White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Pardon Me, Rhode Island, but You Have Lovely Manners

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By Llewellyn King

I have special reasons to be thankful this Thanksgiving. One is to be thankful to America for admitting me as an immigrant back in 1963. From what I can remember, I was welcomed as part of the then-huge British quota that applied to me, even though I was born in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

I am also very grateful to Rhode Island, where my wife, Linda Gasparello, and I have, by happy chance, made our home for more than four years.

People, you have a little treasure here; a bolthole for the world-weary, a welcoming and pleasant place with great restaurants, a wonderful selection of beaches, interesting countryside and the warmest people this side of I know not where — and I have traveled to more than 100 countries and lived on three continents.

Take it from me, Rhode Island is a treasure. To me, it nestles between the arrogance of Massachusetts and the upward-tilted-nose superiority of Connecticut.

In London, they listen to how you speak: “Just listen to her speak, She’s not our class, darling.” In New York, they speak about money: “I’m heavily invested in pharmaceuticals.” In Washington, they speak about power: “I’m well-connected at the White House.”

By comparison, Rhode Islanders speak about everyday things. But, oh, must you have such a bad self-image? Self-deprecation has its limits and, if I might be so bold, you have reached them. I sometimes want to take dear Little Rhody by its lapels and gently shake it, saying, “Don’t you know you have it all here, give or take a larcenous politician?”

John of Gaunt described England in Shakespeare’s Richard II as “this other Eden, demi-paradise.” Of course, he had not seen Rhode Island, the jewel in New England’s crown.

But Rhode Island, my adopted home, is more than being about eating and sunbathing. A special delight for us has been good, affordable theater. There is live theater everywhere, if you look. Sure you know about Trinity, the Gamm, 2nd Story and Ocean State. But did you know about the Arctic Playhouse, in West Warwick’s impoverished Arctic village? Its productions are polished, and it is moving to new, swankier premises next year. Whereas the other theaters charge around $50 a ticket (which is a bargain), little Arctic only charges $10 for its own productions. That should be sent to the Guinness Book of World Records for theater ticket prices.

Newport has its place on the list of destination cities, but I would throw in Providence with its downtown masculine charm, its best Italian food offerings in the nation. I speak as a man familiar with the likes of Little Italy in Baltimore and North Beach in San Francisco.

When I lived in London in the early 1960s, the thing that struck Americans was how polite the English were. Now London and New York are interchangeable, and Washington is well on the way to losing what is left of its manners.

I would offer up the whole state of Rhode Island for recognition as a place of lovely, cheering politeness that makes daily living a pleasure, and smooths a little grease on the rough edges of any day. People of all ages open doors, thank you profusely for even a small purchase, give way to traffic entering a highway and stop for pedestrians.

Also — and as an old newspaperman, this is important to me — Rhode Island has great pubs, as in public houses. A bar is where you go to drink, a pub is an extension of a living room: a place to hang out, meet friends, eat and, yes, imbibe, if you wish. In Rhode Island, as in Britain, people tend to have a “local,” a regular haunt. I have two quite different locals that are quintessentially pubby: the Harris Grill in Coventry and the Square Peg in Warren.

I give thanks to Rhode Island and you, the Rhode Islanders. You are a good lot. — For InsideSources

Trump Needs to Turn to the Graybeards for Stealthy Help

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Will he rise to the office of president, or will he become some sort of mad uncle hidden away in one of his properties, railing against the media on Twitter? The Donald Trump presidency is in the balance even before it has begun.

Nonetheless, there will be a government, and there will be a devolution of power to the many offices of government. For that to work smoothly, President-elect Trump needs to show he can manage as well as deride by tweet. Didn’t he have a Cabinet list of some sort at the back of his mind? Transition is a president’s first test.

Those who voted for Trump — for a new broom, for an end to government by elites — aren’t seeing a new dawn, but rather a chaotic search among the retreads and by a search team that itself is fractured. A little amateurism is refreshing, a lot clownish.

Some of the confusion was anticipated. It’s hard for an outsider to take over the complex structure of the government. The answer should’ve been for Trump to reach out to people who know Washington, people who have substantial contact lists, people who could guide him unobtrusively and skillfully.

Trump needs a graybeard.

Washington’s graybeards have been the savior of many in crisis. Mostly they are lawyers, like the late Robert Strauss and the late Clark Clifford. They are operatives who slide in and out of the White House or wherever, guiding, advising and suggesting. All great presidents have used them.

Ronald Reagan sought out Howard Baker to be his chief of staff and counselor when his administration was in trouble over Irangate. He was an exception in that he was already a commanding figure as the Republican leader in the Senate. He saved Reagan. Baker went into the White House as chief of staff, but the classical graybeard is a counselor who doesn’t want office himself or herself.

Probably Trump would be best served by having a former governor at his elbow, defending the new president from the agenda-driven office-seekers. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie came close, but his own thirst for office most likely clouded his full usefulness to Trump.

Christie, along with Mike Pence, could’ve sorted through the large and permanent rump of those who have Potomac Fever: a passionate desire to be in government or back in government. It rages in the think tanks and the political science departments of universities. They, the feverish, wait for the call. Someone needs to know the competent, even the great, from the purely ambitious.

Who the president-elect picks now determines the success of the first 100 days of the president. And ever since FDR, presidents are judged on the first 100 days: days in which Trump has promised much, from starting on the “beautiful wall” to repealing Obamacare.

So far, all the names mentioned in the speculation have also been office-seekers. Two have had their dreams come true: Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon, someone who would quickly fill any vacuums with his own acolytes, ready to push the agenda of the alt-right — a nice way of saying “fringe.”

It is reasonable to expect the Trump administration to move to the right. But it is less reasonable to see it move from leaning right to veering wildly into the dogma and policies that are outside of public tolerance. In short, leaning toward Reagan is fine; toward George Wallace is not. Leaning toward George W. Bush is OK.

There are broad but accepted parameters in which America will accept the ideology of its president.

The president has limited ability to act domestically; and to achieve any of his declared aims is going to take patience as well as compromise. That takes the suavity of a graybeard consigliere, something missing at present.

If Trump doesn’t get a grip on his transition, he’ll guarantee a wounded administration from the start.

He needs someone who can guide him without seeking office for his or herself. A call to former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour might be a good start.

The situation is dire. The tweet stops here.

For InsideSources

Photo credit: Untitled by Evert Barnes. Use under the Creative Commons Generic License

Trump’s Washington: A Government of Strangers

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Prepare for a government of strangers: people we don’t know and haven’t met.

That government, those strangers, or mostly strangers, will shape the presidency of Donald Trump — not the slogans, not the declarations of intentions, not the hopes of those who threw in with Trump, but the merging of those interests represented by officeholders who aren’t well known in Washington or the nation.

In the short time between now and Jan. 20, the Trump transition team has to come up with some very key players, who eventually will have to be confirmed by the Senate — an easier prospect with a Republican-controlled Senate, but not a slam-dunk.

In relations with the world’s nations, some of whom Trump has vigorously unfriended during the campaign, these jobs will be of first importance, including secretary of state; secretary of defense; national security adviser; secretary of the treasury; and secretary of energy (often forgotten as a defense agency), who is the keeper of our nuclear arsenal.

Domestically, Trump needs to name quickly staff at the White House, especially the Office of Management and Budget, which, within short weeks of climbing aboard, must prepare a budget for him to send to Capitol Hill. That budget will be, in many ways, the first indication of how Trump plans to govern. Republican as much as Democrats will be leery of what it contains.

After those critical positions, there are an incredible 4,000 additional positions to filled, 100 of which require Senate confirmation.

The conservative think tanks in Washington stand ready to heed the call, and maybe to provoke it, if they have an in. The think tanks are sounding boards for political ideas, like what to do about health care, foreign policy and trade, but they also represent something of a government in exile.

When a party is defeated, the ranks of the think tanks sympathetic to that party swell. Expect to see the Brookings Institution, the Progressive Policy Institute, the Economic Policy Institute and the New America Foundation find places for those leaving the Obama Administration.

Likewise, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the newer Foreign Policy Initiative will be ready to disgorge their best to serve in government.

It is a changing of the guard that takes place with each election that results in a change of party.

After the think tanks, or maybe in lockstep, come the universities. Look for Obama refugees to show up at places like Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government: a kind of halfway house for politicos. MIT and Stanford expect to have their faculty raided for the top jobs in the department of defense, energy and homeland security. Whether Trump and his people will raid these larders of talent is unknown.

Normally, White House watchers have a trail of crumbs to follow. They can say so-and-so was at college with the president, that professor so-and-so helped him form a position on nuclear power, or some think-tanker may have had a role in the campaign.

The Trump the clues are meager. Only four names stand out: Steve Bannon of Breitbart News, his campaign’s chief executive, Kellyanne Conway, his campaign manager, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, his transition team head, and Sean Hannity of Fox News. Another clue: Many on the campaign staff once worked for Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.).

Journalists will be watching the Trump camp just as Kremlin watchers in the days of the Soviet Union watched for hints out of Moscow. How will Trump govern? Who will staff his administration?

While Trump and his administration get settled in, while they find out how enormously complicated and far-flung the responsibilities of the U.S. government are, the day to day running of the country will be with the disparaged civil service: the bureaucrats so despised by Trump the campaigner, now his vital aides in transition.

— For InsideSources

Photo credit: Alex Barth, “Washington Monument” Washington DC, 2009. Used under the Creative Commons Generic 2.0 license

The Choice — Gender Politics or Shake, Rattle and Wobble

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On Tuesday, I’ll apprehensively, haplessly, hesitatingly, joylessly, morosely and reluctantly cast my vote for president.

I don’t subscribe to the journalistic piety that journalists should conceal their preferences and not vote, or that having a point of view makes it impossible to be fair. This is the kind of virtue signaling favored by the former editor of The Washington Post, Leonard “Len” Downie, and by CNN host Anderson Cooper. I don’t think it’s altogether bad for the public to know where their writers and broadcasters are coming from.

But the truth is, I can’t decide for sure this election.

After watching all the debates, having read hundreds of thousands of words and wasted hundreds of hours in conjecture with friends and colleagues, I can’t say I’ve decided so completely that I’ll go with certainty into the booth.

Yes, I lean ever so slightly toward Hillary Clinton. I know her, so to speak; and there’s the rub. I know she is ambitious, hardworking, micro-managing, secretive and that she has no commanding vision for America at home or abroad. I also know that she’ll try to turn the country into an experimental social science laboratory.

My uncertainty went up a few notches with her declaration that she wants at least half her Cabinet to be women. I did my time in the trenches of the women’s movement in the 1960s: I’m for equality everywhere and redress where it is needed. But to be told in advance that half the Cabinet would be women is playing gender politics with the national well-being.

So, I veer toward Donald Trump: a man who has led a life as reprehensible as it has been lucky. Here we have a scoundrel, a sleaze, a sexual cad and a braggart of Olympian proportions. Yet the fascination is there; the hope that he is a man on a horse who will shake up the elites in Washington, from the cozy foreign policy establishment to the education lobby, which demands more money for worse outcomes.

The rot starts in the universities: high tuitions, self-regarding professors and irrelevant courses. Trump says he can fix everything so, for a moment, I think he can fix the universities too.

Napoleon fixed almost everything: the educational, economic and legal systems. But Trump is no Napoleon: He is a man of organic ignorance, apparently sustained by his own slogans.

Even if Trump were eminently desirable, as an outsider, he’d be faced with huge challenges in appointing a government: 4,000 jobs, 100 of which need Senate confirmation.

In Trump’s case, knowing no one and nothing of the myriad responsibilities of the government, his vice president, Mike Pence, could become the de facto president.

But Pence is a man of rectitude and Trump is the opposite. They’re bound to clash; thereafter, Pence being exiled to the official vice presidential residence at Number One Observatory Circle.

Hence vacuums everywhere and eager, shady people to fill them. People we’ve never heard of before; the first of whom will be recruited by the Trump transition team, led by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. One can just imagine the names in his Rolodex.

The fiefs will spring up, secure in the knowledge that the president isn’t interested or doesn’t know how his administration works.

In a Trump government, things would shake, rattle and wobble.

Like millions of Americans I must decide whether I want Clinton with her record of challenged veracity, stretching back to the Rose Law firm in Little Rock, Ark., or the monstrously awful Trump, whose appeal is that he’s not Clinton. Vote wisely, won’t you?

For InsideSources

 

Photo source: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trump_%26_Clinton.jpg

The Political Architecture of Britain and America Under Attack

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On both sides of the Atlantic, political and business retaining walls are being torn down in the belief that they are of no structural importance. Messing with the political and business architecture is likely to have grave, and possibly terrible, effects on democracy and prosperity.

In the United States solid, political orthodoxy, which has served well for so long, is under attack in the Congress and on the hustings.

A more advanced attack is underway in Europe than the United States, but it is a harbinger nonetheless of bad things that can happen here. The commonalities outweigh the differences.

In Europe, Britain has embarked on one of the great, avoidable debacles of history: the decision to leave the European Union. It will destabilize Europe, almost certainly lead to a breakup of the United Kingdom, and leave the British Isles vulnerable and impoverished, clinging to the tatters of its “sovereignty.”

To bring about this state of affairs, the British had to take aim at the very architecture of the English Constitution: the collection of rules and precedents that has flowed since Magna Carta and is enshrined in the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty.

Now the Conservative Party is bowing to the result of a referendum, a decisive result nonetheless, that will withdraw from Europe without a debate or vote in the House of Commons. A referendum in Britain — there have only ever been three, and all have been on Europe — denies representative government, created over the centuries, as the only system of government: the fundamental political architecture.

In the United States, the political architecture is under threat because we fail to revere it. A book by Richard Arenberg and Robert Dove, titled “Defending the Filibuster: The Soul of the Senate,” outlines one way that the structure is facing the wrecking ball. For 34 years, Arenberg worked in the Senate for such Democratic political giants as George Mitchell, Carl Levin and Paul Tsongas. Robert Dove served twice as Senate parliamentarian and was on Republican Robert Dole’s staff. They argue that the political architecture in the Senate is under attack from the ceaseless, ugly partisanship and that the filibuster, a minority guarantee to a say, may be swept away.

Arenberg told me that the filibuster, always used sparingly and seldom invoked, has been abused in recent years to such an extent that a change in the Senate rules could sweep away this unique tool of whichever party is in the minority to be heard. If that happens, he said, a situation like the one in the House would prevail, where the majority holds sway without regard to the minority, more like a parliamentary system.

Other threats to the structure of American democracy abound. Many of them have been enunciated by Hedrick Smith, a distinguished documentary filmmaker and former New York Times correspondent, in his book “Who Stole the American Dream?” He points to gerrymandering and special interests and their money as threatening the retaining walls of the American democracy.

Worse, maybe, on both sides of the Atlantic, is the growing conservative rejection of trade as the basis not only of prosperity, but also of foreign policy stability.

Brexit is the willing destruction of Britain’s largest trade arrangement and an equivalent reduction in its influence in Europe and, by extrapolation, in the world.

In the United States, Hillary Clinton has pusillanimously turned her back on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade pact that she helped write. And Donald Trump has declared his intention to trash almost all our trade treaties, which, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, he claims have been written by idiots to favor our competitors.

Most worrying is the way the U.K.’s Conservative Party and Republicans, silenced by Trump’s candidacy, here have accepted this rejection of traditional conservative bedrock: prosperity through trade. Institutionally, they have been quiet, so quiet.

The threat to good governance in Europe and America, combined with the prevailing economic heresy, poses a serious threat to the West and must have its enemies in Moscow and Beijing doing a happy dance. They know that if you knock down enough retaining walls, the structure will be weakened to the point of collapse. The wrecking balls are already at work.

For InsideSources

Oh, My Gourd! Pumpkins Are on the Loose

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Giant pumpkins are a clear and present danger, and we are not being told about it. Linus of the comic strip Peanuts no longer gives us the heads-up.

Consider in 1900, the largest pumpkin on record weighed in at a modest 400 pounds. Two men could lift it. That was the typical weight of obese pumpkins until 1980, the year after the accident at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant, when they started getting bigger, a trend that continues. Suspicious, eh?

Monster pumpkins this year are coming in at more than 2,000 pounds, with the American champion weighing a scale-busting 2,261.5 pounds. It was grown in Rhode Island.

But maybe there are bigger pumpkins lurking in the Amazon. The Swiss claim a bigger pumpkin, but they would, wouldn’t they?

In the world of Cucurbita maxima (Latin for big pumpkin), these monsters are fit for a pie for the Kardashian family. Have you noticed the Kardashians only seem to do three things: take selfies, conduct social media fights and eat? Just watch “Keeping Up with the Kardashians”: They are always eating. The family’s many crises are dealt with food. Did Kim go to Maxim’s when her jewels were stolen in Paris?

Actually, pumpkins are good-eating. Always sprinkle cinnamon on pumpkin. Cinnamon is to pumpkins what drawn butter is to lobster: It just belongs.

When I was a boy, I ate a lot of pumpkin and it was either mashed up with or without sugar. My brother and I liked the sugared version, while my father preferred his simply boiled.

But that was before people started growing pumpkins as big as elephants. What is the purpose of a 2,000-pound pumpkin? Do you need a chainsaw to cut it up? Who needs to cook with a vegetable that was brought in on a truck, held down by chains? Even the best-equipped kitchens do not have forklifts.

Worse, there is the way pumpkins are taking over our politics.

The first politician to show their influence was John Boehner, the former speaker of the House, whose face kept turning pumpkin-orange before our startled gaze.

Now comes Donald Trump, clearly a man who has had sinister dealings with pumpkins: His orange hair is the giveaway. What do the pumpkins want? Can Trump deliver or will Hillary Clinton get the Pumpkin Party endorsement? Some of her pantsuits are already Hubbard squash-colored.

Halloween and Thanksgiving are when the pumpkins come to haunt us. Forget the witches, it is the gourds muscling in on our innocent festivals.

Yet all year in domestic gardens, U.S. Department of Agriculture research centers and in secret pumpkin patches, pumpkins are sucking up nutrients to grow bigger and bigger. Soon they will rival the Trump Tower and the Grand Coulee Dam.

What do they want? Why are they courting our celebrities, our politicians and corrupting our children? Oh, my gourd!

Be afraid, the pumpkins are on the loose for the next month.

After the Hurricane, There Are Real Heroes up the Pole

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From across the nation an army of men, and a few women, is on the move. They are deployed with tools and gauges, maps and their own know-how in a critical battle. They are shock troops fighting the flooding in North and South Carolina.

They are electricity linemen.

When disaster strikes, the nation’s electric utilities spring into action, sending equipment — which can range from temporary lighting to the familiar bucket trucks — hundreds and thousands of miles to the battle.

When these first responders reach the site of disaster, they go to work down manholes and up poles, struggle with knotted wires and fallen trees.

The work is hard and the conditions are dangerous, but there is a camaraderie that binds linemen from different localities in a common purpose and danger. Those who more usually might rely on a bucket truck, in fine conditions, take out their climbing gear and up the pole they go.

The constant danger is electricity itself: the threat of electrocution. Up the pole, there are many other dangers. The pole may be weakened and critters seeking safety may be up there, from raccoons to venomous snakes.

When the lights go off, life as most of us know stops. It does not grind to a slow halt, it stops. Elevators, air conditioners, heating systems, ovens, refrigerators, televisions and computers are stranded. Even the pumps for removing water from a flooded basement need electricity.

Everyone knows that in an emergency, it is vital to restore the juice. The linemen, often several sleeping in a single motel room or in their trucks, are the heroes who work as many as 19 hours straight to do that.

It is rewarding, exacting and well-paid work. A spokesman for the American Public Power Association explains that pay varies, depending on the part of the country, but $100,000 a year is common and earnings shoot up with overtime, as in emergencies. The association represents more than 2,000 publicly owned utilities, serving about 14 percent of the nation’s electricity consumers.

So it is astounding that for a number of years both the publicly owned and the large, investor-owned utilities, which the Edison Electric Institute represents and account for 80 percent of the power supply, have been having a devil of a time finding workers prepared for a very secure life that has its moments of high drama — as is the case right now with the crews restoring power to areas devastated by Hurricane Matthew.

The problem is that even the most enthusiastic young person cannot just go up a pole without a lot of training: four years of training.

In the world of labor, electric utilities are not the only ones gasping for help. There is an artisan labor shortage and it is worsening. One truck operator reckons there are vacancies for at least 50,000 truck drivers. Similar shortages exist for electricians, pipe-fitters, sheet metal workers, stone masons, welders and many other skilled artisans.

If all the manufacturing jobs that politicians say they would like to bring back to the United States were to arrive next year, there would be no workers to build the factories, nor a trained workforce to make the goods. The unemployment crisis — so emphasized in this election year — is with the unskilled.

Part of the artisan problem may be that too many young men and women are being herded into colleges without any knowledge of alternatives for which they might have more aptitude and interest. More college is always seen as a virtue. But who needs four years of college to become an Uber driver?

When the APPA tried recruiting in high schools with a video, they found teachers trashed the video. Schools are rated on how many graduates go on to college, not on to training in trades offering job security and satisfaction.

There is a future up the pole.

For InsideSources

Office Seekers Beware — It Is a Rough Road Ahead

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So you want to run for office, shake up Washington and clean out the political stables? Then prepare to subject yourself and your family, possibly your old paramours, to the rigors of a very rough ride.

Little of what you will endure will have much, if anything, to do with your fitness to govern. Expect abuse, distortion, rejection and exhaustion.

Get ready to eat bad food, struggle to remember names, endure bores, suffer poorly prepared reporters and watch the money flow out. Steel yourself against crises you never dreamed of and betrayals you never thought possible. All this before a single vote is cast and the prize is won or lost.

If you are after national office, you will need professional campaign help. The first thing you will be asked is not what you believe, but how much money do you have? Second question: Do you know any wealthy people who might back you or have indicated they might be prepared to contribute to your campaign? If your answers are in the affirmative, you are on the way to becoming a candidate.

After the money issue is settled, then you can get into the details: your party affiliation and your relationship, if any, with the local party apparatus.

What the professionals will not tell you is just how awful running for office can be; being lied about, being besmirched, having your private life picked over, having your spouse examined as though he or she were the candidate. Any skeletons in the closet can be expected to come out, pointing bony fingers at you. Youthful indiscretions, boisterous behavior of yore, padded resumes, driving offenses, unpaid taxes, taxes not paid for domestics and your religion, or the lack of it, are all fair game to your opponents and the media.

You privacy will be violated in ghastly creative ways, like having your garbage sifted through, your telephone hacked and, God forbid, if you have said anything impolitic or off-color on Facebook: It will be front page tomorrow.

Think hard about the times when you advocated causes, like gun control, that are now too hot to handle. Everything you ever thought aloud can turn into a smoking gun. A paper trail can be incendiary. A 30-year-old photograph of you mooning the flag may be curtains for you. Selfies have lethal possibilities.

You will think the media is out to get you; those nice people at the newspaper may seem to grow horns and those unscripted TV interviews are journeys through the mine field.

If it is any comfort, the media is not out to get you, nor is it out to help you. It is out to get a story. Bad information may be fed to the media by your opponent’s campaign or dug up by reporters themselves.

You will be in The Overton Window, also known as The Window of Discourse. It is a concept developed by Joseph Overton, the late conservative political scientist, which identified political and social issues acceptable for discussion. Thirty years ago, for example, gay marriage was not in the window. In the time of Franklin Roosevelt, Americans with disabilities were not in the window. And in the time of John Kennedy, sexual peccadilloes were not in it.

Today the window is wide open: everything allowed.

However, this presidential election, where nothing has not been mentioned, may have reduced the shock value of how lives have been led. We may be at a watershed in private-life-as-political-fodder. Donald Trump has been married three times and has had some questionable business episodes, Hillary Clinton has had her time in government cruelly dissected, and it has been suggested that she was an enabler of her husband’s infidelities.

The window is wide open now, but it may be closing because of the excesses of this election.

So why would anyone run for office? Because it is the most exciting, adrenalin-fueled time that those who are prepared to pay the price will ever have. You will be on a steed galloping across the battlefield of ideas. If you win, you can affect things. If you lose, well, you will have enjoyed an exhilaration like none other.

Go for it — and implore your spouse’s forgiveness.

For InsideSources

Photo: Joel Kramer, “political buttons”, 2008. Used under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

Rattled by the Ghosts of Presidents Past

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The ghosts of presidents past are haunting me.

I look at Hillary Clinton and she morphs into Jimmy Carter: all facts and figures and no direction.

I look at Donald Trump and he morphs into George W. Bush: all intention without knowing how things work.

Carter was earnest to a fault. He loved to bore into the details even when he should have been thinking about big, directional issues. Former Energy Secretary James Schlesinger told me how Carter had gotten lost in the intricate scientific issues of catalytic converters at a White House meeting. Knowing how many great issues were awaiting Carter’s attention, Schlesinger was appalled.

Bush’s weakness was what could easily become Trump’s weakness: Bush simply didn’t know enough about, well, anything. He was not a stupid man; actually, he was very quick. But he did not come to the office with a well-stocked mind. That left him vulnerable to all kinds of agenda-driven experts, especially his vice president, Dick Cheney.

Bush simply had never been curious. Cheney, with a lot of knowledge and a hard edge, took foreign policy upon himself. Bush did not wrest it from him until it was too late.

Carter’s passion for detail worked well in forming the Camp David Accords, but was disastrous in leading the country forward. As the result of a dinner party conversation with the journalist Rod MacLeish, Carter became fascinated with France’s constitution, known as the Constitution of the Fifth Republic. It combines presidential and parliamentary concepts.

MacLeish told me that the interest persisted until the very day of the announcement of the Camp David Accords, when Carter called him with more questions, ahead of CIA briefing on France’s constitution. MacLeish blurted out his surprise that the president would find time for this exercise on a day so critical to his presidency. Carter allowed that as he had scheduled a briefing on the constitution from the CIA later that day, he intended to be prepared for it. “That’s how I work, Rod,” he told MacLeish, as reported to me. Wow!

I doubt that Clinton would be that detail-compulsive, but she is a policy wonk and policy wonks get lost in policy, usually forgetting the ultimate purpose. Like Carter, Clinton seems to have no idea about how all the policy bits will fit into a grand scheme for the country in the years ahead.

Two other concerns about Clinton are her penchant for secrecy and her tendency to pettiness, demonstrated in her e-mails with Sidney Blumenthal. But overshadowing those are her inability to synthesize information into a course of action: Carter redux.

A Trump presidency would appear to be hugely vulnerable to having large parts of it taken over by surrogates simply because they knew more. The secretaries of state, defense and treasury could easily become fiefs, where the president was left out of major decisions.

More worrying ought to be who Trump would put into these positions. He has made much of his potential Supreme Court nominees, but has given nary a hint about who would staff his administration.

The job hopefuls are all over Washington, burnishing their resumes and hoping that they will get on the short lists. The fear is that the very obvious players who surround Trump will make the decisions, led by ideologue Steve Bannon, assisted by those whose stars have dimmed: Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie.

Trump, like Bush, appears to lack curiosity and without curiosity, there cannot be a well-stocked mind. Nothing, but nothing, we have heard from Trump suggests wide knowledge or a thirst for it.

By contrast, Clinton clearly has a mind jammed with facts. But do they line up as a way forward or are they like Carter’s catalytic converter, a distraction? Is it to be a blind date with Trump or a reprise of a kind of factual gridlock, which we saw in Clinton’s failed healthcare plan?

The ghosts rattle me.

For InsideSources

Photo credit: Giant President Heads by artist David Adicke, photograph by WayTru 2007. Used under the Creative Commons 2.0 license.

Novel Revives Vietnam War Memories — and Lessons

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By Llewellyn King

The Vietnam War was much with me. I never made it to Vietnam during the war. But the war came to me in every job I had between 1961 and 1973.

It is not that I did not try to get to Vietnam as a correspondent, or even as a soldier. I registered for the draft when I arrived in the United States in 1963, but I was rejected because my eyesight was poor, I was married, and I was too old.

I started my long-distance association with the war when I was working for Independent Television News in London in 1961, and continued it when I moved over to the BBC. I was always selected as the writer for the Vietnam segments.

At The Herald Tribune in New York, on my first night, I was asked to pull all the files together for the lead story: Vietnam. Later at The Washington Daily News and The Washington Post, Vietnam always found me.

Now comes a novel and the war finds me again, as I read about correspondents David Halberstam and Peter Arnett; U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin, who was delusional about the situation; Nguyen Van Thieiu, the president of South Vietnam until his ouster. It is all as fresh as if it were the file coming off the teleprinter today.

The novel is “Escape from Saigon” and its authors, Michael Morris and Dick Pirozzolo, tell the last, desperate days of Saigon in 1975. It is a novel where the end is known, but not known; where the tension ratchets up each day of the countdown to evacuation on April 29.

In Washington, Congress had refused President Gerald Ford’s last attempt bolster aid to South Vietnam with a final $722 million. The major U.S. military participation ended with the peace treaty of 1973. For two years, the South Vietnamese had struggled on with U.S. support but without ground troops. The North Vietnamese would roundly violate the peace, and the South Vietnamese would live in hope that the United States would not let them be overrun. Forlorn hope.

The United States had lost interest in the war, after it had been so torn apart by it, and wanted no more part of a land war in Asia, or at that time, a land war anywhere. More than 50,000 Americans and an untold number of Vietnamese had perished.

Lessons? You draw them: secret plans, ground troops, aerial war, insuperable U.S. military might. These ideas are flying again about other regions of the world. Beware. Read this novel.

I have often thought that if the Kennedy brain trust had read “The Quiet American,” Graham Greene’s masterful novel about Vietnam, published in 1955, things would have turned out differently. We might have shunned involvement on the election of Jack Kennedy.

“Escape from Saigon” has the same ring of authenticity. It should: the authors both served in Vietnam. Morris was sent to Vietnam when he was just 19 years old and, as an infantry sergeant in Northern 1 Corps, he saw some of the fiercest fighting of the war. He was wounded and his bravery was rewarded with a Purple Heart.

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Dick Pirozzolo in civvies after a party trip on the Saigon River.

Pirozzolo was an Air Force information officer in Saigon. Perhaps that is why the city is so well described, from the watering holes to hotels, like the Caravelle and the Continental where so many journalists stayed and drank. Drinking was a part of Saigon in war.

When I finally made it to Vietnam in 1995, I traced the war from Hanoi, replete with its French boulevards down through Da Nang, Hue and China Beach. All so peaceful, after so much bloodshed. Battlefields are that way.

“Escape” could be a sad book, or a book of recrimination, or an attack on the American role. Instead, it is a novel of facts told through the lives of the people: journalists, a bar keeper, a priest, a CIA official, South Vietnamese who worked for the Americans and sometimes betrayed them, and those who fled by plane and boat.

The novel is exceptional in authenticity. Its portrait of city in extremis is chilling and completely engrossing. It will take many back and some forward — forward to new foreign involvements. — For InsideSources