey and Iran. Tehran called African nations began gaining inde- for the average Joe, and they do not. the vote “illegal,” banned all flights pendence, the Organization of African Trump cleverly cast Jeb Bush in that to and from Kurdish airports, then Unity in Addis Ababa faced the ques- role during the primaries, and he is threatened to seal its border and start tion of whether to eliminate the old just as happy for NFL commissioner damming rivers. President Recep colonial boundaries and create new Roger Goodell to play the part now. Tayyip Erdogan also threatened to frontiers using tribal, linguistic, and It seems almost quaint to point close Turkey’s border and plug the economic data,” says Charles Hill, a out that nothing of substance will come pipeline carrying oil from Kurdistan former high-ranking official at State of this controversy. No citizen will to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. who now is diplomat in residence and be made better or worse off because Baghdad denounced the entire exercise international studies lecturer at Yale of it. The government will not be and announced it would be sending University. “The OAU decided not to reformed. The nation will not be made tanks into Turkey for a joint military redraw any lines. Unfortunately, six safer. There will be no great national exercise along the Kurdish border. years ago, they decided to break up conversation on race, policing, crime, Erdogan’s bluster is not taken seri- Sudan following a referendum and it’s celebrity, or anything of the sort. It’s ously in the Kurdish capital of Erbil been hell to pay ever since.” all a show, intended to arouse the pas- since Turkish developers have bil- Independence referendums aren’t sions of the mob. For Trump, against lions invested in the region, and that unusual. A 1999 plebiscite spon- Trump—it does not matter, so long Ankara earns money off every barrel sored by the U.N. enabled East Timor as the people are riled up. The actual of crude transiting Anatolia. Tehran to leave Indonesia. In 2014, Scotland problems our nation faces will have poses a more serious threat since Shia voted to remain in the U.K., which to wait while the citizens enjoy their two years later decided to exit the bread and circuses, served up by David DeVoss spent five years in European Union. The dissolution of their president for his own ends. ♦ Iraq working for USAID. Czechoslovakia in 1993 that created

October 9, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 19 the independent nations of Slova- of the Yazidi people. Over the past city where Iraq’s oil was discovered kia and the Czech Republic did not three years more than 1,800 Peshmerga in the 1920s. Kirkuk’s oil fields are prompt turmoil in Europe. have died in Iraq’s war on ISIS. (Pesh- far less productive than those around Proponents of a unified Iraq argue merga, by the way, translates as “those the southern port city of Basrah, but that Kurdistan is different, since a who face death.”) Kirkuk is symbolically important to Arabs and Kurds alike. Historically, Kirkuk was home to Assyrians, Kurds, and Turkmen, but in an attempt to secure its oil for Baghdad, Sad- dam Hussein began forcibly removing Kurds in 1991 and giving their homes to Arabs. By 2003, when U.S. troops arrived, 500,000 Kurds had left, and the city had a majority Arab population. According to Iraq’s consti- tution, Kurds are entitled to 17 percent of Iraq’s oil reve- nues after “national accounts” like military spending are paid for. In practice, however, other expenses resulting from cost- plus contracts signed with Iraqi Kurds wait to check their identities before voting in Erbil, September 25. oil companies working in the south reduce the KRG’s cut to sovereign Kurdish state with a pop- Since 2014, the territory under 13 percent. This reduced allotment, ulation of 6 million that is excised Kurdish control has increased which often never arrives, combined from Iraq will affect the aspirations 40 percent, to include most of Kirkuk with the expense of fighting ISIS and of the 22.5 million Kurds residing in Province and part of the Nineveh Plain caring for displaced refugees, has left Turkey, Syria, and Iran. Politicians north of Mosul. Some of the land is the KRG so short of money that gov- in Erbil concede that independence used to shelter 1.8 million Iraqis dis- ernment employees routinely miss could be destabilizing if it is not pur- placed by the Islamic State. Many are paychecks. Most Baghdad-based dip- sued in a respectful, methodical way. Sunni Arabs fearful of returning to lomats believe the KRG is moving But they vehemently reject Washing- Anbar, Saladin, and Diyala provinces toward independence because it no ton’s assertions that any movement because of rampaging militias con- longer has confidence in Baghdad’s toward an independent Kurdistan trolled by Iran and its Baghdad allies. Shia politicians. will detract from the war against The situation is even worse for Despite Kurdish contributions to ISIS and foreclose any support Kurds Christians, whose numbers have the war and Erbil’s openly expressed might have received in future nego- declined from 1.4 million at the time admiration for America, Washington tiations with Baghdad. of the U.S. invasion in 2003 to 250,000 remains a strong supporter of Bagh- Were it not for the Kurdish Pesh­ today. Ethnically cleansed from Bagh- dad and still dreams of Iraq becoming merga fighters, Iraq might be a ter- dad and pushed out of Nineveh by ISIS an Islamic Finland, separating Sunni rorist state today. When ISIS invaded militants, many today live in the Erbil and Shia in the Middle East. Siding in 2014, Iraq’s army discarded its uni- neighborhood of Ainkawa where the with the Kurds risks having Iraq and forms, abandoned its weaponry, and Chaldean archbishop is located. They, Iran—both of which have petroleum fled south to Baghdad, allowing Mosul, too, would like to return to Christian reserves equal to two-thirds of Saudi Ramadi, Fallujah, and the entire Sunni villages north of Mosul where until Arabia’s—aligning themselves into a Triangle to be incorporated into the recently Aramaic was the primary lan- theocratic petrostate. Islamic State. Kurdish soldiers stopped guage. The odds of that happening are For former deputy national secu- the ISIS advance 17 miles outside slight since Iranian militias are busily rity adviser James Jeffrey, who served Erbil then evicted terrorists from the turning the remaining buildings still as U.S. ambassador to both Turkey and suburbs of Kirkuk. When the moun- standing into mosques. Iraq, the logic of America’s foreign pol- tain town of Sinjar fell to ISIS, Kurd- The main impediment to a peace- icy is unassailable. “Gratitude is subjec- ish fighters from Syria pushed them ful resolution of Kurdistan’s future is tive,” he says. “The Kurds are an asset,

out, halting the genocidal elimination the fate of Kirkuk, the province and but a unified Iraq is a bigger asset.” ♦ AHMED DEEB / AFP GETTY

20 / The Weekly Standard October 9, 2017 Now More Than Ever The state of America’s missile-defense program

By Peter J. Boyer defense thinkers. Thirty-four years after Reagan under- took to build a shield to protect the United States from s Kim Jong-un’s cavalcade of menace enemy missiles, with North Korea now routinely sailing has proceeded across the 2017 calendar, them over Japan, it is reasonable to ask what exactly the revealing a North Korean arsenal that American missile-defense system is capable of doing. Can now includes a hydrogen bomb and mis- our missile defenses block a nuclear warhead aimed at the siles capable of reaching New York City United States? Can it protect Japan and South Korea or andA Washington, D.C., America’s strategic posture has the American territory of Guam? Could it have shot down been old and familiar (if now more colorfully put)—deter- any of the 15 (so far) test missiles that North Korea has rence (“fire and fury”), sanctions, launched this year? entreaties to China, and even the prospect of a diplomatic sit-down SCUDS, THAAD, AND AEGIS with the renegade regime. America’s missile-defense pro- Missing, or, at least, relegated to gram is not really one single sys- the margins, is any clear articula- tem but four. One component is tion of the role of American missile the Patriot missile, descendant defense. “I don’t hear enough about of the SCUD-hunting rockets it, and this baffles me,” says Jon Kyl, deployed, with mixed success, in the the former Arizona senator who is 1991 Gulf war. The newer, far more now a Washington think-tanker and effective Patriot, called the PAC-3, a member of the congressionally is a low-altitude weapon deployed mandated Commission on Defense in South Korea and in several other Strategy. “It seems so obvious that ally nations. The ground-based Ter- the first thing you have to do with minal High-Altitude Area Defense North Korea is shore up your abil- system, or THAAD, and the sea- ity to ensure that they can’t damage based Aegis defense system are both us or our allies. Once you’ve done considered dependable weapons that, then you’ve got a lot more flex- against short- and medium-range ibility to do whatever you’re going missiles. Experts believe they can to do—whether it’s with more sanc- reliably, if not infallibly, protect tions or whatever.” South Korea, Japan, and Guam Kyl, a freshman congressman Anti-U.S. poster released on August 17 against a North Korean attack. Nei- during Ronald Reagan’s presi- ther system has scored a kill against dency and then a three-term senator, has long been one of one of Kim’s test missiles, and they are not likely to be tried Washington’s most forceful advocates of missile defense. in such a manner, mostly because they are oriented toward Given today’s existential threat posed by North Korea, protecting populations, and the North Korean test missiles Kyl can’t understand why missile defense isn’t central to have been shot into the sea. As Loren Thompson, a defense every defense policy conversation. “I think part of the analyst at the Lexington Institute, puts it, “We deploy our answer is that people really do think that somehow or defenses to protect the U.S. and its allies, not fish.” other we’ve got this covered,” he says. “And, you know, The final piece of the missile-defense program, and we don’t.” the only one aimed at protecting the American home- That is a jarring assertion from one of Washington’s top land, is the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system, an array of 30 interceptors situated in Alaska and California

Peter J. Boyer is national correspondent at The Weekly Standard. (to be increased to 44 by the end of this year), which are NEWSCOM

October 9, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 21 designed to take out enemy missiles as they cruise in space Nixon later said that he’d pushed the anti-ballistic mis- toward the United States. The system is complex, and the sile system because the Soviets had one, and at the least, it ground-based interceptors have a mixed record. The newest could serve as a bargaining chip in arms negotiations. That interceptor had a successful test in May, a so-called “bullet- deal came with the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and a to-bullet” kill of an ICBM-class missile. This was a remark- follow-on amendment, which effectively enshrined MAD able achievement, but it was also the system’s only such as inviolable writ, allowing each side one anti-missile site, intercept of an intercontinental ballistic-class missile. limited to 100 interceptors. The Soviets already had a site This summer, Lieutenant General Samuel Greaves, near Moscow, and the United States located Safeguard in head of the Missile Defense Agency, said, “We believe that Langdon, North Dakota. It became fully operational in the the currently deployed ballistic missile defense system can autumn of 1975. But politics intervened. Nixon had been meet today’s threat.” Defense Secretary James Mattis, testi- chased out of office by Watergate, and a scandal-weary elec- fying before Congress in June, said that the current system torate had stacked Congress with hyper-partisan Democrats. is good enough to “buy us some time.” Forty-eight days after it became operational, the $5.7 billion Our missile-defense system is hardly an impenetra- Safeguard system was shut down by Congress. The Soviets, ble shield, and it is not nearly as robust as it could have meanwhile, kept their missile-defense system near Moscow; become by now. When Reagan announced his Strategic its successor continues to be maintained by Russia today. Defense Initiative (SDI) to the nation in a televised speech in 1983, he said that achieving a viable anti-ballistic missile STAR WARS IS BORN system would be a “formidable technical task” and warned So things stood until that summer day in 1979 when that “[t]here will be failures and setbacks” along with the Ronald Reagan visited Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado breakthroughs. The science of missile defense has, indeed, Springs, then the home of the North American Aerospace been hard, but the politics have been even harder. Defense Command (NORAD). The facility was an early- Liberal opposition to missile defense is nearly as old as warning tracking installation buried under 2,000 feet of the concept. The reigning strategic doctrine of the Cold War granite, with a command center several stories high. As was Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD—the notion Reagan would tell the story, he stood in the center, with its that stability was purchased by each side’s knowledge that a vast walls of monitors and sensors overlaid by a huge map nuclear strike would be met by devastating retaliation, with of the United States, and heard how we could track a Soviet annihilation the result for both sides. By this reasoning, a missile from the launchpad, watch its trajectory through missile-defense system was inherently provocative, because space, and then see it reenter the atmosphere en route to its it would undermine the other side’s confidence in its abil- target on American soil. ity to retaliate, thus encouraging a preemptive first strike. “What can you do to stop it?” Reagan asked NORAD’s Even so, ballistic missile-defense systems were proposed commander, General James Hill. in the 1950s and 1960s and fiercely disputed along sharply “Nothing,” Hill replied. ideological lines. This politicization was partly because one That paradox animated Reagan’s vision for the Strategic of the early, and most forceful, advocates of missile defense Defense Initiative, which he sold to the public as a matter of was Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, who’d common sense and moral imperative. “Wouldn’t it be bet- come to believe that it was far preferable to “shoot at enemy ter to save lives than to avenge them?” he asked in his 1983 missiles than to suffer attack and then have to shoot at peo- speech. “Are we not capable of demonstrating our peaceful ple in return.” Years earlier, Teller had testified against J. intentions by applying all our abilities and our ingenuity to Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist and Manhattan Project achieving a truly lasting stability?” principal accused of Communist sympathies. For many on Reagan’s program was savagely attacked by his political the left, support for something Teller advocated amounted opponents, including Ted Kennedy, who dubbed it a “reck- to an endorsement of McCarthyism. less Star Wars scheme’’—a cue that the press eagerly took. Teller contributed to the development of an early mis- As Reagan had said it would, the SDI program had its sile-defense system called Safeguard, which envisioned failures as well as successes—not least being its role in has- interceptors dispersed across the country, able to destroy tening the demise of the Soviet Union. There were remark- enemy missiles with a small nuclear explosion in space. able technical advances, including an imaginative system of When President Nixon announced in 1969 his intention to thousands of small, autonomous space-based interceptors deploy Safeguard, he was fiercely opposed by congressional designed to detect and destroy enemy missiles on their own, liberals, led by Massachusetts senator Edward M. Kennedy. thus avoiding the risk of being rendered useless if cut off It won authorization in the Senate by a single vote—the tie- from command and control. The system, named Brilliant breaker cast by Vice President Spiro Agnew. Pebbles, was relatively cheap and carried huge strategic

22 / The Weekly Standard October 9, 2017 implications. It became the centerpiece of the SDI program, interceptors meant to protect Europe from Iranian missiles. and by 1992 it had passed through its first six tests. One of Then came another turn of the political wheel. Barack its innovators, Greg Canavan, guessed that Brilliant Pebbles Obama began to dismantle the Bush missile-defense sys- was two years away from deployment when, as he later put tem almost as soon as he took office. He canceled the Air- it, “the scaffolding just dropped out.” borne Laser and other “boost-phase” systems, reduced the Bill Clinton had campaigned against SDI in his run for number of interceptors in the homeland defense system, the presidency, and soon after his inauguration, his Defense and cut the overall missile-defense budget significantly. secretary, Les Aspin, declared the administration’s determi- In a nod to Russia, with whom Obama wished to “reset” nation to “take the stars out of Star Wars,” which it unhesi- relations, he canceled the systems planned for Poland and tatingly did. SDI was killed in Clinton’s first 100 days. the Czech Republic, promising that they’d be replaced by From that moment until this, the fortunes of missile “stronger, smarter, and swifter defense.” Obama’s “stronger­ , defense have directly reflected the smarter” system—which would political cycle, waxing when Repub- have fielded an interceptor, the licans are in ascent, waning when SM-3 IIB, to which Russia particu- Democrats hold sway. larly objected—never materialized. In 2013, two years after Obama’d KIM’S CALLING CARD said it would be deployed, the pro- Republicans made missile gram was canceled. defense part of their Contract with By then, there was new mischief America in the nationalized 1994 from North Korea, now being led by midterm elections that made Newt Kim Jong-un, that obliged Obama Gingrich speaker of the House, and to re-think his reluctance on mis- the next year, Congress passed leg- Kim Jong-un watches a ballistic missile sile defense, just as it had with Clin- islation mandating a national anti- test launch, September 16. ton. The latest Kim had not only missile system. Clinton vetoed it. successfully debuted a three-stage Then, in August 1998, North Korea, led at the time by Kim rocket and conducted new tests with nuclear technology, Jong-il, the current dictator’s father, launched a Taepodong-1 he’d gone on a rhetorical gambol that established his stand- missile. It was the regime’s first ballistic missile, a wakeup ing as a uniquely weird and dangerous figure—unilater- call to the world, and Congress again passed a missile- ally renouncing the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean defense mandate. By then, Clinton was on trial in the Sen- War and proclaiming North Korea’s right to a preemptive ate on impeachment charges, and he signed the legislation, nuclear strike. Obama decided to increase the number of mandating a national missile-defense system but delaying interceptors protecting the homeland from 30 to 44—which deployment until his successor took office. had been the Bush plan before Obama whittled it down. As it happened, George W. Bush had, during his cam- “In the Obama years, some extraordinary damage was paign, articulated what was to become American policy for done,” Kyl notes. “Efforts to build out the GMD system and the next eight years. “America must build effective missile also to create some really new innovative and much more defenses based on the best available options at the earli- powerful systems with our Aegis, and Patriot, and THAAD est possible date,” he’d said. “Our missile defense must be were all doused by the Obama administration.” designed to protect all 50 states and our friends and allies and deployed forces overseas from missile attacks by rogue BIPARTISAN ACTION nations or accidental launches.” Bush’s Pentagon pursued a Dan Sullivan was a second-year pre-med student at global, multilayered system, testing an array of land-, sea-, Harvard when he cast his first presidential vote, for Ron- air-, and space-based weapons. Among the systems funded ald Reagan in 1984. A Crimson poll at the time showed was an Airborne Laser, designed to take out an enemy mis- that the Republican incumbent only drew 27 percent sup- sile in its very earliest moments after launch. Such a “boost- port from the student body, and Sullivan and his friends phase” weapon is the holy grail of missile-defense scientists used to joke that they personally knew every student because at that early stage, an enemy rocket is a fat, slow who’d voted for the Gipper. Sullivan, who’d attended a target positioned over enemy territory. In 2004, Bush military prep school, admired Reagan’s common-sense began deploying the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense style and, especially, his buildup of the hollowed-out post- (GMD) system in Alaska and California, which is now Vietnam military. Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, the homeland’s only defense against missiles, and negoti- by then commonly known as “Star Wars,” just made sense

STR / AFP GETTY ated deals with the Czech Republic and Poland to install to young Dan Sullivan.

October 9, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 23 Over the course of the next 33 years, Sullivan gradu- an Iranian or North Korean threat and create, at least, the ated from Harvard, received degrees from Georgetown, potential for dealing with an even more robust threat.” enlisted in the Marines (doing four tours of active duty), married, moved to Alaska, had three kids, and got into TRUMP JUMPS IN elective politics. And when he came to Washington as One of the Democratic cosponsors of Sullivan’s legisla- Alaska’s junior senator in 2015, he found that the debate tion was Gary Peters, a liberal from Michigan. “The United over missile defense hadn’t really changed much since his States faces an evolving number of security threats—from undergraduate days. North Korea’s provocative missile tests designed to inflame “You know, the critics, they all say, ‘Oh, this is too global tensions to Iran’s ballistic missile tests in defiance of a expensive, it’s not fully tested, let’s just use the mutual U.N. Security Council resolution,” Peters said in May. “It is assured destruction doctrine with Kim Jong-un as he critical that America take proactive steps to bolster our mis- gets these nukes, the way we’ve done it with Russia and sile-defense systems so we are prepared in the event of a China,’ ” he tells me. missile attack directed at our homeland.” Indeed, Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, It was the sort of thing that not so long ago only a argued in August, “History shows that we can, if we must, Republican would have uttered. And Republicans have tolerate nuclear weapons in North Korea—the same way left space open for Democrats on the issue of missile we tolerated the far greater threat of thousands of Soviet defense. Not only had stalwarts like Kyl retired, but for nuclear weapons during the Cold War.” the first time in a generation, the election of a Republi- But Sullivan believes one factor should change the can president didn’t necessarily mean a commitment to a politics of missile defense—the unknowable mind of Kim robust missile-defense system. Jong-un. “Mutual assured destruction assumes a rational The issue had scarcely been mentioned during the 2016 actor at the other end of the red button,” he says. “And I campaign, although a page that went up on the White House don’t think, given his activities, that’s a risk we want to website on Inauguration Day called for a more robust take—to assume that he’s a rational actor.” system, and Defense secretary James Mattis ordered a More than a year ago, Sullivan began to solicit the coun- Pentagon review of missile defense in the spring—to be sel of key defense figures on how to reinvigorate the mis- completed by the end of the year. The Trump budget cut sile-defense program. Advice from such experts as General missile-defense spending by $300 million, and the White John Hyten, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, and House mildly criticized the Sullivan proposal, urging Vice Admiral James Syring, then the director of the Missile Congress to wait for the Pentagon’s review before making Defense Agency, provided Sullivan with the substance he any decisions. needed for a missile-defense bill. But Trump himself, who’d not seemed particularly The Alaska senator recruited allies from both parties interested in, or even aware of, his administration’s mis- for his effort, and his Advancing America’s Missile Defense sile-defense policy, awakened to the issue this summer. Act had more than two-dozen cosponsors, several of them Speaking to reporters at his Bedminster, N.J., golf club two Democrats. The legislation proposed the addition of weeks after North Korea’s second ICBM test, Trump said, another 28 interceptors to the 44 that will be in place by the “We are going to be increasing our budget by many bil- end of the year, a quickened pace for anti-missile testing, lions of dollars because of North Korea and other reasons and, most important, would open the door to a space-based having to do with the anti-missile.” sensor system that could integrate the various ground- and “As you know, we reduced it by 5 percent, but I’ve sea-based systems into one. decided I don’t want that,” Trump continued. “We are The essence of Sullivan’s bill became a key element going to be increasing the anti-missiles by a substantial of the Senate’s National Defense Authorization Act, the amount of billions of dollars.” annual congressional exercise in directing defense pro- If it wasn’t Reagan’s 1983 speech, Trump was none- grams, which passed earlier this month. A similar mea- theless on board with missile defense. Sullivan says he sure passed the House, and the two bills will soon be in believes a consensus is building and that this time, it may conference. survive the next political cycle. It isn’t exactly Star Wars or Missile Shield, but Sul- “Look, people are hearing about this in town halls, livan’s effort is seen by missile-defense advocates as an not just in Alaska and Hawaii, but in places like Seattle,” important start. “I’m hopeful that this signals a recogni- he says. “If you ask the average American should we be tion that we’ve got to turn the scientists loose,” says Kyl, spending billions more to make sure we have an insurance “and get back to innovating. We need new improvements policy that your city is protected, I think the answer from to these weapons that can make them very effective against almost everybody is yes.” ♦

26 / The Weekly Standard October 9, 2017 Cheney Was Right The sorry history of our North Korea policy

By Eric Edelman & Robert Joseph the International Atomic Energy Agency access to the Yong- byon reactor and other nuclear facilities while quickly initi- ince Donald Trump took office, the growth of ating a clandestine program to reprocess fissile material for North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and the increas- its nuclear arsenal. The loss of its superpower patron after ing capability and diversity of its ballistic missile the collapse of the Soviet Union made nuclear weapons a force have made that country the most urgent matter of some urgency for the Kim dynasty. Thus began threat to U.S. national security. Observers as a pattern of serial prevarication and the use of “arms-con- Sdiverse as Mark Bowden in the Atlantic, Michael Auslin trol” negotiations as a cover for covert activity. of the Hoover Institution, and former White House chief One pretext the North used to avoid concluding a safe- strategist Steve Bannon agree that all military options avail- guards agreement was the presence of U.S. theater nuclear able to the president are bad. How exactly did weapons in South Korea. As the Cold War we get to this point? What policy decisions wound down, President George H.W. Bush led to an emerging intercontinental ballistic working with his Secretary of Defense Dick missile capability and a nuclear arsenal that Cheney announced his Presidential Nuclear could rival that of the U.K. by the middle of Initiative to withdraw all sea- and land-based the next decade? How did we end up with a tactical nuclear weapons from their locations, North Korean leader seemingly more will- including those forward-deployed to the ing to run enormous risks than his father or Republic of Korea. Soviet president Mikhail grandfather? The answer demonstrates once Gorbachev in the waning months of his ten- again the venerable adage that “the road to ure agreed to do likewise. This prompted hell is paved with good intentions.” One South Korean president Roh Tae-woo to Dick Cheney in 2007 of the few national figures who consistently renounce any intention to produce, possess, raised alarms about U.S policy towards North Korea was store, or use nuclear weapons on ROK territory. Stripped of former vice president Dick Cheney, and he has proven pre- any remaining rationale for denying the IAEA access to its scient. The United States now faces the real prospect of a facilities, North Korea agreed in December 1991 to a Joint war that Secretary of Defense James Mattis says would Declaration calling for the denuclearization of the Korean be “catastrophic.” This story should be studied carefully peninsula. The two sides agreed not to “test, manufacture, before it repeats itself—say, in Iran. produce, receive, possess, store, deploy or use nuclear weap- Kim Il-sung manifested an interest in obtaining nuclear ons” or “possess nuclear reprocessing and uranium enrich- weapons almost as soon as he founded the North Korean rul- ment facilities.” They agreed in principle to an inspections ing dynasty, in the early 1950s. His Soviet patrons were not regime to verify the joint declaration. The North signed an prepared to oblige but did help to build a nuclear research IAEA safeguards agreement in January 1992 and provided reactor in Yongbyon that could provide a source of pluto- its first statement to the agency a few months later. nium. His unrequited urge for nuclear weapons led Kim to The IAEA quickly realized that there were discrep- approach Mao Zedong after the successful Chinese nuclear ancies in the documentation Pyongyang provided. The test in 1964, but he was again turned down. Ultimately Mos- agency sought clarifications on the amount of plutonium cow, wanting to keep the number of nuclear-weapon states North Korea had secretly reprocessed and, as officials low, persuaded Pyongyang to sign the Nuclear Nonprolif- became more suspicious about the country’s claims, asked eration Treaty in 1985. But North Korea procrastinated for special inspections. The North refused and threatened about signing the mandatory safeguards agreement to give to withdraw from the NPT. Fearful of the impact a with- drawal might have on the treaty, Bill Clinton’s administra- Eric Edelman was undersecretary of defense for policy from 2005 tion began almost two years of intensive crisis diplomacy to 2009; Robert Joseph was undersecretary of state for arms control that culminated in the Agreed Framework.

and international security from 2005 to 2007. The effort to find a negotiated solution to North Korea’s / GETTY / BLOOMBERG JACK ATLEY

October 9, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 27 violations of its NPT obligations was undoubtedly well Many of the career officials who had worked on the intentioned and predicated on a notion that has under- Clinton Agreed Framework were committed to engage- pinned the attempts of subsequent administrations to cope ment and resisted a tougher, more coercive approach, lead- with the Kim dynasty’s dishonesty and frequent provoca- ing to bureaucratic infighting the first two years of the tions: that any coercive action might precipitate a renewed Bush administration. Cheney and the so-called “hardlin- war on the peninsula and carried such high risks of civilian ers” wanted to mobilize North Korea’s neighbors (par- casualties that it was simply unacceptable. ticularly Russia and China, who many believed shared an The Agreed Framework called for North Korea to interest in preventing the nuclearization of the peninsula freeze and eventually eliminate its nuclear facilities and and its consequences), address the North’s ballistic missile institute a special-inspections regime for the IAEA to ver- proliferation and extensive conventional firepower arrayed ify compliance. The North agreed not to pursue a nuclear- within range of Seoul, and highlight its massive human weapons capability. In return, the United States would rights violations. establish a multinational consortium (KEDO) to provide The fate of the Agreed Framework was sealed when the North with two allegedly “proliferation-resistant” Cheney’s skepticism about North Korean compliance was light-water reactors. The North would receive shipments of vindicated by intelligence suggesting Pyongyang had been heavy fuel oil to provide energy while the light-water reac- cheating all along. Even as the ink was drying on the Agreed tors were being constructed. The agreement also called for Framework, the Kim regime had launched a large-scale, the United States to provide assurances that it would nei- clandestine effort, aided by the notorious A. Q. Khan ring in ther threaten nor use nuclear weapons against the North Pakistan, to create a uranium-enrichment capability, giving and for the parties to move toward full normalization of it another pathway to nuclear weapons. When U.S. negotia- relations. As normalization proceeded, the two sides would tor Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly confronted him, address other matters of concern to the United States, such his North Korean interlocutor admitted the existence of as North Korea’s ballistic missile development program such a program. Any doubts about whether Kelly had accu- and its tendency to treat missiles as the equivalent of a cash rately understood the envoy were conclusively eliminated crop for export. when Stanford University nuclear scientist Sig Hecker, a Cheney, no longer secretary of defense but considering a committed supporter of the Agreed Framework, traveled to run for president, identified North Korea as “the most per- North Korea in 2009 and was allowed to visit a fully func- ilous immediate threat” to national security in a series of tioning, industrial-scale uranium-enrichment facility. speeches he gave in 1994. He opposed the Agreed Frame- With Cheney’s encouragement, staffers in his office work because it rewarded North Korea for deception and and at the National Security Council developed a strategy violating its NPT obligations. Appeasement of the North of “tailored containment” that sought to pressure North seemed likely to incentivize additional bad behavior. That Korea, which withdrew from the NPT in 2003, with a vari- admonition turned out to be prophetic. ety of tools including intensified economic sanctions and When George W. Bush was elected, the Clinton admin- enhanced international interdiction capabilities under the istration was feverishly concluding efforts to flesh out the Proliferation Security Initiative. The point was to change “promise” of the Agreed Framework while working on an the regime’s calculus by demonstrating that nuclear weap- agreement on ballistic missile technology proliferation and ons were not a guarantor of regime survival but a threat to a possible historic visit to Pyongyang by the outgoing presi- it. If that proved impossible, these stringent measures might dent. Clinton wisely thought better of going to North Korea still, over time, provoke a change in the regime’s composi- during a presidential transition, and the Bush administra- tion that could lead to a negotiated denuclearization. tion turned to its review of its predecessor’s handiwork. Critics frequently suggest that the debate over North Negotiations on ballistic missiles were discarded after Sec- Korean policy during the Bush administration was between retary of State Colin Powell pronounced that following those who favored negotiation and those who didn’t—and through with the Clinton approach would have amounted that the opponents had no real alternative to engagement. to “one of the worst pickpocket deals in history.” Cheney’s This is a convenient fiction used to justify the ongoing longstanding skepticism about the Agreed Framework process of serial concessions. The issue was not the ques- helped persuade President Bush to take a tough line from tion of negotiations but on what terms negotiations would the outset, and he repeatedly referred to the agreement as take place. Cheney throughout the six-party talks tried to a “mistake.” Nevertheless, primarily for alliance-manage- toughen the U.S. position to keep those charged with carry- ment purposes, the administration took the initial posi- ing out the diplomatic effort from succumbing to the inevi- tion that it would honor the Agreed Framework as long as table temptation of making the process of negotiation more North Korea continued to abide by it. important than the outcome. Specifically, he was insistent

28 / The Weekly Standard October 9, 2017 that the only acceptable objective was comprehensive, veri- what they were really doing, and we were not only com- fiable, irreversible denuclearization. Where proliferation is plicit, but were in fact rewarding them for it by offering involved, you cannot allow countries of concern to be a lit- benefits and concessions in exchange for missed deadlines tle bit pregnant. They cannot be permitted to possess those and false declaration.” He added that he “feared we were key elements of the nuclear fuel cycle that permit breakout. headed for a train wreck.” The notion that complete denuclearization was unrealiz- When Barack Obama took office, Hill expressed his sat- able, on the other hand, was contradicted by the experi- isfaction that Cheney and his allies were no longer sitting at ence of South Africa, Libya, and the former Soviet states of the table in the Deputies or Principals Committee meetings. Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, among others. But his glee was short-lived because Cheney’s warnings Armed with new sanctions, like those the Treasury were again borne out. Even before Obama took the oath of Department imposed on Banco Delta Asia, a Macao-based office, the North announced it had weaponized all the plu- bank through which illicit gains from the North’s counter- tonium it had harvested from Yongbyon. In April, Pyong- feiting, drug trafficking, and other criminal activities flowed yang tested a three-stage ballistic missile. Ten days later, it into the Kim family coffers, U.S. negotiators in September expelled the U.S. and IAEA monitors from the Yongbyon 2005 won North Korea’s agreement to the objective of “aban- plant, and in May it conducted a second nuclear test. The doning all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs agreement Hill negotiated had totally collapsed. Perhaps and returning, at an early date, to the Treaty on the Nonpro- chastened by this experience, the Obama administration liferation of Nuclear Weapons and to IAEA safeguards.” It determined that arms-control diplomacy with North Korea was, as six-party talks negotiator Chris Hill acknowledged should be put on the back burner. After the death of Kim at the time, a commitment that “all elements of the DPRK’s Jong-il and the transfer of power to Kim Jong-un, the devel- past and present nuclear programs—plutonium and ura- opment of the North Korean arsenal continued apace. nium—and all nuclear weapons will be comprehensively What are the lessons of this depressing story? declared and completely, verifiably and irreversibly elimi- Cheney and other opponents of “engagement” were nated and will not be reconstituted in the future.” skeptical of North Korea’s adherence to the agreements Almost immediately, however, a contingent led by Hill it had signed; their suspicion was merited. They also sus- himself began contending that to keep the negotiations pected that failure to apply pressure on the Kim regime moving forward, the United States would have to make would lead to a serial retreat that ultimately would result in more concessions to North Korean concerns, particularly North Korea as a nuclear power—which is, unfortunately, about the funds frozen by the Banco Delta Asia sanctions. where we find ourselves today. This was precisely what Cheney had been worried about— They worried that the further the North got down that the United States would make concession after conces- the nuclear road, the more aggressive Pyongyang would sion and turn a blind eye to North Korean misdeeds, the become and the harder it would be to address security on most dramatic instances of which were an October 2006 the Korean peninsula. The opponents of appeasement nuclear test and the spring 2007 discovery that the country thought that a more comprehensive approach taking into was building a Yongbyon-like reactor in the Syrian desert account conventional weapons and human rights issues with no apparent connection to the Syrian electricity grid. as well as nuclear and missile issues would enable greater Although Cheney pushed, for example, for the United progress, as it had with the Soviet Union in the final years States to destroy the reactor, the administration ignored of the Cold War. the transgressions to facilitate the ongoing negotiations. Cheney and the skeptics concluded that only severe eco- The BDA funds were returned to Pyongyang, and North nomic pressure on the North’s economy, clearly its Achil- Korea was taken off the list of state sponsors of terrorism les heel, might lead to Pyongyang rethinking the utility of and relieved of the burden of being subject to the Trading possessing nuclear weapons as a strategy for regime sur- with the Enemy Act. These steps were part of an “action for vival and unification of the peninsula by force. They also action” program negotiated by Hill, who argued that they believed, correctly, that prematurely lifting economic pres- would lead to the full declaration of the North’s nuclear sures would lead to more, not less, intransigence and set program. But that was not what the United States received. back negotiations even further, since multilateral pressures Instead it got an incomplete declaration that ignored the once relieved are very difficult to reimpose. uranium-enrichment program (even as the records them- As the Trump administration considers the future of selves revealed traces of enriched uranium) and failed to the Iran nuclear agreement negotiated by its predecessors, mention the transfer of a nuclear reactor to Syria. Cheney it would do well to ponder the lessons of the North Korean objected, “increasingly concerned that the six-party talks experience and remember whose views were vindicated by were now a convenient way for the North Koreans to hide events and whose weren’t. ♦

October 9, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 29 The Germans Turn Right Merkel’s immigration hangover

By Christopher Caldwell late summer of 2015 to refugees fleeing the war in Syria​—​ an invitation she saw fit to extend without consulting par- Berlin liament. Germany got over a million immigrants in the ngela Merkel’s time as “leader of the West,” months that followed, virtually all of them Muslims, the vast to use the honorific the New York Times and majority young men, and most of them from places other CNN bestowed on her, lasted about eight than Syria. At the time Merkel appealed to the common months​—​roughly from the swearing-in of decency of Germans: “If we have to apologize for showing a Donald J. Trump in January until people friendly face,” she said, “then this is not my country.” beganA throwing tomatoes at her during a September cam- Perhaps it is not. “Nazis,” said Merkel’s foreign min- paign rally in Heidelberg. “Traitor to the people!” the signs ister, the Social Democrat Sigmar Gabriel, “are going said. “Hau ab!” the attendees shouted, an instruction too to speak in the Reichstag for the first time in 70 years.” obscene to translate. By election day, so That is an oversimplification. The loud was the whistling that outdoor ral- AfD was founded in 2013 by a group lies were moved indoors. of policymakers and economists con- Merkel was campaigning for a cerned Germany would need to bail fourth term as Germany’s chancellor, out Greece and other failing European something only Konrad Adenauer and economies in the wake of the financial Helmut Kohl had won since the war. crisis. It was a single-issue party, and On September 24, she got it, too, but at that year it fell just short of the 5 per- a steep price for her and for Germany. cent required to get seats. In 2015, as It was the worst performance for her the first reports emerged of migrants Christian Democrats (CDU) since 1949. moving north across the Mediterra- They got less than a third of the vote nean, the party spokeswoman Frauke and lost ground in all 16 of the country’s Petry had a brainstorm. Her backers, states—​ ​this for a party that used to dom- much more worried about Islamization inate the right of German politics and than inflation, helped her oust the was capable of winning absolute majori- nerdy leader Bernd Lucke. The party ties. The old party of the left, the Social now had a different profile. Petry was Democrats (SPD), did worse, barely Frauke Petry, September 25 ebullient, eloquent, Anglophone, and scraping 20 percent. Coming in third East German, and beloved by the rank with 13 percent of the vote was the brand-new Alternative and file. Her party added to its core of concerned busi- for Germany (AfD), an anti-immigration party that will nessmen new groups of cultural conservatives and nation- send 93 members to the 709-seat Bundestag, the parliament alists, not to mention extremists of all varieties. in Berlin. The AfD brings a shudder to those who think of Refugees began pouring into the country months Merkel as the leader of the West. In a way, it is her creation. later. On New Year’s Eve 2015-16, groups of North Afri- France’s National Front, the UK Independence party, can immigrants isolated, surrounded, and groped hun- the Republican party in the Trump era . . . Germany used dreds of women on the square in front of Cologne’s not to have groups like those. The rawness of the country’s cathedral. The details were not known to the public until memory of Nazism gave it an aversion to the style of poli- weeks later, thanks to the obstinacy of local police in cov- tics now called populist. But something has destroyed the ering it up and of politicians in minimizing it. Soon the German party system. Possibly it is globalization or the mere AfD was racking up seats in state parliaments, and lots of passage of time. More likely it is Merkel’s invitation in the them​—​getting a quarter of the vote in the eastern region of Sachsen-Anhalt and even 15 percent in yuppie Baden-

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard. Württemberg. (In this fall’s national election, the AfD / GETTYIMAGES: SEAN GALLUP

30 / The Weekly Standard October 9, 2017 was the number-one party in Saxony, taking a third of Germans still get the generous retirement benefits con- the vote in Petry’s Saxon stronghold.) ferred in the 20th-century heyday of the welfare state. They Much of the media discussion faulted Merkel for one give their votes to the SPD and CDU, and AfD support policy misstep or another. The migrants ought to have been skews younger than Trump’s, with its core in the 35-44 better vetted. More should have been done to make the pas- age bracket. (It is striking how unflattered AfD members sage across the Mediterranean less hazardous for migrants, are by the suggestion their movement might have some- to create job opportunities in the Middle East, to explain thing in common with Trump. One intellectual close to the the chancellor’s position. That is nonsense. The fears moti- party described Trump as having a Pegidagesicht, a face that vating Germans are matters of demography. Africa is going reminded him of angry, anti-immigrant marchers in east- to add 493 million people between 2015 and 2030, accord- ern Germany.) ing to U.N. statistics. Add, not have. There are few jobs for The AfD’s leaders have found it as difficult as Repub- them. Many will head north. licans to appeal to a party that is both radical and not-radi- The economist Thilo Sarrazin, an old-school Social cal. The best account of the new AfD Bundestag delegation Democrat, published a book in 2010 called The Abolition of comes from Markus Wehner, a journalist for the Frankfurter Germany that became the Allgemeine Zeitung. They are country’s biggest nonfiction overwhelmingly men, with success since World War II. an unusually high number One of his bolder claims was of engineers and scientists that within three genera- among them. Some are aides tions, Germany would have to older members. There is an ethnically non-German the Berlin traditionalist Bea- majority. Last year he pub- trix von Storch, who is not lished a sequel, Wishful Think- only a duchess but related by ing, in which he admitted marriage to Karl Marx; the that the process was moving gun-rights advocate Enrico much faster than that. The Komning; the Italian-born migrants Merkel accepted in philosopher Marc Jongen, 2015 include about a million a onetime student of Peter young men. That may not Sloterdijk; the talk-show sound like a lot, but it is about The AfD’s Alexander Gauland and Alice Weidel, September 26 host Leif-Erik Holm; the 15 percent of the German prosecutor and former CDU men of their age. And the bureaucratic process of bringing Bundestag member Martin Hohmann, excluded from that their families from Syria and Afghanistan is already under party a decade ago for remarks deemed anti-Semitic. The way. Certain neighborhoods in Berlin​—​Wedding, stretches variety is striking. of the old East Berlin avenue Sonnenallee​—​have lately become heavily Middle Eastern. ast winter, Frauke Petry, hoping to become her par- It is common to snicker that voters for the AfD must ty’s lead candidate in this fall’s elections, had a sec- not know what they are doing, since the party had its best L ond brainstorm. She thought the AfD was ready to scores in the parts of the former East Germany where immi- form coalitions with other parties, and to govern. To that gration is lowest. Only 27 of the AfD’s 93 members come end, she called for expelling Björn Höcke, head of the AfD from the East. But a lot of the economically stagnant rural in Thuringia, for a speech in which he had called the Holo- zones there will indeed be changed by migrants, because caust Memorial in the middle of Berlin a “monument of they have become spontaneously generated assisted-living shame.” She argued, probably rightly, that Höcke was mak- communities. Houses are empty and kids are gone. They ing a sinister double entendre. But Petry’s resolution failed, are tempting places to lodge the newcomers, and Germany for two reasons. First, most in the party do not yet want to lacks the demographic resources—the young volunteers— make deals with the establishment parties, and such deals to teach them German and otherwise assimilate them. would not be offered even if they did. Second, while Höcke The AfD is like the Republican party in the Trump is at the AfD’s most mischievous rhetorical extreme, almost era: It would be wrong to dismiss it as just a radical party, all the party’s members are vulnerable in one way or another but there are radicals in it. A lot of the AfD’s voters are to being shamed out of politics​—​including Petry herself, among the “losers of globalization”—22 percent are unem- who has argued that Germans should once again be able to ployed. But where Trump does best among seniors, older use the adjective völkisch, tainted by its use by the Nazis.

October 9, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 31 Once Petry lost her bid to be the top candidate, her Perhaps you could call Gauland a German Pat days were numbered. (She announced after the election Buchanan. In conversation in his office in Potsdam, that she would sit independently of the party once the he sounds less like a radical than like a conservative in Bundestag convened.) Without her, the party had lost a country that has forgotten what conservatism is. He its most obvious chance at a candidate who could make wrote a book on the history of the word “conservative.” it look like something other than a party of grumpy old His preoccupation is a specifically German puzzle: how to men. But it was not at a loss for long. In April it picked cultivate a Burkean conservatism in a country where the two lead candidates, a common practice in Germany. institutions through which Burke understood conserva- One was Alice Weidel, a 38-year-old international busi- tism had been destroyed by Hitler. ness consultant living in Switzerland in a romantic rela- This is a puzzle that Merkel has badly complicated. tionship with a woman. The beautiful Weidel was given There was an extraordinary stability to the West Ger- to storming out of interviews, setting off on right-wing man party system for a half-century after the Nazis. It tirades (complaining in a 2013 email leaked just before was based in part on a superstition that there is a readily the elections that Germany is being “flooded with Arabs, identifiable “left” and “right” in politics and that, in the Sinti-Roma and other people of for- wake of the Second World War, eign culture”), and wearing outfits that parties to the “right” of the Chris- would let her blend in at a Catholic Merkel transformed tian Democrats are extremist boys’ school of the 1970s (blue blazers, her party to make it and taboo. What Merkel did was khakis, blue Oxford shirts, and horn- indistinguishable from therefore logical. She transformed rimmed glasses). In the days after the its left-wing rivals, her party to make it indistinguish- election, Weidel said at a press confer- able from its left-wing rivals, the ence that the questions she was most the Social Democrats Social Democrats and the Greens. often asked by journalists were variants and the Greens. She She could compete for their vot- on the theme of: What’s a nice lesbian could compete for their ers, confident no one would chal- like you doing with people like this? voters, confident no lenge her from the right. In 2010 The other lead candidate was one would challenge her she ended military conscription. 76-year-old Alexander Gauland, a In the wake of Japan’s Fukushima founder of the AfD, long a familiar fig- from the right. disaster in 2011, she announced ure in German politics. Gauland was a an end to atomic energy. In 2014 CDU intellectual who so often said outrageous-sound- she backed a minimum wage. In 2015 she opened the ing things to convey that his party was going to hell in a borders to migrants. Last spring she brought gay mar- handbasket that he finally fell out of it. The great novel- riage to a vote and secured its passage, while professing, ist Martin Walser even wrote a roman à clef (Finks Krieg, like Barack Obama until 2012, to disapprove of it. In the 1996) in which Gauland played a starring role. Gauland 2017 campaign’s one televised debate, which lasted an warned his fellow AfD members after the election to be hour and a half, Social Democrat Martin Schulz could careful of “sound bites that could be used to paint the find nothing of importance to disagree with her on. He party as right-wing.” But like Petry, like all of them, he ran his campaign under the slogan “More Social Justice.” had already done a good deal of that himself. He told But after 12 years of Merkel, there wasn’t much social reporters that most Germans would not want to have justice left unprovided. the African-descended, Berlin-raised soccer star Jérôme Merkel’s strategy wound up discrediting the entirety Boateng as a neighbor​—​a misunderstanding, Gauland of the political system. It weakened the Christian Social says, that arose from assuming his interviewers meant Union (CSU), the Bavarian Catholic “sister party” to “Boateng” as a hypothetical foreign-sounding name. He Merkel’s own. Now it appeared to be little more than a also suggested that Merkel’s top immigration adviser, wing of Merkel’s operation, dedicated to misleading peo- Aydan Özoguz, be “disposed of ” in Turkey, after she ple whose interests Merkel disregarded. The CSU got made the multiculturalist assertion that there was, “aside drubbed in this election. Almost a quarter of its voters from the German language, simply no such thing as Ger- fled. The Left party, which called itself an alternative to man culture.” Picking on Özoguz showed the same inspi- capitalism, had only a so-so election. It appeared to stand ration as Donald Trump’s picking on Colin Kaepernick. for nothing more than busing young toughs to harass Like Trump, Gauland has a gift for sensing when some the few hundred old ladies who gather in Berlin for the media favorite has gone out on a limb where 90 percent annual March for Life. All these parties together consti- of the country disagree with him. tuted what the AfD called a “political cartel.”

32 / The Weekly Standard October 9, 2017 he migration crisis turned Merkel’s behavior into were published by small presses, and one​—​a collection something more than a political-science question. of notes called Finis Germania​—made​ it to the top of the T As Berthold Kohler of the Frankfurter Allgemeine bestseller list. Many of its entries questioned Germany’s Zeitung put it, “The fundamental trust of many middle- culture of Holocaust memory. Now, Germans have broken class Germans was shaken.” the taboo against voting for conservative parties. But one Some Americans will recognize in the uprising against should hesitate before assuming that Germany is traveling Merkel an element of their boiling fury towards Barack back down the road to fascism. The sociologist Gunnar Obama at the end of his presidency. The AfD’s advertis- Heinsohn points out that, even if it wished to, Germany ing campaign capitalized on that. It was the brainchild of would not have the demographic resources for it. At the Thor Kunkel, a Petry friend and madcap author educated point in the 20th century when Western countries began in San Francisco. Kunkel enlisted Austin, Texas-based wreaking havoc, the United States, Canada, and Europe Harris Media, which has run ad campaigns for Ted Cruz, accounted worldwide for 44 percent of fighting-age men Mitch McConnell, and Likud. Kunkel’s own literary taste (15-29 years old). Today they account for 11 percent. runs to Thomas Pynchon, and his Heinsohn is not saying fascism Endstufe, or Final Stage, is a his- cannot arise. But he makes a con- torical novel about a little-known vincing case that Germany will pornographic film studio that not be the place where it happens. operated under the Nazis. Keeping the AfD marginalized In 2013 Merkel had cam- nonetheless remains important to paigned under the slogan “Ihr the other parties. Merkel is negoti- kennt mich” (“You know me”), and ating to set up a coalition between now she was traveling around the her Christian Democrats and country saying the invitation to two mutually hostile parties, the migrants “must not be repeated,” Greens and the capitalistic Free as if someone else had done it. Democrats. The Social Democrats, Some in the AfD went so far as to with whom she has governed in call her criminal. Her invitation two of her three terms, would be to immigrants required ignor- a much more logical pairing with ing the EU’s Dublin agreements her CDU, as there are literally no on refugees. Weidel announced major issues on which they dis- after the elections that she hoped agree with Merkel. But there is a to investigate Merkel for “all the Angela Merkel meets the press, September 25. problem. The largest opposition breaches of the law that lady has party in the Bundestag gets cer- committed.” For better or for worse, Merkel was not the tain perks: chairmanship of the budget committee, for one person the press presented her as. She was not “steady.” thing. A lead role in speaking against the government’s leg- She was not a mother figure. She was impulsive, unpre- islative projects, which guarantees it daily television time, dictable, dangerous. “The Oath-Breaker” was the head- for another. Over the summer, the Bundestag preemptively line on one of Kunkel’s online ads. passed a law to keep the 77-year-old AfD legislator Wil- The AfD’s distrust of the press is absolute. Today, helm von Gottberg from becoming the “Alterspräsident”—​ ​a the party’s activists complain, the press does little more title given to the oldest member of the Bundestag, entitling than collude in Merkel’s project of shaming those who him to certain gestures of intergenerational respect. Under disagree with her. Merkel’s justice minister, the Social the new rules the honor will henceforth go to the member Democrat Heiko Maas, worked assiduously to limit who has been longest in politics. negative comments about the wave of migrants, both The people who are most uneasy about the AfD would on newspaper comment pages and on social media. So have done well to focus their minds in 2015. When they worried was the government about his unpopularity that applauded Merkel for a grand unilateral gesture that 250 policemen accompanied him when he went to Dres- would change the country forever, did it not occur to den to give a talk in July. them that someone might arise to defend the country as Trust in all institutions in Germany has plum- it was? Merkel and her party saddled Germany with prob- meted​—​and with it trust in the “European values” that lems to which it had long been immune. Its citizens have Merkel invoked two summers ago. Earlier this year, two now begun administering remedies to which it had long

TOBIAS SCHWARZ / AFP GETTYTOBIAS SCHWARZ posthumous books by the historian Rolf Peter Sieferle been immune, too. ♦

October 9, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 33 Books&Arts

Liam Neeson as the eponymous hero of Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House The ‘White Rat’ Mark Felt—Watergate’s ‘Deep Throat’—wasn’t interested in bringing down Nixon; he wanted the FBI’s top job. by Max Holland

used to have this annual argument at Christmas with figures, rearrange chronologies, invent fictitious subplots, my brother-in-law, a well-regarded film editor in Hol- and the like for the sake of entertainment. As the Los Angeles lywood. I would arrive brimming with complaints Times film critic Kenneth Turan once noted, historical films about a movie like Argo, said to be “based on actual “are constitutionally incapable of being completely accurate.” events” but with an entirely fictitious Keystone Kops- The mere fact of turning a camera lens on a real event means Ilike airport chase scene. I would rail about the disservice to its distortion. But I insisted a line is crossed whenever a film history and the misleading effects as an increasing number of violates the historical essence of an event. History may be a Americans learn their history from Hollywood features. He never-ending argument, but one is not entitled to one’s own would defend dramatic license. I’d respond by saying a driv- facts, and not all facts are equal. er’s license doesn’t give one the right to do anything one wants I invented a matrix in which the upper left quadrant is on the road. Round and round we’d go, until we reached his reserved for films that simultaneously respect the gist of his- final redoubt: “It’s only a movie.” torical events and manage to be highly entertaining. It goes all Eventually I conceded that films “based on actual events” the way back to Call Northside 777, the 1948 docudrama featur- have the right to composite characters, to elide real-life ing Jimmy Stewart as a crusading reporter whose investiga- tion frees a man wrongly convicted of murder. More recent Max Holland’s Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat examples include Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, about the ill-fated

is available in paperback. moon mission; Edward Zwick’s Glory, about a regiment of BOB MAHONEY / SONY PICTURES CLASSICS

34 / The Weekly Standard October 9, 2017 black soldiers in the Civil War; and Michael Mann’s portrait Vanity Fair article in which Felt outed himself as Deep Throat of the tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, The appeared, his conduct became a matter of great controversy in Insider. In the lower left quadrant, you’ll find films that while the society, with the membership irrevocably split. Landes- respectful of the past are disappointing as drama. I’m thinking man went to great lengths to assure Dotlo that he wanted to here of movies like 42, the syrupy Jackie Robinson biopic, and tell the story of Watergate from the FBI’s perspective in a way Valkyrie, which recounts the July Plot to assassinate Hitler. that would “let the viewer decide what the reason was for Felt’s The quadrants on the right side of the matrix are reserved cooperation,” Dotlo told me. Persuaded by what Landesman for the pernicious films, distinct because they promote a called his “commitment to accuracy,” Dotlo vouched for him. big resounding lie. The bottom quadrant includes deserv- One of the most important FBI retirees Dotlo spoke to edly panned films like 1965’s The Battle of the Bulge—which was Edward S. Miller, the assistant director in charge of the Dwight Eisenhower felt compelled to condemn for its histori- bureau’s domestic intelligence division from 1971 to 1973. cal inaccuracies—and Brian De Palma’s account of Eliot Ness, Miller had initially rebuffed the screenwriter, but Dotlo The Untouchables. The top quadrant is dedicated to riveting had a particular influence. As a young agent in the New features, ones made by filmmakers who are unfortunately at York field office, Dotlo had been the moving force behind the top of their game. Selma would be an example for the way the 1978 establishment of a legal defense fund to aid bureau it falsely depicts Lyndon Johnson as an obstacle in the way of personnel—most prominently Miller himself—put in legal civil rights legislation. Oliver Stone’s entertaining jeopardy because of the aggressive counterintel- and noxious JFK occupies its own special pedes- ligence tactics they had used against the Weather tal here. Underground in the early 1970s. The other FBI The matrix is subjective, of course. And executive tried and convicted in 1980 alongside many films sit on the line dividing the wooden Miller was Mark Felt. but accurate film from the wooden but inaccu- My book, Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep rate one. Thirteen Days, a depiction of the Cuban Throat, came out in 2012 to coincide with the missile crisis, faithfully renders John F. Ken- 40th anniversary of the Watergate break-in. It nedy’s determination to avoid nuclear war while posited that the “war of the FBI succession” was simultaneously perpetuating a big lie about Rob- the context for Felt’s conduct and winning it pro- ert Kennedy being a dove from the start. All the vided his motive. As J. Edgar Hoover aged and President’s Men is another problematic case. This Peter Landesman refused to retire gracefully, a fight for the director- 1976 paean to investigative journalism has many ship had developed at the highest echelons of the fabulist elements. It demonizes or skirts the government’s role bureau. The weapon of choice was the leak to the press. When in uncovering Watergate (nobody is doing their job except the Hoover died in May 1972, just seven weeks before the Water- reporters at the Washington Post), and it greatly distorts what gate break-in, Felt, then the FBI’s No. 3 executive, expected to went on inside the Post. It is, nonetheless, a diverting drama: succeed him. Instead, Nixon unexpectedly appointed Assis- eminently watchable after 40 years. And it will be on the tant Attorney General L. Patrick Gray as acting director. minds of everyone who goes to see Hollywood’s latest stab at This surprise ascension exacerbated the bureau’s instability. portraying Watergate: Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down After one director for 48 years, the FBI would have four in the the White House, written and directed by Peter Landesman. space of 14 months, amid intense infighting. Much of it was due to Felt. As William Ruckelshaus, who temporarily suc- ark Felt was the No. 2 executive at the FBI during ceeded Gray as acting director in 1973, put it, “Felt was a guy the Watergate investigation and a key source for obsessed with taking Hoover’s place as FBI director. [By leak- M the Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein—the ing], he was trying to feather his own nest and undercut his one they famously dubbed “Deep Throat.” I was working on bosses at the FBI.” a book about Felt in 2010 when I first began hearing the name Peter Landesman. I was interviewing FBI agents involved in week after my book appeared, I received an email the Watergate investigation or who knew Felt, and, invariably, from Peter Landesman, expressing an interest in no matter whom I contacted, Landesman had been there first. A comparing notes on the subject of our mutual fascina- More than one interviewee said Landesman had asked the tion. I was open to doing so. More, I was curious. No one else exact same questions that I was asking now. I could not help had engaged, as far as I knew, in any serious investigation of but be impressed and a little unnerved. Landesman had been Deep Throat besides Landesman and myself. Following the a globe-trotting investigative reporter before changing careers 2005 Vanity Fair article and Bob Woodward’s quickie book on to write and direct films. This was no screenwriter searching Felt, The Secret Man, the subject of Deep Throat was regarded for a little color, but someone who knew how to report. as exhausted. Landesman had been aided by the late Craig L. Dotlo, What I found particularly intriguing was Landesman’s an influential figure in the Society of Former Special Agents opening remark. “[I] had a fascinating dinner w[ith] Wood- of the FBI. The society’s cooperation is not easy to come by ward and Bernstein last year,” he wrote in his email. “I was because it carefully vets requests from authors and filmmak- amazed how little they know outside their own ‘narrative.’ ”

EARL GIBSON III / GETTY ers, and it was doubly difficult in this case. After the 2005 This accorded with my view. One of the points in my book

October 9, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 35 was that the two Post reporters had exhibited a striking and what was Landesman suggesting: Felt leaked because he was convenient lack of curiosity about Felt. Woodward, lauded for henpecked and his daughter, a Stanford graduate, had turned his ability to plumb the innermost secrets of the White House, into a hippie? Supreme Court, Pentagon, and CIA, had turned a blind eye to He reiterated the personal motive in a subsequent email: the ferocious politics at the FBI. He even falsified the story of While I completely agree with your assessment of Felt vis a Felt’s abrupt departure from the bureau in May 1973. Wood- vis Woodward and Bernstein, almost no one is addressing ward maintained that Felt “retired” from the FBI, even after Felt’s personal life or stakes. Having spent a great deal of Ruckelshaus called the reporter expressly to tell him that Felt time with his family, and him before he was completely lost had resigned overnight rather than be the subject of an inter- to dementia, and people who worked with him in the FBI, I nal investigation for leaking. reject the notion that he was purely acting out of careerism. As Landesman and I exchanged messages, clear differ- The truth is much more nuanced, and Felt is much more ences emerged. “Though I don’t discount Felt’s desire to run complex than that. the FBI,” Landesman wrote, “I think his impulse to protect it as an institution” counted for more. The institutional expla- I didn’t understand this message. Deep Throat fed the nation for Felt’s behavior dated back to 1992, when James cub reporter a lot of false information. To me, this under- Mann, a former colleague of Woodward and Bernstein at the scored that the relationship was all about the war of the FBI succession. The outstanding example here was when Felt explained to Woodward ostensibly why Nixon had nominated Gray to be the permanent FBI direc- tor in February 1973. This appointment “didn’t make any sense” to Woodward; the confirmation hearings were bound to turn into an inquisition on the FBI’s investigation of Watergate. Nixon’s disenchantment with Gray over the issue of FBI leaks the previous fall, moreover, was no secret. Felt told Woodward that an angry Gray had marched into the White House and reminded Nixon that he had performed well in lim- iting the FBI’s probe and that “all hell could break loose” if he weren’t nominated. The suggestion that Gray had blackmailed Nixon was a lie. It was also emblematic of Felt’s schemes to discredit his rivals for the directorship. Besides raising motives I considered extrane- ous, Landesman emphasized the importance of talk- Former FBI officials Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller speak to reporters in ing to Felt’s closest colleague, Ed Miller. According late 1980 after a federal judge fined them $5,000 and $3,500 respectively to Landesman, Miller would substantiate that there’s upon their convictions for approving illegal break-ins in the early 1970s. “a good deal more to this story than career and ambi- tion.” When I had interviewed Miller in May 2011, I Post, wrote a long speculative essay about Deep Throat’s iden- hadn’t learned anything remarkable. He had, though, men- tity for the Atlantic Monthly. The article didn’t flatly claim Felt tioned writing an unvarnished account of that tumultuous was Deep Throat, but placed the source squarely inside the Watergate period at the bureau that included an explanation of FBI. Mann—who had worked on several early Watergate sto- why Felt had leaked. (The 2005 revelation that Felt was Deep ries with Woodward before the pairing with Bernstein was Throat had come as absolutely no news to Miller.) I cajoled and cemented—posited that bureaucratic politics, rather than pleaded with Miller to share his testament, as he would do with noble whistleblowing, offered the most likely explanation Woodward. But Miller wouldn’t budge. Reading Landesman’s of Deep Throat’s behavior. Woodward would himself adopt email, I presumed he had seen it and found it persuasive. Mann’s theory when he came to write his Felt book in 2005. But Landesman also mentioned two wrinkles that I hadn’t n May 2012, despite our emerging differences, Landes- seriously considered. More important than Felt’s longing for man invited me to his home in the Hollywood Hills to the directorship or desire to protect the bureau from Nixon, I compare notes. Our conversation ranged all over the suggested Landesman, was “what was going on at home with place, and it became clear that he had cast his net far wider his wife (who was nuts and a drunk) and [with] his daughter than the FBI, interviewing such people as CBS’s Lesley Stahl, (who was a counterculture runaway).” I had briefly mentioned who, in addition to covering Watergate, had dated Woodward Audrey, Felt’s wife, in my book. She was known for nursing at the time. Landesman talked about how difficult it must her husband’s ambition and anticipating the day he would have been for Woodward and Bernstein to have this “false ascend to the top of the FBI pyramid. She was also a manic- history hanging over their heads” all these years. His Deep

depressive who killed herself with Felt’s revolver in 1984. But Throat script was “congruent” with my book, he asserted, BETTMANN / GETTY

36 / The Weekly Standard October 9, 2017 except that it was going to add the personal angle that I had me a lawyer friend of Alex’s, who had been with him and ignored, including Felt’s rescue of his daughter, Joan, from a Segretti in the Army’s judge advocate general’s corps, had California commune in the early 1970s. He had arrived there, been the person who called Bernstein. This friend was cer- Landesman said, to find Joan sitting naked in a field nursing tainly not Mark Felt. her newborn baby. One finding of Landesman’s that genuinely surprised me uring our conversation, Landesman disclosed his was his claim that Felt had leaked to Carl Bernstein, too. It involvement in the project was via Tom Hanks’s has long been part of Watergate lore that Felt dealt only with D production company, Playtone, which had pur- Woodward. Indeed, the first time Bernstein ever met Deep chased the film rights to Felt’s story soon after theVanity Fair Throat was in November 2008, when the reporters trav- article appeared. Felt was to be a vehicle for another heroic eled to California to see the 95-year-old Felt, who died the turn by Hanks, and Landesman made it seem like produc- next month. Landesman insisted that Felt was the anony- tion was imminent. In June 2012, he wrote, “We gotta get this mous “government lawyer” described in the 1974 book All movie made. The same way [the movie of All the President’s the President’s Men who telephoned Bernstein at the Post and Men] solidified the false mythology, only a movie as big can tipped him off that a young lawyer named Donald Segretti correct it forever. I should know soon.” Instead, in August had tried to hire another lawyer named Alex B. Shipley Jr. to of that year, Landesman got the go-ahead for another one of engage in “dirty tricks” aimed at disrupting the Democratic Playtone’s based-on-actual-events film projects: Parkland, primaries in 1972. Landesman was proud of this alleged dis- about the long weekend of the Kennedy assassination. covery, which had come about only because of his dogged I heard infrequently from him after that. And when I did, research. He triumphantly said he had shared it with Wood- he tended to emphasize the gap in our respective positions ward and Bernstein. rather than any supposed congruence. Felt “was a complicated This scoop, if true, constituted a substantial revision of guy,” Landesman wrote in November 2013, just as Parkland history, not to mention my book. The 2006 reissue of Felt’s was coming out, “and his motives on this were complicated. 1979 autobiography—revised to put Deep Throat in the best To reduce it to careerism dishonors not just the man but the possible light—had not claimed that Felt called Bernstein. In event. Too simply [sic]. Too reductionist. Too easy.” Mean- Woodward’s archival notes from the famed October 9, 1972, while, the Felt film appeared to be in limbo. meeting with Deep Throat in a Virginia parking garage, Delays are a common Hollywood malady, my brother-in- Felt specifically declines to talk about Segretti. If Landes- law assured me. But he also noted that Tom Hanks had suf- man were right, Felt was simultaneously tipping off Bern- ficient clout to get any film into production promptly—that stein anonymously and refusing to discuss the same subject is, if he believed in the script. That there were snags was con- with Woodward. Most importantly, what Felt purportedly firmed to me later in the year by two producers I met while told Bernstein was something the FBI did not even know at working on a Hanks-produced documentary series on the the time. After the Post’s story about Segretti was published sixties. They expressed doubt the film would ever be made, on October 10, Pat Gray ordered an internal investigation and if it were, they said, it wasn’t going to star Tom Hanks. because of all the references in the story to information from Meanwhile, Landesman had moved on to writing and direct- FBI reports. This internal probe found that while the bureau ing yet another film “based on actual events”:Concussion , knew about Segretti, the FBI had had “no knowledge con- about the NFL’s brain-injury problem. cerning Segretti’s attempts to recruit” Shipley. In May 2015, out of the blue, Landesman reported to This was important. If my book did well enough, I could me that the Felt film was finally in preparation. He had cor- insert a correction in the paperback edition. I asked Landes- ralled Liam Neeson into portraying Felt, and Diane Lane man about his source for this finding, which contradictedAll was playing Audrey. Their star power proved crucial to piec- the President’s Men and contemporaneous FBI documents. ing together the “indie financing” needed to get the film Landesman promptly put on his investigative-reporter hat. out of Hollywood purgatory (Hanks and Playtone were still “I hate to pull this, because I hate when I get it, but I can’t involved, but only marginally). Landesman wrote, “I know [divulge my source], not just yet,” he wrote in an email. we don’t agree on all things Felt. . . . I would like to compare “One day I’ll be able to tell you who and how, but I do know notes, making sure things are as right as they can be. I’ll start it was [Felt]. No disrespect. I see us as allies and compatriots by re-reading your book. And then I’ll be in touch.” This cor- pure and simple on this. Bear with me. . . . Though anecdot- diality was in marked contrast to his tone the last time I had ally, you can see how it makes total sense, correct? Who else heard from him. In November 2013, Landesman had taken would it have been, esp[ecially] given what you found out exception to my blunt rejection, in an email to him, of Felt’s and wrote in your book.” supposedly complex psychological and emotional realities. Yet the more I thought about it, the more convinced I “How would you know,” he responded. “You have no access became that Felt calling Bernstein made no sense. I went to the people who actually knew him. You’re just pulling that back over all the primary and secondary evidence and con- out [of] your ass.” ducted new interviews. Ultimately, I established to my sat- Ed Miller had died in July 2013, and I was finally able isfaction who called Bern­stein after talking to Marietta to procure from his daughter a copy of the text that sup- Shipley, the wife of the now-deceased Alex Shipley. She told posedly explained everything—though I never did learn if

October 9, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 37 Landesman had ever read this explanation. It turned out to be such distortions believable because Liam Neeson is an impos- 25 inchoate pages, revealing only in the sense that it conspicu- ing presence on the screen, the personification of gravitas and ously avoided addressing the savage war of the FBI succes- high-mindedness—think Gregory Peck in the ’50s and ’60s. sion. I sent copies to Angelo Lano, the FBI’s Watergate case Neeson carries Mark Felt. agent; John J. McDermott, Lano’s boss as the special agent Felt’s rivals for the directorship are the villains in the film: in charge of the Washington field office; Daniel Armstrong, William C. Sullivan and Gray—with Nixon, of course, lurking a special assistant to Pat Gray; and Earl J. Silbert, the attor- in the background. Sullivan had been Hoover’s heir appar- ney who prosecuted the five burglars caught red-handed at the ent until he became impatient and was fired for insolence and Watergate and the two ringleaders of the break-in, E. How- insubordination in October 1971. In the film, Sullivan repre- ard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. All four agreed Miller’s testa- sents the bad old FBI under Hoover, a serial violator of Amer- ment was gibberish. icans’ constitutional rights on the flimsiest of pretexts. In a For good measure, I ran Landesman’s rationalization of conspicuous piece of miscasting, Sullivan—a tightly wound, Felt’s conduct by every FBI man I knew of from those days. bantamweight Irishman—is portrayed as a sloth-footed, men- When they didn’t laugh, they scoffed. Felt was renowned for acing hoodlum by Tom Sizemore. his cold, detached, and calculating demeanor. He was called Neeson’s Felt is hellbent on preventing Sullivan’s venge- the “White Rat” at the bureau—a nickname owing to his ful return. While this was indubitably true—Felt leaked to thick mane of carefully coiffed hair and his penchant for tat- damage both his perceived rivals for the directorship, Sullivan tling on subordinates and rivals to Hoover. Nor had Miller’s and Gray—the line the film takes, that Sullivan was tainted ramblings mentioned Audrey or Joan as contributing factors by his association with the FBI’s abuses while Felt was a clos- in Felt’s decision to leak. Indeed, Miller’s memoir could be eted proponent of civil liberties, is risible. Sullivan’s excesses read to suggest the opposite: are traceable to his responsibilities for the bureau’s domestic- intelligence gathering and internal security. He sought and [Felt] clearly was [Audrey’s] hero; but something happened. oversaw aggressive measures—including wiretaps, infiltra- Although I don’t think Watergate bothered her and I have tion, and even sabotage—to disrupt radical groups ranging absolutely no feeling that “Deep Throat” was ever discussed from the KKK to the Weather Underground. between them, Things didn’t start to fall apart until and after When Felt rose to a position of responsibility at the FBI, the Felt-Miller trial in 1980 in Washington. . . . We were he too advocated vigorous countermeasures. He sanctioned found guilty and even though President Reagan pardoned us illegal break-ins during the same period he was leaking to Audrey was not herself. She confided in [Miller’s wife] that Woodward. The film doesn’t pretend otherwise, except that Mark was no longer paying any attention to her and that he Landesman’s Felt orders the gloves-off approach with only the was spending virtually all his time in their guest room. greatest reluctance, whereas his Sullivan delights in building a police state. There is good reason to believe, moreover, that he Felt movie finally began filming in May 2016. Felt reinstituted the program of illegal break-ins—called black- Judging from the Hollywood trades, Landesman’s bag jobs—to curry Nixon’s favor, hoping they would result in T view of his script was not modest. The movie will the capture of one or more of the Weather Underground terror- “change the accepted history of Watergate,” he told Deadline: ists who were proving maddeningly elusive and so garner him Hollywood. “Right or wrong, [Deep Throat] felt what he did the directorship. In any event, what Sullivan had in common was the last defense of the American ideal. . . . The story has with Felt was far more telling than any alleged differences over the components of a suspenseful spy thriller, but there are bureau counterintelligence techniques. They shared, recalls huge reveals about his motivations.” Landesman referred to a Jack McDermott, a “hungry, needy drive to replace Hoover.” subplot involving daughter Joan as “Shakespearean.” The film is focused on the eventful year from Hoover’s he even greater disservice is the film’s depiction of L. death to Felt’s departure from the bureau in June 1973, amid Patrick Gray. If there was one official who most defi- grateful applause from assembled employees. It is the story of T nitely was not one of the president’s men, it was Gray. how Felt had to betray the FBI—by leaking, which was oth- Named acting director the month before the June 1972 break- erwise against his character, training, and ethical code—to in, Gray was between the proverbial rock and hard place. If he save the FBI. This is where the war of the FBI succession is did not keep the Watergate probe under control and out of the folded into the plot, except that the facts are so distorted that press, he was going to incur Nixon’s wrath and lose any hope the truth is unrecognizable. Felt’s lust for the directorship is of securing the nomination to be permanent director after depicted in a single scene, immediately following Hoover’s the November election. Yet if he failed to let the investigation death, when he gingerly and respectfully tries on the direc- run its full course or was seen to have interfered with it in any tor’s chair for size. We are supposed to believe Felt will serve way, Gray would stand no chance of being confirmed by what honorably if only he is asked, but he is double-crossed by was sure to be a Democrat-controlled Senate. As CIA director Richard Nixon. Neeson’s Felt promises his fidelity to Gray Richard Helms later observed, almost in sympathy, “Can you so long as Gray’s first loyalty is to the bureau. In truth, Felt imagine the predicament of a new FBI director coming into acted like a sycophant in front of Gray and disparaged him office and having this thing break over his head?” at every opportunity behind his back. Landesman can make Gray’s solution was to try to have it both ways. He

38 / The Weekly Standard October 9, 2017 largely absented himself from direct management of the Throat; pure invention. Landesman leaves out that Gray’s investigation, leaving it to the professionals at the bureau— confirmation testimony before the Senate led to backslap- including his deputy, Mark Felt. Simultaneously, the acting ping in the Post newsroom. The words of Nixon’s ostensible director opened a private channel to White House counsel hatchet man justified the Post’s singular devotion to the story, John Dean and kept him informed about the FBI’s prog- and as the paper’s executive editor, Ben Bradlee, put it, single- ress—never realizing that Dean’s real function was desk handedly “rescued the free press.” Most egregiously, Landes- officer for the cover-up. man includes his phony scoop about Felt leaking to Bernstein, In Landesman’s film, Gray is a Nixon hatchet man who in what amounts to a transparent attempt to give Felt whistle- poses an even greater existential danger to the FBI than Sul- blower cred. One salutary element is that Landesman rightly livan. “Crazy Billy” (as Sullivan was known) would merely makes much more of Felt’s relationship with Time’s Sandy return the bureau to the bad old days; Gray would compro- Smith, a reporter who had many Watergate scoops thanks to mise its very integrity. Gray orders the Watergate investiga- his long-standing ties to the FBI, than he does of the encoun- tion shut down after 48 hours—a plot point based on a false ters with Woodward. Indeed, Woodward’s screen time is so story Felt leaked to the press in June 1972. Missing from the meager it may come as a shock to Watergate buffs, given that film is any indication that Grayalone warned Nixon about Woodward invented Deep Throat. the attempt to obstruct justice in the first few weeks after the Mark Felt is fated to be juxtaposed with All the President’s break-in—what would eventually become the first article in Men, and it will suffer by the comparison. Alan J. Pakula made the House Judiciary Committee’s bill of impeach- ment against the president. Dean (with full knowledge of the president and his chief of staff) was trying to invoke CIA privi- leges to block a particularly embarrassing aspect of the FBI’s Watergate investigation: the laundering of questionable campaign contributions through a Mexican lawyer to the president’s reelection com- mittee, whereby they reached the bank account of one of the five Watergate burglars. In an exchange that would become famous, Gray and Nixon talked on July 6, 1972, about this aborted effort to deflect the FBI investigation. “People on your staff,” Gray warned the president, “are using the CIA and FBI” in an attempt to impede the investigation. After a perceptible pause, Nixon replied, “Pat, you just continue to conduct your aggressive and thorough investigation.” The actor Marton Csokas bears Liam Neeson as Mark Felt and Julian Morris as Bob Woodward reenact an uncanny resemblance to Gray. But thanks to the pair’s secret meetings in an Arlington, Virginia, parking garage. Landesman’s script, a naïve, hapless man in a dif- ficult position is portrayed as a simple thug in the employ exceptional use of Washington’s architecture and symbol- of the federal government. ism in his account of the Watergate investigation. Mark Felt was not filmed on location, and the absence of Washington’s andesman is no Oliver Stone retailing paranoid monumentalism is telling. There is a mismatch between the history. But there are several touches in Mark Felt weightiness of the subject and the locale, as if the war over L reminiscent of JFK. Like the earlier film’s Mr. X the FBI succession and the Watergate scandal had both taken (played by Donald Sutherland), there is a mysterious, men- place in Sacramento. Watching Landesman’s rendering of acing CIA-figure (played by Eddie Marsan) who tries, in a the iconic garage rendezvous between Felt and Woodward, brief appearance, to wrap up all the loose ends. Like Stone, one yearns for a cameo by Robert Redford, perhaps as the Landesman purveys the concept of an unaccountable Deep attendant, or even better, Hal Holbrook as an anonymous State. “Presidents come and go,” Marsan intones. “The CIA patron departing in his car. Even a bow to the beloved but stays. The FBI stays.” And like Stone’s JFK, Landesman’s apocryphal “follow the money” line is missing, and there is film ends with a claim that is the opposite of the truth: nothing memorable to take its place. Mark Felt’s “legacy is incalculable as one of the most impor- That scene also serves as a pointed reminder of what All tant whistleblowers in American history.” the President’s Men is and what Mark Felt isn’t. Every sentient Mark Felt is chock full of lesser falsehoods, misrepresenta- American already knew how the story turned out in 1976 when tions, and elisions of fact. Neeson’s Felt arrives at the scene Pakula’s film premiered. But All the President’s Men was a crack- of the Watergate break-in as his personal presence is urgently ling, gripping movie. Mark Felt is a plodding, unsubtle melo- required by investigators; never happened. Landesman has drama, guilty of the only cardinal sin in Hollywood: tedium. It

SONY PICTURES CLASSICS Woodward telling Felt that his newsroom sobriquet is Deep is beyond rescue, even by Liam Neeson’s pensive looks. ♦

October 9, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 39 Soulcraft AS STATECRAFT The many virtues of Scalia’s speeches.

by Adam J. White CATHERINE FITTS / COLLECTION OF THE SUPREME COURT UNITED STATES CATHERINE

40 / The Weekly Standard October 9, 2017 hen I was in law nalism, to deemphasize the “intent” of teaching,” recalled Scalia Speaks individual Founders and to emphasize Antonin Scalia in Reflections on Law, Faith, instead the objective meaning of consti- a speech just days and Life Well Lived tutional terms as they would have been edited by Christopher J. Scalia ‘Wbefore his 1986 nomination to the best understood by the American people and Edward Whelan Supreme Court, “I was fond of doing Crown Forum, 420 pp., $30 at the time that the particular constitu- what is called ‘teaching against the tional provision became law. As the edi- class’—that is, taking positions that tors observe, the latter approach “soon the students were almost certain to dis- a case for the fundamental consti- became the dominant school of origi- agree with, in order to generate some tutional concepts to which he had nalism—thanks in large part to Scalia’s discussion, if not productive thought.” devoted his career. For example, in indefatigable advocacy and to the power- He admitted to doing something simi- a 1991 speech on the nature of the ful example of his opinions as a justice.” lar when addressing public audiences: U.S. Constitution, Scalia argues that “It is neither any fun nor any use its most important feature is not the hroughout his career, Scalia preaching to the choir.” Bill of Rights, but rather its struc- Tstressed that judges’ proper role In decades of public speeches at ture: “A bill of rights has value only in our constitutional system is crucial home and abroad, Scalia educated, if the other part of the constitution— but limited: Courts should interpret challenged, and entertained countless the part that really ‘constitutes’ the the meaning of laws but the vast bulk audiences. Now anyone who wants organs of government—establishes of governance should be left to the to benefit from the late justice’s wit a structure that is likely to preserve, people’s elected representatives. “The and wisdom can do so with Scalia against the ineradicable human lust American republic is a democracy,” Speaks, a collection of speeches edited for power, the liberties that the bill of Scalia says in a 2012 address, “and the by Christopher J. Scalia and Edward rights expresses.” background rule of democracy is that Whelan (that is, the justice’s youngest As for how judges should inter- the majority rules.” son and his former clerk). The book pret the Constitution’s terms, Scalia’s And in the long run, the people offers Scalia’s reflections on a vast explanation of originalism makes the will decide not just what legislation array of subjects. historical case that judges formerly they want, but also what kind of con- Lawyers and law students may interpreted the document in accord­ stitution they want. “No part of the gravitate toward the speeches on ance with its original meaning, until Constitution—neither its structural legal subjects, some of which Scalia the post-World War II era, when they portions nor the individual guaran- previously touched upon in A Mat- unabashedly began to make new con- tees [of rights]—can be preserved ter of Interpretation (1997) and Read- stitutional law unmoored from actual for the people by the Supreme Court ing Law (2012)—and of course in his constitutional text. (True, there had alone,” Scalia warns in a 1991 speech. hundreds of judicial opinions and law always been judges willing to “bend a “A Supreme Court fiercely dedicated review articles. But as son Christo- text to their wishes,” Scalia concedes, to preserving that document cannot pher observes in his touching and elo- “but in earlier times they at least had exist in the midst of a society that quent introduction, Scalia’s speeches the decency to lie about it, to pre- does not understand it.” The Court framed the constitutional doctrines tend that they were saying what the can take a countermajoritarian stand even more crisply: “He spoke to legal unchanging Constitution required.”) against momentary excesses, but in organizations, of course, and those One speech in the book is of special the long run the effects of a changing speeches include some of the sharpest historical importance: a June 14, 1986, society will inevitably be felt in the and most concise articulations of his address to a Justice Department con- Court. “In the last analysis, in other legal philosophy. . . . But my father ference organized by Attorney Gen- words, the court cannot save the soci- didn’t speak only to lawyers. And eral Edwin Meese. Two days after that ety from itself—because in the last even when his subject was the law, speech, Scalia would meet privately analysis the court is no more than his language was tailored to lay audi- with President Ronald Reagan to inter- the society itself. . . . The Constitu- ences in a way that his court opinions, view for a Supreme Court seat that tion will endure, in other words, only as readable as they are, simply could (unbeknownst to the public) was about to the extent that it endures in your not be.” to be opened by the retirement of Chief understanding and affection.” That style allowed Justice Scalia to Justice Warren Burger. The interview For that very reason, the biggest begin with first principles and build evidently went well: Reagan offered the contribution of Scalia Speaks to our job to Scalia on the spot and announced American constitutionalism may prove Adam J. White is a research fellow at the it the next day. to be not Scalia’s explanation of con- Hoover Institution and director of the Center But the June 14 speech was more stitutional law, for which he is already for the Study of the Administrative State at than an audition before the Justice famous, but the repeated examples of George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Department. It offered an argument in Scalia exhorting audiences to under- Law School. favor of fundamentally refocusing origi- stand the crucial role that education—

October 9, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 41 Good Writer’s Disease? by Barton Swaim

’m not sure I’ve ever enjoyed written for general readers but for great fan of opera and twice appeared, reading a collection of speeches. lawyers and judges and journalists. together with Justice Ruth Bader Gins- This may be due to the fact that In this collection we have, in essence, burg, as an extra in Strauss’s Ariadne most or maybe all I’ve read are the great man’s essays. He delivered auf Naxos—Scalia contended that they Ipolitical, and political speeches, even scores of speeches over the course of his only thrive in the context of law. Not those authored by literate and capable career, and as a conscientious orator he court decisions on First Amendment politicians, lose their significance protections, but statutory law—con- almost immediately. But perhaps tract law especially, but also even the more important reason speeches rationally debated laws on obscenity. don’t work as published products “The First Amendment says what it is that their authors typically aren’t says,” he argues, “not what we lovers writers. Writers don’t give many of the arts would like it to say. And speeches, for one thing, and for frankly, I find it impossible to stretch another their writings are the things ‘the freedom of speech and of the people care about, not their public press’ beyond those symbols (includ- addresses. With only a few excep- ing even symbolic actions) that con- tions, collections of speeches are for vey thought as opposed to aesthetic, statesmen or agitators or celebrities or for that matter erotic, emotion.” or maybe tycoons—not for writers. These addresses are beautifully Scalia Speaks, by contrast, some- constructed in their rhetorical how works. That it does so is partly expression and logical develop- the result of a circumstantial oddity ment, as satisfying to read as they Christopher Scalia mentions in his must have been to hear. There’s introduction: His father, the late justice wrote out the script of what he wanted a warm lucidity about Scalia’s writ- Antonin Scalia, was a terrific writer, as to say (though in delivery, his son ing that nicely complements the oral even his adversaries readily concede. explains, he felt free to depart from his form: He’s always clear but treats But his writing is mostly bound up own text). Here are addresses on Chris- his readers as people, not reasoning in Supreme Court opinions. I’ve read tianity, on American society, on politi- machines; his aim is to express his some of his decisions and dissents, and cal principle, on the lives of friends argument as cleanly and efficiently feel they are probably masterpieces of and heroes, on law and the Constitu- as he can, but he’s happy to stop and the genre, but I’m not a lawyer, and tion, and much else. In one wonderful ensure you’re following the logic. And anyhow most court opinions aren’t talk on the arts, for instance—he was a happy to crack a joke, too. Scalia’s wit

especially civic and moral educa- anity, but rather to inculcate the vir- Scalia returns to this theme over tion—must play in sustaining repub- tues required to sustain republican and over; it becomes the book’s most lican government. government. Scalia quotes Benja- prominent refrain. His 1999 talk on One 2014 speech is dedicated min Rush: Without moral education, college education quotes Washington’s entirely to this point. Focusing on “there can be no virtue, and without farewell address again. His 2011 speech “a subject that [George] Washington virtue, there can be no liberty, and at Xavier High School in New York would have approved of ”—namely, liberty is the object and life of all City, his alma mater, celebrates West “the education of the citizenry to republican governments.” As Scalia Point as the American institution that render it capable of democratic self- further notes, John Adams agreed, as “took most seriously . . . the task of governance”—Scalia argued that “the did Tocqueville later. So did Washing- moral formation.” In a 1994 address, Founders were as interested in teach- ton, whose farewell address stressed he pauses to reflect that, “not long ago, ing virtue as in teaching civics.” And that “of all the dispositions and hab- all colleges, even nondenominational they saw this as necessarily including its which lead to political prosperity, ones, used to consider [moral forma- the teaching of religious values—not Religion and Morality are indispen­ tion] their task.” Speaking at his son

to convert all Americans to Christi- sable supports.” Paul’s high school graduating class in ALEX WONG / GETTY

42 / The Weekly Standard October 9, 2017 is legendary, but I was unprepared to the book’s introduction, his son recalls personal predilections will usually be laugh as much as I did. One example once asking Scalia whether he found those of the majority (he was, after all, of many, on the absence of “soccer writing easy. “No,” was the reply. “It’s elected by the majority, or appointed moms” in the Brooklyn of his youth: hard as hell.” by officials who were elected), his “There were no soccer moms because In a little address titled “Writing nonadherence to the law will more there was no soccer,” he writes. Well,” Scalia concludes by rejecting often disadvantage the minority mem- “Americans overwhelmingly preferred the idea that good writing requires bers and the downtrodden.” baseball, a game in which a lot of play- only intellect. To write well, he To put it differently: Judges are gen- ers stand around while not much hap- says, primarily requires “the abil- erally going to share the opinions of pens, to soccer, a game in which peo- ity to place oneself in the shoes of the powerful and influential people ple run back and forth furiously while one’s audience; to assume only what of their time; otherwise they couldn’t not much happens.” There are people they assume; to anticipate what they have gotten themselves appointed as who write jokes for a living who’d anticipate; to explain what they need judges. (Elsewhere he repeats the old consider that their best work. explained; to think what they must joke: “A judge is a lawyer who knows be thinking; to feel what they must the governor.”) But a good judge, a calia’s adversaries admitted that he be feeling.” That’s anguishing work, judge who only cares what the law Swas a gifted writer but often said as any competent writer will tell you. actually says and refuses to chan- so in a way that implied he wasn’t a But there is one connection between nel the dominant opinions of his age fine legal mind. I’ve heard Justice Ste- writing well and intellect, he says, (very likely his own opinions) into phen Breyer do this more than once and it’s this: “A careless, sloppy the decisions he issues in court, will in public forums. Some people suffer writer has a careless, sloppy mind.” often find himself in an adversarial from “good writer’s disease,” Breyer I suspect there’s another reason relationship with the culture around likes to say; the people who suffer for Scalia’s ability to write so clearly him. And that’s the proper stance of from this disease (he means Scalia) and cogently, and it has to do with a writer: an adversarial one. When the happen upon a felicitous phrase and his conception of the law and the role writer knows his reasoning won’t be can’t help using it. The line gets a of the judge. Justice Scalia believed accepted by most of the great and good chuckle, but it’s meant to suggest that the judge’s job is to interpret the law members of the literate society of his the force of Scalia’s writing derives according to the meaning it had when time, he’s compelled to work at it a few from mere phrasemaking and that it was written. That put him in the more hours and fashion his words into he wasn’t sufficiently discerning to minority—partly owing to the con- something better than the complacent see that his felicitous phrases didn’t temporary fashion to treat the Con- fluff of consensus. amount to good arguments. stitution’s meaning as malleable, but It’s not a knack or a “disease,” Jus- Wrong. Scalia had a talent for writ- partly also because Scalia’s original- tice Breyer. It’s just hard as hell. ♦ ing, for sure, but his writing hits you ism necessarily puts a judge at odds as hard as it does because he worked with the majority. He alludes to this Barton Swaim, the opinion editor of at it, relentlessly, always refining his point several times in these pages. The Weekly Standard, is the author of language in order more efficiently and “If we assume (as is surely correct),” the memoir The Speechwriter: A Brief accurately to convey his thought. In he says in one lecture, “that a judge’s Education in Politics.

1988, he said that “freedom is a luxury ment that it created, was rooted in this point at Scalia’s funeral mass: that can be afforded only by the good his Christian faith. In a 1989 speech, “God blessed Dad, as is well known, society. When civic virtue diminishes, he quotes St. Paul’s Letter to the with a love for his country. He knew freedom will inevitably diminish Romans, to remind his audience that well what a close-run thing the found- as well.” “the Christian bears a moral obliga- ing of our nation was. And he saw in tion toward the just state,” including that founding, as did the Founders calia’s critics often accused him of the American state, the laws of which themselves, a blessing.” Sletting religion dictate his judicial “have a moral claim to our obedience.” The Founders’ project remains decisions. He rebutted that charge Two years later, he observes that “the a close-run thing. The work of sus- repeatedly throughout his time on the wondrous durability of the Constitu- taining the republican government public stage, as exemplified by some tion is attributable to a whole series of that they originally framed is aided of the speeches contained in Scalia irreplicable circumstances—incredi- immensely by Justice Scalia’s legacy, Speaks. Still, the book reminds us how bly lucky, if you will, or, as many of the which now includes the speeches con- Scalia’s appreciation of the Constitu- Founders thought, providential.” His tained in this indispensable book. We tion, and of the republican govern- son Paul, a Catholic priest, recalled find in that legacy, too, a blessing. ♦

October 9, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 43 with white paper standing for unshad- B A owed stone. He washes the two narrow & buildings that anchor the bridge to the Rialto in broad strokes of pale green and mauve too, but separates their col- Water and Light ors carefully along the pencil guideline of their party wall. The scenes and portraits of John Singer Sargent—and Juggling brushes again—he liked the puzzling influence of photography.by Dominic Green to hold a handful, to save time—Sar- gent marks the balconies of the mauve building and the windowsills of the ohn Singer Sargent (1856-1925) green building with grids of the whitest painted watercolors throughout Sargent purple. Then he reunites his colors and his European childhood. Like The Watercolors composition by adding tiny vertical J Dulwich Picture Gallery, London his family, the dependents of the through October 8 strips of deep purple to create the three- peripatetic Dr. Fitzwilliam Sargent, dimensional recesses of the balconies. watercolors were portable and pic- Switching back to a thicker brush, he turesque. Sargent continued to paint Sargent’s Women splashes deep purple into the window watercolors in the 1870s as a student Four Lives Behind the Canvas recesses of the pale green building. by Donna M. Lucey in Paris and in the 1880s and 1890s W. W. Norton, 311 pp., $29.95 Meanwhile, the boat surges into when his oil portraits, applying Old the shadows beneath the bridge. This Master grandeur to the gloss of new instability seems to pull the whole com- money, defined the ages Gilded and position down and under the bridge, Edwardian. But only after 1900, when buildings and all. The turquoise water Sargent renounced the clientele and seems to surge with the boat, because commissions of the society portrait, the boat’s disturbance of the water did watercolors become the preferred splits the turquoise into overlapping medium of his late style. refractions of blue, green, and white Sargent’s early watercolors shared and reflects a diluted, jagged tincture the spare handling and tonal restraint of mauve into the sky. But just as the of his Parisian oils of the 1870s. When white of the bridge is the paper beneath in the 1880s his oil portraits acquired the paint, so the white on the water is broken brushwork and a higher-keyed applied on top of the paint. palette, his watercolors did too. They To finish, Sargent highlights the dec- were private exercises or preparatory orations on the balustrade of the bridge, studies; after sending two watercolors the packages in the sandolo, the reflec- of Venice to the Paris Salon of 1881, tion of the bridge in the waves, and the Sargent did not exhibit a watercolor Simplon Pass: Reading (ca. 1911) waterman’s shirt with thick smears of until 1903. By then, however, his water- white gouache. Somehow, he describes colors were no longer subordinate to in oil with the speed of a watercolorist, the waterman’s shirt and rotated upper his oils, and he was no longer subordi- he layered his watercolors with the eye torso in a single stroke, then tops the nate to the studio. of an oil painter. white shirt with a squirt of yellow like Sargent: The Watercolours, now at the For The Rialto Bridge, Venice (ca. the juice of a passion fruit. In a further Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, is a 1900-04), Sargent decides to turn bravura, Sargent repeats a trick from glorious, light-filled memoir of the lib- his paper vertically, portrait-style, his flamenco dancer in the 1882 oil El erations that followed and how the last to emphasize the effects of light and Jaleo (now in Boston’s Isabella Stewart great portraitist of the 19th century movement. He sketches a few sweeps Gardner Museum) and turns the water- became the first great watercolorist of of pencil: the edges of the buildings man’s head so far round as to confound the 20th. In Paris, Sargent had studied in the background; the plunge of the anatomical reason. oil painting in the progressive atelier bridge, less than half of which he will White beneath, white on top: pure of Carolus-Duran, who taught paint- show us; and the body of a waterman light, containing a swirl of movement ing au premier coup, applying strokes of who leans forward to push his sandolo and color. Everything feels alive and paint “wet-on-wet.” If Sargent painted barge under the bridge. Then Sargent spontaneous, as though fleeting hints dives in with the brush. In the left fore- have been fixed in solid form. As Henry Dominic Green, a fellow of the Royal ground, he notates the stone bridge in James observed, for Sargent, perception Historical Society, is a frequent contributor an ethereal shorthand of soft washes was “already by itself a kind of execu-

to The Weekly Standard. and shadows, pale green over mauve, tion.” But the impression of immediacy FUND COLLECTION / CHARLES HENRY HAYDEN THE HAYDEN

44 / The Weekly Standard October 9, 2017 is just that: an impression, a tribute to the artist’s skill.

n oils, Sargent achieved spontaneous I effects not just with fast brushwork, but also through elaborate execution, scraping back much of each day’s work and starting over the next. In Donna Lucey’s new group biography Sargent’s Women, Sargent is described as recall- ing the sitters again and again. In 1888, Isabella Stewart Gardner extended the sittings, and Sargent’s labor, by an inability to keep still. He painted her face eight times, scraped it away eight times, and finally settled for the ninth version. Sargent worried at his portrait of 17-year-old Elsie Palmer for over a year before he exposed how her open face masked private depths. He probably worked on the portrait in Palmer’s absence too; in 1884, he had returned Madame X’s shoulder strap to her shoulder after her mother had complained about the implications of its having dropped onto her arm. Did some of Sargent’s watercolors develop from another kind of extended process? Sargent’s Venetian watercolors con- vince because they look real. That is, they conform to expectations. The expectations of his contemporaries were not much different from our own; by 1900, the fixed perspective of the cam- era had been shaping visual expecta- tions for decades—and, by reaction, shaping the development of painting. In one of Donna Lucey’s many pen- etrating insights into the studiously private Sargent, we see him in a family The Rialto Bridge, Venice (ca. 1900-04) scrapbook from 1890, “winking at the camera, his mouth half open, perhaps line by the steps of Palazzo Grimani the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. And smiling,” as he larks on a beach with his (1904). Often, the prow of a gondola last year, researcher Ella Ravilious dis- cousins. The box camera was portable, intrudes from the bottom of the frame, covered more than 600 professionally and a familiar companion. as if directing the viewer’s eye. In taken tourist photographs in the Vic- The Venetian scenes, like most of other words, the watercolors look real toria and Albert Museum’s archive. Sargent’s watercolors, are not tradi- because they look like tourist memo- Sargent probably bought these photo- tional landscapes. They are cropped ries and tourist photographs. graphs, Ormond and Kilmurray write, and asymmetric, like the bridge in The We know that a portable camera “in their place of origin.” Rialto Bridge or the gorgeously glow- traveled with Sargent and the large, It is difficult to paint in a bobbing ing Dome of the Spirits in Jerusalem convivial group of family and friends gondola. It is possible, though, to (ca. 1905-06). They are painted close- that joined him on his plein air expedi- sketch the lines of a painting. In The up and from below, and they focus tions to the Alps, Italy, and the Levant. Piazzetta, Venice (ca. 1904), the pencil on odd architectural details, like the In the catalogue for Sargent: The Water- guidelines for the foreground gon- bruised shadows and oxidized copper colours, guest curators Richard Ormond dola’s prow are to the left of the final, on the underside of Spanish Fountain and Elaine Kilmurray supply snap- painted prow. Did the boat move in (1912) or the green and yellow water- shots from these trips, now held by the water at the time, or did Sargent

October 9, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 45 improve on his sketch afterwards? If period. But the image of reality is always Sargent always was an artist of the so, did he refer to his photograph of eerie. A picture is a fixed impersonation juste milieu, for the “golden mean” was the Libreria Vecchia, now in the Vic- of a moving object that we see but can- also the sweet spot between tradition toria and Albert? not feel. and novelty. Impressionism inflected Some of the watercolors are identical him enough for him to risk introducing to photographs, but it is not clear which one of this derogates from Sar- it to London with Carnation, Lily, Lily, came first, especially when Sargent was N gent’s achievement. Rather, it Rose (1886), but in small doses, with a painting still objects like buildings and confirms its scale and nature, and the sugaring of Aestheticism. Suspecting people, rather than evanescent effects intelligence with which it was executed. that the critical value of his oil portraits like sunlight on water. The monastery of In his years as a flatterer in oils, Sargent would depreciate with the decline of Mar Saba (ca. 1905-06), perched on rocks admitted to having used watercolors to their subjects, he identified the poten- of pink and orange not too far from Jeru- “keep up my morale.” Now, he applied tial of watercolor as his legacy. He made salem, matches Sargent’s tourist pho- his experience and ambition, and his oil sure to distribute the watercolors in tograph, taken from the same vantage. techniques, to what had traditionally large tranches in collections on both Did the photograph help him to fill in been considered a lesser medium, and sides of the Atlantic. the details as he painted? Or did he buy which by 1900 was less likely to be asso- In 2013 and 2014, American audi- it so that he could rework or replace his ciated with Turner or Delacroix than ences saw the watercolors that Sar- painting? Or was it just a souvenir? with lady amateurs like Sargent’s sisters. gent sold to the Brooklyn Museum The languid, sunlit Dorothy Bar- The watercolor tradition had slipped and the Boston MFA. The Dulwich nard and Rose-Marie Ormond in Sim- into a gentility from which it has still Picture Gallery’s exhibition presents plon Pass: Reading (ca. 1911) match the to recover. Even today, the best-known the British half of Sargent’s legacy identically posed but staid and shad- watercolorist is Charles, Prince of Wales, for the first time since his death. Now owed Dorothy and Rose-Marie in a who sells his Highland scenes for char- that Sargent’s skill has been recog- photograph now in the Boston MFA’s ity. Sargent applied modern vision to nized, first in oil and then in water, archive. Another MFA photograph is a medium that had softened with the it is time for scholars to decipher called “Sargent painting the watercolor decay of Romanticism. His watercolors his method and answer the question Simplon Pass: Reading.” Was the photo are images from a magic lantern—or, asked by anyone confronted with a made in sequence with the water- like another visual innovation from his beauty at once strange and familiar: color—and if so, which came first—or lifetime, stills from a moving picture. How did he do it? ♦ in parallel with it? Unfortunately, there is no photograph of the photographer in the act of photographing Sargent as he painted the painting whose final B&A form conforms to, but might not post- date, a photograph. David Hockney has argued convinc- ingly that the optical effects of Western Chauvinist Racket painting suggest the widespread use of The not-so-historic clash of Billie Jean King camera lucida. The effects of Sargent’s late watercolors evoke the monocular and Bobby Riggs. by John Podhoretz perspective, cropping, and heightened contrasts of photography. Real shad- ows are not as dense as those in Spanish he 1973 tennis match Fountain. If Sargent was not using a pho- between the 29-year-old Battle of the Sexes Directed by Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris tograph, he was thinking photographi- female champ Billie Jean cally, in the knowledge that his audience King and the 55-year-old would be seeing photographically. Tformer champ Bobby Riggs was many Nor was Sargent alone in using pho- things. It was one of the great “pseudo- tographs. Contemporaries like Gustave events” of all time, fitting perfectly case, was the Male Chauvinist Pig vs. Moreau, Anders Zorn, and Thomas Daniel Boorstin’s definition in his the Women’s Libber. Eakins were working from photographs 1962 book The Image as “dramatic per- The match was a ludicrous and too. In a photograph of Sargent’s sis- formances in which ‘men in the news’ colorful distraction from the accel- ters on the Grand Canal, the gondolier simply act out more or less well their erating disaster in Vietnam and the leans forward and whisks them under prepared script.” The script, in this accelerating collapse of a presidency. the shadowy Rialto Bridge. The pho- And it was a forerunner of the stupid tograph is eerily similar to Sargent’s John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, culture wars of our day in which our The Rialto Bridge, Venice, from the same is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic. national discussion is overtaken by

46 / The Weekly Standard October 9, 2017 absurd sideshows (the War on Christ- mas! the silencing of Sandra Fluke!). Yes, the event dubbed the “Battle of the Sexes” was many things. But a historically significant moment it was not—not for tennis, not for women, and not for homosexuals. Similarly, Billie Jean King herself was many things at the time—but adorable and demure and unsure of herself she was not. One of the most ferocious and competitive players who ever lived, she was driven and determined and not at all personable. And Bobby Riggs, too, was many things—an anything-for-attention reprobate who stumbled into a commercially brilliant idea by playing a cartoonish version of a woman-hating troglodyte—but cute he was not. Alas, Battle of the Sexes presents us an adorable, demure, and unsure Billie Jean against a cute Bobby. It is set against the backdrop of King’s discovery and explo- ration of her lesbian feelings and her battle against the casual sexism of the powers-that-be in tennis and American culture more generally. Emma Stone turns Billie Jean into the second coming of her Oscar-winning Mia from La La Steve Carell as Bobby Riggs and Emma Stone as Billie Jean King in Battle of the Sexes Land; it’s a wonder this woman can get a ball over the net, given her half-heart- might have deliberately thrown the the-top spectacle the match became. edness, let alone win a tournament or set match in order to settle gambling debts The only inspired flourish is the use up a competing women’s tennis league with the mob, as Don Van Natta Jr. of Howard Cosell’s classically ridicu- to challenge the male-dominated U.S. revealed in an explosive 2013 piece for lous and knowing color commentary Lawn Tennis Association. And Steve ESPN. The movie doesn’t even show during the match (with a nice CGI job Carell’s Bobby is neither a proto-Trump Riggs battling against the temptation. placing the actress Natalie Morales in nor a self-inflated caricature of the rear- Far from it; Battle of the Sexes seems direct proximity to the real Cosell). guard American action against gender determined to quash the very idea by King wins a cool $100,000 but what egalitarianism but rather a lovable con showing us a scene in which Riggs lays do we see? Emma Stone going for con- man with a gambling problem and a a $15,000 bet on himself to win. secutive Oscars by having a sobbing heart of gold. Why do this? Because screenwriter fit alone in a locker room. Carell get- Everything that might have made Simon Beaufoy and codirectors Jona- ting an unearned sentimental final this movie more interesting is left than Dayton and Valerie Faris are moment when Bobby makes up with on the sidelines. A genuine explora- committed to the narrative that Bil- his incomprehensible wife (Elisabeth tion of the very real risks King was lie Jean King’s victory meant some- Shue), whom we’ve seen be dismissive taking experimenting with same-sex thing transcendent. They cannot and contemptuous in one scene and lov- attraction as a married woman in 1973 allow her triumph to be mitigated in ingly thoughtful in the next. And then, would have been more compelling any way by even a hint that Riggs— at the last moment, we get an anachro- than the inadvertently comic imagery who had slaughtered King’s rival nistic speech from Billie Jean’s wise gay offered as she and her first girlfriend Margaret Court in straight sets only dress designer: “Someday we will be contemplate their desires—footage months before he collapsed in the free to love whom we love.” that unfortunately calls to mind televi- King match—might have dogged it So Battle of the Sexes takes a fizzy sion commercials of the era for Vidal for money. comic moment appropriate for satire Sassoon and Summer’s Eve. Because Battle of the Sexes takes itself and turns it into an ABC Afterschool Even worse, the movie dispenses so seriously, it cannot even have that Special. What a waste of a juicy sub-

TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX entirely with the possibility that Riggs much fun with the cheesy and over- ject. What a bore. ♦

October 9, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 47 “I know many Puerto Ricans.” —Donald Trump, September 26, 2017 PARODY

October 9, 2017