White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Trump Foreign Policy Sneers at Europe, Winks at Russia

by Leave a Comment

There is a strain of conservatism in the United States that suffers from what might be called “Euro envy.”

It is not mainstream, and it was not the conservatism of former presidents Ronald Reagan or either of the Bushes. It has evolved from a hatred of socialist manifestations in European economies.

Sadly, President Donald Trump is the exemplar of this envy; this need to deride Europe and all things European.

Euro envy has its equally foolish counterpoint across the Atlantic that might be called “U.S. disdain.”

Neither would be of any consequence if it were not for the delicate international situation with the deteriorated relations between the United States and Europe, compounded by Europe’s own troubles.

Euro envy, at its purest, revolves around the successes of Europe: its public health systems, its efficient rail system, and its support of fine and performing arts. The belief is that Europe’s social approach cannot be better and somehow it must be found to be wanting.

Some things in Europe do work better, but at a price; a price in taxation and bureaucratic rigidities, which cost the Euro economies in lower growth and higher unemployment.

Anyone who has looked at European health systems knows that they work. Perhaps not perfectly, but well enough and at a lower gross price than their patchier American equivalent. Yet fables persist of people lining up in the streets of London for heart surgery and long waiting lists all over Europe for critical care. These are myths but potent ones.

For public transportation, health care and generous retirement, Europe pays. Recently in Sweden, a colleague who once worked in the White House press corps told me: “We pay half our wages in tax, but we get a lot for it.”

I would add to the downside of European life that it is very hard to fire anyone, that people retire too early and have too many government-guaranteed perks in the workplace like, in some countries, extended maternal leave for both parents.

The obverse, U.S. disdain, features exaggerated emphasis on gun violence, prison conditions, no universal health care, no job security and two-week vacation times.

The European left has always denigrated conditions in America and has unfailingly given short shrift to Republican presidents. They are damned out of the blocks. “Cowboy” is the pejorative thrown at them. This is as unfair and untrue as is the Euro sneering.

Despite these streams of envy, even hatred, the Atlantic alliance has been a thing of beauty in world history, a bulwark defending the cultures and freedoms that are the Western inheritance; the inheritance that has made the liberal democracies such a magnet for the world’s less fortunate. Illegal immigration is the compliment that the hapless pay to the happy.

Trump has swallowed whole the Euro disdainers’ views — they fit well with his nativistic views about the United States.

In one thing though, and it has riled the right for decades, Trump is right: Europe pays too little for its own defense. This is the cudgel that he will wield at the NATO summit. Europe, for all its quality-of-life smugness, depends on the U.S. defense umbrella.

These things make the next two weeks critical in world affairs, and replete with terrible irony. Europe depends on the United States to defend itself against Russia, which has shown designs on all the European countries which were once Soviet vassal states. But the guarantor of European freedom, Trump, is out to trash the European alliance and cozy up to Russia.

The irony does not stop there. Trump wants more money from Europe when he is about to damage its economies with a trade war.

In the next two weeks, there is not much to envy in the European predicament: pay up or face Russia alone. Trump will not have your back.

Sanders Deserved What Burton and Taylor Got — Privacy

by Leave a Comment

Public accommodations can be a thorny matter. Historically, Virginia has had its problems, as have other states and nations.

In Marshall, Va., a little greasy spoon became notorious and its owners served time in prison because they refused to serve people of color. Very soon, the only people who frequented the joint were journalists who hoped to catch the owners in the act of violating the state’s public accommodations law.

In a bar in Baltimore, I watched the owner lie to a black man who wanted service. “This is a private club, but I could sell you something to go,” the owner said. It wasn’t a club; it was racism at work.

At a roadside restaurant in South Africa, before the fall of apartheid, my family and I and our African driver stopped for a bite. I was told that our driver couldn’t enter this humble establishment with me and my family and would have to eat in the car. We all ate in the car.

Obviously, there was no race dimension in the booting of White House press secretary Sarah Sanders from the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Va., but there was the owner’s anger, fury and protest. It was a comment on actions of the administration Sanders defends daily. Lexington, located in the Shenandoah Valley, is a thoroughly Trump town — home to the Virginia Military Institute, Washington and Lee University, flag-bedecked houses, pickup trucks with NRA decals, and Fox on the box.

The restaurant owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, said Sanders didn’t meet the restaurant’s standards of kindness, compassion and cooperation and that’s why she kicked out Sanders. Clearly Wilkinson was vexed, as many are these days, with the profound national division over the treatment of immigrant children at the border and the constant defense of mendacity by Sanders.

While political speech deserves defense, I think one deserves to eat one’s vittles without victimization. Chowing down shouldn’t be an opportunity for others to speak up.

Customers who meet reasonable standards of behavior and dress shouldn’t be denied service or yelled at while exercising their right to patronize public places. I think it was wrong for protesters to attack Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen at a Mexican restaurant in Washington. Some privacy in public is an entitlement, even if the president behaves in outrageous ways with ad hominem attacks on allied leaders, schoolyard abuse of his detractors and a rabid-dog approach to public life.

There isn’t much for which I can claim the moral high ground, but when it comes to restaurants, I have credentials — top-drawer bona fides, as it were.

Back in 1962, I was employed by one of the London newspapers, notorious for intruding on peoples’ privacy. My assignment was to follow a couple of lovebirds around London. They were Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and my job was to spend all day and much of the night at the famous Dorchester Hotel, where love was being committed.

Except that they never entered stage center.

Every day I made my way to the five-star hotel and sat around, had drinks (which the hotel provided free) and hoped to see them coming or leaving or, fond hope, kissing on the backstairs. No joy. Even hopes of asking the chambermaid about the bed were nobbled by hotel security.

Then one Sunday in Dulwich, a green and pleasant oasis in south London, my then wife, a brilliant journalist, Doreen King, and I went for our Sunday lunch, an English tradition, at a very nice pub. And there they were, my prey: Taylor and Burton as large as life having lunch. Not just having lunch, but at the next table.

My wife whispered, “Are you going to call the office and get a photographer? What questions have you got ready?”

I looked at the lovers at the next table. Never have I seen two people so in love, so happy with each other. My wife and I agreed silently to leave them alone.

I’d like to be able to say that Burton winked, but he didn’t. He had eyes only for Taylor.

To my mind, the lovely (Taylor and Burton) and the less so (Nielsen and Sanders) should be able to enjoy a private meal in public. I missed a scoop on this belief.

 

 

Photo Editorial credit: Michael Candelori / Shutterstock.com

GOP Establishment Savants Speak Softly, Back a Carbon Tax

by Leave a Comment

Call it a tax without tears. It is a proposal to address carbon pollution by replacing a raft of tax subsidies and regulatory requirements with a carbon tax.

What is surprising is who is pushing it: dyed-in-the-wool, rock-ribbed Republicans.

They are the top of the GOP: Every one of them has had an outstanding career in finance, industry or academia. They are men and women who contribute to Republican candidates regularly — and some of them quite generously.

These Republican grandees and party financiers have formed the Alliance for Market Solutions (AMS), which aims to educate conservative policymakers on the benefits of market-oriented solutions to climate change.

“A carbon tax, if the myriad of subsidies and regulations that policymakers now use to affect markets are stripped away, would lead to economic growth and achieve significant carbon pollution reductions,” says Alex Flint, executive director of AMS.

Well-known in Republican circles, he previously served as staff director of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and as senior vice president of government affairs at the Nuclear Energy Institute.

The organization’s 10-member advisory board includes John Rowe, former chairman and CEO of Exelon Corp., the largest diversified utility in the United States, and Marvin Odum, former chairman and president of Shell Oil Co. and board member of the American Petroleum Institute.

What we need now, Rowe said, is “a new approach to energy tax and regulation that advances our strategic policy objectives and recognizes that the period of scarcity that began in the 1970s is over. We no longer need to subsidize energy production.”

Instead, we need policies that address “the next great energy challenge: carbon pollution,” he said.

Rowe and AMS allies believe that pairing a “revenue-neutral” carbon tax with a regulatory rollback would be good climate policy.

Flint explained: “A carbon tax would ideally be imposed upstream where carbon enters the economy. Costs would then be passed down the consumption chain through prices, which would impact decision-making and drive the use of cleaner fuels and new technologies across the economy.”

Studies by AMS estimate that a carbon tax would generate more than $1 trillion in additional revenue over the next decade, which lawmakers could use to reduce other, more distortionary taxes, or do things like make the 2017 tax reform permanent or even further reduce income taxes.

Rather than mounting a loud public-pressure campaign, Flint told me the members of the alliance — which also includes William Strong, chairman and managing director of Longford Capital Management, and Chris DeMuth, distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute — began by meeting quietly with influential Republicans in small groups, going over the gains that would come from tax reform and emphasizing that the carbon tax does not have to be a one-size-fits-all solution, although it is a simple solution to a pressing problem.

Emphasis has been on Republicans who wield power behind the scenes and the tax writers in the House and the Senate. The reformers are getting a hearing, I am told.

The alliance has tried hard to get the facts and detailed analyses nailed down ahead of public discussion. They have done this in a new book, “Carbon Tax Policy: A Conservative Dialogue on Pro-Growth Opportunities,” edited by Alex Brill of the American Enterprise Institute.

The book is, you might say, the creed of the AMS. It is an eye-opening read by conservatives who want to limit government market-meddling and bring about sound policy through enlightened taxation.

The Case Against Mega Mergers Is Written in History

by Leave a Comment

At lightning speed, after a judge approved the merger, AT&T and Time Warner announced the completion of their $85-billion deal. Another behemoth has taken the field.

This merger, it is assumed, will lead to a flurry of other mergers in communications. Witness Comcast’s $65 billion bid for Fox, topping Disney’s $52.4 billion offer.

This is heady stuff. The money on the table is enormous, in some cases dwarfing the economies of small countries.

Merging is an industry unto itself. A lot of people get very rich: They are investment bankers, arbitragers, lawyers, economists, accountants, publicists and opinion researchers. When really big money moves, some of it falls off the table into the willing hands of those who have managed the movement.

The fate of the real owners of these companies, the stockholders, is more doubtful after the initial run-up. The earlier merger of Time with Warner Communications is considered to have been disadvantageous for stockholders.

Another concern is the mediocre performance of conglomerates. The latest to have run into trouble is General Electric, which had managed to do well in many businesses until recently.

A more cautionary story is what happened to Westinghouse when it went whole hog into broadcasting and lost its footing in the electric generation businesses. This was spun off, sold to British Nuclear Fuels in 1997, then sold again to Toshiba and later went into bankruptcy.

From the 1950s, Westinghouse it bought and sold companies at a furious rate, until the core company itself was sold in favor of broadcasting. One of Westinghouse’s most successful chairmen, Bob Kirby, told me it was easier for him to buy or sell a company than to make a small internal decision.

In another pure financial play, a group of hedge funds bought Toys R Us and with the added debt, it failed.

In many things, big is essential in today’s economy. News organizations need substantial financial strength to be able to do the job. Witness the cost of covering the Quebec and Singapore summits. As Westinghouse proved by default, big construction needs big resources. That is indisputable.

When growth through acquisition becomes the modus operandi of a company, something has gone very wrong. The losers are the public and the customers. The new AT&T, if it comes about, will still need you and I to lift the receiver, watch its videos and subscribe to its bundles.

Recently, I was discussing the problems customers have with behemoth corporations on SiriusXM Radio’s “The Morning Briefing with Tim Farley” when a listener tweeted that I hated big companies and their CEOs and loved big government.

Actually I’d just spent a week with the CEOs of several companies, admirable people, and I don’t think government should be any bigger than needs be. I certainly don’t think government should perform functions that can be better performed in the private sector.

The problem is size itself.

When any organization gets too big, it begins to get muscle-bound, self-regarding. Although it might’ve been built on daring innovation, as many firms have been, supersized companies have difficulty in allowing new thinking, reacting nimbly and adopting innovative technologies and materials.

If large corporate entities were as nimble as small ones, the automobile companies would’ve become the airplane manufacturers in the 1920s and 1930s. They had the money, the manufacturing know-how and the engineering talent. They lacked the vision. It was easier to be rent-takers in the production and sale of automobiles.

Likewise, it’s incredible that FedEx was able to conquer the delivery business when another delivery system, Western Union, was up and running. But Western Union was big, smug and monopolistic. They had the resources and an army of staff delivering telegrams.

Companies like Alphabet (Google’s owner) snap up start-ups as soon as they are proven. That snuffs out the creativity early, even if it wasn’t meant to, and makes Google even more dominant. I would argue too big for its own good — and for ours.

Customer Frustration Drove Many to Vote for Trump

by 1 Comment

Trump is the product of a frustrated electorate sick of elites in Washington who pay no heed to the people who pay the taxes and have little interest in them. Thus runs the popular narrative of how we got President Donald Trump and why his base, despite everything, is firmly committed to him.

Half right, I say.

There was a great national dissatisfaction at the time of the election and there is so today. But was that really the result of unhappiness with elites in Washington?

I’d suggest that it is the daily frustration we all face in simply going about our business. Elites are to blame, but not the elites named in the political narrative that has become the conventional view of the Trump phenomenon.

The elites who frustrate us are the large corporate ones that we cannot live without and have difficulty living with. Substitute corporations for elites.

In no particular order, they are the insurance companies, the banks, the credit card companies, the airlines, the hospitals, the telephone companies, the cable TV providers, Amtrak, Amazon and other corporations that hide behind a battery of devices programmed to avoid any direct human contact with the customer.

In fact, to most billion-dollar-plus corporations, the individual is less significant than a grain of sand on a California beach. These suppliers of our needs are hidden in a thicket of automatic phone systems that seem to require that you spend half an hour in a maze of prompts before, maybe, you reach a person who will also behave as though he or she is a recording; a person who is reading from a script and diverting your pleadings.

Collectively, what they’d like to tell you is you are in the wrong and will always be in the wrong because you are a statistical inconvenience, your custom a nuisance.

Step forward my bank.

More than 40 years ago, I added my wife to a credit card. We had an amicable divorce and we both got married again.

Regularly, over the years, I’ve asked my bank to remove her name, Jane Doe King — to protect her privacy — from the card. I paid all the bills, and my notes with the payments and letters were never answered.

Suddenly this year, my bank decided it was imperative that they get information on Jane Doe King, who is a nonexistent person. I went to my branch, explained the situation and was told by an officer that she’d been removed from the card. All’s well that ends well.

But it wasn’t the end, and all wasn’t well.

A few days later, when I tried to call an Uber car, I learned that my card was blocked because Jane Doe King hadn’t supplied her financial information to my bank.

I called my bank. After the de rigueur half hour of playing the equivalent of telephone pinball with their answering system and the irrelevant prompts, I spoke to a representative. He might as well have been a recording because no matter what I said, he went back to the script in front of him.

I explained, he demurred. Jane Doe King would have to prove first that she existed and then that she wanted to be removed from the card, which she had never used in more than 40 years.

I asked him to call the officer in the bank’s branch with whom I’d spoken. He said his phones didn’t have outgoing lines and so he couldn’t do that. I said I’d go to the bank’s branch and have the officer call the credit card department and straighten out the matter. But he wouldn’t give me his direct-dial number or his last name; just his first name and the general number. I went into serious profanity suppression mode.

Only the appearance of the person who does not exist would satisfy the Man Who Can’t Make Phone Calls. Fearing temper loss, I hung up and emailed the bank officer who had “fixed” the problem. He hasn’t replied.

The message is that you, the customer, and your account and patronage don’t count.

Even as you read this, thousands of Americans are getting the electronic runaround as they try to solve simple issues. Confused and angry, they are turning to the wildest political solution they can: Trump. Sadly, this is another abortive pursuit.

Llewellyn King on Morning Briefing with Tim Farley

by Leave a Comment

Llewellyn King joins Tim Farley, host of “The Morning Briefing with Tim Farley” on SiriusXM Radio’s P.O.T.U.S., Channel 124, to discuss the inhumanity of illegal immigrant deportations and the future economic need for immigrants in the United States. He also discusses a “third way” to remedy many of the stresses borne by communities from illegal immigration.

Click the play button below to listen.

 

 

You Need to Be Brave for This New World

by Leave a Comment

Pondering the future requires an extrapolation from a data point in the present. But different data points give very different futures. Beware of the prognosticators.

Take this as a data point: Stephen Entin, senior fellow at the Tax Foundation, a think tank devoted to tax studies since 1937, predicts that with an aging population and low birthrates, we’re going to need more immigrants to fill the federal and state coffers with their taxes. We’re also going to need hundreds of thousands of workers for health care and aged care in the years ahead, he says.

Or take this as a data point: MIT Sloan Professor Tom Kochan fears that artificial intelligence will substitute for millions of employees. Retraining is possible, but can you see a long-haul truck driver pushing wheelchairs in an assisted-living facility? Not easily.

Upheaval in work is the most predictable aspect of the future.

It is, if you will, already arriving in the workplace. New techniques and new concepts of what is work are afoot.

The old concept is that a person leaves school, gets a job and signs on to the social/work contract — gets company-paid benefits and expects security and stability. The infrastructure of society pointed the way to employer-employee model.

The new concept is the gig economy, where contract work and freelancing rule. The work/social infrastructure where medical insurance, Social Security and retirement are part of the deal is dying. But a one has yet to emerge in concept and in law.

Business is in the throes of its own future adjustment. Take 3D printing, more correctly called additive manufacturing. What was novelty a decade ago is now a tool used in industrial plants across the country. Instead of taking a chunk of metal, say aluminum, and cutting and lathing it to make a part, which wasted most of the metal, there’s no waste with 3D printing.

Now to make a part, you print it from metal powder to a design lodged in a computer. The saving in material, shipping and manpower is enormous.

And additive manufacturing, just like everything else on the shop floor, can be automated. Machines can sinter — the term for 3D printing — through the night with only artificial intelligence supervision.

There’s a new existential worry in every large enterprise in the United States, from banking to manufacturing, from electricity generation to hospital management and from building crane operation to pharmaceutical design: cyber-vulnerability.

To paraphrase Leon Trotsky, you may not be interested in cyber-war, but cyber-war is interested in you.

I’ve interviewed widely on the subject, from top academics to some of the most successful cyber-security entrepreneurs, to National Security Agency sources. The story is the same everywhere: Nothing connected to computers is entirely safe; and if it’s safe today, will it be tomorrow? That plague, like the plagues of old, will, I’m assured, be with us for decades, if not centuries to come.

Cyber-defenders build, cyber-hackers build around. It’s a version of what one secretary of defense, Harold Brown, said about the Soviet threat in the Cold War: “We build, they build.”

The changes are all around the home: Everything has changed since the day of the black AT&T phone, but you haven’t seen anything yet. Your packages may be delivered by drone, your phone service will be entirely mobile, and your life will be dictated by electronic secretarial aids. Alexa is just the beginning. With artificial intelligence, these robots will talk back to us and maybe argue, shudder the thought.

I pity the dogs. We had a dog that would be very upset if she heard my wife, a talk show regular, on the television when she was also elsewhere in the house. Dogs are sensitive to these things.

What if man’s best friend, eternal unquestioning companion, develops a strong affection for the electronic assistant and changes loyalties, especially if the gadget is feeding the dog? Will it be as Julius Caesar might have said, “Et tu, Fido?”

 

 

Photo: Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

A Third Way on Immigration Proposed by Tax Expert

by Leave a Comment

To me, there is something especially savage and cruel about deportations. It reminds of what I saw in colonial Africa, or in South Africa, or touring the Auschwitz concentration camp. Armed men and women coming by surprise to rip apart a family, to condemn people to a future they had braved so much to escape, evokes all the horrors of history. The rough brutality of one person taking charge of another appalls, twists the gut and stops the heart.

Even if sanctioned by law, the unfettered power of the state and its officers moving against an individual is profoundly ugly. The fact that those seized have broken the law doesn’t seem, in most cases, to justify ending the order and hope of their modest lives.

Yet I don’t believe any nation should allow conquest by immigration which is a threat to one’s culture, one’s language and one’s own sense of place. I believe there should be legal immigration, screened immigration. Our natural rate of population replenishment is inadequate.

Against the backdrop of vast shifting populations around the globe, the United States has only a modest problem. The illegal immigrant inflow, particularly across the southern border, has dwindled. So the issue is the estimated 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants who are here, have put down roots and are often raising American children.

Their fate is bitterly divisive: on one side, liberals and groups that speak for immigrants wanting amnesty and citizenship and on the other, conservatives demanding that our immigration laws are immutable, and the illegals must be arrested and deported.

Mark Jason, a retired IRS inspector from Malibu, Calif., looked at the problem from a taxman’s point of view through the Immigrant Tax Inquiry Group, which he founded in 2008.

Jason was concerned with the negative effect illegal immigrants were having on local communities, straining budgets and overwhelming social services. This kind of pressure has led many local entities to act against these people, denying them services, from driving licenses to schooling.

Jason knew from his research that many illegal immigrants, who came here to get a better, safer life, want eventually to return to their homelands. Trouble is they are immobilized in the United States, particularly if they have family here. If they visit their homelands, they can’t get back into the United States.

Jason believes a creative tax could defuse the illegal immigrant argument and stabilize life for what have become people of the shadows.

His plan, his third way, will:

—Grant all illegal immigrants who want to work a permit, called a REALcard (short for respect, equality, accountability and legality) that is valid for 10 years and renewable.

—Impose special taxes — 5 percent on the wages of the workers and 5 percent on the same wages to be paid by the employer — which would go to the hurting local communities.

Jason calculates that his tax will raise $210 billion over 10 years and that this money should be earmarked for communities hosting large numbers of immigrants.

For a decade, Jason has been imploring immigration groups, think tanks and Congress to consider his plan. Next week, he will be holding an information session on Capitol Hill to investigate various perspectives on immigration. His plan is to have a discussion on immigration focused on sound public policy, placing the interests of U.S. taxpayers first and treating all the stakeholders with respect.

I’ve known Jason for five years and have been astounded by the tenacity of this gentle Reagan Republican and his desire to do the right thing for those caught up in the immigration gyre, to relieve the acute artisan labor shortage, and to help counties and cities with their added illegal immigrant burdens — the new money going to education, health care, policing, jails and social services.

Legalize the illegal immigrants and some will go home early. Data shows that about half will return eventually to their homelands.

To my mind, Jason’s self-funded Immigrant Tax Inquiry Group is offering a solid alternative to the bleak immigrant policy debate — and to the swinging door of the detention center. Illegal entry into the United States in law, so venerated by the deportation enthusiasts, is only a misdemeanor.

Families physically torn apart, deportation and ruin, is a severe penalty for a misdemeanor. Does it fit the crime when there is another way?

 

 

Photo: VANCOUVER, BC – OCTOBER 30 The peace arch border on October 30, 2016 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Peace arch border between Canada and USA represent the world’s longest undefended border.

The Husband and Wife Who Founded Memorial Day

by 1 Comment

(Channeling Gen. John A. “Black Jack” Logan)

WASHINGTON — It’s Memorial Day. I see you’re walking from Logan Circle to Constitution Avenue to watch the parade honoring all the nation’s veterans.

I’ll be there, too. In spirit.

Do you see the bronze statue in the circle? That’s me: Gen. John A. Logan, sitting erect on my horse, my sword drawn and the ends of my thick mustache flying in the wind. I was nicknamed “Black Jack” for my swarthy complexion, boot-black hair, eyes and that mustache.

At the outset of the Civil War, I won re-election to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Jacksonian Democrat from Illinois’s 9th Congressional District, a region that had partisan and divided loyalties. I tried to take a neutral stance, but I ended up fighting to preserve the union. I rose from colonel to major general, distinguishing myself in eight major campaigns. Many historians consider me to be best of the Union Army’s “political” generals.

Gen. Ulysses S. Grant offered me a brigadier generalship in the postwar U.S. Army, but I returned to politics, winning three more U.S. House elections as a Republican from Illinois, and an advocate of African-American civil rights and public education.

Later I won three U.S. Senate elections, which spurred me to run for higher offices. I was a vice-presidential candidate on the Republican ticket that lost the general election in 1884, and I failed twice to become my party’s presidential nominee.

Enough about my political career. If you can dally, I’d like to tell you about the origin of this national holiday, which involves me and my wife, Mary, an indefatigable Washington hostess and a prodigious writer and public speaker.

In March 1868, when I was a congressman and commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union veterans, my wife and I were invited to tour the battlefields of Virginia. Unfortunately, I couldn’t accompany her on what she called a “pilgrimage” in her May 30, 1903, article in The Los Angeles Times, headlined “Memorial Day: A Noted Woman’s Story of Its Origin and Growth.”

She wrote that on her visit to the oldest church in Petersburg, Va., whose bricks had been brought from England, “as we passed through the rows of graves, I noticed that many of them had been strewn with beautiful blossoms and decorated with small flags of the dead Confederacy.”

When I met her at the train station, she told me about this “sentimental idea” and I said, by her account, “What a splendid thought! We will have it done all over the country, and the Grand Army shall do it! I will issue an order at once for a national Memorial Day for the decoration of the graves of all of these noble fellows who died for their country.”

While I’d known about the Decoration Day observances in the South (and mentioned them in a speech in 1866), my wife’s enrapture with the idea likely got me moving on an annual national day to honor the fallen.

On May 5, 1868, at Grand Army headquarters in Washington, I issued General Order No. 11, designating that May 30 “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion. … It is the purpose of the Commander-in-Chief to inaugurate this observance with the hope it will be kept up from year to year …”

Now, on your way to the parade. But I hope you’ll take the time, as I said in my order, to visit the graves of our heroic dead and “garland the passionless mounds above them with the choicest flowers of springtime.”

Remembering Tom Wolfe, Revolutionary in a White Suit

by 1 Comment

Every field of endeavor gets stuck in a rut and it takes a pioneer, a rebel, to blast it loose. In journalism and literature, Tom Wolfe, who has died, age 88, did that, starting in the 1960s.

His incendiary device was the “New Journalism.” It used the techniques of the novel in observation and quoted speech for news and feature writing. Wolfe was its exemplar with unequaled verbal pyrotechnics.

In the summer of 1963, I had the luck to work in the same room as Wolfe at The Herald Tribune in New York City. He was in the initial stage of shaking up journalism.

That golden summer, somehow, some of the greats of American journalism found themselves at “The Trib,” a newspaper that had had a history of shaking up journalism and was doing it again.

By 1963 the newspaper was suffering from years of poor business decisions, which had reduced it to near bankruptcy. It had been bought by the oil billionaire Jock Whitney to provide a conservative voice to counter the liberal New York Times.

What Whitney got was a cornucopia of newspaper talent.

Probably never before or since have so many gifted wordsmiths been assembled in the same place: a championship season of talent that was to affect journalism for a generation.

Altogether Murray “Buddy” Weiss, who was the managing editor, and I calculated, long after the paper had failed in 1966, that 67 people who worked at the paper went on to major journalistic success. The names included Eugenia Sheppard, Jimmy Breslin, Red Smith and David Laventhol, who later created the Style section of The Washington Post and fired another newspaper revolution.

And sitting there, in the middle of one of long tables where the reporters sat, was one Tom Wolfe, already wearing the white suit that was his trademark all the long years of his success. The tailoring got better over time, but the color remained.

Wolfe got to New York via a Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale and stints at The Springfield Union and The Washington Post. At both papers editors knew he had talent, but sort of ignored it.

Fortune helped Wolfe along when The Trib was closed by a strike in 1962 and he contracted with Esquire magazine to travel to San Francisco and look at psychedelic paint jobs on cars.

Wolfe discovered the counterculture and Esquire discovered what became known as the New Journalism — a term that he didn’t really like. When he had difficulty putting his discoveries into traditional journalistic form, his editors told him to send them a memo and they would write it for him.

He did and they published the long, long memo, 49 pages, in full: “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.” It was unique in reporting history. It also introduced Wolfe into the world of the counterculture that he, along with Hunter S. Thompson and others, was to chronicle.

But unlike Thompson, Wolfe never joined the counterculture. He reported on it and gave it a language of its own, drawn from how people in the culture spoke, but remained a courtly Virginia gentleman.

One of the many gifted people at The Trib at the time was Clay Felker, editor of the newspaper’s magazine, which survives today as New York Magazine.

They were made for each other and Wolfe, the reporter and wordsmith, was on his way with Felker guiding and cheering. A collection of Wolfe’s pieces came out in 1965 and the New Journalism became the rage, especially in magazines. Other names like Gail Sheehy, Gay Talese and Joan Didion were soon in the flux.

But Wolfe was the supreme writer and reporter. His masterpiece on the space program and the Mercury 7 astronauts, “The Right Stuff,” his blockbuster novel, “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and another novel, “A Man in Full” were all built on meticulous reporting.

Wolfe “pushed out the envelope” — one of the many phrases he has left us with — in reporting, writing and creative punctuation. A few other Wolfe-isms: “me generation,” “radical chic” and “master of the universe.”

 

 

Photo: Author Tom Wolfe participates in the White House Salute to American Authors hosted by Laura Bush in the East Room Monday, March 22, 2004. Public domain.