CHAPTER ONE
Argument Without End
In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy
By ROBERT S. McNAMARA, JAMES G. BLIGHT and ROBERT K. BRIGHAM with THOMAS J. BIERSTEKER and HERBERT Y. SCHANDLER
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The Theme and Structure of the Book
Most men look at things as they are and wonder why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not?
George Bernard Shaw
From In Retrospect to Argument Without End
The Vietnam War, with which I was personally involved for more than seven years as U.S. secretary of defense (1961-1968), was among the bloodiest in all of human history. It is estimated that something on the order of 3.8 million Vietnamese (North and South, military and civilian) were killed. The United States lost 58,000. Had the United States lost in proportion to its population the same percentage as Vietnam, 27 million Americans would have died. Many times these numbers were wounded. During the course of the war, in addition, North and South Vietnam were nearly destroyed as functioning societies, and America was torn asunder by issues related to the war. Ironically, each principal combatant achieved its objectives: The Hanoi government reunified Vietnam under its leadership; and to the United States, the "dominoes" did not fall, as communism and Soviet and Chinese hegemony did not spread across Southeast Asia.
The thesis of this book is that the war was a tragedy for both sides. Both Washington and Hanoi could have accomplished their purposes without the appalling loss of life. There were missed opportunities, either for avoiding the war before it started or for terminating it before it had run its course. I speculated along these lines in my memoir of the war, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. But lacking access to former officials and documents from the Hanoi government, I could not pursue the matter further at that time.
Since then, however, this thesis has been buttressed by an analysis of formerly unavailable, newly translated Vietnamese and Chinese documents, as well as the six sets of discussions in Hanoi over more than two years between Vietnamese and U.S. scholars and former officials. For the first time, I believe, an understanding has begun to emerge regarding which of the decisions on each side were made on the basis of an accurate understanding of the motives and capabilities of the adversaries, and which were made on the basis of misperceptions, miscalculations, and misjudgments. On the basis of what our analysis adds to the historical record, we propose lessons that should be drawn for advancing peace among nations in the twenty-first century.
The Twenty-First Century: A Bloody Repetition of the Twentieth?
My earliest memory as a child is of a city exploding with joy. The city: San Francisco. The date: November 11, 1918—Armistice Day. I was two years old. The city was celebrating not only the end of World War I but also the belief, held so strongly by President Wilson—and many other Americans—that the United States and its allies had won a war to end all wars.
They were wrong, of course. The twentieth century was on its way to becoming the bloodiest, by far, in all of human history. During the century soon to end, 160 million people will have been killed in conflicts—within nations and between nations—across the globe. If we wish to avoid a repetition in the next century of the tragedy of the twentieth, the time to start is now.
As a first step, we should begin by establishing a realistic appraisal of the problem. It is readily apparent, very complex, and very dangerous. A recent report, titled "Carnegie Commission on the Prevention of Deadly Conflict," chaired by David A. Hamburg and Cyrus R. Vance, stated it very clearly:
Peace—will require greater understanding and respect for differences within and across national boundaries. We humans do not have the luxury any longer of indulging our prejudices and ethnocentrism. They are anachronisms of our ancient past. The worldwide historical record is full of hateful and destructive behavior based on religious, racial, political, ideological, and other distinctions—holy wars of one sort or another. Will such behavior in the next century be expressed with weapons of mass destruction? If we cannot learn to accommodate each other respectfully in the twenty-first century, we could destroy each other at such a rate that humanity will have little to cherish.
The Carnegie Commission is saying, in effect, that the end of the Cold War in 1989 did not, and will not, in and of itself result in an end to conflict. We see the truth of this statement on all sides—in the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, the turmoil in northern Iraq, the tension between India and Pakistan, the unstable relations between North and South Korea, and the conflicts across the face of sub-Saharan Africa in Angola, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, Burundi, Zaire, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. These all make clear that the world of the future will not be without conflict. Racial, religious, and ethnic tensions will remain. Nationalism will be a powerful force across the globe. Political revolutions will erupt as societies advance. Historic disputes over political boundaries will endure. And economic disparities among and within nations will increase as technology and education spread unevenly around the world. The underlying causes of Third World conflict that existed long before the Cold War began remain now that it has ended. They will be compounded by potential strife among states of the former Soviet Union and by continuing tensions in the Middle East. During the past fifty years, these very tensions have contributed to 125 wars causing 40 million deaths. So, in these respects, the world of the future will not be different from the world of the past: Conflicts within nations and conflicts among nations will not disappear.
In such a world many political theorists, in particular those classified as "realists," predict a return to traditional power politics. They argue that the disappearance of ideological competition between East and West will trigger a reversion to traditional relationships based on territorial and economic imperatives. They say that the United States, Russia, Western Europe, China, Japan, and perhaps India will seek to assert themselves in their own regions while also competing for dominance in other areas of the world where conditions are fluid. This view has been expressed, for example, by Harvard University professor Michael Sandel, who has written: "The end of the Cold War does not mean an end of global competition between the superpowers. Once the ideological dimension fades, what you are left with is not peace and harmony, but old-fashioned global politics based on dominant powers competing for influence and pursuing their internal interests." In contrast to Sandel, Carl Kaysen, former director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, states: "The international system that relies on the national use of military force as the ultimate guarantor of security, and the threat of its use as the basis of order, is not the only possible one. To seek a different system ... is no longer the pursuit of an illusion, but a necessary effort toward a necessary goal."
Sandel's conception of relations among nations in the post-Cold War world may be historically well-founded. But I would argue that it is inconsistent with our increasingly interdependent world. No nation, not even the United States, can stand alone in a world in which nations are inextricably entwined with one another economically, environmentally, and with regard to security. I believe, therefore, that the United Nations charter offers a far more appropriate framework for international relations in the future than does the doctrine of power politics.
I would also argue that Sandel's emphasis on balance-of-power politics in the twenty-first century assumes we will be willing to continue to accept a foreign policy that lacks a strong moral foundation. I am aware that the majority of political scientists, particularly those of the realist school, believe morality—as contrasted with a careful calculation of national interests based on balance-of-power considerations—is a dangerous guide for establishing foreign policy. They would say that a foreign policy driven by moral considerations promotes zealousness and a crusading spirit, with potentially dangerous results. But the United States has defined itself in highly idealistic and moral terms throughout its history. A leading contemporary figure in the discussion of the role of morality in foreign policy is Joseph Nye, who served in both the Carter and first Clinton administrations. Currently the dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, he writes: "Americans are a moralistic people, and their concern carries over into foreign policy.... Given the nature of the American political culture, there will always be a demand for moral expression in foreign policy. To ignore it in one period is likely to lay the grounds for exaggerating it in the next."
But simply including morality as a variable is not a solution. Many of the most controversial foreign policy debates in the United States have found both sides basing their arguments on moral considerations. U.S. policy toward Cuba today is justified on moral grounds by supporters saying it is immoral to support dictators who abuse human rights. And it is attacked, on moral grounds, by critics saying it leads to suffering by the mass of the Cuban people. Similarly, a U.S. policy toward China that placed primary emphasis on support of individual civil rights might well weaken the Chinese government's ability to increase the population's access to advances in nutrition, education, and health.
Moreover, moral considerations do not offer a clear guide to action in many other foreign policy disputes, for example, the conflicts today in the Middle East and Bosnia. Peoples of different religions and cultures, confronting common problems, often arrive at different moral judgments relating to conflicts between individual and group rights, between group rights and national rights, and between the rights of individual nations. And even where the moral objective may be clear—as in Rwanda or Burundi, where there was near universal agreement that the killing should stop—we may lack the capability to achieve it. We are learning that external military force has limited power to restore a failed state.
But surely, in the most basic sense, one can apply a moral judgment to the level of killing that has occurred in the twentieth century. There is no justification for it today, and there can be no justification for its continuation into the twenty-first century!
So, can we not agree that there is one area of foreign policy in which moral principles should prevail yet have not? And that is in relation to the settlement of disputes within nations and among nations without resort to violence. To move in this direction, should not the nations of the world—the United States in particular—establish as their overarching foreign policy goal the reduction of fatalities from conflict within and among nations?
Learning from History: Missed Opportunities and Lessons
As I have said, wars between great and lesser powers, and conflicts within nations, are certain to occur, but can we not reduce their frequency and severity by learning from history—by identifying missed opportunities, drawing lessons, and applying the lessons to the future? Although I believe the answer is that we can, such a proposition remains highly controversial among historians.
Many would argue that nonrecurring, broad historical forces determine the course of relations among nations, including wars. They would say that the U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia during the 1960s—the Vietnam War—was the result of such pressures. In effect, they say history is predetermined, that missed opportunities do not really occur and therefore history has few if any lessons to teach succeeding generations: Historical events are determined by forces larger than individual people making individual choices.
I believe such a view is contradicted by common sense and by everyday experience. We all make choices. We observe the results. If we are conscientious, we examine our experience for clues as to opportunities we may have missed, and we look for ways to make fewer mistakes in the future. Do we not believe that our lives are the sum of the choices we make? And is this not our principal means of assuming our share of responsibility for our own conduct—and for the welfare of those who come after us? I believe it is.
Many scholars share my view. For example, the distinguished Stanford diplomatic historian Gordon A. Craig notes the prevalence of this tendency in his fellow historians, then tells us what is wrong with their approach:
In our historical explanations we are biased in favor of great impersonal forces and long-term trends and dominant political and cultural developments, and are uneasy with the contingent, the unexpected, and the accidental.... The trouble with this kind of explanation is that it tends to be deterministic and to give the impression that what happened had to happen and that there were no alternatives.
Craig, a specialist on modern Germany, is thus keenly aware of the many unlikely circumstances, especially the many rooted in misunderstanding and misjudgment that in combination made possible Hitler's rise to power.
British historian H. R. Trevor-Roper is even more forceful on this point. He criticizes his fellow historians for "keeping the corpse [of history] unburied and refrigerated, on a cold mortuary slab, for anatomical demonstration." Instead of becoming caretakers of a living history, a history in which events are seen as the "result of particular ... decisions or events that in themselves were not necessary," many historians become, in effect, the undertakers of that history.
Historians who think in this way are concerned about what they call "counterfactual" history. They fear that instead of writing the history of what actually happened, historians, memoirists, and others may simply engage in speculation about "what if" or "what might have been" without paying due attention to the historical record of what actually occurred.
This relates directly to our attempt in this book to identify missed opportunities and draw lessons from them. The historians fear, in other words, that efforts like ours will become mired in what they believe the record shows are impossible or low-probability outcomes—like avoiding a U.S. war in Vietnam or ending it much earlier than was the case. They would say, for example, that any outcome that did not occur should not be taken seriously, because the "outcome" seems possible only in retrospect.
I want to be absolutely clear that my primary concern is with raising the probabilities of preventing conflict in the future. The missed opportunities we examine are, we argue, due primarily to mutual misperception, misunderstanding, and misjudgment by leaders in Washington and Hanoi. We therefore ask: If each side had known the truth about the other's reality, might the outcome have been less tragic? This permits us to focus on the lack of knowledge, on what prevented each side from acquiring such knowledge, and thus to draw lessons about how to prevent ignorance from producing such tragedies in the future.
I believe, therefore—and my coauthors of this book agree with me—that history is not immune from human initiative. I agree with Columbia University political scientist Robert Legvold, who argues as follows:
History is neither determined, nor a set of dramatic turning points, but rather should be understood as the accumulation of marginal human choices made by real leaders, in real time, operating under real-world constraints. Or to put it another way, in every situation there are not only broad historical forces at work, there are also highly specific aspects which one could imagine having been very different at the time. Moreover, if in the light of the historical record the difference had occurred, a different outcome might have been made more probable.
Does it matter whether one believes that human decisions make a difference? I believe it does, for two reasons: first, because such a view encourages us to search for missed opportunities that (had they been grasped) would have led to a better result; and second, because the analysis of missed opportunities often points to lessons aimed at preventing missed opportunities in the future.
Of course, outside pressures exist that limit actions. And I know from personal experience in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations that these pressures can be excruciating. Time is short. Information is sparse or inconsistent. And the stakes are high, as is often the case in matters of foreign policy, because the nation's vital interests seem threatened. These pressures are often difficult to overcome.
On Vietnam, this has led some historians to leap to a conclusion I find unacceptable: Individual initiative and choice were of little consequence in determining the course of the war. For example, the distinguished Harvard historian Ernest May has written that "given the assumptions generally shared by Americans in the 1960s, it seems probable that any collection of men or women would have decided as did members of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations." In other words, leaders from these two administrations, myself included, are said to have been pushed along, like leaves before the wind, by forces no one could have resisted. More recently, when commenting on In Retrospect, professor May, though he praised the book, characterized it as "a little like a memoir by a Crusader who cannot remember why he particularly cared about the fate of Jerusalem." He felt I had been too critical of myself and my colleagues, too intent on identifying missed opportunities to have avoided the war or ended it earlier, with less tragic results. I was, therefore, in his view, insufficiently appreciative of the forces that led us to our failed policies.
But—and this is a fundamental point—leaders are supposed to lead, to resist pressures or "forces" of this sort, to understand more fully than others the range of options and implications of choosing such options. This is what Pres. Franklin Roosevelt did when he convinced the American people that the United States should help its allies fight the Nazis. I believe this is what President Kennedy did during the Cuban missile crisis when he resisted heavy pressure—public and private—to attack the Soviet missile sites in Cuba. And I believe this is what President Johnson and his associates, including myself, should have done to resist the pressure—from the public, the media, academicians, and the Congress—toward a military solution to the problem of Vietnam.
The Method: Critical Oral History
But on what basis, and through the application of what principles, can we learn from history to avoid the mistakes of the past? The method of retrospective review of conflict by opponents—what the scholars call "critical oral history"—was created specifically to address these questions. It was developed first at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, in the context of a project on the Cuban missile crisis. That project moved to Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies in 1990. The Watson Institute has subsequently been responsible for organizing other projects on the recent history of U.S. foreign policy. These have included reexaminations of the Bay of Pigs and the collapse of U.S.-Soviet détente during the 1970s. Since late 1995 it has acted as principal organizer of "Missed Opportunities," the joint U.S.-Vietnamese project on the Vietnam War, the data from which provide the basis of this book.
The approach requires the simultaneous interaction of documents bearing on the paper trail of decisions for issues and events under reexamination; memories of those who participated in the decisions; and scholars, whose business it is to know the relevant aspects of the written record.
As formerly secret documents become available, we begin to understand more clearly than before the way events unfolded. Yet documents have a weakness of their own: They do not supply their own context. To a large extent, then, the memories of the participants help to supply missing context to the documents, and in turn the documents supply many of the facts that human memories distort or forget. In concert, several people's memories may test and correct each individual's memory, so that errors in recollection or egregious distortions can be reduced—all the more so if the parties to a discussion are known to have divergent views of the event. (This is especially true, as one would expect, in the case of former adversaries, whose views of an event usually are not just discrepant but often contradictory.) Unlike conventional oral history, in which people merely tell their stories, critical oral history subjects these stories to multidimensional analysis and criticism. Thus, a particular story—not only a policymaker's recollection of his experience but also, perhaps, a scholar's favorite theory—must answer to three judges: the documentary record, the expertise of specialists in the field, and the recollections of those who lived through the event in positions of official responsibility.
The Cuban Missile Crisis Project and the Vietnam War Project
The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 was the first event analyzed by the method of critical oral history. Five major conferences were held between 1987 and 1992. I participated in all five, including the final meeting, in Havana, Cuba, chaired by Cuban Pres. Fidel Castro. That project proved that the crisis was more dangerous than is generally recognized even today—and that its lessons have yet to be learned.
The crisis began when the Soviets moved nuclear missiles and bombers to Cuba—secretly and with clear intent to deceive—in the summer and early fall of 1962. The missiles were to be targeted against cities along America's East Coast, putting 90 million Americans at risk. Photographs taken by a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft on Sunday, October 14, 1962, brought the deployments to President Kennedy's attention. He and his security advisers—military and civilian—believed that the Soviets' action posed a threat to the West. Kennedy therefore authorized a naval quarantine of Cuba to be effective Wednesday, October 24. Preparations also began for air strikes and an amphibious invasion. The contingency plans called for a "first-day" air attack of 1,080 sorties—a huge attack. An invasion force totaling 180,000 troops was assembled in southeastern U.S. ports. The crisis came to a head on Saturday, October 27, and Sunday, October 28. Had Soviet leader Khrushchev not publicly announced on that Sunday that he was removing the missiles, I believe that on Monday a majority of Kennedy's military and civilian advisers would have recommended launching the attacks.
By the conclusion of the third Cuban missile crisis conference, in Moscow in 1989, it had become clear that the decisions of each of the three nations before, during, and after the crisis had been distorted by misinformation, miscalculation, and misjudgment. At the time, some of us—particularly President Kennedy and I—believed that the United States faced great danger. The Moscow meeting confirmed that judgment. But during the Havana conference we learned that we had seriously underestimated those dangers. While in Havana, we were told by the former Warsaw Pact chief of staff, Gen. Anatoly Gribkov, that in 1962 the Soviet forces in Cuba possessed not only nuclear warheads for their intermediate-range missiles targeted on U.S. cities but also nuclear bombs and tactical warheads. The tactical warheads were to be used against U.S. invasion forces. At the time, as I mentioned, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was reporting no warheads on the island.
In November 1992—thirty years after the event—we learned more. An article appeared in the Russian press stating that at the height of the missile crisis Soviet forces on Cuba possessed a total of 162 nuclear warheads, including at least ninety tactical warheads. Moreover, it was reported that on October 26, 1962—a moment of great tension—warheads were moved from their storage sites to positions closer to their delivery vehicles in anticipation of a U.S. invasion. The next day, Soviet Defense Minister Rodión Malinovsky received a cable from Gen. Issa Pliyev, the Soviet commander in Cuba, informing him of this action. Malinovsky sent it to Khrushchev. Khrushchev returned it to Malinovsky with "Approved" scrawled across the document. Clearly, there was a high risk that in the face of a U.S. attack—which, as I have said, many in the U.S. government, military and civilian alike, were prepared to recommend to President Kennedy—the Soviet forces in Cuba would have decided to use their nuclear weapons rather than lose them.
We need not speculate about what would have happened in that event. We can predict the results with certainty.
Although a U.S. invasion force would not have been equipped with tactical nuclear warheads—President Kennedy and I had specifically prohibited that—no one should believe that had American troops been attacked with nuclear weapons the U.S. would have refrained from a nuclear response. And where would it have ended? In utter disaster.
What lesson should we draw from these stunning data—data suggesting that our brush with nuclear catastrophe in October 1962 was extraordinarily close? The lesson was clear to me from that moment in Havana when we first began to learn, from General Gribkov, about Soviet preparations for nuclear war in the event of a U.S. invasion. Near the conclusion of that session, I asked Fidel Castro two questions:
(a) Were you aware of it—the Soviet deployment of tactical nuclear warheads, and plans for their use; and
(b) What was your interpretation or expectation of the possible effect on Cuba? How did you think the U.S. would respond, and what might the implications have been for your nation and the world?
Castro's answer sent a chill down my spine. He replied:
Now, we started from the assumption that if there was an invasion of Cuba, nuclear war would erupt. We were certain of that ... we would be forced to pay the price, that we would disappear.... Would I have been ready to use nuclear weapons? Yes, I would have agreed to the use of nuclear weapons. ... I would have agreed, in the event of the invasion you are talking about, with the use of tactical nuclear weapons.... If Mr. McNamara or Mr. Kennedy had been in our place, and had their country been invaded, or their country was going to be occupied ... I believe they would have used tactical nuclear weapons.
I hope that President Kennedy and I would not have behaved as Castro suggested we would have. His decision would have destroyed his country. Had we responded in a similar way, the damage to our own would have been disastrous.
But human beings are fallible. We know we all make mistakes. In our daily lives, mistakes are costly, but we try to learn from them. In conventional war mistakes cost lives, sometimes thousands of lives. But if mistakes were to affect decisions related to the use of nuclear forces, there would be no learning period. They would result in the destruction of nations. The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons carries a very high risk of a potential nuclear catastrophe.
This lesson—and I regard it as the most important substantive lesson by far deriving from the Cuban missile crisis project—has also been endorsed by many distinguished civilian and military leaders around the world.
The Cuban missile crisis project also taught me what I will call a "methodological" lesson: Through extensive dialogue with one's former enemies it is possible to learn a good deal about decisionmaking on "the other side" in pivotal events involving U.S. foreign policy. We had gambled that going to Moscow in 1989, and to Havana in 1992, would yield knowledge about the missile crisis to an extent that would silence the many critics who warned that we would be dealing with communists, who were still our adversaries, if not our enemies; that our counterparts would not be forthcoming and that we would, in effect, be "duped." But the gamble paid off. We learned things in Moscow and Havana that were astonishing (and which subsequent investigations have substantially verified) and that point to important lessons.
Therefore, while I was writing In Retrospect, but before it was published, I began to wonder whether a process could be initiated with the Vietnamese from which might come some answers to questions I could pose only rhetorically in my memoir. Some of these questions were debated by me, and by the two presidents I served, throughout my involvement with the Vietnam War, questions such as: Would China intervene militarily, as it had in Korea, if the United States should attempt to invade North Vietnam and occupy the country; were any of our attempts to establish a cease-fire and move to negotiations between 1965 and 1968 taken seriously in Hanoi; if so, why did they fail? About all such questions, I wrote, "We may never know."
I began an attempt to initiate an inquiry to sound out Vietnamese interest in a project modeled on the missile crisis project by contacting Leslie Gelb in February 1995. Mr. Gelb is president of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and had worked with me as general editor of the Pentagon Papers project nearly thirty years before. Mr. Gelb expressed interest, and made inquiries with Mr. Le Van Bang, who was then the Vietnamese representative to the United Nations (and who would later become, in July 1995, Vietnam's first postwar ambassador to the United States).
Le Van Bang thought the idea had merit, but he also said that the suggestion of a seminar setting in which former enemies exchanged views on issues of common interest would probably strike the traditionally secretive and hierarchical Vietnamese leadership as strange. He said, for example, it was hard for him to imagine the Vietnamese leadership handing over sensitive documents relating to the war, such as one finds in the Pentagon Papers. Nevertheless, he told Mr. Gelb that the idea would be taken seriously, in part because of my personal involvement, but also because the Vietnamese government, then on the verge of achieving full diplomatic relations with the United States, was conscious of the need to demonstrate to the U.S. public that it was willing to sit down with Americans and discuss our once bitterly fought war with calmness and credibility.
With that, Mr. Gelb agreed that the Council on Foreign Relations would sponsor an exploratory trip to Hanoi, with the caveat that I personally lead the group going to Hanoi.
I then contacted professor James Blight of Brown University's Watson Institute, who along with Joseph Nye had organized the missile crisis project. I asked him whether he would also act as principal organizer of a Vietnam War project. He said he would. One of professor Blight's first calls was to professor Robert Brigham, Vassar College historian of decisionmaking on the war in both Washington and Hanoi (and fluent in Vietnamese). Professor Brigham agreed to join the team, as did several others, and the project was launched.
Our group met throughout the summer and fall of 1995 in preparation for a November trip that had been approved by the Vietnamese government. I arrived in Hanoi on November 7 and met with Vietnamese officials and scholars the following day, November 8. On Saturday, November 9, I appeared at a press conference held at the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, announcing our agreement to work toward a conference on the war. I left Hanoi that evening, following a visit to the U.S. chief of mission in Hanoi, Desaix Anderson, who also endorsed the project.
Unknown to me, In Retrospect had been translated into Vietnamese, published in Vietnam months earlier in a pirated edition, and become a best-seller. The net effect of this was that all of the people with whom we discussed the project had read the book and spoke in an informed way about its contents. There was, in fact, resistance in some quarters in Hanoi to focusing on joint responsibility for missed opportunities. But it was clear that some Vietnamese officials and scholars also strongly supported the idea. So my colleagues and I returned to the United States cautiously optimistic that the success of the missile crisis project might be repeated.
The trip to Hanoi proved to be at least as controversial as my previous participation in the Havana conference. The considerable publicity generated by the trip backfired, leading to substantial criticism from the American press of the project and my participation in it. Regretfully, the Council on Foreign Relations withdrew from the project.
Fortunately, the Watson Institute believed the project had the potential to yield lessons from the past that could be applied in the future. Its director, professor Thomas Biersteker, gave his support to the project and has become a contributor to this book. From time to time, political pressure from the left and right was applied to professor Biersteker and to Brown University to drop the project. But they never wavered in their support; without it, the project would have been terminated.
Following an enormous amount of preparation, lasting two years and involving a half-dozen trips to Hanoi by professors Blight, Brigham, Biersteker, and their colleagues, a conference was convened in Hanoi, June 20-23, 1997. Its title reflected my original intended focus: "Missed Opportunities: Revisiting the Decisions of the Vietnam War." I led the U.S. delegation, which also included two former senior U.S. generals, one of whom had spent 500 days in the Vietnamese jungles, other former civilian officials involved with the war, and a team of outstanding U.S. scholars on the war. The Vietnamese delegation was led by Nguyen Co Thach, deputy foreign minister throughout the Vietnam War (later foreign minister, 1980-1989), and included an impressive array of former military and civilian leaders and scholars of the war.
Two things were clear from the outset—and throughout the Hanoi conference. First, the Vietnamese government had established limits to the candor of its participants. For example, though the Vietnamese entered enthusiastically into discussions of what they considered to be missed opportunities by the United States, nothing but stony silence followed our repeated attempts to draw them out and to admit that misperceptions, misunderstandings, and misjudgments had been mutual. This was not merely frustrating. The Vietnamese government's desire to control the conference nearly caused the conference to be canceled, just as it began, when the Vietnamese reneged—or tried to renege—on their prior agreement to let the Cable News Network (CNN) film the meetings in preparation for a documentary. A compromise was eventually reached, whereby CNN filmed one entire day of proceedings and received exclusive interviews with Nguyen Co Thach and the second ranking Vietnamese participant, Tran Quang Co, following the conference.
Second, it was also clear from the outset that some of the Vietnamese participants were trying to circumvent the gag rule that had been imposed by their government. One could see this in discussions that took place during breaks, over lunches (which were taken together with the Vietnamese), and eventually in the sessions themselves. For example, Nguyen Co Thach, who seemed to be acting as the "policeman" in charge of limiting candor, increasingly was challenged by Vietnamese scholars who began their interventions by saying that they had been reviewing documents relevant to the issues in question and that they had a different perspective from Mr. Thach. These were then followed up by ever more explicit and revealing comments outside the conference room, some even beginning with open admissions of Hanoi's joint responsibility for missed opportunities. Finally, in one private conversation with me, Thach volunteered that he had come to accept that position. These admissions were given further credence by reference to details that had never before been revealed about Hanoi's decisionmaking.
Those Vietnamese participants who seemed most informed and open asked the U.S. organizers from Brown University to meet after the conclusion of the conference to plan a small follow-up meeting in Hanoi at which these issues could be discussed further. But there was a catch: I personally must be excluded from the participants in the proposed follow-up meeting. Jim Blight went to Hanoi just before Christmas 1997 to ask the Vietnamese organizers why they felt it was desirable that I stay away.
They answered as follows: Mr. Thach was very ill and would not be able to attend the follow-up meeting (he died in April 1998). To avoid "imbalance" in the delegations, it would be wise for McNamara to be absent.
Just as I had gambled in going to Havana in January 1992, this time I gambled that in staying away from the meeting our team would have a better chance of breaking new ground in understanding the missed opportunities—and lessons—associated with the war. And so, during February 23-26, 1998, our group and a Vietnamese team met in Hanoi to go over the ground covered in the June 1997 meeting and to extend the discussion beyond that point. I believe—and my coauthors believe—that this gamble has paid off handsomely.
Missed Opportunities in Vietnam
Were there not missed opportunities, for each side, to have achieved its geopolitical objectives without the terrible loss of life suffered in the war—missed opportunities either for avoiding the war before it started or for terminating it before it had run its course? In Hanoi, I suggested there were at least six, and I asked whether these truly were missed opportunities. If so, why weren't they grasped? I put the six in the form of questions for discussion, by both sides:
1. A Neutral Vietnam.
If, in 1961-1964, the United States had supported the concept of neutralization then under discussion between France and North Vietnam, would the result have been a viable, "neutral" Vietnam allied to neither East nor West?
2. The Survival of the Diem Regime in South Vietnam.
If the United States had given its full support in 1963 to Ngo Dinh Diem's regime, and if Diem had survived and remained leader of South Vietnam, would he have asked for, or permitted the introduction of, large numbers of U.S. combat troops?
3. The Possibility of a U.S. Military "Victory."
Was it ever feasible? Could it have been achieved without genocide or involving China, Russia, and the United States in a massive war?
4. A U.S. Withdrawal.
In September 1967 the director of the CIA, Richard Helms, presented to President Johnson a secret memorandum stating that the United States could probably have withdrawn from Vietnam at that time without a significant adverse effect on its geopolitical status and security around the world. Was this judgment correct? Might a U.S. withdrawal have resulted in a unified Vietnam but not in a communist takeover of the rest of the region?
5. The Failed Negotiations.
During the years I was secretary of defense, there were at least seven major attempts by the U.S. government, several formulated by me, to initiate negotiations with the Hanoi government. Why did all of these efforts at negotiations fail?
The discussions in Hanoi in June 1997 and February 1998 focused on
this agenda. Likewise, the organization of this book derives from it.
There were two significant exceptions—additions, really—placed onto the agenda by the Vietnamese. Beginning with my first visit to Hanoi in November 1995, all our Vietnamese interlocutors, without exception, told us that two missed opportunities were absent from the U.S. agenda. Vice President Madame Nguyen Thi Binh concluded our discussion on November 8, 1995, by asking me: "Why, in 1945, did the United States spurn Chairman Ho Chi Minh's attempts to reach out to President Truman? And why, in 1954, did the United States become our enemy, taking the place of the French imperialists?"
The period before 1961—before President Kennedy came to office—also came up several times in my conversation with Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap during the same November 1995 visit to Hanoi. What began as a discussion about the escalation of the war during the 1960s was shifted by Giap back to the earlier period, especially 1954, the year President Eisenhower first articulated what became known as the "domino theory"—that is, if South Vietnam fell to communism, all of Indochina would fall, "like a row of dominoes." Giap commented: "Dominoes, dominoes, dominoes—this theory was an illusion. Whatever happened in Vietnam had nothing to do with what happened in Laos, to say nothing of Indonesia.... I am amazed that even the brightest people—people like yourself—could have believed it." I assured him that we did believe it but that I took his point and now believed that the pre-1961 period needed to be on the agenda for our conference.
I felt that this emphasis by the Vietnamese, contrasted with my own initial preference to begin our analysis of events with the period following President Kennedy's inauguration, showed how differently some Americans and Vietnamese still viewed the events in question, with different starting points, and certainly with different views as to which missed opportunities were the most important.
Tran Quang Co, a former first deputy foreign minister, formulated a sixth category of possible missed opportunities as follows:
6. Misunderstandings, 1945-1960.
The first occurred in 1945-1946. If the Truman administration had adhered to the concept of self-determination; and had responded to the letter that Ho Chi Minh sent to President Truman in September 1945; and had prevented the French occupation of Vietnam; then an opportunity would have presented itself to achieve Vietnamese independence and unification, without the French and American wars.
The second missed opportunity took place in 1954, with the Geneva Accords. The Geneva Conference was intended to be an historic meeting that would put an end to war in Indochina and restore long-lasting peace to Vietnam. The Geneva Accords endorsed free elections, which, if they had occurred in 1956, would have provided a basis for the peaceful reunification of Vietnam. However, in 1954 the U.S. administration, fearing that free elections involving communists were unlikely, supported the installation of Ngo Dinh Diem as president of a new entity called "South Vietnam."
The basic question put to participants in the Hanoi meetings—and to readers of this book—is this: In the light of what now can be learned from the historical record, what U.S. and Vietnamese decisions might have been different and what difference would they have made in the course of the war—if each side had judged the other side's intentions and capabilities more accurately?
Would not a discussion of these missed opportunities, of the U.S. and Vietnamese mindsets that lead to them, and of the lessons to be drawn from such an analysis help avoid similar conflicts in the twenty-first century? That was my hope as I boarded the plane for Hanoi, and that remains my hope now.
Monday, March 16, 2009
in a decent society, quality medical attention is a birthright?
in a decent society, quality medical attention is a birthrigh
And he inherits an economy that needs not only to be revived, but also to be reformed--to be made greener and more equal and less rapacious.
Affirm the principle that, in a decent society, quality medical attention is a birthright. And we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. HOT AIR.
Around the globe, the temptation for Obama to run away from ideals, and fall back on interests, will be great. Bush, after all, has badly tainted foreign-policy idealism. But, instead of abandoning idealism, Obama should strive to save it. That means fulfilling our obligations to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan--providing them with as much stability and freedom from tyranny as we have within our means to ensure. It means using American power to stop genocide, and dealing unflinchingly with regimes--from Iran to Burma to China--that suppress their own people or threaten others. And it means revivifying our role as the vanguard in crafting global efforts to check the spread of nuclear weapons and carbon emissions
In a decent society, quality medical attention is a birthright.
Maybe I AM cynical. But this is just not a fact of life. This birthright entitlement idea is the split between the two american philosophies. And the right is right. We can't afford to help the unfortunate. Obama speaks of the reach of our prosperity. Well, it ain't necessarily so.
In any case, this is a balanced view of Obama, minus my lovingly culled references to how horrible his so called soaring rhetoric is. But I'm just jealous. This guy is just plain having more fun than I am. So of course, being me, I react with spite. Not that I'm sure what that means exactly. Bitter and unhappy with the success of others, constantly crammed in my face. Is that so bad? Isn't it just natural to resent your betters? And find fault. Where fault can be found. I mean, my fault finding has been accurate hasn't it??
It doesn't matter anyway. It's just me carrying on and showing off. Pass the time. Observe the passing scene with some clarity. It's enjoyable. Of course, resenting your betters is not enjoyable. It's a goddamned curse. The work is to reject old patterns of behavior. But who has ever done that? I mean, that is very hard work. Probably impossible work. Stop being resentful. How about no attachments. Or selected attachments that don't lead to resentment. Lots of luck.
And he inherits an economy that needs not only to be revived, but also to be reformed--to be made greener and more equal and less rapacious.
Affirm the principle that, in a decent society, quality medical attention is a birthright. And we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. HOT AIR.
Around the globe, the temptation for Obama to run away from ideals, and fall back on interests, will be great. Bush, after all, has badly tainted foreign-policy idealism. But, instead of abandoning idealism, Obama should strive to save it. That means fulfilling our obligations to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan--providing them with as much stability and freedom from tyranny as we have within our means to ensure. It means using American power to stop genocide, and dealing unflinchingly with regimes--from Iran to Burma to China--that suppress their own people or threaten others. And it means revivifying our role as the vanguard in crafting global efforts to check the spread of nuclear weapons and carbon emissions
In a decent society, quality medical attention is a birthright.
Maybe I AM cynical. But this is just not a fact of life. This birthright entitlement idea is the split between the two american philosophies. And the right is right. We can't afford to help the unfortunate. Obama speaks of the reach of our prosperity. Well, it ain't necessarily so.
In any case, this is a balanced view of Obama, minus my lovingly culled references to how horrible his so called soaring rhetoric is. But I'm just jealous. This guy is just plain having more fun than I am. So of course, being me, I react with spite. Not that I'm sure what that means exactly. Bitter and unhappy with the success of others, constantly crammed in my face. Is that so bad? Isn't it just natural to resent your betters? And find fault. Where fault can be found. I mean, my fault finding has been accurate hasn't it??
It doesn't matter anyway. It's just me carrying on and showing off. Pass the time. Observe the passing scene with some clarity. It's enjoyable. Of course, resenting your betters is not enjoyable. It's a goddamned curse. The work is to reject old patterns of behavior. But who has ever done that? I mean, that is very hard work. Probably impossible work. Stop being resentful. How about no attachments. Or selected attachments that don't lead to resentment. Lots of luck.
INAUGURATION SPEECH IS PURE CEREMONY
INAUGURATION SPEECH IS PURE CEREMONY
1. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.
Wrong.
Everybody knows that unending increasing unemployment is a consequence of automation and competition from cheap labor abroad. And natural shifts in demand. And products that satisfy and last, causing lowered production. The badly weakened economy results from miriad causes; the natural cycles of the economy, the cost of the war on terror, changes in spending habits, (the paradoxial fact that frugality, normal good household economics impacts the economy negtively), and of course the inevitible irresponsible greed on the part of some. The rest is nonsense, Our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age? Don't patronize us. This is politically correct nonsense. What choices does that refer to? What are we supposed to do for our country anyway? You can ahsk not what you can do for your country until the cows come home, but what we do for our country is absolutely nothing. We go to our jobs to put
food on the table. The last thing anybody should ever think about is doing something for their country. It's never crossed my mind or come up in conversation.
2. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land - a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.
Wrong.
What happened to hope? The sapping of confidence is not less measurable but simply an intuition with no basis. Most people have no idea what will happen. This is garbage. What segment of the next generation is he talking about? Not our best and brightest? Gifted and energetic Americans will continue to prosper. Everyone else will muddle through as always their success depending on the economic climate.
3. Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction..
wrong
Just a single word is wrong. They worked till their hands were raw so that THEY might live a better life. So they could eat every day and have a roof over their heads. And I am not being cynical. For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life? What does that mean? They didn't come to America. They fled poverty. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted - for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.?? Whom might that be? Who among us prefers drugery over self chosen endeavor and activity, and the leisure of rest after striving? Nobody seeks only the pleasure of riches and fame. Of course we all want to be big earners. To experience the joy of money, the joy of having a fortune. But we seek validation, acceptance admiration, prestiege, romance and very importantly, the joy of accomplishment, the sin of pride, of a job
well done.
Thomas Alva Edison got it right when he said, " I've never worked a day in my life,. It's all been fun". That's the ideal, work we enjoy. Obama was asked, during the heavy lifting of his campaign, if he was having a good time,. His answer, "Of course I am". He might have added, " that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone".
Why is everyone so accepting of this hypocrisy! !?
They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions?? NO THEY DIDN'T.
4. This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions - that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.
NO!
This isn't even true. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began?? Three million new unemployed? The largest employers Walmart and MacDonalds? Our capacity remains undiminished??
Our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions - that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.
NO AND NO!!
Who is he kidding. What does he think "we" were doing a week ago? Trying to reverse the downward trend. Who'se been "standing pat??" Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America?? Who was lying down covered with dust a month ago? Newly unemployed workers reading the classifieds every day and taking in boarders, moving to cramped apartments?
This is stupid rhetoric. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. There's some college educated jobs right there, yess sirree!
We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.
Harness the sun and the winds. Not wind, not wind power, Nothing plain speaking here. Harness the sun and the winds. Forsooth! Harken ye! Balderdash. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do. Transform those colleges out of business. College is a rip off unless you plan to be a doctor, lawyer or engineer.
FINALLY, A TRUE AND BOLD STATEMENT. The question before us is not whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control - and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart - not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.
The reach of our prosperity. That's music to my ears. But there is a counter claim. A rising tide lifts all ships. The reach of our prosperity depends primarily on the degree of our prosperity. Think about it.
5. More balderdash. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine??? Scarcely imagine. How about people jumping out of the Twin Towers. Ben Franklin never imagined any perils on that scale. How about Hiroshima. Adolph Hitler. What in the hell kind of a sentence is that. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine??? Bullshit!!
6. Forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan?? When Hell freezes over!
7. The spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment - a moment that will define a generation - it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all.
For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.
It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break?? The only bridge out of New Orleans was closed by police and citizens, to keep that mob out of their towns. One exit, blocked. Human beings forced back into that horror. The milk of human kindness is thin.
The selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours?? When did that happen?? Mostly never. A parent's willingness to nurture a child. What parent doesn't do that? Black ghetto parents? How did that reference get in there. It's nonsense.
8. Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends - hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths.
A return to these truths??? Who abandoned these truths? Hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism ... When were these abandoned??! How do we return to truths we never left??! It's empty rhetoric. It fills the heart but not the mind. And that is never right. In fact, it is always wrong.
6. To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect.
We pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish? I don't. Who is he talking about. Consume the world's resources without regard to effect. That won't stop. Give up our comforts? Not in a million years.
7. There is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.
Not true. We all wish there were no war on terror, and no downward period in our economy, no lost income. No. Heavy lifting, drugery, sacrifice . If it's so good for us, how come almost nobody would choose it.
8. This is the price and the promise of citizenship.
This is the source of our confidence - the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.
Hey, what about those unbelievers that shaped our country.
Price and promise. Off the mark again.
America. In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.
Great gift of freedom?? We just want to have incomes we can depend on, have security and leisure to pursue our interests and accomplishments. Just like anyone. What has that got to do with America. Or God's grace.
7. With eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.
WRONG!
Our eyes are not fixed on the horizon.
Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.
When we were tested we refused to let this journey end?
Who's talking about quitting. What does that MEAN?!
We carried forth that great gift of freedom?? This is the source of our confidence - the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny. BULL CRAP . I JUST WANT MY JOB BACK, MY HOUSE BACK, MY SAVINGS BACK. WHAT THE FUCK GREAT GIFT OF FREEDOM DO I WANT TO DELIVER TO FUTURE GENERATIONS? YEAH, I'D LIKE MY KIDS TO SUCCEED AND HELP ME WHEN I GET OLD. THAT'S THE GIFT OF FREEDOM.
1. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.
Wrong.
Everybody knows that unending increasing unemployment is a consequence of automation and competition from cheap labor abroad. And natural shifts in demand. And products that satisfy and last, causing lowered production. The badly weakened economy results from miriad causes; the natural cycles of the economy, the cost of the war on terror, changes in spending habits, (the paradoxial fact that frugality, normal good household economics impacts the economy negtively), and of course the inevitible irresponsible greed on the part of some. The rest is nonsense, Our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age? Don't patronize us. This is politically correct nonsense. What choices does that refer to? What are we supposed to do for our country anyway? You can ahsk not what you can do for your country until the cows come home, but what we do for our country is absolutely nothing. We go to our jobs to put
food on the table. The last thing anybody should ever think about is doing something for their country. It's never crossed my mind or come up in conversation.
2. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land - a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.
Wrong.
What happened to hope? The sapping of confidence is not less measurable but simply an intuition with no basis. Most people have no idea what will happen. This is garbage. What segment of the next generation is he talking about? Not our best and brightest? Gifted and energetic Americans will continue to prosper. Everyone else will muddle through as always their success depending on the economic climate.
3. Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction..
wrong
Just a single word is wrong. They worked till their hands were raw so that THEY might live a better life. So they could eat every day and have a roof over their heads. And I am not being cynical. For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life? What does that mean? They didn't come to America. They fled poverty. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted - for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.?? Whom might that be? Who among us prefers drugery over self chosen endeavor and activity, and the leisure of rest after striving? Nobody seeks only the pleasure of riches and fame. Of course we all want to be big earners. To experience the joy of money, the joy of having a fortune. But we seek validation, acceptance admiration, prestiege, romance and very importantly, the joy of accomplishment, the sin of pride, of a job
well done.
Thomas Alva Edison got it right when he said, " I've never worked a day in my life,. It's all been fun". That's the ideal, work we enjoy. Obama was asked, during the heavy lifting of his campaign, if he was having a good time,. His answer, "Of course I am". He might have added, " that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone".
Why is everyone so accepting of this hypocrisy! !?
They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions?? NO THEY DIDN'T.
4. This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions - that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.
NO!
This isn't even true. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began?? Three million new unemployed? The largest employers Walmart and MacDonalds? Our capacity remains undiminished??
Our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions - that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.
NO AND NO!!
Who is he kidding. What does he think "we" were doing a week ago? Trying to reverse the downward trend. Who'se been "standing pat??" Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America?? Who was lying down covered with dust a month ago? Newly unemployed workers reading the classifieds every day and taking in boarders, moving to cramped apartments?
This is stupid rhetoric. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. There's some college educated jobs right there, yess sirree!
We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.
Harness the sun and the winds. Not wind, not wind power, Nothing plain speaking here. Harness the sun and the winds. Forsooth! Harken ye! Balderdash. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do. Transform those colleges out of business. College is a rip off unless you plan to be a doctor, lawyer or engineer.
FINALLY, A TRUE AND BOLD STATEMENT. The question before us is not whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control - and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart - not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.
The reach of our prosperity. That's music to my ears. But there is a counter claim. A rising tide lifts all ships. The reach of our prosperity depends primarily on the degree of our prosperity. Think about it.
5. More balderdash. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine??? Scarcely imagine. How about people jumping out of the Twin Towers. Ben Franklin never imagined any perils on that scale. How about Hiroshima. Adolph Hitler. What in the hell kind of a sentence is that. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine??? Bullshit!!
6. Forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan?? When Hell freezes over!
7. The spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment - a moment that will define a generation - it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all.
For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.
It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break?? The only bridge out of New Orleans was closed by police and citizens, to keep that mob out of their towns. One exit, blocked. Human beings forced back into that horror. The milk of human kindness is thin.
The selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours?? When did that happen?? Mostly never. A parent's willingness to nurture a child. What parent doesn't do that? Black ghetto parents? How did that reference get in there. It's nonsense.
8. Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends - hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths.
A return to these truths??? Who abandoned these truths? Hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism ... When were these abandoned??! How do we return to truths we never left??! It's empty rhetoric. It fills the heart but not the mind. And that is never right. In fact, it is always wrong.
6. To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect.
We pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish? I don't. Who is he talking about. Consume the world's resources without regard to effect. That won't stop. Give up our comforts? Not in a million years.
7. There is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.
Not true. We all wish there were no war on terror, and no downward period in our economy, no lost income. No. Heavy lifting, drugery, sacrifice . If it's so good for us, how come almost nobody would choose it.
8. This is the price and the promise of citizenship.
This is the source of our confidence - the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.
Hey, what about those unbelievers that shaped our country.
Price and promise. Off the mark again.
America. In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.
Great gift of freedom?? We just want to have incomes we can depend on, have security and leisure to pursue our interests and accomplishments. Just like anyone. What has that got to do with America. Or God's grace.
7. With eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.
WRONG!
Our eyes are not fixed on the horizon.
Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.
When we were tested we refused to let this journey end?
Who's talking about quitting. What does that MEAN?!
We carried forth that great gift of freedom?? This is the source of our confidence - the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny. BULL CRAP . I JUST WANT MY JOB BACK, MY HOUSE BACK, MY SAVINGS BACK. WHAT THE FUCK GREAT GIFT OF FREEDOM DO I WANT TO DELIVER TO FUTURE GENERATIONS? YEAH, I'D LIKE MY KIDS TO SUCCEED AND HELP ME WHEN I GET OLD. THAT'S THE GIFT OF FREEDOM.
1. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.
Wrong.
Everybody knows that unending increasing unemployment is a consequence of automation and competition from cheap labor abroad. And natural shifts in demand. And products that satisfy and last, causing lowered production. The badly weakened economy results from miriad causes; the natural cycles of the economy, the cost of the war on terror, changes in spending habits, (the paradoxial fact that frugality, normal good household economics impacts the economy negtively), and of course the inevitible irresponsible greed on the part of some. The rest is nonsense, Our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age? Don't patronize us. This is politically correct nonsense. What choices does that refer to? What are we supposed to do for our country anyway? You can ahsk not what you can do for your country until the cows come home, but what we do for our country is absolutely nothing. We go to our jobs to put
food on the table. The last thing anybody should ever think about is doing something for their country. It's never crossed my mind or come up in conversation.
2. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land - a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.
Wrong.
What happened to hope? The sapping of confidence is not less measurable but simply an intuition with no basis. Most people have no idea what will happen. This is garbage. What segment of the next generation is he talking about? Not our best and brightest? Gifted and energetic Americans will continue to prosper. Everyone else will muddle through as always their success depending on the economic climate.
3. Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction..
wrong
Just a single word is wrong. They worked till their hands were raw so that THEY might live a better life. So they could eat every day and have a roof over their heads. And I am not being cynical. For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life? What does that mean? They didn't come to America. They fled poverty. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted - for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.?? Whom might that be? Who among us prefers drugery over self chosen endeavor and activity, and the leisure of rest after striving? Nobody seeks only the pleasure of riches and fame. Of course we all want to be big earners. To experience the joy of money, the joy of having a fortune. But we seek validation, acceptance admiration, prestiege, romance and very importantly, the joy of accomplishment, the sin of pride, of a job
well done.
Thomas Alva Edison got it right when he said, " I've never worked a day in my life,. It's all been fun". That's the ideal, work we enjoy. Obama was asked, during the heavy lifting of his campaign, if he was having a good time,. His answer, "Of course I am". He might have added, " that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone".
Why is everyone so accepting of this hypocrisy! !?
They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions?? NO THEY DIDN'T.
4. This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions - that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.
NO!
This isn't even true. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began?? Three million new unemployed? The largest employers Walmart and MacDonalds? Our capacity remains undiminished??
Our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions - that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.
NO AND NO!!
Who is he kidding. What does he think "we" were doing a week ago? Trying to reverse the downward trend. Who'se been "standing pat??" Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America?? Who was lying down covered with dust a month ago? Newly unemployed workers reading the classifieds every day and taking in boarders, moving to cramped apartments?
This is stupid rhetoric. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. There's some college educated jobs right there, yess sirree!
We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.
Harness the sun and the winds. Not wind, not wind power, Nothing plain speaking here. Harness the sun and the winds. Forsooth! Harken ye! Balderdash. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do. Transform those colleges out of business. College is a rip off unless you plan to be a doctor, lawyer or engineer.
FINALLY, A TRUE AND BOLD STATEMENT. The question before us is not whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control - and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart - not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.
The reach of our prosperity. That's music to my ears. But there is a counter claim. A rising tide lifts all ships. The reach of our prosperity depends primarily on the degree of our prosperity. Think about it.
5. More balderdash. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine??? Scarcely imagine. How about people jumping out of the Twin Towers. Ben Franklin never imagined any perils on that scale. How about Hiroshima. Adolph Hitler. What in the hell kind of a sentence is that. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine??? Bullshit!!
6. Forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan?? When Hell freezes over!
7. The spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment - a moment that will define a generation - it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all.
For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.
It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break?? The only bridge out of New Orleans was closed by police and citizens, to keep that mob out of their towns. One exit, blocked. Human beings forced back into that horror. The milk of human kindness is thin.
The selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours?? When did that happen?? Mostly never. A parent's willingness to nurture a child. What parent doesn't do that? Black ghetto parents? How did that reference get in there. It's nonsense.
8. Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends - hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths.
A return to these truths??? Who abandoned these truths? Hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism ... When were these abandoned??! How do we return to truths we never left??! It's empty rhetoric. It fills the heart but not the mind. And that is never right. In fact, it is always wrong.
6. To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect.
We pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish? I don't. Who is he talking about. Consume the world's resources without regard to effect. That won't stop. Give up our comforts? Not in a million years.
7. There is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.
Not true. We all wish there were no war on terror, and no downward period in our economy, no lost income. No. Heavy lifting, drugery, sacrifice . If it's so good for us, how come almost nobody would choose it.
8. This is the price and the promise of citizenship.
This is the source of our confidence - the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.
Hey, what about those unbelievers that shaped our country.
Price and promise. Off the mark again.
America. In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.
Great gift of freedom?? We just want to have incomes we can depend on, have security and leisure to pursue our interests and accomplishments. Just like anyone. What has that got to do with America. Or God's grace.
7. With eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.
WRONG!
Our eyes are not fixed on the horizon.
Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.
When we were tested we refused to let this journey end?
Who's talking about quitting. What does that MEAN?!
We carried forth that great gift of freedom?? This is the source of our confidence - the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny. BULL CRAP . I JUST WANT MY JOB BACK, MY HOUSE BACK, MY SAVINGS BACK. WHAT THE FUCK GREAT GIFT OF FREEDOM DO I WANT TO DELIVER TO FUTURE GENERATIONS? YEAH, I'D LIKE MY KIDS TO SUCCEED AND HELP ME WHEN I GET OLD. THAT'S THE GIFT OF FREEDOM.
1. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.
Wrong.
Everybody knows that unending increasing unemployment is a consequence of automation and competition from cheap labor abroad. And natural shifts in demand. And products that satisfy and last, causing lowered production. The badly weakened economy results from miriad causes; the natural cycles of the economy, the cost of the war on terror, changes in spending habits, (the paradoxial fact that frugality, normal good household economics impacts the economy negtively), and of course the inevitible irresponsible greed on the part of some. The rest is nonsense, Our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age? Don't patronize us. This is politically correct nonsense. What choices does that refer to? What are we supposed to do for our country anyway? You can ahsk not what you can do for your country until the cows come home, but what we do for our country is absolutely nothing. We go to our jobs to put
food on the table. The last thing anybody should ever think about is doing something for their country. It's never crossed my mind or come up in conversation.
2. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land - a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.
Wrong.
What happened to hope? The sapping of confidence is not less measurable but simply an intuition with no basis. Most people have no idea what will happen. This is garbage. What segment of the next generation is he talking about? Not our best and brightest? Gifted and energetic Americans will continue to prosper. Everyone else will muddle through as always their success depending on the economic climate.
3. Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction..
wrong
Just a single word is wrong. They worked till their hands were raw so that THEY might live a better life. So they could eat every day and have a roof over their heads. And I am not being cynical. For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life? What does that mean? They didn't come to America. They fled poverty. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted - for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.?? Whom might that be? Who among us prefers drugery over self chosen endeavor and activity, and the leisure of rest after striving? Nobody seeks only the pleasure of riches and fame. Of course we all want to be big earners. To experience the joy of money, the joy of having a fortune. But we seek validation, acceptance admiration, prestiege, romance and very importantly, the joy of accomplishment, the sin of pride, of a job
well done.
Thomas Alva Edison got it right when he said, " I've never worked a day in my life,. It's all been fun". That's the ideal, work we enjoy. Obama was asked, during the heavy lifting of his campaign, if he was having a good time,. His answer, "Of course I am". He might have added, " that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone".
Why is everyone so accepting of this hypocrisy! !?
They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions?? NO THEY DIDN'T.
4. This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions - that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.
NO!
This isn't even true. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began?? Three million new unemployed? The largest employers Walmart and MacDonalds? Our capacity remains undiminished??
Our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions - that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.
NO AND NO!!
Who is he kidding. What does he think "we" were doing a week ago? Trying to reverse the downward trend. Who'se been "standing pat??" Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America?? Who was lying down covered with dust a month ago? Newly unemployed workers reading the classifieds every day and taking in boarders, moving to cramped apartments?
This is stupid rhetoric. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. There's some college educated jobs right there, yess sirree!
We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.
Harness the sun and the winds. Not wind, not wind power, Nothing plain speaking here. Harness the sun and the winds. Forsooth! Harken ye! Balderdash. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do. Transform those colleges out of business. College is a rip off unless you plan to be a doctor, lawyer or engineer.
FINALLY, A TRUE AND BOLD STATEMENT. The question before us is not whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control - and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart - not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.
The reach of our prosperity. That's music to my ears. But there is a counter claim. A rising tide lifts all ships. The reach of our prosperity depends primarily on the degree of our prosperity. Think about it.
5. More balderdash. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine??? Scarcely imagine. How about people jumping out of the Twin Towers. Ben Franklin never imagined any perils on that scale. How about Hiroshima. Adolph Hitler. What in the hell kind of a sentence is that. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine??? Bullshit!!
6. Forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan?? When Hell freezes over!
7. The spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment - a moment that will define a generation - it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all.
For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.
It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break?? The only bridge out of New Orleans was closed by police and citizens, to keep that mob out of their towns. One exit, blocked. Human beings forced back into that horror. The milk of human kindness is thin.
The selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours?? When did that happen?? Mostly never. A parent's willingness to nurture a child. What parent doesn't do that? Black ghetto parents? How did that reference get in there. It's nonsense.
8. Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends - hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths.
A return to these truths??? Who abandoned these truths? Hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism ... When were these abandoned??! How do we return to truths we never left??! It's empty rhetoric. It fills the heart but not the mind. And that is never right. In fact, it is always wrong.
6. To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect.
We pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish? I don't. Who is he talking about. Consume the world's resources without regard to effect. That won't stop. Give up our comforts? Not in a million years.
7. There is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.
Not true. We all wish there were no war on terror, and no downward period in our economy, no lost income. No. Heavy lifting, drugery, sacrifice . If it's so good for us, how come almost nobody would choose it.
8. This is the price and the promise of citizenship.
This is the source of our confidence - the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.
Hey, what about those unbelievers that shaped our country.
Price and promise. Off the mark again.
America. In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.
Great gift of freedom?? We just want to have incomes we can depend on, have security and leisure to pursue our interests and accomplishments. Just like anyone. What has that got to do with America. Or God's grace.
7. With eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.
WRONG!
Our eyes are not fixed on the horizon.
Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.
When we were tested we refused to let this journey end?
Who's talking about quitting. What does that MEAN?!
We carried forth that great gift of freedom?? This is the source of our confidence - the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny. BULL CRAP . I JUST WANT MY JOB BACK, MY HOUSE BACK, MY SAVINGS BACK. WHAT THE FUCK GREAT GIFT OF FREEDOM DO I WANT TO DELIVER TO FUTURE GENERATIONS? YEAH, I'D LIKE MY KIDS TO SUCCEED AND HELP ME WHEN I GET OLD. THAT'S THE GIFT OF FREEDOM.
READ THE ECONOMIST
Feb 19th 2009
Politics this week
Feb 19th 2009
From The Economist print edition
AFP
Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, won his referendum to abolish term limits by 55% to 45%. He said it was a victory “for socialism, for revolution” and that he would be a candidate in the next presidential election in 2012. The opposition complained that his “yes” campaign used public money and state facilities. See article
A month-long general strike in Guadeloupe, a French territory in the Caribbean, turned violent. A protester was killed and businesses were looted. France dispatched 260 gendarmes. The strikers want an increase in the minimum wage; many also resent the fact that a lot of businesses are white-owned in a mainly Afro-Caribbean island. See article
Several hundred people blocked bridges at three cities on Mexico’s border with the United States to protest against the use of Mexican troops to fight drug-traffickers. They claim that troops have committed abuses. Traffickers killed four policemen in Ciudad Juárez, one of the cities.
A cruise ship carrying 64 tourists to Antarctica ran aground in high winds. The ship’s operator dispatched a rescue vessel. The navies of Chile and Argentina have expressed worries that the growth in tourist traffic in the area will cause a serious accident.
Oops
It emerged that two submarines carrying missiles armed with nuclear weapons—one British and one French— accidentally collided beneath the Atlantic earlier this month. The two countries said there were no injuries when Le Triomphant and HMS Vanguard bumped into each other “at low speed”, apparently unaware of each other’s presence, during routine patrols. The weapons remained safe, they said.
An Italian court sentenced a British lawyer, David Mills, the separated husband of a British minister, Tessa Jowell, to four-and-a-half years in prison for taking a $600,000 bribe from Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. Mr Berlusconi does not face prosecution, thanks to a law granting him immunity while in office.
Markets were spooked by more bad economic news in much of eastern and central Europe. Fears rose that Ukraine might refuse to abide by the terms of an IMF bail-out and default on its debt. In Poland the zloty fell further, hurting many who took out home loans in foreign currencies. In Russia, the rouble slid as the Kremlin forecast that the economy would contract by 2.2% this year. See article
Inflation buster
Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe’s prime minister under a power-sharing agreement with President Robert Mugabe, said he would pay civil servants in foreign currency. Western governments sounded sceptical as to whether he could afford to do so. See article
Equatorial Guinea’s island capital was unsuccessfully attacked by men in gunboats while President Obiang Nguema was away on the mainland part of his country. He survived a coup attempt five years ago by mercenaries from South Africa.
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia made the most thorough reshuffle of his government since assuming the throne in 2005. He promoted reformers, sacked reactionaries and appointed his first-ever female minister, for women’s education. But women are still not allowed to drive a car.
Egypt’s authorities freed Ayman Nour, who had the temerity to run against Hosni Mubarak for the presidency in 2005, after he had served three years of a five-year sentence for fraud. Mr Nour says the charge was trumped up.
Shifting priorities
Hillary Clinton embarked on her first tour abroad as America’s secretary of state, visiting Japan, Indonesia, China and South Korea. The choice of Asian destinations was seen as symbolising the Obama administration’s determination to give the region new prominence in American diplomacy. Mrs Clinton invited Taro Aso, Japan’s prime minister, to become the first foreign leader to meet Barack Obama in Washington since his inauguration. See article
Mr Obama said America would send a further 17,000 troops to join the 65,000 foreign soldiers already based in Afghanistan to combat the worsening insurgency. America wants its NATO allies to dispatch reinforcements, too. See article
EPA
Taro Aso, Japan’s prime minister, visited the Russian island of Sakhalin for the opening of a liquefied natural-gas plant. He met Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, for talks on resolving the two countries’ long-running dispute over four islands held by Russia and claimed by Japan.
Pakistan’s government agreed a truce to end fighting with Islamist insurgents in the Swat valley in its North-West Frontier Province. As part of the agreement, sharia law will be implemented in the district. NATO commanders in neighbouring Afghanistan expressed concern at the deal. See article
Thirty years after the downfall of Cambodia’s Khmers Rouges, the first trial of one of their leading members for crimes committed during their rule began in Phnom Penh. The defendant is Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, who ran the notorious Tuol Sleng interrogation centre. See article
Spend, spend, spend
AP
Barack Obama signed his $787 billion stimulus package into law at a ceremony in Denver. It is hoped that the bill will create or save 3.5m jobs. Mr Obama then travelled to Phoenix where he unveiled a $75 billion bail-out plan for homeowners facing foreclosure. See article
Judd Gregg withdrew his nomination for commerce secretary on February 12th. The New Hampshire senator, a Republican, cited differences with the White House over both the stimulus bill and its desire to control next year’s census of the population. See article
Frantic negotiations to pass California’s budget took place as the process to lay off thousands of state workers began. Some Republicans in the legislature remained unhappy at a temporary tax increase in the bill, and ousted their leader in the state Senate after he agreed to support the measure so that the budget could pass. See article
The founder of an Islamic television station in upstate New York that was set up to improve the image of Muslims was charged with beheading his wife. The couple had filed for divorce. The local prosecutor described it as “the worst form of domestic violence”, sparking outrage from feminists, who say the murder resembles an “honour killing”.
Politics this week
Feb 19th 2009
From The Economist print edition
AFP
Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, won his referendum to abolish term limits by 55% to 45%. He said it was a victory “for socialism, for revolution” and that he would be a candidate in the next presidential election in 2012. The opposition complained that his “yes” campaign used public money and state facilities. See article
A month-long general strike in Guadeloupe, a French territory in the Caribbean, turned violent. A protester was killed and businesses were looted. France dispatched 260 gendarmes. The strikers want an increase in the minimum wage; many also resent the fact that a lot of businesses are white-owned in a mainly Afro-Caribbean island. See article
Several hundred people blocked bridges at three cities on Mexico’s border with the United States to protest against the use of Mexican troops to fight drug-traffickers. They claim that troops have committed abuses. Traffickers killed four policemen in Ciudad Juárez, one of the cities.
A cruise ship carrying 64 tourists to Antarctica ran aground in high winds. The ship’s operator dispatched a rescue vessel. The navies of Chile and Argentina have expressed worries that the growth in tourist traffic in the area will cause a serious accident.
Oops
It emerged that two submarines carrying missiles armed with nuclear weapons—one British and one French— accidentally collided beneath the Atlantic earlier this month. The two countries said there were no injuries when Le Triomphant and HMS Vanguard bumped into each other “at low speed”, apparently unaware of each other’s presence, during routine patrols. The weapons remained safe, they said.
An Italian court sentenced a British lawyer, David Mills, the separated husband of a British minister, Tessa Jowell, to four-and-a-half years in prison for taking a $600,000 bribe from Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. Mr Berlusconi does not face prosecution, thanks to a law granting him immunity while in office.
Markets were spooked by more bad economic news in much of eastern and central Europe. Fears rose that Ukraine might refuse to abide by the terms of an IMF bail-out and default on its debt. In Poland the zloty fell further, hurting many who took out home loans in foreign currencies. In Russia, the rouble slid as the Kremlin forecast that the economy would contract by 2.2% this year. See article
Inflation buster
Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe’s prime minister under a power-sharing agreement with President Robert Mugabe, said he would pay civil servants in foreign currency. Western governments sounded sceptical as to whether he could afford to do so. See article
Equatorial Guinea’s island capital was unsuccessfully attacked by men in gunboats while President Obiang Nguema was away on the mainland part of his country. He survived a coup attempt five years ago by mercenaries from South Africa.
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia made the most thorough reshuffle of his government since assuming the throne in 2005. He promoted reformers, sacked reactionaries and appointed his first-ever female minister, for women’s education. But women are still not allowed to drive a car.
Egypt’s authorities freed Ayman Nour, who had the temerity to run against Hosni Mubarak for the presidency in 2005, after he had served three years of a five-year sentence for fraud. Mr Nour says the charge was trumped up.
Shifting priorities
Hillary Clinton embarked on her first tour abroad as America’s secretary of state, visiting Japan, Indonesia, China and South Korea. The choice of Asian destinations was seen as symbolising the Obama administration’s determination to give the region new prominence in American diplomacy. Mrs Clinton invited Taro Aso, Japan’s prime minister, to become the first foreign leader to meet Barack Obama in Washington since his inauguration. See article
Mr Obama said America would send a further 17,000 troops to join the 65,000 foreign soldiers already based in Afghanistan to combat the worsening insurgency. America wants its NATO allies to dispatch reinforcements, too. See article
EPA
Taro Aso, Japan’s prime minister, visited the Russian island of Sakhalin for the opening of a liquefied natural-gas plant. He met Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, for talks on resolving the two countries’ long-running dispute over four islands held by Russia and claimed by Japan.
Pakistan’s government agreed a truce to end fighting with Islamist insurgents in the Swat valley in its North-West Frontier Province. As part of the agreement, sharia law will be implemented in the district. NATO commanders in neighbouring Afghanistan expressed concern at the deal. See article
Thirty years after the downfall of Cambodia’s Khmers Rouges, the first trial of one of their leading members for crimes committed during their rule began in Phnom Penh. The defendant is Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, who ran the notorious Tuol Sleng interrogation centre. See article
Spend, spend, spend
AP
Barack Obama signed his $787 billion stimulus package into law at a ceremony in Denver. It is hoped that the bill will create or save 3.5m jobs. Mr Obama then travelled to Phoenix where he unveiled a $75 billion bail-out plan for homeowners facing foreclosure. See article
Judd Gregg withdrew his nomination for commerce secretary on February 12th. The New Hampshire senator, a Republican, cited differences with the White House over both the stimulus bill and its desire to control next year’s census of the population. See article
Frantic negotiations to pass California’s budget took place as the process to lay off thousands of state workers began. Some Republicans in the legislature remained unhappy at a temporary tax increase in the bill, and ousted their leader in the state Senate after he agreed to support the measure so that the budget could pass. See article
The founder of an Islamic television station in upstate New York that was set up to improve the image of Muslims was charged with beheading his wife. The couple had filed for divorce. The local prosecutor described it as “the worst form of domestic violence”, sparking outrage from feminists, who say the murder resembles an “honour killing”.
a sound body of law
a sound body of law,"
The solution is not just to start paring back all the law -- that would take 10 lifetimes, like trying to prune the jungle. We need to abandon the idea that freedom is a legal maze, where each daily choice is like picking the right answer on a multiple-choice test. We need to set a new goal for law -- to define an open area of free choice. This requires judges and legislatures to affirmatively assert social norms of what's reasonable and what's not. "The first requirement of a sound body of law," Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote, "is that it should correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community.
The solution is not just to start paring back all the law -- that would take 10 lifetimes, like trying to prune the jungle. We need to abandon the idea that freedom is a legal maze, where each daily choice is like picking the right answer on a multiple-choice test. We need to set a new goal for law -- to define an open area of free choice. This requires judges and legislatures to affirmatively assert social norms of what's reasonable and what's not. "The first requirement of a sound body of law," Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote, "is that it should correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community.
a second Great Depression.”---Paul Krugman
a second Great Depression.”---Paul Krugman
Let’s not mince words: This looks an awful lot like the beginning of a second Great Depression.”---Paul Krugman
Is there some good news for 2009? There are things that should bring some cheer.
the plummeting price of crude oil to $40 a barrel has put some $200 billion back into the pockets of Americans. That may help economic activity somewhat or at the very least, help repair household balance sheets.
by James Turk
*****
Basically, banks make too many loans creating a ‘boom’ that is built upon an unsustainable and shaky foundation of credit. Eventually, the bankers and their borrowers realize that these extensions of credit and the mountain of borrowing that resulted from it was imprudent, and they then seek to improve the dire state of their overleveraged balance sheets. The ‘bust’ occurs because the loans made during good times inevitably lead to bad investment decisions that appear sound only within the illusory prosperity of the boom.
In short, prosperity comes from hard work and savings, not borrowed money and consumption. Unfortunately, hard work and savings have been in short supply, and economies around the world are now feeling the consequences.
For example, the following quote is from an OpEd piece by Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman that was published in The New York Times on January 5th: “The fact is that recent economic numbers have been terrifying, not just in the United States but around the world. Manufacturing, in particular, is plunging everywhere. Banks aren’t lending; businesses and consumers aren’t spending. Let’s not mince words: This looks an awful lot like the beginning of a second Great Depression.”
James Turk is the Founder & Chairman of GoldMoney.com . He is the co-author of The Coming Collapse of the Dollar, which has been updated for a newly released paperback version, now entitled The Collapse of the Dollar
Let’s not mince words: This looks an awful lot like the beginning of a second Great Depression.”---Paul Krugman
Is there some good news for 2009? There are things that should bring some cheer.
the plummeting price of crude oil to $40 a barrel has put some $200 billion back into the pockets of Americans. That may help economic activity somewhat or at the very least, help repair household balance sheets.
by James Turk
*****
Basically, banks make too many loans creating a ‘boom’ that is built upon an unsustainable and shaky foundation of credit. Eventually, the bankers and their borrowers realize that these extensions of credit and the mountain of borrowing that resulted from it was imprudent, and they then seek to improve the dire state of their overleveraged balance sheets. The ‘bust’ occurs because the loans made during good times inevitably lead to bad investment decisions that appear sound only within the illusory prosperity of the boom.
In short, prosperity comes from hard work and savings, not borrowed money and consumption. Unfortunately, hard work and savings have been in short supply, and economies around the world are now feeling the consequences.
For example, the following quote is from an OpEd piece by Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman that was published in The New York Times on January 5th: “The fact is that recent economic numbers have been terrifying, not just in the United States but around the world. Manufacturing, in particular, is plunging everywhere. Banks aren’t lending; businesses and consumers aren’t spending. Let’s not mince words: This looks an awful lot like the beginning of a second Great Depression.”
James Turk is the Founder & Chairman of GoldMoney.com . He is the co-author of The Coming Collapse of the Dollar, which has been updated for a newly released paperback version, now entitled The Collapse of the Dollar
A Memoir of Ronald Reagan
A Memoir of Ronald Reagan
PROLOGUE
Dutch
By EDMUND MORRIS
Random House
Read the Review
"For heaven's sakes!"
He holds the speckled leaf in his hand, caressing its green patches with his sharp, scarred thumb. The Oval Office is so silent I hope that the dry whisper of that caress will register on my tape recorder. "Direct from Lowell Park," I say. "Remember that big oak tree you used to sit under, when you were a lifeguard?"
He tilts his head at me, mildly amused but wary. Most public yet most private of men, he does not welcome undue familiarity with his past. I have never forgotten the blue anger that came into his eyes (no aquamarine flash like Jimmy Carter's, but a sort of dark flicker, like the inner flame of a candle) when I boasted that I had tracked down his first fiancée. "Oh, you found out about her, huh." It was a statement rather than a question-Ronald Reagan hardly ever used the interrogative form-signaling, for all its tone of polite interest, his resentment at being surprised, and his disinclination to hear another word about the preacher's daughter he once wanted to marry.
I should have kept my research to myself. Yet for sheer pleasure at having tracked down former intimates, I could never resist beginning an interview with, "Guess what-Glen Claussen's still alive. He gave me this photograph of you singing barbershop quartet!" or, "Joy Hodges says, 'Love to Dutch.' " I would pause for a reaction, but-unless you call a practiced chuckle reactive-always in vain. Perhaps his youthful readings in Calvin Coolidge taught him not to encourage interlocutors. It only winds them up for twenty minutes more. Even as a teenager, he had taken no personal interest in people. They were, and remained, a faceless audience to his perpetual performance.
Of course, if I said something like, "Mr. President, your old friend Pee Wee seems to be dying," he would bow his head in appropriate sorrow-checking, meanwhile, the schedule lying crisp before him:
1:30 pm Personal Staff Time
2:00 pm Pre-News Conference Briefing
3:30 pm Taping Session
Perhaps because today's show-and-tell has vegetal rather than human associations, his moment of wariness passes. "That was in front of the little bath house," he says, speaking more to the leaf than to me. He is back under his favorite oak, sixty summers ago, his hot damp swimsuit unlooped from his shoulders and dropped to his taut stomach, leaving behind a pale ghost of itself. The river has "closed" for lunch, and he is eating a hamburger and reading Edgar Rice Burroughs. At about the age of one thousand years, they go voluntarily upon their last strange pilgrimage down the river Iss, which leads no living Martian knows whither and from whose bosom no Martian has ever returned.
That hard, splendid body, those bruising arms and knees, the prickle of wet wool are so manifest that I can feel them-as one skinny-dipper did on August 2, 1928, in the nocturnal rescue that gave "Dutch" Reagan his first newspaper headline. pulled from the jaws of death. A sudden empathy with the drowning boy (who gave his name as James Raider) makes me want to retch, as if the Rock River's brackish waters are in my nose and throat, and my consciousness, too, swirling.
"Mr. President, when you-"
I am in such a frenzy that I have forgotten he is still addressing himself to the leaf. Our voices collide; his soft husk arrests my stammer. "There was a walkway," Reagan says. "And then a square on the end with a slide on it, and a diving board, and uh, a low-level thing along one side. . . ." He glances at me smiling, head cocked. The gray-blue eyes go from gloss to semigloss, and he returns the leaf. "Well, I'll be darned." We are back in the present.
I know now I'll never tell him. No wonder Ronald Reagan embraced the Strategic Defense Initiative-cosmic deflection is his game! Research memo: look for the notion of a space-shield in Burroughs science fiction. Doesn't Princess of Mars have a dome of bombproof glass, five feet thick?
Half an hour later, I emerge from the Oval Office, asking myself for the hundredth time, "How much does Dutch really know?"
There was no sign of recognition when I first saw him in the White House, at a state dinner in August 1981. Nor did he know me (although he pretended to) when I sat next to him fourteen months later, at a lunch with members of the Theodore Roosevelt Association. He again showed no sign of familiarity on Saint Valentine's Day 1983, when Senator Mark Hatfield invited a group of biographers to dine with the Reagans in Georgetown. I was not surprised. The President met an average of eighty people a day; he must long since have stopped relating handshakes to faces.
He certainly lit up, though, when Hatfield introduced me as the author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. "Oh!" he breathed, warmly resting his left hand on my right hand engulfed in his other hand, "I read that. And Nancy was reading your wife's book about, uh-"
"Edith Kermit Roosevelt, sir."
"Yes. Those first few months in the White House, we would lay in bed and read 'em side by side!" He waited for me to express appreciation, then winked and turned to Frank Freidel. Happiness suffused my heart.
I watched Frank melting under similar treatment, then Daniel J. Boorstin and George Nash and the rest of our company. The President had a perfectly prepared quip for each man, a beam of sexless affection for each woman. We were all seduced, with the exception of Arthur S. Link, Ph.D., George Harding Davis '86 Professor of American History at Princeton University. Reagan grasped his disapproving Democratic hand. "Well, hello-" Link bent stiffly forward, craggy and crabbed, bowed by the erudition of forty-two consecutive volumes of The Papers of Woodrow Wilson. His detestation of the Gipper was legendary in academe. Some of us had taken bets that Arthur would not show up. But show he had, in the teeth of a snowstorm, out of courtesy to Senator Hatfield.
For a moment, his silver crew cut bristled inches from Reagan's chin. I braced for an upward jerk and thud. But then he straightened and tried to smile-a mirthless iguana gape. Reagan, nodding kindly, moved on to the butler.
Something about the back of the President's neck, as he ordered a vodka and orange, told me he sensed Link's stiffness, and was figuring how to deal with it. He had been the same at college, at Warner Bros., in the Army, on the road for GE in the Fifties: always the Actor, determined at all costs to captivate every person in the room. Compared with some of the more formidable dyspeptics he had beguiled-Eamon De Valera, Charles de Gaulle, and Chiang Kai-shek, to name but three-Link was easy meat.
It took him no more than twenty minutes, once we had sat down at Mrs. Hatfield's round table, ornamented with bulbous red plastic hearts. I noticed he kept beaming at Arthur. Rubicund from his cocktail, big, broad, lustrous with power, he exuded what Walter Pater called the "charm of an exquisite character, felt in some way to be inseparable from his person." The iguana began to cackle in spite of itself at the flow of his jokes. Who could help laugh, when Reagan himself laughed so irresistibly?
Arthur, being something of an expert on sequitur, must have noticed how each joke adapted to the conversation, how quickly and lightly the words spooled out, every punch line dropping like a fly on the stream. Joke-telling requires a special kind of intelligence, as anyone knows who has tried to write one out: a few syllables too many, a vital phrase misstated, and the humor dies. Reagan lacked wit-he was too cautious to risk repartee-and many of his jokes were hoary, but one could only marvel at their apparent spontaneity.
He grew serious when the conversation turned to a President's responsibility to endow posterity with personal documents. Whatever we recommended for the record, he said, he would do faithfully. But he doubted that details about himself as a man would interest any-body, now or in the future. "I still look over my shoulder when I'm, you know, walking out of the White House and the Marines are saluting and all, and I say, 'Who-me?' "
This was too much for Arthur, who by now was gazing at Reagan misty-eyed. "Mr. President!" he roared, almost sobbing with adoration. "Six hundred years from now, historians will still be fascinated by your manuscripts!" (I had a vision of scholarly lasers, programmed for Freudian clues, scanning Dutch's diaries without so much as a beep.) Arthur, rambling on, would not be stopped until he had begged the President and Mrs. Reagan to preserve their billets-doux. "Imagine what would have happened if Mrs. Wilson had burned those wonderful love letters Woodrow wrote her. How little we would know of his passionate humanity!"
There was nothing to do but let rapture run its course. Reagan sat listening, content at having prevailed once again over a potential enemy. The rest of us twirled our wineglasses and wondered what kind of ideological hangover Arthur was going to have in the morning.
Throughout the seventy minutes we stayed at the table, I was aware of Mrs. Reagan's stare, as a scuba diver in dark water senses two large, pale, accompanying jellyfish. I braced myself to glance at her: she gave a thin return of smile before looking away.
"And then along came Nancy Davis," said Reagan, "and saved my soul."
He was talking about 1949, his annus horribilis, when in the space of a few months he had found himself alone, aging, divorced, unemployed, upstaged in his last picture, and on crutches, nursing a shattered leg. There was a respectful silence while he gazed at his savior. Her eyes glittered with tears, perfectly on cue.
Hokey, yes, but I could not help being moved. The President's adoration of this brittle little woman warmed the room to such an extent that Mrs. Hatfield, draining her champagne, launched into a monologue on the subject of Love that had us all checking our watches. Only Reagan, with his bear's appetite for honeyed sentiment, seemed sorry when her speech, and with it the evening, came to an end.
"I'm going to ask only one favor from you scholars in exchange for this dinner," Senator Hatfield said after the Reagans had left. "Each of you must send me an account of what you've heard and seen tonight."
I wrote some pages from an imaginary History of the United States in the Late Twentieth Century. Its general tone was whimsical, aside from this mention of a proposal by the Librarian of Congress:
. . . that Reagan appoint to his staff a historian trained to sense the long-term significance of events. Presidents, Dr. Boorstin remarked, are often unaware that their most cherished "achievements" might be judged insignificant by posterity, while others, hardly noticed at the time, blossom later to major importance. If the drama of the moment-a gala for the doomed Sadat, a visit to the Berlin Wall-can be captured by an official photographer, then why not also by an official chronicler? "As Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee," Hatfield interrupted with a grin, "I'll see you get the necessary funds."
After quoting Arthur Link's outburst about the "passionate humanity" of Woodrow Wilson, I concluded:
Implicit in that remark was the suggestion that Reagan's own humanity, unchronicled, might fade faster than any other feature of his Presidency; that in the end what chiefly survives, or should survive, of any Chief Executive is the quality of his personality. Presidents, whatever their political symbolism, represent the national character of their era, and if we do not understand our leaders as people, we can never understand ourselves as Americans.
It was not until some time afterward that I learned that the real purpose of the Hatfield dinner had been to set me up as Reagan's "chronicler." So that was why Mrs. Reagan had stared so hard over her volaille de poulet aux champignons. That was why Richard Darman, the Administration's resident intellectual, had invited me to the White House for a follow-up discussion. Presumably, I was expected to offer my pen to the Reagan Revolution.
I didn't. I was at work on another volume of the life of Theodore Roosevelt, and had reason enough to keep my distance. Ironia ironorum, that I of all people should be charged with rescuing the old Lifeguard from the chill current of history!
Nine years later, however, I found myself literally escorting him back to his origins in Tampico, Illinois. He was President no longer, and had been seized by a sudden, senescent desire to visit, for the first time since 1911, what was now grandly called the Ronald Reagan Birthplace Museum. I walked down Main Street with him and Nancy, feeling transcendentally strange. An odd, Dantesque reversal of roles had occurred, as if I were now the leader rather than the led.
"Mr. President," I said, "you don't have to pretend you remember this place. You were only three months old when your parents checked out of number 111."
"Yes. We went to live over the store where my father worked. H. C. Pitney's General Store."
"No, that was in 1919, when you returned here from Monmouth. In May 1911, the Tampico Tornado reported that your parents had moved with their new baby to the Burden house, south of the depot."
I pointed down the one-block street, beyond the little crowd restrained by a police car, and across the tracks. "You can't see it because of the wheat elevator, but it's the house of your first memories."
"Are we going to visit?"
"I think they want us to go to church first, sir, and then go through the museum here."
Docile as ever, he nodded. I did not add that the current occupants of the white, double-story house had no desire to welcome him. Judging by the number of major appliances on the stoop, they were not Reagan Republicans.
Sunday-morning sunbeams streamed through the windows of the Christian Church. He sat immediately in front of me while the organ fluted "What a Friend We Have in Jesus," and Whiteside County's Disciples of Christ-a corn-fed lot-squeezed themselves into adjoining pews. I leaned forward and said, "Just think, Mr. President, if your father had gotten you baptized in Saint Mary's, we'd be attending eleven o'clock mass."
He chuckled and whispered conspiratorially, "Bells and smells."
We sang number 270 in the hymnal. It occurred to me that I had never heard him sing, apart from his execrable rendering of "They Fly Through the Air with the Greatest of Ease" in International Squadron (1942). So I leaned forward and was surprised by the sweetness of his breathy light baritone. Unlike most public worshipers, he sang without a trace of self-consciousness, quietly, almost to himself.
There is a place of full release
A place full of joy and peace . . .
As so often before, I marveled at the dense lie of his hair, thick and shining as an otter's. Why is it old men and small boys always look so vulnerable from behind? Today, he seemed to belong to both categories. There was something engagingly innocent about the way he clutched his wife's hand throughout the prayers and sermon, and about his glance at her for approval when the preacher asked him to speak. Innocent, yet also strange: I had not seen him so dependent before. For the first time, I wondered if there was something wrong with him.
He spoke well enough, in his patented hesitant husk: "My brother and I were started off in the Christian Church by our mother, here in Tampico. I'm afraid I can't . . . uh, tell if this was the same building we-"
I nodded violently at him, over Nancy's coiffure, but he did not see me.
"Reason is, that was about seventy years ago. But I can't describe the feeling of being back here in my birthplace. Really, there are no words."
These were his standard clichés to express emotion required of him, but I looked around and saw many eyes fill with tears. Reagan checked too: the old actor counting the house. Satisfied, he ambled back to his pew, and we sang "That Old Rugged Cross."
After the service, we adjourned to the Birthplace, which was cordoned off for privacy. A voluble and energetic little lady led the returning pilgrim upstairs. I crowded close behind, not wanting to miss a moment of this récherche du temps perdu.
Only when it happened-a door thrown open, a threshold crossed, two windows full of sun, and then another, darker threshold-did I realize that none of us had anticipated its impact. "This, Mr. President," the little lady said, pointing matter-of-factly at a bed, "is where you were born."
Sixty years of public life had taught Ronald Reagan how to react. But these words were so sudden, the room so small, and the bed in its cramped corner so lumpishly there, that if a reproduction of Courbet's Origin of the World had hung over the headboard, he could not have been more shocked. I heard him suck in his breath. He swiveled on his heel, almost treading me down, and began to tell jokes.
Later, over lunch at the "Dutch Diner" down the street (named, oddly enough, not after Ronald Reagan, but after the Mennonite women who run it), a delayed reaction set in. He showed no interest in what I tried to tell him about the events of eighty years ago in Tampico. Instead, he took refuge in his own stories about Hollywood, stories we had all heard a hundred times, except now he left out whole sections without noticing, while Nancy picked at her salad, her face a mask.
Listening to him, I asked myself who of us, forced so brutally to confront the nothingness from which we have sprung, would not have turned away as he did, knowing it to be indistinguishable from-indeed, identical with-the nothingness that looms ahead?
"Don't blame me, this was Mike Deaver's idea," said Robert Tuttle, White House director of personnel, when I assumed the dread title of Authorized Biographer. "We were playing tennis one day, and I told Mike, 'What the President needs is an in-house historian.' He said, 'Don't worry, it's already done.' "
"Except it wasn't, Bob. I said no after the Hatfield dinner. I'm not a historian."
"Well, we thought you were. Couldn't understand why you hesitated so long."
PROLOGUE
Dutch
By EDMUND MORRIS
Random House
Read the Review
"For heaven's sakes!"
He holds the speckled leaf in his hand, caressing its green patches with his sharp, scarred thumb. The Oval Office is so silent I hope that the dry whisper of that caress will register on my tape recorder. "Direct from Lowell Park," I say. "Remember that big oak tree you used to sit under, when you were a lifeguard?"
He tilts his head at me, mildly amused but wary. Most public yet most private of men, he does not welcome undue familiarity with his past. I have never forgotten the blue anger that came into his eyes (no aquamarine flash like Jimmy Carter's, but a sort of dark flicker, like the inner flame of a candle) when I boasted that I had tracked down his first fiancée. "Oh, you found out about her, huh." It was a statement rather than a question-Ronald Reagan hardly ever used the interrogative form-signaling, for all its tone of polite interest, his resentment at being surprised, and his disinclination to hear another word about the preacher's daughter he once wanted to marry.
I should have kept my research to myself. Yet for sheer pleasure at having tracked down former intimates, I could never resist beginning an interview with, "Guess what-Glen Claussen's still alive. He gave me this photograph of you singing barbershop quartet!" or, "Joy Hodges says, 'Love to Dutch.' " I would pause for a reaction, but-unless you call a practiced chuckle reactive-always in vain. Perhaps his youthful readings in Calvin Coolidge taught him not to encourage interlocutors. It only winds them up for twenty minutes more. Even as a teenager, he had taken no personal interest in people. They were, and remained, a faceless audience to his perpetual performance.
Of course, if I said something like, "Mr. President, your old friend Pee Wee seems to be dying," he would bow his head in appropriate sorrow-checking, meanwhile, the schedule lying crisp before him:
1:30 pm Personal Staff Time
2:00 pm Pre-News Conference Briefing
3:30 pm Taping Session
Perhaps because today's show-and-tell has vegetal rather than human associations, his moment of wariness passes. "That was in front of the little bath house," he says, speaking more to the leaf than to me. He is back under his favorite oak, sixty summers ago, his hot damp swimsuit unlooped from his shoulders and dropped to his taut stomach, leaving behind a pale ghost of itself. The river has "closed" for lunch, and he is eating a hamburger and reading Edgar Rice Burroughs. At about the age of one thousand years, they go voluntarily upon their last strange pilgrimage down the river Iss, which leads no living Martian knows whither and from whose bosom no Martian has ever returned.
That hard, splendid body, those bruising arms and knees, the prickle of wet wool are so manifest that I can feel them-as one skinny-dipper did on August 2, 1928, in the nocturnal rescue that gave "Dutch" Reagan his first newspaper headline. pulled from the jaws of death. A sudden empathy with the drowning boy (who gave his name as James Raider) makes me want to retch, as if the Rock River's brackish waters are in my nose and throat, and my consciousness, too, swirling.
"Mr. President, when you-"
I am in such a frenzy that I have forgotten he is still addressing himself to the leaf. Our voices collide; his soft husk arrests my stammer. "There was a walkway," Reagan says. "And then a square on the end with a slide on it, and a diving board, and uh, a low-level thing along one side. . . ." He glances at me smiling, head cocked. The gray-blue eyes go from gloss to semigloss, and he returns the leaf. "Well, I'll be darned." We are back in the present.
I know now I'll never tell him. No wonder Ronald Reagan embraced the Strategic Defense Initiative-cosmic deflection is his game! Research memo: look for the notion of a space-shield in Burroughs science fiction. Doesn't Princess of Mars have a dome of bombproof glass, five feet thick?
Half an hour later, I emerge from the Oval Office, asking myself for the hundredth time, "How much does Dutch really know?"
There was no sign of recognition when I first saw him in the White House, at a state dinner in August 1981. Nor did he know me (although he pretended to) when I sat next to him fourteen months later, at a lunch with members of the Theodore Roosevelt Association. He again showed no sign of familiarity on Saint Valentine's Day 1983, when Senator Mark Hatfield invited a group of biographers to dine with the Reagans in Georgetown. I was not surprised. The President met an average of eighty people a day; he must long since have stopped relating handshakes to faces.
He certainly lit up, though, when Hatfield introduced me as the author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. "Oh!" he breathed, warmly resting his left hand on my right hand engulfed in his other hand, "I read that. And Nancy was reading your wife's book about, uh-"
"Edith Kermit Roosevelt, sir."
"Yes. Those first few months in the White House, we would lay in bed and read 'em side by side!" He waited for me to express appreciation, then winked and turned to Frank Freidel. Happiness suffused my heart.
I watched Frank melting under similar treatment, then Daniel J. Boorstin and George Nash and the rest of our company. The President had a perfectly prepared quip for each man, a beam of sexless affection for each woman. We were all seduced, with the exception of Arthur S. Link, Ph.D., George Harding Davis '86 Professor of American History at Princeton University. Reagan grasped his disapproving Democratic hand. "Well, hello-" Link bent stiffly forward, craggy and crabbed, bowed by the erudition of forty-two consecutive volumes of The Papers of Woodrow Wilson. His detestation of the Gipper was legendary in academe. Some of us had taken bets that Arthur would not show up. But show he had, in the teeth of a snowstorm, out of courtesy to Senator Hatfield.
For a moment, his silver crew cut bristled inches from Reagan's chin. I braced for an upward jerk and thud. But then he straightened and tried to smile-a mirthless iguana gape. Reagan, nodding kindly, moved on to the butler.
Something about the back of the President's neck, as he ordered a vodka and orange, told me he sensed Link's stiffness, and was figuring how to deal with it. He had been the same at college, at Warner Bros., in the Army, on the road for GE in the Fifties: always the Actor, determined at all costs to captivate every person in the room. Compared with some of the more formidable dyspeptics he had beguiled-Eamon De Valera, Charles de Gaulle, and Chiang Kai-shek, to name but three-Link was easy meat.
It took him no more than twenty minutes, once we had sat down at Mrs. Hatfield's round table, ornamented with bulbous red plastic hearts. I noticed he kept beaming at Arthur. Rubicund from his cocktail, big, broad, lustrous with power, he exuded what Walter Pater called the "charm of an exquisite character, felt in some way to be inseparable from his person." The iguana began to cackle in spite of itself at the flow of his jokes. Who could help laugh, when Reagan himself laughed so irresistibly?
Arthur, being something of an expert on sequitur, must have noticed how each joke adapted to the conversation, how quickly and lightly the words spooled out, every punch line dropping like a fly on the stream. Joke-telling requires a special kind of intelligence, as anyone knows who has tried to write one out: a few syllables too many, a vital phrase misstated, and the humor dies. Reagan lacked wit-he was too cautious to risk repartee-and many of his jokes were hoary, but one could only marvel at their apparent spontaneity.
He grew serious when the conversation turned to a President's responsibility to endow posterity with personal documents. Whatever we recommended for the record, he said, he would do faithfully. But he doubted that details about himself as a man would interest any-body, now or in the future. "I still look over my shoulder when I'm, you know, walking out of the White House and the Marines are saluting and all, and I say, 'Who-me?' "
This was too much for Arthur, who by now was gazing at Reagan misty-eyed. "Mr. President!" he roared, almost sobbing with adoration. "Six hundred years from now, historians will still be fascinated by your manuscripts!" (I had a vision of scholarly lasers, programmed for Freudian clues, scanning Dutch's diaries without so much as a beep.) Arthur, rambling on, would not be stopped until he had begged the President and Mrs. Reagan to preserve their billets-doux. "Imagine what would have happened if Mrs. Wilson had burned those wonderful love letters Woodrow wrote her. How little we would know of his passionate humanity!"
There was nothing to do but let rapture run its course. Reagan sat listening, content at having prevailed once again over a potential enemy. The rest of us twirled our wineglasses and wondered what kind of ideological hangover Arthur was going to have in the morning.
Throughout the seventy minutes we stayed at the table, I was aware of Mrs. Reagan's stare, as a scuba diver in dark water senses two large, pale, accompanying jellyfish. I braced myself to glance at her: she gave a thin return of smile before looking away.
"And then along came Nancy Davis," said Reagan, "and saved my soul."
He was talking about 1949, his annus horribilis, when in the space of a few months he had found himself alone, aging, divorced, unemployed, upstaged in his last picture, and on crutches, nursing a shattered leg. There was a respectful silence while he gazed at his savior. Her eyes glittered with tears, perfectly on cue.
Hokey, yes, but I could not help being moved. The President's adoration of this brittle little woman warmed the room to such an extent that Mrs. Hatfield, draining her champagne, launched into a monologue on the subject of Love that had us all checking our watches. Only Reagan, with his bear's appetite for honeyed sentiment, seemed sorry when her speech, and with it the evening, came to an end.
"I'm going to ask only one favor from you scholars in exchange for this dinner," Senator Hatfield said after the Reagans had left. "Each of you must send me an account of what you've heard and seen tonight."
I wrote some pages from an imaginary History of the United States in the Late Twentieth Century. Its general tone was whimsical, aside from this mention of a proposal by the Librarian of Congress:
. . . that Reagan appoint to his staff a historian trained to sense the long-term significance of events. Presidents, Dr. Boorstin remarked, are often unaware that their most cherished "achievements" might be judged insignificant by posterity, while others, hardly noticed at the time, blossom later to major importance. If the drama of the moment-a gala for the doomed Sadat, a visit to the Berlin Wall-can be captured by an official photographer, then why not also by an official chronicler? "As Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee," Hatfield interrupted with a grin, "I'll see you get the necessary funds."
After quoting Arthur Link's outburst about the "passionate humanity" of Woodrow Wilson, I concluded:
Implicit in that remark was the suggestion that Reagan's own humanity, unchronicled, might fade faster than any other feature of his Presidency; that in the end what chiefly survives, or should survive, of any Chief Executive is the quality of his personality. Presidents, whatever their political symbolism, represent the national character of their era, and if we do not understand our leaders as people, we can never understand ourselves as Americans.
It was not until some time afterward that I learned that the real purpose of the Hatfield dinner had been to set me up as Reagan's "chronicler." So that was why Mrs. Reagan had stared so hard over her volaille de poulet aux champignons. That was why Richard Darman, the Administration's resident intellectual, had invited me to the White House for a follow-up discussion. Presumably, I was expected to offer my pen to the Reagan Revolution.
I didn't. I was at work on another volume of the life of Theodore Roosevelt, and had reason enough to keep my distance. Ironia ironorum, that I of all people should be charged with rescuing the old Lifeguard from the chill current of history!
Nine years later, however, I found myself literally escorting him back to his origins in Tampico, Illinois. He was President no longer, and had been seized by a sudden, senescent desire to visit, for the first time since 1911, what was now grandly called the Ronald Reagan Birthplace Museum. I walked down Main Street with him and Nancy, feeling transcendentally strange. An odd, Dantesque reversal of roles had occurred, as if I were now the leader rather than the led.
"Mr. President," I said, "you don't have to pretend you remember this place. You were only three months old when your parents checked out of number 111."
"Yes. We went to live over the store where my father worked. H. C. Pitney's General Store."
"No, that was in 1919, when you returned here from Monmouth. In May 1911, the Tampico Tornado reported that your parents had moved with their new baby to the Burden house, south of the depot."
I pointed down the one-block street, beyond the little crowd restrained by a police car, and across the tracks. "You can't see it because of the wheat elevator, but it's the house of your first memories."
"Are we going to visit?"
"I think they want us to go to church first, sir, and then go through the museum here."
Docile as ever, he nodded. I did not add that the current occupants of the white, double-story house had no desire to welcome him. Judging by the number of major appliances on the stoop, they were not Reagan Republicans.
Sunday-morning sunbeams streamed through the windows of the Christian Church. He sat immediately in front of me while the organ fluted "What a Friend We Have in Jesus," and Whiteside County's Disciples of Christ-a corn-fed lot-squeezed themselves into adjoining pews. I leaned forward and said, "Just think, Mr. President, if your father had gotten you baptized in Saint Mary's, we'd be attending eleven o'clock mass."
He chuckled and whispered conspiratorially, "Bells and smells."
We sang number 270 in the hymnal. It occurred to me that I had never heard him sing, apart from his execrable rendering of "They Fly Through the Air with the Greatest of Ease" in International Squadron (1942). So I leaned forward and was surprised by the sweetness of his breathy light baritone. Unlike most public worshipers, he sang without a trace of self-consciousness, quietly, almost to himself.
There is a place of full release
A place full of joy and peace . . .
As so often before, I marveled at the dense lie of his hair, thick and shining as an otter's. Why is it old men and small boys always look so vulnerable from behind? Today, he seemed to belong to both categories. There was something engagingly innocent about the way he clutched his wife's hand throughout the prayers and sermon, and about his glance at her for approval when the preacher asked him to speak. Innocent, yet also strange: I had not seen him so dependent before. For the first time, I wondered if there was something wrong with him.
He spoke well enough, in his patented hesitant husk: "My brother and I were started off in the Christian Church by our mother, here in Tampico. I'm afraid I can't . . . uh, tell if this was the same building we-"
I nodded violently at him, over Nancy's coiffure, but he did not see me.
"Reason is, that was about seventy years ago. But I can't describe the feeling of being back here in my birthplace. Really, there are no words."
These were his standard clichés to express emotion required of him, but I looked around and saw many eyes fill with tears. Reagan checked too: the old actor counting the house. Satisfied, he ambled back to his pew, and we sang "That Old Rugged Cross."
After the service, we adjourned to the Birthplace, which was cordoned off for privacy. A voluble and energetic little lady led the returning pilgrim upstairs. I crowded close behind, not wanting to miss a moment of this récherche du temps perdu.
Only when it happened-a door thrown open, a threshold crossed, two windows full of sun, and then another, darker threshold-did I realize that none of us had anticipated its impact. "This, Mr. President," the little lady said, pointing matter-of-factly at a bed, "is where you were born."
Sixty years of public life had taught Ronald Reagan how to react. But these words were so sudden, the room so small, and the bed in its cramped corner so lumpishly there, that if a reproduction of Courbet's Origin of the World had hung over the headboard, he could not have been more shocked. I heard him suck in his breath. He swiveled on his heel, almost treading me down, and began to tell jokes.
Later, over lunch at the "Dutch Diner" down the street (named, oddly enough, not after Ronald Reagan, but after the Mennonite women who run it), a delayed reaction set in. He showed no interest in what I tried to tell him about the events of eighty years ago in Tampico. Instead, he took refuge in his own stories about Hollywood, stories we had all heard a hundred times, except now he left out whole sections without noticing, while Nancy picked at her salad, her face a mask.
Listening to him, I asked myself who of us, forced so brutally to confront the nothingness from which we have sprung, would not have turned away as he did, knowing it to be indistinguishable from-indeed, identical with-the nothingness that looms ahead?
"Don't blame me, this was Mike Deaver's idea," said Robert Tuttle, White House director of personnel, when I assumed the dread title of Authorized Biographer. "We were playing tennis one day, and I told Mike, 'What the President needs is an in-house historian.' He said, 'Don't worry, it's already done.' "
"Except it wasn't, Bob. I said no after the Hatfield dinner. I'm not a historian."
"Well, we thought you were. Couldn't understand why you hesitated so long."
Sunday, March 15, 2009
QUOTES, DON'T MISS THIS COLLECTION OF QUOTES
All real Americans love the sting of battle.
-PATTON
Greed is good. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.
---OLIVER STONE
Of course I'm happy. That shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.
---Bob Dylan
It has served us well, this myth of Christ
---Pope Leo x (Giovanni de' Medici)
Surely you can't be serious.
I am serious... and don't call me Shirley
---AIRPLANE
I must pause for one fast second and say a fast word about oral contraception. I was involved in an extremely good example of oral contraception two weeks ago. I asked a girl to go to bed with me, and she said "No".
---Woody Allen
Nearly every man who develops an idea works it up to the point where it looks impossible, and then he gets discouraged. That's not the place to become discouraged. But keep your day job.
---Thomas A. Edison
If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.
— "A Nation at Risk" (1983)
Never marry a man who has no friends. I am always amazed at the number of men I have counseled who have no friends.
---Father Pat Connor
In the second year of the great civil war, when the Irish brigades marched through the streets, New york was a city full of tribes. War chiefs, rich and poor. It wasn't a city really, It was more a furnace where cities someday might be forged.
---GANGS OF NEW YORK
For conservatives, seeing is believing; for liberals, believing is seeing.
---George F. Will
Crack that whip
Give the past the slip
-DEVO
Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind. Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works.
Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind.
---WALLSTREET
And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.
From the Oliver Stone film Wall Street 1980
Read by Michael Douglas
Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. You not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
---C. S. Lewis Grief
San Francisco in 1966 was what the whole young and popular world would be doing Saturday nights if the Nazis had won the war. It was the Sixth Reich.
---FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS
Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.
---Thomas Jefferson
... These guys are proud of what they did. They did Dealey Plaza! They took out the President of the United States! That's entertainment!
FERRIE Oh man, why don't you stop. This is too fuckin' big for you! Who did Kennedy? It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma. Even the shooters don't fuckin' know! Don't you get it yet? I can't be talking like this. They're gonna kill me. I'm gonna die! (he sits down, cracking, sobbing) I don't know what happened. All I wanted in the world was to be a Catholic priest - live in a monastery, study ancient Latin manuscripts, pray, serve God. But I had this one terrible, fatal weakness. They defrocked me. And then I started to lose everything.
---JFK
JIM GARRISON ... some story ... the whole thing. It's like it never happened.
DONALD SOUTHERN It never did.
---JFK
Kilgore (Robert Duval) stands there, hands on hips, looking at the burning jungle in the distance.
KILGORE
You smell that? Do you smell that?
LANCE
What?
KILGORE
(pointing to trees)
Napalm, son. Nothing else in the
world smells like that.
(crouches down)
I love the smell of napalm in the
morning. You know, one time we
had a hill bombed for twelve
hours...and when it was all over,
I walked up. We didn't find one
of them, not one stinking dink
body. The smell, you know that
gasoline smell? The whole hill-
smelled like-victory.
He looks of nostalgically. A shell comes in and HITS in the background. Willard and the soldiers react; Kilgore ignores it.
KILGORE
Someday this war's gonna end.
---APOCALYPSE NOW
This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims.
---Matthew Arnold
For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still.
---John Maynard Keynes
A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
---H. L. Mencken
EISENHOWER
The conjunction of an immense military
establishment and a large arms industry is new
in the American experience. The total influence
- economic, political, even spiritual - is felt
in every city, every statehouse, every office of
the Federal Government ... In the councils of
government we must guard against the acquisition
of unwarranted influence, whether sought or
unsought, by the military industrial complex.
The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist ... We
must never let the weight of this combination
endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
We should take nothing for granted ...
Badges? We ain't got no badges.
We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges.
But, I'm funny how? Funny like a clown? I amuse you? I make you laugh? I'm here to fuckin' amuse you?
---GOODFELLAS
Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country
My father made him an offer he couldn't refuse.. .
Luca Brasi held a gun to his head, and my father assured him,
that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract.
Butch: What're you looking at, friend?
Vincent: I ain't your friend, palooka.
Butch: What did you say?
Vincent: I think you heard me just fine, punchy.
What we got here is failure to communicate
--COOL HAND LUKE
I'm so rich, I wish I had a dime for every dime I had.
---ARTHUR
Butch: What're you looking at, friend?
Vincent: I ain't your friend, palooka.
Butch: What did you say?
Vincent: I think you heard me just fine punchy.
---PULP FICTION
Badges? We ain't got no badges.
We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges.
---THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE 1948
It's his ship now, his command. He's in charge, the boss, the head man, top dog, big cheese, head honcho, number one
---AIRPLANE
The spider spinning his web for the unwary fly.
The blood is the life, Mr. Renfield
---DRACULA 1931
But, I'm funny how? Funny like a clown? I amuse you? I make you laugh? I'm here to fuckin' amuse you?
---GOODFELLAS
It's a Sicilian message. It means Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.
Don Corleone, I am honored and grateful that you have invited me to your daughter... 's wedding... on the day of your daughter's wedding. And I hope their first child will be a masculine child.
Someday, and that day may never come,
I'll call upon you to do a service for me.
Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country
My father made him an offer he couldn't refuse.. .
Luca Brasi held a gun to his head, and my father assured him,
that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract.
I'm so rich, I wish I had a dime for every dime I had.
---THE GODFATHER
Paternalism is the restriction of freedom for the good of the person restricted.
---George F will
Now, I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.
Men, all this stuff you've heard about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war is a lot of horse dung. Americans traditionally love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle.
---PATTON (GEORGE C. SCOTT)
Hamburgers. The cornerstone of any nutritious breakfast
---PULP FICTION
The world is full of complainers.
But the fact is, nothing comes with
a guarantee. I don't care if you're
the Pope of Rome, President of the
United States, or even Man of the
Year--something can always go wrong.
And go ahead, complain, tell your
problems to your neighbor, ask for
help--watch him fly. Now in Russia,
they got it mapped out so that
everyone pulls for everyone else--
that's the theory, anyway. But what
I know about is Texas..and down here
you're on your own.
---BLOOD SIMPLE
I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.
---SCARFACE
-PATTON
Greed is good. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.
---OLIVER STONE
Of course I'm happy. That shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.
---Bob Dylan
It has served us well, this myth of Christ
---Pope Leo x (Giovanni de' Medici)
Surely you can't be serious.
I am serious... and don't call me Shirley
---AIRPLANE
I must pause for one fast second and say a fast word about oral contraception. I was involved in an extremely good example of oral contraception two weeks ago. I asked a girl to go to bed with me, and she said "No".
---Woody Allen
Nearly every man who develops an idea works it up to the point where it looks impossible, and then he gets discouraged. That's not the place to become discouraged. But keep your day job.
---Thomas A. Edison
If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.
— "A Nation at Risk" (1983)
Never marry a man who has no friends. I am always amazed at the number of men I have counseled who have no friends.
---Father Pat Connor
In the second year of the great civil war, when the Irish brigades marched through the streets, New york was a city full of tribes. War chiefs, rich and poor. It wasn't a city really, It was more a furnace where cities someday might be forged.
---GANGS OF NEW YORK
For conservatives, seeing is believing; for liberals, believing is seeing.
---George F. Will
Crack that whip
Give the past the slip
-DEVO
Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind. Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works.
Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind.
---WALLSTREET
And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.
From the Oliver Stone film Wall Street 1980
Read by Michael Douglas
Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. You not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
---C. S. Lewis Grief
San Francisco in 1966 was what the whole young and popular world would be doing Saturday nights if the Nazis had won the war. It was the Sixth Reich.
---FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS
Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.
---Thomas Jefferson
... These guys are proud of what they did. They did Dealey Plaza! They took out the President of the United States! That's entertainment!
FERRIE Oh man, why don't you stop. This is too fuckin' big for you! Who did Kennedy? It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma. Even the shooters don't fuckin' know! Don't you get it yet? I can't be talking like this. They're gonna kill me. I'm gonna die! (he sits down, cracking, sobbing) I don't know what happened. All I wanted in the world was to be a Catholic priest - live in a monastery, study ancient Latin manuscripts, pray, serve God. But I had this one terrible, fatal weakness. They defrocked me. And then I started to lose everything.
---JFK
JIM GARRISON ... some story ... the whole thing. It's like it never happened.
DONALD SOUTHERN It never did.
---JFK
Kilgore (Robert Duval) stands there, hands on hips, looking at the burning jungle in the distance.
KILGORE
You smell that? Do you smell that?
LANCE
What?
KILGORE
(pointing to trees)
Napalm, son. Nothing else in the
world smells like that.
(crouches down)
I love the smell of napalm in the
morning. You know, one time we
had a hill bombed for twelve
hours...and when it was all over,
I walked up. We didn't find one
of them, not one stinking dink
body. The smell, you know that
gasoline smell? The whole hill-
smelled like-victory.
He looks of nostalgically. A shell comes in and HITS in the background. Willard and the soldiers react; Kilgore ignores it.
KILGORE
Someday this war's gonna end.
---APOCALYPSE NOW
This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims.
---Matthew Arnold
For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still.
---John Maynard Keynes
A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
---H. L. Mencken
EISENHOWER
The conjunction of an immense military
establishment and a large arms industry is new
in the American experience. The total influence
- economic, political, even spiritual - is felt
in every city, every statehouse, every office of
the Federal Government ... In the councils of
government we must guard against the acquisition
of unwarranted influence, whether sought or
unsought, by the military industrial complex.
The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist ... We
must never let the weight of this combination
endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
We should take nothing for granted ...
Badges? We ain't got no badges.
We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges.
But, I'm funny how? Funny like a clown? I amuse you? I make you laugh? I'm here to fuckin' amuse you?
---GOODFELLAS
Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country
My father made him an offer he couldn't refuse.. .
Luca Brasi held a gun to his head, and my father assured him,
that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract.
Butch: What're you looking at, friend?
Vincent: I ain't your friend, palooka.
Butch: What did you say?
Vincent: I think you heard me just fine, punchy.
What we got here is failure to communicate
--COOL HAND LUKE
I'm so rich, I wish I had a dime for every dime I had.
---ARTHUR
Butch: What're you looking at, friend?
Vincent: I ain't your friend, palooka.
Butch: What did you say?
Vincent: I think you heard me just fine punchy.
---PULP FICTION
Badges? We ain't got no badges.
We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges.
---THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE 1948
It's his ship now, his command. He's in charge, the boss, the head man, top dog, big cheese, head honcho, number one
---AIRPLANE
The spider spinning his web for the unwary fly.
The blood is the life, Mr. Renfield
---DRACULA 1931
But, I'm funny how? Funny like a clown? I amuse you? I make you laugh? I'm here to fuckin' amuse you?
---GOODFELLAS
It's a Sicilian message. It means Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.
Don Corleone, I am honored and grateful that you have invited me to your daughter... 's wedding... on the day of your daughter's wedding. And I hope their first child will be a masculine child.
Someday, and that day may never come,
I'll call upon you to do a service for me.
Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country
My father made him an offer he couldn't refuse.. .
Luca Brasi held a gun to his head, and my father assured him,
that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract.
I'm so rich, I wish I had a dime for every dime I had.
---THE GODFATHER
Paternalism is the restriction of freedom for the good of the person restricted.
---George F will
Now, I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.
Men, all this stuff you've heard about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war is a lot of horse dung. Americans traditionally love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle.
---PATTON (GEORGE C. SCOTT)
Hamburgers. The cornerstone of any nutritious breakfast
---PULP FICTION
The world is full of complainers.
But the fact is, nothing comes with
a guarantee. I don't care if you're
the Pope of Rome, President of the
United States, or even Man of the
Year--something can always go wrong.
And go ahead, complain, tell your
problems to your neighbor, ask for
help--watch him fly. Now in Russia,
they got it mapped out so that
everyone pulls for everyone else--
that's the theory, anyway. But what
I know about is Texas..and down here
you're on your own.
---BLOOD SIMPLE
I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.
---SCARFACE
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