White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Send in the Cyber-Battalions

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Thirty years ago, I was asked to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on nuclear proliferation. Like many people asked to testify, I was blindsided by the honor of the thing; and when I came to write my testimony, like others before and since, I was limited to a litany of the woes of proliferation. There were no good answers. Now, there are technological possibilities for intruding into a proliferator’s workplace.

 

I did emphasize to the Senate the difficult moral argument involved: I told the senators that our posture was to ask the world’s lesser countries to trust us because we did not trust them. A ticklish point that–made all the more so by the inevitable appeal of a nuclear arsenal to non-entity countries.

 

But when it comes to proliferation, the nuclear club has a larger obligation: to keep itself small.

 

Every new proliferator is a threat to the world, and most likely a threat to itself. The fact is that a primitive nuclear weapon is a danger to its makers as well as to the world at large.

 

Throughout the Cold War, the United States handed safety technology to the Soviet Union, including failsafe switching and insensitive TNT. Both sides realized that an accidental detonation could lead to a hostile exchange in the confusion. It would have been world annihilation by mistake.

 

So dangerous were the earliest U.S. nuclear weapons that Fat Man and Little Boy were assembled on their flights to Japan. One has to wonder, and to worry, about the safety of North Korea’s bombs and even of Pakistan’s.

 

Thirty years ago, there was no answer to proliferation except hand-wringing and sanctions, which historically have not worked. The Iranian sanctions have been broken by Russia, China and many European countries; and the North Korean sanctions have been broken by China, which provides food and fuel to control the flood of refugees from North Korea into China.

 

So the stealthy technological option becomes imperative.

 

That possibility involves a secret, anonymous attack on the proliferator that can be confused with an earthquake or with the failure guidance systems of the proliferator’s rockets. These would appear to be design malfunctions not secret attacks. Particularly with North Korea, rocket failure will undermine its fragile sense of worth, and cause the military to think it is very vulnerable.

 

It is believed that North Korea set out to build a plutonium weapon from plutonium bred in a Russian-supplied research reactor. But North Korea apparently switched from a planned plutonium weapon to a highly enriched uranium weapon. If so, good. It is easier to disrupt uranium enrichment than the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel to extract plutonium.

 

This is also our advantage with Iran. There are many ways to enrich uranium, but three stand out: gaseous diffusion of the kind used by the United States during World War II, gas centrifuges, and the South African nozzle method. All have the same objective: to separate and concentrate uranium 235 from the more plentiful uranium 238.

 

Gas centrifuge is the most favored. It is what the Iranians are pursuing, and probably what the North Koreans are using. It is efficient, but it requires incredible engineering.

 

Think of a centrifuge as a great cream churn, except this one spins at 1,500

revolutions per second. One report says that a centrifuge can fail as a result of the imbalance produced by a single fingerprint. In order to stop a proliferator using enriched uranium, you would need either to create a huge vibration that would cause the centrifuges to fly apart or cut the electricity supply.

 

The electricity option is tempting. It is difficult to conceal a power plant and easier to disrupt its output if it is computer-controlled, as most are. If North Korea’s plants are so primitive that they are not vulnerable through computers, other vulnerabilities need exploiting.

 

Some commentators have called for war against North Korea and for the Israelis to bomb the Iranian installations. The former would bring all-out war back to the Korean Peninsula and the latter would unite the Arabs with the Iranians, incite war and starve the world of oil.

 

A better way is to surreptitiously throw science at the miscreants, disrupt the flow of electricity in Iran and the flight of rockets in North Korea.

 

Thirty years ago, we were babes in the woods about arresting nuclear proliferation. Today, we can look to the countermeasures of stealthy cyber-invasion. No bombs, please. Send in the electrons.


 

Republicans Need an English Lesson from Thatcher and Blair

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Before Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, Britain was in trouble and headed for worse. The story was told on radio news every morning. Along with the weather and the traffic reports, there was daily a list of trouble spots of a different sort: industrial action.

 

Industrial action was the euphemism of the time for strikes; most of them unofficial, all of them debilitating. The national mood was sour, the economy perilous, and Britain’s international competitiveness was slipping fast. Commentators around the world talked about “the English disease.”

 

Thatcher’s challenge was to curb the unions; but before she could do that, she had to convince a doubting nation that the unions could become, or be made, responsible. Over the years, the unions had amassed quite extraordinary power that reached into lives of people who had never thought they were affected by unions.

 

Union excess was everywhere but because the British believed in the importance of unions, their strengths and excesses were taken as the necessary price for the fundamental right of collective bargaining.

 

The Labor Party derived much of its support and financing from the union movement. They were structurally entwined: The unions represented the core, or the “base,” of the party. Unfortunately for Labor, the base was toxic and threatened the health of the economy and, as the election of 1979 showed, the electability of the party.

 

Thatcher, though hard to love, did three enormous things for Britain. She restored the primacy of the free market, curbed union excess and, ironically, saved the Labor Party. Thatcher’s changes made it possible for what was to be called New Labor to modify its relations with its trade union base. The politicians got back the politics, which had been progressively assumed by union bosses of the base.

 

The British experience is redolent with lessons for the Republican Party. The “base,” represented by the aggressive broadcasters like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham, is goading the party in Congress to adopt positions that satisfy them, but not the electorate.

 

Building on the new reality created by Thatcher’s Conservatives, Tony Blair and his political brain, Peter Mandelson, were able to discipline or silence the trade unions in the Labor Party and present an alternative to the Conservatives that could plunder the best ideas of the right. When nobody was looking, Blair must have thanked God for Thatcher.

 

The agony of the Republicans is clearly on display with the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court: To oppose her blindly is to kiss off millions of Hispanic voters, maybe for generations. The party clearly had no strategy to deal with a candidate like Sotamayor. None.

 

The far right came out with, well, with an old argument: She is a liberal activist. Not much evidence of that, but the conservative talk-show hosts were ready for war. The last war. Or the one before that.

 

More damaging to serious Republicans has been the conversion, almost entirely on Fox, of respected Republican philosophers into political Vaudevillians. Enter, center stage, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee and Karl Rove. Their collective TV antics are damaging to the movement they once led.

 

A lot of good thinking about the future of the Republican Party is taking place in the think tanks, particularly the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. But the solid work of restructuring the party for the new realities at home and abroad is drowned out by the eponymous broadcast wing of the party.

 

It is hard to believe that Newt Gingrich, broadcaster, is the same Newt Gingrich who masterminded the 1994 Republican midterm sweep. Or that Karl Rove was the genius who saw that George W. Bush could be presented as a convincing presidential candidate.

 

Absent any possibility of reform of the Republican base from the outside, in the Thatcher way, it has to come from the inside. Several astute conservative writers, like David Frum and Mickey Edwards, have lighted a path. A first step down that path could be a more even-handed examination of President Obama’s Supreme Court picks. He could have as many as four of them in his first term. Clearly he has an eye to the electorate, as much as to jurisprudence, if Sotomayor is a harbinger.

 

Thatcher built herself an entirely new base. Blair dismantled an old one. The Republicans need to examine both.

 

 

The Supremes Have It Made

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Oh, to be a federal judge, a lifetime judge. Ah, to interpret the U.S. Constitution for lawmakers or to have the unbridled joy of deciding what Congress meant without being able to ask it.

It is delightful to be on the federal bench and divine to be on the Supreme Court, where you can play mind games and search for writers’ clues hidden in the 222-year-old Constitution. It is the treasure hunt that never ends. More: You can look at plain words–such as those in the Second Amendment—and, depending on your personal interests, opine on what they mean with two radically different interpretations.

You can also stir things up by interpreting what your predecessors had already interpreted. Stare decisis et non quieta mouvere (settled law)? That is just what they tell the kids in law school. The pranksters on the highest court in the land will have none of it. Hence, Roe v. Wade hangs in the balance all the time. No stare decisis there.

Can anything be as much fun as deciding what a group of, albeit exceptional and erudite, 18th-century white men thought about the Internet? Talk about trivial pursuit. But it is not trivial; it can reshape the country. As each term approaches, fancy contemplating how much fun it would be to rearrange history by persuading just four of your fellow justices.

But that is not all. Working conditions are pretty nice. You cannot be fired. The pay is good. There is no mandatory retirement. All heavy lifting, from your suitcase to a weighty opinion, can be delegated to those too-eager clerks. The little buggers plan to make millions on the strength of clerking for you. Make them work for it, whether it is picking up your laundry or redefining the rights of the press.

But that is still not all. As an added bonus, the evidence suggests you will live a long time. After all, there is no strain. You are treated with unctuous deference. Even if you are so gaga you cannot tell one colleague from another, a thousand law schools will hang on your ramblings. Clerks will write opinions for you based on what they think you said. Deferential colleagues will try to side with you, even if they think you’re full of it.

And do not forget the sheer exhilaration of writing a minority opinion. You can really let off steam in those. It is the next best thing to talk radio for venting, and it has a much greater impact. Just savor the shock on your colleagues’ faces when you turn against them and, quoting you smartest clerk, you tell them what the Founders meant.

You have enjoyed the reality television show “Survivor.” Well, that is what life on the court can be like–with the additional pleasure that you can’t be voted off, canceled or bitten by a poisonous snake.

The greatest pleasure of all, though, is to go against the constituency that endorsed you. From Earl Warren to David Souter, this fun has been intense. Appointing a justice is a crap shoot: Like Henry II appointing Thomas Becket to be Archbishop of Canterbury, high perfidy is possible.

In recent years, things have been changing for the justices: more women and minorities have joined the all-white-male rumpus room. This change to a representative court brings up issues we should be informed about. Have the Great Ones had to clean up their language, or put down the seat on the highest legal throne in the land? Does Clarence Thomas speak without being spoken to? Does Antonin Scalia smirk in private as well as in public? And does John Paul Stevens remember when he was born?

However democratic we try to be, when presidents nominate someone for the highest court in the land, they create a demigod, beyond the reach of politicians and their jackals, journalists. They enter their own Pantheon, as sanctified and superior as the gods of ancient Rome who were given, like the Supreme Court, a marble temple, courtesy of the Emperor Hadrian.

 

 

 

 

 

Letter to the Site

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Hello, young man (I’m 90). I was listening to your reaction [on Sirius XM Radio, Channels 110 and 130] to the diatribe against you, when you evidently said something favorable about socialism.

Let me tell you about my experience with socialism in the late-1930s, when the sawmill shut down in our town in north Idaho.

Since no jobs were to be had in the private sector, I joined the CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps]: a socialistic project.

In my home state of Washington, before the Grand Coulee Dam was built, central Washington was inhabited by nothing but sagebrush, jackrabbits and rattlesnakes. The result of that socialistic project caused central Washington to bloom like the Garden of Eden.

I’m now on Medicare: another socialistic project. Enough said.

JERRY KESSLER via e-mail

Eiffel and Ferris, Engineers of Joy

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With so much talk of infrastructure renewal, a case needs to be made for a few new toys for grownups of the kind that enliven London today, and once enlivened cities and nations.

 

Time was when you wanted to get your city spruced up, you held a world’s fair. All through the19th century and well into the 20th century, the legacy of world’s fairs was that they left permanent attractions for the public to enjoy long after the gates had closed.

London’s fair of 1851 left behind the glorious Crystal Palace, which sadly burned down in 1936.But the idea was sowed for the two legacies that outlasted all the other world’s fairs: Gustave Eiffel’s tower for the Paris Exhibition of 1889 and George Ferris’s wheel for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. Both men were great bridge builders and enormously gifted engineers.

Eiffel, who originally wanted to build his tower for an exhibition in Spain but was rejected, faced limitless criticism. Architects, authors, journalists and poets formed a common front against the tower. They said it would destroy the beauty of Paris; it was ugly and dangerous; and, of course, it was too expensive.

Supposedly the writer Guy de Maupassant ate his lunch in the tower every day after it went up, so that he did not have to look at the “high and skinny pyramid of iron ladders.” Eiffel built himself an apartment at the top of the tower, and threw lavish parties there.

Today the Eiffel Tower is the symbol of Paris, and the most popular tourist attraction in the world.

When it became clear that the organizers of the Chicago exhibition were having trouble in coming up with a spectacular structure of their own, Eiffel, whose ego matched the height of the tower, offered to help them out. But the planners could not face the humiliation of bringing in a Frenchman to save the day.

Luckily for them Ferris, who was attending an engineering meeting where the lack of a project was lamented, sketched a passenger wheel on a napkin and the day was saved. Ferris’s original wheel did not survive, but countless Ferris Wheels have enhanced public entertainment ever since.

The London Eye, which opened on the South Bank of the Thames River in 2000, as part of the millennium celebrations (it is also known as the Millennium Wheel), is the most popular tourist attraction in Britain. Take another bow, George Ferris.

The Eye, designed by David Marks and Julia Barfield, a husband and wife architect team, was briefly the largest passenger wheel in the world. But Singapore and the eastern Chinese city of Nanchang rushed to build bigger wheels. However, the Eye is the largest cantilevered wheel–which means, like a windmill, it is supported only on one side–and this is what makes it so elegant.

World’s fairs are a thing of the past in the age of television, and the fact is their legacy has not always been as great the legacies from Chicago and Paris. The 1964 World’s Fair left behind nothing special in Flushing Meadow, N.Y. Its Unisphere still stands, but it is not a big attraction. Likewise, nothing spectacular remains from the 1967world’s fair in Montreal. And the Space Needle in Seattle is a local rather than a national attraction.

The message is that people want beauty, but also participation; a wheel to ride on, a tower to ascend.

When it comes to toys for millions, London stands front and center–and is even a little egocentric. Those buses! Those taxis! Where else? Recent additions to the public amusements of London, besides the Eye, the foot bridge over the Thames River, dubbed the Wobbly Bridge; the New Tate art gallery in the old Battersea power station; new subways and a revived St. Pancras railway station, which is even grander than it was in its Victorian heyday.

Not all of London’s attractions required public money. The Eye was largely funded by British Airways and is operated by the people who run Madame Tussauds.

Once, London ruled much of the world. Now, it beckons it. In America, we are losing the race for public fun–and profit. –For Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

British Socialist Idealism and Pakistan’s Road to Ruin

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You can blame the mess that is Pakistan on an excess of liberal idealism in London after World War II. When the Labor Party under Clement Atlee trounced Churchill’s Conservatives, it came into power with an agenda of idealistic socialism that was to have consequences down through the decades.

 

At home this socialist administration planned for national insurance in health and pensions, which Churchill supported, and for an almost immediate British withdrawal from India, which he vehemently opposed.

 

India was already far along toward some kind of independence by the outbreak of World War II. The manner of Britain’s going was more the issue than that it would happen. The speed and the nature of the withdrawal are debated to this day, as is the rough partition of British India into India and West and East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.

 

In the end the withdrawal was swift, ill thought out, and led to enormous loss of life: an immediate slaughter of more than a million people in religious violence. If you add the deaths in the 1965 and 1971 wars, the toll rises by more millions, especially when you count in the endless violence over the disputed territory of Kashmir.

 

There were many weaknesses in the British withdrawal, including the absurd idea of two Pakistans separated by India. Pakistan was an idea supported by Muslim leaders going back to the 19th century, but the creation of a modern country based solely on religion had yet to be tested.

 

Where the socialist idealists in Britain failed was in realizing that the industrial and entrepreneurial heart of British India (The Raj) lay not in the poor Muslim areas but in the more sophisticated cities of India, with its diversity of languages and religions–even though Hinduism dominated.

 

What is now Pakistan was poor, feudal, corrupt and torn between the two sects of Islam, Sunni and Shia.

 

Pakistan might have been left to stew, if it had not been for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, coupled with the Indian championing of regimes hostile to the United States. Through this support of the unaligned movement (a bunch of troublemakers like Cuba and Tanzania), India thought it could play the United States against the Soviet Union. All it did was to accelerate the U.S. tilt to its unstable neighbor, Pakistan.

 

The Soviet incursion into Afghanistan lured the United States deeply into the region. Pakistan became our ally and we willfully overlooked its feudalism and corruption and, most importantly, the spread of a potent Islamic militancy, through its religious schools (madrassas). We heavily favored Pakistan, even though we knew the country was trying to build a bomb.

 

In the mid-1980s, I interviewed Gen. Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, Pakistan’s strong man. He denied Pakistan was working on a weapon, but his own detailed knowledge of bomb construction gave the lie to his protestations. I left Pakistan convinced that a nuclear weapon was in the works. What one did not know was the willingness of the rogue scientist, A.Q. Khan, to sell the technology to all comers, like North Korea and Iran.

 

This week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came to the White House briefing room to announce that the United States was committing $100 million to refugee aid in Pakistan, on top of the $60 million already committed. She also asked people to use their cell phones to dial more dollars for refugees.

 

There is irony here. It was American food aid that supported Afghan refugees and their Pakistani supporters from the tribal areas during the Soviet war in Afghanistan. I stood outside Peshawar and watched convoys of trucks with sacks of American grain heading to the refugee camps where the Taliban was incubating. When I went to those camps, beneficiaries of our food complained that it was not accompanied by enough cooking oil. American policy and food have nurtured the Taliban.

 

While India’s economy strengthens and the country celebrates 60 years of democracy, Pakistan is in chaos, fed by the ancient evils of religion and corruption.

 

In a further irony, Britain’s ill-planned withdrawal from India, in a frenzy of liberal idealism, had no effect in Britain beyond opening the door to floods of poor immigrants from Pakistan: immigrants who have vastly complicated Britain’s response to terrorism.  –For North Star Writers Group

 

 

 

 

 

The Long Shadows of the British Empire

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Corruption in Kenya? Blame it on the British and the psychological damage of colonialism. The partition of Cyprus? Step forward the social engineers in London, who underestimated the depth of feeling in the Turkish minority when the British were finally forced out.

When it comes to the Middle East, one can really get exercised about “Perfidious Albion.” The British had their fingers in every territorial dispute: They created whole countries and, with the help of the French, imposed borders from Morocco to China.

Trouble with Iran? Even before the CIA started meddling there in 1953, it was Winston Churchill who, as First Sea Lord in 1913, decided the Royal Navy would move faster, cleaner and have greater range if it switched from coal to oil. So he partially nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the forerunner of BP, to exploit the newly discovered oil fields in Iran. Later, this led to a surge in Iranian nationalism and the CIA plot to restore the Shah.

On to Pakistan and the British legacy in the autonomous tribal lands, now home to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Put the British colonial administration of the 18th to 20th centuries in the dock. Yes, three centuries of British commission and omission.

The British interest in Afghanistan, which they failed to subdue in a series of wars, was largely as a buffer between British India and the growing territorial interests of the Russian Empire. It was here that The Great Game was played: the romanticized espionage that flourished in the region. The British divided the traditional Pashtun lands with the Durand Treaty of 1893, creating a northwestern border for British India, and later Pakistan. It amounted to a land grab. However, the British did recognize the separateness of the people in the Northwest Territories and left them to their tribal and religious ways.

With independence and the partition of India in 1947, the incoming Pakistani government had enough problems without encouraging ethnic strife between the largely Punjabi Pakistanis and their difficult Pashtun brothers in the territories. So the government in Islamabad continued the British policy of benign indifference to the Pashtuns, with whom they were more closely linked by religion than ethnicity or politics.

Yet, the border dispute smoldered and periodically erupted. Kabul and Islamabad do not agree, both blaming the border drawn by the British.

What neither the British nor the Pakistanis wanted was a strong movement for a Pashtun state that would carve out territory from Afghanistan, as well as the tribal territories in Pakistan. There was a failed attempt to bring this about in 1949. Segments of the Pakistani army and the intelligentsia have feared this ever since. They are haunted by another stateless people living on both sides of a border: the Kurds who straddle the border between Iraq, a largely British creation, and Turkey and Iraq and Iran.

The message is that simply being Muslim does not wipe out tribal and ethnic identity any more than borders drawn by others create a new identity. If it were so, Cyprus would not be divided; Yugoslavia would have held together, as would have Czechoslovakia; and Britain would not be considering the possibility of an independent Scotland–after 300 years of union.

The current hostilities in the Pakistani tribal areas, U.S. drone strikes on suspected Taliban strongholds and renewed determination from the Pakistani army to crush extremists in the region could renew a sense of nationhood among the Pashtuns, and a movement toward the creation of Pashtunistan across the British-drawn border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In the long reaches of the night President Obama’s special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, may wish one of the following had happened in the days of the British Raj: 1. the British had stayed home; 2. the British had insisted the Pashtuns submit to central authority; 3. the British had created a new country, Pashtunistan; or 4. the British had never created that troublesome border.

One way or the other, he can blame the Brits.

 


First the Party, Now the Hangover

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By the time the Washington press corps struggled into the Washington Hilton for the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, we were pretty bedraggled.

So much news. There was the Obama puppy; the White House vegetable garden; Michelle’s arms; Barack’s chest, his hot dog, his mustard; and to cap it all, the knife-edge issue of whether Miss California would keep her crown. One suspects the Supreme Court was ready for an expedited hearing on that one.

So 2,600-plus journalists (most of who have never been near the White House) and guests, after many fights over tickets, struggled into the crowded confines of the Hilton to drink too much, fawn over actors and other celebrities, and talk on a leveled playing field with cabinet secretaries and service chiefs.

Make no mistake, this is the big one in Washington: the must-be-seen-at event.

This is Washington’s Oscar Night. Every year, many news organizations throw elaborate before and after parties. Organizations that value their dignity–like The Washington Post and The New York Times–or those, as so many are, that are in bankruptcy, do not throw parties. But ABC, Atlantic Media, Bloomberg, Business Week, CBS, CNN, Congressional Quarterly, Newsweek, Time and Reuters all vied to give the working press the works. The press drank deeply.

Of course, not all those enjoying the largesse of the publishers had tickets to the dinner. Many jumped into dinner suits or evening gowns (show lots of skin, darling) and enjoyed the cocktails and the celebrity-watching, before going home to see the show on television.

Actually, these crashers are smart and necessary. They fill the cocktail parties, so the hosts feel loved; they meet their friends, schmooze and scram before they make fools of themselves. They also are spared the pitched battle for tickets that precedes the dinner every year.

It is a battle between those with the big bucks and swagger, like the television networks, and those who actually write or broadcast about the White House. It is an unseemly struggle. The big outfits want as many as eight tables of 10, whereas many smaller outfits, like Human Events, do not pass the glamour test. Even Barron’s complains.

I used to fight to get one table. Now, I settle for four seats for my wife and myself and two friends. But every year, trade associations, lobbyists and journalists, who are not members of the White House Correspondents’ Association, implore me to get them in. I have started to affect hearing loss.

Year after year, the drill is the same. An inebriated audience listens to the president making jokes, usually at his own expense, then a comedian, chosen exclusively by the president of the association, tries to better the president and the effects of the liquor on the revelers.

Comedian Drew Carey, who can handle just about any audience, from Las Vegas to “The Price Is Right,” told me that the WHCA dinner was the one that had made him the most nervous of any standup engagement, and that he thought it was a difficult audience.

One year, Laura Bush stole the show when she spoofed her husband. In other years, George W. Bush stole the show with his self-mockery.

This year, Obama was funny but not uproarious.

Things were headed down the predictable slippery slope of after-dinner festivities when Wanda Sykes, the comedian known for her acerbic and sometimes blue humor, intimated that she would not shed a tear if Rush Limbaugh went to the great studio in the sky.

This did not cause supporters of Rush to walk out en masse. On Monday Fox News, which was well represented at the dinner and had Todd Palin as their prized guest, decided that a sacrilege had been committed against the sainted Rush. Led by Bill O’Reilly, Fox wanted an apology for the keeper of the conservative covenant. Their indignation was right up there with, you know, the Obama puppy, the White House vegetable garden, Michelle’s arms and Barack’s torso.

For those of us who are not in the small space to the right of Fox News, a vulgar comedian made an unfunny joke about a vulgar broadcaster. We should concentrate on the big stuff, like Miss California and her political philosophy.

The Smell of the Ink and the Roar of Presses

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It was a simple calculation: If I could not make history, I wanted to have a front-row seat to watch it unfold. I would be a newspaperman. What is more interesting to me is that I made that calculation when I was just 11 years old.

After more than 50 years, I am as much in love with newspapers as I was then. But alas, my love is in failing health.

One after the other, the great newspapers are stumbling; and some have fallen, never to get up again. The Boston Globe is on life support, as are many of the titles of the Tribune Group and The McClatchy Company. Two of the country’s most revered titles, The Washington Post and The New York Times are losing money. The venerable Christian Science Monitor and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer have ceased daily print publication and now haunt the Web. Gone is The Rocky Mountain News.

Newspaper closures are not new, but this time the sickness is pandemic. Long gone are titles like The New York Mirror, The New York World-Telegram, The New York Herald Tribune, The Washington Times-Herald, The Baltimore News-American, The Chicago Daily News, The Baltimore Evening Sun, The Washington Star and hundreds of others.

The first great infection was from the impact of television on afternoon newspapers. That changed the whole pattern of newspaper reading. No longer did the newspaper fill the evening hours, television did. Ironically H.L. Mencken, maybe the greatest newspaperman, worried about the health of morning newspapers in a time when evening papers dominated the market.

Television also swept away the great magazines like Life, Look, The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers.

The message here is clear: Few survive, despite long wars of attrition, and despite the best efforts and deep pockets of some publishers.

I am sure that the World Wide Web will grow into its mission as the substitute carrier of the news. But it has a long way to go before it reaches the basic standards of the lowliest daily newspaper.

First, the Web lacks a viable business model. It costs money to maintain a worldwide system of bureaus and correspondents. Then the Web has to find discipline. Its writers need to learn their trade–with respect to the veracity and provenance of both their news and the news on which their opinion is based. The Web also needs an appellate procedure. With a newspaper you can complain to the editor, the publisher and even, in some cases, the ombudsman. Also you can sue. If you are libeled on the Web, it is an indelible stain. So far among the millions of web wannabes only Slate, The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast are showing the way it might be.

For the rest, the Web needs editors. These are the men and women who keep the standards in newspapers, verify the doubtful facts, cut the indulgent writing, and save writers from the humiliation of their own mistakes. The unseen hand of the copy desk is what makes newspaper journalism worthwhile and saves the wretches who write.

For news, neither television nor radio has supplanted the newspaper. They are too ephemeral, too transitory and too inefficient to deal with a complex world. Even at this time, the heavy lifting is still being done by newspapers– newspapers with reduced staffs and demoralized employees.

The production of a daily newspaper is a daily miracle. It involves many disciplines, sometimes many unions, in a management structure that is more horizontal than vertical. The publisher is nominally in charge, but so is the editor, the advertising manager, the printing foreman and the mailing supervisor. In fact, it is the undertaking that is in charge day after day.

The newspaper, especially a big metropolitan newspaper, is akin to a steam locomotive: a great and beautiful beast. In the old days, I loved the clack of typewriters, the smell of ink (it has been reformulated since then), the industrial-scale paper loading, and the tremor when the presses, deep in the bowels of the building, started up. We had pulled it off again.

And I loved the denizens of the newsroom, whether in Harare, London, New York, Baltimore or Washington–my journalistic ports of call. Underpaid sentimentalists posing as cynics all.

I wish the newspaper business well, even as the fever rages. It kept its bargain with me.

Favoritism from the White House Podium

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Like others who ply the newspaper trade here in Washington, I have attended many presidential press conferences, and I am always struck by the same thought when the president steps up to the podium: how alone he seems to be.

Because presidents are nearly always surrounded by staff, security and often other politicians, the essential aloneness of the president can be missed. At press conferences, a president is both alone and on his own. No assistant can whisper in his ear or produce a useful statistic. Unlike the British prime minister who sits among members of his cabinet—and has advance notice of the questions–during Question Time, when a president hears a question he must answer it with the full knowledge that his words are circling the globe, and that later he must defend them.

A presidential press conference is intolerant of slips of the tongue, twisted history or evasion. You might say a press conference is an enhanced interrogation technique.

So it is strange, and unfortunate, that President Barack Obama and his media team leave the impression that his press conferences are rigged.

The appearance of “rigging” came in with George W. Bush and, along with some other aspects of the Bush press operation, has survived. I am referring to the practice of preselecting who will be called upon to ask questions. This gives the impression that the either the reporters in question know they are going to be called upon or, worse, that the president has advance knowledge of the questions themselves.

Until Bush, presidential press conferences were free-for-alls with dozens of correspondents shouting, “Mr. President.” Sure it was untidy, but it was fair and transparent. One imagines that the prescreening now takes place between the press secretary, Robert Gibbs, and Obama. Hence the favoring of television networks, The New York Times, and one black and one Hispanic correspondent, as was witnessed last week. This kind of engineering wrings spontaneity out of the proceedings and causes more and more reporters to stay home and watch the travesty on television.

This trend was obvious in the drop-off in attendance from Obama’s first and second prime-time press conferences to his third. If there is no chance that you will get to ask a question, what is the point in attending?

Many White House regulars, some of whom have covered the White House for decades, are expressing dissatisfaction with Gibbs’s fascination with a handful of reporters–most newly arrived on the beat, like Gibbs himself.

It is not reasonable to expect the president to be familiar with inner workings of the White House press corps. But it is upsetting that Gibbs has clearly not sought to learn from Bill Clinton’s last two press secretaries, Mike McCurry and Joe Lockhart, both of whom were masterful in difficult circumstance. Or, in the spirit of bipartisanship, he might put in a call to Dana Perino, one of the stars of the waning days of George W. Bush’s presidency and his last press secretary.

One of the questions Gibbs might usefully ask of past press honchos is how they kept things running on time. Seldom were briefings late or rescheduled during the day, the way they are now. Clinton was a terrible timekeeper, but the press operation was sensitive to the time demands on correspondents. Not so Gibbs. When it comes to tardiness, the press operation at the Obama White House is in a class by itself.

Back to last week in the East Room of the White House. As is the way in these days of tribal politics, the Washington commentariat saw what it wanted to see in Obama’s performance. One conservative friend, John Gizzi of Human Events, thought Obama was in campaign mode. Some fit the press conference to their belief that the president is hell-bent on taking the country down the French socialist road, and that he will not rest until the tricolore flies over the White House and American schoolchildren sing the “Marseillaise.” Others, amazingly, found proof that Obama would be only a one-term president.

I think I can speculate with the best of them and I saw only a tired, slightly impatient but impressively articulate man alone with big troubles.

Obama is trying to fix everything at once. The only person who really pulled that off militarily and domestically was Napoleon Bonaparte. It was Napoleon who gave us the idea that a new leader’s effectiveness should be assessed in 100-day increments–except it was 111days for Napoleon, but the Paris newspapers shortened it to 100 days. And the 100-day timeline was not at the beginning of Napoleon’s reign, but at the end–the time between his escape from Elba and his final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo.