White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Problem of Old Leaders — Churchill’s Sad Last Years in Office

by Leave a Comment

Old age is a thorny issue. I can attest to that. As someone told my wife about me, “He’s got age on him.” Indubitably.

The problem, as now in the venomously debated case of former president Joe Biden, is how to measure mental deterioration. When do you take away an individual’s right to serve? When do you restrict choice and freedom by the calendar and not by some other measure? Can you oblige the old to pass arbitrary competency tests for everything from driving to running a country?

Part of the answer in the Biden case, and many things, is a vigorous and fearless press. Contrary to the current allegations that Biden’s health decline was hidden by the press, nothing was hidden except by those close to him.

Anyone who watched Biden on television or heard him speak knew he was having problems. Months before the last election, I wrote a column about it. And so did others. Nothing was hidden from anyone except the full severity of the decline, which might have been buried by Biden’s family and his White House staff.

Supposing they had felt strongly that the 46th president should step aside, how would that have been managed if Biden had refused their entreaties? How do we know what his wife, Jill, said to him privately? Biden had reason to go on to protect his son, Hunter, who was the victim of considerable political animus.

Most of all, Biden probably wanted to finish what he saw as the business he had started: promoting people he felt had been unfairly left out. The symbols of that were Vice President Kamala Harris and Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Before Biden ran for president, I chatted with him at a reception by a brain cancer support group in Washington. I had interviewed some of the doctors involved on television, and I went away thinking how likable Biden was and what a pity he was too old to run for president.

But he did run, and the Biden presidency was a success, measured by the economy, peace and optimism about the future. By the end, it might have been running on inertia. Only those close to Biden know how much staff work was done what Biden directed.

Biden wasn’t the only man with trouble at the end of a successful political career. So did a much greater man, a true figure of destiny: Winston Churchill.

As the late historian and philosopher Roger Scruton courageously pointed out, the second Churchill administration was a disaster. The man who stepped into the prime minister’s role in 1951 wasn’t the great statesman who stepped into the same office in 1940, aged 65.

Ten momentous years had taken its toll. This was an old, forgetful man whose constant drinking added to his failing powers.

As he had during the war, he would call the news desk at The Daily Express every night and inquire, “What’s the news?” During his second term as prime minister, it is reported that he was often confused and didn’t seem to know what day it was. But he was Winston Churchill, the man who had saved Britain. And no one, no journalist on The Daily Express, was going to whisper that Churchill was failing.

Lord Beaverbrook, the proprietor of The Daily Express and close friend and ally of Churchill, did tell the paper’s editor, Bob Edwards, “I’m dying from the legs down and Churchill is dying from the neck up.”

Many problems in Britain weren’t addressed by the prime minister and his government and were to haunt Britain until Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979. Foremost among these were a lack of any immigration restrictions for people from the former empire and trade union power allowed to grow unchecked.

The Churchill case is instructive. Had there been an age limit of 65 for prime ministers, as many companies have for their top executives, Churchill wouldn’t have been allowed to assume office when he was so needed in 1940.

Candor from loved ones may be the best defense against senility in leadership. After all, children do take the car keys from old and failing parents, or should.

If you love what you do, is it right for society to force retirement? Noel Coward, the prolific British playwright, actor and director, said, “Work is more fun than fun.” So, apparently, is high office.

How Technology Built the British Empire

by Leave a Comment

As someone who grew up in the last days of the British Empire, I am often asked how it was that so few people controlled so much of the world for so long?

The simple answer is technology underpinned the British Empire, from its tentative beginnings in the 17th century to its global dominance in the 18th and 19th  centuries and most of the first half of the 20th century.

The first great tech leap forward was the steam engine, perfected in the 1760s by James Watt, but originally developed to pump water in coal mines by Thomas Newcomen in 1712. Steam was the workhorse of the Industrial Revolution, and the enabler of the management and expansion of the empire for Britain.

With steam, ships which had taken months to reach India got there in weeks and the great railways, whether in southern Africa or India, which were one of the hallmarks of the empire, were built.

Another invention which made communications throughout the empire possible was the electric telegraph, perfected by Samuel Morse in 1838.

But if there was one silver bullet, one invention that set Britain’s imperial ambitions ahead, it was the invention of the longitudinal chronometer, the first design of which was completed in 1730, but many modifications followed. The government had offered a substantial reward for a clock that could help its captains accurately establish their longitudinal positions. John Harrison’s chronometer gave British ships a great advantage: they knew where they were. 

Other technical innovations included copper-sheathed hulls and eventually steam engines and iron hulls, leading to steel ships. Henry Bessemer made steel an available commodity with the Bessemer furnace in 1860, and soon British steel hulls upgraded naval fleets.

In 1733, the flying shuttle was invented which made Britain rich and enabled British fabric mills to process local wool and cotton from around the world, including America, India and Egypt.

Imperial Britain was a mercantile country (government working hand in hand with commerce) that insisted that all raw materials had to be transported to Britain to be processed, including cotton and jute, and even agricultural products like tea. To this day, tea is packaged in Britain and Ireland but grown in China, India, Sri Lanka, Africa and other countries.

Weaponry, importantly, also got the Brit-tech boost and played its role in the expansion of the empire. First came rifling of muskets to improve accuracy. Then came breech-loaded artillery and toward the end of the 19th century, the deadly Maxim Gun, a forerunner of the machine gun. Mass weapons manufacture assured British dominance.

Advances in medicine were important as well, especially in treating malaria and understanding tropical diseases. The use of quinine enabled troops in malarial areas, particularly in Africa, to recover. Keep the troops healthy and ready for combat.

My paternal grandfather was one of those. He was shipped from London to India and then to South Africa where he was demobilized at the end of the Boer War, which is how I came to grow up in the last vestiges of the empire and to understand some of the complexities of British rule.

For example, when it came to local administration, one size did not fit all. India was the Raj, the jewel in the crown. Southern Rhodesia, where I grew up, was the only self-governing colony in all but external affairs. Kenya Colony was just that; Malawi (Nyasaland) was a protectorate, as was Zambia (Northern Rhodesia) and Bechuanaland (Botswana). If in doubt about a rock or a country, the Brits claimed it fell under the monarch’s suzerainty. Good enough. It was red on the map.

Despite some imperial rumblings lately, America shouldn’t want and wouldn’t benefit from trying to assemble even a modest empire this late in the game. But America has had the tech benefits of empire since the British one faded, starting with India’s independence in 1947.

America filled the gap left by Britain as the dominant force in the world, admired, copied and envied. But underpinning that state of esteem and financial ease was tech leadership, medical leadership, and cultural leadership through film and television. America became the techno supremo.

Now government research funding is being butchered across the board from advanced energy to, most shameful of all, the philistine slashing of the National Institutes of Health’s research budgets. 

Changing times doomed the British Empire, America’s future is at stake and it will be determined by technology and medicine. If we underfund research, the future is known.

Make Public Broadcasting Great Again by Shaking It Up

by Leave a Comment

The animus that has led President Trump to order an end to federal funding of PBS and NPR isn’t new. Public broadcasting has been an irritant to conservatives for a long time.

Conservatives say public broadcasters are biased against them, especially PBS; they are a kind of ground zero for all things “woke”; and they don’t deserve one penny of public money.

My friend and colleague, Adam Clayton Powell III, who has worked in commercial and public television and was the first vice president of news at NPR in the 1980s, thinks that some of the old rigor about being even-handed may have “fallen away.”

What I think has happened — and conservative critics see this as bias — is that programming reflecting a humanitarian concern about minorities, about the left-out, and about those who are without, rose in volume. That has led to the impression of public broadcasting being left-of-center.

Full disclosure: Since 1997, I have produced and hosted “White House Chronicle,” a weekly news and public affairs show which airs on some PBS stations and is available to all PBS stations via the PBS satellite.

As an independent producer, I don’t receive funding from PBS, and, since my show has had interactions with PBS, it is with individual stations, not PBS headquarters in Washington.

I don’t think PBS and NPR need to be defunded, but they need to be taken by the lapels and shaken. They can be as tired as they are self-regarding. They are losing their audiences and relying on old formulae and old programming.

I once asked an important PBS executive why there wasn’t more original, creative drama on PBS. As speedy as a TV electron, the executive shot back, “It would cost too much money.”

Clearly, there was no preparedness to consider how it might be financed. Genteel poverty is not dynamic.

PBS is dominated by the shows it buys from Britain. The best of PBS is British, either from the BBC or the commercial channels, which go under the rubric of ITV.

The most successful PBS show recently, “Downton Abbey,” came from ITV. PBS also seems to have an endless need to tell us all that is known about the history of the English royal families. Watch enough, and you will know more about them than you wanted to know, all the way down to the duties of the Royal wiper, the Groom of the Stool, scatology in ermine.

What is lacking at PBS is creativity.

I worked at the BBC in London during the great explosion of satire, which was manifested in such shows as “Beyond the Fringe,” “Good Evening” and “Monty Python.” Another BBC satirical show, “That Was The Week That Was,” gave the broadcast world David Frost, who started as a comedian and became one of the great interviewers.

The BBC took chances, and it worked. I feel that if you walked into PBS with a blueprint for “The Daily Show” or “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” you wouldn’t get far.

It is time for public broadcasting to think beyond its self-imposed creative chastity. Over time, it overcame its aversion to working with industry. A fear of commercialism pervades PBS and NPR. It is written into their protocols.

Powell suggested on a current episode of “White House Chronicle,” which he co-hosts, that public broadcasters might look at what William Paley, who built CBS, did in its radio days before television.

Paley, noting that NBC had all the talent and all the income, went to top stars of the day, like Jack Benny, Bing Crosby and Red Skelton, and said he would let them control and produce their shows on CBS, and, at the end of the runs, they would own their material free and clear.

It changed the fortunes of CBS, which then went on to become the dominant network.

If PBS produced great entertainment programs, it could sell them worldwide, as the BBC does. Two documentary series, “Frontline” and “Nova,” produced by Boston’s WGBH, show that PBS can reach its high when it seeks to do so.

Great entertainment might not be enough income to solve all its problems, but at least it would open up a new revenue stream.

At the end of the day, what public broadcasting needs is to be known as a creative hub: the first place for new ideas, performers and writers.

To do this, it should be less timid about collaborating with creative sponsors and letting them have a say. Why not the “Google Hour”? Or the “ChatGPT Theater”? The golden age of television was marked by that kind of sponsor involvement.

California Doctor Opens a New Front in Cancer War

by 1 Comment

In the world of medicine, immunotherapy is a hot topic. It has uses in the treatment of many fatal diseases, even of aging.

Simply, immunotherapy is enhancing and exploiting the body’s natural immune system to fight disease.

Think of it as being like a martial art, where you use an opponent’s strength against him. Call it medical Judo.

Dr. Jason R. Williams, a Beverly Hills oncologist and radiologist, is passionate practitioner of intratumoral immunotherapy and has a string of successful cancer outcomes, he tells me and my co-host, Adam Clayton Powell III, on “White House Chronicle,” the weekly news and public affairs program on PBS.

Williams, who heads up the eponymous Williams Cancer Institute, believes in aggressively attacking cancer, as he says, “from the biopsy.”

In cancer cases, he explains, by the time a needle is inserted into the tumor, the clinician is pretty certain of a cancer finding.

“When you stick a needle into a tumor, that’s your chance to actually start treating,” says Williams, who is a board-certified radiologist and interventional oncologist.

The current practice in cancer treatment is to treat cancer from outside the body with radiation and oral drugs. But Williams’ institute is pioneering a system of fighting cancer from within the body by delivering a cocktail of drugs directly into the tumor.

The goal is to stimulate the body’s immune system while preventing the cancer from eluding the drugs. “Cancer has various ways to hide from the immune system,” says Williams.

Williams sees his cancer treatment as a precursor to a new era when immunotherapy can fight many diseases and lengthen people’s lives.

“We’ve been working with immunotherapies and it seems like they’re actually making patients younger,” he says. “One of the things that we figured out is that the immune system is what helps keep us young and healthy. And so by boosting the immune response against the cancer, the immune cells will also start killing older cells.”

He explains further, “Cancer and aging are a very similar process. Cancer is a cell that has a mutation and it wants to work for itself; it doesn’t work with the body. An old cell is a cell that doesn’t have a mutation, but it’s not doing its job and it should be eliminated.

“Neither one of these cells want to die and they send signals to the immune system to stay alive. When you block those signals, the immune system kills those cells and allows younger cells to come in and flourish. And so this is what we’ve been seeing.”

The use of cocktails of drugs to fight diseases has a long history. It started in 1955 with Emil J. Freireich, a pioneering oncologist known for his groundbreaking work in leukemia treatment, particularly childhood leukemia. He came to be known as a founding father of modern clinical cancer research.

As a young doctor, Freireich was assigned to care for the children in the leukemia ward of the new National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. It was a dreaded assignment because the children suffered horribly and the mortality rate was very high.

He suggested to colleagues that rather than administering drugs singly to their young patients, they do so simultaneously, as a cocktail of drugs.

Freireich was attacked as a dangerous crank. But he persisted, arguing that the children were dying and his therapy would work.

And it did work. Today, drug cocktails are the basis of leukemia treatment. For children with leukemia, the five-year survival rate is now around 90 percent, meaning a high chance of being cured, according to St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Williams is a big believer in using these chemo cocktails, except he believes in delivering them directly into the tumor. He says on “White House Chronicle” that the dose might include as many as 12 different drugs.

He thinks artificial intelligence will be helpful in creating new drug cocktails without the challenges of dangerous interactions or other bad effects.

Williams is an adjunct professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, where he is helping to further cutting-edge research. He is the author of “The Immunotherapy Revolution.” In addition to Beverly Hills, the Williams Institute operates clinics in Miami, Mexico and Saudi Arabia.

How Trump and Technology Have Turned the Press Corps From Lions to Hyenas

by Leave a Comment

Political messaging isn’t what it used to be. Far from it. It used to be that the front pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times were an agenda for action. This power was feared and used by successive presidents in my time, from Lyndon Johnson to Joe Biden, but not by Donald Trump.

Before Trump, there were several ways a president spoke to the nation. He either made a speech, held a press conference or leaked an idea to one of the two newspapers that counted in the Washington firmament, The Times and The Post. If that balloon floated upward, something formal followed.

Until Bill Clinton, that was often a speech at the National Press Club, a few blocks from the White House. Clinton never gave a major speech at the Press Club. That was the end of an era, the end of the Press Club as the forum of choice for presidents and heads of state.

In Clinton’s case, this wasn’t a failing of the Press Club system; it was just that it had become cumbersome and unnecessary. Clinton said it was simpler for him to talk to the nation from the White House formally in a press conference in the East Room. Less formally, he could walk into the Brady Briefing Room, where the press was on duty all day and the network cameras were ready to roll.

Technology was changing the way news came out of the White House. While Clinton preferred press conferences or informal presentations, the two dominant newspapers were essential tools to him, as they had been and would be to other presidents until technology again changed things.

I watched the system of trial-by-leak from the Johnson through the Biden years, although things were somewhat different under Bush. There was a new newspaper in town, The Washington Times, which was avowedly conservative, which caused George W. Bush’s staff to lean that way.

However, the new paper didn’t change the system in which a top White House correspondent would be leaked a story. If it failed, it wasn’t heard about again; it would either die in the aridity of silence, or it could be mildly denied as “speculation.”

None of this was ever laid out formally, but it worked and worked for a long time. It gave the president cover and the reporter a payoff with “access.”

With Trump, things are different, primarily because of his seemingly narcotic addiction to publicity but also because technology has bypassed the media of old: the newspapers and the hungry cameras.

Trump has Truth Social, and his aides have X. He makes announcements all the time, changes direction, denies former positions and doesn’t test ideas before sharing them. It is dangerous and giddy, but clearly, it delights Trump.

It has created the kind of yo-yo of yes-no-yes-perhaps that we have seen most recently with Trump’s statements about whether he would or wouldn’t try to fire the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell.

The now-nightly Niagara Falls of unformed presidential thinking on Truth Social has changed the role of the press corps.

From leading the day’s news to following it, the press corps has seen its role change and its significance diminished. The media giants are now forced to follow like hyenas, not hunt like lions. They are following the hunt, not heading it.

Whereas when ideas were tested through media, presidents could be saved from some of their worst inclinations, now there is no restraint, not even the thin membrane provided by a diligent press secretary, suggesting caution or at least preceding thought.

From his early days in real estate in New York, Trump has craved publicity, grooved on it, and seen it as an end in itself more than a means to an end.

In a naive moment when the National Press Building was in financial trouble, which was at one time owned mainly by the Press Club, I suggested to some colleagues that we sell the building to Trump — not Trump the politician but pre-political Trump.

Fortunately, some of my colleagues had dealt with Trump and knew about his media bullying — he would even call into New York radio talk shows and talk about himself as though he was someone else — and warned that our lives would be hell and the club would be used by Trump, if he could, to glorify himself.

Now, we see Trump converting the Oval Office, heretofore an inner sanctum, into a kind of television studio, himself enthroned at the center.

Rare Earths Are a Crisis of Government Neglect

by Leave a Comment

An old adage says “a stitch in time saves nine.” Indeed. But it is a lesson seldom learned by governments.

As you struggle through TSA screening at the airport, just consider this: It didn’t have to be this way. If the government had acted after the first wave of airplane hijackings in the early 1960s, we might never have had the Transportation Security Administration.

The government and the airlines should have done something very simple: Put locks on the cockpit doors. It was discussed among the airlines, at the Federal Aviation Administration, and at the White House Office of Science and Technology.

Then came Sept. 11, 2001, and governments acted. Massively — even too much too late.

When it comes to the emerging crisis over rare earths, whose supply and processing is almost totally controlled by China, successive administrations have sighed and done nothing. 

As the uses for rare earths have increased dramatically, the calls for the United States to do something to alleviate this dependence have been constant and loud. Action hasn’t corresponded.

The modern world runs on the 17 rare earths which are great enhancers.

Notable for sounding the alarm has been John Kutsch, executive director of the Thorium Alliance, which promotes the use of thorium as a nuclear reactor fuel.

The need for rare earths is huge in the United States — as is our attendant vulnerability.

“There is no piece of modern technology that does not use rare earths or other technology metals. There are no drones, windmills, electric cars, computers, lasers, radar systems, magnets of quality, or medical devices, which are not 100-percent reliant on China for components using their critical materials,” Kutsch told me.

It is a giant vulnerability and Kutsch and his colleagues have been drawing attention to it for 15 years.

“We have been telling the decision makers in Washington and at the Pentagon for 15 years that China will use rare earths as an economic weapon. And we were always told that they would not. Well, now the U.S. is cut off,” he said.

According to Kutsch, and others, “rare earths aren’t rare at all.” They are difficult to mine and process and, as with much else, it has just been easier and cheaper to import them from China. 

Additionally, production in the U.S. has been hampered because rare earths are found in conjunction with thorium. Thorium is a fertile but not fissile nuclear material. That means that it can’t be used in a reactor, without having the reaction initiated by a fissile material, like uranium.

But its classification as a nuclear source material means it must be inventoried and stored as a nuclear material and is classified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as such. This makes mining and processing rare earths challenging and expensive in the U.S.

Kutsch lamented, “Every year, Florida produces enough rare earth ore to supply the western world’s needs. We choose not to process any of that rare earth material because it would create a small amount of slightly radioactive material.

“So, we have given up on any materials refining in the U.S. and have decided to put our entire economic and national security fate in the hands of our number one adversary.”

Even if the limiting factors of associated thorium were dealt with — a national thorium bank and registry has been proposed — rare earths wouldn’t begin to flow  overnight.

We simply don’t have the expertise in mining but especially in processing rare earths. Hell, it is hard enough to get our mouths around some of the names. Try saying Praseodymium and Neodymium.

The near-future looks like this:

1. We probably have enough stockpiles held by rare earth-using companies to last for several months, but shortages will start appearing after that.

2. The military is believed to have a better stockpile, enough for a year or longer.

3. Users initiate elaborate workarounds, like using a more plentiful but less effective metal.

3. Manufacturers may reduce the size or efficiency of systems that use rare earths, like a smaller motor in an electric car.

The essential role of rare earths is as a multiplier. A wind turbine produces at least five times more electricity because of the use of exceedingly small amounts of rare earths.

What does seem outrageous, is that the U.S. has embarked on a nasty trade war with China without understanding the People’s Republic has a grip below the belt. Ouch!

Hello, World! America Doesn’t Have Your Back Anymore

by Leave a Comment

America has your back. That has been the message of U.S. foreign policy to the world’s vulnerable since the end of World War II.

That sense that America is behind you was a message for Europe against the threat of the Soviet Union and has been the implicit message for all threatened by authoritarian expansionism.

From the sophisticated in Western Europe to the struggling masses worldwide, America has always been there to help. Its mission has been to serve and, in its serving, to promote the American brand — freedom, democracy, capitalism, human rights — and to keep America a revered and special place.

America was there to arbitrate an end to civil war, to rush in with aid after a natural disaster, to provide food during a famine and medical assistance during an infectious disease outbreak. America was there with an open heart and open hand.

If you want to look at this in a transactional way, which is the currency of today, we gave but we got back. The ledger is balanced. For example, we sent forth America’s food surplus to where it was needed, from Pakistan to Ethiopia, and we opened markets to our farmers.

The world’s needs established a symbiotic relationship in which we gained reverence and prestige, and our values were exported and sometimes adopted.

President Trump has characterized us as victims of a venal world that has pillaged our goodwill, stolen our manufacturing and exploited our market. The fact is that when Trump took office in January, the United States had the best-performing economy in the world, and its citizens enjoyed the products of the world at reasonable prices. Inflation was a problem, but it was beginning to come down — and it wasn’t as persistent as it had been in Britain, for example.

Trump has painted a picture of a world where our manufacturing was somehow shanghaied and carried in the depth of night to Asia.

In fact, American businesses, big and small, sought out Asian manufacturing to avail themselves of cheap but talented labor, low regulation, and a union-free environment.

Businesses will always go where the ecosystem favors them. The business ecosystem offshore was as irresistible to us as it was to a tranche of European manufacturing.

The move to Asia hollowed out the old manufacturing centers of the Midwest and New England, but unemployment has remained low. Some industries, including farming, food processing and manufacturing, suffer labor shortages.

We need manufacturing that supports national security. That includes chips, heavy electrical equipment and other essential infrastructure goods. It doesn’t include a lot of consumer goods, from clothing to toys.

Former California Sen. S.I. Hayakawa, a Republican and a semanticist, said you couldn’t come up with the correct answer if your input was wrong, “no matter how hard you think.” Trump’s thinking about the world seems to be input-challenged.

The world isn’t changing only in how Trump has ordained but in other fundamental ones. Manufacturing in just five years will be very different. Artificial intelligence will be on the factory floor, in the planning and sales offices, and it will boost productivity. However, it won’t add jobs and probably will subtract them.

Trump would like to build a Fortress America with all that will involve, including higher prices and uncompetitive factories. While not undermining our position as the benefactor to the world, a better approach might be to build up North America and welcome Canada and Mexico into an even closer relationship.  Canada shares much of our culture, is rich in raw materials, and has been an exemplary neighbor. Mexico is a treasure trove of talent and labor.

Rather than threatening Canada and belittling Mexico, a possible future lies in a collaborative relationship with our neighbors.

Meanwhile, Canada is looking for markets to the East and the West. Mexico, which is building a coast-to-coast railway to compete with the Panama Canal, is staking much on its new trade deal with the European Union.

Trump has sundered old relationships and old views of what is America’s place in the world order. No longer does the world have America at its back.

This is a time of choice: The Ugly American or the Great Neighbor.

Oh, Congress! How Have You Become So Pusillanimous?

by Leave a Comment

October 1989 found me in a small hotel, the Londonderry Arms, on the Antrim Coast of Northern Ireland. It was during “The Troubles” and evidence of the sectarian strife was everywhere, even along that beautiful shoreline, complete as it is with the Giant’s Causeway, one of Northern Ireland’s big tourist attractions.

My wife, Linda Gasparello, and I were reminded of the bitter divisions between Protestants and Catholics when we were stopped by British soldiers at a roadblock. They were polite and checked our papers. While they were doing that, Linda said, “Aren’t those soldiers vulnerable, standing like that in the open road?”

“Take a look over there,” I replied.

Just as I knew there would be, there was a soldier in a ditch with a machine gun trained on us and offering cover to the troops.

It was a reminder of just how bad things were in Northern Ireland at the time with frequent murders, kneecapping, and a lack of any communication between Protestants and Catholics. One people divided by their religious and historical burden.

The Londonderry Arms was a hotel of historic importance, having once been owned briefly by Winston Churchill and which was operated from 1948 until last year by the legendary O’Neill family.

We had been warmly welcomed and made at home by Frankie O’Neill. After dinner at the hotel, he came to me and said, “I am afraid I won’t be able to be with you after today because I am taking my sister to Washington to see the Congress at work.”

“Why?” I asked.

One could imagine traveling to Washington to see the museums, the White House and the Capitol. But Congress in session, that querulous place with its confusing systems and norms?

Then he explained that the Northern Ireland Parliament, called Stormont, after Stormont Castle where it meets, is based on the British House of Commons where party discipline is absolute. Under a parliamentary system, the government of the day would fall if there were no party discipline. If you are Labor, you vote Labor; if Conservative, you vote Conservative. Only very occasionally is there a free vote on a moral issue, like the death penalty.

That meant, O’Neill told me, that in Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants were on opposite sides of the aisle and the government was always at a standstill.

He thought the American legislative system, with its ability to incorporate minority views, and for minorities to introduce and pass legislation of interest only to a fragment of the population, was a beacon for Ireland.

I don’t think O’Neill would take his sister to Washington today to see the Congress as it is now: inglorious, pusillanimous, fawning men and women more concerned with their own job protection than discharging the high duty of the House and the Senate. Worse, its magnificent independence has been traded for obsequious party loyalty.

Of course, the lickspittle members of Congress at present are the wretched, obsequious, groveling Republicans who have enabled President Trump to trample the Constitution and usurp the powers of Congress.

But one has to say the Democrats are hardly admirable, not exactly an impressive body of leaders. In their way, they are humbled by their own diminished concept of the role of the loyal opposition.

The Republicans may be the more guilty invertebrates, but the equivalence of the Democrats is also noteworthy in this sad abrogation of responsibility that has taken hold of the political class in Congress. Look no further than Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s failure of courage in throwing in with the Republicans to keep the government open. It was political will withering in plain sight.

As someone who was covering Congress at the time of O’Neill’s declaration about the superiority of Congress as a democratic legislating arrangement, I have seen that great body subsume the national interest to personal job security and fear of criticism from on high, the White House.

The great thing at that time was the individualism of members of Congress, who had a keen eye to their constituents and what they felt was the national interest.

Sadly, that grand time of free-for-all legislating came to an end when Newt Gingrich took up the House speaker’s gavel in 1994 and introduced a concept of party discipline more appropriate to Westminster than to Capitol Hill. Shame.

Memories of a Great Senator, When the Senate Was Great 

by 4 Comments

Anyone wondering about a career as a U.S. senator might want to study the life and times of Sen. J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.), who died March 25 at the age of 92. To me, he embodied the best of the Senate that was.

Johnston was both a patriotic American and a loyalist to the state that sent him to Congress. He also was bipartisan, curious and totally on top of his subject. His legislative milestones endure, from natural gas and oil deregulation to the electricity and environmental structure of today.

Johnston was an exemplar of the art of the Senate, when it was correctly known as the world’s greatest deliberative body. He was chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and, as such, was a major player in the shaping of energy and environmental policy.

He was a Democrat who worked across the aisle. Oddly, his most contentious relationship might have been that with President Jimmy Carter. They clashed over a water project on the Red River in Louisiana: Carter thought it was too expensive, but Johnston argued that it was needed. He admired President Bill Clinton for his brilliance.

In the aftermath of the Three Mile Island accident, he worked with President Ronald Reagan to establish the Institute for Nuclear Power Operations to save nuclear power from those who wanted to eliminate it.

Like other distinguished chairmen, Johnston recognized two fealties: to his state and to the nation.

I watched Johnston all his years as Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee chairman, and I came to revere and admire him as a great gentleman, a great patriot and a great senator.

Johnston was neither flashy, nor loud, but he was effective. The New York Times said of him that he was a notable exception, compared with the noisy and controversial political heritage of Louisiana, which included such notables as Huey and Earl Long and Edwin Edwards. Johnston was instead “a quiet intellectual with finely honed political judgments who grasped the technical intricacies of energy exploration and production and could also lucidly discuss astrophysics, subatomic particles and tennis serves.”

Thomas Kuhn, a former longtime president of the Edison Electric Institute, said Johnston had a lasting impact on environmental and energy policy during his 24 years in Congress with the Clean Air Act of 1990 and the Energy Policy Act of 1992.

When the Energy Policy Act was working its way through Congress, I saw Johnston at work up close. He invited me, as the founder and publisher of The Energy Daily, and Paul Gigot, then a Washington columnist for The Wall Street Journal and later its editorial page editor, to lunch in a small private dining room in the Senate.

Johnston was low-key yet forceful in seeking our support for the bill. I asked him, “Who is carrying your water on this one?” He responded in an endearing and lonesome way, “I’m afraid I am.” And carry it he did until it became law.

On another occasion, when President George H.W. Bush’s nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court was bogged down with Anita Hill’s allegations of impropriety by the nominee, Johnston told me, “I’m going to vote for him. I think when he looks in the mirror in the morning, he will see a black face and he will do the right things.” Maybe not Johnston’s best call.

While Kuhn may have met Johnston as a lobbyist, they became close friends and tennis partners. Kuhn told me Johnston was so passionate about tennis that he had a court built atop the Senate Dirksen Office Building. Among others, he would play tennis there with fellow Louisiana Sen. John Breaux.

Johnston was also passionate about Tabasco sauce and carried a bottle with him at all times.

Kuhn remembered this about his friend, “He was well-liked by everyone and had a great sense of humor. And he got things done on a bipartisan basis — a skill that is sorely missed in today’s Washington.”

Political Fear Stalks Law, Education, Journalism, Migration

by Leave a Comment

Something new has entered American consciousness: fear of the state.

Not since the Red Scares (the first one followed the Russian Revolution and World War I, and the second followed World War II and the outbreak of the Cold War) has the state taken such an active role in political intervention.

The state under Donald Trump has a special interest in political speech and action, singling out lawyers and law firms, universities and student activists, and journalists and their employers. It is certain that the undocumented live in fear night and day.

Fear of the state has entered the political process.

Presidents before Trump had their enemies. Nixon was famous for his “list,” which was mostly journalists. His political paranoia was always there, and it finally brought him down with the Watergate scandal.

Even John Kennedy, who had a soft spot for the Fourth Estate, took umbrage at the New York Herald Tribune and had that newspaper banned for a while from the White House.

Lyndon Johnson played games with and manipulated Congress to reward his allies and punish his enemies. With reporters, it was an endless reward-and-punishment game, mainly achieved with information given or withheld.

The Trump administration is relentless in its desire to root out what it sees as state enemies or those who disagree with it. It includes the judicial system and all its components: judges, law firms and advocates for those whom it has disapproved. If an individual lawyer so much as defends an opponent of the administration, that individual will be “investigated,” which, in this climate, is a euphemism for persecuted.

If you are investigated, you face the full force of the state and its agencies. If you can find a lawyer of stature to defend you, you will be buried in debt, probably out of work, and ruined without the “investigation” turning up any impropriety.

One mighty law firm, Paul, Weiss, faced with losing huge government contracts, bowed to Trump. It was a bad day for judicial independence.

The courts and individual judges are under attack, threatened with impeachment, even as the state seeks to evade their rulings.

Others are under threat and practice law cautiously when contentious matters arise. The price is known: Offend and be punished by loss of government work, by fear of investigation, and by public humiliation by derision and accusation.

The boot of the state is poised above the neck of the universities.

If they allow free speech that doesn’t accord with the administration’s definition of that constitutional right, the boot will descend, as it did on Columbia.

Shamefully, Columbia caved to try to salvage $400 million in research funds. Speech on that campus is now circumscribed. Worse, the state is likely emboldened by its success.

Linda McMahon, the education secretary, has promised that with or without a Department of Education, the administration will go after the universities and what they allow and what they teach, if it is antisemitic, as defined by the state, or if they are practicing diversity, equality and inclusion, a Trump irritant.

One notes that another university, Georgetown, is standing up to the pressure. Bravo!

At the White House, press secretary Karoline Leavitt has decided to usurp the White House Correspondents’ Association and determine who will cover the president in the reporters’ pool — critical reporting in the Oval Office and on Air Force One.

Traveling with the president is essential. That is how a reporter gets to know the chief executive up close and personal. A pool report from a MAGA blogger doesn’t cut it.

Trump has threatened to sue media outlets. If they are small and poor, as most new ones are, they can’t withstand the cost of defending themselves. ABC, which is owned by Disney, caved to Trump even though its employees longed for the case to be settled in court. Corporate interests dictated accommodation with the state.

Accommodate what they have, and they will. Watch what happens with Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit against CBS’ “60 Minutes. The truth is obvious; the result may be a tip of the hat to Trump.

Nowhere is fear more redolent, the state more pernicious and ruthless than in the deportation of immigrants without due process, without charges and without evidence. ICE says you are guilty, and you go. Men wearing masks double you over, handcuff you behind your back and take you away, maybe to a prison in El Salvador.

Fear has arrived in America and can be felt in the marbled halls of the giant law firms, in newsrooms and executive offices, all the way to the crying children who see a parent dragged off by men in black, wearing balaclavas, presumably for the purpose of extra intimidation.