My FINAL Word On Indecision 2004

I confess: I have never viewed "Citizen Kane." What I know about William Randolph Hearst, I learned from William A. Swanburg's biography: Citizen Hearst (1961). Hearst was a proto-fascist who would endorse W if he were alive to day. As for W, his piety is as genuine as he is tough. He talks the talk, but he can't walk the walk. If this is (fair & balanced) skepticism, so be it.

[x HNN]
Does Bush Think He's Channeling God?
By Robert S. McElvaine

As I read Ron Suskind's dismaying cover story on President Bush's religiously inspired certainty in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, "Without a Doubt," I kept experiencing déjà vu.

I've seen this storyline somewhere before: A president who had been a feckless, party-loving, hard-drinking man, is visited by a messenger of God and suddenly changes his ways. Thereafter, he knows what is right and will listen to no one who suggests otherwise. This president, convinced that he is doing God's work--that he is God’s spokesman on earth--suspends civil liberties to fight crime. He repudiates international treaties and announces that the United States will build new weapons to put itself in a position of world dominance. He orders other nations to follow American dictates, or else. That the "or else" means using American military might for preemptive war is made clear to world leaders when they are assembled and shown a demonstration of American military power. They all immediately agree to do what the United States (and God) demands.

Then it hit me. The plot that sounds so much like the way George W. Bush sees himself and his presidency is that of a now obscure 1933 film produced by William Randolph Hearst's Cosmopolitan Studios, Gabriel Over the White House. In it, an irresponsible man named Judson Hammond, played by Walter Huston, is elected to the presidency on promises he doesn't intend to keep. "Oh, don't worry," an aide tells him, "by the time they realize you’re not keeping them, your term will be over." Then, driving his car recklessly, President Hammond has a tire blowout at 100 mph. He apparently dies from his injuries, but is transformed by divine intervention and emerges, literally born again, as a supremely confident leader who has no doubts in the rightness of his course. He demands that Congress give him dictatorial powers and then adjourn, so that he can solve all domestic and international problems. He once was lost; now he's found. But what has he found?

President Hammond's approach to the world, like that of George W. Bush, fits with neither traditional Republican isolationism nor the Wilsonian internationalism practiced by most presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt through George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Rather, the film, with the assurance that God is on the side of the United States, advances an approach to the world that might best be termed "isolated internationalism." With God on our side, this nation should neither withdraw from the world nor work out agreements with other nations to form cooperative international coalitions. Rather, the United States should simply declare what it will do and expect others to do. Other nations are welcome to join in a Coalition of the Willing, meaning those willing to follow unquestioningly the divinely inspired Leader of the United States.

Mr. Hearst's simplistic views of the world and of the solutions to its problems eerily foreshadow those that hold sway in Mr. Bush's White House today. God spoke through Hearst's fictional President Hammond; similarly the Bush who now occupies the presidency confuses himself with the one that burned in Exodus 3:2. "I pray to be as good a messenger of [God's] will as possible," Mr. Bush told Bob Woodward.

It is well known that Ronald Reagan often confused movies with reality. Garry Wills and others have contended that Mr. Reagan got his idea that something like the Strategic Defense Initiative was possible from a 1940 movie, Murder in the Air. That film depicts a new super weapon called an "inertia projector" that can shoot down enemy planes before they reach the nation. In the movie, this weapon makes the United States invincible and puts it in a position to establish world peace.

Now it appears that the current president is living out a movie fantasy of his own, basing his self-image on the plot of a seven-decade-old movie that purported to speak the will of God but actually spoke the will of William Randolph Hearst.

The source of the problems of Orson Welles's fictionalized Hearst in Citizen Kane was that he had lost the love of a mother; the source of our--the nation's and the world's--problems with George W. Bush is that he thinks he has found, not just the love, but the voice of a Heavenly Father. That voice, which is in fact one that is all too much of this world, sounds uncomfortably similar to that of the real life Hearst.

Welles's Charles Foster Kane represented America, with its ideals corrupted by excessive wealth and power, demanding that others follow his distortions of reality. Hearst’s Judson Hammond was an American president corrupted (although Hearst didn’t realize it) by the belief that he had Ultimate Power on his side. Citizen Bush suffers from the same delusion.

The citizens of America must recapture the ideals of our national youth. All together, now, as we enter the voting booths on November 2, let us whisper: "Rosebud."

Robert S. McElvaine teaches history at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss. He is the author of Eve's Seed: Biology, the Sexes and the Course of History (McGraw-Hill). He is currently completing his first novel and screenplay, What It Feels Like....

Copyright © 2004 History News Network

Presidential Predictors?

The Weekly Reader poll went to W by 20 points. The kiddies like W overwhelmingly this year. The couch potatos will be watching the Packers play the Skins today and W's supporters will be Hogs for the day. Others look at the underbellies of family dogs to determine the depth of a winter coat of hair. Hairy means 4 more years of W's wonderful leadership. Of course, the last predictor is fictitious. Who will win on November 2. 2004? I dunno. If this is (fair & balanced) befuddlement, so be it.

[x Alternative Insight]
The Predictors of the Presidential Election


Several techniques predict the coming presidential election and favor George W. Bush to succeed himself as President of the United States. However, technical predictors lack total credibility; each comes with a caveat of voter beware. Close elections defy the polls and last minute changes in voter preference are standard. One way to predict a presidential election is by combining facts with historical trends, voter momentum and a "gut feel." All you need to be accurate in your prediction is to have the right gut and a sensitive feel.

Predictor #1- The Thirteen Keys

Alan J. Lichtman, professor of history at American University in Washington, DC, has devised a method for determining the presidential election. The method contains 13 statements, each having either a "true" or a "false" response. If six or more replies are "false", then the incumbent party loses the presidential election. Professor Lichtman tuned his "crystal gazing" system by test driving various statements until they successfully predicted all presidential campaigns since 1860.

The 13 statements:
1. The incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives after the midterm election than after the preceding midterm election.
2. There is no serious contest for the incumbent-party nomination.
3. The incumbent-party candidate is the current president.
4. There is no significant third-party or independent candidacy.
5. The economy is not in recession during the campaign.
6. Real (constant-dollar) per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth for the preceding two terms.
7. The administration has effected major policy changes during the term.
8. There has been no major social unrest during the term.
9. The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.
10. There has been no major military or foreign-policy failure during the term.
11. There has been a major military or foreign-policy success during the term.
12. The incumbent is charismatic or is a national hero.
13. The challenger is not charismatic and is not a national hero.
Note: If six or more of these statements are false, the incumbent party loses. For this election only keys 6, 10,11 and 12 are positively false. Statements 8 and 9 are not sufficiently false.

The Thirteen Keys predict that George W. Bush will be re-elected, but the predictive quality of the "13 Keys" has limitations.

The Keys predict a preference vote and not the electoral vote.

The statements are valid in a static environment. The dynamics of our society may change the significance of a statement. As an example, before television, charisma didn't have too much weight with the electorate. In the modern television era, a candidate gains attention with visual charm.

Statistical analysis is valid until it is no longer valid. The law of large numbers may eventually 'hiccup" the analysis. The 13 Keys algorithm has been fitted to a pattern of behavior over a specific 120 years. Each year, events might modify that pattern.

The "Keys" are not weighted. Each one is given the same value, although they are of unequal importance.

Statements influence other statements. An example: If the economy goes into recession, then its likely that Keys 8 (major social unrest) and 4 (third party candidacy) will go false.

Predictor #2- The Mathematical Technique of Regression

Yale economist Ray C. Fair developed a statistical analysis using the mathematical technique of regression to predict the outcome of presidential elections. Professor Fair uses six factors to model the share of the presidential popular vote going to the incumbent party. The three most determining factors are:

the per capita growth rate of the GDP;
the number of quarters during the previous 3¾ years in which the growth rate exceeded 3.2 percent, and;
the inflation rate.

Three less critical factors:

is a candidate an incumbent, with incumbency noted to have an advantage;
the Republicans are noted to have having a slight historical edge;
desire for change, that favors the Party out of power for more than two terms;

Professor Fair's model predicts that George W. Bush will be re-elected by a wide margin, close to 58 percent of the vote. Unless figures are being misinterpreted, the more essential economic factors don't favor the Bush administration, and so it's difficult to believe Fair's conclusion. All models have their weakness, the principal ones being the number of data points available for the predicting equation. This model has other weaknesses; waging the battle against terrorism has replaced the economy as the principal determinant in voters' preference and the War in Iraq also runs high in directing votes. Despite the limitations, Professor Fair' s predictions of vote percentages since the 1916 election have been unusually accurate.

Predictor #3- Polling

Polls taken weeks before the election usually give an incumbent the edge. Polls are partly awareness contests; voters' choice depend upon the brand name from media and advertising. Since the president makes daily headlines, many voters are attracted to his name. Last minute events and more considerate thought before pushing the lever, neither of which are reflected in polls, influence the voter's final choice.

Other contradictions to the reliability of polls:

(1) A recent NBC-Wall Street Journal poll showed a contradiction: respondents slightly favoring Bush also had 58% of them hoping for "major changes" in a second Bush term.
(2) AMERICAblog.org has a chart from The Polling Report (http://www.pollingreport.com/) that describes "how 23 of 26 polls in 2000 showed Bush winning the popular vote in the 3 days before the election. Two of the polls had Bush winning by 9 points."

Predictor #4- Subjective Analysis

Examining the facts and combining facts with historical trends, voter momentum and a "gut feel" is a method for analyzing most situations.

Some facts that are important to the electorate, don't favor Bush and have trends that could continue through the election process :
(1) The Consumer Confidence Index fell 1.9 points to 96.8 from a revised reading of 98.7 in August. Analysts had expected a reading of 99.5. Will consumers losing confidence vote for those who are responsible for their loss of confidence?
(2) Worker's costs for health insurance have increased by 36 % since 2000; one part of a "disguised" inflation that is eroding "take home" pay. Will workers vote for an administration in which their "take home" pay has been reduced?
(3) In July, 2004, the National Intelligence Council ( NIC) prepared a bleak assessment of the efforts in Iraq that has been dismissed by Bush (reported by the New York Times). One of a plethora of reports that will appear before election until the electorate realizes the danger due to the adminstration's foreign policies.
(4) The stock market is stagnant. If Wall Street is concerned, won't all Americans become concerned?
(5) Government annual budget is at record high deficit. After enjoying surpluses, will Americans accept record deficits?

Historical trends of voter patterns also don't favor Bush.

In the 2000 election George Walker Bush was a relative unknown. Positioned as a compassionate conservative, many voters gave the inexperienced Bush the benefit of the doubt. After four years Bush has lost his principal benefit. He has displayed incompetence in several disciplines, demonstrated meager intelligence on vital matters, exhibited awkward handling of the English language and shown little compassion. Bush has his permanent followers but they aren't sufficient to carry him into the presidency.

Is it conceivable that those who voted for Bush in the 2000 election when they were unaware of his lack of ability would be voting for him in the coming election after they have become aware of his lack of ability? Is it conceivable that he can gain new voters - where would they come from? Polls claim a drift of women to Republican ranks, due to terrorist fears. These votes don't come from the feminist constituency that votes solely on women issues. By election time, as many non-feminist women might desert Bush as those that have suddenly become attracted to him. Voter drift to Bush is random drift and the drift is in both directions.

The thrust of the Bush campaign is to turn the president's failures into positives, sort of using his debts as collateral:

He is irresolute in his determination to achieve victory in Iraq rather than being stubborn to change policy and being ignorant in forming new policies.

He is decisive in the war on terrorism rather than making decisions that have aggravated the war on terrorism.

He is truthful and honest rather than reciting the most outrageous lies ever presented to the American people.

He represents family values rather than noting he is never together with his family and his daughters have been involved in alcohol consuming episodes.

He has a vision for America rather than he shows no vision on any subject.

He must be allowed to finish his program rather than he has no well developed program to finish.

He, leader of the country, should not be changed in mid-stream in times of emergency, rather than, as John Kerry said it, "When you're going over a waterfall or sinking, it's preferable to change the leader." Note: Herbert Hoover and Lyndon Johnson were discarded in "times of emergency" because they were unable to lead the country in the "time of emergency."

Is it possible that the electorate will accept the deceptive campaign until election day? Hardly likely. George Herbert Walker Bush, the president's father, had credentials and abilities far exceeding his son. President H.W. Bush, after leading the country to a decisive victory in the Gulf War lost the election to a relative unknown, Governor William Clinton. Why would the electorate approve a greatly inferior George W. Bush for a second term after they had rejected his more qualified father, George H.W. Bush, in his second term bid?

Conclusion

Never in American history was an incumbent as beatable as George Bush. His detractors accuse of him of being the worst and most uninformed president ever to hold the office - and they might be right. So, what's the problem? Evidently, John Kerry has run a poor campaign - but he has not lost. The major problem: Senator Kerry, despite his war record and years in the Senate, is still a relative unknown to the American audience.

President Bush's ardent followers cite honesty, conviction and steadfastness as his qualities. They believe he has American values and the courage to fight terrorism. They don't cite accomplishments because he has no accomplishments. These persons, who are aren't sufficiently informed and won't allow otherwise, don't influence others, don't run to vote and might not even seek the voting booth. On the other hand, a vast part of the electorate has a mission - to make certain Bush does not return to office - and will campaign ferociously, try to influence others and run to the nearest polling booth, possibly more than once, to vote for Kerry. The last weeks of the election campaign, which includes debates, will inflate Kerry's name and image and deflate Bush's record. People don't vote for their downfall. When they arrive at the gas station and pay the elevated gas prices (partly due to the Iraq war), go to the television and observe the continual toll of life in Iraq, read their financial statements and learn their economy has stagnated, they will conclude that the "guns and butter" strategy, also used by Lyndon Johnson, leads to catastrophe and they'll pull the Kerry lever.

POPULAR VOTE
Kerry: 49%
Bush: 47%
Independents: 4%

ELECTORAL VOTE
Kerry: 324
Bush: 214

Alternative Insight presents news and views that are alternatives to the conventional media. The news and views don't necessarily represent those of Alternative Insight.

Copyright © 2004 Alternative Insight

Happy Birthday, Kinkster!

The Kinkster is getting old (he thinks). He's gonna be OK. Especially after he takes up residence in the Governor's Mansion. If this a (fair & balanced) delusion, so be it.

[x Texas Monthly]
Zero to Sixty
by Richard (Kinky) Friedman

I've lived hard and loved hard, and I was supposed to die young. Instead, a dreaded milestone birthday is fast approaching—and I'm wearing an oversized straw hat.

ON NOVEMBER 1 I’ll be sixty years old. Impossible, you say? How the hell do you think I feel? I don’t know whether to have a birthday party or a suicide watch. I have received many misguided cards and a few inquiries from paleontologists, but basically all being sixty really means is that you’re old enough to sleep alone. In my case, having breezed through my entire adult life in a state of total arrested development, it’s especially hard to accept that Annette Funicello has been eclipsed as the most famous former Mouseketeer by Britney Spears. The older and wiser I get, indeed, the less I seem to know. Soon I may become such a font of wisdom and experience that I will know absolutely nothing at all. Some of you, no doubt, believe this stage of evolution has already occurred.

This is where seniority comes to the rescue, for the older you get, the less you care what others think of you. You may find yourself peeing in Morse code, but you’re still happy to water the garden of wisdom once in a while. When hotel magnate Conrad Hilton was a very old man, someone asked him to share the most important thing he’d learned in life. “Always keep the shower curtain inside the tub,” he answered. These may not sound like words to live by, but you’ll have to admit, it’s good practical advice.

What does being sixty amount to? Yesterday I was cooking chicken gizzards for the dogs while watching Wuthering Heights. I forgot about the gizzards until I saw smoke billowing out of the kitchen like the fog on the moors. This is what it amounts to, I told myself, asking in the same breath, “Where are all our Heathcliffs?” and “Now what did I do with that damn coffee cup?” We find the coffee cup eventually. Everything else we’ve lost, however, winds up as a wistful reflection in a carnival mirror.

According to my friend Dylan Ferrero, guys our age are in the seventh-inning stretch. This sports analogy may be lost on Iranian mullahs and other non-baseball fans. Or perhaps everybody knows what the seventh-inning stretch implies, but most of the world is too young or too busy to think about what it means to baseball or to life. A lot of wonderful things can happen after the seventh-inning stretch, but statistically speaking, it’s pretty damn late in the game. None of us are getting younger or smarter. About all we can hope for is lucky. But at least we’re old enough to realize and young enough to know that when the Lord closes the door, he opens a little window. Old age is definitely not for sissies, but those of us who are chronologically challenged can take comfort in the words of my favorite Irish toast: “May the best of the past be the worst of the future.&rdquo

Sometimes I wonder why, God willing, I’ll make it to sixty when almost all the people I’ve loved are either dead or, at the very least, wishing they were (as you may be, reading this). My fate, apparently, in the words of Winston Churchill, is to “keep buggering on.” It’s too late for me now to drive a car into a tree in high school. Yet I remain a man who at times feels like he is eighty, at times forty, and at times a rather precocious twelve. What I do not feel is sixty. Sixty is ridiculous. Sixty is unthinkable. What God would send you to a Pat Green concert and send you home feeling like the Ancient Mariner? I’ve lived hard and loved hard, and I was supposed to die young—though if that had happened, I never would have gotten the chance to order the Lu Ann platter at Luby’s.

All that notwithstanding, when you get to be a geezer, you can gleefully gird yourself in garish geriatric garb. I’ve lately taken to wearing an oversized straw hat like the one van Gogh wore when he painted The Night Café. Unfortunately, van Gogh wore lighted candles on his hat, which was one reason they put him in the mental hospital. Other heroes of mine who wore large straw hats are Father Damien, Billy the Kid, and Don Quixote (none of whom saw sixty except for Quixote, who lives forever in the casino of fiction). And, of course, there’s always Juan Valdez.

My life, it seems, is a work of fiction as well. As a reader, it’s getting more and more difficult to find books that are older than I am. For instance, I’m currently reading J. Frank Dobie’s A Texan in England, which was written one year before I was born. When you read books created before you were, the pages are green fuses—leaves of grass through which, as if by some arcane form of spiritual osmosis, you receive the wisdom of the past. Writing at the ripe young age of sixty, however, is quite another matter. Larry McMurtry remarked that nobody writes great fiction after sixty. Hell, I was just getting started.

My father, in his later years, would wake up in the morning and say, “It almost feels good to be alive.” The older I get, the more I understand how he felt. I have emulated Tom Friedman in surrounding myself with people still older than I, but needless to say, this task gets harder all the time. In the shallow, sallow world of material wealth, I’ve tried to follow in my father’s footsteps as well. When our accountant, Danny Powell, once asked my father what his financial goals were, Tom responded, “My financial goals are for my last check to bounce.” This witty outlook is very much in keeping with the gypsies’ definition of a millionaire: not a man with a million dollars, but a man who’s spent a million dollars. (The gypsies have been reading my mail.) At sixty, I find that I am rich in the coin of the spirit. That may not buy you a cup of coffee these days, but it might just buy you a big, satisfying slice of peace of mind.

Richard (Kinky) Friedman, polymath (musician, novelist, humorist, and Texan extraordinaire), will be the best damn governor the Lone Star State has ever had. How hard could it be? He ain't our governor, he's Kinky.

Copyright © 2004 Texas Monthly Magazine

I Like Anyone Who Admires John D. Hicks !

Tom Frank burst on the scene this summer with What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America? just before the 2004 Democrat National Convention. What caught my eye was Frank's inspiration for his political analysis. He came upon The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers' Alliance and the People's Party in the library stacks of the University of Chicago. Hicks' book is the Progressive historian's magnum opus on Populism. It was published in 1931 as the nation sank into the Great Depression. Hicks emphasized economic pragmatism over ideals and presented Populism as interest group politics, with have-nots demanding their fair share of the nation's bounty. Hicks argued that financial manipulations, deflation, high interest rates, mortgage foreclosures, unfair railroad practices, and a high protective tariff unjustly impoverished farmers. Corruption accounted for such outrages and Populists presented popular control of government as the solution. The Populist Revolt brought Tom Frank to wonder why so many people vote against their own economic interest in casting a ballot for W.

John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers' Alliance and the People's Party (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1931). An excellent retrospective on this work can be found in Martin Ridge, "Populism Revolt: John D. Hicks and The Populist Revolt," Reviews in American History 13 (March 1985): 142-54.

If this is (fair & balanced) revisionism, so be it.


[x Washington Post]
The Author Who's Got Himself in a Purple State
By Bob Thompson

Thomas Frank. What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America? New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004.

"This one is fantastic," Thomas Frank is saying. "This is a memoir of the New Economy years that I particularly like. . . . Here's my essay about going to the Super Bowl, which actually stands up. . . . This is another fantastic essay -- did you know the founder of the John Birch Society invented Sugar Babies?"

Frank -- a young-looking 39-year-old in wire rims and a button-down blue shirt that may or may not have come from his favorite thrift store -- is standing by a bookcase in the basement of his newly acquired Tenleytown house, talking several miles a minute. The talk is supposed to be focused on his latest book, "What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America," in which he uses his native state as a case study to explain how the nation's politics got bent into the shape they're in today. But he's been sidetracked by his first love: an obscure yet influential little magazine called the Baffler that he's edited for 16 years.

One by one, he snatches perfect-bound issues from the shelf and flips through them, looking to show off some greatest hits. He pauses at a piece about one of his heroes, H.L. Mencken ("I don't agree with the guy's politics, but I love his writing"). Grinning, he holds up the house ad on the inside back cover of Baffler No. 15.

It's a plea for subscriptions, adapted from a World War I recruiting poster. It shows a disconsolate-looking man in an armchair with a little girl on his knee. A little boy plays with toy soldiers at his feet.

The headline reads, "Daddy, what did YOU do in the Culture War?"


The Great Backlash

When Tom Frank's own children are old enough to ask that question -- he's got a 3-year-old and a baby on the way -- he'll have an answer for them: He did his damnedest to change the subject.

"What's the Matter With Kansas?," Frank's vehicle for that effort, had a nine-week run on the New York Times bestseller list before it dropped off last month. Asked if he'd expected it to attain even this modest success, the author bursts out laughing: "Of course not! No idea!"

It's easy to see why he was surprised. Frank's politics are deeply contrarian, at least in the current intellectual climate, and they're calculated to offend Democrats and Republicans alike.

In "Kansas," Frank sets out to prove that the noisy, seemingly endless American culture war -- fought over such issues as Hollywood depravity and the alleged disparity between mainstream values and those of cultural elites -- is a giant smoke screen that clouds the real cause of Middle America's distress. And what might that real cause be? Frank thinks it's economic. To be specific, it's unconstrained free-market capitalism, which has routed the social and political forces that once kept it in check.


Holy sacred cow, Batman! How far out of the mainstream can one man be?

Frank argues that it's unregulated capitalism, taken to its laissez-faire extreme, that has outsourced the blue-collar prosperity of cities like Wichita and driven the Kansas farm economy to "a state of near collapse." What he really wants you to understand, however, is why so many aggrieved Kansans have banded together not to fight the economic philosophy that, in his view, has put the screws to them, but to elect and reelect proponents of that very laissez-faire philosophy.

To explain this paradox, Frank points to what he calls the "Great Backlash," a species of conservatism that emerged in reaction to the social and cultural upheavals of the late '60s. The backlash, he writes, "mobilizes voters with explosive social issues -- summoning public outrage over everything from busing to unchristian art -- which it then marries to pro-business economic policies."

It's not a marriage between equals, he says. The business agenda gets enacted, producing "low wages and lax regulation." The rich get obscenely richer as a result. Yet the cultural agenda remains unfulfilled. "Abortion is never halted. Affirmative action is never abolished. The culture industry is never forced to clean up its act." Meanwhile, backlash strategists have repackaged the idea of the American "elite," to devastating political effect.

In its new meaning, retailed incessantly on talk shows and in screeds with titles like "Treason" and "Bias," the term doesn't refer to members of the nation's economic upper crust, who reap the benefits of tax cuts and deregulation. No, in backlash-speak, an "elitist" is a member of an exclusively cultural establishment, defined as a collection of liberal snobs in the media, the academy and government who sneer at the values of ordinary Americans. Hapless liberals are forced to fight a rear-guard action against these charges, Frank writes, in large part because they've conceded most of the economic ground already.
"What's the Matter With Kansas? came out the month before this past summer's Democratic convention, which proved to be excellent timing. Frank placed op-ed columns in major newspapers, which helped generate attention and sales. He even got a boost from George Will. The conservative columnist called Frank -- what else? -- a liberal elitist out of tune with "what everyday people consider their fundamental interests."

But Will also served up a backhanded compliment.

"Imagine Michael Moore with a trained brain and an intellectual conscience," he wrote.


What Kind of Vegetable?

Frank has a trained brain, all right. He got a PhD in cultural history from the University of Chicago in 1994. But he wasn't destined to wind up an academic. The story of his one and only university job interview has his Baffler colleagues laughing to this day.

By the time he landed it, Frank had a contract from the University of Chicago Press to publish a book based on his dissertation. His interviewers seemed amazed by this, he recalls, and the main question they had for him was: How did he do it?

This annoyed him. ("I was, like, 'Well, it's a quality book, that's how.' ") So did the fact that, having flown in at his own expense, he was given to understand that he had no real chance at the job. At the end, the interviewers asked if he had questions for them.

"Yeah," he said. "Let's go around the room and each of you tell me: If you had to be a vegetable, what kind of vegetable would you be, and why?"

If he has regrets, he doesn't show them. He likes being an entrepreneurial provocateur.

Frank grew up admiring Ronald Reagan, like many of his neighbors and friends in Mission Hills, Kan., a wealthy suburb of Kansas City. He took his Republican politics with him when he headed off to the University of Kansas. One day, in the library stacks, he stumbled across a book called "The Populist Revolt." Up to that point, he'd associated the term "populism" with the kind of revolt Reagan was urging: of ordinary Americans against a too-powerful government. Now he discovered a radically different populism, in which late 19th-century Kansans, among others, saw concentrated economic power as the main force citizens needed to confront.

The contrast was a revelation. "One populism acknowledges that we live in a business universe. The other doesn't see that," Frank says. "For the new conservatives, it's all about government, and business is just invisible."

He left Kansas after his freshman year for the University of Virginia. In Charlottesville, he and some friends decided to start their own magazine. When he moved on to Chicago for grad school, the Baffler went along.

Early issues ridiculed the infinite variety of commercialized "rebellion" through which American consumers are encouraged to define themselves. Frank's 1995 essay, "Why Johnny Can't Dissent," lists a few of the available options: "Break the rules" by eating at Burger King! Be "different" by choosing Arby's! "Innovate" with Hugo Boss! "Chart your own course" using Navigator Cologne!

Not coincidentally, Frank was mining this same vein for his dissertation. The result, later published as The Conquest of Cool, was a fresh look at consumer capitalism's response to the 1960s. Frank's research showed that, far from being threatened by the decade's countercultural spirit, smart marketers had welcomed -- and in some ways, even anticipated -- the youth rebellion. After all, if consumers could be taught to "rebel" through purchasing decisions, the sky was the limit when it came to flogging new stuff.

The next big Baffler target was the much-hyped "New Economy" of the late 1990s. One Market Under God, the Frank book that resulted, is a caustic evaluation of the economic ideology that swept the field as the dot-com-fueled Nasdaq continued its dizzy climb.

One Market was written as the boom was peaking. Its thesis is that the New Economy represented "not some novel state of human affairs but the final accomplishment of the long-standing agenda of the nation's richest class." That agenda included free trade, cheap labor and deregulation, including the near-abandonment of antitrust enforcement. Frank calls its proponents "market populists."

"Their fundamental faith was a simple one," he writes. "The market and the people . . . were essentially one and the same. By its very nature, the market was democratic, perfectly expressing the popular will."

The dot-com bubble burst in 2000, the same year "One Market" came out. Before long, even Fortune magazine was asking, "Can We Ever Trust Wall Street Again?" Not long afterward, the Baffler ran a full-page ad for Frank's book.

Under the headline "Great Minds of the New Economy Deplore Cynical Account of Bountiful New Era," it gleefully quoted only negative reviews.


Tweedledum and Tweedledee

The entrepreneurial provocateur moved to Washington from Chicago last year -- his wife, an economist, landed a job here -- but he was writing "What's the Matter With Kansas?" at the time and says he didn't get outside much for a while.

Given what Washington thinks of his views, this reclusiveness may have been wise.

Conservatives have a simple question for him. It was posed by David Brooks, the New York Times columnist and chronicler of "bourgeois Bohemia," several years ago in a Slate-sponsored online dialogue with Frank:


If not capitalism, what?

At the time, Frank was unable to reply -- he'd finished his part of the exchange and signed off -- but he's happy to respond today. "We live in a capitalist state now," he says, "but we also lived in a capitalist state in the 1960s and the 1950s and the 1940s. And yet it was a very different country." The balance of power between labor and management hadn't collapsed. Wealth distribution hadn't reverted to a 19th-century pattern, with ever-increasing concentration at the top. That capitalism was a better model, he thinks.

Brooks doesn't. "I don't think a left-wing economic agenda would be a successful agenda," he says now. "Economic populism has been tried and it hasn't worked."

Meanwhile, "New Democrats" -- the kind whose champion Bill Clinton became, the kind who rally around the Democratic Leadership Council -- have an even simpler question for Frank:


Are you nuts?

In the concluding chapter of "Kansas," Frank assigns "a large part of the blame for the backlash phenomenon" to the "criminal stupidity" of the Democratic Party in abandoning its commitment to labor and economic justice in pursuit of white-collar votes and corporate contributions. The DLC in particular, he writes, thinks that "to collect the votes and -- more important -- the money of these coveted constituencies," Democrats must stand firm on issues like abortion rights while making "endless concessions on economic issues" such as NAFTA, welfare, privatization and deregulation. The result? Democrats become Tweedledum to the Republicans' Tweedledee on the laissez-faire economy, leaving their opponents free to woo blue-collar voters with backlash issues.

Earlier in the book, Frank takes his anti-DLC rhetoric to an even higher pitch. He notes that generous contributions from the Kansas oil billionaires who run Koch Industries have propped up numerous institutions that champion laissez-faire economics, from the Cato Institute to Citizens for a Sound Economy. And he includes the DLC on his list of Koch-funded "hothouses of the right."

"That's crazy," says Ed Kilgore, the DLC's policy director. "If you can't tell the difference between the DLC and the Republicans, you're not paying attention."

Sure, the DLC took some Koch money, Kilgore says. But it has never advocated abandoning the working class or taking economic issues off the table, and it is proud of Clinton's economic record. "If you have to be self-consciously and vocally anti-business in order to be considered a legitimate Democrat or progressive," he says -- well, sheesh: That would rule out the party's current presidential nominee.

Informed of this return fire, Frank seems uncharacteristically exasperated. But his fundamental stance remains: Bring 'em on.

Has the DLC taken economic issues off the table? "Of course they haven't taken them off the table -- they've just become Republicans."

Does a Democrat have to be anti-business? "I don't think I'd call myself anti-business. . . . I'm critical of the species of capitalism that we're living under today."

Is that Koch money innocent? "Okay, it is Koch that funds right-wing organizations. And it's the Democratic Leadership Council that's been working hard for years to push the Democratic Party to the right. Not to the left. To the right."

But isn't that where the American mainstream has been heading for decades? And hasn't he positioned himself way outside it?

Frank concedes this last point, but nothing more.

"I may be outside the debate," he says. "But ultimately my description is accurate and theirs is not."


A Sequel, Perhaps?

Tom Frank is a big fan of what he calls "American middleness," and as such, he doesn't think he wants to settle in Washington for good. He'd like to get back to Chicago eventually. Still, since he finished "What's the Matter With Kansas?" he's been getting out a little more, immersing himself in the political culture of his temporary home.

He's been going to public events at foundations like the Cato Institute. He heard President Bush speak to the American Conservative Union. He plans to hit some Democratic functions later on. Is he working on a sequel, perhaps? One called "What's the Matter With Washington?," maybe?

Frank laughs at the thought. A minute later, though, he tells a story that could work as an opening chapter. It's from this year's Republican convention -- but true to Frankian form, it reflects equally badly on both parties.

One day he attended a fete thrown by Grover Norquist's tax-cutting powerhouse, Americans for Tax Reform. "It was at the New York Yacht Club, for God's sake," Frank reports, astonished by the sense of invulnerability the choice projects, by the Republicans' obvious belief that the Democrats would never actually call them on this.

"Rich people toasting tax cuts in the New York Yacht Club! If we had a left in this country, they would put that on a TV commercial from now until Election Day."

Founding editor of The Baffler, Thomas Frank is the author of One Market Under God and The Conquest of Cool. A contributor to Harper's, The Nation, and The New York Times op-ed page, he lives in Chicago.


© 2004 The Washington Post Company

Ben Sargent Strikes Again!

Ben Sargent: National Treasure [Click on image to enlarge.] Copyright © 2004 Austin American-Statesman 

Garry Wills: A Man After My Own Heart

Garry Wills is a brilliant political historian and a brilliant religious historian. Wills bestowed nicknames for the Bushies in his last paragraph. Guess whom each aphorism represents: Bring 'Em On, Mission Accomplished, Mushroom Cloud, Forty-Five Minutes, Prague Meeting, Stuff Happens, Slam Dunk, Shinseki Is Wild, Mobile Labs, Iraqis Love Me, Oil Will Rebuild It, Cakewalk), and Ahmed Told Me. Hint: Bring 'Em On is the Commander in Chief (or Thief). If this is a (fair & balanced) appellative, so be it.


[x New York Review of Books]
The Election and America's Future
By Alan Ryan, Anthony Lewis, Brian Urquhart, Edmund S. Morgan, Garry Wills, Ian Buruma, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Mark Danner, Michael Ignatieff, Norman Mailer, Ronald Dworkin, Russell Baker, Steven Weinberg, Thomas Powers

Garry Wills
Evanston, Illinois

What was the last election with great stakes in play? I suppose 1968. It was similar to this race, but (as it were) upside down. Both involve the problem of admitting a tragic mistake. The mistake in 1968 was a belief that where the French had failed in a long and committed colonial adventure in Indochina, we could replace them and succeed. We could do so, we thought, because we were not colonialists but supporters of indigenous freedom against world communism. We came with "clean hands."

The current mistake is a belief that we could enter the Mideast with clean hands as supporters of democratic values in the whole region, in opposition to world terrorism. We would do so with Donald Rumsfeld's swift military in-and-out operation to put friends like Ahmed Chalabi in charge and withdraw—just as we could use Robert McNamara's "surgical" and "counterinsurgent" operations to keep friends like Nguyen Van Thieu in charge of Vietnam before withdrawing. Both mistakes reflected an ignorance of the respective regions, a false view of America's reception by those being "helped," and an underestimation of American resistance to longer-term commitment than was first proposed.

Our election is an upside-down version of the 1968 one because the incumbent party was then most disposed to admit the mistake of Vietnam, though it had led us into the quagmire. President Kennedy's closest advisers had egged on President Johnson to sustain the war—but it was proving unsustainable, as Lyndon Johnson's withdrawal, the Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy presidential bids, and Hubert Humphrey's wobbling demonstrated. Had Humphrey won, his party would not have supported vigorous extension of the war—it had already admitted the mistake. Nixon, by contrast, though he vaguely referred to a plan for ending the war, had constituencies not disposed to that course. The anti-Communist rationale for the war was so strong that even when Nixon achieved his opening to China, Republicans who opposed that move said they would not stay with him unless he continued his commitment to the war—as he did throughout his first term. Only after many more casualties on both sides, and no accomplishment of our war aims, was the mistake finally (indirectly) admitted.

Today it is the incumbent party that refuses to admit the mistake made in the preemptive war on Iraq. Its ideological stake in the venture resembles that of the out party in 1968, while the current out party, despite Kerry's wobbling of the Humphrey sort, has a cumulative opposition to the war like that of the Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy insurgents in 1968 (their equivalents now being Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, and Dennis Kucinich). What will be done in Iraq remains unclear for both parties; but a sane policy must begin from a grasp of the mistake that was made, an understanding of which the Republicans seem incapable.

Will it take us decades and thousands of deaths to see our error in Iraq, as it did to see our error in Vietnam? It may well do so under another Republican term. No one in it has resigned, been fired, repented, or apologized. The air of rectitude is bolstered as the blunders become clearer. What is generally true of presidential elections is imperatively true of this one—that the part of wisdom is to vote the party, not the man. Whether you like George Bush or John Kerry is beside the point. One must vote for the constituencies that are at the core of the candidate's campaign and future ability to govern. That means, in the case of the current administration, that a vote for the Republicans is a vote for Halliburton and contractors in the oil world, for a Rumsfeld policy of destroying the military, for a Cheney vision of unilateral action in a world of nations dismissed as cowards or fools, for an economy based on tax cuts, deficits, and resistance to social programs.

Most elections are referendums on the people in place, and that should be the overwhelming criterion this time. What will four more Bush years do to our relations abroad, our armed forces, our environment, our economy, our civil rights, our separation of church and state? Were it not so tragic in its toll of the dead and maimed on both sides of the conflict, our war in Iraq would seem a comedy of endless errors, featuring such Keystone Kops as George (Bring 'Em On) Bush, Karl (Mission Accomplished) Rove, Condi (Mushroom Cloud) Rice, Tony (Forty-Five Minutes) Blair, Dick (Prague Meeting) Cheney, Don (Stuff Happens) Rumsfeld, George (Slam Dunk) Tenet, Paul (Shinseki Is Wild) Wolfowitz, Colin (Mobile Labs) Powell, Ahmed (Iraqis Love Me) Chalabi, Doug (Oil Will Rebuild It) Feith, Ken (Cakewalk) Adelman, Richard (Ahmed Told Me) Perle, and other supporting players. What will the future say of us if we continue to reward this crew?

Garry Wills is an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University. Wills received a Ph.D. in classics from Yale and has had a distinguished career as an author, with books such as Lincoln at Gettysburg, John Wayne's America, a biography of St. Augustine, and A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government. He has received numerous accolades, including the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction (for Lincoln at Gettysburg) and the NEH Presidential Medal.

Wills is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his articles appear frequently in The New York Review of Books.

Copyright © 2004 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.

W's Dr. Strangelove

Michael Moore filmed Wolfie licking his comb to control his hair prior to a press conference. Gag. This is the guy who is the brains of the Iraq fiasco. W and his merry men are scrambling to deflect the incredible loss of 380 TONS of the most explosive conventional weapons materials from aqn Iraqi munitions depot. No wonder the insurgents have an unlimited number of car bombs! Just now, NPR reported that Osama released a video message to all of us. W and the Dickster will probably blame Kerry. Incredibly, W claims that Kerry rushed to judgment on the missing munitions without sufficient intelligence. This from W and his Weapons of Mass Deception! If this is (fair & balanced) idiocy, so be it.

[x The New Yorker]
THE BELIEVER: Paul Wolfowitz defends his war
by Peter J. Boyer

On the night of October 5th, a group of Polish students, professors, military officers, and state officials crowded into a small auditorium at Warsaw University to hear Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, give a talk on the subject of the war in Iraq. It was an unusually warm evening for October, and every seat was filled; the room seemed nearly airless. Wolfowitz began by joking that his father, a noted mathematician, would have been proud to see him in this academic setting, even as he was saddened that the younger Wolfowitz had pursued the political, rather than the “real,” sciences. After a few minutes, Wolfowitz’s voice, which normally has a soft tremble, grew even more faint, and his aspect became wan. For an instant, he seemed actually to wobble.

It had been a tiring day, preceded by an overnight flight from Washington. This was to have been a routine official trip for Wolfowitz—a visit with soldiers in Germany and some bucking up of Iraq-war allies in Warsaw and London. The bucking up, however, was made a bit more complicated by developments within the Administration. The previous afternoon, as Wolfowitz was preparing to board his plane at Andrews Air Force Base, an aide had handed him a report containing some vexing news. Wolfowitz’s boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, had just delivered a speech in New York and, in a question-and-answer exchange afterward, had declared that he had not seen any “strong, hard evidence” linking Al Qaeda with Saddam Hussein’s regime. Rumsfeld’s unexpected remark—undercutting one of the Administration’s principal arguments for going to war—had already prompted press inquiries at the Pentagon, suggesting a bad news cycle ahead. Meanwhile, the Washington Post was preparing to report that L. Paul Bremer, the former administrator of the American-led occupation of Iraq, had faulted the U.S. postwar plan for lacking sufficient troops to provide security—affirming a principal contention of the Administration’s critics. In addition, the government’s Iraq Survey Group, headed by Charles Duelfer, was about to release a final report on the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; already the report’s substance was being summed up in headlines as “report discounts iraqi arms threat.” And the Times had learned of a new C.I.A. assessment casting doubt on links between the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Saddam’s regime—undermining yet another of the Administration’s rationales for the war.

Wolfowitz has been a major architect of President Bush’s Iraq policy and, within the Administration, its most passionate and compelling advocate. His long career as a diplomat, strategist, and policymaker will be measured by this policy, and, more immediately, the President he serves may not be returned to office because of it. The Administration had been divided over Iraq from the start, and new fissures seemed to be appearing. The Poles sitting in the Warsaw audience, “new” Europeans who had cast their lot with America, might understandably have been concerned. The government in Poland, where public opinion has shifted against the war, faces elections next year, and will probably reduce its forces in Iraq in the coming months.

After his faltering start, Wolfowitz, nearing the midpoint of his speech, began to find his voice. He recounted the events of Poland’s darkest days, and the civilized world’s acquiescence to Hitler’s ambitions which preceded them. When Hitler began to rearm Germany, Wolfowitz said, “the world’s hollow warnings formed weak defenses.” When Hitler annexed Austria, “the world sat by.” When German troops marched into Czechoslovakia before the war, “the world sat still once again.” When Britain and France warned Hitler to stay out of Poland, the Führer had little reason to pay heed.

“Poles understand perhaps better than anyone the consequences of making toothless warnings to brutal tyrants and terrorist regimes,” Wolfowitz said. “And, yes, I do include Saddam Hussein.” He then laid out the case against Saddam, reciting once again the dictator’s numberless crimes against his own people. He spoke of severed hands and videotaped torture sessions. He told of the time, on a trip to Iraq, he’d been shown a “torture tree,” the bark of which had been worn away by ropes used to bind Saddam’s victims, both men and women. He said that field commanders recently told him that workers had come across a new mass grave, and had stopped excavation when they encountered the remains of several dozen women and children, “some still with little dresses and toys.”

Wolfowitz observed that some people—meaning the “realists” in the foreignpolicy community, including Secretary of State Colin Powell—believed that the Cold War balance of power had brought a measure of stability to the Persian Gulf. But, Wolfowitz continued, “Poland had a phrase that correctly characterized that as ‘the stability of the graveyard.’ The so-called stability that Saddam Hussein provided was something even worse.”

Finally, Wolfowitz thanked the Poles for joining in a war that much of Europe had repudiated, and continues to oppose. His message was clear: history, especially Europe’s in the last century, has proved that it is smarter to side with the U.S. than against it. “We will not forget Poland’s commitment,” he promised. “Just as you have stood with us, we will stand with you.”

Wolfowitz, who is sixty, has served in the Administrations of six Presidents, yet he is still regarded by many in Washington with a considerable measure of puzzlement. This is due partly to the fact that, although his intelligence is conceded by all, and his quiet bearing and manner suggest the academic that he used to be—at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies—he has consistently argued positions that place him squarely in the category of war hawk. He began his life in public policy by marshalling arguments, in 1969, on behalf of a U.S. anti-ballistic-missile defense system. Like his mentor at the University of Chicago, the late political strategist Albert Wohlstetter, Wolfowitz was skeptical of a U.S.-Soviet convergence, embraced a national missile-defense system, and argued for the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe.

But most puzzling to some, perhaps, is the communion that Wolfowitz seems to have with George W. Bush. How can someone so smart, so knowing, speak—and even apparently think—so much like George Bush? Except for their manner of delivery—Wolfowitz speaks in coherent paragraphs and Bush employs an idiom that is particular to himself—the language used by the two men when discussing Iraq is almost indistinguishable. It is the stark tone of evangelical conviction: evil versus good, the “worship of death” and “philosophy of despair” versus our “love of life and democracy.” Alongside Bush himself, Wolfowitz is, even now, among the last of the true believers.



Earlier on the day of his speech, Wolfowitz had toured the old city of Warsaw. In ceremonies attended by a Polish military honor guard, he laid wreaths at a memorial commemorating the Warsaw uprising and the monument to the Warsaw ghetto heroes. He laid a wreath, too, at the Umschlagplatz Memorial—the point of departure for some three hundred thousand Warsaw Jews who were transported to the Nazi death camp at Treblinka. Wolfowitz had pillaged the Pentagon library for a copy of “Courier from Warsaw,” the memoir of Jan Nowak, a Catholic who was among the first Warsaw-uprising witnesses to reach the West and testify to the Nazi horrors. In Warsaw, Wolfowitz asked to meet with Nowak, who is ninety. They spoke about the scale of the Holocaust, and about “how terrible it was for the Poles during the sixty-three days of the uprising. Three thousand Poles were killed every day—a World Trade Center every day.”

Wolfowitz told me that he had never before visited the memorials, and that, other than a quick stopover, this was his first trip to Poland, even though his father, Jacob Wolfowitz, had been born in Warsaw. He managed to emigrate during Poland’s brief interwar independence, unlike many other family members, who did not survive the Holocaust. It is probable that some of Wolfowitz’s relatives made their way through the Umschlagplatz, although not much is known. Wolfowitz said that he had learned little about Warsaw life, or the fate of his lost relatives, from his father. “He hated to talk about his childhood,” Wolfowitz said. As a boy, Wolfowitz devoured books (“probably too many”) about the Holocaust and Hiroshima—what he calls “the polar horrors.”

After his meeting with Jan Nowak, Wolfowitz’s conversation in the following days kept returning to what he had heard. “He told about how the ghetto was walled off from the rest of the city, but there was one streetcar that had to cross it,” Wolfowitz said. “And every day he would see bodies laid out, covered with newspaper, because that was all they had to cover them with, and people who’d starved to death and died of typhoid.” Nowak told Wolfowitz that in secret wartime meetings with Britain’s top officials, including Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, he had reported the plight of the Warsaw Jews; yet, when he later examined the minutes from these meetings in the British archives, he found no mention of the Jews. “Nowak said it was wartime inconvenience.” Wolfowitz paused, then added, “There are some parallels to Iraq. One is that people don’t believe these things. First, they don’t know it, because the world doesn’t talk about them. It may be for different reasons, although some of it is ‘wartime inconvenience.’”

Wolfowitz said that he was astonished by the argument of some war critics that, with no imminent threat from Iraq, the overturning of Saddam was unwarranted—an argument that he believes implicitly accepts Saddam’s brutality. A corollary phenomenon is the relative lack of opprobrium directed by the international community and the press toward the insurgents in Iraq, whom the Administration brands as terrorists. “It’s amazing,” he said. “If you said the insurgents were terrible, then you couldn’t go on and on about all the mistakes that Bush has made.”

Perhaps, but the other side of that coin is the Administration’s shift in rhetorical emphasis after Baghdad was taken. Given the lack of weapons of mass destruction or proven ties between Iraq and the terror attacks of September 11th, the liberation rationale acquired a primary importance that it had not had in the Administration’s public argument for war.

In turn, the developing insurgency, which eclipsed the parades and the cheering throngs, prompted renewed focus on the Administration’s geopolitical strategy—the transformation of the region—as a war rationale. This grand idea of liberalizing the Middle East one country at a time, beginning with Iraq, was associated particularly with Wolfowitz. The State Department was, and is, skeptical, and it is said that Rumsfeld harbored doubts as well.

Wolfowitz’s critics accuse him of naïveté, of setting out a vision that fails to consider fully the complex and unpredictable regional dynamics of tribal loyalties, honor, revenge, and Arab pride in Iraq and in the region generally. They argue that the invasion and the subsequent insurgency have undermined American authority throughout the world and have led to more, not fewer, jihad-minded terrorists. Wolfowitz often responds to critics by drawing an analogy to Asia, where skeptics once argued that Confucian tradition was a barrier to the development of democracy. He has said, “This is the same Confucian tradition that more recently has been given a substantial share of the credit for the success of the Korean economy and many others in Asia.”



En route to Poland, Wolfowitz made a brief stop in Munich, where he met with two men who had helped to shape his view of Islam. One was Anwar Ibrahim, the former Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia, who was in Germany for medical treatment. Ibrahim had been a nineteen-seventies-era student activist who entered politics and became, in the eyes of Wolfowitz and other Westerners, the embodiment of the moderate Muslim ideal—at once devoutly religious and tolerant, and eager to move his country into the modern world. He was widely expected to succeed his mentor, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, but in 1998 Mohamad had Ibrahim arrested, on charges of corruption and sodomy (a crime in Malaysia), and he was sentenced to a nine-year jail term. Three years later, just after the September 11th attacks, Ibrahim, still in a Malaysian jail, wrote an impassioned essay condemning the attacks as an abomination and lamenting the Muslim world’s failure to address “the suffering inflicted on the Muslim masses in Iraq by its dictator as well as by sanctions.” He was freed in September.

Wolfowitz also met with Abdurrahman Wahid, the former President of Indonesia. Toward the end of the second Reagan Administration, Wolfowitz, who was then Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia, was offered the Ambassadorship to Indonesia. Wolfowitz had spent more than a dozen years in the policy grind of Washington, and he and his wife, Clare, were eager to get away. Clare Wolfowitz had a particular interest in Indonesia—she’d been an exchange student there in high school, spoke the language, and had made Indonesia her academic specialty; she holds a Ph.D. in social anthropology. (The couple are now separated.) People who have spent much time with Wolfowitz eventually notice that Indonesia is the one subject guaranteed to brighten his mood. “I really didn’t expect to fall in love with this place, but I did,” he told me earlier this year. “I mean, I don’t think I made the mistake of forgetting which country I represented, or overlooking their flaws, but there was so much that was just enormously appealing to me.”

Wolfowitz’s appointment to Indonesia was not an immediately obvious match. He was a Jew representing America in the largest Muslim republic in the world, an advocate of democracy in Suharto’s dictatorship. But Wolfowitz’s tenure as Ambassador was a notable success, largely owing to the fact that, in essence, he went native. With tutoring help from his driver, he learned the language, and hurled himself into the culture. He attended academic seminars, climbed volcanoes, and toured the neighborhoods of Jakarta.

At the time, Wahid was the leader of Indonesia’s largest Muslim group, which eventually morphed into a political party and brought Wahid to the Presidency, the nation’s first in a free election. (Not long after, however, he was impeached by the Indonesian parliament.) Wolfowitz found Wahid to be urbane, witty (his translation of a book of Soviet black humor became a best-seller in the Suharto era), and broadminded. Islam arrived late in Indonesia, and is less deeply rooted there than it is in many Arab states. The constitution protects other religious faiths, and Wahid, who is deeply devout, took that tolerance a step further, advocating total separation of mosque and state. “He’s a remarkable human being,” Wolfowitz said. “I mean, there’s the leader of the largest Muslim organization, and he’s an apostle of tolerance. How can you not admire him?”

Wolfowitz and Wahid became lasting friends, and, inevitably, one of their shared interests was the subject of Iraq. Wolfowitz told me that Wahid had studied in Baghdad, and that he was an early witness to the Baath Party’s atrocities. Wahid had described how Saddam’s regime “left the bodies hanging so long, the necks stretched,” Wolfowitz said. “It was in the main square in Baghdad, to send a message, to say, ‘This is who you’re dealing with from now on.’ And he said his teacher was taken away, the body was brought back in a sealed coffin, and they were told not to open it. They went ahead and opened it, and they found he’d been horribly tortured.”

At the reunion in Munich, Wahid, who is nearly blind and has been enfeebled by strokes, made his way slowly down a hotel corridor and embraced his old friend. Wahid is an acquaintance of the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most influential Shiite cleric, upon whom the future direction of Iraq may largely depend. Sistani, who does not openly engage with Americans, is believed to oppose the creation of an Iranian-style theocracy in Iraq, and his influence has been instrumental in reining in the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Wahid indicated that he might visit Iraq soon, and, as a Sunni who knows Sistani, he’d like to help improve relations between Sunnis and Shiites.

Another influence on Wolfowitz’s thinking is an Arab feminist named Shaha Ali Riza, with whom he has become close. Riza, who was born in Tunisia and reared in Saudi Arabia, studied international relations at Oxford and subsequently became a determined advocate of democracy and women’s rights in the Islamic world. She is now a senior official at the World Bank, where she works on Middle Eastern and North African affairs.

Wolfowitz says that his hopes for a democratic Iraq now are modest. He claims that he never expected a Jefferso-nian democracy, as some of his critics have derisively asserted. What he wishes to see is something stable, and more liberal than what came before. “It is something of a test,” he told me one day this summer, regarding the Iraqis. “We can’t be sure they’ll pass. And they’re not going to pass with an A-plus. I mean, if they do Romanian democracy and the country doesn’t break up that’ll be pretty good.”



The morning after his speech at Warsaw University, Wolfowitz flew to London, for meetings at 10 Downing Street and at the Ministry of Defence. That evening, he hosted a gathering of British writers at Annabel’s, in Mayfair, and their questions quickly turned to the subject of Rumsfeld’s remark earlier in the week that he’d seen no hard evidence of an Al Qaeda-Iraqi connection. This had prompted hurried defensive strategizing at the Pentagon, and Rumsfeld put out a clarification of his statement. Still, the issue lingered. The C.I.A.’s latest assessment, based on information gathered since the end of major combat, cast further doubt on the connection, and was now in circulation.

Wolfowitz often prefaces his response to questions about this issue, as he did at Annabel’s and at the Aspen Institute earlier this year, by posing a question of his own. It’s a sort of parlor game that he plays. He asks, in a professorial whisper, “How many people here have heard of Abdul Rahman Yassin, if you’d raise your hand?” In a room of two dozen people, no more than two or three will raise their hands.

Wolfowitz notes the meagre tally, allows himself a slight smile, and then explains that Abdul Rahman Yassin was one of the men indicted for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which killed six people and injured a thousand others. He remains a fugitive, the only one of the indicted perpetrators of that attack still at large.

Then Wolfowitz turns to the September 11th attacks. They were planned, he reminds his audience, by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing, Ramzi Yousef, was a nephew and close associate of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. “These are not separate events. They were the same target. They were the same people.” And Abdul Rahman Yassin, the fugitive from the first event? He fled to Iraq. “It would seem significant that one major figure in that event is still at large,” Wolfowitz says. “It would seem significant that he was harbored in Iraq by Iraqi intelligence for ten years.”

Many intelligence analysts believe that the presence of Yassin in Iraq was not particularly meaningful. Not long after his arrival there, Yassin, who grew up in Baghdad, was detained by the Saddam regime, and in 2002 he was even interviewed by “60 Minutes” in an Iraqi holding cell; if he was being “harbored,” the argument goes, it was only as a detainee that Saddam hoped to use as a bargaining chip with the United States. Furthermore, during the run-up to the war the Administration didn’t make Yassin a major issue.

Neither Wolfowitz nor the other intelligence analysts can say unequivocally what Yassin was doing in Iraq. Wolfowitz’s purpose in raising the issue is to illustrate the uncertain nature of intelligence analysis. He believes that there is important unexamined evidence regarding Yassin, yet, he says, when he broaches the matter with members of Congress his arguments are often met with resistance. “Every time you try to raise it, people say, ‘But there’s no proof Saddam was involved in 9/11.’”

The issue illustrates Wolfowitz’s own deep and abiding suspicions about the inviolability of the intelligence community’s culture and processes, a skepticism that dates back to his earliest days in government service. In 1973, Wolfowitz was a young new hire at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, his first foray into the national-security side of government. It was the era of the salt talks with the Soviets, and one of the first reports that Wolfowitz saw was the “big prize” itself—the National Intelligence Estimate of Soviet capabilities. Wolfowitz read the estimate, but he was struck, he says, more by a cover letter that accompanied it. The letter said that it was a credit to the report that, on such an important subject, it contained hardly any footnotes. In that world, footnotes were the means by which differing opinions were indicated. Wolfowitz was amazed, and appalled, that the C.I.A. boasted about not presenting dissenting views.

Some years ago, after Wolfowitz had left Washington for Jakarta, he consented to an interview with the C.I.A., which was reassessing its analysis processes. “The idea that somehow you are saving work for the policymaker by eliminating serious debate is wrong,” Wolfowitz told his interviewer. “Why not aim, instead, at a document that actually says there are two strongly argued positions on the issue? Here are the facts and evidence supporting one position, and here are the facts and evidence supporting the other, even though that might leave the poor policymakers to make a judgment as to which one they think is correct.”

Wolfowitz wanted to reëxamine national-security intelligence, and to avoid what he considered the groupthink inclinations of the intelligence professionals (“the priesthood,” he calls them). Eventually, he came to be known for his ability to recognize threatening patterns and capabilities that others had been unable to see. When the common wisdom held that the Soviets would slow the development and deployment of their intermediate-range missiles, Wolfowitz predicted, correctly, that the Soviets meant to modernize and enhance them. When the conventional view held that Saddam Hussein would not invade another Arab nation, Wolfowitz said that we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that he might cross the border into Kuwait—and a decade later Saddam did just that.

In 2001, the Defense Department set up a small in-house operation called the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, whose purpose, according to its creators, was not, as its critics have charged, to cherry-pick raw intelligence in order to justify the invasion of Iraq but to connect the dots between terrorist groups and countries that harbored them. Wolfowitz had his aides run a software program called Analyst Notebook, which, like a wiring diagram, could show links between disparate pieces of information. As a result, all manner of putative links were made, in much the same way that Wolfowitz connects the dots in his little parlor game. This is one way in which the connection between terrorism and Iraq became a fixed idea.



After the session at Annabel’s, Wolfowitz flew back to Germany. The next morning, he began the day by visiting Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, near Ramstein Air Base, which serves as the American military’s hub hospital for an area stretching from Europe to Southwest Asia. As Wolfowitz walked down the facility’s long corridors, he was accompanied by its commander, Colonel Rhonda Cornum. She is a physician, and a pilot—in the Gulf War, she was captured and briefly held by the Iraqis—and she had an agenda. The hospital was running at a high capacity, with some sections—orthopedics, the psych ward—completely full. Since the start of the global war on terror, nineteen thousand people had been admitted, many of them within twelve hours of being wounded in Iraq. But because the Administration continues to categorize the war as a “contingency” operation, she said, she was not able to add permanent staff. This meant having temporary medical staff who were rotated in and out of the facility from other military hospitals around the world, and it added stress to an inherently stressful operation. Wolfowitz accepted her neatly prepared PowerPoint report, and handed it to an aide.

Then he stepped into the room of a young sergeant named Jeron Johnson, from Bowman, South Carolina. Johnson was connected to several I.V.s and monitors, but he was awake, and alert. Wolfowitz walked to his bedside, leaned in, and asked, “What happened?” In a quiet, raspy voice, Johnson, who had just reënlisted before being wounded, told him that he had been on a mission with his unit in Baghdad, when his convoy got hit. “It was a V.B.I.E.D.,” Johnson explained. An I.E.D., or improvised explosive device, is the military’s term for a roadside bomb, a favored weapon of the insurgents. Car bombs are called vehicle-borne I.E.D.s.

“I saw this big burst,” Johnson calmly recounted. “I said, O.K., I got hit. . . . I called the guys over—I said, ‘My leg’s broke.’” Johnson suffered two broken legs, and several lesser injuries.

Another soldier entered the room and approached Johnson’s bedside. “I wanted to stop by,” he said. The soldier, slight and wiry, was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. A long scar zigzagged down the right side of his neck, and much of his left arm was missing, replaced by a prosthesis that ended in two curved steel hooks. He was Adam Replogle, a twenty-four-year-old sergeant from Denver. He addressed Johnson directly: “I got hit with an R.P.G. in the chest. I stopped by here on the way through. I wasn’t conscious like you, but I know what you’re going through.” Replogle had been a gunner on an Abrams tank, and his unit came under attack by insurgents in Karbala in May. He was evacuated to a field hospital, then to Landstuhl, where he was stabilized before being sent to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in Washington. Wolfowitz, who regularly visits the hospital, came to know him there. (When Wolfowitz is asked if he ever wonders about the war’s costs, he answers, “Every time I visit Walter Reed.”) The Army flew Replogle back to Germany for a reunion with his unit, which had recently returned from Iraq, and he wanted to stop by Landstuhl to offer encouragement.

Replogle said, “You hear about Karbala? That’s where I got hit. Where were you hit?”

“Baghdad.”

“Sadr City?”

“No. Five South.”

“We ran into some smack back in Sadr City a while ago,” Replogle said. “They got a lotta radicals out there. Al-Sadr keeps them around.”

This aroused Sergeant Johnson. “It’s amazing,” he said. “You see these kids around you, ‘Mister, mister, give me water! Give me food!’ And you dig around, tryin’ to give it to ’em, and you give it to ’em. And then, when you’re done, they throw rocks at you. You think, Hey, you little bastard!”

“They don’t know how to act, man,” Replogle replied. “They got their freedom, they don’t know how to act. You can’t really blame ’em for it. It’s frustrating over there. I’ll tell you one thing, man. Just maintain. You can feel a couple of different ways about Iraq. You can feel bad. But when people ask you questions, man, you just tell ’em. They gotta know about the good things we did. We’re not down there smackin’ people around.”

Johnson said that he’d sometimes had difficulty convincing his own soldiers of the utility of their mission. “There’s this long street, we clean it up. Couple of weeks later, it’s trashed up again. I get a lotta guys that go, ‘What are we doing out here?’ I say to ’em, ‘We’ll come back here, let ’em see our work.’‘Sarge, they’ll tear it up again.’‘Well, that’s our job. Get the trash outta the street, clear the street, make this place a little better.’ But they don’t understand.”

Wolfowitz stood by Johnson’s bed, listening. An aide handed him a copy of Time, the issue that featured the American soldier as Person of the Year. Wolfowitz signed it to a “true American hero,” and then leaned over the hospital bed and looked Johnson in the eye. “I’ll tell you, no matter what people think about the war, ninety-eight per cent of them love our soldiers,” he said. “Period. It’s really the truth. So don’t confuse the fight about the policy for the people. I’m sure we’re going to win, and one day people will feel about you guys the way we feel about the guys who won World War Two. The world didn’t look so great in 1945-46. It took a little while to get it done. You’re getting it done.’’

And so it went, room by room, unit by unit. In one darkened room, a soldier with the build of an offensive lineman lay unconscious, his bare feet extending from the sheet covering his gurney. His wife stood at his side. When Wolfowitz entered the room, she smiled and reported the latest update from the doctors. Then she began to talk about her husband’s long deployment, growing more emotional as she spoke. “Six months is one thing,” she said, “but a year, which usually becomes thirteen or fourteen months, is just too much.” As she began to cry, an aide closed the door, and Wolfowitz spent several minutes with her privately.

Later that day, Wolfowitz flew by helicopter to Wiesbaden, for a ceremony marking the return of the 1st Armored Division. It was a large and clamorous event, attended by, among others, the American Ambassador to Germany, Daniel Coats; the Army Chief of Staff, General Peter Schoomaker; and the V Corps commander, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez. Such homecomings are always cause for celebration, but the return of the 1st Armored Division bore special significance. Old Ironsides, as the division calls itself, is perhaps the most put-upon unit in the war. It had rolled into Iraq just after the end of major combat operations, and was assigned the tough sectors of Baghdad, among them Sadr City. When the division’s yearlong deployment ended, last spring, some of its units were packed and were waiting at the airfield for the flight back to Germany. Then the division’s commander, Major General Martin E. Dempsey, broke the bad news: the sudden upsurge in fighting required more force, and the division’s deployment had been extended. Everyone knew what that meant: some of the men who had made it through a year in Iraq now stood a chance of not returning home whole, or at all. Adam Replogle was one of those soldiers.

Wolfowitz made one other stop that day. It was in Würzburg, at the headquarters of the 1st Infantry Division (the Big Red One). The division’s commander, Major General John R. S. Batiste, had been Wolfowitz’s military adviser at the Pentagon, and is currently deployed in Iraq. Wolfowitz had visited Batiste in January, before the division moved out, and the atmosphere had been pointedly gung ho. Batiste had adopted as the division’s motto a quote from F.D.R., which he felt captured the Big Red One’s attitude toward its coming mission in Iraq: “When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until it has struck before you crush him.”

“The Secretary will love that quote,” Wolfowitz had told Batiste.

Wolfowitz had seen Batiste again in June, this time in Iraq, at the division’s forward post, near Tikrit. The mood was more subdued then, and Batiste had adopted a new motto, this one, as it happens, from Gerald Ford: “There is no way we can go forward except together, and no way anybody can win except by serving the people’s urgent needs. We cannot stand still or slip backwards. We must go forward now together.’’ The words reflected the then emerging exit strategy, which was to set up an Iraqi government and an Iraqi security force to fight the insurgency, allowing the Americans to pull back and, eventually, to withdraw.

Now, in Würzburg, the headquarters staff was reduced to a skeletal rear detachment. Still, at a luncheon given in Wolfowitz’s honor, the large ballroom was packed, filled with the spouses and family members left behind. Following the custom of their tightly insular culture, the women betrayed no indication of anxiety over their men “down-range,” as they refer to the battlefield of Iraq. They chatted gaily about the food, catered by a favorite local restaurant, and talked about their children. Wolfowitz showed them a video recorded by the First Lady, and they reacted with a standing ovation. Then he took questions. One woman asked whether anything could be done about the long deployments. The Pentagon is working on it, Wolfowitz assured her. Finally, someone asked, How will this war be won? What will victory look like?

Wolfowitz responded that in January Iraq will hold elections. The resulting transitional government will write a permanent constitution. That government will run Iraq for a year, until elections at the end of 2005 produce a permanent, fully independent government. By then, he said, American forces will have trained several Iraqi Army divisions and, equally important, fifty or more battalions of the Iraqi National Guard, the domestic stability force. Reaching down to the table and knocking wood, Wolfowitz mentioned recent progress in regard to the National Guard, noting the Iraqis’ participation in the wresting of Samarra from the insurgents’ control.

While the retaking of Samarra was indeed a welcome event, it may not be a wholly accurate measure of the progress being made by Iraqi forces. The key Iraqi unit in Samarra, the 36th Battalion, was the same one that in August prevailed in Najaf, and it was the only Iraqi unit that did not flee during the Falluja uprising last spring. The 36th Battalion, however, is exceptional. It is composed of fighting forces loyal to various political factions, mostly Kurdish, and it was American policy for much of the first year of the occupation to discourage the development of such units, for fear of losing control of them.

Wolfowitz spoke of the September visit to Washington by the interim Iraqi Prime Minister, Ayad Allawi. He quoted at length from Allawi’s optimistic speech to a joint session of Congress, which Wolfowitz said had been characterized by some members of Congress as one of the best speeches ever delivered on the floor of the House.



Wolfowitz did not discuss a meeting between Allawi and President Bush during that visit, in which the Iraqi Prime Minister had been less optimistic. Allawi had spoken to the President about the conundrum facing him and the coalition: the insurgency required forceful action, but any forceful action by coalition troops would underline the negative impression of an occupation, thus fuelling the insurgency. Allawi asked the President to provide more training of Iraqi troops and more equipment.

The day after Wolfowitz left Washington on this trip, Allawi had sent, via the American Embassy, a letter to Bush. In it, he again spoke insistently about the situation in Iraq on the ground. The American training program, he said, was fine, but it was proceeding too slowly; the bulk of trained and equipped Iraqi forces would not be ready until well after the January elections, Allawi said, “which is simply too late.” Allawi said that he and the coalition needed an expanded plan for Iraqi forces, “to be implemented now.” He said that Iraq had to make a visible and effective show of force, and reminded Bush of what he had told him in Washington—that Iraq needed at least two trained and equipped Iraqi mechanized divisions. It was a huge request.

American commanders have been hesitant to provide Iraqis with tanks, arguing that the Iraqis are not yet ready for them. Wolfowitz, noting that American forces are glad to have the armored-tank protection for themselves, has said that he thinks the Iraqis will get at least a mechanized brigade fairly soon.

In his letter, Allawi asked Bush to convene a summit this month in Baghdad, with an American delegation headed by Wolfowitz. Such a high-profile meeting just weeks before the American election was unlikely, and the proposal may simply have been Allawi’s way of prodding the Administration. In any case, he was visited in Baghdad the following week by Donald Rumsfeld, who was in the region for a meeting with his commanders.

After leaving Iraq, Rumsfeld travelled to Romania for a NATO meeting. Discussing Allawi’s request for tanks, he proposed a characteristically Rumsfeldian solution. The new members of nato—those countries which Rumsfeld once called the “new Europe”—had been members of the old Warsaw Pact, which had a surplus of Soviet weapons. One way they could help, Rumsfeld suggested, was by supplying their Soviet-era tanks to the fledgling Iraqi Army.



The big miscalculation underlying the American-led intervention in Iraq was that the enemy would recognize defeat, and submit. When the Administration was faced with an insurgency, a new calculation—one that was advocated by Wolfowitz—was made: putting an Iraqi imprimatur on the mission would defuse the insurgency. The first step was the hastened transfer of sovereignty, last June. Yet the insurgency rages on, and Allawi worries about appearing to be an American puppet. Although he assured President Bush in his letter that he had “absolutely no intention” of changing his convictions or policies, he warned, “I am concerned by the concerted effort by some Iraqis and foreigners to paint my government as too close to the US and her allies.” He went on, “This is likely to get worse as elections approach, and makes it harder to rebuild political unity and to isolate the insurgents.” Now the Bush war policy depends upon a final calculation—that an Iraqi security force can be made strong enough, soon enough, to allow the mostly American multinational force to recede.

Wolfowitz seems more confident about this prospect than Allawi does. Speaking in Germany to the spouses of the 1st Infantry Division’s soldiers, Wolfowitz said, “I think you’re going to see a major change over the course of the next six months or a year.” He said he hoped that progress with the Iraqi force might go even faster than expected. “At the moment, we’re just planning for the worst,” he said. Then he added, “But a lot of good should happen this coming year.”

Peter J. Boyer has been a New Yorker staff writer since 1992.

Copyright © 2004 The New Yorker

Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel : A Real Woman

Tom Lehrer, my favorite satirist, retired while he was at the top of his game. His final album—"That Was The Year That Was" (1965)—contained a song entitled "Alma." What follows is Lehrer's introduction, the lyrics of "Alma" (Lehrer played a Viennese waltz tune.), and Lehrer's closing remarks about marriage. All are classics. Just recently, a book about Alma's marriage to Gutav Mahler was reviewed in the The Sunday Telegraph and the book verifies Tom Lehrer's unerring satirical accuracy. If this is (fair & balanced) connubial nonsense, so be it.

Tom Lehrer's "Alma"

Last December 13th, there appeared in the newspapers the juiciest, spiciest, raciest obituary that has ever been my pleasure to read. it was that of a lady name Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel who had in her lifetime, managed to acquire as lovers practically all of the top creative men in central Europe, and, among these lovers, who were listed in the obituary, by the way, which was what made it interesting, there were three whom she went so far as to marry.

One of the leading composers of the day: Gustav Mahler, composer of "Das Lied von der Erde" and other light classics. One of the leading architects: Walter Gropius of the Bauhaus School of design. One of the leading writers: Franz Werfel, author of "The Song of Bernadette" and other masterpieces. it's people like that who make you realize how little you've accomplished. it is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years. It seemed to me, in reading this obituary, that the story of Alma was the stuff of which ballads should be made. So here is a modest example.


Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel [Click on image to enlarge.] 

The loveliest girl in Vienna
Was Alma, the smartest as well.
Once you picked her up on your antenna,
You'd never be free of her spell.

Her lovers were many and varied,
From the day she began her -- beguine.
There were three famous ones whom she married,
And God knows how many between.

Alma, tell us!
All modern women are jealous.
Which of your magical wands
Got you Gustav and Walter and Franz?

The first one she married was Mahler,
Whose buddies all knew him as Gustav.
And each time he saw her he'd holler:
"ach, that is the fraulein I moost have!"

Their marriage, however, was murder.
He'd scream to the heavens above,
"I'm writing 'Das Lied von der Erde,'
And she only wants to make love!"

Alma, tell us!
All modern women are jealous.
You should have a statue in bronze
For bagging Gustav and Walter and Franz.

While married to Gus, she met Gropius,
And soon she was swinging with Walter.
Gus died, and her tear drops were copious.
She cried all the way to the altar.

But he would work late at the Bauhaus,
And only came home now and then.
She said, "what am I running? a chow house?
It's time to change parters again."

Alma, tell us!
All modern women are jealous.
Though you didn't even use Ponds,
You got Gustav and Walter and Franz.

While married to Walt she'd met Werfel,
And he too was caught in her net.
He married her, but he was carefell,
'cause Alma was no Bernadette.

And that is the story of Alma,
Who knew how to receive and to give.
The body that reached her embalma'
Was one that had known how to live.

Alma, tell us!
How can they help being jealous?
Ducks always envy the swans
Who get Gustav and Walter,
You never did falter,
With Gustav and Walter and Franz.

I know some people feel that marriage as an institution is dying out, but I disagree and the point was driven home to me rather forcefully not long ago by a letter I received which said: "Dearest, I love you and I cannot live without you. Marry me, or I will kill myself." Well, I was a little disturbed at that until I took another look at the envelope and saw that it was addressed "Occupant."

Speaking of love, one problem that recurs more and more frequently these days in books, plays, and movies, is the inability of people to communicate with the people they love. Husbands and wives who can't communicate; children who can't communicate with their parents, and so on. And the characters in these books, and plays, and so on, and in real life, I might add, spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can't communicate. I feel that if a person can't communicate the very least he can do is to shut up.


[x The Sunday Telegraph]
Mahler's meddling wife
by Tom Payne

Review of Gustav Mahler: Letters to His Wife.


From his childhood, Gustav Mahler's life clanged with the sound of the lofty and the banal colliding. He recalled listening to a military band, too distracted to notice he'd peed in his pants. He disrupted the singing of a cantor in the synagogue by yelling, "That's horrible!" and requesting a nursery song. It explains why he produced sublime movements in his symphonies, only to send them up in the following movement; why he makes trombones rasp and clarinets caw.

So it was with the crisis of his life. When he was preparing for the premiere of his eighth symphony – a glorious hymn to creation, unscathed by his uglifying urges – he became a cuckold.

His wife, Alma Mahler, wasn't a liar, exactly. In her version of the story, Mahler knew about Walter Gropius's devotion to her before the affair began. But her memoirs of life with Mahler are full of inaccuracies and distortions. In this edition of Mahler's letters to his wife, which includes much new material, Antony Beaumont is able to correct many of these blemishes. He is fairly courteous about the corrections and concludes that "by the time she sat down to write [her memoirs], her recollections of people, places and events had themselves parted company with reality".

But Alma's treatment of the letters shows that she could edit the truth quite actively. When she published them after Mahler's death, she suppressed a phrase or paragraph here, a postcard, telegram or whole letter there. This book prints them all. Beaumont is used to this kind of restoration: with Susanne Rode-Breymann, he managed to make magnificent sense of Alma's scrawly, doctored diaries. (They are still revealing their secrets – as we learn here, in one entry she referred to her daughters as brats, only later deciding that "children" was a better word.)

So, although we don't have Alma's letters, we can learn about her through what she decided to conceal in Mahler's. She took out the sentences in which Mahler complained she had forgotten to pack his comb or demanded to know why a manuscript hadn't reached him in the post. Sometimes it looks like she took out the boring bits.

Except that the boring bits tell their own story. Before they married – when Mahler was nearly twice Alma's age – he wrote her a long, self-conflicting but candid letter dealing with her own ambitions as a composer. On the one hand he wrote: "I don't want you to believe that I take that philistine view of marital relationships which sees a woman as some sort of diversion, with additional duties as her husband's housekeeper." On the other he told her: "The role of the `composer', the `bread-winner', is mine; yours is that of the loving partner, the sympathetic comrade." He conceded that it was a lot to ask, but Alma acquiesced.

Still, she didn't want to be remembered as Mahler's skivvy, or as a dumb beauty. She took out lines such as "If there's anything you don't understand in [Holderlin], you must ask me." These alterations might have stopped Mahler looking like a patronising nag, but one could already surmise that he was inept at handling his young, wilful spouse. When he failed to buy her a birthday present, he wrote: "What more can one give, when one has already given oneself?" Considering the sacrifices she'd made for him, you'd think a nice hat would have been a start.

The reader can make what he wants of the quotidian details that emerge from this correspondence – sometimes they're revealing, sometimes they're not. But one approach towards the book as a whole is to think of it as a Mahler symphony – it starts off with bold statements announced by a large orchestra, settles into chunks of fugues, alarms and excursions, and ends with affirmations of faith and visions of heaven. The desperate love the composer expressed in his last letters are the consequence of the strident defining of terms with which he began the marriage.

Beaumont does an excellent job of commenting on the letters. He doesn't intrude, preferring to rely on other sources to fill in the narrative rather than improvising it himself. And although the letters can only hint at their author's swings from triumph to trauma, we do at last have the whole sequence. The best way to serve Mahler is to skip nothing. As he remarked to Sibelius: "A symphony must be like the world. It must be all-embracing."

Copyright © 2004 The Telegraph Group Limited