Quotulatiousness

January 24, 2025

The end of “affirmative action” in US government hiring

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Free Press, Coleman Hughes outlines how the US federal government got into the formal habit of hiring and promoting staff based on things other than ability and merit during the Nixon administration:

Trump’s Executive Order 14171 is titled Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity. It describes how vast swaths of society, including the “Federal Government, major corporations, financial institutions, the medical industry, large commercial airlines, law enforcement agencies, and institutions of higher education have adopted and actively use dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI)”.

In response, Trump has ordered the executive branch and its agencies “to terminate all discriminatory and illegal preferences, mandates, policies, programs, activities, guidance, regulations, enforcement actions, consent orders, and requirements”.

That is a lot of preferences and mandates. Trump’s executive order accurately describes the enormousness of the DEI bureaucracy that has arisen in government and private industry to infuse race in hiring, promotion, and training. Take, for example, the virtue-signaling announcements made by big corporations in recent years — such as CBS’s promise that the writers of its television shows would meet a quota of being 40 percent non-white.

And so, we will now see what federal enforcement of a color-blind society looks like. We’ll certainly see how many federal employees were assigned to monitor and enforce DEI — Trump has just demanded they all be laid off.

The most controversial part of this executive order is that it repeals the storied, 60-year-old Executive Order 11246, signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Johnson’s original order mandated that government contractors take “affirmative action” to ensure that employees are hired “without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin”.

The phrase affirmative action, however, has come to have a profoundly different meaning for us than it did during the 1960s civil rights era. Back then, it simply meant that companies had to make an active effort to stop discriminating against blacks, since antiblack discrimination was, in many places, the norm. Only later did the phrase come to be associated with the requirement to actively discriminate in favor of blacks and other minorities.

One of the great ironies of affirmative action is that it was not a Democrat but a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who did more than anyone to enshrine reverse racism at the federal level by establishing racial quotas. According to the Richard Nixon Foundation, “The Nixon administration ended discrimination in companies and labor unions that received federal contracts, and set guidelines and goals for affirmative action hiring for African Americans”. It was called the “Philadelphia Plan” — the city of its origin.

For the first time in American history, private companies had to meet strict numerical targets in order to do business with the federal government. Philadelphia iron trades had to be at least 22 percent non-white by 1973; plumbing trades had to be at least 20 percent non-white by the same year; electrical trades had to be 19 percent non-white, and so forth.

In the intervening decades, this racial spoils system has not only caused grief for countless members of the unfavored races — it has also created incentives for business owners to commit racial fraud, or else to legally restructure so as to be technically “minority-owned”. As far back as 1992, The New York Times reported that such fraud was “a problem everywhere” — for instance, with companies falsely claiming to be 51 percent minority-owned in order to secure government contracts. In a more recent case, a Seattle man sued both the state and federal government, claiming to run a minority-owned business on account of being 4 percent African.

November 30, 2024

QotD: Unrealized promises of a “Great Society”

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Black unemployment, which had been the same as that of whites in the 1950s, from the early 1960s rose above white unemployment. The gap between black and white unemployment widened. Welfare programs funded by presidents Johnson and Nixon expanded rolls to an appalling extent — appalling because welfare fostered a new sense of hopelessness and disenfranchisement among those who received it. “Boy, were we wrong about a guaranteed income!” wrote that most honest of policy makers, Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1978, looking back on a pilot program that had prolonged unemployment rather than met its goal, curtailing joblessness. The “worker versus employer” culture promoted by the unions and tolerated by the automakers suppressed creativity on the plant floor and in executive officers. Detroit built shoddy autos — the whistleblower Ralph Nader was correct when he charged that American cars were not safe. Detroit failed to come up with an automobile to compete with those made by other foreign automakers. Whereas in the 1930s American automakers’ productivity amounted to triple that of their German competitors, by the late 1960s and 1970s, German and Japanese automakers were catching up to it or pulling ahead. In the end the worker benefits that union leaders in their social democratic aspirations extracted from companies rendered the same companies so uncompetitive that employers in our industrial centers lost not merely benefits but jobs themselves. Vibrant centers of industry became “the rust belt”, something to abandon. […] What the 1960s experiment and its 1970s results suggest is that social democratic compromise comes close enough to socialism to cause economic tragedy.

Amity Shlaes, Great Society: A New History, 2020.

October 24, 2024

Did the Media Lose the Vietnam War?

Filed under: Asia, History, Media, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Time History
Published Jun 21, 2024

In late April 1975, dramatic images from Saigon are beamed across the world. North Vietnamese troops proclaimed final victory. Just how did the US lose the Vietnam War?
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September 10, 2024

Why the US Left Vietnam

Filed under: Asia, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Time History
Published Apr 19, 2024

With violent anti-war protests at home and discipline problems on US bases, President Nixon promises to withdraw American troops from the Vietnam War, but that doesn’t mean an end to the fighting. As US troop numbers drop, the war expands across borders and in the air as more weapons are pumped into the South.
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November 28, 2023

Pierre Trudeau and Canada’s choice to become an international featherweight in the 1970s

Filed under: Cancon, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Jen Gerson endures a foreign policy speech from Mélanie Joly that takes her on a weird journey through some of Canada’s earlier foreign policy headscratchers … usually leading back to Justin Trudeau’s late father:

A Toronto Sun editorial cartoon by Andy Donato during Pierre Trudeau’s efforts to pass the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. You can certainly see where Justin Trudeau learned his approach to human rights.

If I saw a statue of P.E.T. on the roof of a foreign affairs building that looked like it were competing for a 10th place spot in the Eurovision tourney, I don’t know how I’d feel: embarrassed, touched, certainly too polite to say anything honest. I probably wouldn’t be so struck with awe by the sight that I’d be keen to shoehorn the anecdote into a major policy speech in front of the Economic Club.

And yet.

Joly’s speech was striking in that it could be divided into two distinct parts: The first half was a cogent and clear-eyed examination of the state of play of the world, one that acknowledged a fundamental shift in the assumptions that underpin the global order. Nothing one couldn’t glean from the Economist, but grounded nonetheless. The global order is shifting, the stakes have increased, and the world is going to be marked by growing unpredictability.

“Now more than ever, soft and hard power are important,” Joly noted, correctly, ignoring the fact that Canada increasingly has neither, and doesn’t seem to be doing much about that.

And this brings us to the second half of the speech, which was an attempt to spell out the way Canada will navigate this shift, by situating itself as both a Western ally and an honest broker: we are to defend our national interests and our values, while also engaging with entities and countries whose values and interests radically diverge from our own. “We cannot afford to close ourselves off from those with whom we do not agree,” Joly said. “I am a door opener, not a door closer.”

This was clearly intended to be analogous to the elder Trudeau’s historic policy of seeking cooperation with non-aligned countries — countries that declined to join either the Communist or the Western blocs throughout the Cold War.

[…]

If our closest allies treat us like ginger step-children as a result of our own obliviousness and uselessness, our platitude-spewing ruling class is going to seek closer relationships in darker places: in economic ties with China, and in finding international prestige via small and middling regional powers or blocs whose values and interests are, by necessity or choice, far more malleable than our own.

These cute turns of phrase are a matter of domestic salesmanship only. “Pragmatic diplomacy” is a thick lacquer on darker arts.

Which brings us back to Macedonia, again. Or North Macedonia, if you’re a stickler.

Before it declared independence in 1991, Macedonia was a republic within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. During much of Trudeau Sr.’s time, Yugoslavia was led by Josip Tito, a Communist revolutionary who broke with Stalin and spearheaded a movement of non-aligned countries, along with the leaders of India, Egypt, Ghana, and Indonesia. Tito was one of several despotic and authoritarian leaders with whom Trudeau Sr. sought to ingratiate himself to navigate the global order.

P.E.T.’s most ardent supporters maintain a benevolent amnesia about just how radical Trudeau Sr. was relative not only to modern standards, but to world leaders at the time.

During the 1968 election, Trudeau promised to undertake a sweeping review of Canada’s foreign affairs, including taking “a hard look” at NATO, and addressing China’s exclusion from the international community.

In 1969, America elected Richard Nixon a bombastic, controversial, and corrupt president who forced Canada examine the depth of its special relationship with its southern neighbour. At the time, this was termed “Nixon shock.” And it could only have furthered Trudeau Sr.’s skepticism of American hegemony.

It was in this environment of extraordinary uncertainty, and shifting global assumptions and alliances, that Trudeau Sr. called for a new approach to Canadian foreign policy. He wanted a Canada that saw itself as a Pacific power, more aligned to Asia (and China). Trudeau also wanted stronger relationships with Western Europe and Latin America, to serve as countervailing forces to American influence.

October 23, 2023

QotD: The real meaning of “Watergate”

Filed under: Government, History, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I was reflecting this week on my brief stint, many years ago, as a newspaperman. It was a job I loved. I signed on not too many years after the Watergate scandal, and journalists were still flush with heroic ideas about themselves. Woodward and Bernstein — and all reporters by extension — had toppled a corrupt presidency and saved the republic and the Constitution from the kind of behind-the-scenes government tyranny dramatized in such thriller films as The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor.

[…]

Recently, reading Mark Levin’s Unfreedom of the Press, I was reminded that, before reporters went on their great crusade against Richard Nixon, they had overlooked a whole lot of corruption in the Democrat presidents who preceded him.

Levin tells how John F. Kennedy, with the knowledge of his brother and Attorney General Robert, nudged the IRS into auditing conservative groups. With Kennedy’s approval, the FBI was also employed to investigate those the administration disliked, including Martin Luther King Jr. Lyndon Baines Johnson would later increase the politically motivated auditing and spying. None of this was uncovered until later on.

Ben Bradlee — the editor of the Washington Post, where Woodward and Bernstein broke the Watergate story — was well aware of his pal Kennedy’s misuse of the tax and investigative agencies. Not only did he not report it, he allowed himself and his paper to be manipulated by information JFK had wrongly obtained.

This totally changes the Watergate narrative. Nixon’s dirty tricks and enemy lists may have been creepy and wrong, but the press exposure of these misdemeanors came after years of ignoring similar and worse malfeasance by Democrat administrations.

That changes what Watergate means. That transforms it from a heroic crusade into a political hit job, Democrat hackery masquerading as nobility. The press turned a blind eye to the corruption of JFK and LBJ, then raced to overturn the election of a man they despised — despised in part because he battled the Communism many of them had espoused.

Andrew Klavan, “‘Watergate’ Doesn’t Mean What the Press Thinks It Means: The press turned a blind eye to the corruption of JFK and LBJ, then raced to overturn the election of a man they despised”, The Daily Wire, 2019-08-31.

August 27, 2023

6 Strange Facts About the Cold War

Filed under: Asia, Britain, Cancon, History, Russia, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Decades
Published 27 Jul 2022

Welcome to our history channel, run by those with a real passion for history & that’s about it. In today’s video, we will be exploring 6 odd Cold War facts.
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January 24, 2023

The Vietnam War still has echoes in US politics

Filed under: Asia, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In UnHerd, Dominic Sandbrook outlines the end of US involvement in the Vietnam War:

From George L. MacGarrigle, The United States Army in Vietnam: Combat Operations, Taking the Offensive, October 1966-October 1967. Washington DC: Center of Military History, 1998. (Via Wikimedia)

In the course of his troubled presidency, Richard Nixon spoke 14 times to the American people about the war in Vietnam. It was in one of those speeches that he coined the phrase “the silent majority”, while others provoked horror and outrage from those opposed to America’s longest war. But of all these televised addresses, none enjoyed a warmer reaction that the speech Nixon delivered on 23 January 1973, announcing that his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, had achieved a breakthrough in the Paris peace talks with the North Vietnamese.

At last, Nixon said, the war was over. At a cost of 58,000 American lives and some $140 billion, not to mention more than two million Vietnamese lives, the curtain was falling. The last US troops would be brought home. South Vietnam had won the right to determine its own future, while the Communist North had pledged to “build a peace of reconciliation”. Despite the high price, Nixon insisted Americans could be proud of “one of the most selfless enterprises in the history of nations”. He had not started the war, but it had dominated his presidency, earning him the undying enmity of those who thought the United States should just get out. But the struggle had been worth it to secure “the right kind of peace, so that those who died and those who suffered would not have died and suffered in vain”. He called it “peace with honour”.

Fifty years on, Nixon’s proclamation of peace with honour has a bitterly ironic ring. As we now know, much of what he said that night was misleading, disingenuous or simply untrue. South Vietnam was in no state to defend itself, and collapsed just two years later. The North Vietnamese had no intention of laying down their weapons, and resumed the offensive within weeks. And Nixon and Kissinger never seriously thought they had secured a lasting peace. They knew the Communists would carry on fighting, and fully intended to intervene with massive aerial power when they did. But then came Watergate. With Nixon crippled, Congress forbade further intervention and slashed funding to the government in Saigon. On 30 April 1975, North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gates of the presidential palace, and it really was all over.

Half a century later, have the scars of Vietnam really healed? It remains not only America’s longest war but one of its most divisive, comparable only with the Civil War in its incendiary cultural and political impact. The fundamental narrative trajectory of the late Sixties — the turn from shiny space-age Technicolor optimism to strident, embittered, anti-technological gloom — would have been incomprehensible without the daily images of suffering and slaughter on the early evening news. It was Vietnam that destroyed trust in government, in institutions, in order and authority. In 1964, before Lyndon Johnson sent in combat troops after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, fully three-quarters of Americans trusted the federal government. By 1976, a year after the fall of Saigon, not even one in four did so.

It was in the crucible of Vietnam, too, that you can spot many of the tensions that now define American politics. Perhaps the most potent example came in May 1970, after Nixon invaded nominally neutral Cambodia to eliminate the North Vietnamese Army’s jungle sanctuaries. First, on 4 May, four students were shot and killed by the National Guard during a demonstration at Kent State University, Ohio. Then, on 8 May, hundreds more students picketed outside the New York Stock Exchange, only to be attacked by several hundred building workers waving American flags.

The “hard hat riot”, as it became known, was the perfect embodiment of patriotic populist outrage at what Nixon’s vice president, leading bribery enthusiast Spiro Agnew, called “the nattering nabobs of negativism … an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterise themselves as intellectuals”. Today it seems almost predictable, just another episode in the long-running culture wars. But at the time it seemed genuinely shocking. And with his brilliantly ruthless eye for a tactical advantage, Nixon saw its potential. When he invited the construction workers’ leaders to the White House two weeks later, he knew exactly what was doing. “The hard hat will stand as a symbol, along with our great flag,” he said, “for freedom and patriotism and our beloved country”.

October 18, 2022

QotD: The US media and the Democratic Party since 1968

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… back in 1968 the Media convinced themselves they held the whip. Between the “Chicago Police Riot” (in reality a bunch of SDS goons finally goading the cops into cracking down) and the Tet Offensive (in reality, a communist catastrophe that all but destroyed the Viet Cong as a fighting force), the Media convinced themselves they truly were the shapers of the nation’s hearts and minds. From then on out, the Media assumed their primary job was not to report the news, but to instruct us how to feel about the news. They anointed themselves as a secular priesthood, and from that moment forward, people went into “journalism” specifically to change the world.

That suited the Democrats’ short-term interests just fine. Then as now, the Democrats were a bunch of fellow-traveling wannabe-totalitarians. The difference, though, is that in 1968 grownups were still in charge of the party. Being intimately familiar with the concept of “useful idiots”, the grownup Dems were happy to encourage the journo-kids’ delusions of grandeur. The kids might not have been able to stir up enough shit to get Hubert Humphrey elected — that would’ve been a tough sell for Josef Goebbels — but they could make life hot for Richard Nixon. In other words, the Democrats thought they held the whip.

1972 should’ve been a wakeup call, but to be fair, all the campaign wonks were still reeling from The Great Magic Party Switch of 1964. Both halves of the failed Democratic ticket from 1968 ran in the 1972 primaries, and so did George Wallace (who actually won more primaries than either Humphrey or Muskie — 6 to 5 and 4, respectively). Which left George McGovern, a goofy hippie from a nothing state who was so bad at politics that he got outflanked as a peacenik by Richard Nixon, the man who was right at that moment actually running the goddamn war. […]

[McGovern’s platform was], in short, “amnesty, abortion, and acid,” a Donald Trump-level linguistic killshot if ever there was one.

The point isn’t that McGovern was a goofy hippie. The point is that McGovern was The Media’s fair-haired boy. Hubert Humphrey was no one’s idea of a steely-eyed realist, but he was a grown-up. When he attacked McGovern as too radical during their primary debates, he was expressing America’s frustration with bratty, coddled, know-nothing college kids and their bong-addled, patchouli-soaked nonsense. But since it was the aforesaid spoiled, stoned college kids who wrote the election coverage …

Viewed from this perspective, Democratic Party politics up to now can be seen as the increasingly desperate attempts of the few remaining grownups to fend off The Media’s increasingly frantic grabs for the whip. Take a gander at these goofballs from 1976. Remember the “Scoop Jackson Democrats” all the National Review types kept gushing about when they needed some Democratic cover for W’s imperial misadventures? “Scoop” Jackson was a real guy, and probably the only adult in the room in 1976. Jimmy Carter, the eventual nominee, could at least fake being a serious, mature human being when he wasn’t being chased by enraged, swimming bunnies. The Jerry Brown of 1976 is the very same Jerry Brown who is putting the finishing touches on the shitholization of California here in 2019, and guess who The Media just loooooooved back in the ’76 primaries?

See also: Every other election through 2016. Sometimes The Media and the Party moved in tandem — e.g. Bill Clinton — but more often it played out like 1988, when the Party had to drag a bland nonentity (Mike Dukakis) over the finish line in the face of a Media darling (Jesse Jackson). This dynamic also explains the weird “enthusiasm gap” of Democratic voters starting in 2000 — nobody actually liked Al Gore or John Kerry, but since W. made The Media lose their tiny little minds, they went all-in on painting those two human toothaches as The Saviors of Mankind.

Severian, “Which Hand Holds the Whip?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-17.

March 31, 2022

QotD: Nixon’s 1971 gamble to win re-election also tanked the economy for a full decade

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[In 1971, economist Herb] Stein was saying aloud what they all knew. Prettifying a political grab by dressing it as an economic rescue was precisely the kind of action against which eminences like Burns warned foreign governments when they made grand speeches abroad. Nixon was indeed now preparing to do what Harold Wilson had done in 1967: disingenuously pretend that devaluing a currency would not affect the consumer. Stimulating the economy in this way might win Nixon the election, but inflation would eventually explode, as Friedman sometimes said, like a closed pot over high heat. Wage and price controls and taxes on imports could make the kind of growth America was accustomed to, the old bonanza, disappear for years, even a decade. True scarcity of key goods might suddenly become the rule. And that was true no matter how many times that cowboy Connally went around bragging about tariffs and telling others that America was “the strongest economy on earth”.

[…]

The 1971 run on American gold also, however, reflected foreigners’ insight. Outsiders knew a tipping point when they saw one. America had moved closer to Michael Harrington’s socialism than even Harrington understood. The United States had locked itself into social spending promises that might never be outgrown. Today, interest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies serves as a measure of markets’ and individuals’ distrust of the U.S. dollar. In those days there was no Bitcoin, but gold played a similar role. The dollar was the common stock of America, and foreigners used gold to short it.

The disastrous performance of the U.S. economy in the following years proved the foreigners’ 1971 wager correct. To pay for its Great Society commitments, the U.S. government in the next decade found itself forced to set taxes so high that it further suppressed the commercialization of innovation. Products that could have been developed from patents awarded in the 1960s remained on the researchers’ shelves. Today we assume all markets will rebound given a decade. But there was to be no 1970s rebound for the Dow Jones Average. The Dow flirted with the 1,000 level throughout the decade, but did not cross the line definitively until 1982, an astonishingly long period to stagnate, nearly a generation. While markets languished, unemployment for all Americans rose. High prices, high interest rates, and federal budget deficits plagued the nation. “Guns and butter” had proved too expensive, but so indeed had butter alone. The 1960s commitments required spending that, then and down the decades, would be far greater than for Vietnam or most other wars. Those on the far left who had originally pushed for aggressive public-sector expansion had achieved what they sought, to subordinate the private sector. In 1977, Harrington actually titled a new book The Twilight of Capitalism.

Those who had counted on the private sector to sustain prosperity saw they had expected too much. The nation’s confidence evaporated. Indeed, by the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter felt the need to undertake a national campaign to restore confidence, the kind of campaign Franklin Roosevelt had launched in response to the Great Depression. From being a nation that could afford everything, America morphed into a country that could afford nothing, a place where the president warned citizens to set their living room thermostats to sixty-five in January, or face catastrophe.

In a supreme irony, many of the people who caused the economic damage found themselves mired in the dirty work of reversing what they had wrought. The task of reducing inflation through punishing interest rates fell to Paul Volcker, who as a junior official aided leaders in the 1971 decisions that triggered the 1970s inflation in the first place. Mortgage rates rose to today incredible-sounding levels, over 15 percent. In the 1980s, the same John Connally who as treasury secretary in 1971 pounded on Nixon’s desk for populist measures that ensured an economic quagmire, went bankrupt, a casualty of the mess he had helped to create.

Amity Schlaes, Great Society: A New History, 2019.

October 13, 2021

QotD: The POW/MIA theories from the post-Vietnam War era

Filed under: Asia, History, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… there are lots of cases where “the narrative” — the method of organizing disparate facts for easy transmission and digestion — becomes The Narrative, all caps, the conspirazoid stuff. Al from da Nort brought up the POW/MIA thing from the Vietnam War, which is a great example. […] back in the 1980s The Narrative (note the capital letters) was that the Vietnamese government was still holding American prisoners of war for some reason.

It routinely showed up on the “news magazine” shows, and of course there were whole series of movies about it: The Missing in Action flicks with Chuck Norris, Rambo II, I’m sure I’m forgetting a few. And though the “firsthand testimony” for this thesis was always of the “somebody knew somebody who heard from somebody that Lt. Smith suddenly disappeared from a POW camp back in 1968,” there was one seemingly strong piece of archival evidence: The seemingly disproportionate number of soldiers and airmen officially listed as “missing in action”.

And yet … c’mon, man, as a guy who dodged that war probably said back when he could still remember what century he’s living in. Why would the Vietnamese do that? All the mooted explanations — slave labor, selling captured pilots to the Russians for training purposes — didn’t pass the smell test. So a historian started digging into it, and while I read MIA: Mythmaking in America 30 years ago in college, I remember the crux of his argument:

In the war’s early days, the military used a statistic called KIA/BNR — killed in action / body not recovered. Everyone knows Lt. Smith is dead, but since his aircraft was vaporized by a SAM over Haiphong, his remains can’t be returned to his people. As Al notes, though, when a pilot was killed in action, his wife and kids got a puny condolence check from the government and kicked out of base housing. Thus the surviving pilots, acting from noble motives, started fudging. “Well … maybe Lt. Smith’s plane wasn’t vaporized. I might’ve seen a chute. It’s all very confusing; remember I was going Mach 1 at the time, dodging flak …” Mrs. Smith and the little Smiths get to keep drawing a paycheck, keep living on base housing, etc. So the official MIA list grew.

Enter Richard Nixon and that sneaky rat fuck Kissinger. Needing a way to prolong the war while concluding “peace with honor” — that is, to weasel out without seeming too weaselly — they needed a sticking point at the treaty table. The MIA issue was perfect for that. What about Lt. Smith? Of course the Vietnamese government can’t account for him; he was blown to atoms over Haiphong; but there’s his name on the missing list. Perhaps he’s in double secret prison!

And thus “the narrative” — the perfectly understandable-in-context lie that changed KIA/BNR to MIA — became “The Narrative”, that the Vietnamese were, for some unfathomable reason, still hanging on to captured American servicemen. Who knows why those inscrutable Orientals do anything, and what kind of America-hating hippie scum are you to ask questions? Don’t you want to bring our boys back home?

Severian, “Kayfabe”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-04.

June 21, 2021

QotD: The young Richard Nixon

Filed under: Education, Football, History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As a schoolboy he hadn’t a single close friend, preferring to cloister himself up in the former church’s bell tower, reading, hating to ride the school bus because he thought the other children smelled bad. At Whittier, a fine Quaker college of regional reputation unknown anywhere else, he embarked upon what might have been his most humiliating job of all: learning to be a backslapping hail-fellow-well-met. (“I had the impression he would even practice his inflection when he said ‘hello'”, a reporter later observed.) The seventeen-year-old blossomed when he realized himself no longer alone in his outsiderdom: the student body was run, socially, by a circle of swells who called themselves the Franklins, and the remainder of the student body, a historian noted, “seemed resigned to its exclusion.” So this most unfraternal of youth organized the remnant into a fraternity of his own. Franklins were well-rounded, graceful, moved smoothly, talked slickly. Nixon’s new club, the Orthogonians, was for the strivers, those not to the manner born, the commuter students like him. He persuaded his fellows that reveling in one’s unpolish was a nobility of its own. Franklins were never photographed save in black tie. Orthogonians wore shirtsleeves. “Beans, brains, and brawn” was their motto. He told them *orthogonian* — basically, “at right angles” — meant “upright,” “straight shooter.” Also, their enemies might have added, all elbows.

The Orthogonians’ base was among Whittier’s athletes. On the surface, jocks seem natural Franklins, the Big Men on Campus. But Nixon always had a gift for looking under social surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath. It was an eminently Nixonian insight: that on every sports team there are only a couple of stars, and that if you want to win the loyalty of the team for yourself, the surest, if least glamorous, strategy is to concentrate on the nonspectacular — silent — majority. The ones who labor quietly, sometimes resentfully, in the quarterback’s shadow: the linemen, the guards, the punter. Nixon himself was exemplarily nonspectacular: the 150-pounder was the team’s tackle dummy, kept on squad by a loving, tough, and fatherly coach who appreciated Nixon’s unceasing grit and team spirit — nursing hurt players, cheering on the listless, even organizing his own team dinners, entertaining the guests on the piano, perhaps favoring them with the Orthogonian theme song. It was his own composition.

Nixon beat a Franklin for student body president. Looking back later, acquaintances marveled at the feat of this awkward, skinny kid the yearbook called “a rather quiet chap about campus,” dour and brooding, who couldn’t even win a girlfriend, who attracted enemies, who seemed, a schoolmate recalled, “the man least likely to succeed in politics.” They hadn’t learned what Nixon was learning. Being hated by the right people was no impediment to political success. The unpolished, after all, were everywhere in the majority.

Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, 2008.

April 7, 2021

QotD: The G-[pick-a-number] meetings

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There are far too many of these “summits,” far too undistinguishedly attended, expensive to organize, and conducted in public in ways that attract swarms of hooligans who vandalize shops, beat up bystanders, and provoke the police. Canada spent $400 million on three days of photo-ops at La Malbaie, to achieve practically nothing. For the first nearly 30 years of summiting, there were only nine such meetings; Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin at Tehran and Yalta (1943 and 1945), Stalin, Truman and Attlee at Potsdam (1945), Eisenhower and the divided Russians and Anthony Eden and Edgar Faure at Geneva (1955), Eisenhower, Khrushchev, Macmillan and de Gaulle at Paris (1960), Kennedy and Khrushchev at Vienna (1961), Lyndon Johnson and Alexei Kosygin at Glassboro (1967), and Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev at Moscow and San Clemente, Calif. (1972, 1973).

The first three were essential to plan for victory and peace, though many of their key provisions, especially for the liberation of Eastern Europe, were ignored by Stalin. The first Nixon-Brezhnev meeting was substantive and a couple of the later Reagan-Gorbachev meetings were very productive. These were intense business meetings between people who really were at the summit of world power and influence. The only matter agreed to in meetings between Soviet and American leaders between 1945 and 1972 was in the “kitchen debate” between then vice-president Nixon and Khrushchev in Moscow in 1959, when (forgive my coarseness in the interests of historical accuracy), Khrushchev accused Nixon of uttering “Horse shit, no, it is cow shit, and nothing is fouler than that” to which Nixon replied, “You don’t recognize the truth, and incidentally, pig shit is fouler than cow shit.” Khrushchev conceded the second point.

Conrad Black, “Take heed Canada: the U.S. would win a true trade war”, Conrad Black, 2018-06-16.

April 11, 2020

QotD: Zhou Enlai’s famous “too early to say” comment on the French Revolution

Filed under: China, France, History, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When Chinese premier Zhou Enlai famously said it was “too early” to assess the implications of the French revolution, he was referring to turmoil in France in 1968 and not — as is commonly thought — to the more distant political upheaval of 1789.

So says a retired American diplomat, Charles W. (Chas) Freeman Jr., who was present when Zhou made the comment during President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in February 1972.

Freeman, who was Nixon’s interpreter during the historic, weeklong trip, made the disclosure last week during a panel discussion in Washington about On China, the latest book by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

The discussion was moderated by Richard McGregor, a journalist and China expert who wrote about Freeman’s comments for the Financial Times of London.

In an interview yesterday, Freeman elaborated on his recollection about Zhou’s comment, the conventional interpretation of which is frequently offered as evidence of China’s sage, patient, and far-sighted ways. Foreign Policy magazine, for example, referred last month to that interpretation, saying the comment was “a cautionary warning of the perils of judgments made in real time.”

The Washington Post‘s recent review of Kissinger’s book likewise referred to the conventional understanding of Zhou’s remark.

Freeman described Zhou’s misconstrued comment as “one of those convenient misunderstandings that never gets corrected.”

He said Zhou’s remark probably was made over lunch or dinner, during a discussion about revolutions that had succeeded and failed. They included, Freeman said, the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Hungarian uprising of 1956, both of which the Soviet Union crushed.

He said it was clear from the context and content of Zhou’s comment that in saying it was “too early to say” the Chinese leader was speaking about the events in France in May 1968, not the years of upheaval that began in 1789.

Freeman acknowledged that the conventional interpretation makes for a better story but added that it was “absolutely clear” from the context of the discussion that Zhou was speaking about 1968.

W. Joseph Campbell, “‘Too early to say’: Zhou was speaking about 1968, not 1789”, Media Myth Alert, 2011-06-14.

January 21, 2020

Amity Shlaes’ Great Society: A New History

Filed under: Books, Economics, Government, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In City Journal, Edward Short reviews the latest American economic history book by Amity Shlaes:

In Great Society: A New History, Amity Shlaes revisits the welfare programs of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations to show not only how misguided they were but also what a warning they present to those who wish to resurrect and extend such programs. “The contest between capitalism and socialism is on again,” the author writes in her introduction. Despite the Trump administration’s thriving economy, or perhaps because of it, Democratic Party progressives are calling for new welfare programs even more radical than those advocated in the 1960s by the socialist architect of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, Michael Harrington. In the new schemes for wealth redistribution, student debt relief, socialized medicine, and universal guaranteed income that make up the Democrats’ political platform in 2020, Shlaes rightly sees a recycling of Great Society hobby horses — and she worries that a good portion of the electorate may be taken in by them. “Once again many Americans rate socialism as the generous philosophy,” she observes, and she has written her admirable, sobering study to make sure that readers realize that the “results of our socialism were not generous.”

Reviewing how ungenerous makes for salutary reading. After all, socialism of any stripe, whether in Russia, South America, Europe, or America, has always been an inherently deceitful enterprise. Shales captures the essence of this imposture when she describes one of its manifestations as “Prettifying a political grab by dressing it up as an economic rescue.” In totting up these receipts for deceit, Shlaes has done a genuine public service. […]

On display here are all of Shlaes’s strengths as an author: her clear and unpretentious prose, sound critical judgment, readiness to enter into the thinking of her subjects with sympathy (even when she regards it as mistaken), and, perhaps most impressively, understanding how history can help us fathom what might otherwise be obscure in our own more immediate history.

Accordingly, she describes the influence that Roosevelt’s New Deal had on Johnson, who saw it as a model for maintaining and consolidating his Democratic majorities, as well as focusing his Cabinet’s talents. “The men around Johnson,” Shlaes points out, including Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Richard Goodwin, and Sargent Shriver, “felt the weight of his faith on them, and strove hard. Vietnam would be sorted out. There would be a Great Society. Poverty would be cured. Blacks of the South would win full citizenship. The Great Society would succeed.” Yet the president’s men could not help asking “by what measures” it would succeed.

Moynihan’s answer to this question is one that still mesmerizes social-engineering elites. The Great Society would be achieved by social science. “Progress begins on social problems when it becomes possible to measure them,” Moynihan declared. Improved quantitative analysis would give the centralized power of planners a new credibility.

Whether Johnson himself ever truly believed in such claims is questionable. When aides asked the exuberant Texan what he thought of the risks of going forward with his wildly ambitious program, his reply epitomized the hubris at the heart of his Great Society: “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?”

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