Thomas Jefferson Was Not a Monster
Debunking a major new biography of our third president.
By Annette Gordon-Reed
Posted Friday, Oct. 19, 2012, at 4:00 AM ET
Almost 20 years have passed since the publication of Jeffersonian Legacies, a collection of essays published on the occasion of the Founding Father’s 250th birthday that ushered in a new era of Jefferson scholarship. What were modern Americans to make, the book asked, of the 18th-century slaveholding patriarch who could not envision a multiracial America but who nonetheless authored America's creed—a vision that has inspired people the world over? At the very least, one had to be, the book suggested, conflicted about the man.
Henry Wiencek is not at all conflicted. He loathes Thomas Jefferson. In Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves, his attempted takedown of the man, the third president appears as a demonic figure warped one summer day by a sudden discovery that being a slaveholder could pay. I’ll detail how Wiencek arrives at his bizarre proof of a Jefferson who suddenly becomes Simon Legree, but I should say up front that this book fails as a work of scholarship. This is surprising. I favorably reviewed Wiencek's book about George Washington, Imperfect God, and I admire The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White. What happened with Master of the Mountain?
The book's tone and presentation betray a journalistic obsession with “the scoop.” Getting the scoop can be the life’s blood of journalism. It does not work so well for writing history, which is not always (or almost ever, really) about discovering things previously unknown. This sensibility leads Weincek astray in a number of ways. To begin with, it compels him to write as if he had discovered, and was writing about, things that had not been discovered and written about before. In truth, all of the important stories in this book have been told by others.
There is nothing inherently wrong with recycling stories. All historians do, and that is to be expected. But Wiencek rarely adds insights to these recycled stories, and when he offers interpretations, they are usually wrong-headed. It often seems that he is ignoring all the things that have been written about Jefferson and slavery over the past 30 years, consigning it to a claim that “scholarly consensus” is that “Jefferson managed his plantations with a lenient hand.”. In fact, scholars have known, and written, for years about whipping at Monticello.
Wiencek’s primary scoop—upon which his thesis depends and his publisher is marketing this new history—is that he has discovered why Jefferson went from opposing slavery to enthusiastically supporting the institution. It happened, Wiencek says, in the summer of 1792:
As Jefferson was counting up the agricultural profits and losses of his plantation in a letter to President Washington in 1792, it occurred to him that there was a phenomenon he had perceived at Monticello but never actually measured. He proceeded to calculate it in a barely legible, scribbled note in the middle of a page, enclosed in brackets. What Jefferson set out clearly for the first time was that he was making a 4 percent profit every year on the birth of black children.
Of course, Weincek could not possibly know what “occurred to” Jefferson as he did his calculations. And note the reference to the “barely legible, scribbled note,” as if he had ferreted out a detail that only the most diligent of researchers would have found. He then quotes Jefferson: “I allow nothing for losses by death, but, on the contrary, shall presently take credit four per cent. per annum, for their increase over and above keeping up their own numbers.”
The problem with what Wiencek calls the “4 percent theorem” or “formula” is that Jefferson was not speaking about his slaves at Monticello—he was speaking about farms in Virginia generally. The quoted “four per cent” line is from his “Notes on Arthur Young’s Letter to George Washington,” written, while Jefferson was serving in Washington’s Cabinet, in response to a request for a comparison of free labor to enslaved labor. Jefferson, who could never resist an opportunity to count and compute, joined in to “calculate, in the Virginia way, the employment” of slave labor. When he speaks of allowing “nothing for losses by death,” he is explaining what variables are going into his calculations about how to determine the value of enslaved labor—not opining on any policy he had at Monticello. In a later letter to Washington, Jefferson noted that “being at such a distance from the country of which I wrote,” he utilized his own time-weakened memories of life in Virginia. “I therefore hazarded the calculation rather as an essay of the mode of calculating the profits of a Virginia estate, than as an operation which was to be ultimately relied on.”
Jefferson had no “4 percent theorem” or “formula.” This lawyer and lifelong slaveholder had no epiphany in 1792, approaching age 50, that the babies of enslaved women increased his capital. Jefferson’s thoughts about slavery cannot be treated in such a reductive manner.
We can come down from Wiencek’s version of high theory to see in another context how he reasons and solves problems. He suggests that Jefferson purchased collars—iron spiked vises—for slaves. Follow Wiencek’s logic and note the incredible inferential leaps required to link these disparate occurrences into a chain: Jefferson’s father, Peter, advertised for a runaway slave (in 1751) who was wearing an iron collar; Jefferson must have seen enslaved people being collared when he was growing up; while in France in the 1780s, Jefferson wrote to Nicholas Lewis, the manager of his farms, telling him to use “extraordinary exertions”; and then—“the manager’s expense accounts in 1791 include a line item for the purchase of ‘collars.’” Wiencek’s endnote explains that he had “at first” thought the reference was to “horse collars.” That view changed after Wiencek noticed that Jefferson wrote “leather collars” or “horse collars” and “Lewis would have been similarly specific.” Therefore, enslaved people at Monticello must have been put in iron collars.
In fact, Monticello had a blacksmith shop that supplied the surrounding community with iron works. Why, then, would Lewis have to buy iron slave-collars from an outside source? And Christa Dierksheide, a researcher at Monticello, says that the man from whom Lewis bought the collars was not a blacksmith. He was a local tenant farmer, and would have used collars for cattle and horses on his farm. Wiencek should have considered this.
Wiencek also excoriates Jefferson for his handling of Tadeusz Kosciusko’s will. Kosciusko, the Polish patriot and supporter of the American Revolution, drafted a will in 1798 that included a bequest of funds to purchase and emancipate slaves, naming Jefferson as executor. According to Wiencek, the matter was crystal clear, as it must be if he wants to present yet another example of Jefferson's implacable evil: “Kosciusko had made him the executor of the will, so Jefferson had a legal duty, as well as a personal obligation to his deceased friend, to carry out the terms of the document.” Jefferson “refused” to act.
Jefferson’s legal duties, however, were inextricably paired with potential liabilities of which Wiencek seems wholly unaware. Long story short: Kosciusko screwed up. After the 1798 will, Kosciusko wrote three more wills, the last one in 1817, the year he died. In the one written in 1816, he explicitly revoked all his previous wills and made bequests to other people in Europe. He made no mention of excepting the American will from this revocation, though a reference he made in a letter to Jefferson in 1817 indicates he thought his 1798 bequest still valid. Jefferson may have believed that too. But he also knew that whether Kosciusko’s statement revived the bequest was a legal question that would have to be answered in court—a high court, no doubt, given the large sums of money involved. Upon learning what Kosciusko had done, and that there were competing wills, Jefferson, in his mid-70s, transferred his duties (and, this is important, his potential financial exposure) to a court that then appointed an administrator.
As Jefferson knew, this was a litigation disaster waiting to happen. Indeed, the case became an American version of Bleak House’s Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, dragging on from the 1820s to final resolution before the Supreme Court in 1852, which declared that the 1816 will had, in fact, revoked the 1798 bequest. Using money from the bequest to free slaves when others had potentially valid claims on the estate would have been extremely risky. If Jefferson had done that and it was later determined that the claimants had a right to the funds, he could be liable for repayment. Once he gave his powers over to the court, Jefferson’s responsibilities—and the threat of financial entanglement to his already precarious financial position—were over.
Wiencek, apparently not attuned to the workings of law and the tendencies of many lawyers toward paranoia and risk aversion, simply will not consider the notion that Jefferson could have had other good reasons for resigning as executor. Wiencek recounts some of these details, but analyzes them all from the perspective of the powers Jefferson had, without considering the corresponding vulnerabilities inherent to the position of executor or administrator of a will. That is because Wiencek’s all-powerful “bad Jefferson” can never be vulnerable or apprehensive. Everything he does is in service of getting his 4 percent every year, which Wiencek does not even demonstrate he ever got.
I could go on. Suffice it to say that the problems with Master of the Mountain are too numerous to allow it to be taken seriously as a book that tells us anything new about Thomas Jefferson and slavery, and what it does say is too often wrong. It is, instead, a book about Henry Wiencek—with Jefferson, enslaved people, and the mountain thrown in for scenery. As he seeks to destroy Jefferson, Wiencek seeks to put himself in the place of the “Master of the Mountain” and become the true protector of the enslaved people of Monticello. He injects himself into the narrative, touring Monticello, walking the grounds that Jefferson walked, cataloging the injustices to the enslaved people as if they had finally, after all these years, found a champion.
But as they so often do in life, a stray comment betrays true feelings. Wiencek tells the story of Peter Fossett, a member of the favored Hemings family, who spoke with fondness of the blue suit and watch that his father and free grandmother, Mary Hemings, gave to him. “That Peter could hold on to those precious items,” Wiencek writes, “without having them stolen and himself beaten by the slave boys or local whites reveals the power of the invisible zone of protection that enfolded him.” What must Wiencek really think of those enslaved at Monticello? In his view, the only thing stopping enslaved people from beating one another up and stealing from one another was the protection provided by a white man who fashioned himself as a benevolent patriarch. It seems the enslaved people of Monticello, in death as in life, can’t catch a break.
Sunday, October 21, 2012
Senator McGovern
Democratic Party Sunday, Oct 21, 2012 07:26 AM CDT
George McGovern: He deserved better
In 1972 the populist war hero was destroyed by Richard Nixon's dirty tricks and Democrats' self-destructive fear
By Joan Walsh
Sen. George McGovern accepts the Democratic presidential nomination at the closing session of the Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach, Fla., in this July 14, 1972 file photo. (Credit: AP/Ray Stubblebine)
More than 30 years before Karl Rove and friends Swift-boated Vietnam War hero John Kerry, Republicans managed to turn a decorated World War II combat veteran, a devout Christian and a son of the Depression-era Plains heartland into the elite, effete counterculture candidate of “amnesty, abortion and acid.” But when Republicans destroyed the 1972 presidential candidacy of George McGovern, who died early this morning at the age of 90, they had more than a little help from Democrats.
Years after Robert Novak tarred the South Dakota senator and Democratic nominee with favoring “amnesty, abortion and legalization of pot” (over time “pot” got replaced with the alliterative “acid”) in a column attributing the quote to an unnamed Democratic senator, the right-wing columnist revealed that his source had been Missouri Sen. Thomas Eagleton – who briefly served as McGovern’s running mate in 1972. Ironically, Eagleton himself probably sealed McGovern’s losing fate when it was revealed that he’d undergone electroshock therapy for depression and hadn’t told the campaign (he then stepped aside for Sargent Shriver). Eagleton’s double shot at McGovern took its toll, and the Democratic nominee lost to Richard Nixon in a landslide, carrying only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia that year.
McGovern’s loss is a case study in how low Republicans would go, and how much Democrats would do to help them, in those turbulent post-60s years of despair and liberal self-destruction.
The son of a Methodist minister, McGovern grew up in Depression-era Mitchell, South Dakota and never forgot the raw Dustbowl desperation he witnessed there. He volunteered for the Air Force at the start of World War II and won the Distinguished Flying Cross; just as influential in his career was the hunger he saw in Italy as the war came to a close, which led to his lifelong work on hunger relief. He returned home and went to divinity school on the G.I. Bill but switched to history, doing his doctoral dissertation on the 1913 Colorado coal strike, which shaped his lifelong advocacy for labor. He supported Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party presidential bid in 1948, but moved away due to the predominance of what he derided as “fanatics,” Communists and extremists.
Elected to the House of Representatives in 1956 (despite being red-baited for his Wallace association, a sign of things to come), he ran for Senate in 1960, campaigning alongside John F. Kennedy. Kennedy later lamented that he probably cost McGovern his election, given that the Massachusetts Catholic was associated with a toxic East Coast liberalism unpopular in South Dakota. He was right; McGovern lost, but Kennedy made him the first director of his Food for Peace program (he would be President Clinton’s Ambassador to United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture through both Clinton terms.) McGovern won the senate seat in 1962.
Almost immediately, he began speaking out against rising U.S. involvement in Vietnam, even during Kennedy’s presidency. Although he would vote for Lyndon Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin resolution, he would later say he was misled, and his guilt over that vote helped fuel what even admirers called his “obsession” with ending the war. With Republican Mark Hatfield, he would dog Nixon with the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment threatening to cut off war funding in the absence of a deadline to withdraw troops.
Despite a strong pro-labor voting record, McGovern’s opposition to the war helped alienate him from hawkish union leaders, particularly AFL-CIO president George Meany. Although McGovern declined to be the standard-bearer for the anti-war Dump Johnson campaign, he briefly jumped into the 1968 race after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in June, representing Kennedy’s delegates at the disastrous Chicago convention. He wound up far behind Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy in the delegate count, and immediately endorsed Humphrey. Unlike McCarthy: the Minnesota senator and some of his supporters in the party’s liberal anti-war wing arguably helped elect Nixon, by withholding support from Humphrey until Johnson announced he would stop his bombing campaign on the eve of the election, and even then, support was grudging. That disrespect for Humphrey worsened the split between big labor and the New Left that was already weakening the Democratic Party. Center right Democrats got their revenge by abandoning McGovern in 1972.
Before the South Dakota senator won the nomination, Meany’s top lieutenants drove the Stop McGovern movement, backed by southern Democrats including Jimmy Carter who believed McGovern was too liberal to win the presidency. Tom Eagleton’s infamous interview with Novak was part of the effort to marginalize him. “The people don’t know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion and legalization of pot,” Eagleton told Novak. “Once middle America – Catholic middle America, in particular – finds this out, he’s dead.”
Catholic voters were in fact key to Nixon’s plan to wrest the white working class away from the Democratic Party. As an adjunct to his famous “Southern strategy,” Kevin Phillips helped Nixon devise a northern strategy that involved luring voters from “the Catholic sidewalks of New York,” largely on issues of race and culture. The Stop McGovern forces denounced McGovern and his coalition as “elitists,” giving Nixon the ammunition he’d later use to turn the plainspoken prairie populist into the poster boy for liberal privilege and condescension toward common folks.
Of course, Meany and his allies were also enraged at McGovern’s role in rules changes that opened the party up to the young and diverse forces that had been shut out of Chicago ’68. When Meany arrived in Miami for the 1972 convention he famously sneered at New York’s delegates: ”What kind of delegation is this? They’ve got six open fags and only three AFL-CIO people on that delegation!” (In fact, there were more labor delegates than there had been in 1968, according to labor historian Jefferson Cowie; they just weren’t Meany’s guys.) He later described the ’72 convention delegates as “people who looked like Jacks, acted like Jills and had the odors of Johns.”
Protracted floor-fighting over the new rules pushed McGovern’s moving acceptance speech, “Come Home, America,” into the wee small hours when no one was watching. With photos of Jack and Bobby Kennedy above him as he spoke, McGovern tried to rally the factions of a forlorn party that had been shattered by multiple assassinations, a divisive battle against an unjust war and the necessary struggle to combat the cruel persistence of racism. The ’72 convention was another debacle for the Democrats, less bloody than Chicago ’68 but arguably no less damaging.
In the end, the stubborn Meany managed to withhold the AFL-CIO’s endorsement from a candidate who had a 93.5 percent voting record on the Federation’s scorecard. As Bruce Miroff recounts in “The Liberal Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party,” Meany worked hard to prevent even state and local affiliates from helping McGovern. While nominally neutral, he went golfing with Nixon, and in an appearance on “Face the Nation” weeks before the election he called McGovern “an apologist for the Communist world.” It was probably overkill; McGovern never really recovered from the Eagleton disaster or labor’s mutiny.
For his part, Nixon had always wanted to face liberal McGovern, so his crew of “ratfuckers” mostly messed with his rivals, forging a series of nasty letters from Edmund Muskie that damaged him with key constituencies, then picking up the same trick with forged letters from Hubert Humphrey. Still, Nixon planned one of his dirtiest tricks for McGovern after George Wallace was shot by Milwaukeean Arthur Bremer: He and Chuck Colson discussed sending Howard Hunt to Milwaukee to plant McGovern campaign literature in Bremer’s apartment; they gave up the plot when they learned the FBI had already sealed the premises.
Once McGovern had the nomination, Nixon obsessed over defeating him. In his memoir, John Ehrlichman recounted the personal instructions he received from Nixon.
There should be more “savage attack lines” in our literature. McGovern advocates amnesty for draft dodgers. Put in there it may cost a billion dollars just to buy enough white flags for America. …We must always stay with his worst positions, putting him way over on the left. Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Angela Davis are around his neck. The issues are radicalism, peace at any price, a second rate United States; running down the United States; square America versus radical America.
It worked. Of course Nixon’s aggressiveness was ultimately his downfall; he resigned over the scandal around his henchmen breaking into the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate building. A year after the ’72 election, polls showed Americans would choose McGovern if they had it to do over again. Yet McGovern would later lose his Senate seat in the Republican landslide of 1980 that elected Ronald Reagan; it was like Nixon’s third term.
When I asked labor historian Jefferson Cowie in an interview whether he could identify one crucial moment in the Democratic Party’s post-’60s unraveling, I expected him to fudge like a good academic, but he surprised me; he had one: “The 1972 decision by organized labor…to destroy McGovern. Because that solidified a moment. It said, ‘We can’t work with the unions,’ to the left and to the women’s movement and the rest. It said organized labor is just about guys like George Meany, and Mayor Daley, it’s really the same monster, we can’t deal with them. And that creates a natural alliance between the New Left and the New Democrats, who were much more sympathetic to important issues of diversity than to labor.”
McGovern’s campaign manager, Gary Hart, would pioneer the idea of “New Democrats” who owed no allegiance to labor. When he ran for Senate in 1974, Hart titled his stump speech “The End of the New Deal.” That same year he proclaimed that his new generation of Democrats were not just ”a bunch of little Hubert Humphreys,” slandering labor’s longtime champion. A young Bill and Hillary Clinton got their start on the McGovern campaign, and it’s hard not to see the impact of McGovern’s defeat on Clinton’s careful centrism and Democratic Leadership Council politics. The DLC was formed in direct reaction to Walter Mondale’s 1984 loss, which was even more lop-sided than McGovern’s. But it was designed to eradicate McGovernism from the party – to define Democrats as tough on crime and welfare, friendly to business, hawkish on defense – everything McGovern supposedly was not. It also involved the party running away from its proud New Deal legacy, and defining itself more as what it wasn’t than what it was.
How crucial were Democrats in helping Nixon shellack McGovern in 1972? Did Eagleton’s claim that the South Dakota Methodist supported amnesty for draft resisters, abortion and the legalization of pot (in fact he favored some kind of amnesty for resisters but not deserters, was tepid on abortion rights and only favored lesser sentencing for marijuana) smear McGovern effectively even before Nixon could get to him? It’s hard to say. Much of the country was in full revolt against what was perceived as the excesses of the 1960s, and McGovern’s centrist Democratic detractors reflected that. Certainly some people genuinely believed McGovern was too liberal to be elected, and they were well within their rights to back an alternative candidate during the tough primary. But the party’s inability to come together after a brutal fight in 1968 and again in 1972 helped confirm the national image of Democrats as fractious and incompetent, if nothing else. (That’s why the party’s ability to reunite after the bruising 2008 primary battle was crucial, and wasn’t necessarily a given.)
McGovern tried to be a bridge between those warring factions, endorsing Humphrey in 1968 while trying to make room in the party for the new energy (and concerns) of younger, more diverse and more radical activists. It was a supremely worthy cause, even if he failed. And while the anti-war left bears some blame for abandoning Humphrey and helping elect Nixon in 1968, nothing that any lefty individual or institution did to hurt Humphrey comes close to what Meany did to destroy McGovern. Tragically, McGovern’s defeat helped accelerate the big-business backlash that unraveled unionism.
Yet the small, true-blue McGovern coalition of ’72 became the Obama coalition 36 years later. The president owed some of his primary victories to rule changes pioneered by the McGovern committee, even as he defeated a woman who got her political start in the 1972 campaign. This time around, a smaller, wiser AFL-CIO is a cornerstone of Obama’s ground game, just this week promising it would knock on 5.5 million doors in swing states over the last four days of the campaign. It would be a great tribute to McGovern if Obama sticks to his fighting, populist campaign and defeats the pro-business, plutocratic backlash against liberalism represented by Mitt Romney.
George McGovern: He deserved better
In 1972 the populist war hero was destroyed by Richard Nixon's dirty tricks and Democrats' self-destructive fear
By Joan Walsh
Sen. George McGovern accepts the Democratic presidential nomination at the closing session of the Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach, Fla., in this July 14, 1972 file photo. (Credit: AP/Ray Stubblebine)
More than 30 years before Karl Rove and friends Swift-boated Vietnam War hero John Kerry, Republicans managed to turn a decorated World War II combat veteran, a devout Christian and a son of the Depression-era Plains heartland into the elite, effete counterculture candidate of “amnesty, abortion and acid.” But when Republicans destroyed the 1972 presidential candidacy of George McGovern, who died early this morning at the age of 90, they had more than a little help from Democrats.
Years after Robert Novak tarred the South Dakota senator and Democratic nominee with favoring “amnesty, abortion and legalization of pot” (over time “pot” got replaced with the alliterative “acid”) in a column attributing the quote to an unnamed Democratic senator, the right-wing columnist revealed that his source had been Missouri Sen. Thomas Eagleton – who briefly served as McGovern’s running mate in 1972. Ironically, Eagleton himself probably sealed McGovern’s losing fate when it was revealed that he’d undergone electroshock therapy for depression and hadn’t told the campaign (he then stepped aside for Sargent Shriver). Eagleton’s double shot at McGovern took its toll, and the Democratic nominee lost to Richard Nixon in a landslide, carrying only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia that year.
McGovern’s loss is a case study in how low Republicans would go, and how much Democrats would do to help them, in those turbulent post-60s years of despair and liberal self-destruction.
The son of a Methodist minister, McGovern grew up in Depression-era Mitchell, South Dakota and never forgot the raw Dustbowl desperation he witnessed there. He volunteered for the Air Force at the start of World War II and won the Distinguished Flying Cross; just as influential in his career was the hunger he saw in Italy as the war came to a close, which led to his lifelong work on hunger relief. He returned home and went to divinity school on the G.I. Bill but switched to history, doing his doctoral dissertation on the 1913 Colorado coal strike, which shaped his lifelong advocacy for labor. He supported Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party presidential bid in 1948, but moved away due to the predominance of what he derided as “fanatics,” Communists and extremists.
Elected to the House of Representatives in 1956 (despite being red-baited for his Wallace association, a sign of things to come), he ran for Senate in 1960, campaigning alongside John F. Kennedy. Kennedy later lamented that he probably cost McGovern his election, given that the Massachusetts Catholic was associated with a toxic East Coast liberalism unpopular in South Dakota. He was right; McGovern lost, but Kennedy made him the first director of his Food for Peace program (he would be President Clinton’s Ambassador to United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture through both Clinton terms.) McGovern won the senate seat in 1962.
Almost immediately, he began speaking out against rising U.S. involvement in Vietnam, even during Kennedy’s presidency. Although he would vote for Lyndon Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin resolution, he would later say he was misled, and his guilt over that vote helped fuel what even admirers called his “obsession” with ending the war. With Republican Mark Hatfield, he would dog Nixon with the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment threatening to cut off war funding in the absence of a deadline to withdraw troops.
Despite a strong pro-labor voting record, McGovern’s opposition to the war helped alienate him from hawkish union leaders, particularly AFL-CIO president George Meany. Although McGovern declined to be the standard-bearer for the anti-war Dump Johnson campaign, he briefly jumped into the 1968 race after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in June, representing Kennedy’s delegates at the disastrous Chicago convention. He wound up far behind Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy in the delegate count, and immediately endorsed Humphrey. Unlike McCarthy: the Minnesota senator and some of his supporters in the party’s liberal anti-war wing arguably helped elect Nixon, by withholding support from Humphrey until Johnson announced he would stop his bombing campaign on the eve of the election, and even then, support was grudging. That disrespect for Humphrey worsened the split between big labor and the New Left that was already weakening the Democratic Party. Center right Democrats got their revenge by abandoning McGovern in 1972.
Before the South Dakota senator won the nomination, Meany’s top lieutenants drove the Stop McGovern movement, backed by southern Democrats including Jimmy Carter who believed McGovern was too liberal to win the presidency. Tom Eagleton’s infamous interview with Novak was part of the effort to marginalize him. “The people don’t know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion and legalization of pot,” Eagleton told Novak. “Once middle America – Catholic middle America, in particular – finds this out, he’s dead.”
Catholic voters were in fact key to Nixon’s plan to wrest the white working class away from the Democratic Party. As an adjunct to his famous “Southern strategy,” Kevin Phillips helped Nixon devise a northern strategy that involved luring voters from “the Catholic sidewalks of New York,” largely on issues of race and culture. The Stop McGovern forces denounced McGovern and his coalition as “elitists,” giving Nixon the ammunition he’d later use to turn the plainspoken prairie populist into the poster boy for liberal privilege and condescension toward common folks.
Of course, Meany and his allies were also enraged at McGovern’s role in rules changes that opened the party up to the young and diverse forces that had been shut out of Chicago ’68. When Meany arrived in Miami for the 1972 convention he famously sneered at New York’s delegates: ”What kind of delegation is this? They’ve got six open fags and only three AFL-CIO people on that delegation!” (In fact, there were more labor delegates than there had been in 1968, according to labor historian Jefferson Cowie; they just weren’t Meany’s guys.) He later described the ’72 convention delegates as “people who looked like Jacks, acted like Jills and had the odors of Johns.”
Protracted floor-fighting over the new rules pushed McGovern’s moving acceptance speech, “Come Home, America,” into the wee small hours when no one was watching. With photos of Jack and Bobby Kennedy above him as he spoke, McGovern tried to rally the factions of a forlorn party that had been shattered by multiple assassinations, a divisive battle against an unjust war and the necessary struggle to combat the cruel persistence of racism. The ’72 convention was another debacle for the Democrats, less bloody than Chicago ’68 but arguably no less damaging.
In the end, the stubborn Meany managed to withhold the AFL-CIO’s endorsement from a candidate who had a 93.5 percent voting record on the Federation’s scorecard. As Bruce Miroff recounts in “The Liberal Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party,” Meany worked hard to prevent even state and local affiliates from helping McGovern. While nominally neutral, he went golfing with Nixon, and in an appearance on “Face the Nation” weeks before the election he called McGovern “an apologist for the Communist world.” It was probably overkill; McGovern never really recovered from the Eagleton disaster or labor’s mutiny.
For his part, Nixon had always wanted to face liberal McGovern, so his crew of “ratfuckers” mostly messed with his rivals, forging a series of nasty letters from Edmund Muskie that damaged him with key constituencies, then picking up the same trick with forged letters from Hubert Humphrey. Still, Nixon planned one of his dirtiest tricks for McGovern after George Wallace was shot by Milwaukeean Arthur Bremer: He and Chuck Colson discussed sending Howard Hunt to Milwaukee to plant McGovern campaign literature in Bremer’s apartment; they gave up the plot when they learned the FBI had already sealed the premises.
Once McGovern had the nomination, Nixon obsessed over defeating him. In his memoir, John Ehrlichman recounted the personal instructions he received from Nixon.
There should be more “savage attack lines” in our literature. McGovern advocates amnesty for draft dodgers. Put in there it may cost a billion dollars just to buy enough white flags for America. …We must always stay with his worst positions, putting him way over on the left. Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Angela Davis are around his neck. The issues are radicalism, peace at any price, a second rate United States; running down the United States; square America versus radical America.
It worked. Of course Nixon’s aggressiveness was ultimately his downfall; he resigned over the scandal around his henchmen breaking into the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate building. A year after the ’72 election, polls showed Americans would choose McGovern if they had it to do over again. Yet McGovern would later lose his Senate seat in the Republican landslide of 1980 that elected Ronald Reagan; it was like Nixon’s third term.
When I asked labor historian Jefferson Cowie in an interview whether he could identify one crucial moment in the Democratic Party’s post-’60s unraveling, I expected him to fudge like a good academic, but he surprised me; he had one: “The 1972 decision by organized labor…to destroy McGovern. Because that solidified a moment. It said, ‘We can’t work with the unions,’ to the left and to the women’s movement and the rest. It said organized labor is just about guys like George Meany, and Mayor Daley, it’s really the same monster, we can’t deal with them. And that creates a natural alliance between the New Left and the New Democrats, who were much more sympathetic to important issues of diversity than to labor.”
McGovern’s campaign manager, Gary Hart, would pioneer the idea of “New Democrats” who owed no allegiance to labor. When he ran for Senate in 1974, Hart titled his stump speech “The End of the New Deal.” That same year he proclaimed that his new generation of Democrats were not just ”a bunch of little Hubert Humphreys,” slandering labor’s longtime champion. A young Bill and Hillary Clinton got their start on the McGovern campaign, and it’s hard not to see the impact of McGovern’s defeat on Clinton’s careful centrism and Democratic Leadership Council politics. The DLC was formed in direct reaction to Walter Mondale’s 1984 loss, which was even more lop-sided than McGovern’s. But it was designed to eradicate McGovernism from the party – to define Democrats as tough on crime and welfare, friendly to business, hawkish on defense – everything McGovern supposedly was not. It also involved the party running away from its proud New Deal legacy, and defining itself more as what it wasn’t than what it was.
How crucial were Democrats in helping Nixon shellack McGovern in 1972? Did Eagleton’s claim that the South Dakota Methodist supported amnesty for draft resisters, abortion and the legalization of pot (in fact he favored some kind of amnesty for resisters but not deserters, was tepid on abortion rights and only favored lesser sentencing for marijuana) smear McGovern effectively even before Nixon could get to him? It’s hard to say. Much of the country was in full revolt against what was perceived as the excesses of the 1960s, and McGovern’s centrist Democratic detractors reflected that. Certainly some people genuinely believed McGovern was too liberal to be elected, and they were well within their rights to back an alternative candidate during the tough primary. But the party’s inability to come together after a brutal fight in 1968 and again in 1972 helped confirm the national image of Democrats as fractious and incompetent, if nothing else. (That’s why the party’s ability to reunite after the bruising 2008 primary battle was crucial, and wasn’t necessarily a given.)
McGovern tried to be a bridge between those warring factions, endorsing Humphrey in 1968 while trying to make room in the party for the new energy (and concerns) of younger, more diverse and more radical activists. It was a supremely worthy cause, even if he failed. And while the anti-war left bears some blame for abandoning Humphrey and helping elect Nixon in 1968, nothing that any lefty individual or institution did to hurt Humphrey comes close to what Meany did to destroy McGovern. Tragically, McGovern’s defeat helped accelerate the big-business backlash that unraveled unionism.
Yet the small, true-blue McGovern coalition of ’72 became the Obama coalition 36 years later. The president owed some of his primary victories to rule changes pioneered by the McGovern committee, even as he defeated a woman who got her political start in the 1972 campaign. This time around, a smaller, wiser AFL-CIO is a cornerstone of Obama’s ground game, just this week promising it would knock on 5.5 million doors in swing states over the last four days of the campaign. It would be a great tribute to McGovern if Obama sticks to his fighting, populist campaign and defeats the pro-business, plutocratic backlash against liberalism represented by Mitt Romney.
Arranging the Books
People Of The Bookshelf
By Geraldine BrooksOctober 11, 2012Alpha by subject ... or by dinner party seating rules? Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks on a shelving obsession.
I was expecting my sister and her husband for dinner, but she arrived solo.
“I didn’t feel like bringing him. We just had a big fight,” she said.
“What about?” I asked.
“Alphabetising our bookshelves.”
For most couples, this would be thin gruel for a contretemps. But my sister is a bibliophile and married a man of similar passions. They had just completed a house renovation, a feature of which was a magnificent bookshelf that spanned two floors. All had gone well as they placed their novels, histories, memoirs. But schism had arisen over the biographies. She wanted to shelve them alpha by subject, on the grounds that she wouldn’t necessarily be able to recall the author’s name. (Since she is, herself, a biographer, this view seemed both pragmatic and un-self-aggrandising.) But that notion was anathema to her husband, who wanted to follow proper library practice. Heated words had been exchanged.
I too have a book-loving spouse, but fortunately he adheres to no rigid shelving doctrine. In fact, he prefers to ignore the shelves, piling books around him in tottering redoubts. When he can no longer move freely in his study or get out on his side of the bed without negotiating a mogul field of mounded volumes, he’s happy enough for me to gather the books up and arrange them as I like. If he wants a particular title, he just asks me where to find it. His indifference is fortunate, for my own philosophy is more dewy-eyed than Dewey decimal; more idiosyncratic than ISBN.
I start out conventionally enough, alpha by author. But while I take account of the first letter of the writer’s surname, I have other ambitions for my shelves that transcend the conveniences of mere alphabetical accuracy. It’s impossible for me to place one book alongside another without thinking about the authors, and how they would feel about their spine-side companion.
I arrange my shelves as I would seat guests at a dinner party. Anne Tyler and Anthony Trollope both seem devoted to a diligent scrutiny of manners. So I imagine them, shelved side by side, comparing notes on the mores of their respective eras.
It’s impossible for me to place one book alongside another without thinking about the authors, and how they would feel about their spine-side companion. Claire Messud and Alice Munro? I’m sure they’d get on. But Norman Mailer and Anne Michaels? I think not. Best move the poetic and exquisitely sensitive Michaels next to Andre Makine — a much better match. Mailer can slide back along the shelf to sit beside D.H. Lawrence. If nothing else, they can always brag to one another about their sex lives.
I wouldn’t dream of subjecting Jane Austen or Margaret Atwood to the misogyny of Martin Amis (although they might find him rich material for an eviscerating satire). Paul Auster seems mensch enough to manage Amis, and then Atwood and Austen can get on together undisturbed.
Sometimes I stand there, book in hand, paralysed by indecision: Is it okay to shelve Jonathan Safran Foer next to Jonathan Franzen? Perhaps the two Jons are dear friends in real life, but what if they dislike each other? Safest, maybe, to put William Faulkner in between.
I’m not always so benevolent. When Thomas Mallon gave one of my novels a lacerating review, I retaliated by reshelving him. I snatched him from his place beside an author I thought he might enjoy — David Malouf — and wedged him instead alongside Toni Morrison, hoping that her liberal feminism might prove a thorn in his conservative spine.
As mad as all this is, it gets worse. Sometimes I ascribe metaphysical effects to my shelving choices. Placing Tim Winton alongside Virginia Woolf, I wonder whether his life-affirming wisdom might ameliorate her existential despair.
I thought I was alone in my craziness, until I confessed it to a friend whom I consider a model of sanity in most respects. “That’s nothing,” he said. He confided that he had a “punishment shelf” in his garage, reserved for writers he does not like.
When my sister came solo to dinner, I counselled her to compromise with her spouse, pointing out that his shelving proclivities could be far more eccentric, offering up my own as an example. “Yes,” she nodded sagely, “You are mad. But it must run in the family.” She then confessed that one day she’d been horrified to find a book by my husband, Tony Horwitz, shelved next to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. She’d rushed to reshelve him.
By Geraldine BrooksOctober 11, 2012Alpha by subject ... or by dinner party seating rules? Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks on a shelving obsession.
I was expecting my sister and her husband for dinner, but she arrived solo.
“I didn’t feel like bringing him. We just had a big fight,” she said.
“What about?” I asked.
“Alphabetising our bookshelves.”
For most couples, this would be thin gruel for a contretemps. But my sister is a bibliophile and married a man of similar passions. They had just completed a house renovation, a feature of which was a magnificent bookshelf that spanned two floors. All had gone well as they placed their novels, histories, memoirs. But schism had arisen over the biographies. She wanted to shelve them alpha by subject, on the grounds that she wouldn’t necessarily be able to recall the author’s name. (Since she is, herself, a biographer, this view seemed both pragmatic and un-self-aggrandising.) But that notion was anathema to her husband, who wanted to follow proper library practice. Heated words had been exchanged.
I too have a book-loving spouse, but fortunately he adheres to no rigid shelving doctrine. In fact, he prefers to ignore the shelves, piling books around him in tottering redoubts. When he can no longer move freely in his study or get out on his side of the bed without negotiating a mogul field of mounded volumes, he’s happy enough for me to gather the books up and arrange them as I like. If he wants a particular title, he just asks me where to find it. His indifference is fortunate, for my own philosophy is more dewy-eyed than Dewey decimal; more idiosyncratic than ISBN.
I start out conventionally enough, alpha by author. But while I take account of the first letter of the writer’s surname, I have other ambitions for my shelves that transcend the conveniences of mere alphabetical accuracy. It’s impossible for me to place one book alongside another without thinking about the authors, and how they would feel about their spine-side companion.
I arrange my shelves as I would seat guests at a dinner party. Anne Tyler and Anthony Trollope both seem devoted to a diligent scrutiny of manners. So I imagine them, shelved side by side, comparing notes on the mores of their respective eras.
It’s impossible for me to place one book alongside another without thinking about the authors, and how they would feel about their spine-side companion. Claire Messud and Alice Munro? I’m sure they’d get on. But Norman Mailer and Anne Michaels? I think not. Best move the poetic and exquisitely sensitive Michaels next to Andre Makine — a much better match. Mailer can slide back along the shelf to sit beside D.H. Lawrence. If nothing else, they can always brag to one another about their sex lives.
I wouldn’t dream of subjecting Jane Austen or Margaret Atwood to the misogyny of Martin Amis (although they might find him rich material for an eviscerating satire). Paul Auster seems mensch enough to manage Amis, and then Atwood and Austen can get on together undisturbed.
Sometimes I stand there, book in hand, paralysed by indecision: Is it okay to shelve Jonathan Safran Foer next to Jonathan Franzen? Perhaps the two Jons are dear friends in real life, but what if they dislike each other? Safest, maybe, to put William Faulkner in between.
I’m not always so benevolent. When Thomas Mallon gave one of my novels a lacerating review, I retaliated by reshelving him. I snatched him from his place beside an author I thought he might enjoy — David Malouf — and wedged him instead alongside Toni Morrison, hoping that her liberal feminism might prove a thorn in his conservative spine.
As mad as all this is, it gets worse. Sometimes I ascribe metaphysical effects to my shelving choices. Placing Tim Winton alongside Virginia Woolf, I wonder whether his life-affirming wisdom might ameliorate her existential despair.
I thought I was alone in my craziness, until I confessed it to a friend whom I consider a model of sanity in most respects. “That’s nothing,” he said. He confided that he had a “punishment shelf” in his garage, reserved for writers he does not like.
When my sister came solo to dinner, I counselled her to compromise with her spouse, pointing out that his shelving proclivities could be far more eccentric, offering up my own as an example. “Yes,” she nodded sagely, “You are mad. But it must run in the family.” She then confessed that one day she’d been horrified to find a book by my husband, Tony Horwitz, shelved next to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. She’d rushed to reshelve him.
Saturday, October 20, 2012
The Least Popular Subject
BY Gail Collins
New York Times
19 October 2012
Let’s give a cheer for Nina Gonzalez, the woman who asked Mitt Romney and Barack Obama about gun control at the presidential debate.
People, have you noticed how regularly this topic fails to come up? We have been having this campaign since the dawn of the ice age. Why wasn’t there a gun control moment before now?
New York Times
19 October 2012
Let’s give a cheer for Nina Gonzalez, the woman who asked Mitt Romney and Barack Obama about gun control at the presidential debate.
People, have you noticed how regularly this topic fails to come up? We have been having this campaign since the dawn of the ice age. Why wasn’t there a gun control moment before now?
True, the candidates were asked about it after the horrific blood baths last summer in Colorado and Wisconsin. But there have been 43 American mass shootings in the last year. Wouldn’t you think that would qualify guns for a more regular mention?
“I felt very empowered,” said Gonzalez, a 57-year-old mental health practitioner from Long Island. We were talking on the phone a few days after the debate. She had been fielding calls from strangers who were eager to give her their opinion about guns, and she still couldn’t quite understand why the candidates were less enthusiastic. “What’s the problem?” she asked.
Democrats running for national office are terrified of the whole subject. Party lore has it that passing the assault weapons ban in 1994 cost them control of Congress and Al Gore’s election. (There is ample evidence that this isn’t true, but that’s what makes it lore.)
So President Obama, a vocal gun control supporter in his Chicago days, is now a gun control nonmentioner. And, when it comes to legislation in Congress, a nonhelper.
Republicans are usually eager to bring up gun control, the better to denounce it. But Mitt Romney has — surprise! — a complicated history of policy molt on the issue. He was once on the same page as Ted Kennedy, and then the page turned.
For purposes of running for president, Romney is against new gun laws. And he would rather not have any discussions that lead to a mention of his pre-molt state. Or the fact that he once unsuccessfully attempted to woo rural voters by recounting his skill as a hunter of “small varmints.”
Into all this stepped Gonzalez, who was haunted by the Colorado theater shooting in July that killed 12 people. The gunman carried a 100-bullet assault rifle. The ban on assault weapons, which allow you to fire as fast as you can keep pulling the trigger, expired in 2004. Congress has been afraid to renew it because, you know, there’s the lore.
“What has your administration done or planned to do to limit the availability of assault weapons?” Gonzalez asked Obama.
“You know, we’re a nation that believes in the Second Amendment,” Obama began. “And I believe in the Second Amendment. You know, we’ve got a long tradition of hunting. ...”
When in doubt, say something nice about hunters.
The president signaled that he favors renewing the ban by saying that weapons designed for soldiers at war “do not belong on our streets.” Then he swerved away to the importance of better law enforcement, good schools and faith groups that work with inner-city children.
That was pretty much it for the guns, except that Obama did call for getting “automatic weapons that kill folks in amazing numbers out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill.” Actually, automatic weapons, like machine guns, are already heavily regulated. Although, in a different world, we would be discussing why they’re in the country at all.
Mitt Romney wasted only 42 words on assault weapons before veering off into the importance of good schools. When it comes to gun control, both presidential candidates are strongly in favor of quality education.
Romney followed up with a long disquisition on the virtues of two-parent families. (“But, gosh, to tell our kids that before they have babies, they ought to think about getting married to someone — that’s a great idea. ...”)
It was about here that he lost Nina Gonzalez. “Single mothers have enough problems. Leave them alone,” she said. “Why are we even talking about that? That’s not the issue.”
Romney then lurched into an attack on “Fast and Furious,” a much-criticized Justice Department program involving Mexican drug lords. The moderator, Candy Crowley, was forced to round him up and send him back toward the United States. Crowley noted that Romney had signed a ban on assault weapons when he was governor of Massachusetts. “Why is it that you’ve changed your mind?” she asked.
This was an excellent question, and Romney’s answer was basically that in Massachusetts nobody was against it. I think that, by now, we have plenty of reassurance that whenever something universally popular comes up, Mitt Romney will be there with his signing pen.
The president then interrupted urgently for what turned out to be a comparison of his and Romney’s positions on hiring teachers.
Gonzalez still thought Obama did better. (She’s really irked about the single mothers.) But she says she’s maintaining her undecided status, just in case Romney comes up with a credible jobs-creation strategy in the next fewweeks.
In Wi-Fi Intoxicated Manhattan, a Generation of Teetotalers
BY Cara Buckley
New York Times
19 October 2012
Mary Kipin, 82, has a computer, but all she really uses it for is to play bridge. Marie Mutz, also in her 80s, is eager to find out what a PDF is — “I’m waiting for my neighbor to tell me,” she said. Sally Anderson, 78, has been promising herself a new computer for years — her old one was a dial-up that spent the bulk of the early aughts gathering dust. “I did send a few e-mails,” Ms. Anderson, who lives near Gramercy Park, said. “The first one I sent 16 times.”
Thus did the three women find themselves in a ground-floor room, bathed in fluorescence, on Thursday at the First Presbyterian Church, in Greenwich Village, just north of Washington Square Park. Every month the church hosts a seminar as part of its Aging Well series, and on this night the topic was “What’s Wi-Fi and Do I Really Need a Smartphone?” New York may be one of the most wired, smartphone addicted-slash-addled cities in the nation, but the pace of the technological leaps has left a lot of older people behind, wondering what they were missing and whether it was worth finding out.
He moved onto Wi-Fi.
Robert McCarl, 81, found it terrifying that smartphones could pinpoint the user’s location. “They could put a bomb on your head anytime,” he said. Who could? “Your enemies,” he replied. “Your slobbering enemies.” Still, Mr. McCarl deemed Mr. Finkenthal’s presentation “terrific.”
“It was fascinating,” he said as he rose to leave. “But it’s not my generation, so I didn’t know what he was talking about half the time.”
New York Times
19 October 2012
Mary Kipin, 82, has a computer, but all she really uses it for is to play bridge. Marie Mutz, also in her 80s, is eager to find out what a PDF is — “I’m waiting for my neighbor to tell me,” she said. Sally Anderson, 78, has been promising herself a new computer for years — her old one was a dial-up that spent the bulk of the early aughts gathering dust. “I did send a few e-mails,” Ms. Anderson, who lives near Gramercy Park, said. “The first one I sent 16 times.”
Thus did the three women find themselves in a ground-floor room, bathed in fluorescence, on Thursday at the First Presbyterian Church, in Greenwich Village, just north of Washington Square Park. Every month the church hosts a seminar as part of its Aging Well series, and on this night the topic was “What’s Wi-Fi and Do I Really Need a Smartphone?” New York may be one of the most wired, smartphone addicted-slash-addled cities in the nation, but the pace of the technological leaps has left a lot of older people behind, wondering what they were missing and whether it was worth finding out.
About three dozen people attended, most in their 70s and 80s. Many came armed with answers of their own. Whatever Wi-Fi was, it sounded a little scary, untrustworthy or hopelessly complicated. As for smartphones, they had turned people, body snatcher-like, into distracted drones.
“They’ve dropped out of social intercourse on the street,” said Bob Moran, a 76-year-old mostly retired social worker who owns a dying computer but no cellphone.
Mr. Moran said he cursed out people who chatted on smartphones in restaurants or who texted their way down sidewalks, heads in that telltale bend. “I think it’s going to end badly, this lack of contact in the world,” he said.
Sandy Guzik, 72, proud to own neither a smartphone nor a cellphone, was there “so I can tell people even more about why I don’t want one.”
“People say, ‘What if there’s an emergency?’ I say, ‘There’s nine people around me who have one,’ ” she said. “I’ve never had that emergency, and neither have they.”
“I’ve seen children neglected,” she added darkly. “I’ve seen friends neglected.”
Several others said they were there for the light dinner that was served beforehand — $7 a head for cold cuts on baguettes with tortilla chips, soda, coffee and a pastry. Still, the place really filled in at 6:45 p.m., when the seminar began.
Robert Finkenthal stood before them, a technology trainer at NYU Langone Medical Center who spent six years working at a nonprofit organization that specialized in teaching technology to older people. Many of his elderly students felt fearful or anxious about technology, he said beforehand, or were embarrassed about not being in the digital mainstream. “The worst is not knowing what it is, not knowing how to get there, and knowing that everyone around you is completely hooked in,” Mr. Finkenthal said.
PowerPoint slides glowed on a roll-down screen. Mr. Finkenthal explained what smartphones were, and what the differences between them were, and what apps were.
“Has anybody heard of Angry Birds?” he asked. Murmurs followed. Not one hand went up.
He moved onto Wi-Fi.
“WiFi,” a seminar participant wrote on a pad of paper, adding the phonetic pronunciation for Wi: “Y.”
After an hour and a half, Mr. Finkenthal took questions. Do all smartphones have Internet connections? Is there a way to turn the Internet off? Did he use a headset and was he concerned about radiation? Could you watch an Audrey Hepburn movie on your phone?
Afterward, the Rev. Richard Pease, who organizes the seminars, thanked Mr. Finkenthal, saying, “I’m too old to understand this, but I think it’s great.”
The audience began filtering out. Ms. Guzik said the seminar reinforced her resolve to never get Wi-Fi. The Internet was addictive enough, she said; when she logged on at libraries, whole afternoons vanished.
Ms. Anderson said that when she did get around to buying a computer, she would be sure to get wireless, to obviate the need for wires.
Robert McCarl, 81, found it terrifying that smartphones could pinpoint the user’s location. “They could put a bomb on your head anytime,” he said. Who could? “Your enemies,” he replied. “Your slobbering enemies.” Still, Mr. McCarl deemed Mr. Finkenthal’s presentation “terrific.”
“It was fascinating,” he said as he rose to leave. “But it’s not my generation, so I didn’t know what he was talking about half the time.”
Friday, October 19, 2012
McGovern
Close On War and Peace, George McGovern Will Die Vindicated
By Conor Friedersdorf
2Oct 19 2012, 8:00 AM ET 6
The former presidential candidate, who is nearing death, warned of the folly of the Vietnam and Iraq Wars. Americans came to agree with him -- but only when it was too late.
Speaking at the Democratic National Convention in 1972, George McGovern kicked off his ill-fated presidential bid by focusing on his opposition to the ruinous war in Vietnam. "I have no secret plan for peace. I have a public plan. And as one whose heart has ached for the past ten years over the agony of Vietnam, I will halt a senseless bombing of Indochina on Inaugural Day," he said. "There will be no more Asian children running ablaze from bombed-out schools. There will be no more talk of bombing the dikes or the cities of the North. And within 90 days of my inauguration, every American soldier and every American prisoner will be out of the jungle and out of their cells and then home in America where they belong. And then let us resolve that never again will we send the precious young blood of this country to die trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad. This is also the time to turn away from excessive preoccupation overseas to the rebuilding of our own nation. America must be restored to a proper role in the world. But we can do that only through the recovery of confidence in ourselves."
Over the course of his career, McGovern made a lot of arguments that I personally find unpersuasive. But he sure did get the most important issue of his time right. Think of all the Americans who'd be alive today if the country had listened to McGovern rather than his opponents about the Vietnam War. Think of all the veterans who'd have been better off. Think of how many Vietnamese civilians would've been spared death by napalm. But America didn't listen.
The country would eventually come to see Vietnam as a mistake.
But ours is a people who are dismissive of men who lose presidential elections. We behave as though the electoral outcome discredited their ideas, even on matters where they're ultimately proved right.
Of course, it was about more than one war for McGovern. A World War II veteran, he liked to say that he'd been persuaded by Dwight Eisenhower, under whom he served, about the dangers of the military industrial complex. The Democratic Party grew comfortable with it over time.
But McGovern never did.
When America launched its war in Iraq, a lot of Democrats signed on. McGovern opposed it. "I oppose the Iraq war, just as I opposed the Vietnam War, because these two conflicts have weakened the U.S. and diminished our standing in the world and our national security," he wrote.
He was right again.
After Obama took office, McGovern wrote him an open letter, published in Harper's magazine, that said, "When I entered the U.S. Senate in 1963, the defense budget was $51 billion. This was at a time when our military experts felt it necessary to have the means to win a war against the combined powers of Russia and China. Today we have a military budget of over $700 billion, and yet neither Russia nor China threatens us, if indeed they ever did. Nor does any other nation."
Once again, few Americans are listening.
It's strangely common to think of men defeated in presidential elections as losers, though they are invariably men who'd be regarded as especially accomplished if they'd never run for the office. McGovern was a decorated combat veteran, a college professor, a three term senator, and a humanitarian who worked for years to alleviate global hunger, among other things. As he lays dying in hospice, his country remains as beholden to the military industrial complex as ever, years after the decisive defeat of its only credible geopolitical foe. When the obituaries are published, they'll note McGovern's electoral loss. It's far less likely that they'll note the two ruinous wars America would've been spared had its leaders and voters taken McGovern's advice.
The failure wasn't his, it was ours.
By Conor Friedersdorf
2Oct 19 2012, 8:00 AM ET 6
The former presidential candidate, who is nearing death, warned of the folly of the Vietnam and Iraq Wars. Americans came to agree with him -- but only when it was too late.
Speaking at the Democratic National Convention in 1972, George McGovern kicked off his ill-fated presidential bid by focusing on his opposition to the ruinous war in Vietnam. "I have no secret plan for peace. I have a public plan. And as one whose heart has ached for the past ten years over the agony of Vietnam, I will halt a senseless bombing of Indochina on Inaugural Day," he said. "There will be no more Asian children running ablaze from bombed-out schools. There will be no more talk of bombing the dikes or the cities of the North. And within 90 days of my inauguration, every American soldier and every American prisoner will be out of the jungle and out of their cells and then home in America where they belong. And then let us resolve that never again will we send the precious young blood of this country to die trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad. This is also the time to turn away from excessive preoccupation overseas to the rebuilding of our own nation. America must be restored to a proper role in the world. But we can do that only through the recovery of confidence in ourselves."
Over the course of his career, McGovern made a lot of arguments that I personally find unpersuasive. But he sure did get the most important issue of his time right. Think of all the Americans who'd be alive today if the country had listened to McGovern rather than his opponents about the Vietnam War. Think of all the veterans who'd have been better off. Think of how many Vietnamese civilians would've been spared death by napalm. But America didn't listen.
The country would eventually come to see Vietnam as a mistake.
But ours is a people who are dismissive of men who lose presidential elections. We behave as though the electoral outcome discredited their ideas, even on matters where they're ultimately proved right.
Of course, it was about more than one war for McGovern. A World War II veteran, he liked to say that he'd been persuaded by Dwight Eisenhower, under whom he served, about the dangers of the military industrial complex. The Democratic Party grew comfortable with it over time.
But McGovern never did.
When America launched its war in Iraq, a lot of Democrats signed on. McGovern opposed it. "I oppose the Iraq war, just as I opposed the Vietnam War, because these two conflicts have weakened the U.S. and diminished our standing in the world and our national security," he wrote.
He was right again.
After Obama took office, McGovern wrote him an open letter, published in Harper's magazine, that said, "When I entered the U.S. Senate in 1963, the defense budget was $51 billion. This was at a time when our military experts felt it necessary to have the means to win a war against the combined powers of Russia and China. Today we have a military budget of over $700 billion, and yet neither Russia nor China threatens us, if indeed they ever did. Nor does any other nation."
Once again, few Americans are listening.
It's strangely common to think of men defeated in presidential elections as losers, though they are invariably men who'd be regarded as especially accomplished if they'd never run for the office. McGovern was a decorated combat veteran, a college professor, a three term senator, and a humanitarian who worked for years to alleviate global hunger, among other things. As he lays dying in hospice, his country remains as beholden to the military industrial complex as ever, years after the decisive defeat of its only credible geopolitical foe. When the obituaries are published, they'll note McGovern's electoral loss. It's far less likely that they'll note the two ruinous wars America would've been spared had its leaders and voters taken McGovern's advice.
The failure wasn't his, it was ours.
Romney's Snow Job
Op-Ed Columnist
Snow Job on JobsBy PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: October 18, 2012 195 Comments
Mitt Romney talks a lot about jobs. But does he have a plan to create any?
You can defend President Obama’s jobs record — recovery from a severe financial crisis is always difficult, and especially so when the opposition party does its best to block every policy initiative you propose. And things have definitely improved over the past year. Still, unemployment remains high after all these years, and a candidate with a real plan to make things better could make a strong case for his election.
But Mr. Romney, it turns out, doesn’t have a plan; he’s just faking it. In saying that, I don’t mean that I disagree with his economic philosophy; I do, but that’s a separate point. I mean, instead, that Mr. Romney’s campaign is telling lies: claiming that its numbers add up when they don’t, claiming that independent studies support its position when those studies do no such thing.
Before I get there, however, let me take a minute to talk about Mr. Romney’s claim that he knows how to fix the economy because he’s been a successful businessman. That would be a dubious claim even if he were honestly representing his business career, because the skills needed to run a business and those needed to manage economic policy are very different. In any case, however, his portrait of his own experience is so misleading that it takes your breath away.
For Mr. Romney, who started as a business consultant and then moved into the heady world of private equity, insists on portraying himself as a plucky small businessman.
I am not making this up. In Tuesday’s debate, he declared, “I came through small business. I understand how hard it is to start a small business.” In his speech at the Republican convention, he declared, “When I was 37, I helped start a small company.”
Ahem. It’s true that when Bain Capital started, it had only a handful of employees. But it had $37 million in funds, raised from sources that included wealthy Europeans investing through Panamanian shell companies and Central American oligarchs living in Miami while death squads associated with their families ravaged their home nations. Hey, doesn’t every plucky little start-up have access to that kind of financing?
But back to the Romney jobs plan. As many people have noted, the plan has five points but contains no specifics. Loosely speaking, however, it calls for a return to Bushonomics: tax cuts for the wealthy plus weaker environmental protection. And Mr. Romney says that the plan would create 12 million jobs over the next four years.
Where does that number come from? When pressed, the campaign cited three studies that it claimed supported its assertions. In fact, however, those studies did no such thing.
Just for the record, one study concluded that America might gain two million jobs if China stopped infringing on U.S. patents and other intellectual property; this would be nice, but Mr. Romney hasn’t proposed anything that would bring about that outcome. Another study suggested that growth in the energy sector might add three million jobs in the next few years — but these were predicted gains under current policy, that is, they would happen no matter who wins the election, not as a consequence of the Romney plan.
Finally, a third study examined the effects of the Romney tax plan and argued (implausibly, but that’s another issue) that it would lead to a large increase in the number of Americans who want to work. But how does that help cure a situation in which there are already millions more Americans seeking work than there are jobs available? It’s irrelevant to Mr. Romney’s claims.
So when the campaign says that these three studies support its claims about jobs, it is, to use the technical term, lying — just as it is when it says that six independent studies support its claims about taxes (they don’t).
What do Mr. Romney’s economic advisers actually believe? As best as I can tell, they’re placing their faith in the confidence fairy, in the belief that their candidate’s victory would inspire an employment boom without the need for any real change in policy. In fact, in his infamous Boca Raton “47 percent” remarks, Mr. Romney himself asserted that he would give a big boost to the economy simply by being elected, “without actually doing anything.” And what about the overwhelming evidence that our weak economy isn’t about confidence, it’s about the hangover from a terrible financial crisis? Never mind.
To summarize, then, the true Romney plan is to create an economic boom through the sheer power of Mr. Romney’s personal awesomeness. But the campaign doesn’t dare say that, for fear that voters would (rightly) consider it ridiculous. So what we’re getting instead is an attempt to brazen it out with nakedly false claims. There’s no jobs plan; just a plan for a snow job on the American people.
Snow Job on JobsBy PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: October 18, 2012 195 Comments
Mitt Romney talks a lot about jobs. But does he have a plan to create any?
You can defend President Obama’s jobs record — recovery from a severe financial crisis is always difficult, and especially so when the opposition party does its best to block every policy initiative you propose. And things have definitely improved over the past year. Still, unemployment remains high after all these years, and a candidate with a real plan to make things better could make a strong case for his election.
But Mr. Romney, it turns out, doesn’t have a plan; he’s just faking it. In saying that, I don’t mean that I disagree with his economic philosophy; I do, but that’s a separate point. I mean, instead, that Mr. Romney’s campaign is telling lies: claiming that its numbers add up when they don’t, claiming that independent studies support its position when those studies do no such thing.
Before I get there, however, let me take a minute to talk about Mr. Romney’s claim that he knows how to fix the economy because he’s been a successful businessman. That would be a dubious claim even if he were honestly representing his business career, because the skills needed to run a business and those needed to manage economic policy are very different. In any case, however, his portrait of his own experience is so misleading that it takes your breath away.
For Mr. Romney, who started as a business consultant and then moved into the heady world of private equity, insists on portraying himself as a plucky small businessman.
I am not making this up. In Tuesday’s debate, he declared, “I came through small business. I understand how hard it is to start a small business.” In his speech at the Republican convention, he declared, “When I was 37, I helped start a small company.”
Ahem. It’s true that when Bain Capital started, it had only a handful of employees. But it had $37 million in funds, raised from sources that included wealthy Europeans investing through Panamanian shell companies and Central American oligarchs living in Miami while death squads associated with their families ravaged their home nations. Hey, doesn’t every plucky little start-up have access to that kind of financing?
But back to the Romney jobs plan. As many people have noted, the plan has five points but contains no specifics. Loosely speaking, however, it calls for a return to Bushonomics: tax cuts for the wealthy plus weaker environmental protection. And Mr. Romney says that the plan would create 12 million jobs over the next four years.
Where does that number come from? When pressed, the campaign cited three studies that it claimed supported its assertions. In fact, however, those studies did no such thing.
Just for the record, one study concluded that America might gain two million jobs if China stopped infringing on U.S. patents and other intellectual property; this would be nice, but Mr. Romney hasn’t proposed anything that would bring about that outcome. Another study suggested that growth in the energy sector might add three million jobs in the next few years — but these were predicted gains under current policy, that is, they would happen no matter who wins the election, not as a consequence of the Romney plan.
Finally, a third study examined the effects of the Romney tax plan and argued (implausibly, but that’s another issue) that it would lead to a large increase in the number of Americans who want to work. But how does that help cure a situation in which there are already millions more Americans seeking work than there are jobs available? It’s irrelevant to Mr. Romney’s claims.
So when the campaign says that these three studies support its claims about jobs, it is, to use the technical term, lying — just as it is when it says that six independent studies support its claims about taxes (they don’t).
What do Mr. Romney’s economic advisers actually believe? As best as I can tell, they’re placing their faith in the confidence fairy, in the belief that their candidate’s victory would inspire an employment boom without the need for any real change in policy. In fact, in his infamous Boca Raton “47 percent” remarks, Mr. Romney himself asserted that he would give a big boost to the economy simply by being elected, “without actually doing anything.” And what about the overwhelming evidence that our weak economy isn’t about confidence, it’s about the hangover from a terrible financial crisis? Never mind.
To summarize, then, the true Romney plan is to create an economic boom through the sheer power of Mr. Romney’s personal awesomeness. But the campaign doesn’t dare say that, for fear that voters would (rightly) consider it ridiculous. So what we’re getting instead is an attempt to brazen it out with nakedly false claims. There’s no jobs plan; just a plan for a snow job on the American people.
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