White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Long Shadow of Clinton Falls

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Back to the future? Oh, say it ain’t so, Barack Obama. As the president-elect struggles to fill out his staff, there is concern among analysts and scholars of the presidency that the new president may be relying too much on the men and women who served Bill Clinton.

The problem is that they are perceived as yesterday’s people and, worse, that Obama was elected on a clarion call of change. The stalwarts of the Democratic administration of the ’90s have about them the ghostly tinge of another time. In a parliamentary system of government, you know the likely players after an election. There is in place a shadow cabinet, ready to seize the reins if the electorate favors a change. In a presidential system you hope for new faces.

We look not only for fresh ideas in a new administration, but also for fresh faces to carry the policies forward. The need for the new has been elevated by the George W. Bush administration, staffed as it has been by his father’s placemen, especially in the first term. Alas, it was old wine in new bottles. Sometimes the wine was bitter: men who came back to Washington to finish that which had been unfinished. While the new president might not have had an agenda, the staff he appointed did–and they sold it to the president, particularly after the emboldening that 9/11 conveyed.

That is one lesson for the Obama crowd. Another is do not tear up everything that the previous administration has done, even if you don’t like it. That just sets up a policy seesaw of the kind that debilitates. The new Bush administration reversed treaties, including the Kyoto agreement, and encouraged a kind of belligerence. It gave the back of its hand to all sorts of people and undermined, rather than reformed, the United Nations.

The early signs are that Obama is relying heavily on Clinton worthies. First there is Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), who is known for his arrogance, effectiveness and profanity. Obama has chosen Emanuel to fill the position of chief of staff. He is an odd choice. It is a position best occupied by self-effacing professionals who can control an egotistical staff. It is a job best performed by those who can mollify without conceding. Ronald Reagan, after difficulties, found the right person in Howard Baker. George H.W. Bush had difficulties with John Sununu, fewer with Sam Skinner and found the perfect person in that Man for All Reasons, James Baker. Clinton had three chiefs of staff, but Leon Panetta stood out. Andy Card and Josh Bolten have both served George W. Bush well–not an easy assignment, given the intrusive influence of Vice President Cheney and the pre-emptive role of strategist Karl Rove.

Washington’s foreign policy establishment is particularly concerned about the names circulating for national security adviser and secretary of state. For national security adviser, these include Susan Rice, who was Clinton’s assistant secretary of state for African affairs. She is liked and respected, but her gravitas is questioned, as is her role in the Rwanda civil war. And for secretary of state, these include Richard Holbrooke, Clinton’s man in the Bosnian crisis and architect of the Dayton peace accords. If Emanuel has an ego, the brilliant Holbrooke is his equal. Then there is the perennial office-seeker Bill Richardson, Clinton’s secretary of energy and United Nations ambassador. A man of derring-do, he longs to move back to Washington and leave his gubernatorial duties in New Mexico. He likes worlds to conquer and supported Obama after his own presidential bid collapsed.

Their hopes may be dashed by the ambitions of Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who is pressuring Obama for the top State Department job and by the friends of Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.), who would like to see the minority leader on the Foreign Relations Committee go out in a blaze of bipartisan glory. The joke in the Capitol is that if you walk into any urinal and say, “Mr. Secretary,” 10 men will reply, “Yes?”

And so it goes. What is lacking so far are the new faces of “change.” Things look a little less Clintonesque over at the Justice Department, where a variety of names, some with Clinton ties and some without, are circulating. The wisdom about the other two critical appointments is less informed. This gives the Treasury either to former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker or to the quintessential Clinton man, Robert Rubin. Defense aficionados hope Obama will keep Robert Gates as long as he wants to serve, and then will slip in the much-loved but wayward Republican, Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.

Letter to the Editor

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Your article this morning (“Requiem for U.S. newspapers,” Commentary by Llewellyn King, Nov. 1, 2008, The Providence Journal) rang a bell here! Your article should be compulsory reading for all sentient humans. Opinions are worthless if there
is nothing real to base them upon.
Well done.

CHARLES ANDREWS
East Greenwich, RI
The writer is chairman of the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations

Remembering the Last of the British Empire

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The black Humber Super Snipe, a British luxury car with a soft, American-type suspension, pulled in front of a teenager wearing a coat and tie. The boy dodged around the front of the car and got in next to the driver.

The driver needed a large car because he was a very large man, over 300 pounds. He had a big face to go with his big body and even bigger eyebrows. It seemed that the only exercise the man got was changing gear in the car.

Not only was he a big man in a big car, but he also had a big job. A very big job. His job was so big he could have had a police escort, bodyguards and a chauffeur.

He could have traded up the car to a Rolls or a Bentley, but he liked driving this particular car to work in the bright sunshine. There was nearly always bright sunshine, so no weather forecasts were issued for six months of the year.

The man and the boy were talking animatedly as the car stopped to pick up another passenger: a shoe-less African laborer. After exchanging a few words in the man’s native language, the driver and the boy went back to talking politics.

The driver was well qualified to talk politics. He was the prime minister of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, comprising the self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia and the British Protectorates of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, now respectively Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi.

He was Sir Roy Welensky, reviled in much of the world’s press as the last great colonialist: a scoundrel who stood between the legitimate aspirations of the indigenous people of Africa and their white overlords.

The critics missed the substantial difference between the struggle by men like Welensky and the growing evil on the southern bank of the Limpopo River: apartheid in South Africa.

The uncouth boy, who had the temerity to argue with the prime minister, was myself. And the barefoot laborer was part of the great silent majority about whom the white minority was always arguing, including my daily exchange with the prime minister.

I was in my second year as a journalist and Welensky was still giving me a lift, as he had done when I was in school. Sometimes he would chide me on articles that had appeared in English newspapers, but always with good humor.

The prime minister’s office was on the edge of Salisbury, now Harare, but close enough to everything so that a ride to his office was a ride into town.

This day was in 1957. I remember it because I was about to move out of my parents’ house and to lose my daily briefing from the prime minister.

I also remember it because Welensky was being castigated in the British press as a racist, a monster, a white supremacist and a tin-pot dictator, elected only by the white minority. He was none of the former, but the latter was true.

Ever since then, in my travels around the world, I have been asked, “What was it like in Rhodesia then?” The answer is, it was like the weather — a bit unbelievable. There was this small number of Britons trying to recreate the best of the British Isles in the middle of Africa. The impediment was that another people were already in residence: the Africans.

Twenty years before Welensky became my chauffeur, Evelyn Waugh, the English writer, had described the white Rhodesians as having a “morbid lack of curiosity” about the indigenous people. He was right. If the Africans behaved like black Englishmen, well and good — otherwise they were better off as subsistence farmers. The administration of Africans was to be fair, kind and, above all, paternal. The whites were in the intellectual sway of Rudyard Kipling and Winston Churchill, convinced of an innate moral and cultural superiority.

All this only really applied to Southern Rhodesia. Despite the “federation,” Southern Rhodesia was where the British had chosen to live a special existence as a “self-governing” colony. Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland were protectorates, their future independence assured. Another way of saying “protectorate” would be “not suitable for white settlement.”

What the British had wrought was a paternal masterpiece, where all the indigenous people in Southern Rhodesia were in a kind of welfare state. A servant class, people who knew their place.

The state of people in Cuba today is reminiscent: no rights but survival services. Employers had to provide each servant with 15 pounds of cornmeal a week, some meat three times a week and, if the employee was in domestic service, accommodation.

Medicine and schooling was available, as resources allowed, and both were spotty in delivery. Segregation was enforced.

The British withdrawal from India in 1947 signaled the beginning of the end of that way of life in Southern Rhodesia and Kenya.

It also was the end of innocence and 50 years of peace under a system that had developed in an eddy of the once-mighty British Empire

The Swamp in Washington That Awaits

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Dear John, Barack, Sarah and Joe,

You have come a long way, gang, and two of you are going all the way. Congratulations. All four of you say you are going to change Washington. Here in the nation’s capital, we are not convinced.

For starters, let us take earmarks. They run in the thousands. They may be dented by a new administration, but they will not be stopped. Bringing home the pork is largely why we, as voters, send our senators and representatives to Capitol Hill. Earmarks have become a clumsy redress for the indifference of the central government to local need. They have become the palpable evidence of our tax dollars at work. We cannot sense the value of a missile shield in Eastern Europe, but we can measure the stop-and-go traffic on our way to work.

If all politics are local, so are all earmarks. The courts have said that the president is not entitled to a line-item veto. Ergo John McCain, unless you can substitute a funding initiative that Congress will agree to, or you are prepared to shut down the government often, your promises will go unfulfilled. (Check the shutting-down-the-government option with Newt Gingrich,)

Then, friends, there is the permanent alternative administration: the think tanks. These are the intellectual halfway houses where ambitious public servants park between tours of duty in government. Their influence is pervasive, subtle and continual. Every administration leans on think tanks which agree philosophically with it. And here is always a think tank which is particularly close to every administration. For Ronald Reagan, it was The Heritage Foundation; for Bill Clinton, it was The Brookings Institution; and for George W. Bush, it was the American Enterprise Institute.

The epicenter of neoconservatism, The American Enterprise Institute provided the Bush administration with ideas, personnel, moral support, and rationales for the invasion of Iraq and the formulation and promotion of the troop surge. Vice President Cheney has been especially close to AEI. His wife, Lynne, is a fellow there and many old colleagues inhabit its halls on 17th Street. They include Newt Gingrich, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Lawrence Lindsey and David Frum. You have to admire the place and its initiative in seducing an entire administration.

Growing in influence on the conservative side, and waiting for a friend in the White House, is the Cato Institute, which has been strengthening its roster of libertarian/conservative thinkers.

Meanwhile, the liberal Brookings Institution is churning out policy papers on everything from education reform to Pakistan. A team of powerful liberals is ready to take Barack Obama by the hand and lead him down the path of liberal righteousness. Already Brookings experts are advising the Obama campaign, including Susan Rice, Clinton’s assistant secretary of state for African affairs. Of course Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, is president of the think tank and the nation’s leading liberal columnist, E.J. Dionne, Jr., hangs his hat there.

The point is not that the think tanks are bad but that they are powerful, and they generate the ideas of government. Remember you may not be interested in them, but they are interested in you. The press tends to point to the lobbyists of K Street as controlling Washington. The lobbyists influence Congress, but the think tanks influence an administration.

Finally, White House hopefuls, there is the bureaucracy: permanent, entrenched and bloody-minded. The civil service approaches each new administration with skepticism and often hostility. With every administration, the bureaucracy gets a new senior management team in the form of political appointees (secretary, deputy secretary, assistant secretary, etc.). Often, the bureaucracy frustrates these appointees from the get-go. Many a cabinet secretary has had to bring in a small group of loyalists in order to wage war on the larger staff. One agency head told me that she felt she could only confide in her chauffeur and her secretary.

You two lucky victors in this presidential contest will learn that it is easier to invade a faraway country than it is to reform the Washington establishment. Orthodox or maverick, liberal or conservative, Washington is waiting for you.

 

On a Blind Date with Annie Oakley

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In Washington, and around the world, we are waiting for the first torpedo to hit the hull, as they say. Having been broadsided ourselves in the extraordinary selection of Sarah Palin by John McCain for his running mate, we who cover politics are treading water.

Predictably the polemicists are out in front praising, or damning, with a terrible tribal loyalty. If the tribal leader says it is so, so it is. And why not say it is brilliant, or catastrophic, while you are about it? Talk is cheap, and the Internet and talk radio makes it plentiful. Oh so plentiful.

Nobody really will have much idea about Palin until that first torpedo fired is on its way. It could be a gaff on economics or foreign policy or something her Democratic antagonists have dug up from what appears to be a Doris Day past. We will begin to know her by how she responds.

We know that she is a kind cartoon Westerner, a huntin’, fishin’, gun-totin’ Annie Oakley who is going to draw a bead on easy money in Congress and easy virtue along K Street. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We know all about that one. We also know that, with the exception of Dick Cheney, no vice president has had the power to effect much.

If the heroin from the tundra makes it to Washington, Palin will have to do more than face down oil lobbyists and wayward legislators; her big challenge will be the party chiefs and their financiers who helped get her elected.

Washington may be corrupted by special interests, but it is also sustained by them. Lobbyists not only control a lot of campaign money they also own a lot of knowledge. Because they know the industries they represent, in a complex world, legislators need lobbyists–lobbyists they feel they can trust. At some level, every expert is a lobbyist. There are precious few people with deep knowledge on any subject who do not hold opinions about what they know. The smart legislator can sort out the frauds, like Abramoff, from those who work in the vineyards and know the grapes.

The selection Sarah Palin tells us very little about her. But it tells us, again, mountains about John McCain. (Disclosure: I have known McCain almost since he came to Washington, and he has spoken at defense conferences I used to organize.)

Yes, what McCain’s pick again tells us about McCain is that he is the most capricious of senators, and that he can see no contradiction in his own contradictory positions. McCainism is not conservatism. It is a view of the world peculiar to the man who holds it. His grip on Republican orthodoxy, outside of a right to life and a strong military, is tenuous.

Most of the delegates now assembling in St. Paul would, one suspects, leave a private chat with the man they are about to nominate shaking their heads. They believe money is speech, he does not. They believe in drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, he does not. It goes on and on.

More, they are opposed to tokenism and quotas. But in selecting Palin, McCain has perpetrated what must be the most cynical act of tokenism and quota acceptance in recent political history. He also has again demonstrated his unique capacity to be on both sides of an issue.

McCain’s rap on Barack Obama is that he is inexperienced. Now McCain has propelled the neophyte’s neophyte into the small group of people who might sit in the Oval Office and lead the free world. Nearly one in three vice presidents have become president. And McCain is not a young man.

His choice of Palin suggests that McCain is either a cynic or a fatalist—much more likely the later. The fatalist has no faith in orderly progression, but expects happenstance to intrude and change the course of events. It was fate that got McCain shot down and captured. It is McCain coercing fate that has put Palin on the national stage. Win or lose, she will be there for a long time.

 

Russia: The Bad Neighbor

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Georgia on my mind.

I was struck when I arrived in Tbilisi a few years ago, in the early hours of the morning, that the lights were blazing in dozens of stands that dotted the road from the airport to the city. This gave the impression that Georgia was booming; that the economy was vibrant and the people were entrepreneurial.

The next day, I learned that nothing in the small and ancient country of Georgia is quite the way it seems. A year after my visit a colleague from The Washington Times, Joseph Curl, also mistook the appearance of prosperity for the real thing.

The fact is that lights blaze night and day in Tbilisi because the good business people steal their electricity. Every one of the road stands is located next to a power line, and there is no attempt to hide the illegal connections. No wonder the lights stay on all night—no switches.

Georgia, like its bullying neighbor Russia, has fostered a strange indifference to law. It goes like this: laws are for the people who make laws, not for the rest of us. We just have to do the best we can.

In few countries have I felt more isolated by language than in Georgia. In most countries, at street level—restaurants and taxis–someone speaks English. Not so in Tbilisi. The first language, of course, is Georgian and the second is Russian. Happily, I was traveling with another journalist who spoke excellent Russian. Otherwise, like so many, I would have been confined to the international hotel where English was spoken.

Our first order of business was to get press passes at the information ministry. We were registered, photographed, paid a fee and were issued with press passes by an engaging young woman. My colleague, Nathan Hodge, elicited that our friendly registrar was going to a rock concert that evening and the tickets would cost about $150. We calculated that this would be many times her weekly salary and were perplexed. Georgians are poor, and government workers are not well paid. A role in the black economy? A rich lover?

Much in Georgia is unexplained. Since the Russian tanks rolled into South Ossetia, one those unexplained issues is how the government of Mikheil Saakashvili thought it could taunt Russia when it knew that Russia historically has been paranoid about its borders; and that its paranoia had been exacerbated by the West’s quick recognition of Kosovo and the loss of face by Serbia, a Russian Slavic ally.

Russia was poised to invade and the Georgian president lit the fuse when he sent Georgian troops to reclaim South Ossetia. Justice may have been on Saakashvili’s side, but realpolitik was not.

As long as Russia feels surrounded by American surrogates in the colors of NATO, it is going to bully where it can and use its energy superiority to try and separate Europe from the United States. Europe is 50-percent dependent on gas from Russia. Watch for European indignation to subside as winter approaches.

There is a precedent for Russia annexing chunks of its neighbors and getting away with it. Remember what happened to Finland during World War II. With the spread of mechanized warfare, Russia felt its crown jewel of a city, St. Petersburg, lying a few kilometers from the Finnish border, was vulnerable. So they began a land grab for about one-tenth of Finland, known as Karelia. This was to be a buffer zone.

After the bitterly fought Winter War of 1940, in a lopsided peace, Russia grabbed Karelia, including the second-largest Finnish city and most of its industrial infrastructure. Twelve percent of the Finnish population had to be resettled. It was a great blow to the Finns, and is remembered painfully today.

Neither candidate for the American presidency has any idea what to do about Russia. It is not an economic colossus. If it were not for energy, it would be sick indeed. It is not a competitive manufacturer in anything except vodka and nuclear power plants. It has not been able to divert its oil wealth for the betterment of its rural towns and villages, and its population of 142 million is declining rapidly.

But Russia is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and is our partner in some things that work well, like weapons decommissioning and the International Space Station. John McCain has proposed throwing the Russians out of the G-8. To what end? It has no real role in that group. Barack Obama would talk to them more. No one has courted the Russians more assiduously than George W. Bush or been as thoroughly rebuffed.

The Russian enigma will be with us a long time. As for the enigma of the Tbilisi rock concert ticket-holder, I think she was making money selling press passes to gullible American journalists who did not need them.

In Praise of Robert Novak

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The op-ed page of The Washington Post is full of type, but not enough to fill the gaping hole where Robert “Bob” Novak’s column used to appear. Novak’s column nominally originated from The Chicago Sun-Times, but he was the first to say that much of his success was the result of appearing in The Washington Post. If you write about politics it helps to do it where the politicians will read you. In Washington the best place for that is The Post, with its dominant circulation among the three newspapers published in the nation’s capital.

Now that Novak, 77, has had to retire to fight a brain tumor, it is clear that he has no successor. Some of his colleagues on The Post are more articulate than Novak. His fellow conservatives Charles Krauthammer, George Will and Michael Gerson all are great stylists. The liberals Ruth Marcus and Harold Meyerson turn a beautiful phrase, and Richard Cohen has remained fresh and funny for three decades.

But none of them sets out to do what Novak did for 45 years–break news. He believed the old adage that “there is nothing as good as news in the newspaper.” First with his late partner Rowland Evans, and in recent years by himself, Novak broke news. He understood that opinion alone grows tired, especially when everyone knows the sympathies of the columnist, but news is always self-refreshing.

For Novak, the column was a newspaper inside a newspaper; and he was going to fill it with news whether it was hurtful or harmless to his Republican friends. Because Novak was an ardent conservative for most of his professional life, conservatives always felt hurt when Novak’s reporting revealed chinks in their armor. As a commentator, particularly on television, Novak was a fierce partisan. But as a reporter he went where the story led, as they say, without fear or favor.

Novak got the news, which distinguished his column, the old-fashioned way: He worked for it. In this he was like the liberal Jack Germond, who worked hard for his stories.

Timothy Carney, who worked for Novak on the Evans-Novak Political Report, and now edits that newsletter, said in his Washington Examiner column last week, “The hardest working man I have ever known has retired.”

Carney went on: “What we’ve lost primarily is a reporter who cast a cynical eye on the best-laid plans of bureaucrats, who took the same level of skepticism to his coverage of both political parties, and who was motivated, above all, by the desire to unearth information that powerful people would prefer remain buried.

“To the detriment of the republic, there is now one fewer skeptic calling around Capitol Hill until he gets the real dirt–there is one fewer sleuth–freed by his spot on the opinion pages from what Novak calls ‘the deaf-dumb-blind’ sort of impartiality that often makes news reporting worthless–exposing the true machinations in the government. This can be a cause for relief for many powerful people.”

I first met Novak at a conference. We were both speakers, but he was the star. I do not remember the conference or where it took place–Texas, I think. But I do remember Novak and how kind he was to me, and generous with his praise of my talk.

Over the years I ran into Novak at the White House, at receptions, and one glorious evening at the National Press Club in 2001, when we lampooned Novak. Actually that was not the plan, but it was the result. The plan was to give him the prestigious Fourth Estate Award and to say pompous, platitudinous things about journalism. Instead his fellow columnists filled the stage, and there was much merriment and roasting “The Prince of Darkness.” This moniker came from a fellow journalist, John Lindsay, and was a commentary on Novak’s Slavic looks and pessimism about the human condition. Novak loved it.

To my mind Novak’s politics were tortured, but his journalism shone through. He believed that the purpose of his column was to find out what is going on and to tell us. He was true to the old journalistic concept that you have failed if the reader does not know something he or she did not know before they picked up your piece.

Obama on Oil’s Slippery Slope

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Way back in the 1970s, the old Mobil Oil Company paid $212 million for an oil shale lease in Colorado. The company did not produce a single barrel of oil from that lease. After leasing the land, Mobil shied away from developing the resource because of substantial environmental problems, involving water and degradation of the high desert.

Traditionally, oil companies have taken leases that they have had to abandon either because the resource was not as substantial as they had hoped, or because the economics had changed or as in Colorado, other impediments appear.

Also, there are physical limitations on where the oil companies can look for oil. And sometimes the judgment of their geologists is just wrong. Even in this age of seismic sophistication, there are dry holes.

A modern deep-sea oil rig is nearly as complex and sophisticated as a refinery. Every off shore rig (there are a little over 400 of them around the world) is working flat out; sometimes in the service of international oil companies, and sometimes in the service of state-owned oil companies, which control a majority of the world’s resources.

When it comes to offshore drilling, the oil industry feels that there would be a better chance of finding reserves in new leases rather than old leases, which they acquired defensively at a different time.

To the Democrats, this is evidence of oil company ineptitude and greed. To the oil companies, it is a situation reminiscent of the David Mamet play “Glengarry, Glen Ross,” where the real estate salesmen are denied the best prospects in order to shift lousy inventory.

The best oil-drilling prospects are in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Not only do these areas have the best expectation of good reserves, but there is already a sophisticated infrastructure in place in the Gulf and Alaska. No such infrastructure exists on the Atlantic Coast or the West Coast north of Santa Barbara. Infrastructure is important because it reduces cost, and especially because it speeds the time it would take to bring new oil to market.

The drilling controversy has been a gift to the Republican Party because it enables John McCain to go after Barack Obama on an issue that people understand: the price of gasoline. Seventy percent of Americans, according to the polls, favor drilling offshore now. Yet Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House, refuses to allow an up or down vote on this simple issue. She wants a vote to be part of a larger energy and environment bill.

Pelosi is handing the best issue yet to John McCain. The public cannot understand many of the complex problems confronting the country, but it can understand the price of gasoline, even if new drilling will not lower that. It does not matter to the public that it was a Republican president, George H.W. Bush, who originally blocked drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf, or that John McCain was a supporter of not drilling there and still opposes drilling in ANWR.

The Democrats have boxed in their presumptive presidential nominee. Unless Pelosi softens her position, the issue is going to dog Obama through to the election. Even if he comes out in favor of drilling, he is vulnerable to McCain’s attacks if he is at odds with the speaker of the House.

Democratic antipathy to Big Oil goes back many decades. To many Democrats, the dislike of Big Oil is visceral. They have convinced themselves that somehow the oil companies represent a malign international conspiracy to block alternative energy sources and to run up prices. The left wing of the party has never been able to separate the oil industry from John D. Rockefeller and his kerosene cartel.

For their part, supporters of more drilling onshore and offshore are overselling what can be expected in the way of new supplies. The United States has about 2.5 percent of the world’s oil reserves and consumes about 25 percent of the world’s oil. Nothing can be done about the former, so something will have to be done about the latter. Right in the front of doing something about the latter are–surprise, surprise–the oil companies. British Petroleum has enormous investments in alternative energy, including hydrogen. And Chevron, as it likes to remind us, is the largest geothermal producer in the United States.

The oil companies are not perfect, but they are quite good at what they do: getting oil out of the ground and to your local gas station.

In Memoriam: The Pleasure of His Company

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John McCaughey, journalist, bon vivant, friend and a past editor of The Energy Daily, died on Saturday of heart failure. He was 61.

McCaughey was born to a Catholic family near Belfast, Northern Ireland, when it was not a city in which you wanted to be a Catholic. More remarkable, his father was a member of the strongly Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary.

Like many young Irish, McCaughey went to London to make his way in journalism. After a brief stint on a local Irish paper, McCaughey was scooped up by the foreign desk of The Financial Times, where he was a sub editor. He was also the toast of the paper’s staff and a growing circle of admirers across London. In the tradition of George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, another literary wit from Ireland had arrived to disperse the London fog.

It used to be said of Wilde that he put his talent into his writing and his genius into his conversation. It could be said of McCaughey that he put his talent into journalism and his genius into his dinner parties. London had seldom seen the like of them. And when he moved to Washington, well, they were in the style only the Kennedys were known to approach: Waterford crystal (the Lismore pattern), the best Bordeaux vintages (preferably Chateau La Mission Haut Brion) and fine port (ideally bottled in Holland not in its native Portugal). All this he accomplished while despising garlic, cheese and nuts, except for the nutty flavor of the port.

If you entertained McCaughey, he would always, but always, send you a wonderful piece of writing as a thank you letter. If they had been gathered and published, they would take their place as works of the high art of protocol.

Such a man also had to be a man of friends, and so he was–friends in Washington, England, Ireland , Germany and France. He was a man of Edwardian tastes and formality softened with wit and charm. He loved satire and revered the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift. He liked his church services served in Latin.

He was also a great journalist with a reverence for a well-turned phrase and an intuitive understanding that you could write commercial and industrial news with flair, passion and humor. I hired him as a temporary matter while he got a feel for the United States. He stayed more than a decade and rose to be the editor of The Energy Daily. He was good at his work and brilliant at his play.

Hail a Cab, Hail a Culture

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CARTAGENA, Colombia–I think it was the English writer Alan Bennett who said that for him taxis were not the black boxes he found in London, but the “yellow projectiles” that hurtle through intersections in New York.

Taxis tell you a lot about a country, and more about the social status of the taxi-driving class. In France taxis are clean, small and entrepreneurial. Taxi drivers in France do not think they are at the bottom rung of the social ladder.

Alas, American taxis tell us that the drivers would rather be doing something else. The cars are dirty, seats are broken, and the drivers are often mannerless immigrants with no sense of service.

It was not always like this.

When New York taxis were driven by the Jewish working class, men who read Dorothy Schiff’s The New York Post and lived in the Bronx, you got a serving of philosophy, or at least humor, with each ride. Similarly in Washington, D.C., taxis were spotless and driven by older African-American men who appeared to love their work, knew the geography of the city and took pride in it.

At last, Washington taxis have meters. But because the hack bureau of the city government has no teeth, the taxis are as dirty as ever, the drivers talk incessantly on cell phones in the languages of Africa and the Middle East and treat their passengers as inconvenient necessities.

Things are not much better in other American cities.

In Atlanta, I was taken all the way around the beltway to reach an address near the airport. The driver did not know the way, would not listen to me and refused to call his dispatcher for guidance.

In Houston, I had an experience nearly as bad when the driver, newly arrived from Nigeria, took me about 25 miles out of my way because he could not understand what I was saying to him.

Taxis in Los Angeles are more fun. Here the driver is more likely to turn to you and say, “I am not actually a taxi driver. I am in the movie business.” In the City of Angels, I have been offered two scripts and a demonstration tape by drivers who thought I could advance their careers. When I asked friends in L.A. why I had been singled out for this treatment, they replied, “You wore a suit. Only film financiers wear them here. And you were probably staying at The Beverly Hills Hotel.” I was.

In Chicago, a driver waved a bunch of bills at me and said, “We have the best police money can buy.”

In the Third World, taxi drivers offer services beyond transportation. In Singapore, I arrived to give a speech just before a monsoon broke. I was greeted at the airport by a lovely, young ethnic Chinese woman who asked if I was Mr. King. I said I was. She said, “I have a car waiting for you” and escorted me to a Rolls Royce. I thought things were looking up.

As we headed out of the airport, she began to tell me about the program for the following day. She said there would be a tour of the port, an inspection of crane technology, and meetings with maritime officials. When I pointed out that I was in Singapore to give a speech on energy, not port operation and technology, she started screaming at the driver, “Wrong Mr. King. Wrong Mr. King.” Just as the monsoon broke, and rain came down in a way that you do not see outside Asia, she tossed me and my bag out of the Rolls. Taxis evaporated.

Then there appeared at my side a man I called Mr. Fixit. Journalists learn the value of shady entrepreneurs in tight situations. “I have taxi,” he declared, grabbing my bag. I asked if it had a meter and light on the top, knowing the answer. “No, my taxi discreet,” he said.

There was not much choice, so we negotiated a fee and off we went in quite a nice car that he had parked illegally at the curb.

“I am looking after you in Singapore,” announced Mr. Fixit. “We go see snake charmer, crocodile wrestling and transvestite show. And at night, I bring you different girls, every kind of ethnic.”

Then, quite suddenly, he took his hands off the wheel and put them around his throat. Turning to me, he said, “But no drugs. When government start hanging people, I stop drugs.”

In Rio de Janiero, in the 1960s and 1970s, the standard taxi cab was a VW Bug, with the front passenger seat removed. It worked surprisingly well, but only for two passengers.

The Soviets did not understand economic value, and neither did the puppet governments in their satellites. The Poles are justifiably proud of their strong horses. And in the last days of the Soviet Union, they used horses to plow fields. But in one village, I was astounded to see a large agricultural tractor towing a small cart marked “taxi.”

Of course, taxis in London are part of the pride of the place. Fact and mythology get a bit mixed up about the cabs, and Londoners like it that way. In law, it is said, a London cab must carry a bale of hay for the horse and it is legal for a man to urinate on the right rear wheel.

London cabs are always evolving. Every few years, the city holds a new cab design competition. It is said that the only two essential design criteria are that the cab’s roof must be high enough for a man to wear a top hat and the cab must be able to turn almost entirely on its own length. The cabs are not always built by automobile companies, and there is fierce competition for new innovations.

Which brings me to yellow projectiles and the cabs of Cartagena. They are not so much yellow projectiles as yellow darts, buzzing around in a way that reminds me of yellow jackets. These cabs are clean and made by various manufacturers, including Chevrolet, Hyundai, Kia and Renault. No car so small would have the temerity to offer itself as a taxi in America. But the price of gas here is a factor. The price at the pump in Cartagena hovers at $4 per gallon.

As the price of oil increases in America, look for the downsizing of all vehicles, and cabs in particular. But I fear that we will get the downsizing without the cleanliness and courtesy of the cabs in Cartagena.