White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Boris Johnson: Mayor of London, Clown of England

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I would like to introduce you to the new Conservative mayor of London, Boris Johnson. He is remarkable. He is unique. His political success is based on the oft-repeated pratfall. Yes, Johnson has committed every political sin and is now at the helm of the most important city in Europe, and the one best beloved by Americans.

In the age of the technocrat, Johnson is more like something out of a P.G. Wodehouse novel. For more than a decade, the British media have been regaled by Johnson’s “scrapes.” For example, he was demoted in the Conservative Party from a position on its front bench (which means that if the Tories had come back to power, he would have been a cabinet member) for variously insulting the city of Liverpool, antagonizing Pacific Islanders, and having an extramarital affair with Petronella Wyatt, a columnist at The Spectator, the weekly magazine which he edited.

Indeed, everyone at The Spectator seemed to be having an affair at the time Johnson occupied the editor’s chair. Publisher Kimberly Quinn, an American, was having an extramarital affair with David Blunkett, the blind British home secretary. Associate Editor Rod Liddle was having an extramarital affair with a Spectator secretary. Given that the staff is very small, that it is the oldest continuously published magazine in England (1828), and it is the seat of the Conservative intelligentsia, you can imagine how the tabloids loved the goings on. In fact, they took to calling Johnson “Boudoir Boris” and the magazine “The Sextator.”

Johnson was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and with which he has been able to cut himself. From Eton, the world’s most exclusive boarding school, Johnson sailed into Oxford University, where he distinguished himself as president of its debating society, The Oxford Union. Many a future prime minister has honed his skills debating at Oxford, and it seemed inevitable that Johnson would find his way into parliament. In 2001, he became a Conservative member.

Johnson’s running for mayor of London had all the characteristics of William F. Buckley Jr.’s running for mayor of New York. The only difference is that Johnson secured–to the horror of his party–the formal Conservative nomination, and now he is the mayor. At 43, he is one of the few executive mayors in England. He is a man known for his dazzling white hair, disorganization, irreverently witty tongue, and a sense that absolutely everything is not to be taken seriously.

Johnson was aided in his campaign because he was running against an equally bizarre, but more calculating, Ken Livingstone, also known as “Red Ken.” Livingstone had a long history in London politics and was elected to the new post of executive mayor eight years ago. Livingstone’s admiration of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, coupled with his newly found affection for big business, offended the left and the right of his party. Yet, to his credit, Livingstone introduced congestion pricing, which has eased London traffic, and coped with the al-Qaeda subway bombings on July 7, 2005.

But in this election, the big issues like the 2012 Olympic Games in London and street crime were dwarfed by a silly argument over buses. Livingstone had decided that it was time to replace London’s double-decker fleet with flexible single-deck buses, commonly called “bendy” buses. The argument is one of tradition versus modernity. Johnson, who mostly rides a bicycle, wants the double-decker Routemaster buses redesigned and saved. He wants to ban the bendy buses that he believes hurt the image of London as well as being, well, un-English: the Routemasters are made in England and the bendys are made in Germany.

The Conservative Party is not so happy about Johnson winning the executive mayoral race. They feel that he will embarrass the party leader, David Cameron, and generally humiliate Tory values. Johnson has the wit of Will Rodgers and none of the temperance. Here are some of Boris’s best:

“My friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.”

“I don’t see why people are so snooty about Channel 5. It has some respectable documentaries about the Second World War. It also devotes considerable airtime to investigations into lap dancing, and other related and vital subjects.”

“I love tennis with a passion. I challenged Boris Becker to a match once and he said he was up for it, but he never called back. I bet I could make him run around.”

“I have as much chance of becoming prime minister as of being decapitated by a Frisbee or of finding Elvis.”

The Pity of Earth Day–It Brings Out the Crazies

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The trouble with Earth Day, which we mark this week (April 22), is that it has a powerful hold on crazies. Crazies on the left and crazies on the right.

That certainly is not what Sen. Gaylord Nelson had in mind when he inaugurated the first Earth Day in 1970. The senator, and others, hoped that Earth Day would attract a serious examination of the stresses on the Earth. Instead, it seems to attract stressed people.

From the left come the neo-agrarians, the anti-capitalists, the no-growth proselytizers, and the blame-America-first crowd. From the right come the supporters of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a pro-business phalanx that is in deep denial about man’s impact on the environment, and libertarians who refuse to believe that governments can ever get anything right, or that government standards can be beneficial.

The fact is that a great majority of Americans are deeply concerned about the environment and maintaining the quality of life that has been a hallmark of progress in the 20th and 21st centuries. This majority includes electric utility executives, oil company CEOs, and the trade associations to which these industrial captains belong.

It is notable the extent to which the energy industries have signed onto the concept of global warming and other environmental degradation. They know that their activities often collide directly with the environment and they are, often to the surprise of the environmental community, keen to help. British Petroleum is pouring millions of dollars into solar power and hydrogen. John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil Company, the U.S. division of Royal Dutch Shell, is retiring early to devote himself to the task of alerting Americans to their energy vulnerability and to the environmental story.

Sure, it took industry a long time to get on the environmental bandwagon. It is the way of industry that it initially resists any innovation that might cost money or involve difficulty. Later it buys television advertising, pointing to its own virtue when it has capitulated.

The introduction of double-hulled oil tankers in domestic waters is a clear example of this: conversion in the face of necessity. After the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989, the government mandated double-hulling, the tanker industry moaned, and oil spills in domestic waters declined by 70 percent. The cost of double-hulling is balanced out by the lack of payouts for spills. Double-hulling ships, like removing lead from gasoline, introducing the catalytic converter, and banning hydrofluorocarbons in propellants and refrigerants, are major American environmental successes. We led the world.

But if you listen to the critics, you would think that the United States was always on the wrong side of the environmental ledger.

The problem is we live well and we consumer a lot of energy and a lot of goods in our routine lives. There are about 21 gallons of gasoline in a 42-gallon barrel of oil. If you calculate your own daily gasoline usage, you will come up with a pretty frightening number over your lifetime. Likewise, coal burned for lighting, heating and cooling. Residents of New York City, who live on top of each other and do not drive very much, use about half of the energy of suburban households.

For a serious improvement in the environment, just from an energy consumption standpoint, we need to generate electricity by means other than burning fossil fuels (nuclear and wind), introduce more electric-powered public transportation, and substitute electric vehicles for hydrocarbon-powered vehicles. The technology is in sight for all of these. The problem is that the political will is distracted by the pressure groups on the left and the right.

Human impact on the environment can be disastrous or benign, and even beneficial. The towpath along the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal in Washington, D.C. started out as a purely commercial intrusion on a river bank, but now it is a recreational magnet. The dams along the Colorado River have boosted growth in the West, but the river has paid a price. Seattle City Light, the utility that serves the Seattle area, is now carbon-neutral because of the large amount of generation it gets from wind and hydro. There is a debate whether damming rivers is justified; but compared with other ways of producing large quantities of electricity, it is relatively benign.

Farming is an intrusion into nature—a constructive one. The challenge for the Earth Day advocates is to find other constructive intrusions.

 

A Little Hate Is Good for Fourth Estate

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There must be some nostalgia at CBS News for the good old days, when the network was roundly hated and people at the political extremes longed to see it fail. Now that it is failing (it is a laggard in the ratings), nobody seems to care. Gone are the conservatives, who wanted to buy the network to sanitize it and rout out alleged liberal journalists. Also gone are the political lefties, who believed that CBS was the captive of its advertisers.

In media, to be hated is an affirmation that you are succeeding.

At The Radio & Television Correspondents’ Association annual dinner this week, the happiest people were at the Fox News tables. Roger Ailes, the principal architect of Fox’s huge success as a news network, and his star host, Bill O’Reilly, were beaming—well aware that most people in the room believe that the Fox cable channel has degraded broadcast news.

It is not just CBS that is hurting, but also other traditional media as well—most especially newspapers. Marylanders used to hate The Baltimore Sun. Now they worry that their venerable newspaper is on the ropes, and may be sold to quite the wrong kind of person.

They used to say in newsrooms, “If you aren’t hated, you’re not doing this job right.” Unfortunately, the quality of hatred that most news organizations face is sadly watered down. Generalized attacks on the “liberal media” and the “mainstream media” just don’t pack much of a wallop. They tell us more about the attacker than the attacked.

Happily, two newspapers—maybe two of the three best newspapers in the country—can still agitate those who believe in media conspiracies. These are The New York Times and The Washington Post. The third is The Wall Street Journal, which has never raised the same kind of intense feeling as the other two. Its editorial page is so predictable that even liberals cannot get mad at it. And its news coverage is pretty faultless.

The two big East Coast newspapers can really get the critics going. The New York Times, through a series of terrible blunders, has opened itself up to particularly virulent criticism. The Washington Post, which sells five times as many newspapers as its nearest competitor, The Washington Times, unerringly gets the brickbats. Civil rights groups accuse it of racial insensitivity. And radio talk show hosts like to refer to it as “The Washington Compost.” Even so, the paper has just bagged six Pulitzer prizes. Particularly, it showed the whole world last year that it could still deliver great journalism by revealing the scandalous treatment of veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Both The New York Times and The Washington Post have the resources to do the job right. Although The Times is in a slump, and appears to be in desperate need of an editor who has a vision and a publisher who is competent, it still triumphs on solid, day-to-day coverage of big continuing stories. Its coverage of the subprime mortgage crisis and its on-the-ground reporting out of Iraq are excellent.

Michael Wolff, the media critic of Vanity Fair, is in full pursuit of The New York Times in his May column. Wolff catalogs the humiliations the newspaper has suffered in recent times (including the Jayson Blair fictions, Judith Miller’s partisanship, and the insinuation that John McCain was having an affair with a lobbyist) and speculates on the possibility that the special voting stock, which gives the Sulzberger family control of the paper, may be under attack.

It may be very difficult to change the bylaws of the company, but Wolff thinks that angry shareholders could force the sale issue; or that the Sulzberger family, like the Bancroft family that used to own The Wall Street Journal, can simply be bought off. One way or the other, Wolff sees dissident shareholders changing the corporate structure of the paper.

At the same time, with a similar stock arrangement, the Graham family, greatly assisted by Warren Buffet, is firmly in control of its newspaper.

Yet, neither the Sulzbergers nor the Grahams have had huge financial successes with the properties they inherited. Both have had considerable editorial successes by lavishing resources on the papers. But as publishing ventures, the families have been timid and sometimes foolish. They profited from near monopolies, but mostly failed in diversification. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the father of the present publisher of The New York Times, confounded the publishing industry when he bought The Boston Globe. Analysts warned that two newspapers in the same advertising market would hurt more than a different kind of diversification. But the man who got it right in launching a national edition of The New York Times got it very wrong in Boston. The Globe is losing money and is a drain on The New York Times Company.

Katherine Graham, the late publisher of The Washington Post, who is revered in newspaper circles, did some pretty odd things herself. She clung to Newsweek, when it could have been sold profitably; invested in newspapers in New Jersey and Washington state; and nibbled at small publishing ventures in Washington, D.C. It can be argued that it wasn’t until Buffet came onto the scene with his steadying hand—he is a large shareholder and director of the company—that The Post started hedging the risk of newspaper publishing. In particular, it bought Stanley H. Kaplan Educational Centers, which has turned out to be a cash cow and is now more profitable than The Post.

Unlike The New York Times, The Washington Post had a clear idea of what to do with its Web pages, which are now in profit–as is Slate, the online magazine that The Post bought from Microsoft.

Nobody knows the future of newspapers. But we do know that the well-being of a democracy depends on them. Both The New York Times and The Washington Post are still making a profit, though not as much as in years past. And the public still has the energy and good sense to hate them.

The Most Traumatic Year, 1968

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Nineteen sixty-eight was, as they say, a year to remember.

 

Many extraordinary events were crammed into 1968, including the launching of the Tet Offensive by the North Vietnamese; U.S. ground troops from Charlie Company rampaging through the South Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai, killing more than 500 civilians; President Johnson’s announcing of his decision not to seek re-election; the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; student rioting in Paris; the assassination of Robert Kennedy; the “Prague Spring” uprising against communism in Czechoslovakia; and the tumultuous Democratic Convention in Chicago.

 

As an editor at The Washington Daily News, an evening newspaper, the enormity of King’s assassination was hard to get my mind around. And the riots that ensued left scars on the infrastructure of the nation’s capital that would never quite heal. Only now, two generations later, is the Shaw neighborhood, which grew out of freed slave encampments in Northwest Washington, returning to normal urban vitality. Much of Shaw was engulfed in flames in1968, and it fell into the worst kind of decay; its hollowed-out buildings housing crack addicts, feral animals and rats.

 

As in other cities, fire did the damage, but politics and litigation delayed the recovery. There may be something informative here for those who think Baghdad will spring back to life, or that Zimbabwe will return to the status quo ante. Recovery is hard and slow.

 

Little did we know it, but The Washington Daily News was to be a victim of the riots. Looters and rioters destroyed the newspaper kiosks that were a feature in Washington and essential to selling our afternoon tabloid. The Daily News began to fail because it depended on street sales, and the infrastructure for that was destroyed. The city’s other two newspapers, The Washington Post and The Washington Evening Star, fared better because they had a larger percentage of their circulation home-delivered.

 

After the fires were extinguished, the smell of smoke hung over the city, a curfew was in effect, and troops were deployed on street corners. Those of us with press credentials were able to drive around, and we were constantly speculating how eerily similar this must have been to events behind the Iron Curtain.

 

Over time, the riots of 1968 have been referred to more and more as “race riots.” But at the time we just called them “the riots,” because one of the consequences was a period of elaborate politeness between whites and blacks. This was noted by two of the best chroniclers of the time: Richard Starnes of the Scripps-Howard News Service and Richard Harwood of The Washington Post. One of them beautifully encapsulated the calm after the storm, when he referred to black drivers yielding to white drivers at street intersections. After one such incident, Harwood said that “both thought they had done something significant.”

 

The rioters’ anger seemed to be directed more toward property than to people: It seemed to be black rioters against white-owned property than blacks against whites. In the worst of the rioting, on April 5, I walked up the Shaw-U Street corridor without any sense of trepidation. Looters–their arms full of appliances–were everywhere. When they banged into you, they apologized. One looter even suggested that I walk on top of a wall for safety. “That way the brothers will see you, and you will be safe,” he said.

 

It was after the riots that fear gripped the city. White flight to the suburbs began and continued for many years.

Washington’s suburbs boomed, and the inner-city decayed. A somewhat unconsciously integrated city became a segregated one that pretended otherwise. Large corporations added blacks to their boards of directors, television stations added black anchors, and the newspapers searched high and low to beef up their core of black writers. Tokenism became an industry.

 

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s message advanced in some ways–mostly because there was a recognition that black grievances were well-founded and deeply seated. But some of the remedies have been as harmful as the disease–excesses of affirmative action and reverse racism.

 

Of course, civil rights was only one of the issues roiling the nation in 1968. There was also the women’s liberation movement; the environmental movement; and underlying it all, the Vietnam War.

The war touched every aspect of national life. And as people turned against it, they did so with anger, often fueled by the drafting of a family member. Some institutions were torn apart by the division. The Reporter magazine, a liberal alternative to The National Review, was destroyed by contention. Washington columnist Joseph Alsop lost the confidence of editors across the country. And Paul Harvey, the conservative radio commentator, reversed his position on the war because his son was facing the draft.

 

Nineteen sixty-eight tested loyalties and caused many people to re-examine their politics and to think through their predispositions. A majority of Americans were well on their journey from right to left because of the war.

 

The assassination of King, followed shortly after by the assassination of Robert Kennedy, convinced many people that the nation had lost its way. Unfortunately, it chose Richard Nixon to lead it out of the darkness.

 

 

The Men Who Should Stand in the Dock with Mugabe

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It is easy to work up a head of hate against Robert Mugabe, the cruel president of Zimbabwe. He has destroyed a beautiful country and inflicted untold suffering on his people. He has so mismanaged the economy that the country’s inflation rate is the world’s highest–over 100,000 percent. He has expelled the productive people from the country and others have fled. He has given choice land and accommodations to his family of thugs.

 

More, he is a murderer. In the early part of his reign of terror, he killed tens of thousands of the Matabele people in southern Zimbabwe, around the city of Bulawayo.

 

It is not hard to vilify Mugabe, who may now be at the end of his bloody reign. But there are other guilty men who should be named. They are the de facto co-conspirators up and down the continent of Africa, who lead countries, enjoy influence and have, to a man (the arrival of a woman leader in Liberia is recent), remained silent as Mugabe has become more maniacal.

 

The guiltiest are those in the frontline states that surround land-locked Zimbabwe. They are the leaders of Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa and Zambia. Each one of them has some of the blood Mugabe has shed on his hands. Because of the silence that they have assiduously maintained, their complicity has been absolute. All four leaders have been the enablers of Mugabe.

 

Each country has suffered from the implosion of Zimbabwe. Each country has felt the pain from the lack of trade; unsatisfied debt; and the surge of people fleeing from the privations of Zimbabwe–once one of the richest countries in Africa, and the breadbasket of the southern region.

 

Botswana, on Zimbabwe’s southwest border, is currently the showplace of Africa. It is a functioning democracy, with a healthy economy based on mining and tourism. But Botswana could have used its economic leverage, as the host of the principle rail line carrying exports out of Zimbabwe into South Africa, and from there to the world, to put pressure on Mugabe. But it did not.

 

To the east, Mozambique hosts many of Zimbabwe’s exports and imports through the port of Beira on the Indian Ocean. If there had been some tightening of this relationship, Mugabe would have listened. Instead, there was silence.

 

Then there is South Africa and President Thabo Mbeki. If there is a judgment day, Mbeki will have much to answer for his connivance in tolerating Mugabe. Mbeki’s guilt extends beyond the suffering of the people to his north to his own people. More than 2 million refugees have fled from Zimbabwe to South Africa, where they have been no more popular than illegal aliens anywhere. The really hapless live on such charity as they can find; while those who are more capable of organization, particularly deserters from the Zimbabwe armed forces, have formed sophisticated criminal gangs, specializing in bank and armored car robbery.

 

Finally, Zambia has shouldered the burden of watching over the giant Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River, which provides electricity to both Zambia and Zimbabwe. Zambia has kept essential goods flowing into Zimbabwe, against the international sanctions; and it has seen its own Victoria Falls tourism plummet because of conditions on the Zimbabwe side of the falls. Yet, Zambia’s leaders have said nothing.

 

If Mugabe is forced from power by the ongoing election, and if he leaves without trying to annul the results of the election, milk and honey will not flow again in the country between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers. Too much has been destroyed in 28 years of his rule. The infrastructure has been destroyed; soil erosion has carried away an incalculable amount of earth from the fragile plain that once produced corn for all of southern Africa; the professional class is scattered around the world, in what they refer to as the Zimbabwe Diaspora; and the people of Zimbabwe have lost confidence in the future. The most optimistic country in Africa has traded hope for fatalism.

 

Assuming Morgan Tsvangirai really has won the election in Zimbabwe, he will have to preside over a massive reconstruction, which will last decades simply to get the country back to where it was when Mugabe destroyed it through racism, megalomania, and economics so primitive that he thought he could print money and it would have value.

 

Tsvangirai will have to turn to the world for economic aid and technical assistance. But he will have to turn to Zimbabweans for goodwill and to resist corruption. And he will have to turn to another silent partner, China, for a better deal on the contracts Mugabe signed with Beijing.

 

Not since Idi Amin was feeding his opponents to the crocodiles has there been such a catastrophic head of state in Africa. And not since Amin’s days, have the leaders of Africa remained so quiet in the face of such palpable evil.

 

 

Obama and the Return of the Great Political Speech

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In this extraordinary political season, last week introduced a new dimension: a minute examination of one candidate’s rhetorical skills. Barack Obama was put under the microscope to see whether he could produce a transcendental speech that would nullify the excesses of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.

That this should be is extraordinary in itself. We have heretofore judged politicians on their religious affiliation, but not on the utterances of a particular clergyman.

More, as a people, we have shied away from lofty rhetoric, favoring meat-and-potatoes speech. Our best orators have not played well with the electorate, although sometimes they have handed down memorable thoughts. William Jennings Bryan comes to mind as the preeminent orator of his day. We still remember his mesmerizing “Cross of Gold” speech, but we also remember him as being baited and brought down by Clarence Darrow in the “Scopes Monkey Trial.” Today, we adore the cascading cadences of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. But his was a voice of protest, a cry of pain, not a solicitation for votes.

One of our best orators was Sen. Everett Dirksen of Illinois, who filled the Senate chamber with speech but changed no minds. In that, he was like Winston Churchill before World War II. According to Roy Jenkins’s detailed book on Churchill’s parliamentary life, members of the House of Commons revered Churchill’s eloquence but resisted his logic. Jenkins reports that when it was known that Churchill was to speak, the House would fill up with enthusiastic members who came for the show. But that was all they came for.

Rhetoric had its birth, and maybe its finest hours, in the ancient Greek democracy. The ability to argue brilliantly in public was revered as established as an art form. It continued, but was modified, in the Roman Forum. As the Roman state became more important than the individual, the nature of public oration changed: disputation surrendered to the triumphalism of Julius Caesar.

Through history there were great speakers from the thrones and the pulpits. But the growth of parliamentary democracy in England brought the art of public persuasion back to life, as it had been in Greece and Rome.

Initially, when British parliaments reflected only a small part of the population, debate was erudite with many references to the classics. As the franchise expanded in the 19th century, the language was modified to be more comprehensible to the public.

The House of Commons provided an arena, and rhetorical success there meant success in politics, witness H. H. Asquith, David Lloyd George, F.E. Smith, Charles Parnell, and Daniel O’Connell. The Liberal William Gladstone and the Conservative Benjamin Disraeli, the great rivals, went about it with scholarship and wit, enhanced by their personal antipathy to each other. Gladstone was the greatest orator (he could speak without notes for four hours), but Disraeli excelled at repartee—the quick thrust and the lethal turn-of-phrase were his weapons. So popular were Gladstone’s speeches that he had to employ shouters: men who stood just in earshot and repeated the great man’s words so that people could hear them.

Broadcasting has banished the thundering speech in favor of a more intimate conversation between politician and voter. Franklin D. Roosevelt understood this and changed political speech from big, bold oratory to a crowd to intimate communication to individuals. He also understood the value of scarcity and addressed the nation infrequently, compared to today’s presidents who broadcast once a week to an inattentive nation. Ronald Reagan, always referred to as a great communicator not a great orator, followed the FDR example of delivering big ideas in soft, informal language.

Whether Obama becomes the Democratic nominee and president or not, he has raised the rhetorical stakes. He has melded something of the eloquence of the 19th century with the collegiate delivery of today. He has also raised expectations for his future speeches. People will expect them to be as well crafted and as nuanced as his Philadelphia speech. As a speaker, Obama will always be compared to himself—and that is a high standard.

Eliot Spitzer and the Parallel Life Phenomenon

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The two most effective and reprehensible spies of he Cold War were the Briton Kim Philby and the American Aldrich Ames. They were both professionals in the espionage business who betrayed their countries and caused the deaths of untold Western agents in the Soviet Union.

In style and personality, Philby and Ames did not share much in common. There is no compelling evidence that they yearned for the triumph of communism over capitalism. This separated them from the atomic spies Klaus Fuchs and Julius Rosenberg: They were traitors who believed in the Soviet enterprise.

Perhaps, Philby and Ames shared the desire to live two lives in parallel.

Perhaps, it was New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s desire for a parallel life–a secret but concurrent existence—that propelled his elaborate patronage of an escort service. Spitzer did not pick up a sex worker in a bar, make eye contact with her across a crowded room, but planned, financed and orchestrated the betrayal of his wife and public life.

It seems that Spitzer wanted something more than sex. He was not Bill Clinton redux. He was a man who clearly got some satisfaction from the structure of his infidelity; the pseudo-romance of it.

Here was a man of huge public life, pursuing a private life that he sought to make larger than sex alone would require. The analogy with the world of espionage fits. Here was a man in the sun who wanted to be in the shade at the same time.

John le Carre, the great espionage writer, has explored this lifestyle duality in his characters. In his novel, “A Perfect Spy,” the protagonist, Magnus Pym, tries to explain the rewards of his two lives by telling his son what it is like to be “well run.” Here, le Carre reveals the perfect spy: the person who wants to live two lives at full speed.

Not all secret lives are confined to spies and governors who want complexity in their sex lives. There are, for example, bigamists—people who feel compelled to have more than one family simultaneously, often at great risk. I know a man who maintained two families until the truth came out. The stress and strain must have been terrible, but he was very happy with the parallel families. Playwright and theater critic Kenneth Tynan was the product of a bigamist marriage. The truth was not revealed until his father’s funeral, when the two families collided.

Of course, not all secret lives are dangerous and lead to national betrayal or the suffering of families. Some are quite innocent and involve an escape from the reality of the first life. They include the huge gambit of people who belong to secret societies, mostly innocent, and to cross-dressers.

Clearly for Spitzer, a brilliant academic career, a seemingly perfect family and great success in public life were not enough. He wanted to put his talent to work at diverting money, initiating complex logistics, and spending a little time with a high-priced sex worker in a hotel room. It looks as though he wanted the life of those he used to prosecute.

Alas for Spitzer, his secret life is public and his public life is in shreds. No hiding place now.

Whither Cuba after the Brothers Castro?

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In Havana, the enfeebled fingers of Fidel Castro have handed the baton of dictatorship to the feeble fingers of his brother, Raul. The endgame is in sight, but what will it lead to?

There are those in Miami and Washington who believe that, by some miracle, the status quo ante will return to Cuba, but this time with democracy and transparency.

To understand what might happen in Cuba, let us look at two examples of countries where power was transferred.

First, take South Africa. The white minority government ceded power to the African National Congress by throwing open the franchise, enabling a black government to be elected. Significantly in South Africa, there were independent institutions, a democratic tradition among whites, and organized political groups.

Second, look at Russia. Change came quickly, but Russia was not ready for democratic emancipation in tandem with economic liberalization. While South Africa transferred power smoothly, it did not have to transfer ownership of its commerce. Result: an orderly transition. In Russia, the political transition was smoother than the commercial one. Smart kleptocrats stole Russia’s wealth. This has generated great public resentment; and from it, Vladimir Putin was able to abridge democracy. Of course, Putin was helped by the economic chaos of the early 1990s–another symptom of Russia’s democratic and commercial immaturity.

There are those who think that there will be a transition in Cuba akin to the one in South Africa. The parallel is faulty. They would be better advised to look at what happened in Russia and chart a future for Cuba that avoids the mistakes of Russia.

The great truth about Cuba, as far as the United States is concerned, is that it lies 90 miles off Florida; its economy is a disaster; and it has 11 million people—a goodly number of whom would like to move to the United States.

Here are some scenarios for Cuba:

1. The United States lifts the embargo. In the first week, Cuba is flooded with private aircraft and boats. There is chaos, and the Cubans fear that they are being taken over. Solution: a gradual lifting of the embargo over time.

2. A democratic government is established in Havana. But without political parties, Cuba divides along racial lines. Roughly 50 percent of Cubans are white and the rest are black. Solution: a government in exile is formed in Miami to prepare a constitution that could be adopted in Cuba, allowing for the special conditions on the island.

3. A new Cuban government seeks to privatize state-owned enterprises– the most valuable of which is the pharmaceutical research industry. Any move to privatize industry would put a new government at odds with the Cuban exile community in the United States. Many harbor claims against Cuba for companies and private property that were seized by Castro 48 years ago. These claims are extremely complicated and could bog down a new administration in litigation in Cuban and American courts. Solution: a commission of reconciliation, whose findings would be legislated into law in Havana with treaty recognition in the United States.

If things go wrong in Cuba, they go wrong for the United States as well. A rush to democracy could be as damaging as anything that has happened, including civil war. There are those in Havana who believe that there should be a period for private industry to be established before democracy is implemented. These are people who look not to the South African or Russian examples but to China.

And, of course, there are the Cubans. When I first went to Cuba in the 1980s, at least half of them remembered the days before the revolution and were sullenly angry about what had happened to Cuba. On my last visit, four years ago, the change in generations was apparent. There was less memory of the old days, and Cubans’ aspirations had more to do with their daily lives than with great upheavals. As I could define it, a wish-list included better pay, more meat in the diet, and better-fitting clothes. A distant fourth on the wish-list, and from the young, was to travel. But years of propaganda have taken their toll, and many young Cubans believe that life outside of Cuba is brutal and dangerous. Interviews on the street suggest that they fear the inequalities of the past as much as they resent the oppression of the present.

The Cuban question will not be resolved when two old men leave the scene there.

William F. Buckley, a Life of Fun

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All of my adult life, William F. Buckley Jr. has been a player on the national stage. It is hard to believe that Buckley is no longer with us; that he has to be moved in our mental computers from an active folder to one labeled memory.

Thousands of writers have claimed that Buckley was the father of modern conservatism. Maybe. What is certain is that Buckley has carried the conservative standard from the time he wrote his seminal book, “God and Man at Yale.” He followed this with the founding of National Review in 1955. National Review sought to give an intellectual patina to the business-dominated conservatism of the Eisenhower era.

Buckley was a grandee; a boisterous intellectual who, at some level, never left the debating society at Yale. Above all, Buckley was a man of fun.

His conservatism was never in tow with the conservatism of the Republican Party. It was Buckley conservatism–as much informed by the high spirits of European aristocracy as it was by the yeoman farmers of America.

Buckley was hugely imaginative: He did things that had never been done before. His television program, “Firing Line,” was all Buckley: intellectuals disagreeing with wit and erudition. For 33 years it was a mainstay on PBS–which at the time of the program’s founding, in 1966, was the only network for intellectuals. While many conservatives were damning PBS, Buckley was quietly remaking it with “Firing Line.” In typical fashion, Buckley did not want to see his program become the product of a committee or university when he moved on. So he struck the set: “Firing Line” ceased production, but it is still remembered as an example of how television can do talking heads well.

His son, the author Christopher Buckley, said that Buckley’s contribution to the conservative movement was, among other things, to drive “the kooks” out of it. He broke with the John Birch Society and kept his distance from the radicalism of Pat Buchanan. Buckley thoughts on talk radio and extreme conservatives, like Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham, have not been recorded.

The conventional wisdom is that Buckley paved the way for Barry Goldwater to run for president. And the Young Americans for Freedom, who Buckley organized to support Goldwater, became the foot soldiers in the Reagan Revolution. But it seems to me that Buckley was always outside the conservative movement. His importance was as a provider of ideas and a tutor of young conservative writers, ranging from George Will to David Brooks. Most major conservative thinkers pass through National Review.

Buckley was not a fixture in Washington. He was not published in The Washington Post. He was not a courtier in the Reagan administration, as was George Will.

Many conservatives loved Buckley in principal, but kept their distance in practice. They worried about some of his not-so-conservative positions, like calling for the legalization of marijuana, and his enthusiasm for continental Europe. He loved Switzerland and retired there to write many of his books.

Even in religion, Buckley was not quite part of the movement he was credited with founding. Evangelicals embraced conservatism, and conservatives embraced evangelicals. Buckley, however, remained a very devout, very orthodox Roman Catholic.

Buckley tried to understand popular taste, but he confessed that he could not get the hang of it–especially rap music. Buckley was born a patrician who would never have to worry about money. He could apply his considerable talents and energy to his interests, including wine, food, literature and sailing.

Sometimes, Buckley seemed bored with politics. It is said that out of the public arena, he did not discuss politics.

Buckley had many favorites, most of whom shared his theatricality but not his political views. He was a close friend of John Kenneth Galbraith, the left-wing economist. He was enchanted by Malcolm Muggeridge, a radical British journalist and roue, who converted to Catholicism later in life and wrote a book about Jesus.

Everyone who worked at National Review, or was a friend of Bill, used the same word to describe the ethos: fun. Buckley was fun to be around and it was enormous fun to have him on the national stage. Sometimes the fun was mischievous, as when Buckley proposed that after he finished his term as president, Eisenhower should run as a vice president on the Nixon ticket. It was a joke, but it was one that sent scholars running to the books and lawyers pondering the legality of it. Then there was the time Buckley ran for mayor of New York. There were strings of bon mots every day, and the press had to discipline itself to cover the serious candidates and not the entertainment provided by Buckley.

Buckley did not like debating politicians: He liked debating clever people such as Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and Michael Kinsley.

Buckley was a prodigious writer and is output ranged from politics to book reviews to travel articles. He was so industrious that he actually wrote a book about his own industry: a snapshot of two weeks in the life of one of the nation’s greatest dilettantes.

Buckley was without peer and appears to be without a successor.

The Back Story of the Breakfast Banana

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To you, the banana may be a fruit that you slice onto your cereal at breakfast. To me it is a slice of history, an examination of a moral dilemma, and an explanation of why the government grows bigger. It is also a tale of mortality because the banana, as we know it, is facing extinction.

Let us begin at the end: The banana that we now enjoy, called the Cavendish, has already been wiped out by Panama disease–a lethal fungus prevalent in Asia and Australia. In the near future, that varietal is expected to be under attack in the large growing areas of the Caribbean and Central America.

The trouble is that the banana cannot fight back: It cannot mutate to meet the new threat in the normal way of plants because the cultivated banana is a clone. Evolution interruptus.

Before the Cavendish was the choice of exporters around the world, there was the Gros Michel banana. But in the 1950s, it fell victim to Panama disease and the Cavendish, in many ways an inferior fruit, had to be substituted.

Bananas, which originated in Asia thousands of years ago, somehow made their way to Africa, and Arab slave traders brought them to the New World. The global banana trade got underway in the 1870s, when entrepreneurs found that they could pick bananas green and they would ripen on their way to market.

American foreign policy in Central America became captive to the banana companies, most famously the United Fruit Company. While the banana trade was a blessing to the campesinos of Central America, it enslaved them to the companies. To support the banana trade the United States invaded, threatened, cajoled and buttressed dictators. The governance of Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama reaped the trade benefits, but paid the price of banana dominance. The banana traders, particularly United Fruit, now known as Chiquita, were vilified in Europe as America’s neocolonial exploiters.

But the truth is more complicated.

In his masterpiece “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the great Colombian novelist and Nobel laureate, wrote poignantly about the Colombian government’s massacre of striking banana workers. But in his memoirs “Living to Tell the Tale,” Marquez also refers to the hope in rural Colombia that United Fruit would return after it had ceased operations in the aftermath of the massacre.

The banana, a nutritious fruit, has often had a bitter harvest. While the United States placed the so-called banana republics of Central America as in its sphere of influence, Europeans, particularly the British, became possessive of banana producers in their Caribbean colonies. As these colonies gained their independence, Europe sought to assist development in the Caribbean by establishing floor prices for bananas. This led to a trade war with the United States, which began in 1993 and ended in 2001.

The banana wars may not be over.

Large fruit exporters, like Dole and Chiquita, with assistance from U.S. laboratories and universities, are seeking to bioengineer the banana to protect it from Panama disease and other lethal attackers that can threaten it at any time. But Europe opposes bioengineered foods and bans their import. Will the Europeans turn their backs on the bioengineered version of a banana that they have known for 140 years? Will they fight U.S. fruit companies that want access to European markets?

The banana, seemingly so benign, illustrates the complexity of foreign relations, the unintended consequences of commodity dependence in poor countries, and why the U.S. government grows like Topsy. Before the banana crisis is resolved, the government will hire more scientists, let more research contracts, and beef up the diplomatic corps with banana trade experts. Banana policy is a slippery business.