White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Sam Donaldson Moves Out of Focus

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Sam Donaldson has retired from ABC News after 41 tumultuous years. His going–without an official send-off or even a press release–was the way he wanted it. A loud man, Donaldson elected to go quietly. We all should miss him. He was good for his audience and a tonic for his colleagues.

 

As controversial as he was competent, Donaldson is not so much remembered for his reporting around the world as for his years as ABC’s chief White House correspondent–and for his antics in that role.

 

Sam covered Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. But, he told me when I interviewed him on my television program, “White House Chronicle,” that Reagan was his favorite. Donaldson famously shouted questions at Reagan, who clearly enjoyed the repartee–sometimes breaking away from his staff to answer one of the questions Donaldson shouted from behind the rope line.

 

The public–and maybe some of the suits at Disney, which owns ABC—thought Donaldson rude. Clearly, Reagan did not. Two fine actors were enjoying their roles, feeding off each other.

 

And that is the thing about Donaldson; he is always on. The energy he showed in bawling at presidents was the same energy that invigorated the White House press corps.

 

Make no mistake, Donaldson has always been an invigorator, a controlled explosion of a man. When he was in the White House briefing room, it was palpably alive. When he was not there, it was as it is today: earnest, serious and subdued. The closest personality to Donaldson’s for sparking up the briefing room has now moved on: David Gregory. Without big energy, the place lacks a robust sense of itself.

 

Television and print both seek to tell the news, but they are not the same animal. Shouting out at presidents, or anyone else, will not help a print reporter. Deft cultivation of sources and a sensitive ear are the tools of great White House scribes. But for television, the getting of the story can be as much the story as what is elicited. On a TV news program, the quarry pushing away the camera is significant. It is just a frustration to a newspaperman.

 

Donaldson knew so well that a question avoided by the subject on television amounts to a question answered. In an interview with The Washington Post, Donaldson said he might have gone for a contract renewal if ABC had a program like CBS’s “60 Minutes.” Clearly, Donaldson misses the years of confrontation.

 

As a White House reporter, Donaldson’s strength was an indifference to what people thought about him. He did not care whether his antics annoyed his colleagues. And he had the good sense to ignore his peers.

 

At the end of Clinton’s visit to China in 1998, there was a full press conference in Hong Kong. That was before former President George W. Bush insisted on having a list of reporters to call on and the questioning became formulaic–something, sadly, President Barack Obama has continued to do.

 

Donaldson failed to find a front-row seat, where he could be heard. Undeterred he found a chair at the back of the room, carried it to the front, set it up with the back facing forward, and sat with his arms resting on the back. Simply, his action said: “I am Sam Donaldson, and I am here to question the president of the United States.”

It was pure chutzpah; and it worked. I doubt the preselecting of questioners by the current White House staff would have survived the Donaldson treatment.

 

He could also be considerate. In Uganda, during Clinton’s extended African trip, a large gathering of schoolchildren, local officials and, of course, the traveling press was assembled in an arena under a broiling African sun. As usual, Clinton was inconsiderately late. Everyone baked, but none more than the video crews in the “pod,” which is the structure in front of the podium from which the president is to speak. They were trapped, unable to leave in case Clinton appeared. The rest of us were given crates of life-saving ice water.

 

It was Donaldson who realized their predicament and struggled through the crowd with ice water for the crews. It was thoughtful and observant.

It was the softer side of Sam Donaldson: correspondent extraordinaire.

 

 

 

 

Changing Direction in the Drug War

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Mexico is being torn apart by drug gangs, often wrongly called cartels. Cartels are created to uphold prices. In the case of Mexico, it is law enforcement and the prohibition of drugs that upholds prices–and makes drug dealing irresistibly profitable.

 

All along the drug chain there is death, from the campesino in the jungle who runs afoul of a drug lord to the overdosed addict.

 

The libertarian solution is legalization. It was endorsed by the late conservative William F. Buckley Jr. and by The Economist magazine. This would work if not one new user were to come into the drug culture. But drugs are aggressively proselytized.

 

The British learned this the hard way. In the early 1960s, they thought they had the hard drug problem licked with a form a legalization that worked. Heroin addicts—and there were few, just 27 in London–were under the care of a doctor and they would line up at pharmacy, waiting to get their prescriptions filled. This was fairly easily managed because heroin is a legal medicine in Britain, used as a pain suppressant for the terminally ill. The British were so proud of how they handled the hard drug problem that they liked to lecture Americans on how it should be done.

 

Then it all fell apart. An addict broke into a storage unit and introduced a wide range of people to heroin. The speed at which heroin addiction spread frightened the authorities. From a little over two dozen addicts, the number in London jumped to over 250. The government was shocked by the dependence and the proselytizing effect. Additionally, immigrants were pouring into Britain and bringing with them a culture of drug use.

 

The flood gates were open. Britain is now overwhelmed with drugs and no solution to the problem is in sight.

 

Here is a modest proposal: legalize marijuana. It is widely available and is used at every stratum of society. The economy of Mendocino County in

California is dependent on it and the Florida Keys are awash in smuggled pot. The Royal Canadian Mounted police told me they believe there are more than 10,000 grow houses around Toronto. They cannot compete with the growers.

 

The horticulture of marijuana is improving–the latest advance is cold light and hydroponic tanks. More the active ingredient, THC, is getting stronger and plant yields are way up.

 

The war on marijuana cannot be won because society does not take the consumption seriously. I have seen it smoked everywhere by journalists, musicians, a publisher and a Wall Street analyst. Sometimes, you can smell it in the park across from the White House.

 

I never fancied it myself. I tried it but I did not get high or develop the munchies. A stronger drug, alcohol, has been my downfall. I would have got in less trouble with pot.

 

Stabilized, taxed and supervised marijuana would be an advance on today’s hodge podge of tolerance and intolerance. Federal law is intolerant and state law can be quite lenient. Some states tolerate personal use but cultivation is frowned on. This prohibition is expensive, ineffective and contributes to the woes in Mexico.

 

Pot has been legal in Amsterdam for decades. The Dutch prefer those seeking a changed state to smoke a joint rather than use a hard drug or get falling-down drunk.

 

We also can do something about hard drugs. Considering the British experience, it has to be done with care. However, there is a road map. The French banned absinthe, a liquor distilled from wormwood, because it caused such damage to drinkers—the artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec comes to mind. But rather than driving the fierce spirit underground, they introduced a substitute, Pernod. No underground bootleg trade resulted.

 

Therefore, we ought to throw science at the two big imported tropical drugs, heroin and cocaine, with a view to neutering them. If you cannot, as you cannot, end the human desire for changed states, make drug use safe—that is non-addictive but enjoyable.

 

So there are two possibilities for winning the war on drugs: unbundle them, and take marijuana out of the mix, and throw science at the dangerous drugs. There are other wars to be fought and won. Winable wars.

The Last Boulevardier

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When the great actor David Garrick died in 1779, Samuel Johnson said of his friend and pupil, “I am disappointed by that stroke of death that has eclipsed the gaiety of nations, and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure.”

When Winston Churchill died in 1965, William Connor, the great columnist for The Daily Mirror, wrote that “a petal has fallen from the English rose.”

Both great evocations of loss come to my mind as I mourn the recent death of my great friend and collaborator Grant Stockdale. He was an adventurer, an artist, a boulevardier, a businessman, a comedian, a musician, a novelist, a sailor and an intense family man. Together we raged around the world on and off for more than 30 years. We partied in Washington, New York, Chicago, Dallas, Miami, London, Paris, Helsinki and Doha.

You did not meet Grant. He burst into your life. They say his line with women, by whom he was adored, was “You haven’t met me yet.”

I first became aware of Grant’s talents when he followed me across Dupont Circle in Washington, making me laugh so hard I had to sit on a bench, which gave him a further chance to press the case he wished to make: I should hire him. I refused to do so.

The next morning, as I walked to my office in the National Press Building, Grant was lying in wait at the circle and we went through the same routine. I had just started an energy newsletter, but Grant was not a reporter. He had worked as salesman and had moved from his native Miami, via Hollywood, to Washington. I do not remember how such a charismatic and entertaining a figure as Grant had settled on Washington: a company town, if ever there was one. Happily, on fourth day, I succumbed.

Grant looked like no one else I have ever met. Enormously attractive, he had a round face and a compelling smile. He was in his mid-twenties and his hair was bright white; it looked as though it had been stripped of its color, but it had always been white.

Grant’s sister, Susan, said that when he was a teenager, it was “cool” to hang out with him. I thought it was pretty cool for 35 years. He was the best company.

And Grant was so funny; funny as a raconteur, funny as a mimic and sometimes wordlessly funny. One day, in the lounge of a club, he started wrestling with his tie as though it were a bewitched, unruly serpent. He mimed for minutes. A crowd gathered. People asked me whether he was a professional. No. Just a funny man.

His way with words was funny, too. Dawn, a friend of mine from South Africa, instantly became “Daybreak.” A Cuba Libre made with Diet Coke was a “thin Cuban,” a Manhattan was a “skyscraper.” Champagne was the “French friend,” Bordeaux was the “French tribute.”

We adored the movie “Becket” and its stars, Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton. We went often to Downey’s Steak House in New York in the hope of watching the two great thespians drink together. They were never there when we were there, so we did the drinking for them. One night, this was going so well for us, reciting Shakespeare and parts of “Becket” to one another and many bystanders, that I turned to Grant and said, “Have you booked the bridal suite at The Plaza?” “Twenty minutes ago,” he replied.

So he had. In the morning I awoke to find a large man, Grant, lying in bed beside me. I protested. Grant opened one eye and gave me a look that might have passed for disdain. “I think you forgot that bridal suites only have one bed,” he said.

In the 1970s, we played hard and worked even harder. We sold newsletter subscriptions, held conferences and tried many things, which were not always successful.

Grant started many businesses of his own. Always the ideas were wonderful, but they required too much capital. One was The Sergeant’s Program, a physical fitness business that he sold; another was Ocean Television, in which remote cameras watched interesting oceans, producing a kind of white noise for the eyes. There was a fashion publication for which he would photograph well-dressed, ordinary women, walking in parks or boarding buses and would list what they were wearing, where they had bought their clothes and how much they had paid for them. His final business venture was the online EnergyPolicyTV, a kind of C-SPAN for energy.

Maybe Grant was too much of a multi-talent to succeed at just one thing.

He worked with President Clinton to make it possible for District of Columbia children to go to college and benefit from in-state tuition rates at universities across the country. The program compensates for the restricted choices for students in Washington. They met at the Sidwell Friends School, where Grant’s children and Chelsea Clinton were students.

Grant shared a gift with Clinton. He would find and comfort those hurting. He was the best friend in adversity; the big shoulders thrown back, the big smile holding fear at bay.

His last e-mail to me, shortly before colon cancer carried him away at 61, said, “Damnit, I miss you.” Aye.

 

Politicians and Small Business—just Lip Service

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It’s right up there with Mom and apple pie in the political lexicon: small business.

Everyone knows that small business creates jobs and it creates them quickly. Ergo, politicians are constantly proclaiming their adoration for small businesses. However, their idea of how to foster new businesses seldom extends beyond tax cuts.

Politicians believe small business carries a heavy burden of tax. By implication, the only impediment to the success of small business is tax. In reality, tax is a minor ache in the small business body. To pay taxes, small businesses must show profit. Most are in profit intermittently. So a bill proposed by newly elected U.S. Rep. Betsy Markey (D-Colo.), which extends the period over which income can be averaged from two to five years, should bring some relief.

In the decades since the end of World War II, the owners of small businesses—from restaurants to light manufacturing—have been pushed to the wall by government action at the local, state and federal levels; all of which have favored the growth not of small business but of big business. At the state level, the big lobby and the small are voiceless. At the federal level, big businesses are on the congressional doorstep with campaign contributions, while small business is an abstraction.

In particular, the kindly treatment of chain retailers in local planning has pummeled and even destroyed small businesses. The arrival of a Home Depot in my semi-rural neighborhood meant summary execution of about 25 hardware stores.

Lower prices and some convenience sucked the customers out of the locally owned hardware stores. But it was a dubious bargain. After the initial enthusiasm, indifferent service and total ignorance of the stock reminded those customers that they had traded away expertise and service for a few cents of initial savings.

The big box stores–some of which are now going out of business–not only crush their small retail competitors, but they also crush their American suppliers by demanding prices that compete with those of cheap-labor competitors in other countries.

Got a great idea for a new type of oven mitt? OK, you will have to try and get your product on the shelves of the big retail stores. There are not enough other outlets. Gird your loins because you are about to go into a bruising negotiation with these retailers. To them, you are no more than a sharecropper. They want low prices and you, the small business manufacturer, are going to deliver them or perish–or, maybe, deliver and perish anyway.

How about the predicament of the travel agencies? Like bookstores, there was something genteel and very appealing about operating a travel agency. It was a lot of work for a small income, but travel agencies provided an independent living for tens of thousands of individual operators, and sometimes families. With deregulation the airlines took against the agents, refusing to pay commissions. This parsimony has not saved the airlines, but it has greatly undermined the travel agents and the service they provided.

It is not just the entrepreneurial class that has suffered from chains. We all have. Just look at their natural habitat: the shopping center. From Miami to Seattle, shopping centers are offensive in their sterility and their replicated chain-store banality. Is this the American Dream? Architecturally challenged, bland, homogenized, remotely owned shopping centers. They are not American Main Street replacements.

A thrill goes through me when I find a strip mall showing its age. There I know I will find small businesses with a fist full of employees booking cruises, repairing televisions and vacuums, and selling things from crystal to to yarn. In old industrial parks, small companies make everything from custom chimney pots to industrial fasteners.

This is where American dreamers have found self-employment and have the sense of possibility and the certain knowledge that they are small enough to fail. It is also where the jobs are, my political friends. Small business is driven as much by romance as profit. It offers the individual a chance. It also hires quickly.

 

Tribulations of a Press Secretary

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Sportsmen spend hours studying tapes of opposing teams or players. Presidential press secretaries, however, tend to prefer learning on the job. It is early, and scant on charity, to attack President Barack Obama’s man Robert Gibbs. But he has had a rocky start.

Gibbs seems to be unsure of his game in the White House press briefing room. The crush of journalists overwhelming the small room during his briefings is not there to lead a cheering session for the president. Nor are they an operatic claque come to embarrass the tenor. They want to find out what is going on and tell their viewers, listeners and readers all about it as fast as their skill and electrons can carry it.

Gibbs must know that the White House press corps takes no prisoners. But in these early days of the Obama administration, he still seems to be in campaign form—even treating reporters as though they are his friends, and by extension sympathetic to the president.

This is an easy mistake to make, and Gibbs is not the first to make it. On the campaign trail, there is a practical necessity for reporters to be cordial, or downright cozy, with the campaign staff.  With the election, any campaign bonhomie evaporates and some remembered slights are exposed.

Gibbs, one hopes, is too smart to believe the right-wing ranters bark that the media is “in the tank” with Obama. In fact, the political press fears plans to continue the arms-length strategy of his presidential campaign in the White House.

Four recent press secretaries set a good example of how to do the job.  They are Marlin Fitzwater, George H.W. Bush’s press secretary; Clinton’s Mike McCurry and Joe Lockhart; and George W. Bush’s Tony Snow and Dana Perino. All did the job with aplomb, defended their employer with skill, and tried hard to answer questions without attacking the questioner.

Poor press secretaries include Clinton’s Dee Dee Myers, and George W. Bush’s Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan. They did not appear to have the access to the president that is vital for the job, and often attacked the questioner by denigrating a question as “hypothetical.” Questioning often requires hypothesis. The press secretary who is not in the president’s confidence and his inner circle will fail with the press. He or she, not knowing the answer, will fall back on the hated evasion: “I refer you to . . .” This does not help someone on deadline.

Gibbs got into this dangerous territory early on. He refused to answer any questions about an unmanned aerial strike on terror suspects inside Pakistan. The question was obvious: Did the president authorize the strike and what were the policy implications going forward? The briefer clearly had not been briefed about something that would come up.

Then there was Gibbs’s problem with lobbyists. Gibbs appeared blindsided when asked why President Obama had signed an order limiting the role of lobbyists day ago and now was nominating Raytheon’s top lobbyist, William Lynn III, to be deputy secretary of defense. Gibbs tried to punt but could not connect with the ball.

No doubt many of Gibbs’s problems had to do with transition difficulties that included an incomplete press list, a total collapse of White House e-mail, and a staff which had never seen the White House press corps after its quarry.

Gibbs is not new to Washington, and has worked on Capitol Hill, but there is no preparation for carrying the message of the president to the world except by learning on the job. The press secretary has to learn that every gesture and gaffe will be dissected globally. Even the variety of his neckties has already drawn attention in, of all places, The Christian Science Monitor.

Requiem for the DC News Bureaus

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Journalism in its modern form owes everything to the spread of general education in the 19th century. In the turbulent decade of the 1840s, governments in the advanced countries added education to their responsibilities. In a generation, millions of people could read and were hungry for reading materials like The New York Tribune, founded and edited by Horace Greeley.

By the 1900s, newspapers were a great business. As there were many newspapers in many cities, only a few had great influence–and those were primarily in the regional centers of New York, Chicago and San Francisco. They included Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, Joseph Medill’s Chicago Tribune and William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner. Newspapers were a means to great wealth, power and prestige. Proprietors saw themselves not only as political king-makers but also as arbiters of fashion, taste and public rectitude.

From the birth of the modern newspaper (greatly sped along by the invention of the Linotype machine at the end of the 19thcentury), newspapers have been a good business. With annual profit exceeding 20 percent, newspapers have been among the most desirable businesses in America. In the 1980s and ’90s, they were bought and sold at enormous multiples. The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times looked invincible, eternal.

Then the Internet struck. Sales began to slide and advertising began to relocate to the Web. Publishers realized too late the folly of giving away their content on it. Journalists had favored this because they believed it would mean more readers, and publishers had thought the publicity would benefit them.

Massive adjustment is not new to the newspaper industry. But never has it been so imperative.

The1960s saw the first wave of newspaper closures, particularly in New York where five papers folded. Then, one by one, afternoon newspapers died across the country. Washington and Baltimore both supported two afternoon newspapers, but they began to fail in the 1970s and ’80s.

Once, evening newspapers had been the jewels, bought by men and women who went to work early and wanted something to read before and after dinner. But television was changing the way people got their news.

The workforce was changing too; the service economy was replacing manufacturing. The new workforce read early and watched television late. This lifted morning newspapers into the stratosphere, particularly when they were a monopoly in their home cities. From The Washington Post to The Los Angeles Times, things were rosy. And for small town monopolies, things were rosier–almost a license to print money.

Mass circulation magazines, such as Life, Look and The Saturday Evening Post, all hung it up. In their place, there appeared specialized magazines about wine, running, computers and sex. Publishing regrouped and entered what will be seen as a golden age.

The common thread was that the few, the publishers, served the many, their readers. As A.J. Liebling said, “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.” But with blogs, the many are now publishing to the many, commented Andrew Glass of The Politico.

Today, newspapers are an anachronism: perishable products, produced in a factory well before consumption and delivered, as often as not, by 10-year-olds. They are not so different today from the one that Greeley edited. So who needs them? Greeley might have said, “Go to the Web, young man.”

The trouble is you and I need newspapers. We need them to tell us what is happening in Darfur and eastern Congo; why Russia is playing games with gas supplies to Europe; why our veterans are not getting quality health care; and, yes, what are our elected leaders are doing.

Recently, the bureau system of coverage of Washington has collapsed. There is no one to watch the congressional delegation from Atlanta, San Diego or 100 other cities that once employed reporters in Washington who kept their representatives in the light of scrutiny. Twilight has fallen for the news tradition and with it the transparency of government.

There is no indication that Web-only publishers will generate the kind of wealth that will enable them to replace the ailing newspapers. Like radio, the Web favors commentary not reporting. Opinion cannot be better than the reporting that triggered it.

The Glorious 20th, so Very American!

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There is an annual festival in Sri Lanka known as the Esala Perahera. It has everything, including a parade of richly-decorated elephants, drummers and dancers, food and clothing stalls, and all sorts of entertainment for children. But above all, it has people–hundreds of thousands of them. The organizers told me it was a million, but people always inflate crowd numbers, don’t they?

 

I wandered, a sole Westerner through the throng, amazed at its security as much as its size. This, I thought, could never happen in America. If we had half as many people, there would be incidents. By incidents I mean stampedes, violent crime, tension between racial groups, and teenagers just behaving badly. Sri Lanka, I thought, even in the midst of its civil war with the Tamil Tigers in the north of the island, is a place of peace; a civil place, where you can be outnumbered by hundreds of thousands and still feel secure, respected and inviolate.

 

Tuesday made a liar of me.

 

The largest-ever gathering of Americans to descended on Washington came for many reasons, but above all to celebrate America. Nominally, the millions (is that an exaggeration?) came to inaugurate Barack Obama: this slight African-American, who has come to Washington from Chicago like some 21st-century Lochinvar, ready to unite the tribes and lead them away from their tribulations.

 

But it was not Sir Walter Scott’s percussive poem that flooded my mind as I was watching Obama’s inauguration, but the lines from the gloriously jingoistic speech that Shakespeare gave his Henry V to deliver on the eve of his great victory against the French at Agincourt: “…And gentlemen in England now- a-bed/Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,/And hold their manhoods cheap…”

 

The outpouring of feeling on the Mall was spiritual; one of those outpourings that occasionally grips human beings collectively and transcends politics, race, religion, philosophy, and the other manifestations of our tribal rigidities. It was an outpouring of something deep in the human heart, that inner need to celebrate as well as to mourn. It was the happy side of the same thing as the sadness that gripped the world when Princess Diana died. Then it was a need to cry, to acknowledge the pain of the human condition. On the Mall it was the need to celebrate, to rise above our lesser selves and feel a oneness with possibility.

 

I was five years old when World War II ended in Europe. But I remember the parade in Cape Town, South Africa. I remember waving my little Union Jack (it got torn), my father looking so handsome in his Royal South African Navy uniform, and the mood. Oh, the mood. Blacks and whites, English and Afrikaners put aside all of their bitter history to hug, kiss and dance. They were jubilant.

 

All these years later, there was something of that feeling in Washington; not only because many had repudiated the excesses of George W. Bush, but also because collectively we had put aside the racism of our history for something very, very American: a new beginning.

 

The celebrants on the Mall knew they would look good in the eyes of the world and that made them feel even better. Who doesn’t want to be well thought of, even in “Old Europe”?

 

It was only one day, but what a grand American day. Bigger than a gigantic gathering in Sri Lanka, not quite as wonderful as the end of war, but a vaulting day for the spirit. American exceptionalism is a concept used more for nefarious purposes than honored when it is at hand. It was at hand on Tuesday.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Looking Legacies: Tips for Bush

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President Bush, one gathers from his exit ruminations, believes history will treat him more kindly than today’s polls. But history is tricky. Although it has tended to give presidents the benefit of the doubt–once aspersions are cast, they can stick and grow. Dwight Eisenhower, has been reevaluated upward, as has Harry Truman. But there has been no mercy for James Buchanan, and not much for Warren Harding. And Jimmy Carter is in historical limbo.

 

When we leave these shores, history gets vicious. In French history, untold numbers of monarchs have been pilloried by historians as decadent, feckless and idle. Their queens, too. It is unlikely that Marie Antoinette actually said, “Let them eat cake.” But that libel has stuck to her down through time.

 

In English history things are just as bad, or worse, but the targeting has been more precise. Although appeasement was popular when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain capitulated to Adolf Hitler, he has been vilified ever since. English monarchs have had to deal with English writers. They dubbed Mary I “Bloody Mary” and contrasted her unfavorably with her half sister, Elizabeth I, an all-round favorite.

 

If you came to the attention of Shakespeare, you were pretty well done for. Richard III, is a villain in history, despite scholars’ attempts to rescue him and a relentless disavowal of the popular concept of his villainy in the north of England, where he is still a local hero.

 

Then there is the linkage between the most denigrated English monarch, John, and our own George W. Bush. Not only did he merit a fairly obscure Shakespearian play, but his name was so blackened by his barons that no other English monarch has ever been named John.

 

Actually John was not all bad, but he was definitely luckless. His father, Henry II (whom we know from the play “Lion in Winter”) disliked him so much that he inherited no land and was known derisively as “John the Lackland.” He was totally overshadowed by his elder brother, Richard the Lionheart.

 

But when Richard headed to the Middle East in the Third Crusade, he put John in charge of things in England and the chunks of France controlled by the English crown. John gets no credit, but apparently he was an able administrator and an undistinguished soldier. He also had the unedifying habit of flying into towering rages.

 

The seeds of John’s later humiliation at Runnymede in the Thames River were sown in France, after Richard was killed and the crown passed to John. As commander in chief, John systematically lost English lands to the French. And he picked up a new sobriquet “John Soft Sword.”

With a diminished empire, John increased taxes on his subjects and the barons in particular. Apparently, history does not take kindly to those who increase taxes. But there is no evidence that it rewards those who cut them.

 

Anyway, the barons had had enough of John and forced him to sign the Magna Carta (the Great Charter) in 1215, which embodied habeas corpus (produce the body) to control reprisals by the king. It became the central pillar of English Common Law and its U.S. derivative. It also became a cornerstone for human rights legislation elsewhere and remained such, until George W. Bush and his administration excluded enemy combatants from its provisions.

 

The president might be encouraged to know that there was an attempt by historians to reposition John more favorably in the scheme of things seven centuries later. However, a children’s verse by A.A. Milne in the 1920s which said, “King John was not a good man–/He had his little ways,” confirmed the old view.

 

Winston Churchill, referencing habeas corpus, summarized the legacy of John’s reign: “When the long tally is added, it will be seen that the British nation and the English-speaking world owe far more to the vices of John than to the labors of virtuous sovereigns.”

 

Presumably, history will record that Bush admired Churchill but lacked his enthusiasm for John’s legacy: the Magna Carta.

 

 

The Roar of the Tourists, the Smell of the Waffles

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BRUSSELS, Belgium–“L’Angleterre est une nation de boutiquiers,” Napoleon Bonaparte was supposed to have said disparagingly of the preparedness of England to fight France. If the emperor were alive today, perhaps he would dismiss the pre-Christmas collapse of the government by saying that Belgium is a nation of waffle merchants.”Belgique est une nation de marchands de gaufres.”

“Oh, yes. They sell a lot of waffles here. And they waffle a lot,” a Pakistani immigrant, who owns a convenience store near the city’s Grand Place, said of Belgian politicians.

He said he much preferred the political waffling in Washington, where he drove a taxi for 12 years, to that of Brussels. “In Washington, it is Democrats and Republicans. So simple. Here, the political situation is so complicated.”

On Dec. 30, King Albert named Flemish Christian Democrat Herman Van Rompuy as prime minister to head a revived five-party coalition in a nation facing a bank crisis, as well as impending recession and a continuing ethnic rift. Two days later, Van Rompuy received the backing of parliament in a vote of confidence.

Van Rompuy, replaces his party colleague Yves Leterme, who resigned amid allegations of political meddling in the bailout of Fortis bank.

“It’s the same coalition with the same five parties,” Pascal Delwit, president of the Center for Political Studies at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, told Reuters. “But Van Rompuy is a little bit more subtle than Yves Leterme.” Belgium’s coalition comprises the Flemish Christian Democrat Party, Flemish Liberal Party, Francophone Liberal Party, Francophone Christian Democrats and Francophone Socialist Party.

Delwit said Van Rompuy could be more successful in the job than Leterme because he was more attuned to the linguistic and political divisions between the poorer, French-speaking south and the richer, Flemish, Dutch-speaking north.

“I think he knows better the French-speaking people, the French-speaking politicians, and in this way, he is more engaged in compromise. I think perhaps he will do better,” Delwit said.

Van Rompuy will need all his old-pol skills of compromise to keep this new government-the third in 12 months–together beyond regional elections due later this year. That is when the acrimonious divisions between Belgium’s Flemish and the French-speaking Walloons will come to the fore, according to the BBC’s Olana Lungescu in Brussels.

Van Rompuy had long resisted taking the premiership, but is seen as a steady pair of hands, after successfully cracking down on public debt as budget minister in the 1990s, Lungescu said. He has promised to start out by taking over his predecessor’s plan to battle the economic crisis.

“Nothing is simple in our country, but what is important is that we have a government to lead with seriousness, stability and serenity,” Elio di Rupo, leader of the Francophone Socialist Party, told Reuters.

Choc-Troops

“Belgium’s economic and political mood is as dark as its chocolate.” The headline topped the Jan. 5 “European Diary” by Irish Times writer Jamie Smyth.

Over the holidays, British tourists in Brussels bought chocolates-dark, milk and white–as though they were on a campaign to lift the nation’s gloomy mood. Piece of cake for the Brits, who eat the most chocolate per capita (22 lbs a year) of anyone in the world, according to Datamonitor.

As soon as the high-speed Eurostar trains from London arrived in Brussels, the Brits marched to the chocolate shops all over the city. From the artisanal (Pierre Marcolini and Frederic Blondeel) to the ancien regime (Corne de la Toison d’Or, Mary, Neuhaus and Wittamer) to the nouveau arrivee (Chinese chocolatiers who sell lower-quality boxed chocolates piled haphazardly on counters), the British choc-troops demonstrated an impressive use of their credit power and came away with the spoils. Arms laden with bespoke and assorted ballotin boxes filled with pralines (the Belgian name for filled chocolates), their victory was sweet.

Chalet City

At Christmastime, the area between the Bourse (stock exchange) and the Place St. Catherine becomes a chalet city. Hundreds of small wooden chalets surround the great, gray Bourse building, guarded by two stone lions, sprawl across the broad Avenue Anspach and fill Place St. Catherine, the site of the old fish market.

Vendors come from all over Europe, and even North and South America, to sell their wares in the festive chalets, from French foie gras and olive oil soap to Flemish gluhwein (mulled wine) and gumdrops to Argentine alfajores (caramel sandwich cookies) and Andean chullos (knitted caps with flaps and long ties).

No question, these folk-patterned caps were the hit of the 2008 Christmas market. At the Place St. Catherine, you saw them on the heads of skaters whizzing around the ice rink, on parents watching their children ride the fantastic merry-go-rounds, on red-cheeked babies in prams, on lovers sharing a milk chocolate-filled crepe geante, on groups of teenagers waiting to ride the big Ferris wheel.

Curiously, you saw the caps pulled tightly over the headscarves on the heads of teenage Muslim girls. I watched three teens trying them on at one of the chalets. After some discussion about whether they should remove their headscarves before trying on the caps, one unruly-haired teen asserted in French: “I think it would be correct, and chic, to wear the hat over the hijab.”

And lo, at a Christmas market chalet, an Islamic fashion trend was born in Brussels.

Photos: Dorcas Shurberg

Photo Credit: Dorcas Shurberg

Restaurant Suggestions

Here are a few restaurants to try in Brussels:

Aux Armes de Bruxelles (classic Belgian dishes like mussels and fries; and waterzooi, chicken or fish in a creamy soup with vegetables), near the Grand Place.

Taverne du Passage (classic Belgian dishes), in the Galerie de la Reine near the Grand Place.

L’Entree des Artistes (classic Belgian, with a few hearty Italian dishes, like a single sheet of homemade cannelloni, filled with spinach and ricotta, topped with a tomato and smoked salmon cream sauce) in the Grand Sablon.

La Belle Maraichere (seafood) in the Place St. Catherine.

How Russia Coerces Europe

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No building in Moscow so much says “Soviet Union” as the headquarters of Gazprom, the Russian gas monopoly. It is more foreboding than the Lubyanka, the former headquarters and torture emporium of the KGB. The romantic charm of the czarist era, epitomized by the Kremlin itself, is wholly absent. Like the state monopoly itself, the structure is gigantic, threatening and very hard to get into.

It is set back from the road, and there are layers of security a visitor has to negotiate to see an official. It is easier to get into the Kremlin, No. 10 Downing Street or the White House than it is to get into Gazprom HQ. I know because I have gotten into all of them. No wonder old KGB hand Vladimir Putin loves the gas company.

As president, and now as prime minister, Putin grew Gazprom and its oil counterpart, Rosneft, not to be normal companies but agents of political implementation. Between them, they were tasked to gobble up the pieces of Yukos when its luckless founder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was thrown in jail.

But even more than Rosneft, it is Gazprom that has emerged as the right hand of Russian policy in Europe.

At the moment, in the dead of winter, it is Gazprom that has cut off supplies of gas to more than 12 European countries. Ostensibly, the argument is over the price paid for gas by Ukraine, the transshipper of gas to all of Europe. But the Russian political agenda is not concealed. Putin, and the siloviki (the men of power around Putin and President Dimitry Medvedev) are angered by the defiance of former members of the Soviet Union, especially Ukraine. Despite its large Russian-speaking minority (about 40 percent) it has talked of joining NATO and the European Union–a red rag to Russia. Russia is angry at the West, in general, for trying to route new pipelines from Central Asia through Georgia, avoiding Russia. It is also mad at the West for recognizing Kosovo, and has responded by buying the Serbian gas fields.

Russian gas, which now makes up 30 percent of Europe’s need, does not look such a good idea–particularly to Germany, where pressure from the Green party led to the retreat from nuclear and the push for gas turbines. Before Germany turned its back on nuclear, it was a leader in the development of promising pebble bed technology. Now, sadly, Germany depends on Russia for nearly 40 percent of its gas supplies.

The gas crisis is worst in countries like Bulgaria, where there is very little gas storage and demand is in real time. But it is also affecting Italy and Southern Europe. Having closed their coal-fired power plants and shelved their nuclear plans, those countries now feel the full pain of the Russian bear’s embrace: gas droughts and electric shortages are leaving their populations cold and hungry in the dark.

So dependent has Europe become on Russian energy that every step to ameliorate the situation is a possible irritant to Moscow. If the pipelines bypass Russia, or the hub in Ukraine, that is a provocation. If new gas comes by ship from North Africa, that is an excuse for Russia to try and price its pipeline gas at the higher price of liquefied natural gas.

Belatedly, Britain and Finland commissioned new nuclear power plants. But Germany, whose former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder took a lucrative job with Gazprom, has chosen to increase its energy dependence on Russia.

Most observers believe that the current crisis will not last. Most likely, it will conclude with a jump in the price of gas, and some satisfaction in the Kremlin that Europe has been taught a lesson. But that lesson may have to be repeated over issues far from energy–such as the expansion of NATO and the European Union.

While the Russians appear to take some satisfaction in upsetting Western Europe, it is their Soviet-era satellites that most annoy them. Why, they wonder, can’t all of Eastern Europe remain suitably deferential, like Belarus and Armenia? Both toady to Moscow.

For the rest of Europe, the message is clear: build more gas storage, arrange more imports and diversify away from gas turbines.

For our part, we can help our friends and allies by thinking through our own actions, from the European missile shield to the willy-nilly expansion of NATO. This is a European problem. But if Europe has to make geopolitical compromises with Russia, it becomes problem for the Western alliance. That is us.