Saturday, January 31, 2015
A beautiful End of January
I hate to see January end because time will start speeding up now. At least it's a georgeous day in a Alabama.
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
On Playing Dumb
One of life's essential skills is the ability to "play dumb" when the
occasion demands it. Some of us have this skill more than others,
present company included. It seems to come natural to us. Playing dumb
can be easier than playing smart.
On Seeing "Selma"
Makes me think of growing up in Alabama in the 1950's and 60's and being basically unaware of what was going on in the civil rights movement. I have no memories of the church bombings and the march in Birmingham in 1963. I do remember the '64 civil rights bill passing but I do not remember the '65 voting rights bill passing. I don't remember Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. It's not that I wasn't interested in current events. It's a function of growing up in a small town with no cable TV and no internet like today. I doubt that there were headlines in The Birmingham News. So sad. Such blanks in my memory.
Monday, January 26, 2015
More on "Selma"
“Selma” Vs. “Selma”
By Sam Tanenhaus
Even
if you have an infallible memory for film, you won’t recall the moment
in Ava DuVernay’s “Selma” when President Lyndon Johnson suggests a
compromise to Martin Luther King, Jr., who has been leading protesters
in their demand for voting rights but encountering violent resistance.
“What I’m proposing is this,” L.B.J. says. “I announce a special
commission to investigate electoral abuses in the South, and you respond
by declaring the Selma campaign a major victory—which is exactly what
it would be!—and announce its conclusion.”
You
won’t remember this scene because it didn’t make it into the film. It
was included, however, in the original screenplay by Paul Webb, which
was written nine years ago and was coveted by several major directors—including Spike Lee and Michael Mann—before it found its way to DuVernay, who then reworked it heavily.A rewritten screenplay isn’t news. Film is a collaborative art, and filmmakers with strong visions often reshape the material they’re given. But in the case of “Selma,” the changes matter, because DuVernay’s depiction of L.B.J. and his relationship with King has become a source of controversy, with figures like Joseph Califano, a former policy adviser to L.B.J., on one side, and Gay Talese on the other. DuVernay, for her part, has said that Webb’s original screenplay needed extensive reworking, because it was a “traditional bio-pic” that adhered to antiquated and patronizing ideas about history and the civil-rights movement. “If, in 2014, we’re still making ‘white savior movies’ then it’s just lazy and unfortunate,” DuVernay told the Boston Globe. “We’ve grown up as a country and cinema should be able to reflect what’s true. And what’s true is that black people are the center of their own lives and should tell their own stories from their own perspectives.”
Many of DuVernay’s changes, especially to scenes set in the Deep South, enrich and complicate the drama. As in recent civil-rights histories like Todd Purdum’s “An Idea Whose Time Has Come” and Clay Risen’s “The Bill of the Century,” DuVernay shows how sweeping historical change is often the result of small acts of bravery and defiance performed in quiet, even hidden, corners of our shared national life.
But it is also true that several key scenes in “Selma” do take place in the Oval Office and revolve around the Johnson-King relationship. Webb’s script was “much more slanted to Johnson,” DuVernay has said, and so she tried to right the balance. One way she has done this is through her use of a third central player, J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I. director who seems more intent on undermining King than on protecting the protesters being menaced by Southern police. In Webb’s script, Johnson, though forced to rely on Hoover’s monitoring of events in Selma, brushes aside Hoover’s well-documented fixation on King’s private life. (He explains to an aide that he can’t fire Hoover because most Americans “think J. Edgar Hoover and the F.B.I. is all that stands between them and Satan. For now I need him inside the tent pissing out, not outside pissing in.”) At one point, Hoover calls King a “political and moral degenerate.” In Webb’s original screenplay, it leads to this exchange:
L.B.J.: What I need to know right now, J. Edgar, is this: Is King about to be killed?The script notes that the ensuing silence between Johnson and his aides is “heavy with irony.” In DuVernay’s film, L.B.J. also swats down Hoover’s attacks on King, but he senses an opening, too. “What I need to know right is what King is going to do,” L.B.J. says, implying that he wants King, not King’s enemies, placed under surveillance.
HOOVER: I have no information to indicate a current threat.
L.B.J.: Good. I sleep a lot easier knowing the F.B.I. is looking out for that man’s life.
“We can go with the wife,” Hoover says. “We know there’s tension in the home already; we can weaken the dynamic, dismantle the family.” L.B.J., by his silence, tacitly approves the plan. Later, after a particularly heated exchange with King, L.B.J. tells an aide, “Get me J. Edgar Hoover,” and in the next scene King and his wife, Coretta, listen to an audiotape that includes a recording of King in bed with another woman.
It is well known that the F.B.I. sent such a tape to King’s home. “Selma” would have us believe that Lyndon Johnson was to blame. To some, this is defamatory. To DuVernay, it’s necessary revisionism. “What’s important for me, as a student of this time in history, is to not deify what the President did,” she told Rolling Stone. “Johnson has been hailed as a hero of that time, and he was, but we’re talking about a reluctant hero. He was cajoled and pushed, he was protective of a legacy.”
But what history has DuVernay studied? Apparently not “At Canaan’s Edge,” the third volume of Taylor Branch’s monumental biography of King, “Parting the Waters,” with its account of the “historic collaboration” between King and Johnson. And not Robert Dallek’s biography of Johnson, which notes that L.B.J., far from lagging behind on voting rights, had called for their reform in a State of the Union address in January, 1965, at the time the Selma protests were being organized. In this same period, L.B.J. also instructed his attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, to draw up legislation “that would enforce constitutional guarantees to vote,” Dallek writes.
DuVernay may have in mind a different history—not of civil rights but of American cinema. In particular, she may be thinking about the long history of movies about race, which includes “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962), “Mississippi Burning” (1988), “Glory” (1989), and even “42” (2012). All emphasize the heroic role of whites in racial uplift—the lawyer who defends the unjustly accused black man, the Boston colonel who leads a black regiment in the Civil War, the white baseball executive who gives a Major League job to Jackie Robinson. (Amy Davidson noted last week how “Selma” spares us the familiar scene in which blacks pour “loving gratitude on sympathetic white Americans who are willing to recognize their rights.”)
But DuVernay’s conception of the L.B.J.-King pairing suggests another cinematic lineage. It includes “The Defiant Ones” (1958), in which Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis play chain-gang members who are handcuffed together and who work out their differences in a doomed escape to freedom, and “In the Heat of the Night” (1967), with Poitier as a big-city detective who helps a redneck sheriff (Rod Steiger) solve a local murder and become less blinkered by bigotry. Both are variations on the “buddy film” and are intended for white audiences, who come out of the theatre feeling better about themselves. Racial conflict becomes a vehicle for the exorcism of white guilt. The white character is the hero in the classical sense—the person we identify with—while the black figure plays the secondary role of moral teacher or guide, leading his hard-hearted or close-minded partner out of the wilderness of prejudice. Poitier specialized in these thankless parts, playing it yet a third time in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”
And this is where “Selma” the film is most bewildering. The L.B.J.-King relationship offers an opportunity to subvert the “white savior” genre, since the two principals really were equals—each a master strategist, each a recognized leader who commanded the loyalty of millions. Together they dominated the political stage in 1965. In February, as the Selma protests were getting underway, Senator Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina segregationist, complained that King had “more access to the White House than just about anyone in this country.”
Webb’s screenplay captures this collaborative aspect in its complexity. His L.B.J. and M.L.K. circle each other warily, at once antagonists and allies, competitors and comrades. In an exchange inspired, perhaps, by a phone conversation the two had in January, 1965, in which King said that having “a Negro in the Cabinet” would send a powerful message “to the Negro and to the nation,” Webb’s Johnson tries to seduce King with an unspecified job in his Administration, one that would enable him to “use your prestige and influence to the full . . . power. You done your time on the streets, Martin!” When King turns him down, L.B.J., exasperated but also admiring, tells an aide, in language that betrays Webb’s not always perfect ear for Texas idioms, “I have totally underestimated him . . .. Under that saintly exterior is a shit-kickin’ bare-knuckle prizefighter!”
That scene doesn’t appear in the film, needless to say. DuVernay does grant L.B.J. one inspiring moment. It comes near the end, when the President makes his famous televised speech to Congress, declaring that the time has come for a voting-rights law. We hear him say, as he did in real life, “We shall overcome.” DuVernay has said that L.B.J. is redeemed for the audience in this instant. “People cheer in the theatre for L.B.J. at the end of it,” she pointed out to Jon Stewart.
Of course they do, because DuVernay has reverted to the old formula. L.B.J., like so many before him, has fulfilled the time-honored role of the white man in American race movies—he has at last seen the light. The trouble with “Selma” is not that it violates the facts of American history but that it perpetuates clichés of cinematic history.
Sunday, January 25, 2015
The Movie "Selma"
Good movie and I enjoyed it but I was not overwhelmed. It packs a punch but has shortcomings. I am not one with the facts to express judgement, but I think the presentation of President Johnson could have been better. The actors who played King and Coretta were great, but the actors who played LBJ and George Wallace were not so believable. Facts do matter. This is what real history is about. Yet emotional and psychological impact are important. The movie excels in this regard.
A Good Start
The day is off to a good start. For once I didn't wake up in a cold
sweat thinking some men in white suits were outside ready to take me
away. Plus I managed to get to the men's room without feeling like a
stumbling drunk. Perhaps the day has possibilities.
Saturday, January 24, 2015
The Pocket Watch
Can you think of anything more quaint than a pocket watch? Can you
still imagine a man reaching into his pocket and pulling out a watch to
see what time it is? Hard to imagine, huh. This act goes back to a
time when time was something different from what it is today---when 20
minute sermons seemed to last 2 hours and Sunday afternoons were 8 hours
long. I say pulling a pocket watch into the light is an elegant act, a
stylish gesture that should stand the test of time, almost an act of
rebellion by today's standards of decimating time. What time did you
say it was?
"Selma" is Fair to LBJ
Why “Selma” Is More Than Fair to L.B.J.
By Amy Davidson
There is a scene in “To Kill a Mockingbird,”
an otherwise outstanding film, that has not aged as well as it might
have. It comes just after Atticus Finch, played by Gregory Peck, has
seen his client, a black sharecropper named Tom Robinson, unjustly
convicted of rape, despite Finch’s impassioned defense, and he is left
to pack up his papers. The main, whites-only section of the courtroom
has emptied out, but the people in the “colored balcony” are still
seated, all in a posture of weary resignation. Little Jean Louise Finch,
or Scout, has snuck up there, too, to watch. Then, as her father turns
to go, the black spectators slowly rise. An older man, Reverend Sykes,
played by William Walker, nudges Scout:
The reverend says it without anger; his expression, on which the camera lingers, is one of sadness redeemed by awe at Atticus Finch’s courage. Peck later said that, when Walker delivered the “your father’s passing” line, “he wrapped up the Academy Award for me.” (Peck won for Best Actor; Walker was not listed in the film’s credits.) For Scout, it is a moment of revelation. She glimpses what the scene suggests is the essential transaction of the civil-rights struggle: black Americans’ bestowal of loving gratitude on sympathetic white Americans who are willing to recognize their rights.Miss Jean Louise? Miss Jean Louise, stand up! Your father’s passing.
There is no scene like that one in “Selma,” the new film about a voting-rights campaign in Alabama in early 1965, during which three protesters were murdered, dozens more were badly beaten, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and other black leaders were imprisoned. Perhaps that cinematic absence helps to explain why, in certain circles, “Selma” has been greeted with outrage. The complaint is that the film is unfair to Lyndon B. Johnson—that it is a scandal, an insult, a lie. Joseph Califano, a former Johnson aide, in a particularly furious attack in the Washington Post, asked if the film’s director, Ava DuVernay, and her colleagues felt “free to fill the screen with falsehoods, immune from any responsibility to the dead.” Califano wrote that “The movie should be ruled out this Christmas and during the ensuing awards season.” And, despite nominations for Best Picture and Best Song, neither DuVernay nor David Oyelowo, whose performance as King is an act of utter alchemy, are up for an Academy Award. (My colleague Richard Brody wrote that he had considered a nomination for Oyelowo “a well-deserved lock.”)
Califano’s charge, in short, is that the film
falsely portrays President Lyndon B. Johnson as being at odds with Martin Luther King Jr. and even using the FBI to discredit him, as only reluctantly behind the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and as opposed to the Selma march itself.
Califano, though, misrepresents “Selma” the movie and Selma the history. The movie does not, for example, portray L.B.J. as “only reluctantly behind” the Voting Rights Act, which would indeed be a gross distortion. (See Robert Caro’s work for the best analysis of Johnson’s stealthy passion for the cause of equality.) It does portray him as disagreeing with King about the timing of the bill—which, to be fair, he did. On other points, though, Califano is simply rewriting history.In fact, Selma was LBJ’s idea, he considered the Voting Rights Act his greatest legislative achievement, he viewed King as an essential partner in getting it enacted—and he didn’t use the FBI to disparage him.
How, one might ask, was the Selma campaign, whose origins within the civil-rights movement are well documented, “LBJ’s idea”? Exhibit A, for Califano, is the transcript of a phone call between L.B.J. and King on January 15, 1965. The conversation, Califano claims, shows that it was Johnson who revealed the importance of voting rights to King (“There’s not going to be anything though, Doctor, as effective as all of them voting”); “articulated the strategy” for him; explained that it would be helpful to “find the worst condition that you run into in Alabama, Mississippi or Louisiana or South Carolina”; and then “seal[ed] the deal” with a final exhortation about how much they could accomplish. King, in Califano’s telling, then hurried off to fulfill this brief, and returned, like a dutiful messenger, with Selma.
There are problems with this account, both textual and contextual. The transcript does not match the story Califano tells—not unless one is deaf, as he and his former boss may well have been, to what King was actually saying. Did it embarrass Califano at all, when he played the recording, to notice how often Johnson interrupted King, or talked over and past him? For that matter, did it occur to either of them that King, in 1965, two years after his “I Have a Dream” speech—where he shared the stage with the widow of Herbert Lee, who had been murdered for his efforts to register voters—might have been well aware of the importance of voting rights, and might have been able to “articulate a strategy” for Johnson? It would be hard to find a purer example of what might be called POTUS-splaining.
And then there is the context. In “At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years,” Taylor Branch writes about the same phone call, and where it fits in the relationship between King and Johnson. “Johnson in the White House was intensely personal but unpredictable—treating King variously to a Texas bear hug of shared dreams or a towering, wounded snit.” In an earlier call, just after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, L.B.J. had told King “how worthy I’m going to try to be of all your hopes.” But then, Branch writes,
“Just as suddenly,” according to Branch, came the January 15th phone call, in which “Johnson had rushed past King’s congratulations to confide a crowning ambition to win the right for Negroes to vote…. King, on his heels, had mumbled approval. He did not mention that he was headed to Selma for that very purpose—knowing that Johnson would not welcome his tactics of street protest.” In other words, at the time of the conversation in which Johnson, in Califano’s telling, came up with the “idea” for Selma, King was already on his way to the city; other organizers were already there. Soon afterward, Branch writes, “Johnson’s mood had turned prickly again,” and, in a subsequent meeting, “he insisted on his prerogative to choose the content and moment for any voting rights bill.” (Karen Tumulty, citing Branch in a piece on the controversy in the Post, writes that he “has his own film project in the works,” and had declined to comment.) As Louis Menand wrote in The New Yorker last year, “He asked King to wait.”Johnson had turned suddenly coy and insecure. Having consciously alienated the century-old segregationist base of his Democratic Party, he refused to see King, pretended he had nothing to do with his own nominating convention, and lashed out privately at both King’s Negroes and white Southerners.
Other critics of “Selma” have been offended by the idea that Johnson wanted King, and a voting-rights bill, to wait in line behind the President’s other legislative priorities. But that’s exactly what the historical record shows, including the January 15th transcript. In it, Johnson tells King that he wants his “people” to lobby “those committee members that come from urban areas that are friendly to you” in support of Medicare and Johnson’s education and poverty bills. Those were the priorities; they needed to get through without any filibuster. After those bills are passed, Johnson says, “then we’ve got to come up with the qualification of voters.” It was the protesters’ attempts to cross the Edmund Pettus bridge that changed Johnson’s timetable. Their first attempt ended with a brutal assault by local law enforcement—Bloody Sunday. The White House sent John Doar, an official in the Justice Department (who had earned the protesters’ trust), to try to talk King out of making the second attempt, urging him to abide by a federal injunction blocking the march. (This is the legal mess behind the exquisitely filmed moment in “Selma” when Oyelowo, as King, leads protesters to the middle of the bridge, only to turn them back.) It is ahistorical to insist that a film show how civil-rights leaders ought to have experienced Johnson, given his fine intentions, and not how they did. There is no question that Johnson was deeply, viscerally committed to civil rights—no question historically, and, again, no question in “Selma.” It is also the case that the White House waited several days after Bloody Sunday before making an official statement about the violence, and that it did not, in that interim, respond to urgent requests for federal protection, including sit-ins at Administration offices. Sending in federal marshals or troops, at that point, might have been politically risky; it might have played into the hands of segregationists. One way or another, by the time either of those things happened, another man, a minister from Boston, was dead, and Johnson had set his staff scrambling to write a draft of a speech, and to assemble a voting-rights bill that he’d send to Congress sooner than he had planned.
The next source of offense is the film’s suggestion that Johnson at least abetted J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the F.B.I., in his vicious campaign against King. Perhaps it is fair to give Johnson a pass when it comes to Hoover’s dealings; Hoover may have technically worked for him, but he was Hoover. At the same time, a recording of another phone call between Johnson and Nicholas Katzenbach, his attorney general, makes it clear that Johnson knew that Hoover was tapping King—“that must be where the evidence comes from … with some of the women, and that kind of stuff.” Katzenbach tells the President that the King wiretap was one that his predecessor, Robert Kennedy, had authorized, and “which I’ve been ambivalent about taking off.” DuVernay artificially, and somewhat clumsily, crams a decade’s worth of murkiness into the narrow time frame of the Selma campaign. The character most compromised, though, is not Johnson but King. The film is fairly merciless when it comes to his infidelities, which harmed both his family and his work. “Selma” is neither a demonization nor a hagiography of either man.
Reading Branch’s account of that period, it is revealing how distracted Johnson was by Vietnam. In the days when the scenes of violence in Alabama should have been his focus, he was in endless meetings with Robert McNamara about a secret order to begin a bombing campaign. “It was this crisis that had shortened his patience for King’s visit from Selma,” Branch writes. There is not much mention of Vietnam in “Selma”; in this, the filmmakers did Johnson a kindness.
Indeed, after hearing all of the pro-L.B.J. complaints about the movie, it can be disorienting to watch scenes like the one in which Johnson tells off George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama, saying that he isn’t willing to go down in history paired with “the likes of you.” The climax of the film is Johnson’s address to Congress, in which he stunned the chamber with the ambition of his legislative plan, his invocation of America’s soul and its destiny, and his use of what had been seen as a slogan of the streets: “We shall overcome.” In DuVernay’s staging, there is no doubt that Johnson means it, and that what he has just done is epochal. Her film is fair to Johnson; the portrayal is multifaceted and respectful, and fully cognizant of his essential commitment to civil rights. What “Selma” is not, though, is cartoonish or deferential. Is that, again, the problem?
Maureen Dowd, in the Times, wrote about seeing the movie “in a theater full of black teenagers,” and worriedly noted that, in the scenes with L.B.J. and M.L.K., the young people “bristled at the power dynamic between the two men.” They would now see Johnson “through DuVernay’s lens. And that’s a shame.” None of the teen-agers would want to stand up as L.B.J. passed. Indeed, there is no moment in “Selma” where King really thanks Johnson or, Hollywood-style, puts his hand on his shoulder and tells him, “You’re a good man.” If that’s what the “Selma” critics crave, there are plenty of movies that offer it. (There is almost such a scene in “Selma”—it takes place between two black characters, King and John Lewis, played by the excellent Stephan James).
At the time of Selma, Johnson was fifty-six years old. King was thirty-six; he was thirty-nine when he was murdered. Taylor Branch, describing the night of Johnson’s “We Shall Overcome” speech, describes the frantic, late revisions—“the pale aides who raced between typewriters … a motorcade waiting to transport him to the Capitol.” In the limousine, on the ride over, Johnson read over some late changes to the text, which included “words of disapproval” for protesters who, among other things, “block public thoroughfares to traffic,” Branch writes. “Changing his mind, Johnson struck the latter paragraph to avoid the misimpression that marginal annoyance reflected his true feeling.” A few minutes later, speaking to Congress and a national television audience, a Southern President said, “The real hero of this struggle is the American Negro.”*
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
Monday, January 19, 2015
On Appreciating "Selma" and Selma
“The plain people who became powerful”: Appreciating MLK anew, between “Selma” & Selma
On the eve of march's 50th anniversary, we’re learning to honor the ordinary people who made him King. Here's how
Martin Luther King Jr.; David Oyelowo in "Selma" (Credit: AP/Paramount Pictures)I loved Ava DuVernay’s “Selma.” Its pacing is unrivaled. Moving between portraits of quiet intimacy and epic clashes – arguments, marches, beatings, murder – it wakes us up and pulls us in and keeps us rattled and searching until we leave the theater. The violence is jarring but true to the story and never overdone. Spoiler: In a quiet, beautifully lit scene in a church stairwell, you begin to realize you’re listening in on the four little girls murdered in Birmingham in September 1964, but when it comes, the bombing still takes your breath away. It’s as clear a portrait of innocence and evil as I’ve seen.
I loved DuVernay’s King, too: a fuller, richer MLK, the man in his context, supported by family and friends; tired, doubtful, not always leading; sometimes prodded from behind. “Selma” explores the intricate dynamics of the multifaceted civil rights movement – the cautious ministers and the young firebrands. King and Malcolm X. Diane Nash and James Bevel. The wife of a local leader proudly makes lunch for King and the visiting activists, like so many leaders’ wives who went unheralded. In actual news footage from the final Selma march, near the end of the film, actor/activist Harry Belafonte waves to the camera, so young and so crucial. King matters in the film, but Du Vernay is focused on the plain people who became powerful.
But from the day it opened, “Selma” was dogged by complaints about its historical accuracy, particularly its portrait of President Johnson as opposed to King’s Selma campaign and his voting-rights agitation generally. Johnson’s top domestic affairs aide, Joseph Califano, has been relentless and unforgiving, insisting the Selma movement was LBJ’s idea and declaiming, “The movie should be ruled out this Christmas and during the ensuing awards season.” Califano’s screed reflected the pain of Johnson loyalists who saw their boss’s overall legacy destroyed by his Vietnam escalation. They are determined he get his due when it comes to civil rights. But it’s the embodiment of white entitlement not merely to criticize DuVernay’s film, or to correct the record, but to demand that Selma be “ruled out” for viewership and awards.
Just Don't Call "Selma" History
It’s not just “Selma”: Hollywood’s history problem
Again and again, from "John Adams" to "Lincoln," romantic truthiness supplants historical truth on-screen
Tom Wilkinson as Lyndon B. Johnson, and David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr., in "Selma" (Credit: Paramount Pictures)
On
a recent CBS Sunday Morning, the generally insightful David Edelstein
defended the film “Selma.” He imagined, as one can almost understand,
that by reading a biography or two of Lyndon Johnson, he could establish
the degree of historical accuracy in this much-heralded Hollywood
production. He reached the conclusion that “90 percent” of the film was
accurate. He was comfortable in stating that the filmmakers’ decision
to portray LBJ, for dramatic effect, in a historically irresponsible
way–as one who stood opposed to voting rights–was of minor concern
only. Revising the record did not undermine the larger historical
message meant to be conveyed by the movie. Or so Edelstein judged.
But
it’s time to stop claiming that films are history when they are stories
meant principally to entertain and inspire. Our point is not to
diminish the daring of Dr. King, but to call attention to the claims
made by those who credit imaginative filmmakers with the power to
capture historical truth–when professional historians are themselves
conflicted, even after reading scores of deeply researched texts,
listening to White House tapes, and interviewing veterans of the civil
rights movement. We want to understand MLK. But is this the way?
The
King estate refused to give the filmmakers the rights to any of Dr.
King’s speeches, a fact that should not go unnoticed. The
writer/director Ava DuVernay–who was (not inconsequentially) trained as a
publicist–liberally recast Dr. King’s words after inheriting a complete
script composed by the white British screenwriter Paul Webb. She
admits that she did not like how Webb emphasized LBJ’s leadership, and
wanted a more African-American-centered story. At the same time,
though, she refuses to believe that she has sacrificed historical truth
in her reconstruction of events, recently expressing confidence that she
“knew the history” when she embarked on the project. DuVernay
rationalized that because her mother works in Selma today, she is
herself somehow–mystically–connected to the city’s past. In the end,
having criticized Webb’s script as a “traditional biopic” that needed
revision, she in fact produced a different “traditional biopic” that
showed King on his best day instead of Johnson on his. And that is not
history. LBJ intimate Joseph Califano and the LBJ Presidential Library,
among others, have pointed out how DuVernay’s vision is badly skewed.
In
a story of this magnitude, living participants will invariably
disagree. But are we not supposed to care that there are widely
divergent LBJ biographies? Some revel in his proactive style of
governance, while others paint him as an ogre, a crude power-monger, and
make claims about his motives that still other historians have proven
wrong. Rather than tackle these core elements of the story, “Selma”
offers a singular caricature of Johnson. Hollywood will not complicate a
story by declaring multiple heroes.
Movie
scripts of this kind are bound to follow a particular sequence. Drama
unfolds in a well-timed, circumscribed manner, which history does not
do. That is the flaw of “Selma” and like-minded films that compress the
past. As brilliant as Daniel Day Lewis’ portrayal of Lincoln was, it
focused on a tiny slice of one possible Lincoln, while leaving the
desirable impression that Lincoln’s personality was in some way
“knowable” to us. We can like the acting, and feel a sense of
communion; that’s art. But it’s certainly not history.
Of
the myriad works by professional historians, the brains behind
“Lincoln” gave credit to a derivative book of questionable authority for
its inspiration. “Team of Rivals,” by popularizer (and research
outsourcer) Doris Kearns Goodwin, had lifelong Civil War historians
grumbling as soon as it was published–which, nevertheless, did nothing
to hurt sales. An earlier example, with race as its subject, is Alex
Haley’s blockbuster book and miniseries “Roots.” To this day, few are
aware that for all its success, “Roots” was decisively proven to be a
complete concoction by a self-promoting dreamer. Haley’s outright
fantasy of his family’s noble African heritage was, in his mind alone,
sustained through acts of will and thoughts of pride over decades of
enslavement. It was a desirable kind of history, easy to champion, but
nonetheless a grossly inaccurate one. There was no evidence that Kunta
Kinte was his ancestor
Such abuses are
more common than the majority of Americans realize, and they deserve
better. The screenwriter behind HBO’s John Adams miniseries said he
based his production on David McCullough’s “John Adams.” Like fellow
bestselling author Goodwin, McCullough was not trained in the discipline
of history, nor did he contribute a single new interpretation of any
Adams-related event. The deeply flawed Adams miniseries fictionalized
key moments–e.g., Adams cradling the dying African-American martyr
Crispus Attucks in his arms after the Boston Massacre, when he wasn’t
even there and exhibited none of the modern liberal sentiments we now
demand of our forebears when it comes to racial sensitivity;
furthermore, the HBO writer used artistic license to bring Dr. Benjamin
Rush back from the dead to perform surgery on John and Abigail’s
daughter.
Let’s be ironic for a moment.
In a way, “Forrest Gump,” the overtly fictionalized historical
caricature, tells it like it really is in Hollywood. In that film, Tom
Hanks’ character is everywhere at the moment history is being made.
Without intending to say so, it is the one film–a melodramatic
farce–that captures the reality of how the film industry abuses
historical reality while pretending to convey a functional truth.
Despite
the fine acting of Paul Giamatti, the award-winning HBO series on the
Adamses made John and Abigail into the heroes of a Forrest Gump-like
saga. Where they went, American history followed. They were the
essence of the zeitgeist, as inspired by McCullough’s love-poem of a
putative biography. See the pattern here? Romantic truthiness
supplants history. Alex Haley plagiarized a part of his book from the
work of an anthropologist. Doris Goodwin admitted to having plagiarized
two of her earlier books, too. Both authors had high-placed friends in
the industry; their appealing faces were familiar to TV viewers, and
they were allowed to carry on and prosper. They had talents. But they
never deserved to be hailed for their essential grasp of historical
truth.
That’s the legacy we need to
contend with when discussing “Selma” today. It’s not that the film
deserves no praise. The issue is strictly whether we can be honest
enough to acknowledge it as Not Exactly History. Any historian will
tell you that great historical moments are not micromanaged by single
individuals. The very idea that David Edelstein sees fit to put a
percentage (90 percent!) on the accuracy of this biopic is
ludicrous–mind you, our observation is not so much a dig at the CBS
critic as it is evidence that we as a society have been reared to
believe that “based on actual events” films are approximate
representations of historical truth.
If
there is a Hollywood film that adheres to historical standards of
honesty we can’t think of it. The very act of making a major studio
film leads to distortion. For one, scripts are obliged to reduce
complex moments to a limited number of characters. They also,
simplistically, turn characters into heroes and villains. Facts are
left out in order to make the story fit the operative fable–usually it’s
the triumph of humanity, and who doesn’t want to shell out twelve bucks
to feel that? Then, screenwriters are called on to impose a false
dramatic climax on the narrative.
And,
lest there be lingering doubt, directors almost never listen to actual
historians. Remember the comic vehicle, “Sweet Liberty” (1986), in
which a college professor (Alan Alda) sees his script about a
Revolutionary War battle mangled by the filmmakers? If a director wants
to manipulate the story to inject sex or violence into the film (so as
to make for a seductive trailer), then historical nuance be damned. A
film is a business investment dependent on audience emotions.
Therefore, it becomes an exercise in myth making.
At
one time, viewers thought D.W. Griffith’s deeply racist blockbuster
“The Birth of a Nation” (1915) was history; the then critic-in-chief
Woodrow Wilson fulsomely praised it. Griffith inserted historical
reenactments into his epic, to give the film the feel of a history
lesson. In 1935, after seeing T”he Scarlet Pimpernel,” an adventure set
during the French Revolution, the historian Louis Gottschalk insisted
to the screenwriter Samuel Marx: “No picture of a historical nature
ought to be offered to the public until a reputable historian has had a
chance to criticize and revise it.” Hollywood was not listening to the
reputable historian then, nor is it doing so now.
Special
assistant to the president Joseph Califano’s opinion piece in the
Washington Post is on target. He wants to know what’s wrong with
Hollywood. Why, he posed, did the filmmakers think they had a better
story than the “true story that didn’t need any embellishment”? Why did
they accuse LBJ of using the FBI to discredit Dr. King? Why did they
“feel no obligation” to track down essential facts?
We
love what film can do. Let’s just accept that Hollywood thinks of
something as “great history” that falls well short of being that. And
awards follow. Let’s label it historical fiction, because that’s what
it is. Remember when TV wrestling wouldn’t admit it was fixed, and the
wrestlers wouldn’t admit to being entertainers? At least we don’t do
that anymore. So why do movie critics go on pretending that
screenwriters are expert interpreters of the past? Not everyone who
tells stories–or reads a biography or two–is a historian. You don’t
turn pro after you’ve taken a few tennis lessons. A film that captures
scenes from history can be called “gripping” or “glamorous” or a
“romantic” vision of the past, but don’t try to persuade the public that
it’s truthful.
There is no such thing
as historical truth by percentages. If you’ll just stop calling it
history, then we pointy-headed historians (and key participants like
Califano) will not have to call Hollywood’s bluff.
Sunday, January 18, 2015
Robert L. O'Connell - Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman
I give homage to the Northern trinity that won the war: Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman. What I learned in this biography is not only that Sherman deserves his place in this trinity, but that overall Sherman is one of the greatest and most consequential men of the 19th Century.
Sherman ranged the length and breadth of the US during his time. In a century when travel could be long and arduous, he seemed to be everywhere. He spent time in San Francisco as a banker and roamed the countrysides in his military career, but his favorite place seemed to be St. Louis.
It is amazing that Sherman headed a military academy in Baton Rouge when South Carolina seceded. He had a certain naivete regarding politics.
I was reading flying to SF and I was reading it flying home.
We've got a long way to and a short time to get there.
(1/5 At the Birmingham terminal waiting to board the flight to Houston)
In the Second Seminole War, Sherman wanted a war of extermination. There is no doubt that Sherman was not an egalitarian and that he headed a US army that exterminated Native Americans on the plains after the war. P. 20
The author walks a fine line between absolving and holding Sherman accountable as an Indian killer.
Speaking of Grant:
"He stood by me when I was crazy and I stood by him when he was drunk; now, sir, we stand by each other always." P. 95
Flying to Houston on my way to SF, reading about "Cump." It's bumpy over New Mexico like Sherman's bumpy life. 1/5/15
McPherson says that Vicksburg was the most important strategic victory of the war. P. 122
It's hard for me to visualize Sherman's march to the sea. P. 156
Grant's battlefield insensitivity. P. 202
The Bummers. (1/9 Ready to takeoff in SF)
"You will be satisfied in their utter extermination." P. 206 (1/9 Leaving SF)
Out the airplane window to my right I see Alcatraz, the City, Oakland, and boats in the bay. Where is Berkeley? (1/9/15)
More than three million bison gunned between 1872 and 1874. Native Americans depended on the buffalo. These creatures were deliberately destroyed by Sherman and his minions in the effort to exterminate the Indians. P. 203
These were fellow Americans however misguided. P. 259
Sherman's Army of the West stole the show at the Grand Review. P. 264
A mythical 19th century boyhood. P. 280
An appointment to West Point at age 16 thanks to his foster father. P. 282
The skeptical Cump had trouble with his pious Catholic wife. (P. 300 1/9 Enroute from Houston to Birmingham)
Sherman perhaps personifies more than anyone 19th century America, the good and the bad. Should I read more about this complex man? P. 347
Sherman ranged the length and breadth of the US during his time. In a century when travel could be long and arduous, he seemed to be everywhere. He spent time in San Francisco as a banker and roamed the countrysides in his military career, but his favorite place seemed to be St. Louis.
It is amazing that Sherman headed a military academy in Baton Rouge when South Carolina seceded. He had a certain naivete regarding politics.
I was reading flying to SF and I was reading it flying home.
We've got a long way to and a short time to get there.
(1/5 At the Birmingham terminal waiting to board the flight to Houston)
In the Second Seminole War, Sherman wanted a war of extermination. There is no doubt that Sherman was not an egalitarian and that he headed a US army that exterminated Native Americans on the plains after the war. P. 20
The author walks a fine line between absolving and holding Sherman accountable as an Indian killer.
Speaking of Grant:
"He stood by me when I was crazy and I stood by him when he was drunk; now, sir, we stand by each other always." P. 95
Flying to Houston on my way to SF, reading about "Cump." It's bumpy over New Mexico like Sherman's bumpy life. 1/5/15
McPherson says that Vicksburg was the most important strategic victory of the war. P. 122
It's hard for me to visualize Sherman's march to the sea. P. 156
Grant's battlefield insensitivity. P. 202
The Bummers. (1/9 Ready to takeoff in SF)
"You will be satisfied in their utter extermination." P. 206 (1/9 Leaving SF)
Out the airplane window to my right I see Alcatraz, the City, Oakland, and boats in the bay. Where is Berkeley? (1/9/15)
More than three million bison gunned between 1872 and 1874. Native Americans depended on the buffalo. These creatures were deliberately destroyed by Sherman and his minions in the effort to exterminate the Indians. P. 203
These were fellow Americans however misguided. P. 259
Sherman's Army of the West stole the show at the Grand Review. P. 264
A mythical 19th century boyhood. P. 280
An appointment to West Point at age 16 thanks to his foster father. P. 282
The skeptical Cump had trouble with his pious Catholic wife. (P. 300 1/9 Enroute from Houston to Birmingham)
Sherman perhaps personifies more than anyone 19th century America, the good and the bad. Should I read more about this complex man? P. 347
Saturday, January 17, 2015
A Review of "Selma"
Selma: MLK in Masterful Microcosm
Director Ava DuVernay wisely focuses her sober, stately film on a few critical months.
Paramount Pictures
The movie begins with a bit of dramatic sleight-of-hand, interspersing King’s acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize (which took place in December 1964) with a heartbreaking dramatization of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that had killed four girls in Birmingham the previous year. DuVernay then settles her gaze on the events leading up to three planned marches from Selma to Montgomery in 1965—marches that directly led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act later that year.
Like Lincoln, another film that had the wisdom to tell its tale in microcosm, Selma is the story not only of a man but of a process. In place of the internal horse-trading of the earlier picture, DuVernay’s movie concerns itself with the application of external leverage. Unable to persuade Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) to push for a voting bill, King and his fellow leaders in the nonviolent movement turn to the most precious asset they have, their own bodies. The political arithmetic is as precise as it is chilling: If they demonstrate in Selma, they will be beaten, or even killed, by the forces of local Sheriff Jim Clarke and the state police; those beatings will be covered in the papers and on the news; and eventually, the activists hope, the revulsion of everyday Americans will reach a tipping point and force Johnson’s hand.
DuVernay’s film is equally stark and clear-eyed when it comes to the mechanisms used to prevent black Americans from registering to vote across the South: poll taxes, civics tests, the need to be “vouched for” by an existing voter, the publication of one’s name and address in the paper in the event that he or she successfully registers—an invitation to violence. So too, with the political stakes in question, which include not only the right to elect leaders but also to sit on juries—the same juries that, having historically been all-white, consistently acquitted any white man charged with anti-black violence.
If this makes the movie sound like a civics lesson, then I am doing it an injustice. Selma is a film of uncommon power, insight, and even humor. Oyelowo is superb in the central role of King, capturing his famous cadences without ever descending into mimicry. This is a life-sized portrait of a larger-than-life figure, and never more so than in the scenes between King and his wife Coretta (Carmen Ejogo), their marriage strained not only by the ever-present threat of violence but also by his own serial infidelities, which the movie handles with tact but does not shy away from.
The supporting cast is likewise strong, notably Colman Domingo (as Ralph Abernathy), André Holland (as Andrew Young), and Stephan James (as John Lewis), but also Lorraine Toussaint, Wendell Pierce, Jeremy Strong, Common, and Giovanni Ribisi. Cuba Gooding Jr. and Martin Sheen never quite disappear into the minor characters they play, but remarkably Oprah Winfrey (who also produced) does so with utter grace and ease.
Which brings me to Wilkinson and Tim Roth, who plays Alabama Governor George Wallace. The casting is a touch odd, and both actors take some time to settle into their roles. But crucially neither is trying to do an impression of the character he plays. They allow us to accept them gradually, without falling back on elaborate makeup or twitchy mannerisms, like the disastrous parade of presidential caricatures that populated last year’s The Butler. (Ironically, the director of the latter, Lee Daniels, was originally slated to direct Selma.)
DuVernay is working on a vastly larger scale here than she has before (her previous feature, Middle of Nowhere, was an intimate portrait of a medical student’s struggles when her husband is sentenced to prison), but she does so with extraordinary self-assurance. Whether filming the easy camaraderie of King with his friends, or the tense meetings between his Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or the outright horror of the “Bloody Sunday” police brutality that took placed on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, she and cinematographer Bradford Young are in full control of their vision. The result is a stately, sober film, at times uplifting and at others agonizing. It’s a snapshot of a moment in time that seems both distant from our own, and yet still unbearably too clos
Friday, January 16, 2015
Strange Doings
Having the flu and taking Tamiflu and a strong antibiotic can do strange
things to you. I woke up this morning with a vision of seeing Billy
Joe about to jump off the Tallahatchie Bridge. I yelled out, "No!
Billy Joe. NO!" But he jumped anyway. Over my noontime luncheon nap I
was singing hymns with Tennessee Ernie Ford. Now I'm craving deviled
eggs and I hate deviled eggs. Having the flu can take some strange
turns.
Thursday, January 15, 2015
Wednesday, January 14, 2015
Monday, January 12, 2015
History Will Treat President Obama Kindly
Why History Will Be Very Kind to Obama
The Obama History Project
History Will Eviscerate Him
By Christopher CaldwellHistorians Weigh In on Obama
The 53 Complete Questionnaires
Our National Affairs columnist:
History Will Be Very Kind
And if it's not, it will be for a highly ironic reason.
Photograph courtesy of the White House
The lived reality of Obama’s presidency has unfolded as almost the precise opposite of this trope. He has amassed a record of policy accomplishment far deeper than even many of his supporters give him credit for. He has also survived a dismal, and frequently terrifying, 72 months when at every moment, to go by the day-to-day media, a crisis has threatened to rock his presidency to its core. The episodes have been all-consuming: the BP oil spill, swine flu, the Christmas underwear bomber, the IRS scandal, the healthcare.org launch, the border crisis, Benghazi. Depending on how you count, upwards of 19 events have been described as “Obama’s Katrina.”
Obama’s response to these crises—or, you could say, his method of leadership—has been surprisingly consistent. He has a legendarily, almost fanatically placid temperament. He has now spent eight years, counting from the start of his first presidential campaign, keeping his head while others were losing theirs, and avoiding rhetorical overreach at the risk of underreach. A few months ago, the crisis was the Ebola outbreak, and Obama faced a familiar criticism: He had botched the putatively crucial “performative” aspects of his job. “Six years in,” BusinessWeek reported, “it’s clear that Obama’s presidency is largely about adhering to intellectual rigor—regardless of the public’s emotional needs.”
By year’s end, the death count of those who contracted Ebola in the United States was zero, and the panic appears as unlikely to define Obama’s presidency as most of the other crises that have come and gone. But there have been other times when Obama’s uninterest in engaging in the more public aspects of his job—communicating his reasoning and vision, soothing our anxieties with lofty rhetoric, infusing his administration with the sense of purpose that electrified his supporters during the 2008 campaign—has clearly harmed him. “If there’s one thing that I regret this year,” he admitted in 2010, “it is that we were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are.”
The president’s infuriating serenity, his inclination to play Spock even when the country wants a Captain Kirk, makes him an unusual kind of leader. But it is obvious why Obama behaves this way: He is very confident in his idea of how history works and how, once the dust settles, he will be judged. For Obama, the long run has been a source of comfort from the outset. He has quoted King’s dictum about the arc of the moral universe eventually bending toward justice, and he has said that “at the end of the day, we’re part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right.” To his critics, Obama is unable to attend to the theatrical duties of his office because he lacks a bedrock emotional connection with America. It seems more likely that he is simply unwilling to: that he is conducting his presidency on the assumption that his place in historical memory will be defined by a tabulation of his successes minus his failures. And that tomorrow’s historians will be more rational and forgiving than today’s political commentators.
It is my view that history will be very generous with Barack Obama, who has compiled a broad record of accomplishment through three-quarters of his presidency. But if it isn’t, it will be for a highly ironic reason: Our historical memory tends to romance, too. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fatherly reassurance, a youthful Kennedy tossing footballs on the White House lawn, Reagan on horseback—the craving for emotional sustenance and satisfying drama runs deep. Though the parade of Obama’s Katrinas will all be (and mostly already have been) consigned to the forgotten afterlife of cable-news ephemera, it is not yet certain whether this president can bind his achievements into any heroic narrative.
It is already clear that, whatever the source of the current disappointment with Obama, the explanation cannot be that he failed to achieve his stated goals. In his first inaugural address, Obama outlined a sweeping domestic agenda. The list of promises was specific: not only to rescue the economy from catastrophe but also to undertake sweeping long-term reforms in health care, education, energy, and financial regulation.
At first, conservatives denounced this agenda as a virtual revolution. “An ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime,” cried the columnist Charles Krauthammer. It “would permanently refashion the role of the federal government in the lives of every American,” warned Jennifer Rubin. Conservatives have since changed their line, and now portray the president as a Carter-esque mediocrity—a “parenthesis in American political history” (Krauthammer) “with no significant accomplishment” (Rubin). But this is not because Obama failed to accomplish the goals he set out. On the contrary, he has incontrovertibly made major progress on, or fulfilled, every one of them. The horrifying consequences conservatives insisted would follow have all failed to materialize.
When Obama’s economic advisers set out to rescue the economy from the abyss, they did not realize how deep it ran. Preliminary measurements of the economic contraction, made at the end of 2008, turned out far too optimistic; as a result, the scale of the remedy they proposed did not meet the need. Still, the combination of rescue measures—an $800 billion economic stimulus, a bank rescue, and an auto bailout—could be historically matched in scale only by Franklin Roosevelt.
By any contemporary standard, the rescue succeeded. Of the 12 countries whose financial systems succumbed to the meltdown of 2008, the U.S. has grown economically at a faster rate than ten. (And the fastest, Germany, is currently teetering precariously.) Unemployment has fallen below 6 percent, and the United States is the locomotive of the world economy.
To be sure, the contemporary standard was fairly horrific. The developed world has suffered six years of economic pain, a fact that has dominated the political discourse. Obama’s Republican opponents have assailed his economic response, which they claim (contrary to the beliefs of more than 90% of professional economists) worsened the crisis. Even Obama’s allies have devoted more attention to the shortcomings of his rescue efforts than the virtues, in part because they sought to focus Washington’s attention on the plight of the unemployed. Paul Krugman devoted much of Obama’s first term to flaying the inadequacy of the administration’s fiscal response, and its failure to nationalize the large banks. Former New Republic economic reporter Noam Scheiber’s deeply reported history of the rescue, “Escape Artists,” emphasized its shortcomings rather than the huge amount of good it did. Liberal economic thought during the Obama years has, for perfectly rational reasons, been dominated by relentlessly campaigning against complacency rather than celebration.
But it can be simultaneously argued that we have endured brutal deprivation and that Americans experienced the world’s most impressive recovery from the Great Recession. History is already being revised. In recent months, as the American economy has surged, Krugman conceded that the bank rescue plan designed by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner worked after all (“He was right; I was wrong,” Krugman wrote in a New York Review of Books essay.) Scheiber recently allowed, “my verdict on the administration was overly harsh.” Geithner’s stress tests reduced the “spread” demanded by investors, which reflects the market’s measure of the failure risk, which plummeted immediately and permanently.
With hindsight, this will look smart. The stimulus act itself spurred 45 states to undertake reforms to their education systems. It prompted doctors and hospitals to shift to electronic medical records and provided $90 billion in funding for green energy sources. The portion of the stimulus that lent capital to unproven clean energy firms came under withering assault from Republicans, who relentlessly touted the failure of Solyndra, one firm that received loans. Surely this will recede in the collective memory now that the program is projected to earn taxpayers a net $5 billion. Thanks to public investment in the U.S. and abroad, solar energy has undergone revolutionary growth. Capacity has increased130-fold since Obama took office, while the price of installing a system has fallen by more than half.
But Obama discovered that existing regulations allowed him to accomplish the same goals to which his failed legislation aspired. In his second term, he unveiled strict new standards for automobile efficiency and power plant emissions that, taken together, allow the United States to meet its internal targets for carbon emissions. He reached a major climate agreement with China, which presages the first-ever international agreement by industrialized and developing countries alike to curtail their emissions (an agreement made easier by the revolutionary improvements in green energy, which could allow developing economies to leapfrog straight past the dirty energy stage). The success of this agreement will take decades to measure, but it could well go down in history as Obama’s most significant legacy.
Overall, Obama’s federal government powerfully reordered the most irrational and damaging aspects of the untrammeled marketplace without impairing its entrepreneurial vigor. He is neither the socialist his conservative enemies have called him nor the weakling his critics on the left have painted him to be. The administration’s financial reforms did not smash Wall Street, but they did reshape it and eliminate its worst abuses. A little-noticed law, passed in 2009, banned a host of abusive practices used by credit-card companies to bilk customers with late fees and hidden rate hikes. A year after passage, total late fees had fallen nearly in half.
The Dodd-Frank reforms went much further, attacking the failures that led to the meltdown from a variety of angles. Banks now must hold more capital, derivatives must be traded openly on exchanges, large institutions must separate their riskiest forms of trading, and any too-big-to-fail institution must create an advance plan for systemic failure. The law also created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, devised by Elizabeth Warren, which protects customers from financial industry abuses in much the same way as the Food and Drug Administration ensures the safety of our food.
News of the law’s impact has not filtered out to the broader public, but people who study the industry for a living have little doubt as to its impact. It is “altering Wall Street in fundamental ways,” The Wall Street Journal reported last summer. “There is no question that many of the highest-risk activities, which happened to be the most profitable activities for Wall Street, are now at least reduced and often totally gone,” Dennis Kelleher, a sharp critic of the industry, said recently. After slightly favoring Obama in 2008, Wall Street has now donated overwhelmingly to the Republican Party, which has staunchly promised to scrap Dodd-Frank.
The Affordable Care Act enjoys—or suffers—a much greater public profile. The law set out to reverse the two unique features of the American health care system: it is the most expensive in the world by far, and the only advanced health care system without a universal right of access. By every important measure, it is succeeding at both goals. The number of uninsured Americans fell by ten million in the laws first year, and continues to drop as more people enroll. Republicans continue to boycott participation at the state level, but Republican-led states have slowly yielded to pragmatism, with Tennessee and Utah joining most recently. Health care premium inflation has fallen to historic lows. Obamacare’s various incentives to encourage hospitals, doctors and insurers to eliminate waste, in place for four years now, have yielded the lowest rate of medical inflation on record.
It is possible that Obama’s vigorous and creative exertions of executive authority in his second term, especially in reshaping immigration-law enforcement, might set a precedent for an excessively powerful presidency that Americans eventually come to regret. It is also surely true that many things were handled poorly, from his allowing Republicans to blackmail him with a debt-ceiling threat in 2011 to the botched launch of healthcare.gov. What cannot be questioned is the administration’s effectiveness, to date, at carrying out the tasks Obama identified at the outset. His administration has made the United States dramatically more prosperous, more egalitarian, and more sustainable. In a remarkable reversal from his predecessor, he has made the government functional and placed it on the side of those who most need its help.
In private conversation, Obama expresses frequent irritation with the news media’s hyperbole and lack of historical perspective. This habit has itself subjected him to withering criticism from Maureen Dowd, who has scolded, “the American president should not perpetually use the word ‘eventually.’ And he should not set a tone of resignation with references to this being a relay race and say he’s willing to take ‘a quarter of a loaf or half a loaf,’ and muse that things may not come ‘to full fruition on your timetable.’” Obama had also likened his foreign policy approach to hitting singles and doubles, further dissatisfying Dowd who, writing last April, brought up the existential crisis of the moment. “Especially now that we have this scary World War III vibe with the Russians,” she wrote, “we expect the president, especially one who ran as Babe Ruth, to hit home runs.” The World War III vibe has disappeared. Indeed, Russia blundered itself into a catastrophe. But attention has moved on. The widespread disappointment with Obama—“I’ve been asked the same question in Beijing, Auckland and Rome: ‘What happened to Barack Obama?,’” reported Howard Fineman last fall—reflects the reality that most of Obama’s presidency has actually felt terrible.
Chuck Todd’s new account of this presidency, The Stranger, suggests an alternate future historical record. It covers Obama’s presidency episode by episode, giving each one the same degree of importance it had at the time. His account of the stimulus, for instance, treats the episode primarily as an attempt to win the favor of Republicans in Congress. He concludes it failed, because, “far from drawing up a truly bipartisan bill, Obama would claim the veneer of bipartisanship with only Snowe, Collins and Specter for cover.” Todd’s own description showed that bringing on more Republicans would have required making the stimulus smaller (and less effective), but measuring the law as an attempt to save the economy, rather than to bring the two parties together, holds almost no interest for him.
Todd confines his description of Obama’s education reforms to a single sentence. (Not even the entire sentence, either -- a clause within a sentence.) He omits any mention of the administration’s climate action plan. Todd does devote several pages to BP’s offshore oil-rig explosion, which captivated journalists for weeks before the Obama administration found a way to plug the leaking oil. He briefly notes that the administration did in fact pull off a technically challenging task in sealing off the spill. “But politically,” Todd writes, “while he certainly prevented the spill from becoming a Katrina rerun for the Gulf Coast, the president somehow never looked comfortable running this successful operation.” The structure of this sentence reveals Todd’s entire analytic method: The administration’s substantive success is the dependent clause. The Stranger rates Obama somewhere between a disappointment and an outright failure, concluding, “His legacy will be a generation of political division”—an appropriate summation of how many Americans experienced Obama’s presidency as a political drama.
In an April speech at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library to praise the 36th president’s legacy, Obama turned to the theme of vindication in an explicit way. His choice of Johnson was a telling one. No American president left such a gap between the scale of his lasting accomplishments and the indignities he suffered in his own time. The Democrat who dismantled legal apartheid in the South and created Medicare and Medicaid was so loathed he did not even bother trying to run for reelection. At times in the speech, Obama linked Johnson’s travails to his own. The triumphs of history that seem clear and simple in retrospect, he noted, felt contemporaneously grueling and ugly. “From a distance, sometimes these commemorations seem inevitable, they seem easy,” Obama said. “All the pain and difficulty and struggle and doubt—all that is rubbed away.” You can sense his desperate wish to arrive at a vantage point where his accomplishments will be buffed of disappointment and take on the same heroic gloss.
One can imagine future histories that focus less on Obama’s dysfunctional relationship with Congress, and that measure accomplishment in more discerning proportion. But the lesson Johnson offers for Obama’s own eventual vindication is not quite so encouraging. LBJ’s political career was defined by his singular failure in Vietnam. The hatred this spawned blotted out his massive and more enduring achievements. The current film Selma inaccurately depicts Johnson as an opponent of the civil-rights struggle he had, in reality, thrown all his energy behind. Five decades on, Johnson still has not escaped the feelings he engendered—indeed, he still requires rehabilitation by figures like Obama.
Johnson is hardly unique in this way. American historical memory is heavily inflected with sentiment. John F. Kennedy remains an iconic figure despite his negligible record. Ronald Reagan has won a legacy as the restorer of American hope and the winner of the Cold War, as if communism fell not as a result of its own dysfunction and four decades of Western containment but because no U.S. politician ever previously thought to tell the Soviets to tear down that wall. Partisan folklore does not inevitably give way to calm appraisal. Andrew Jackson, still introduced to schoolchildren as the hero of the common man, was a white supremacist with a fanatical hatred for any government role in economic development—a kind of 19th-century Ron Paul, but with a genocidal militaristic foreign policy. Ulysses S. Grant, taught as a corrupt and overbearing warlord, was also an effective champion of racial progress as both general and president. Two centuries on, the fog of mythos enveloping these figures has yet to dissipate.
Economists and political scientists will appreciate the scale of Obama’s successes over the long run, as many of them do already. But historians are storytellers, and the moody presentism that has rendered Obama an enigmatic failure will not automatically give way to quantifiable assessment. The president’s most irrational trait may be his inordinate faith in the power of reason itself.
*This article appears in the January 12, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.
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Why Obama Should Pardon Don Siegelman
By Jeffrey Toobin
Siegelman, a Democrat, served a single term in office, from 1999 to 2003, in the last days before Alabama turned into an overwhelmingly Republican state. He’s spent the subsequent decade dealing with the fallout from the case that landed him in prison—a case that, at its core, is about a single campaign contribution. Siegelman ran for office on a promise to create a state lottery to fund education in Alabama. The issue went to a ballot question, and Richard Scrushy, a prominent health-care executive, donated five hundred thousand dollars to support the pro-lottery campaign. (Voters rejected the lottery.) After Scrushy had given the first half of his contribution, Siegelman reappointed him to Alabama’s Certificate of Need Review Board (the CON Board), which regulates health care in the state. Scrushy had served on the CON Board through the administrations of three different governors. The heart of the case against Siegelman came down to a single conversation that he had with Nick Bailey, a close aide of the Governor’s, about a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar check from Scrushy for the lottery campaign. As summarized by the appeals court:
Throughout Siegelman’s legal ordeal, the Supreme Court has been in the process of deregulating American politics, most notably in the 2010 Citizens United decision. In that case, the Justices found that money is speech—that contributing to a political campaign amounts to a protected activity under the First Amendment. As the appeals court in Siegelman’s case noted, the charges in his case “impact the First Amendment’s core values—protection of free political speech and the right to support issues of great public importance. It would be a particularly dangerous legal error from a civic point of view to instruct a jury that they may convict a defendant for his exercise of either of these constitutionally protected activities.”
It seems clear that Siegelman was conducting the seedy, but routine, business of contemporary American politics. Scrushy contributed because he wanted something in return, which is why many, if not most, people contribute to political campaigns. (George Will made this point in a column in defense of Siegelman.) Why do “bundlers” become Ambassadors in congenial countries? Why do local contractors support mayoral candidates? Why do real-estate developers give to prospective (and incumbent) governors? Because they want something. Siegelman was convicted because the quid pro quo was too “explicit”—but, beyond the conversation about what Scrushy might want, there was no clear evidence that it was. Thanks to the courts, the line between illegal bribery by campaign contribution and the ordinary business of politics has all but disappeared. Throwing a man in prison for activity at the murky barrier between the two is simply unjust.
Siegelman should be freed, too, because there was a distasteful overlay of politics to his prosecution. According to an affidavit filed by a Republican lawyer in Alabama, senior state Republicans, in the aftermath of the 2002 election, said that Karl Rove, then a top White House aide to President Bush, had promised them a Justice Department investigation of Siegelman—an investigation that then took place. The matter of White House interference in the case is unproved, but Rove certainly proved, later in the Bush Administration, that he was willing to manipulate United States Attorneys for the political advantage of the Republican Party. Given the ubiquity of quid-pro-quo politics in Alabama (and most other states), the case against Siegelman appears selective indeed.
There is another reason to question the harsh sentence dealt to the Governor. The behavior of the judge who imposed it is more than questionable. On August 10, 2014, Judge Fuller was arrested for domestic violence in an Atlanta hotel after his wife called 911. Shortly after his arrest, Fuller accepted a plea deal that would allow him to expunge his criminal record if he stayed out of further trouble. But the standard of contact for federal judges should be a great deal higher than “not exactly a felon.” At the moment, Fuller is not hearing cases, but, inexplicably, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has failed to remove him formally from his duties, and the House of Representatives has yet not begun impeachment proceedings. The state’s U.S. senators have called on Fuller to resign, but he has refused, and continues drawing a federal paycheck while doing no work. (Yesterday, Siegelman’s lawyers argued before an appellate court that the verdict should be overturned because of the alleged involvement of a lawyer who had been recused.)
Through six years in office, President Obama has been especially stingy in granting pardons and commutations. But the power to grant clemency is an important one; it should be wielded with care, but it should be used. Our prisons are nearly full. Not everyone who is there belongs there. Don Seigelman is one person who should not be incarcerated anymore, and the President can and should make sure that he is freed.