Nicholas von Hoffman, who has died at the age of 88, streaked across the journalistic sky in the 1970s like a comet. From the pages of The Washington Post, he shined in a way that no journalist had done on any paper since H.L. Mencken in The Baltimore Sun in the early 20th Century.

Nick, as he was called, burst onto the pages of The Post’s Style section in a way that was unique. At that time, the section itself was novel and about to be copied across the country.

People lined up to buy The Post to be entertained, to be outraged, to be titillated, but mostly to see what the mad wordsmith devil was up to that day. Nick used words to create explosive devices, which he lobbed from the pages of the paper with awesome effect.

He was my colleague at The Post and he proved that the page, any page in any newspaper, can come alive with great writing; in Nick’s case, combative stuff that took no prisoners, favored none and offended all. If you read him long enough, eventually you would be outraged. It was so exquisitely abusive, so willfully offensive that The Post had to hire security personnel to sort the mail: It contained dead animals, feces, razor blades and possibly poison.

Nick was not the perfect journalist. The serious people in the journalism schools would not cite him, I imagine, as a model. His facts were chosen to accommodate his point of view that day.

He said he was a “radical journalist”. He had worked for Saul Alinsky, the admired and reviled Chicago community organizer. Criticizing the high cost of medicine, Nick wrote that if you stare at the sign of the Hippocratic oath it will morph into a dollar sign.

Nick did not go to college, but he had a deep knowledge and love of language. He was, well, a poseur, a literary exhibitionist and a controversialist.

He did not let the facts stand in the way of a great rant. He skewered Republicans and Democrats alike, calling the Republican minority leader in the Senate, Everett Dirksen, of Illinois, “a piece of American political bric-a-brac.” The Democratic Party, he wrote ,“to its committed members was still the party of heart, humanity and justice, but to those removed a few paces it looked like a Captain Hook’s crew of ambulance-chasing lawyers, rapacious public-policy grants persons, civil rights gamesmen, ditzy-brained movie stars, fat-assed civil servant desk squatters, recovering alcoholics, recovering wife-beaters, recovering child-buggers, and so forth and so on: a grotesque lineup of ill-mannered, self-pitying, caterwauling freeloaders, banging their tin cups on the pavement demanding handouts.”

He was fired from CBS’s 60 Minutes for likening Richard Nixon, during the last days of his presidency, to a dead mouse on a kitchen floor, waiting for someone to take it by the tail and throw it in the garbage.

Yes, Nick was reprehensible. And I loved him. I loved him for his outrageousness and his hatred of cant. I loved his personal insouciance and his extraordinary literary skill. But most of all, I loved him because he made the pages of newspapers thrilling and unmissable: the place to have your nose buried first thing in the morning. Thanks, Nick.

Comfort Dogs Brought Up Short by the Airlines

Doggone, but it was nice while it lasted.

I refer to the number of dogs you saw in the airports during the last holiday season. People had simply declared their dogs “comfort dogs.” Quite right. Every dog is a comfort dog. I have never had a dog that was not a comfort. They are the great reliable comfort in human life, bar none, I might add.

But I read that the airlines, appalled at the sheer number of canines traveling, are going to try and limit the number of comfort dogs to those of the truly sick, blind and otherwise incapacitated. It makes me heartsick.

By the way, dogs love to fly. I used to take my Siberian Husky flying, back in my private pilot days. He loved it, except for landing: He was upset by the ground rushing up. No fool he.

The Things They Say

“There comes a time to join the side you’re on.” — Midge Decter, journalist

In announcing import tariffs on solar panels of 30 percent, President Trump appears, as often, to be taking a hammer to fix a watch: If it doesn’t break, it might start running again. In the case of the solar industry he won’t break it, but he might cause it to miss a beat or two.

Solar is one of the great success stories. It is a fast-growing industry, which is adding more jobs — mostly in installation — than any other economic sector. It is, as they say, on a roll.

The big mission for solar is carbon-free electricity on rooftops, at electric utilities and in the facilities of companies like Google, Apple and Walmart, which want to be colored green. Other uses include autonomous generators for remote locations.

The idea of using the sun’s energy in various things is not new. In Botswana, for example, a few black pipes placed on a roof have provided hot water probably since the 1920s. I first saw them there in the 1960s.

After the 1973 oil crisis, solar was examined seriously in the United States as a power source. Various ideas were afoot. The favored one was to create “farms” of mirrors aimed at a central tower with a boiler. One such installation was at the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M.; a larger demonstration plant was built in Barstow, Calif.

But it was science that made the difference, much of it done in the Department of Energy’s national laboratories. The solar cell, pioneered at Bell Laboratories and used for space exploration, was the ticket. The direct conversion of sunlight into electricity opened the floodgates of possibility. Whoosh!

Early in the solar story, the technology was regarded as fanciful by the electric industry, which favored coal and nuclear. But as prices have fallen, enthusiasm has risen and now solar and wind are hot tickets in the electricity stakes. Germany has more deployed solar than any other country, but deployment is aflame worldwide. When better batteries or other storage devices come on the market, solar will get a second boost.

Like many technologies pioneered in the United States, solar cell and panel manufacturing has moved to Asia. China is playing a dominant manufacturing role with factories on the mainland and other countries, including Taiwan and Vietnam.

Industry calculates that the immediate effect of Trump’s tariffs will be to cut the rate of deployment and cost jobs. The Solar Energy Industries Association calculates 23,000 jobs will go this year.

But solar will begin to adjust, probably with more Chinese factories being established in the United States. This is how the Japanese car manufacturers dealt with tariffs.

Interestingly, the two companies that filed complaints to the U.S. International Trade Commission, resulting in the Trump tariff hike, are both foreign-owned. Atlanta-based Suniva is mostly Chinese-owned and Hillsboro, Ore.-based SolarWorld is German-owned.

More interesting is the Department of Energy’s decision announced by secretary Rick Perry to offer a prize of $3 million for innovation in domestic chip manufacturing. The government, in my experience, does best when it is pulling an industry to achieve a goal and far less well when it is pushing it.

A prize is classic pulling. Aviation prizes offered by newspapers and boosters were early incentives for flight, first across the English Channel and later the Atlantic.

The government saying, “We are going to the moon. You help us get there” works far better than giving aerospace contractors a bunch of money in the 1960s and saying, “Try to get to the moon.”

With its solar actions of a tariff and a prize-incentive, the Trump administration is both pushing and pulling.

Great Drama at The Washington Post Caught by Spielberg

I read somewhere that director Steven Spielberg says he does not read books. However Spielberg gets his information, he has gotten the newspaper trade right, very right in “The Post.”

It is one of the best films about the inside workings of a newspaper.

It involves the decision, reached between the publisher of The Washington Post and its editor in June 1971, to publish the collection of secret documents detailing the hopelessness of the Vietnam War from 1964 onward. Collectively, these are known as the Pentagon Papers. They showed conclusively that the government had always known that the war was a losing proposition and covered it up.

They also, it must be said, showed that the media, for all the reporters crawling over South Vietnam, did not know what the government knew. The story was missed.

This is a film apposite for our time, both as an illustration of the duplicity of governments, in this case under Democratic and Republican administrations (Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon), and the key role of a free press in checking government.

It is also a shot in the arm for the newspaper trade, which is under attack frontally from President Trump and his merry band of besmirches and from financial undermining, occasioned by the flight of advertisers to the internet.

This is a work that is not only fine entertainment but also incredibly accurate. I can make that statement because I was working at The Washington Post at the time and I knew the protagonists, Ben Bradlee, the storied editor and his publisher, Katharine Graham.

Watching this film I marveled at how much Tom Hanks looked like Bradlee, given he was a little heavier than Bradlee, who delighted in looking like David Niven playing a jewel thief in the South of France. Graham, always called “Mrs. Graham,” is very well replicated by Meryl Streep, although Graham was a little taller and maybe a smidgeon more imperial.

It is Hanks’ portrayal of Bradlee that floored me. He is Bradlee, the boulevardier who used profanity as a tool and could drop an expletive as though it were a precision-guided munition.

Graham and Bradlee risked prison to publish the papers, as did editor Abe Rosenthal and publisher Arthur Sulzberger at The New York Times. You will come out of this movie feeling good about the First Amendment, good about newspapers, bad about governments.

You will be very glad the film industry has a talent as great as Spielberg.

A lesser director might have settled for getting Graham and Bradlee right, but Rosenthal and Ben Bagdikian, The Post’s national editor, too? That is meticulous.

Even the atmosphere of the composing room, back when linotype machines clattered and skilled fingers spaced and secured the little lines of type, is authentic.

Hot-type aficionados, like me, rejoice.

Those were the days. And this is the movie.

 

The Night Paul Bocuse Messed Up

Paul Bocuse, widely described as the most important chef of the last century, has died at 91. He invented nouvelle cuisine, a new form of high French cooking. More fresh produce, lighter sauces and the imaginative pairing of flavors and ingredients marked it. It is reflected in nearly all the fashionable restaurants of today and has influenced chefs around the world.

I was lucky enough to be a guest, along with 11 other diners, at the great man’s legendary restaurant L’Augberge du Pont de Collonges, near Lyon. It was an experience foodies dream about. The restaurant had an open kitchen of the kind that came to be associated with California: You could watch the chefs work.

Bocuse and his wife both stopped by our table.

The food? Exceptional — even though one order got lost. The order just didn’t make it out of the kitchen, and the result was the whole restaurant felt the shame.

When we left one of the captains followed me — thinking that I might be a food writer, which I was not — to apologize. He said simply, “Please believe me, we usually do better.”

Indeed, the great chef did, and in doing so changed the world of fine dining.

When I have told this story to people who know more about Bocuse and his legacy than I do, they tell me I may be the only person who left with an apology: a three-star Michelin apology. I am humbled.

 

The Things They Say

“Facts are better than dreams.” — Winston Churchill

 

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Photo: Washington, DC – July 19, 2017: Inside the Washington Post building. Editorial credit: Nicole S Glass / Shutterstock.com

There are neither enough reporters nor newspapers to cover the great human story of today: the shredding of families to fulfill political goals.

Husbands and fathers are saying goodbye to their American children; and wives and mothers are weeping as they are led away by agents of the U.S. government. They are headed for countries they hardly know and for a future they do know: one of heartache and worry about their loved ones in the United States, and fear for their own survival.

One well-recorded case, thanks to the diligence of local media, was the deportation from Detroit to Mexico of landscaper Jorge Garcia, who was brought to the United States when he was 10 years old. At 39, he was too old to qualify as a “dreamer.”

An Associated Press picture shows him hugging his 15-year-old daughter, 12-year-old son and wife, as she extends her arm to take a parting family photo. There were tears aplenty, but the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had their way and this, to my mind, state-sponsored cruelty went ahead.

If deportation is extended to the innocent dreamers — approximately 800,000 individuals who enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which started in 2012 under President Obama — who have been used mercilessly as political hostages, the horror will be multiplied. ICE agents will round up these kids, who have done nothing wrong, and airports will figuratively be drenched in tears.

Slavery left an indelible stain on America. The deportations will come to be a second stain. Many came to America in chains, now many will leave in them.

Every time I write about deportations, I get abusive emails, like this one in which the writer asked rhetorically, “What is it about ‘illegal’ that you don’t understand?”

To that, I offer this battery of replies:

What is it about innocent that you don’t understand?

What is it that is right about sending human beings into danger and possible death?

Where are the evangelical churches with their professed commitment to “family values”?

When did the tears of children, mothers and fathers lose their capacity to wash away the ink of officialdom?

What is it about laws that is so immutable? Are they not made and revoked all the time?

What is it about America that has caused it to turn its back on immigrants when ancestors, save for Native Americans, came from faraway places without papers but with a desire to escape everything from religious persecution (the Pilgrims), to starvation (the Irish), war and genocide (Jews, Armenians, Rwandans)?

I have always opposed free immigration into the United States and Europe, particularly from a single country. That way you get conquest through migration. Some years ago I argued with a friend, a conservative writer, who took me to task. “We are an immigrant country,” he insisted. He still writes about public affairs, but he is silent on immigration.

Once they, the immigrants, are here, assimilation underway or complete, the equation is changed. They have left their Egypt, crossed their Red Sea and they are here: Americans in all but the paperwork. They deserve to live in peace.

Meanwhile the ICE agents, with their paper authorization and their handcuffs, have about them the whiff of authoritarianism; the crushing power of the state coming down on the individual.

The deportation stain is spreading.

 

 

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Photo Editorial credit: Diego G Diaz / Shutterstock.com. An activist wearing a t-shirt reading “Undocumented and Unafraid” speaks at a rally to protest president Donald Trump’s decision to end DACA in Downtown Portland, Oregon, on September 5th, 2017.

Even in a Race Riot, There Was a Place for Civility

Little things mean a lot and manners mean a great deal. Fifty years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, our national manners about race seems to be fraying.

After King was fatally shot, I was in the thick of the riots in Washington. The one thing I recall with great clarity is — even as shops were being looted and fires set — the rioters paused to be polite to me. Several times men, who were out to destroy or steal as much as they could, ushered me to safety and inquired if I was all right.

In those race riots, there were outbreaks of manners; of people seeing each other as people. Richard Harwood of The Washington Post noticed the same outbreak of politeness and wrote about it.

That is why it is distressing to see socially considerate language deteriorate. It means a deterioration in manners.

In these 50 years, we have come both a long way and not far enough. How we talk about things does matter.

Twenty years ago, while I was hanging out with some Irish television journalists in a bar in Dublin, they began attacking a local newscaster. Nothing unusual there: The writers and producers who write the words spoken on air often resent the newscasters who read them.

They are invariably paid much more than the people who prepare the broadcasts, reap the rewards of celebrity and can be a pain. Remember Ted Baxter in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”?

In a final comment, one of the most senior of the journalists declared, “Let’s face it, he’s just a Protestant prick!” This remark gave me a start and made me glad that I was naturalized American. We might call someone names in America, but we would not drag in religious affiliation.

In Washington, at the venerable National Press Club, another little shocker. A Malaysian publisher, discussing the dominant position of the Chinese minority in his country, said in a voice so loud that other guests looked around, “The only straight thing about a Chinaman is his hair.” We would neither say nor think that.

A small thing, words and the related manners they codify, but they set the tone. We scatter the words and they grow into attitude and policy.

In my own negotiations — business negotiations, labor negotiations and news-story negotiations — manners have been an essential part of them. If you have publicly denigrated your opponent before you sit down, you will have traded a position on the high ground for one in the swamp.

So why is President Trump, who fancies himself the deal-maker in chief, the denigrator in chief? Dissing others is like lying; no one will believe anything that comes out of your mouth later. A veracity gap has a permanence about it.

 

The Bad, Sad News from Puerto Rico

I have had a lifelong interest in electricity. As a kid in Africa, I learned the difference between having it and not. It is the difference between living and subsisting, hope and hopelessness.

I read an alarming story in The Intercept, an online news publication, which says that despite more than 1,500 highly experienced emergency workers from the mainland in Puerto Rico, crews are sitting idle while the supplies, which would enable them to get on with the job of restoring power to about 1 million American citizens, are locked away in warehouses.

Yankee can-do is apparently not doing, owing to local incompetence and maybe corruption.

 

The Debate over Embassies: Don’t Lose Track of the Facts

Amid all the outrage and some endorsement of Trump’s moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the fact that the two cities are close to each other got lost. It is a distance of 50 miles and I have traveled it several times in, as I remember, about 40 minutes or less by taxi.

As for the new London embassy, it is on the London Underground in Nine Elms, an up-and-coming area in a dynamic and changing city.

It is not Ye Olde London: Just look at the skyline and marvel.

 

The Things They Say

“It’s not tyranny we desire; it’s just, limited, federal government.” — Alexander Hamilton.

Horace Greeley, founder and editor of The New York Tribune, said, “Go west, young man, and grow with the country.”

In the movie “The Graduate,” Dustin Hoffman is advised to go into “plastics.” Nowadays, young men and women are being advised to go into the “trades”: There’s work for people who can weld, read a grade level, work a lathe or follow site drawings.

There’s a severe shortage of skilled labor, from carpenters to steel fitters. And it’s beginning to be a brake on the economy.

Some are heeding the call. One young man who grew up in San Francisco, call him Jeremy, whose parents are college-educated (his mother is an Ivy League college graduate), has decided he’ll forgo college — although his parents can well afford it — and become a welder. Bravo!

But the road to a happy life through the trades hasn’t been cleared of the debris left by our passion for college degrees. The aspiring young welder and hundreds of thousands of others who’ll be tempted to give up the pleasures of four years in college for the rigors of as many or more years in an apprenticeship will likely find themselves marked for life as “second rate.”

Jeremy can find work aplenty in today’s job market and good wages, too. But he’ll be binding himself to a world where many will look down on him; where the values of his upbringing are scarce in the workplace, with its dictatorial foremen and rough-and-ready society; where he’ll have a sense, ever present, of being low on the social and work totem pole; and where he’ll encounter many closed doors if he wants to leave welding for some other kind of work.

Jeremy or an equivalent young woman, call her Jane, could leave welding as their interest declined or simply because, with the passage of years, he or she couldn’t handle the physical demands of the trade. But what to do? With a wealth of experience, how about teaching? No way with no degree.

Supposing Jane, at age 25, decides that she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life in a world of arcs and acetylene, burns and fumes. She’s young enough to learn to fly and become a pilot. But she’ll never fly for an airline: They require pilots to have a college degree of some sort. Management in a hotel chain? Not as such. They like degrees for anything above housekeeper or waiter.

Jeremy and Jane will come up against the “mortar board ceiling,” as I’ve called it. I know many who’ve bumped up against it. A useless degree from a mediocre college is still better than great life experience when it comes to career.

When I arrived in the United States from Britain, I hit my head on the mortar board ceiling many times. Although I had worked for ITN and the BBC in England, I couldn’t get an interview with a U.S. television network on the grounds I didn’t have a college degree. The human resources departments were adamant.

Insanely, The New York Times told me that I’d never be a writer on the paper, but they had an opening for an editor. I went, almost literally, around the block to The Herald Tribune and signed on there as a rewrite man on the foreign desk. They didn’t ask and I didn’t tell.

It’s important that people going into artisan work, for all of its camaraderie and job fulfillment satisfaction, know that it’s still fair weather work. Little or no sick leave, no lifetime guarantees and pension, unless it is a union job. You clock in and clock out: the devil take the hindmost.

Time was when the trades offered a future: A meat cutter could open a butcher shop and become self-employed, a baker a bakery, etc. That line of entrepreneurship is essentially foreclosed in today’s winner-take-all world of big companies.

But mostly, Jeremy and Jane need to know that the future for the non-college worker is still inferior. Society still looks down on the horny-handed sons and daughters of toil — and there’s no change in sight. Meanwhile, we’ll have too many graduates and too few people who can build and repair.

The Sad Collapse and Sale of Westinghouse

Can you shed a tear for a corporation that messes up? I can.

It was known, after its logo, as “The Flying Bar W.” It was the emblematic “can do” company: creative and confident in its engineering, sagacious in its marketing, aggressive politically and not afraid of a scrap.

It was Westinghouse, and it traced its linage to George Westinghouse, the man who invented the air brake that, with modifications, still stops railway trains and big trucks. He also warred with Thomas Edison and proved to be right in backing Nicola Tesla’s alternating current over Edison’s direct current.

Now, after an ignominious bankruptcy, the company has been sold by its last owner, Toshiba, to a Canadian asset management firm, Brookfield Business Partners.

Westinghouse has had its ups and downs. I was lucky enough to know its executives and to cover the company when it was on a winning streak under the chairmanship of Robert Kirby.

Westinghouse was a sluggish but still prosperous operation when Kirby took over in 1975. He sold off unprofitable divisions and concentrated on its core power generation business, especially nuclear. “I have had to sell businesses that would have made an individual rich,” Kirby told me.

The world nuclear industry owes much to Westinghouse and technology, which came out its former Monroeville, Pa., headquarters near Pittsburgh. It was a technology driver. Nearly every light water reactor design was influenced by Westinghouse. The envied French nuclear electric system relies partly on Westinghouse designs.

Poor management — including an excursion into television — hurt the power business, as did the long hiatus in domestic plant ordering.

The proximate cause of the economic collapse of Westinghouse are two ambitious reactor projects: V.C. Summer and Vogtle nuclear plants in South Carolina and Georgia. There were multiple mistakes suggesting a lack of managerial depth, both at Westinghouse and Toshiba, which bought the battered Westinghouse power business from BNFL for $5.4 billion in 2006, and probably overpaid.

Then there was a new reactor design that was yet to be deployed in the United States (Westinghouse 1000) and the deteriorated nuclear supply chain — no reactor had been built here in 20 years. But, sources tell me, the critical mistake was fixed-price contracting. This had been a no-no from the early days of nuclear power: too much can go wrong and often has. It did again.

Maybe its new owners will let Westinghouse lead again.

The Joy of Reading Detective Fiction

I feel a bit sorry for people who don’t read fiction or who don’t think they have time for it.

I’ve been checking informally on the reading habits of my friends and I learn that most of them are on the news-and-fact treadmill night and day. Get off, I say.

The easiest way to escape dull care is to tuck up with a good detective book and live in your head with its characters. These have beginnings and ends: In the hands of masters — say P.D. James, Donna Leon or the late Colin Dexter — you get complex characters, human situations and the whole project moves along at the pace of the investigation. There aren’t that many awkward endings that bedevil many books.

I exclude those detective novels with superhuman heroes, tough guys. Unreal. A common thread in detective fiction is the struggle of the individual against the system. Maybe that’s everybody’s struggle, the human condition. The system is at odds with all of us. Maybe that’s why we enjoy detective fiction.

And the Answer Is … Money?

One wishes Alex Trebek, the host of “Jeopardy!” who is taking a medical leave after undergoing surgery to remove blood clots from his brain, a quick recovery.

He has been seeking answers at the syndicated game show since 1984. One does wonder how he has survived doing the same thing with the same equanimity for so long? I guess, as Noel Coward said to an interviewer when asked why the critics hated his last play, “Sail Away”, which nonetheless was sold out in London, “I suppose I shall have console myself once again with the bitter palliative of commercial success.”

Trebek makes $10 million a year. Maybe that’s it.

The Things They Say

“It is very important in life to know when to shut up. You should not be afraid of silence.” — Alex Trebek

In the Trump calendar, this is the year for infrastructure. During the campaign it was one of the inducements he held out to voters: $1 trillion to upgrade and renew the nation’s deteriorated roads, bridges, airports, railroads and harbors, and to expand broadband.

The White House is about to announce “principles” for infrastructure legislation. If the nation is hoping for the metaphorical equivalent of a four-lane highway, it had better brace for a bicycle path at best.

Money isn’t the only impediment to a robust approach to rebuilding the infrastructure; so is philosophy.

But first, take money. There simply isn’t a spare trillion bucks floating around the U.S. treasury. Instead, there are deficits reaching to a point beyond the horizon. Even if, optimistically, the economy puts the pedal to the metal and we get hypergrowth and big tax revenues, there’s unlikely to be big, new money to fix America.

At some point, the very condition of the infrastructure will become an impediment to growth: jammed highways, inadequate barge traffic, clogged ports and systems that can neither make goods efficiently nor deliver them to market economically.

One option for infrastructure funding is use-specific tax and in particular, the gasoline tax. The federal take is 18.4 cents a gallon for gasoline and 24.4 cents for diesel, last raised in 1993.

While fixing the infrastructure may be on many lips, Congress is taxaphobic, any tax is to be resisted. A tax is an assault on the national manhood.

That’s why politicians at every level have looked favorably on substituting gambling for taxing. Casinos and lotteries abound across the country in a cynical, collective political decision to tax through gambling; to substitute the foolish for rank-and-file taxpayers, the beneficiaries. This spares those who should be paying taxes for the services, largely education, where gambling is footing the bill. Sadly, the heaviest patrons of state-sponsored gambling are the poor. Heads the politicians win, tails the poor lose.

Trump will most certainly favor private investment and public-private partnerships. Trouble is that there’s limited opportunity here.

Not many public facilities lend themselves to private capital solutions. A bridge may convenience those who drive over it most and they may be persuaded, through tolls, to shoulder much of the cost of the operation of the structure. But a whole region may benefit from the bridge without ever driving over it.

The Gateway project to build rail bridges in New Jersey and new tunnels into Manhattan, which are failing after more than 100 years, illustrates the problem. The cost is enormous, an estimated $30 billion, more than users can ever pay. But the benefits will affect the whole region; jobs during construction, expedited commuting on faster and safer trains, and enhanced prosperity all-around.

Because Amtrak would use these bridges and tunnels, the whole East Coast passenger rail system would benefit. The cost would be shared by the immediate beneficiaries: New Jersey, New York and the federal government.

New Jersey faltered in 2010, then came on board later, influenced by damage to the existing tunnels from Hurricane Sandy. Now the U.S. Department of Transportation is balking — and on the eve of the White House infrastructure announcement.

Where the Trump administration can have a major effect without new money is something dear to its heart: easing the regulatory burden on new projects, especially pipelines and power transmission lines. These are years in the planning and more years in being litigated before, if ever, they see fruition.

In this cold spell, New England has been paying the highest prices ever for natural gas because there aren’t enough pipelines to bring in gas or facilities to handle additional liquified natural gas. Gas pipelines and electric transmission providers shouldn’t be exempt from public decision-making procedures, but they should be guaranteed expeditious and binding decisions.

It’s forgotten now, but the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline was granted federal pre-emption from legal challenges by an act of Congress in late 1973. Otherwise, building it might still be in contention in the courts.

Some things can be done for infrastructure, but don’t expect much if federal dollars are required. It’s a case of the dogs bark but the caravan moves on — along a rutted track.