Frank’s Case Book

If you happen to run into the journalist Ron Suskind, be nice to him. He has had a rough time recently as the lead thesis of two of his most prominent and controversial projects have proven conspicuously false soon after the publication.

In The Price of Loyalty, Suskind teamed with the President George W. Bush’s controversial first Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill. Anti-Bush partisans wanted desperately to believe that decision to attack Iraq was made early in the Bush Administration, well before 9/11. Proof of such would lend credence to the belief that the attacks on 9/11 were merely a convenient excuse to go into Iraq.

Suskind and O’Neill believed that O’Neill had seen a smoking gun. Suskind quoted Paul O’Neill has having seen a Pentagon document listing oil contractors for a post-War Iraq. Suskind should have filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the documents like the public interest group Judicial Watch did. If he had, he would have realized that the documents were not what he hoped and believed they were. This particular charge had to wait to be independently debunked and even Paul O’Neill himself backed away from charge. Of course, the thesis persists long after to evidence for it was withered under the harsh sun of open scrutiny.

Then in October 2004, Suskind wrote an investigative piece, “Without a Doubt,” that appeared in the New York Times Magazine. The timing was not uncorrelated with then pending election. The piece led off with a provocative sentence from Republican Bruce Bartlett that, “…if Bush wins, there will be civil war in the Republican Party starting on November 3.” November 2 rolled around, Bush won re-election bringing with him larger majorities in both the House and Senate, the first time any president had done so since 1936, with nary a Fort Sumter in sight.

Suskind was using a technique as old as political reporting. Find a disgruntled ex-administration official whose ego is a little bruised, and you will likely have someone who is anxious to explain how a foolish administration refused to listed to his brilliant ideas and analyses.

In “Without a Doubt,” Suskind’s thesis is that Bush is absolutely certain in his policies, brokers no dissent, and is constrained by his “preternatural faith-induced certainty in uncertain times.” According to Suskind, “The president has demanded unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his kindred in the Republican Party.” Suskind views strong religious faith as both a metaphor and reason for Bush’s supposed closed-mind and unflinching approach to governance.

Suskind perpetuates the misunderstanding that the Founding Fathers were “…adamant about erecting a wall between organized religion and political authority.” Of course, Suskind must know the real words of the First Amendment are, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” Jefferson referred to a wall of separation in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut, which can hardly claims the force of law, the consensus of the Founding Fathers, or even consistency with Jefferson in other contexts. None of the Founders wanted a state-sponsored religion, but neither did they expect their leaders to exercise judgment without the sustenance of their faith or that religion be removed from the public square. Indeed, what ever “wall” there was did not prevent the Founders from conducting voluntary services in off hours at the Capitol or from referencing the “Creator” in the Declaration of Independence. Suskind drive-by assertion on the Founding Fathers’ view of the appropriate relationship between church and state is embarrassingly puerile.

Less interesting than what Suskind’s article claims to say about George Bush or about the Founders, is what it says about post-modern notions of faith, notions probably shared by many of Suskind’s New York Times readers. To those of faith, Suskind’s article makes no sense. The arrogant intransigence Suskind assigns to Bush is not in the nature of faith, but rather the antithesis of it. However, to the irremediably secular, faith is a blind, uncritical acceptance by people too intellectually and emotionally immature to think critically. Those who are susceptible to religious faith are probably just as uncritical and credulous in other areas as well.

It is presumptuous to speak of anyone else’s faith, but it a service to people with Suskind’s world view to broaden their notions of faith. I am not privileged to peek into Bush’s personal life, but if Bush’s faith is anything like the faith of some of other American presidents, it is a faith that sustains in difficult times. It is a faith that sustains not because things will not go wrong, but because of a conviction that these problems too are part of a grander plan. It is not a faith that stops self-doubt, but allows one to proceed in the face of personal uncertainty. It is not faith that refuses to question. It is faith that requires constant self examination. It is not a faith that presumes that God acts solely through us, but recognizes that we are all imperfect agents.

Perhaps it is best to illustrate a mature faith, with an example from a President that some have foolishly and mistakenly regarded has having little faith: Abraham Lincoln. In the middle of the nineteenth century, politicians often spoke in religious terms, using religious imagery. Hence, it is difficult to separate convenient pious platitudes used for effect, and genuine belief. Abraham Lincoln, fortunately, left a paper trail.

According to Ronald White Jr.’s new book The Eloquent President, Lincoln was in the habit of writing notes to himself on scraps of paper and on the backs of envelopes and then placing these scribblings for safe keeping in his hat. Later Lincoln would ponder these words and ideas, rearrange the notes in different order, as a way to consider, develop, and organize his thoughts. Years after Lincoln’s presidency, meditative notes were found that Lincoln wrote to himself and not for the public. These notes provide key evidence as to the place of faith in Lincoln’s thinking. Lincoln begins his reflection:

“The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one certainly must be wrong. God cannot be for, and against the same thing at the same time.”

Nonetheless, humans must act. Lincoln writes that though God’s purpose can certainly differ from those of either party, “…human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose.” In Lincoln’s faith and I suspect George Bush’s as well, and as expressed in Lincoln Second Inaugural address, a person must proceed, “…with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right…”

What frustrates Bush’s critics is his stead fastness rather than intransigence. They fail to see or acknowledge change and growth which would undermine their thesis of rigidity. When the Civil War began, Lincoln’s goal was the preservation of the Union and issue of slavery was a secondary issue. In 1861, Lincoln wrote,

“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”

Later Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation because he came to understand that saving the Union required the liberation of slaves.

When the War with Iraq began, Bush’s purpose was to secure Americans, to the extent possible, against terror. One way to do this was to remove the threat of weapons of mass destruction from Iraq. Bush’s views have grown and matured. He now appreciates that terrorism is rooted in the lack of freedom and democracy. Freedom and democratic societies are not fertile grounds for terrorists.

The only unreasonable certainty in Suskind’s “Without a Doubt,” is Suskind’s credulity in believing and repeating everything negative he has ever heard about Bush and the small-minded view of faith underpinning his article.

There is much to be learned from and admired about those who have effectively used nonviolent resistance to produce political and social change. Mahatma Gandhi used such resistance to hasten Britain’s departure from India and was responsible for the development of much of the intellectual frame work of and practical techniques for nonviolent resistance. Gandhi’s experience informed the Rev. Martin Luther King’s nonviolent approach to civil rights for black Americans in the United States. Nations too can apply nonviolent pressure with success. Economic and political sanctions against South Africa played a role in the eventual collapse of apartheid. It is certainly not a coincidence that nonviolent techniques, calling upon the conscience of an oppressor, works when some conscience remains and when the political structures are democratic.

As honorable and heroic as nonviolent resistance can be, it is unlikely it could have been successfully applied to Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, or some other totalitarian states. First, in the leadership of such states there is little or no residual conscience to call upon. Second, the media are controlled and there is little opportunity to touch the hearts of the masses, and even if hearts are touched there are no democratic structures to express the will of the people. Nonetheless, brave protests by the people certainly help hasten the fall of communism in Poland and the recent efforts to insure fair elections in the Ukraine.

Nonviolent resistance can also be employed cynically and frivolously. In the prelude to the Iraq War, there were a number of people who preened in front of the press, humbly identified themselves as “Truth Justice Peace Human Shield Action,” and setoff to Baghdad to act as human shields to protect Iraqis from the Americans and the British. As overt hostilities approached most of these erstwhile shields reconsidered their options, decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and scurried back to their home countries. Others realized they had made a mistake giving any comfort to Saddam’s regime. In truth, American and British weapons were targeted at military targets and humans shields in front of water plants or hospitals would have little to fear from Coalition forces. The fact that some would offer to be human shields is an implicit acknowledgement that Coalition forces would be reticent about striking civilian targets.

When Gandhi used nonviolent resistance against the British he declared that “Democracy, disciplined and enlightened, is the finest thing in the world.” By contrast, terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi fumed that, “We have declared a bitter war against democracy and all those who seek to enact it.” It is unlikely that such terrorists would have been very much moved by Gandhi’s techniques or likely to employ them. Those former human shields must have implicitly arrived at the same conclusion, because there are no human shields protecting schools or hospitals in Iraq now.

Where were those brave human shields on January 30, 2005 when Iraqis were going to the polls? Before the war, the spokesman for these heroes proclaimed, “Our strategy is potentially dangerous but that is the risk we must take in standing beside our brothers and sisters in Iraq.” Somehow now, standing with their Iraqis brothers and sisters in polling lines with the real possibility that someone might ignite a car bomb in the vicinity proved a little too risky. It was Iraqi soldiers and policemen that stood by Iraqi citizens as they voted, not self-important Lefties. It was American soldiers and Marines who helped Iraq stand up against the moral equivalent of the Klu Klux Klan.

During the Iraqi elections there was at least one person who genuinely qualifies as a human shield, 29-year-old Abdul Amir al-Shuwayli. Shuwayli was an Iraqi policeman guarding a polling place in Baghdad when he recognized a suicide bomber striding towards the polls. According to USA Today:

“Shuwayli threw his arms around the bomber and drove him backward about 50 feet into an intersection. The rush seemed to catch the suicide attacker by surprise. The bomber had a hand grenade but failed to throw it. A second or two passed before he detonated an explosive belt… The blast shredded Shuwayli, whose body took the brunt of the explosion. It also tore the bomber apart, leaving only his face intact.”

After the incident, as if in protest against the suicide bomber, more and more people came out to vote at the polling place Shuwayli protected. Shuwayli is now honored in the area as a martyr. Shuwayli’s sacrifice has not received quite the press coverage or attention as those pre-war human shields did. However, Shuwayli did far more for Iraqis than many others who are more adept at garnering attention than making accurate moral judgments.

The brave Iraqis queued in long lines, undeterred by threats of violence, to cast their ballots must have believed in the words of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” By becoming the first Arab state in the region to have democratic elections, the Iraqis may indeed be beginning, not only their local world, but their entire region over again.

In one important sense, the argument about Iraq is definitely over. After the immediate euphoria of liberation from the Saddam regime, the extent to which the Iraqi people wanted to move toward a democratic society or would side with the “insurgents” and lapse back into tyranny was an open question. It is no longer. Iraqis have made clear that they want to control their government, rather than be controlled by it. There are many steps from tyranny to a fully functional democracy and the Iraqis may or may not make it, but it is now obvious they aspire to democracy. The insurgents do not represent the Iraqis and no longer even pretend to be a popular movement. They openly intend to acquire and maintain power at the point of a gun.

There are certain crucial or historic turning points that we emotionally recognize by the fact that the hairs on the back our necks prick upward: a marriage, the birth of a child, watching ecstatic Germans chipping away and toppling the Berlin wall. The Iraqi election passed this “back of the neck test.” The joyous dancing, the broad smiles on people dressed up out of respect for the importance for the election, and two fingers, one dyed with purple ink, held up in a defiant victory sign all bespoke an authentic embrace of democracy.

What is disheartening is how people here on the Left can not bring themselves to rejoice fully in the election even if they have legitimate and honest questions about American Iraqi policy. You do not have to be a Bush supporter to recognize that something very good happened this on January 30, 2005 in Iraq. The problem is not only people like Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio who several days before the election cynically predicted it would be a “farce” [1]. Kucinich long ago relinquished the right to be considered a serious or thoughtful critic. It is pundits like E. J. Dionne, Richard Cohen, or John Nichols who acknowledge the importance of the elections, but who feel compelled to nitpick and to caution incessantly about the future, who are putting an unnecessary damper on elation over the Iraqi election. Sure there will be many more problems ahead, but those can wait a while.

This petulance is analogous to watching a child struggle to take their first step. We rejoice and remember that first step, even though it is immediately followed by more falls then steps. Yet the child grows and is soon on the soccer field not only running, but juggling a ball with its feet. The future will come without our hastening it and now is a time for celebration unspoiled by ill-tempered nay-sayers and obstructionists. Remaking the world represents a long journey and the Iraqis have taken their first bold step.

The power of oral rhetoric may lie in part upon the originality of formulation, carefully crafted phrases employing elements of alliteration and repetition tied together with the proper meter and timing. George W. Bush’s Second Inaugural Address was a competently delivered speech, but its real resonance lies not with its beautiful poetry of phrase but in the fact that its ideas are not original. The speech’s power, for those not gagging with political resentment, lies in the fact that its ideas grow organically out of our shared history and political culture. The speech is a masterful rephrasing and renewal of ideas over 200 hundred years old. Consider specific examples how Bush’s speech calls upon our shared political literature and speeches.

* Bush specifically evokes that nation’s founding documents when he asserts, “From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth.” This is a restatement of Jefferson’s phraseology in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

* The country is politically divided and Bush reached out in the speech to heal these divisions: “We have known divisions, which must be healed to move forward in great purposes — and I will strive in good faith to heal them.” This genuine call for reconciliation matches the intention but not quite the poetry of Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address: “Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”
* The central theme of Bush’s speech is the ascent of humanity towards the goal of freedom. Bush asserts that, “We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom.” This is no less confident than the pledge in John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural that, “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

* Bush modestly evokes hope that these efforts are consistent with the will of God, but modestly acknowledges no special or unique knowledge of that will. Bush’s admonition that, “God moves and chooses as He wills.” parallels the warning in Lincolns Second Inaugural Address that “the Almighty has His own purposes.”

Bush’s speech is essentially an affirmation that America’s central commitment is to freedom and liberty and the recognition that the US is most secure when freedom and liberty flourish throughout the world. Bush renews the American commitment to support the expansion of freedom, to the extent possible. It represents the merging of realism and idealism: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”

Specifically, Bush pledges that the US will support and aid in the goal, but ultimately the acceptance of freedom must be a choice made by each people: “America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal, instead, is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way.”

The response to the Inaugural Address has been illuminating. The Europeans were generally cool, perhaps a little apprehensive as to what a commitment to freedom really means. Despite the fact that the entire speech explained the moral and historical underpinning for a US foreign policy that nurtures freedom, the News Telegraph telegraphed that it really did not understand the speech when its headline shouted “Defiant Bush Doesn’t Mention the War.” [1]

Most surprising was the reaction of Peggy Noonan, former speech writer for President Ronald Reagan. She generally has a well-tuned ear for rhetoric, but was upset with the speech complaining that it was a “rather heavenish” and “God-drenched speech.” Noonan forgets, and will surely be reminded by her Conservative friends, that the country’s founding and ideals are deeply routed in a spiritually-informed view of the nature of man. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address unselfconsciously invokes God at least 13 times, where Bush made a comparatively modest six references. The speech may seem “God-drenched” to a modern sensibility that is far too “God-dry.”

If you believe that the nature of man is transcendent, the belief has consequences. One of these consequences is a commitment to freedom as an inherent right. After all we cannot, in the words of Lincoln, call forth the “better angels” of our nature if there are no angels in our nature.

For those who complain that Bush is too ambitious, they are also implicitly uncomfortable that the country’s temperament is too hopeful and imbued with too much confidence. Their complaint is more with our collective history than with Bush in particular. It is clear that Bush is not inclined to “small-ball.” His Second Inaugural Address suggests that he is “swinging for the fences.” It is sometimes difficult for those who are incredibly small to acknowledge that we currently enjoy a president who is large and consequential.

[1] If one reads European papers one is likely to begin to believe that “Defiant” is Bush’s first name.

It has been a hard time for those of us who enjoy popularized histories and historical biographies.  Doris Kearns Goodwin, perhaps best known for Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream and No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Stephen Ambrose author of, among many other volumes, Undaunted Courage and Citizen Soldiers were both caught in plagiarizing material.  Most likely these errors were the consequence of haste and sloppiness, rather than malice.  Much worst was the apparently deliberate historical fraud perpetrated by Michael Bellesiles who ended up resigning from Emory University for his misdeeds.  Bellesiles wrote Arming America which won Columbia University’s Bancroft’s Prize for History.  Columbia University’s Trustees later voted to rescind the prize after Bellesiles’s scholarly crime became clear.  On the basis of irreproducible evidence, Bellesiles argued that in colonial America ownership was far less ubiquitous as previously supposed. It was not lost on the cultural elites that such a result could effect our perceptions of the original understanding of the Second Amendment’s guarantee of the “right of the people to keep and bear arms.”  The original credulity of the Bancroft Committee and academia as a whole towards Bellesiles’s book is a testament to its rhetorical convenience to those for whom the Second Amendment is an inconvenient nuisance.

In between the careless errors of Kearns and Ambrose and the malicious ones of Bellesiles falls the deceitfulness of Joseph Ellis.  Ellis was caught by the Boston Globe in a series of self-aggrandizing lies told to his friends, colleagues, and students.  Ellis really spent his military career lecturing at West Point, but he told others not only that he was in Vietnam, but that he was a platoon leader in the storied 101st Airborne Division.  Ellis also claimed that he served on the staff of General William Westmoreland, the American Commander in Vietnam, giving him extraordinary credibility when teaching a course on that era at Mount Holyoke College.  Again, people were credulous about Ellis’s Vietnam claims because Ellis was anti-war in outlook.  The anti-war sentiments of a Vietnam War hero had greater claim to moral authority. For his sins, Ellis was suspended without pay for one year from his endowed chair at Mount Holyoke

And yet, Ellis is a wonderfully gifted writer, who won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his book the Founding Brothers: The American Revolutionary Generation.  There is a legitimate argument that Ellis is one of the most knowledgeable historians of the Revolutionary War Era. Despite these credentials and gifts, it is difficult to read Ellis’s new book, His Excellency, about George Washington, without nagging doubts caused by Ellis’s personal mendacity.  Fortunately, Ellis used the opportunity of this new book to return to historical scholarship.

His Excellency, is short (less than 300 pages) and does not pretend to be a comprehensive documentation of the events of Washington’s life and career.  Rather, Ellis tries to see beyond the marble bust vision we all have of and attempts to understand the motivations and outlook of George Washington the person.  Ellis does his readers a favor and resists the modern temptation to devote much time to Washington’s early infatuation with Sally Fairfax.  Instead, Ellis endeavors to understand the apparent contradiction in Washington’s personality.  How does one resolve the dilemma of a Washington having sufficient ambition to acquire a sizable estate at Mount Vernon, to successfully lead a rag-tag army against the most powerful empire of the time, and to become president of a fledging nation; while at the same time resisting the inevitable temptation to become an American Napoleon?

Ellis makes the case that Washington’s ambitions were indeed an important and even a transcendent motivation.  However, Washington’s unique quality was his realization that the approbation of history, rather than the more fleeting admiration of contemporaries, was the higher ambition.  There were at least four important instances when Washington eschewed acquisition of personal power and responded to the greater ambition of the respect of posterity.

1. The successful effort by Washington at Newburgh to thwart a cabal of senior officers from leading the Continental Army to Philadelphia to compel the Continental Congress to pay the troops established the principle of civilian control over the military.
2. Washington retired to Mount Vernon after his military victory over the British in the War of Independence and avoided the rise of an American Napoleon at the cost of democratic rule.
3. The fact that Washington set a precedent by only serving two terms re-enforced popular sovereignty.  This precedent lasted until this century, broken by the four terms of Franklin Roosevelt.  This precedent is now formalized in the Twenty-Second Amendement to the Constitution.
4. In Washington’s will, he distributed his wealth evenly among his heirs.  This guaranteed the dissipation of accumulated wealth and prevented the rise of a Washington family dynasty.  Washington’s legacy was political and institutional not familial.

Washington did not so much resist the temptations of power, but embraced the greater ambition of fathering a nation, a republic.

Ellis described Washington as the “rarest of men: a supremely realistic visionary, a prudent prophet… His genius was his judgment.”  It was most certainly not Ellis’s intention, given his personal Left-ward political leanings, but Ellis evokes a direct, but implicit comparison with the most recent George W. — George W. Bush.  Of course, the analogy like all analogies is imperfect, yet Ellis nonetheless finds the source of Washington’s abilities in his single-minded clarity.  Ellis was describing Washington, but he could just as well have been writing of Bush, when he observed that his unfailing judgment “did not emanate from books or from formal education.”  Rather, “Washington’s powers of judgment derived in part from the fact that his mind was uncluttered with sophisticated preconceptions.”  It is not so much that Washington, in Ellis estimation, or Bush now, is an anti-intellectual know-nothing; but rather they both recognize that clarity and firmness is many times more important than nuance.  For the wise, details are important in developing and implementing decisions, but they can be debilitating when they contribute to confusion rather than clarity or provide excuse for desultory inaction.  Read His Excellency, and understand both George W’s.