Author: admin (Page 10 of 16)

Luce Falls Short: Bacevich on the End of the American Century

July 14, 2012 / admin

Andrew J. Bacevich, currently a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, and a former Army colonel, has become an outspoken critic of US foreign policy in Afghanistan and Iraq and the Bush-era doctrine of preventive war.

Bacevich’s latest contribution to the debate is his editing of The Short American Century: A Postmortem (Harvard University Press), a collection of critical essays about America’s historic and future role in the world.

Jefferson Flanders sat down with Bacevich in his BU office to talk about the book and Bacevich’s views on recent developments in the Mideast.

Q: Why this book now? It sees the American Century as a metaphor for American triumphalism—in your words, the illusion that the United States can preside over and direct the course of history. Isn’t the pendulum swinging away from large footprint military action? Aren’t we at a point where’s there a recognition that we can’t have both guns and butter?

Bacevich: I think we should realize that, but I don’t think we have realized that yet. The inspiration of the book is as follows: my own study of US foreign policy has increasingly been informed by an appreciation that we justify doing what we do in the world based on massive claims of our ability to shape or determine the shape of history. This notion really can be traced back all the way to the founding of Anglo-America but has been particularly evident in the post-Cold War era. When the Cold War ended there were any number of commentators and powerful politicians who proclaimed that the United States had triumphed, had become the indispensable nation, that the world was entering a unipolar moment, that somehow we were called upon now to play the role of benign global hegemon—these are phrases I’m using in a kind of a sarcastic way, but back in the 1990s before 9/11 they defined the conversation.

If you fast forward to the post-9/11 period, in particular take things up to about 2008, none of those claims seem to stand up very well. And in particular, they don’t stand up when we consider the failure of the American project in Iraq—which was not just a failure in Iraq but signified the failure of the George W. Bush plan to transform the greater Middle East using American military power. Combine that also occurring in 2008 with the onset of the Great Recession and suddenly we don’t look like the world’s only superpower; suddenly it doesn’t look like a unipolar world. I concluded that if there had been an American Century, if there had been a period of American dominion, by 2008 it was pretty clearly over. And what I wanted to do was to invite a number of historians to reflect on what the American Century had been about—if indeed there was one.

In order to try to provide sort of a hook for that project I went back and took a look at Henry Luce’s great Life magazine essay from February 1941, an essay which he called “The American Century,” which consisted of an impassioned summons for the American people now to accept the burdens of global leadership, the challenges of global leadership, which Luce himself was absolutely persuaded was our destiny. And so the result is this book, The Short American Century, an American Century which arguably began with the end of World War II and by 2008 had concluded. The various scholars who contributed to this offer a wide variety of perspectives about what the American Century was all about and they don’t agree with one another, nor was the intent for them to agree with one another. I wanted to get this wide variety of opinion.

**Max Holland’s Leak: reconsidering Watergate’s Deep Throat**

March 25, 2012 / admin

Deep Throat never really said “follow the money.” †

Nor did he consciously intend to bring down the Presidency of Richard Nixon.

And Nixon and his closest aides knew in mid-October 1972 the name of the FBI insider—W. Mark Felt—who was leaking details of the agency’s ongoing Watergate investigation, but hesitated to move against him for fear that he would expose White House-ordered wiretapping of journalists. (Felt didn’t publicly acknowledge his role as Deep Throat until 2005.)

Those are just a few of the many intriguing historical insights found in journalist and author Max Holland’s superb new book Leak: Why Mark Felt became Deep Throat, a meticulously researched look at Felt’s instrumental, and misunderstood, role in the Watergate scandal.

Holland has crafted a page-turner—which in itself is quite a feat after the saturation media coverage of the Watergate story and the popularity of the book and film versions of All the President’s Men. At the center of Leak are two men: Bob Woodward, the Washington Post cub reporter whose career skyrocketed because of Watergate, and his secret source, Felt, a high-ranking FBI executive who was nicknamed Deep Throat (a moniker borrowed from the title of a notorious 1972 pornographic movie).

In 200 tightly-written pages Holland retraces Felt’s steps during the crucial initial Bureau investigation of the bungled black-bag job in the Democratic National Committee Watergate complex offices. Relying on interviews, transcripts of Nixon White House conversations, and memoirs from many of the participants, Holland carefully reconstructs Felt’s actions and possible motives—borrowing from, Holland says, a technique used in the world of counterintelligence to determine “in whose interests the suspected double agent was genuinely working all along.”

Motive and means

Holland shows convincingly that Felt acted solely in his own self-interest; he was not motivated by any principled need to defend the Republic against Oval Office lawbreaking or to preserve the FBI’s independence. Instead, the reader is introduced to an ambitious bureaucrat, a careerist consumed by office politics following the May 1972 death of J. Edgar Hoover. The infighting over who was to succeed Hoover became what Holland dubs the “War of the FBI Succession.”

When Nixon passed over veteran Bureau executives and named L. Patrick Gray, a Justice Department official without law enforcement experience, as interim FBI director, an embittered Felt resolved to derail the appointment. He had a powerful motive to leak. Thus Felt became Gray’s Iago, appearing to support the new FBI head while secretly undermining him.

The ongoing Watergate investigation gave Felt the opportunity—the means—to damage Gray’s credibility by leaking to Time magazine’s Sandy Smith and to Woodward the false notion that Gray was impeding the FBI’s inquiry into the break-in. Felt hoped to so tarnish Gray’s reputation that the Administration, anxious to avoid a Senate confirmation battle, would instead turn to an agency insider—Felt, the No. 2 man at the agency—as an alternative.

Felt proved quite good at the double game. He lied convincingly to Gray, who never doubted his loyalty, even when warned repeatedly about Felt by the White House. Felt personally launched several half-hearted internal investigations to try to uncover who was leaking to the press, careful to keep his own role hidden. He successfully manipulated both Smith and Woodward, feeding them the information that advanced his ends while disguising his contempt for the media.

Deep Throat as double agent

Holland’s portrait of Felt is telling: an icy personality, ambitious, vain, calculating, capable of flattery and of deception. (Some in the Bureau had nicknamed Felt the “white rat” for his shock of white hair and “tendency to squeal whenever he thought it might help his own agenda.”) After decades at headquarters in Washington, Felt had an insider’s knowledge of all things FBI and, Holland suggests, recruited confederates in the Bureau to assist him in leaking to the press.

For those familiar with the history of Cold War espionage, Felt’s sense of entitlement, his lack of empathy or remorse, and his smooth duplicity match the characteristic traits of a double agent. Jerrold M. Post, a psychiatrist and psychological profiler for the CIA, noted in his (now-declassified) paper “Anatomy of Treason,” that narcissism, or extreme self-absorption, is found in many moles; further, Post noted, these figures “… feel they are destined to play a special role, have an insatiable appetite for recognition and success.” And it is not that hard to imagine Felt meeting his underlying psychic needs for control and a sense of superiority by passing secret information to the Soviets, instead of the Washington Post.

In the end, Felt failed in his scheme to succeed Gray. When it became clear that Gray didn’t have the votes in the Senate, Nixon instead chose William D. Ruckelshaus in May 1973 as the interim director, again bypassing Felt. (In his memoir Felt noted that he technically became head of the FBI, “if only for two hours and fifty minutes” —the period of time between Gray’s resignation and Ruckelshaus’ appointment.) Ruckelshaus wasted no time in forcing Felt into retirement after a confronting him over leaks and what Ruckelshaus saw as Felt’s attempts to undermine his authority.

After Felt’s role as Deep Throat was exposed, an FBI contemporary of his, John McDermott, called him “the Bureau’s Benedict Arnold…Arnold betrayed his oath, his country, and his fellow-citizen soldiers to pursue his own ambitions. Felt did no less to the Bureau and his fellow agents.” McDermott noted that Felt had no evidence that the FBI investigation of Watergate was “impeded or thwarted” by Nixon, the Justice Department, or Gray. “Some have called Felt a hero,” McDermott wrote in 2005, “but heroes don’t lurk in the shadows for 33 years.”

Questions of journalistic ethics

Bob Woodward is also not cast in the most flattering of lights in Leak. Felt found it relatively easy to steer Woodward and his reporting partner Carl Bernstein toward stories that would damage Gray. He fed Woodward “plain untruths—things Felt didn’t know because the FBI didn’t know them; exaggerations or misrepresentations of facts the Bureau had developed; and falsifications of what Felt knew to be the truth.” The Post published two such false stories: that Gray had essentially blackmailed Nixon into appointing him FBI acting director and that the White House was behind the “Canuck letter” that damaged Edmund Muskie’s presidential campaign.

Perhaps Felt’s wildest claim (made right after his confrontation with Ruckelshaus) was informing Woodward that “everyone’s life was in danger” and the CIA had instituted wide-spread wiretaps. This fabrication prompted the dramatic scene in All the President’s Men where Woodward summoned Bernstein to his apartment and—now worried about electronic surveillance— typed out the disturbing claims from Deep Throat. It did make for great drama, even if (as Holland reminds us) one Washington Post editor wondered at the time whether it was “a kind of paranoid delusion of persecution.”

Holland also raises questions about the ethics of the relationship between Woodward and Felt. Woodward’s decision to include Deep Throat in All the President’s Men represented a violation of the deep background agreement the two men had made in 1972. As Holland notes: “The fascination, if not fixation, over Deep Throat obscured the unilateral abrogation of the agreement…”

This expedience paid off: All the President’s Men made Woodward a celebrity (being played by Robert Redford in the film version certainly didn’t hurt) and he and Bernstein benefited handsomely from book sales and film rights. The decades-long guessing game about Deep Throat’s identity also translated into financial rewards: Woodward pocketed a healthy advance for his 2005 book The Secret Man about his relationship with Felt, and the Felt family sold his story to Hollywood for an estimated $1 million.

Deep Throat’s legacy

Holland’s painstaking scholarship in Leak makes it impossible to see Mark Felt/Deep Throat as a principled whistleblower determined to expose the “dirty tricks” of Richard Nixon. Yet Holland’s correction of this Watergate myth comes decades after the mysterious figure of Deep Throat captured the American imagination.

For many, Deep Throat made leaking honorable, even glamorous. Deep Throat appeared to have been motivated by a higher morality, one that justified his violating whatever secrecy oaths he had sworn. The public perception was that without his furtive meetings with Woodward in that darkened underground parking garage Nixon’s cover-up of Watergate would have succeeded (a conclusion sharply challenged by Holland and other historians of the period).

This meme of Leaker as Hero had an impact in Washington in the post-Watergate years. Government officials, whether career bureaucrats or political appointees, got the message: if you don’t like a Presidential or departmental policy, or consider it legally suspect, you have the right to anonymously leak sensitive or secret information. Anonymous leaking is a less risky course of action, as well. Resigning in protest means losing your job. Pursuing a formal complaint through official legal channels can jeopardize a promising career. Leaking is the safer route.

Yet while it is true that too much government information is routinely classified as secret, there are secrets—especially those involving national security—that should be kept. The problem, of course, is who decides what exactly should remain secret. The Leaker as Hero suggests that individuals can unilaterally make those decisions based on their own ethical principles (while avoiding any unpleasant legal consequences).

This approach to secrecy has some obvious flaws. If Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame and Deep Throat are both heroic figures, what about Bradley Manning (accused of leaking confidential U.S. diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks)? What about the outing of Valerie Plame, wife of Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson, as a CIA agent by Richard Armitage/Scooter Libby? In all cases, the leaker can plead conscience as a defense.

Power has a way of changing attitudes. The liberal-left apparently no longer automatically accepts the Leaker as Hero construct. How else to explain the Obama Administration’s aggressive legal pursuit of leakers? As Adam Liptak of The New York Times has noted the Eric Holder Justice Department has “brought more prosecutions against current or former government officials for providing classified information to the media than every previous administration combined.” (Critics have noted that many of these leak prosecutions have not been confined to national security matters). No doubt Richard Nixon would have appreciated the irony, if not the double standard.

† According to Holland, Felt never gave that famous advice “at least according to Woodward’s contemporaneous notes, and now it appears likely that this useful thought was actually dispensed by Henry E. Peterson, or possibly Edward Bennett Williams.”

The stories we tell

March 3, 2012 / admin

We need stories.

They help us make sense of our existence, of where we have been and where we are going, of what is right and wrong, and what purpose and meaning we find along our way, crooked or straight.

It seems there is a story ready-made for every phase of our lives. We borrow these stories and mold and shape them to fit our own circumstances.

There is the story of birth, the story of coming of age, the boy-meets-girl story, the overcome-odds career story. The stories of joy and grief, of love and loss, and of success and failure, of faith and redemption. Finally there is the last story, the story of death, one that others will have to tell for and about us, for we will have departed the stage.

Some stories are one-of-a-kind, bespoke stories, made unique by events or by circumstance: the first man on the moon or the last man (or woman) standing after a tornado has swept through a farm town.

Others are universal, archetypical, templates for the human condition, mythic in their scope and focus. In some magic way these legendary stories reflect elemental truths or record traditions of great value.

Scholars like Joseph Campbell have outlined the repetitive myths that have excited our imaginations for centuries: the Quest of the Hero, the Pursuit of Love, the Adoration of the Sacred, our Rendezvous with Death.

These stories tap into powerful human memories, into what Jung called the collective unconscious, in strange and surprising ways. How else to account for the continuing popularity of the saga of Beowulf? The story’s appeal to its original 8th century audience seems natural: it tells of a hero who fights the monsters that roam in the dark outside the warmth and light of the Great Hall, both a cautionary tale and one designed to inspire the courage of its listeners.

The primal power of Beowulf has lasted. The saga has been retold in fiction and film repeatedly. There have been four full-length cinematic versions in the first decade of this century alone, including one featuring Angelina Jolie (director Robert Zemeckis’ 2007 Beowulf) and another, Outlander (2008), that reimagines the story from the perspective of a warrior from outer space.

Hollywood will never run out of material, for like children at bedtime, we seem to crave hearing the same tale—with some embellishments—over and over again.

Then there are our own stories, the ones we tell ourselves. They chronicle our existence. They may, or may not, align with what others see or experience but they are stubbornly ours. In them we often play the role of unreliable narrator (a term invented by literary critics), and yet we can be reliably expected to fashion a story that somehow meets our psychic needs. We may be victim or hero, bystander or protagonist, innocent or guilty. We may sand off the rough edges and conveniently forget those awkward moments that don’t quite fit into the storyline we have crafted. Under extreme pressure, we may even create a freshly-conceived, alternative reality and come to believe in it.

We need these stories, both the personal and the borrowed. Stories help us find our place in a confusing world. They make sense of the whys and wherefores of our lives. They can gird us for combat, or prepare us for love. They inspire us. They are the stuff of harrowing nightmares and of transcendent dreams.

They may very well be what sets us apart from the rest of creation. Who else tells stories? And who else lives by them?

Michael Bloomberg: Triple Threat

March 1, 2012 / admin

From Success magazine, March 2012 issue

As he stood on the rooftop of the Z NYC Hotel, with the iconic Manhattan skyline glistening in the afternoon sunlight behind him, Michael Bloomberg deftly fielded questions from a group of journalists.

The 108th mayor of New York City was clearly in his element: confident, persuasive, in command of the facts, comfortable dealing with topics ranging from the troubled presidential campaign of Herman Cain to the Occupy Wall Street encampment to the intricacies of the city’s budgetary process.

Bloomberg had come from City Hall to Long Island City, Queens, to celebrate the opening of Z NYC, a boutique hotel built by real estate developer Henry Zilberman (hence the “Z” in its name). It was Bloomberg’s second scheduled media stop on a surprisingly balmy Monday in November. At 7:30 a.m., encircled by a media throng, he had greeted commuters at a bus stop on 34th Street and Eighth Avenue, where he touted the city’s new curbside fare payment machines designed to get riders aboard the bus faster.

The Queens event that afternoon provided Bloomberg a chance to promote his administration’s record on economic development. While city officials, local hotel executives and Queens politicians looked on, Bloomberg rattled off the impressive statistics: New York’s tourism industry now represented a $31 billion-a-year industry employing an estimated 323,000 workers; a boom in hotel construction meant a record 90,000 rooms would be available by the end of 2011, a 24 percent increase since 2006.

Bloomberg also took the opportunity to argue that his pro-growth policies and fiscal prudence had helped New York City emerge from the national recession faster than the rest of the country.

“If you look in all four directions,” he said, “the city is booming.”

Continue reading here

Cold War questions: Soviet espionage and American Jews

September 25, 2011 / admin

September 25, 2011

The organizers of a conference held at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research this past Tuesday in New York City chose a provocative title: “Soviet Espionage and American Jews.”

While perhaps not a hot button topic today with the Cold War now over, nevertheless any public consideration of links between Jews and subversion should make us uneasy–for the alleged treachery of the Chosen People has been a favorite trope of anti-Semites throughout the ages. That concern shouldn’t freeze historical inquiry or debate, of course; it should, however, encourage very careful scholarship and discourage broad generalizations about “the Jews” and their role in Soviet espionage.

As Jonathan Brent, the executive director of the YIVO Institute, pointed out in his opening remarks, the historical reality is that Jews were prominent members of the Soviet elite, and were disproportionately represented in both the American Communist Party and in the ranks of those spying on the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. Some scholars have argued that Judaism’s concern with social justice, its prophetic identification with the oppressed, and its Messianic strain made those raised in its traditions naturally more sympathetic to socialist or Marxist thought. (It should be noted that unlike secular or Reform Jews, Orthodox Jews have been more or less resistant to Leftist ideology.) The leadership of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s was also heavily Jewish, proving that left-of-center Utopian politics continued to retain their allure for many of Jewish descent.

Yet what became clear during the conference, which featured a panel discussion of the Rosenberg spy ring (that group of primarily Jewish engineers who passed military and atomic secrets to the Soviets in the 1940s), was that ideology, not religious identity, served to motivate their underground activities. For example, Joel Barr, a member of the Rosenberg ring who fled to the Soviet Union to avoid prosecution, later told conference panelist Steve Usdin, author of Engineering Communism, that he spied “…because I was a Communist.”

Barr believed in the promise of Marxism to reshape the world, and his willingness to pass information about American weapon systems stemmed from that conviction. The same can be said for the others of Jewish descent providing Moscow with scientific information (the XY Line in KGB terms), like Ted Hall and his Harvard roommate, Saville Sax, who offered up Manhattan Project secrets. It had nothing to do with their Jewishness: they believed that the new Jerusalem would be found in Moscow, not in Israel. They shared this vision of a Socialist Paradise with the non-Jews who spied for the GRU and KGB like Alger Hiss, William Remington, Whittaker Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley, William Henry Taylor, Lauchlin Currie, Donald Wheeler, and Duncan Chaplin Lee.

As a totalitarian system, Communism demanded total allegiance. Some young college-educated Americans of Jewish descent, like the core members of the Rosenberg ring, were consciously repudiating their Jewish identity in embracing the internationalism, and materialism, of their adopted ideology.* They can be more accurately characterized, then, as young American Communists whose education and employment made them useful to the Soviet intelligence apparatus and who (in most cases) happened to be of Jewish descent. While they may have been ethnically Jewish, they had rejected their community and abandoned the faith of their fathers in favor of a different God, the God That Failed.

Other insights

For anyone interested in the spy games of the early Cold War, the conference offered some interesting historical insights:

Despite the large number of Jews caught up in espionage, Sen. Joseph McCarthy and other anti-Communists of the Right did not politicize the situation by blaming Jews for subversion. Panelist Harvey Klehr, Emory University professor and co-author of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, noted that McCarthy “did not bring that toxic brew into the mainstream” but instead focused his attacks on WASP Establishment figures like Dean Acheson and George Marshall. Had he chosen to scapegoat Jews, Klehr argued, “the results would have been very ugly.”
With historical scholarship establishing that Julius Rosenberg was a Soviet agent and that his wife Ethel was also deeply implicated in espionage, their Old Left supporters have shifted their defense of the couple. They are now arguing that the Rosenberg’s refusal to come clean represented a noble commitment to “a higher duty than the truth,” according to Ron Radosh, the preeminent historian of the Rosenberg case.
Morton Sobell, a member of the Rosenberg ring who belatedly acknowledged his role as a Soviet spy in 2008, recently admitted to novelist David Evanier that, in retrospect, “I backed the wrong horse.” Evanier told the conference, however, that Sobell remained reluctant to reexamine the crimes of Stalinism.
The contrast between the harsh sentences for the Rosenberg spy ring members (including death sentences for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and 30 years for courier Harry Gold) and the relatively light sentence in Great Britain for Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs reflected cultural differences about what constituted appropriate punishment and not anti-Semitism by the U.S. courts, maintained Allen Hornblum, author of The Invisible Harry Gold: The Man Who Gave the Soviets the Atomic Bomb.
The amateurism of some members of the Rosenberg ring was comical at times. Steve Usdin recounted how Joel Barr violated basic spycraft by recording directions from his KGB handlers and details of his assumed identity in a pocket notebook. Evanier related how when Sobell fled to Mexico City in 1950 (as the FBI closed in on the spy ring), he forgot to bring his passport.

* It was no different for the New Left. In a disjointed yet revealing talk former SDS leader Mark Rudd gave in 2005 entitled “Why were there so many Jews in SDS? (or, The Ordeal of Civility),” he noted that “…by being radicals we thought we could escape our Jewishness. Left-wing radicalism was internationalist, not narrow nationalist; it favored the oppressed and the workers, not the privileged and elites, which our families were striving toward.”

Author: admin (Page 10 of 16)

Luce Falls Short: Bacevich on the End of the American Century

**Max Holland’s Leak: reconsidering Watergate’s Deep Throat**

The stories we tell

Michael Bloomberg: Triple Threat

Cold War questions: Soviet espionage and American Jews

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