Category Archives: History

What it was really like at the ‘Hanoi Hilton’

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Vanloanjack
        Jack Van Loan in 2006.

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
ON MAY 20, 1967, Air Force pilot Jack Van Loan was shot down over North Vietnam. His parachute carried him to Earth well enough, but he landed all wrong.
    “I hit the ground, and I slid, and I hit a tree,” he said. This provided an opportunity for his captors at the prison known as the “Hanoi Hilton.”
    “My knee was kind of screwed up and they … any time they found you with some problems, then they would, they would bear down on the problems,” he said. “I mean, they worked on my knee pretty good … and, you know, just torturing me.”
    In October of Jack’s first year in Hanoi, a new prisoner came in, a naval aviator named John McCain. He was in really bad shape. He had ejected over Hanoi, and had landed in a lake right in the middle of the city. He suffered two broken arms and a broken leg ejecting. He nearly drowned in the lake before a mob pulled him out, and then set upon him. They spat on him, kicked him and stripped his clothes off. Then they crushed his shoulder with a rifle butt, and bayoneted him in his left foot and his groin.
    That gave the enemy something to “bear down on.” Lt. Cmdr. McCain would be strung up tight by his unhealed arms, hog-tied and left that way for the night.
    “John was no different than anyone else, except that he was so badly hurt,” said Jack. “He was really badly, badly hurt.”
    Jack and I got to talking about all this when he called me Wednesday morning, outraged over a story that had appeared in that morning’s paper, headlined “McCain’s war record attacked.” A flier put out by an anti-McCain group was claiming the candidate had given up military information in return for medical treatment as a POW in Vietnam.
    This was the kind of thing the McCain campaign had been watching out for. The Arizona senator came into South Carolina off a New Hampshire win back in 2000, but lost to George W. Bush after voters received anonymous phone calls telling particularly nasty lies about his private life. So the campaign has been on hair-trigger alert in these last days before the 2008 primary on Saturday.
    Jack, a retired colonel whom I’ve had the privilege of knowing for more than a decade, believes his old comrade would make the best president “because of all the stressful situations that he’s been under, and the way he’s responded.” But he had called me about something more important than that. It was a matter of honor.
    Jack was incredulous: “To say that John would ask for medical treatment in return for military information is just preposterous. He turned down an opportunity to go home early, and that was right in front of all of us.”
    “I mean, he was yelling it. I couldn’t repeat the language he used, and I wouldn’t repeat the language he used, but boy, it was really something. I turned to my cellmate … who heard it all also loud and clear; I said, ‘My God, they’re gonna kill him for that.’”
    The North Vietnamese by this time had stopped the torture — even taken McCain to the hospital, which almost certainly saved his life — and now they wanted just one thing: They wanted him to agree to go home, ahead of other prisoners. They saw in him an opportunity for a propaganda coup, because of something they’d figured out about him.
    “They found out rather quick that John’s father was (Admiral) John Sidney McCain II,” who was soon to be named commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, Jack said. “And they came in and said, ‘Your father big man, and blah-blah-blah,’ and John gave ’em name, rank and serial number and date of birth.”
    But McCain refused to accept early release, and Jack says he never acknowledged that his Dad was CINCPAC.
    Jack tries hard to help people who weren’t there understand what it was like. He gave a speech right after he finally was freed and went home. His father, a community college president in Oregon and “a consummate public speaker,” told him “That was the best talk I’ve ever heard you give.”
    But, his father added: “‘They didn’t believe you.’
    “It just stopped me cold. ‘What do you mean, they didn’t believe me?’ He said, ‘They didn’t understand what you were talking about; you’ve got to learn to relate to them.’”
    “And I’ve worked hard on that,” he told me. “But it’s hard as hell…. You might be talking to an audience of two or three hundred people; there might be one or two guys that spent a night in a drunk tank. Trying to tell ‘em what solitary confinement is all about, most people … they don’t even relate to it.”
    Jack went home in the second large group of POWs to be freed in connection with the Paris Peace Talks, on March 4, 1973. “I was in for 70 months. Seven-zero — seventy months.” Doctors told him that if he lived long enough, he’d have trouble with that knee. He eventually got orthoscopic surgery right here in Columbia, where he is an active community leader — the current president of the Columbia Rotary.
    John McCain, who to this day is unable to raise his hands above his head — an aide has to comb his hair for him before campaign appearances — was released in the third group. He could have gone home long, long before that, but he wasn’t going to let his country or his comrades down.
    The reason Jack called me Wednesday was to make sure I knew that.

What did Hillary say that was so wrong?

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Democrats_debate_wart

So Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have put their spat over race behind them. That’s good, but it still leaves me with a question that I guess only a Clueless White Guy could ask: What was that all about?

Maybe it’s that when it was all brewing I was too busy with the GOP primary to take notice. It seemed to happen late last week, when I was trying to get our endorsement of John McCain decided, written, elaborated upon, discussed in multimedia, and put on the Sunday page.

That’s got to be it. There’s got to be something I just missed entirely. That’s why I find myself still asking, What did Hillary Clinton say that was so wrong? (And note that I’m not even getting into Bill Clinton saying Sen. Obama
was peddling "fairy tales." Supposedly, that was taken by some as
racially insensitive also. But Mr. Clinton say
anything about anybody’s race? He did say "fairy," but it
seems that would offend a whole other demographic group, and then only
if it was really, really willing to stretch to be offended.)

Correct me if I’m wrong, but did this controversy not erupt when the senator from New York said:

    "Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson
passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done."

And did it not only deepen when she said:

    “Sen. Obama used President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr. to criticize me. Basically compared himself to two of
our greatest heroes. He basically said that President Kennedy and Dr.
King had made great speeches and that speeches were important. Well, no
one denies that. But if all there is (is) a speech, then it doesn’t
change anything.”

This was deemed offensive by some, and the nature of the offense was racial, apparently because Dr. Martin Luther King was mentioned. Or maybe because Sen. Obama is black, or not, depending on who’s keeping score.

Where did the offense lie? Haven’t all great, inspirational leaders been followed by more prosaic types who did much to make the dream a reality? Did Moses not have his Joshua? Did Jesus — whose sudden execution essentially left his movement, at first, in shambles — not have his St. Paul? And do any of us think that, because he essentially invented the idea of a "church" as something Gentiles could join, that St. Paul was greater than Jesus? I would hope not.

And correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t MLK, in the most famous passage of one of his most inspirational speeches, compare himself to Moses? And was that comparison not specifically with regard to the fact that, while he had led the movement right up to the border, someone else might have to lead it into the Promised Land? ("I may not get there with you.")

Or did I miss something? It’s highly possible that I did, which is why I’m asking. I’ve looked at several stories on this subject, but it’s certain that I haven’t read them all.

But if I didn’t miss something, then I think Sen. Clinton caught a lot of grief she didn’t deserve. She might be called all sorts of things, by those who are inclined to criticize her — overbearing, perhaps. Condescending, maybe. But racist? I don’t think so.

By the way, that was what I didn’t like about the Ariail cartoon that I showed you in sketch form yesterday: I thought it was way unfair to Mrs. Clinton. Of course, it is in the essential nature of caricature to exaggerate, and even to offend. But I thought the Ariail cartoon we actually used made the same point (with which I disagree, but what Robert wants to say is Robert’s business), and since it left out the emotional hand grenade of the lawn jockey, it did so in a way more likely to be clearly understood. But it’s hard to be sure about such things, which is why I asked y’all about it.

Democrats_debate_wart2

Video: McCain about the 2000 campaign in SC, and what’s different now

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First, an update. I spoke to someone with the McCain campaign about the "push polls" release, and I doubt that there’s much to it. It seems that staffers doing a phone bank up in Spartanburg ran into a rash of people who were saying they wouldn’t vote for McCain because of his divorce back in the ’70s, saying it was evidence of his immaturity, and the similar wording in each of the "spontaneous" responses struck the phone bank folks as odd.

As I suggested earlier, sensitivity on this is on something of a hair-trigger over at McCain HQ.

Second, on that subject — I was going back through some of my video from the McCain interview back in August, and ran across some stuff I don’t remember using before. Since it bears on something I’ve eluded to in past posts (and columns), namely the 2000 campaign and our interview with him then, I thought I’d share it. Main point, with reference to the above topic, is that McCain himself doesn’t blame the smear campaign for stopping him in South Carolina last time. He said Bush just had the better organization, and more money.

Anyway, here’s the video:

Is McCain getting smeared in SC AGAIN?

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One of the most shameful moments in recent South Carolina history was the anonymous smear campaign against John McCain conducted via phone "push polls" in 2000. It was particularly malicious, low and vile, spreading racist lies about an innocent child. Read this account to remind you:

    In South Carolina, Bush Republicans were facing an opponent who was
popular for his straight talk and Vietnam war record. They knew that if
McCain won in South Carolina, he would likely win the nomination. With
few substantive differences between Bush and McCain, the campaign was
bound to turn personal. The situation was ripe for a smear.

    It
didn’t take much research to turn up a seemingly innocuous fact about
the McCains: John and his wife, Cindy, have an adopted daughter named
Bridget. Cindy found Bridget at Mother Theresa’s orphanage in
Bangladesh, brought her to the United States for medical treatment, and
the family ultimately adopted her. Bridget has dark skin.

    Anonymous
opponents used "push polling" to suggest that McCain’s Bangladeshi born
daughter was his own, illegitimate black child. In push polling, a
voter gets a call, ostensibly from a polling company, asking which
candidate the voter supports. In this case, if the "pollster"
determined that the person was a McCain supporter, he made statements
designed to create doubt about the senator.
    Thus, the "pollsters" asked McCain supporters if they would be more or
less likely to vote for McCain if they knew he had fathered an
illegitimate child who was black. In the conservative, race-conscious
South, that’s not a minor charge. We had no idea who made the phone
calls, who paid for them, or how many calls were made. Effective and
anonymous: the perfect smear campaign.

That account was written in 2004 as a warning not to let it happen again. This morning, right after I got up to do a phone interview with C-SPAN about our endorsement of Sen. McCain, I saw this overnight e-mail from the McCain campaign:

    Tonight,
volunteers making telephone calls for the McCain campaign report that
some voters recently received negative information about Senator
McCain. While we do not yet have conclusive proof, we are concerned
that this may be the beginning of a smear campaign.

    If
you receive any malicious messages, letters, phone calls, e-mails,
fliers or any other form of "negative" information about John McCain,
please contact our McCain Truth Hotline directly at 803.477.6987 or email us at southcarolina@johnmccain.com
as quickly as possible. (Note: If the attack is made over the
telephone, either by a caller or by a recorded message, please save the
recording and take note of the CALLER ID phone number for use as evidence of these unethical and possibly illegal campaign tactics.)

    Thank
you for helping protect Senator McCain from false attacks during these
last days leading up to our January 19 Republican Primary.

I certainly hope that this is a case of the McCain folks overreacting out of their perfectly understandable sensitivity — which is base in bitter experience. What happened in 2000 wasn’t just a painful experience for one man and his family — it’s widely believed to have given the S.C. primary to Bush (which, if it did, is in itself a dark stain on the honor of S.C. voters). If that analysis is correct, those vicious whispers had a profound effect on U.S. history.

If it’s starting to happen again, decent people all over our state should rise up to confront the lies, and repudiate the liars in the strongest terms. But is it starting to happen again? Have you received calls that fit this description.

So how come it didn’t work for Muskie?

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Reading this morning about Hillary Clinton getting all emotional the day before in New Hampshire, I just thought, "Well, she did a Muskie," and put it out of my mind as I went on with my day.

But tonight, when I heard someone on the telly speculate as to whether that was what caused her upset squeaker victory tonight, I realized we have just entered the Double Standard Zone: Ed Muskie cries in New Hampshire, he’s toast. Hillary cries in New Hampshire, she gets a come-from-behind victory.

The cynic in me wonders whether she got any coaching on this from Bill. I need to see the video: Did she bite her lip, or give the thumbs-up? But ultimately I doubt that.

I also doubt that the touchy-feely incident was what put her over the top. But then, maybe it’s just because that stuff doesn’t appeal to me. I asked Inez Tenenbaum (an Obama supporter) whether she thought it was possible that the incident had an effect on the outcome, and she didn’t rule it out. She thinks it helped humanize Mrs. Clinton.

Well, whatever caused her win, things are going to be very interesting down in South Carolina, and it’s hard to predict who’s going to be crying when it’s all over. 

It’s now-or-never time for our endorsement decisions

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
ON TUESDAY, New Hampshire votes. On Wednesday, presidential candidates will descend on South Carolina in such numbers as we’ve never seen, and stay for the duration — the Republicans until the 19th of this month, the Democrats through the 26th.
    Time for us to get busy on The State’s editorial board. Not that we’ve been slacking off, but our pace starting this week is likely to make the past year look like a nice, long nap.
    Watch for more columns than usual from me on this page or the facing one. And between columns, keep an eye on my blog. But the main work of the next two weeks will be interviewing the remaining viable candidates and writing our endorsements. Our plan, from which we will deviate only under the most extreme circumstances, is to endorse in the GOP primary a week from today, Jan. 13, and to state our choice in the Democratic contest Jan. 20.
    But, asked regular gadfly Doug Ross on my blog last week, our endorsements have “already been written,” right? And as another writer, who goes by the pseudonym “weldon VII,” asked, “Why would Romney waste his time coming to see you, Brad?”
    Such are the pitfalls of blogging. Some folks mistake my passing observations for final conclusions and (an even greater mistake) my opinions for those of the whole editorial board.
    Right now — since I have not once asked any of my colleagues whom they currently prefer in the two primaries (I want that discussion to happen after the last interview — it makes for a more intense debate, but a much better-informed one), and since they haven’t hinted aloud or in print, I don’t know how near or far we are from our eventual consensus. (Ask me next week this time.)
    As for “weldon’s” comment — well, let’s be frank: He’s thinking of my oft-stated respect for John McCain. You don’t have to read the blog to know about that; it’s been stated here often enough.
    But I’ll say two things about that: First, I had good things to say about Mike Huckabee, too, after I met him for the first time on Sept. 20. He made a stronger impression than expected; he’s made a similar impression on a lot of other people since then.
    Secondly, I was a big admirer of Sen. McCain back in 2000, too — but we ended up endorsing George W. Bush.
    Let me tell you about that — and also answer another question Doug asked: Who breaks a tie on the editorial board?
    It generally doesn’t come to a tie, because we work really hard for a consensus. Some of us change our minds during the discussion, while others concede to a second choice, seeing that their first isn’t going to carry the day. It’s complicated.
    I can think of only two times when we had a “tie” to break, and one of them was in February 2000. Gov. Bush came in at 8 a.m. on the Wednesday before our endorsement; Sen. McCain joined us Thursday afternoon. (Alan Keyes had been in the previous week.) The moment Sen. McCain left, we began our final discussion.
    The previous weekend, I had written and e-mailed to my boss, the publisher, a 4,000-word memo explaining why I believed we should endorse Sen. McCain. I did so knowing that he (this was two publishers ago, I should add) was just as firmly for Gov. Bush. But he was leaving the question open until after the interviews.
    We went into those meetings with most of the group leaning toward McCain (based on comments volunteered to me). It’s amazing what a good meeting can do for a candidate, or what a bad one can do to a candidate. That Wednesday, George W. Bush had the most “on” hour of his life. I have never seen the man, before or since, present himself so well, or so articulately. (Maybe it was the time of day; maybe it was the two cups of coffee we watched him drink; most likely it was his firm knowledge that this was a make-or-break moment.)
    John McCain was in a funk on Thursday. I’ve never seen him so “off” as he was that day. In a downcast voice, he spoke of a young boy who’d come up to him that day and told him the senator had been his hero, but not any more, after what a caller had told the boy over the phone. (Neither he nor we fully appreciated yet the devastating impact that smear campaign would have.)
    The publisher had come prepared for our internal debate. He had a six-inch stack of documents he had gathered to support his position. When he was done, and I was done, we went around the table. Two people had changed their minds. It was a tie. And in a tie in which the publisher is on one side and the editorial page editor on the other, the publisher’s side wins.
    Do I make my decision solely on the basis of a single meeting? Of course not. But some of my colleagues don’t pay the kind of attention to these candidates that I do day after day; that’s not what they’re paid to do. They come in with relatively fresh perspectives.
    And while it doesn’t happen often, I’ve been known to change my mind in these meetings. I’m wary of this, and reluctant to give it too much weight. But if I don’t give it some weight, what indeed is the point of the interview?
    We’re working with the campaigns to firm up the appointments, but I’m hopeful that we’ll have spoken with Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson by the end of the day Thursday. Once those are out of the way, we hope to see Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — and John Edwards, if he’s still in it after Tuesday.
    I don’t know exactly how it’s going to go, but I know this is going to be interesting.

Pay attention to the man behind the curtain — please

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Baker

Howard Baker and me — Des Moines, Iowa, January 1980

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” said the great and powerful Oz. But I say it’s the guy voting in the privacy of a booth that we should heed. It’s the Iowa caucuses we should ignore.
    As I write this [we’re talking Thursday afternoon, folks], I don’t know who won last night, and don’t care. I’ve got my eye on New Hampshire — and, of course, South Carolina.
    The Washington Post’s David Broder had it right in his Thursday column when he called the caucuses a “double-distortion mirror” on the campaign. The turnout is tiny, consisting only of people who are willing to attend a two-hour night meeting during the week and declare their preference in front of the world.
    Forget what happened last night if you were watching to see which candidate has the strongest support among voters of either party. All the caucuses measure is who can most effectively corral the most highly committed, vocal partisans at a given moment. It tests organization — and a very specialized form of it at that. Organizational skill is important — but it’s hardly everything. [Note this amendment today to this opinion.]
    I used to believe in the Iowa mystique, but I learned my lesson. As a reporter for a Tennessee paper in January 1980, I spent a few days following Sen. Howard Baker as he campaigned among the frozen chosen of Des Moines and Dubuque. Ronald Reagan had made the “fatal mistake” of not contesting Iowa. My deadline story on a GOP candidates’ debate began with the solemn pronouncement that while it was difficult to determine the winner, it was clear that Gov. Reagan was the loser, because he had not shown up.
    I really felt vindicated when George H.W. Bush emerged as the caucus winner. (Remember the “Big Mo”?) Needless to say, my perceived political I.Q. dropped precipitously over the succeeding weeks.
    I witnessed the partial unraveling of my thesis up close and personal at another set of caucuses — in Arkansas. At a congressional district caucus in a motel in Jonesboro, I saw what a subversion of the popular will a caucus could be.
    A lot of people in the room favored Mr. Bush after his Iowa win. If the participants (a tiny subset of Republicans in that district) had stepped immediately into voting booths upon arrival, he likely would have come in a weak first or a strong second.
    But the Reagan people and the Baker people had done a deal. They voted for each other’s delegates, giving Mr. Reagan a huge win, boosting Sen. Baker (whose candidacy was essentially over at this point) to second, and giving Mr. Bush — in a gesture that seemed consciously intended to add insult to injury — exactly one delegate.
    The head of the Baker team on the scene smiled slyly in response to my questions and said golly, he couldn’t help it if his people and the Reagan people just happened to like each other’s delegates, could he? It was the first time I’d ever met Don Sundquist, but he was obviously headed for bigger things (Congress, and governor of Tennessee, to be precise).
    But you couldn’t fool George Herbert Walker Bush. He showed up at the caucus for what had been intended as a triumphal appearance. Instead, he kept it jarringly short, then tried to dodge the press. We had to do an impressive bit of broken-field running through the chairs and tables of an empty restaurant to head him off. Trapped, he answered a couple of questions, but he practically had smoke coming out of his ears as he did so.
    He was ticked, and who could blame him? He knew exactly what had been done to him — and it was something that no one could have done in a primary.
    I was peeved myself eight years later, when — having moved back home to South Carolina — I was shut out of the state Democratic Party’s process of choosing delegates to its 1988 national convention.
You may recall 1988 as the year South Carolina vaulted to a national significance that rivaled the influence of Iowa and New Hampshire. South Carolina gave the furious loser I had last seen fulminating in Jonesboro the momentum he needed to win the nomination and the presidency.
    That year’s primary also gave a boost to the state’s Republican Party as then-Gov. Carroll Campbell — who had helped engineer the Bush victory — built it into a force that would dominate South Carolina politics.
    Things were different in the other party. I’m not saying the fact that Democrats chose the insular, insider-oriented caucus path over the GOP’s successful “y’all come” primary caused its slide from relevance. But it didn’t help.
    Personally, I hated the caucus approach because I value my right to vote, and the caucuses disenfranchised me: The editor supervising The State’s political writers could not attend a party caucus and publicly declare for a candidate.
    But there’s a larger point here than my own predicament: Even if they weren’t professionally disqualified from participating, few independent voters will declare themselves at a caucus when they have the option of voting anonymously in a primary.
    Whatever happened last night in Iowa, it can hardly be seen as the collective will of that state’s voters.
    But, you say, the caucuses last night do matter because in such an absurdly compressed nomination process, Iowa can give one candidate a critical image boost on the eve of New Hampshire, and prove a fatal stumbling block to another, with no time to recover.
    Exactly. Iowa shouldn’t matter, in that it does not provide a fair contest of any candidate’s true electoral appeal. But to the extent that it does matter, it constitutes a disservice to the republic.

Sacrifice and religion: More Sorensen video

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Following up today on stuff I didn’t have time to deal with adequately before Christmas, what with Mike being off and me doing the pages in his absence…

One ball I dropped was to follow through on my promise to deliver more video from my interview with Ted Sorensen on Dec. 20. Here’s a link to the much-better-than-mine video that Andrew Haworth of thestate.com posted that very night, covering the first part of the interview.

And here, from my dinky, low-res camera, are a couple of quick clips on other parts of the interview I found highly interesting. They are…

First, a clip covering the subject of my recent column challenging candidates today to challenge us the way JFK did. Since that was triggered by a JFK speech I had recently heard again, I thought it particularly apropos to talk with his speechwriter about the subject (The setup — my question — takes a while, but Mr. Sorensen’s reply is worth waiting through that to hear):

Second, we have Mr. Sorensen on the subject of another pair of speeches, both on religion and politics — Kennedy’s to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on Sept. 12, 1960, and Mitt Romney’s to a sympathetic crowd at the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library on Dec. 6, 2007:

Viewing that second clip myself today as I edited it, I realize that much of what was said was said by me (pretty much what I had said already on the blog). But Mr. Sorensen adds some nuggets of perspective that no one else could contribute, so I thought it worth putting this up anyway. Normally when I edit video, I cut myself out as much as possible — why bore my readers/viewers? This time, I didn’t see a good way to do that and keep the context. So, sorry about that.

JFK adviser Sorensen tells why he’s supporting Obama

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Sorensen_001

Oh, yeah, now I remember why I do this job — one of the reasons, anyway: Really, really interesting people come to see you and you get to ask them questions.

Today, I was honored to meet Ted Sorensen, chief adviser and speechwriter to John F. Kennedy. You know how I’ve written in the past about how how Barack Obama’s call to service echoes JFK’s? (And yes, I know I’m hardly the only one to mention it.) Well, Mr. Sorensen was here to confirm that as far as he’s concerned, Obama is indeed Camelot’s rightful heir (so forget what you may have heard about that Mordred guy; he’s not running anyway).

It’s been a long day, so I’ve just edited and posted one quick video clip (below), with Mr. Sorensen talking briefly about why he supports Sen. Obama. But more will be coming. For one thing, Andy Haworth of thestate.com shot video of the whole interview, with a much better camera than I use and lights and everything. I’ll give you a heads-up when he puts that up.

Also, I’ll go through the rest of my footage as soon as I can (probably this weekend at this point), and provide video on some of the other topics we covered, such as:

  • The Cold War, from a leading participant’s perspective.
  • Why Kennedy doesn’t deserve any blame for Vietnam escalation.
  • How Romney’s "religion" speech stacks up to his own — I mean, to JFK‘s.
  • What kind of speech he’d like to hear the eventually Democratic nominee give.
  • Which Republican he’d prefer, if we had to have a Republican.
  • Why he particularly prefers Obama to Joe Biden.

I’ll get to in when I can. I’m out of steam for today. In the meantime, here’s a clip with Mr. Sorensen talking about Obama:

   

A bit of perspective on our place in the world, by the numbers

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Energy Party consultant Samuel sent me this, which figures. Samuel is the guy who came up with the idea for the endowed chairs program, which bore impressive fruit yet again this week. He’s still the most enthusiastic cheerleader of that program, even after our governor replaced him on the panel that oversees it:

This video — really, sort of a powerpoint presentation, only on YouTube, is worth watching. There are some figures in it that I find suspect (I’m always that way with attempts to quantify the unknowable, which in this case applies to prediction about the future), but others that are essentially beyond reproach, and ought to make us think.

What they ought to make us think is this: So much of what we base the selection of our next president on — party affiliation, ideological purity, our respective preferences on various cultural attitudes — is wildly irrelevant to the challenges of the world in which this person will attempt to be the leader of the planet’s foremost nation. Foremost nation for now, that is. If we don’t start thinking a lot more pragmatically, it won’t be for long.

1962 NIE: No Cuban Missiles

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FYI,  the WSJ notes today that the NIE of Sept. 19, 1962 said:

    The USSR could derive considerable military advantage from the establishment of Soviet medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba, or from the establishment of a submarine base there. . . . Either development, however, would be incompatible with Soviet practice to date and with Soviet policy as we presently estimate it.

That’s 25 days before the start of what we call the Cuban Missile Crisis.

So do you think the CIA is better at that stuff now, or then? And is it better than it was in 2005, when it concluded the opposite of what the latest NIE concluded? And is it better than the Israelis, or the Brits?

Someone on this post raises the yellowcake case to discredit MI6. First, like the NIE, that whole thing was a lot more complicated than either side’s shorthand version. Second, the British are historically seen as better at human intelligence than we are. The Americans do satellites, the Brits do people. And the latest NIE was based, in part, on humint.

Remember when secret agents were secretive?

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Something that strikes me about some of the recent news — the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, the NIE before that one, and the news about the CIA destroying recordings of interrogations…

Remember back when spy stuff was actually classified, which means, NOT in the newspapers? Remember the Patrick McGoohan series, or for that matter the Joseph Conrad novel — or the Johnny Rivers song? "Secret Agent Man," remember?

Seems like, not so very long ago, it was a bad thing that Bob "Prince of Darkness" Novak blew Valerie Plame’s cover. Some folks thought so, anyway. I mean, before she wrote her memoir.

Didn’t NIEs used to be secret? And what was the CIA doing taping interrogations anyway? Isn’t it sort of part of the etiquette of intrigue that the rubber-hose business isn’t on YouTube?

I can think of only one practical reason why spies would record an interrogation — for use on the subject, to extract more information. It’s one of the classic ploys — actually, it’s sort of the classic ploy — for the brutish business of intelligence gathering: You get a guy to spill a little, then you say, What if we told your pals on the other side what you’ve already told us? If you don’t want that to happen, tell us more…

But that was back when secret agent stuff was secret.

Catholic tears of pride

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Key Energy Party adviser Samuel Tenenbaum, who also does a lot to encourage serious thought about matters of faith, sent out to his e-mail list a link to this NPR piece on the JFK speech. That prompted Bud Ferillo to respond to the group as follows:

Sammy:

 
This speech, which I have retained in my memory bank since it was given,
moves me to tears every time I hear it.
 
All of us at Bishop England High School in 1960 had never dreamed a
Catholic could be elected to any office outside of the ethnic centers of Irish
or Italian America. This one speech changed the course of that campaign because
of its direct response to the spoken and unspoken anti-Catholic fervor of the
time. And that election changed the course of the country until the violence
of later years consumed all that had been won.
 
Thanks for sharing it.
 
Bud/

I take it back about JFK

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Actually, now that I’ve taken the time — for the first time ever — to listen to JFK’s entire speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, I take it back about my statement that I "don’t much like the way Kennedy did it."

I was reacting to the shorthand description I’ve always read about the speech, which was that Kennedy essentially said, "Hey, don’t worry about me; my religious faith won’t inform the decisions I make as president." I had always found that offensive — offended that a candidate would suggest his deepest beliefs about the most important questions would be left out of his calculations, and offended at an electorate that would expect him to say that. And on another level, I just found it demeaning even to have to address all that anti-Catholic nonsense about the White House being run by the Pope. Personally, I’d rather lose the election than drag myself down to that level. It’s like answering a question about whether you’ve stopped beating your wife — anyway you look at it you lose.

But having heard the whole speech, I’m reminded of the danger of making conclusions on the basis of shorthand descriptions. (Example: Most of the discussion of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran the last couple of days has been based on the headline, not the more sobering substance of the report.)

The speech itself is so well-rounded, so erudite, so articulate, so thoughtful about the relationship between faith and political power in this country, that I find myself won over to a candidate who could give such a speech. An excerpt:

    Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end, where all men and all churches are treated as equals, where every man has the same right to attend or not to attend the church of his choice, where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind, and where Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, at both the lay and the pastoral levels, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.
    That is the kind of America in which I believe. And it represents the kind of Presidency in which I believe, a great office that must be neither humbled by making it the instrument of any religious group nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding it — its occupancy from the members of any one religious group. I believe in a President whose views on religion are his own private affair, neither imposed upon him by the nation, nor imposed by the nation upon him¹ as a condition to holding that office.
    I would not look with favor upon a President working to subvert the first amendment’s guarantees of religious liberty; nor would our system of checks and balances permit him to do so. And neither do I look with favor upon those who would work to subvert Article VI of the Constitution by requiring a religious test, even by indirection. For if they disagree with that safeguard, they should be openly working to repeal it.
    I want a Chief Executive whose public acts are responsible to all and obligated to none, who can attend any ceremony, service, or dinner his office may appropriately require of him to fulfill; and whose fulfillment of his Presidential office is not limited or conditioned by any religious oath, ritual, or obligation.

When is the last time there was a candidate for president of the U.S. who both

a) was intellectually capable of delivering such a speech; and

b) had enough respect for the American electorate to speak to us in such terms, with such depth and breadth?

Consider it within the context, though. If you look at transcripts from the Kennedy-Nixon debates, both candidates spoke with such erudition that it sounds like a campaign taking place on another planet. Both candidates were smart and unafraid to show it.

What I wouldn’t give for such a set of choices today (ah, the wonkish dream — to hear where today’s candidates would stand on Quemoy and Matsu!). The irony is that those debates are seen as ushering in the age of televised politics — referring to a medium that would in turn do the most to lower the level of debate.

Speaking of the way we dumb things down today, the link below is to a mere excerpt of the speech on YouTube. I highly recommend you go to the full video recording here — it’s not as easy to call up and run, but it’s more rewarding in the end.

Am I the only one who remembers the time BEFORE Kenny’s?

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Today, we have a couple of letters, and our newsroom had a section-front story, that discuss what is to happen with the former Kenny’s Auto Supply site in Five Points, behind Yesterday’s.

And I find myself thinking, as I often do — am I the only one who thinks of that property as where the Winn-Dixie used to be? I still think of Kenny’s as the new thing. I’m like, way disoriented, as the young folks might say.

Or — and this would be worse — am I dreaming this? Did I never go there to buy my groceries, then walk with them all the back uphill on Blossom to the Honeycombs, which, come to think of it, also don’t exist any more?

And if not, where was I really back in the fall of 1971? Somebody give me a reality check here…

John1

Columbia leader to Malcolm X: ‘You’d better leave.’

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Here’s video of Anthony Hurley — one of the co-counders of the Columbia Urban League — talking about his encounter with Malcolm X long ago.

Warren Bolton’s column today tells of this exchange, so I thought I’d provide this clip as a supplement.

The Urban League, of course, has stood for a very different approach to race relations than that which Malcolm X embodied before his hajj. It’s always been about working with people to effect positive change, rather than destructive confrontation.

That’s one reason why I was proud to serve on the board of the Columbia Urban League for a decade, and why I will be happy to help the organization celebrate its 40th anniversary at its annual Equal Opportunity Day dinner tonight.

Don’t take the brown museum!

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My man McCain keeps going on about this proposal Hillary had for a Woodstock museum, and I can’t help that the old dude’s missing the real problem here. I keep thinking: a museum? For Woodstock?

There’s something extremely uncool about that. Museums are where established, older-generation culture is stored and entombed in cold marble, right? It’s where the Man puts his stuff.

Wasn’t Woodstock — to the extent that it was about anything other than being a rip-roarin’, get-high-and-get-nekkid sort of party — sort of about the opposite of that?

Where was Hillary’s head at?

Oh — and in case you’re not digging where my headline is at, here’s a link.

Why don’t candidates ask us for more than our votes?

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
    “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win….”
       — John F. Kennedy, 1962

WHAT WOULD we do if one among the horde of candidates seeking to become president of the United States in 2009 challenged us as a nation to do something hard?
    Most Americans alive today can’t remember a president or would-be president doing anything remotely like that. The ones we’re used to are all about what they’re going to do for us, not what we should do for our country. Republicans want to cut our taxes; Democrats want to give us more programs and, to hear them all talk, at no cost to us.
    But I believe that if the cause were worthwhile and the proposal made sense, we’d rise to it. Maybe not all of us, but there’s a critical mass out here who would follow someone courageous enough to ask us to do our part.
    I, for one, am sick of being treated, by people who seek my vote, as some sort of “gimme-gimme” baby, lacking in any sense of responsibility for the world around me. Those of us who are grownups are used to accepting, in our personal lives, challenges that are by no means easy to meet — going to work day after day, paying our bills, raising children. Why would we not understand a president who said, “Here’s a challenge that concerns us all, and here’s what each of us needs to do to rise to it”?
    Young people among us want to pitch in and accomplish difficult things a lot more than we give them credit for. Part of Barack Obama’s appeal among the young is his call to service, his challenge to build a better nation. But unless I’ve missed it, he has not asked us, as a nation, to do anything hard.
    Don’t misunderstand me, as did a colleague who wrote:

    The feeling I get… is that you’re so frustrated that you just want the government to demand SOME SORT OF SACRIFICE, on something, anything. Whether it’s needed or not. Doesn’t really matter what.

    Well, yes and no. Sure, there’s a part of me that just wants to be asked for a change to do something, if only for the novelty: Buy bonds, save scrap metal, whatever.
    But there’s more to it than that. The truth is, our country faces a lot of challenges that demand something or other from all of us, but political “leaders” have a pathological fear of pointing it out to us.
    Back when JFK challenged us to go to the moon because it was hard, we did it — even though there was no practical reason why we needed to do so. Sure, it gave us the creeps to think of “going to sleep by the light of a communist moon,” but it was a symbolic competition, with only marginal applications to the true, deadly competition of the arms race. We couldn’t stand not to be No. 1.
    But today we have very real, very practical challenges that have tangible consequences if we fail to meet them.
    Take just one of them: our dependence on foreign oil.
    Sen. Joe Biden had a great speech a while back about how President Bush missed the golden opportunity to ask us, on Sept. 12, 2001, to do whatever it took to free us from this devil’s bargain whereby we are funding people who want to destroy us and all that we cherish. And yet, his own energy proposals are a tepid combination of expanding alternative fuels (good news to the farmer) and improving fuel efficiency (let’s put the onus on Detroit).
    A broad spectrum of thinkers who are not running for office — from Tom Friedman to Robert Samuelson to Charles Krauthammer — say we must jack up the price of gasoline with a tax increase, to cut demand and fund the search for alternatives. It makes sense. But the next candidate with the guts to ask us to pay more at the pump will be the first.
    My friend Samuel Tenenbaum is on a quixotic quest to build support for restoration of the 55-mph speed limit. It would be hard (for me, anyway), but the benefits are undeniable. It would conserve fuel dramatically, starving petrodictators from Hugo Chavez to Vladimir Putin to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It would save thousands of lives now lost to speed on our highways.
    Samuel pitches his idea to every candidate he can corner. They smile and move away from him as quickly as possible.
    But you know, when I wrote a column a while back proposing the creation of an Energy Party — that would among other things demand that we jack up the gas tax by $2 a gallon (to fund an Apollo-style project on alternatives), institute Samuel’s 55-mph limit, ban SUVs for anyone without a proven “life-or-death need to drive one” and build nuclear power plants as fast as we can — I got a surprising number of positive responses. I think that was less because my respondents thought those were all good ideas. I think they just liked the idea of being asked to do something for a change.
    Energy independence is just the start. Add to it the urgent needs to stop global warming, win the war on terror, make health care affordable while at the same time avoiding the coming entitlements train wreck, and you’ve got a list of things that require a lot more audience involvement — and yes, sacrifice — than our current candidates have been willing to ask us for.
    And while you may not feel the same, I’m dying to be asked. Not because it would be easy, and not even because it would be hard, but because these hard things actually need doing.

The cognitive divide between black and white

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
THE TIME of the week has arrived at which I look at some problem or other and confidently pronounce, as though I knew, just what we should do about it. But I have no solutions today.
    Today, I’m just sad, and solutions seem scarce. Part of it is personal. I just returned a few days ago from Pennsylvania, where my youngest daughter’s closest friend had died after a traffic accident. But there are other causes.
    As I write, my wife is on her way back from Memphis, where she had been, tending to family business, when the awful news came about David. She had to fly back there after the funeral to get her car, and drive it home.
    A few minutes ago, I checked on her by cell phone. I told her I was groping about for a column idea, and she said I should write about how lucky we were to be living in South Carolina rather than Memphis. She cited what she described as the painfully divisive victory speech Mayor Willie Herenton had delivered after his re-election a few days ago.
    I just saw the video, and she’s right. Lord knows we have our own demons here in the state that was first to secede, and would do it again if some had their way. But there is a rawness to racial tension in Memphis that is hard to describe if you haven’t been there.
    There was a time — 16 years ago, when he became the first black mayor of that city — when Willie Herenton was a sign of hope: a black man elected with both black and white support.
    It was the sort of thing we had wanted and expected to see for a long time. Back in 1974, when we were students at Memphis State, Harold Ford — senior, not the one who ran for the U.S. Senate last year — ran for Congress against incumbent Republican Dan Kuykendall. My wife and I were totally for Ford, even though Rep. Kuykendall was her Dad’s friend and business partner. He had been all very well and good for the folks his age, but our generation was going to change things. And that race thing? Our kids would only know about that from history books.
    So it was sad, here in the next century, to hear Mayor Herenton tell his supporters in his hour of victory that “I now know who is for me, and I also know who is against me,” and the overwhelmingly black crowd applauds, because they know just what he means.
    For a man just re-elected to an unprecedented fifth term, Mr. Herenton had a huge chip on his shoulder. “There are some mean, mean-spirited people in Memphis,” he said to much cheering. “There are some haters…. I know about haters, and I know about shaking ’em off.”
    He went on to tell about “two sad occasions” from the campaign. “I’m gonna let you know about the sickness in Memphis.”
    He spoke of a basketball game at which he had presented the key to the city during halftime, and “the fans showed so much disdain and hatred… and that place was full, 90 percent white.”
    Another time, while appearing live from Memphis on “Good Morning America” along with Justin Timberlake, “I get up on the stage, and it was 95 percent young white kids, they booed me on national television.”
    “But what they want to say is, can Willie Herenton bring us together? I didn’t separate us.”
    “Memphis got a lot of healing to do. But see, I don’t have that problem. They’ve got a problem.”
    We’ve all got a problem, and not just in Memphis. What is Memphis but a great, big Jena, Lousiana? Another town where there are no heroes, just a place full of people, black and white, all messed up over race.
    Mayor Herenton isn’t just some isolated megalomaniac. Judging by the reaction, every person in that room saw what he saw, just the way he saw it. And whites, watching on TV, saw a guy who was calling them racists.
    The Commercial Appeal, the newspaper the mayor dismisses as the voice of the white establishment, harrumphed that “contrary to the innuendoes he made during his speech, the 58 percent of voting population who opposed him can’t all simply be dismissed as racists.” No, they can’t, especially since one of the two candidates who split the anti-Herenton vote was also black. But Herenton supporters can stew over the fact that in the whitest precincts, his support was in single digits.
    It’s this cognitive divide between what white folks and black folks perceive, when both are looking at the very same thing, that keeps us from putting this mess behind us. And I didn’t just arrive at this conclusion.
    Somewhere — maybe in a box in my attic — is a manila folder containing a printout of a column I wrote in 1995, but never ran in the paper. I wrote it in a state of bewilderment on the day O.J. Simpson was acquitted. I hadn’t followed the trial and didn’t care much about it one way or the other, but I had found myself in a room with a television when the verdict came in, and a crowd had gathered to hear it. You know what happened next: The black folks watching cheered; the whites stared in silence. To me, another rich guy’s lawyers had gotten him off; big deal. But that wasn’t the way my black friends in the room saw it at all, and I was shocked at the contrast. But because I had no solution to offer, because the column just chronicled my shock, I didn’t deem it worthy of publication. I’d hold it until I could come up with an answer.
    I’m still holding it. And now, here we are. What’s my point? I don’t have one. I just think it’s sad. Don’t you?

Less than six degrees of Harry Dent

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All right, I didn’t know Harry Dent personally. So I urge you to read the op-ed piece we ran today from Bob McAlister, who did. We’re considering other submissions about him now.

But this is South Carolina, and everybody in South Carolina touches everybody else. We don’t have to play "Six Degrees" around here, even with Kevin Bacon. We are usually no more than a degree or two away. That’s true even of someone like me who didn’t grow up here, except in the summers when I was with my grandparents in Bennettsville and Surfside. All you need is to have your roots here, and three-fourths of my family tree grows out of our poor soil (my father’s father’s people are from Maryland).

Harry Dent — the one who died last week, not the son — was my Dad’s fraternity brother at PC. In fact, in keeping with his pursuit of worldly superlatives in his early life, he was the president of the fraternity. My Dad wasn’t close to him, and even wondered how he ended up among the Pikes, since he wasn’t a jock. Dad was there on a tennis scholarship in the days when the Blue Hose were a tennis powerhouse, and most everybody in the fraternity played ball of some sort. (Dad informs me that his football-playing brothers were in the "smart" positions; the linemen belonged to Sigma Nu.)

But I had never heard of him when I left Hawaii for my one semester at USC in 1971. I first heard of Mr. Dent one day in Prof. Dolan’s world history class. A student had asked the prof during class whether a certain historical situation he was describing (I forget what) didn’t have an interesting parallel with the Nixon Administration. The prof had brushed the question aside. After class, the questioner went up to the prof and asked why he hadn’t answered the question. He said, "I’m not answering a question like that with Harry Dent’s kid sitting there in the class."

I don’t know which son that was because I don’t remember his first name. But after having him thus pointed out, I made the connection when it turned out he lived on the same floor of the Bates House — which was brand-spanking new that semester — with several friends of mine I referred to collectively as the Bates House Gang. (I lived in the honeycombs, with the hard core.)

Once after I came to work at the paper, Harry Dent came to see us about some worthy cause or other he was promoting, and I got to chat with him briefly. I can’t remember now whether he already knew of our connection (the one through my Dad) or not.

One more thing: Whenever his name has come up, Dad has always referred to him as "Harry Shuler" — first name and middle name. I asked him why the other day. He said he didn’t know why; he just always had.

I guess it’s kind of a South Carolina thing.