By the time you read this, sixty-five years ago today, we had finally secured a tiny beachhead on the shores of Western Europe. We would be pinned down there for six more weeks before we could break out into central France.
The first thing Americans should realize about D-Day—and all of World War II—was that it was a joint effort. Our major contribution to the entire war was industrial. Not in the least to insult the gallant men and boys who fought and died, but it would be very fair to say that Rosie the Riveter did more to win that war for us than all the GIs in uniform.
Russians rode American tanks all the way to Berlin. They fired American weapons and ate American Spam. (They thought it was wonderful stuff.) They lost twenty million dead and held down most of the German army, but their heart’s blood flowed north in an endless line of American trucks from the southern coast of Iran.
Those truckers—by keeping Russia in the fight—did as much to win World War II as any military unit. As did the naval convoys around the coast of Norway, braving Arctic storms, German torpedoes and aerial bombs that also poured supplies into Russia.
British and French troops who fled the continent after Dunkirk, four years before D-Day, were immediately rearmed with American rifles and cannon. As Churchill put it, without the American supplies the British would have been forced to use empty beer bottles to repulse German invaders during the Blitz.
(After his marvelous speech, “we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender”, Churchill put his hand over the microphone and said, “We shall hit them over the head with beer bottles as they crawl ashore. We’ve nothing else to work with.”)
Even Tito relied on American supplies air dropped into Yugoslavia where the Serb partisans were engaged in desperate war against a huge German army augmented by Bosnian Waffen SS. American cargo planes regularly landed on empty fields in occupied France bringing in munitions for the underground resistance.
A huge fleet of American cargo planes flew guns, ammunition and supplies over the Burma mountains to keep the beleaguered Chinese in the war against Japan. Philippino guerillas got their supplies with stickers promising that “I shall return”.
We had begun preparing our fleet for World War ten years before D-Day. Long before war was declared a vast American naval umbrella covered most of the Atlantic, firing on German U-boats that tried to stop supplies from reaching England. (Hitler, not daring to shoot back, stuck strictly to the laws of neutrality —and we had a free pass until Pearl Harbor.)
(It was an American coast guard cutter on a “routine” mission near the English Channel that sighted the German battleship Bismarck and notified the British of its location so that they could sink it.)
Our factories won that war. A Japanese industrialist got hold of some pirated figures on American ship building in April, 1942—only five months after Pearl Harbor, before Corregidor surrendered in the Philippines—and he was so stunned at the scale of American production he immediately began planning for life after the war in a defeated Japan.
Rosie the Riveter should have been standing on the Normandy shore with President Obama. She must be in her eighties now, too. Has anybody made an effort to track the number of veterans who manned our factories, how many are still alive, how many die each year?
They made it possible to fight a very smart war with relatively few casualties and no damage at home. We paid other people to do most of the dying. The British lost millions; the Russians lost tens of millions, the Chinese had huge losses. We lost barely a third of a million.
As late as August, 1944—three months after D-Day—the British Empire had more men fighting the Axis than we did. England took her money and built new factories all over the Depression wracked United States because we were out of bombing range.
We dominated the planet with those British-built factories for decades after the war. No nation in recorded history has enjoyed such a preponderance of power as we did in the 1940s, ‘50s’ and ‘60s. That power, wealth and rank came out of World War II.
By contrast, Britain was bankrupt, unable to hang on to her empire. The French could only helplessly watch their Empire drift away. Holland lost her empire. The Russians were ruined (imagine the US with everything burned down east of the Mississippi), China was too weak to withstand the Communists, Belgium’s empire slid away—only America stood tall, powerful and rich.
That glorious American future all turned on D-Day. The men on the beaches—and the men and women who built their munitions—won a future for their nation no Roman Emperor or British King could ever have imagined.
D-Day was the hinge upon which the door of the future turned. It is fitting that the American president who faces the next door to the future was in Normandy on the Sixty-fifth anniversary of the last one.
He faces a world in which we must do our own bleeding and dying—increasingly alone and without reliable allies. Our industry is moving off-shore so rapidly we cannot count the losses. We couldn’t “do” another World War II.
Salute the old; look forward to the new. Understand what created the old; try to see what we can do wisely in the new—leaning on our comprehension of the past. For the first time in sixty-five years we actually NEED other people.
We do need a little help from our friends. We first may need to MAKE some friends. Buy them, flatter them, whatever it may require. D-Day might actually a very good moment for introspection. If we got to know ourselves, what we do well, what we don’t do well—this would be the best lesson we could learn from that glorious day so long ago.
Saturday, June 6, 2009
D-Day: So Important, So Long Ago
Today was the longest day. Sixty-five years ago. It was supposed to be the fourth of June—and the Germans were ready for us. We tried again on the fifth—and the Germans were still ready. On the sixth they all stood down, the weather was too bad. We had better weather reports—we slipped in through a few short hours lull in the storm.
Rommel had even taken a vacation—he wasn’t near the beach. Hitler was napping—no one dared to wake him to get him to free up the panzers for a counterattack. The Russians were doing their bit by holding down two-thirds or more of the German Army, which they did for the whole war.
Even so it was a close thing. By late afternoon the Allied high command was seriously considering pulling all the troops off the beach and calling it a failure. Ike had a speech in his pocket in which he admitted to defeat and took all the blame.
We won through—and on to Paris, the Rhine, all the way to the Elbe and southeast as far as Prague. It was the last war we won (unless you count the invasion of Granada). Even it had its political detractors. Eisenhower was accused of being a communist stooge because he didn’t go all the way to Berlin.
Oh my. Ike was clever enough to realize that when you have two armies (Russian and American) rolling hell for leather straight at each other, shooting at anything that moves, it is very, very tricky to keep them from accidentally shooting each other to pieces.
So he and the Russian high command picked a nice big river for both armies to stop at. “When you see lots and lots of water, don’t shoot at ANYTHING on the other side.” That’s an order the dumbest private can understand.
It wasn’t a communist plot; it was a sane effort on both sides to keep World War III from breaking out before World War II was over. And it was a wonderful victory. It was followed in four months by an equally important surrender in the Pacific. We were ecstatic.
My daddy, my wife’s daddy and a few uncles and two of my older cousins were coming home! No more yellow stars on living room windows to tell the passerby some boy who lived here would not be back home forever more. The rows of white crosses would not continue to grow.
That Victory in Europe (VE Day) all started on the beaches of Normandy. Had the invasion failed, we would live in an unrecognizably different world. Would the Russians have driven all the way to Paris? Would the “Soviet Block” have included every country in NATO but Italy and Britain?
D-Day HAD to succeed. There’s an outside chance that failure might have led to some sort of negotiated peace with Germany—if only to keep the Russians out of western Europe. (The Germans had played that role for over a thousand years—it would have been nothing new to them.)
Then the Nazis might have stayed in power; the death camps might have gone on killing. Can you imagine NATO with Nazi Germany as a member? Had D-Day failed, it might possibly have happened. We owe a lot to the young English, Scotch, French, American, Polish, Canadian, and Northern Irish troops who bled and died to create the world we live in today.
We call it the “good war”, but to the boys who fought it, it was as terrifying, brutish and deadly as any other war. If you asked an American boy what he was fighting for he was liable to say, “A piece of mom’s apple pie.”
The men on the front were no more epic, noble or committed to a glorious cause (democracy, the four freedoms?) then front line troops in almost any war. It was a frightening, exhausting, dangerous job, and they did it well enough to win it. We owe them.
They had the awesome resources of American industry behind them. A storm came up about three weeks after D-Day. It destroyed so much American equipment that, as Churchill points out, had any other participant in World War II lost so much material in a single day, they would have forced to sue for peace immediately.
We didn’t miss a step. Our factories supplied the boys on D-Day, in Italy and the Philippines, the British, the Russians, the Free French, all of the underground operations, the Chinese and anyone else who had a rifle pointed at Japan or Germany. For the whole war.
When we broke out of the D-Day beach head in July, German officers watched in awe and envy as the masses of American bombers flew in support of unending quantities of American tanks, trucks and jeeps. They had never begun to have such resources. Not ever.
The boys who fought at D-Day are old men today. They and the other veterans of our last “good, victorious war” are dying at the rate of a thousand a day. In not long there will be as few of them as the tiny group of Civil War veterans I remember seeing as a boy.
The factories that won World War II are falling down, too. One of the biggest foundries in this area now has a retail mall sitting where it once stood. The railroad tracks in downtown Muskegon still run along the lakeshore where dozens of foundries stood, making engine blocks for tanks, and trucks. They are all gone.
(I sometimes wonder: if we ever again get into a war where huge amounts of trucks and tanks are needed, are we going to import them from Japan and China? Not to worry? Penske has bought up the distribution—NOT the manufacturing capabilities, they’ll go to someone else—chain for Saturn. Perhaps Renault will build them. In a war, no doubt France would be delighted to go on shipping us trucks and military vehicles. We hope.)
But for today, we can celebrate one of our last unambiguous victories. The old men and the young president gather before row upon row of white crosses. For many it may be their last salute. So salute them back—we owe them.
Rommel had even taken a vacation—he wasn’t near the beach. Hitler was napping—no one dared to wake him to get him to free up the panzers for a counterattack. The Russians were doing their bit by holding down two-thirds or more of the German Army, which they did for the whole war.
Even so it was a close thing. By late afternoon the Allied high command was seriously considering pulling all the troops off the beach and calling it a failure. Ike had a speech in his pocket in which he admitted to defeat and took all the blame.
We won through—and on to Paris, the Rhine, all the way to the Elbe and southeast as far as Prague. It was the last war we won (unless you count the invasion of Granada). Even it had its political detractors. Eisenhower was accused of being a communist stooge because he didn’t go all the way to Berlin.
Oh my. Ike was clever enough to realize that when you have two armies (Russian and American) rolling hell for leather straight at each other, shooting at anything that moves, it is very, very tricky to keep them from accidentally shooting each other to pieces.
So he and the Russian high command picked a nice big river for both armies to stop at. “When you see lots and lots of water, don’t shoot at ANYTHING on the other side.” That’s an order the dumbest private can understand.
It wasn’t a communist plot; it was a sane effort on both sides to keep World War III from breaking out before World War II was over. And it was a wonderful victory. It was followed in four months by an equally important surrender in the Pacific. We were ecstatic.
My daddy, my wife’s daddy and a few uncles and two of my older cousins were coming home! No more yellow stars on living room windows to tell the passerby some boy who lived here would not be back home forever more. The rows of white crosses would not continue to grow.
That Victory in Europe (VE Day) all started on the beaches of Normandy. Had the invasion failed, we would live in an unrecognizably different world. Would the Russians have driven all the way to Paris? Would the “Soviet Block” have included every country in NATO but Italy and Britain?
D-Day HAD to succeed. There’s an outside chance that failure might have led to some sort of negotiated peace with Germany—if only to keep the Russians out of western Europe. (The Germans had played that role for over a thousand years—it would have been nothing new to them.)
Then the Nazis might have stayed in power; the death camps might have gone on killing. Can you imagine NATO with Nazi Germany as a member? Had D-Day failed, it might possibly have happened. We owe a lot to the young English, Scotch, French, American, Polish, Canadian, and Northern Irish troops who bled and died to create the world we live in today.
We call it the “good war”, but to the boys who fought it, it was as terrifying, brutish and deadly as any other war. If you asked an American boy what he was fighting for he was liable to say, “A piece of mom’s apple pie.”
The men on the front were no more epic, noble or committed to a glorious cause (democracy, the four freedoms?) then front line troops in almost any war. It was a frightening, exhausting, dangerous job, and they did it well enough to win it. We owe them.
They had the awesome resources of American industry behind them. A storm came up about three weeks after D-Day. It destroyed so much American equipment that, as Churchill points out, had any other participant in World War II lost so much material in a single day, they would have forced to sue for peace immediately.
We didn’t miss a step. Our factories supplied the boys on D-Day, in Italy and the Philippines, the British, the Russians, the Free French, all of the underground operations, the Chinese and anyone else who had a rifle pointed at Japan or Germany. For the whole war.
When we broke out of the D-Day beach head in July, German officers watched in awe and envy as the masses of American bombers flew in support of unending quantities of American tanks, trucks and jeeps. They had never begun to have such resources. Not ever.
The boys who fought at D-Day are old men today. They and the other veterans of our last “good, victorious war” are dying at the rate of a thousand a day. In not long there will be as few of them as the tiny group of Civil War veterans I remember seeing as a boy.
The factories that won World War II are falling down, too. One of the biggest foundries in this area now has a retail mall sitting where it once stood. The railroad tracks in downtown Muskegon still run along the lakeshore where dozens of foundries stood, making engine blocks for tanks, and trucks. They are all gone.
(I sometimes wonder: if we ever again get into a war where huge amounts of trucks and tanks are needed, are we going to import them from Japan and China? Not to worry? Penske has bought up the distribution—NOT the manufacturing capabilities, they’ll go to someone else—chain for Saturn. Perhaps Renault will build them. In a war, no doubt France would be delighted to go on shipping us trucks and military vehicles. We hope.)
But for today, we can celebrate one of our last unambiguous victories. The old men and the young president gather before row upon row of white crosses. For many it may be their last salute. So salute them back—we owe them.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Still More This and That
Right after the Air France Airbus went down in the Atlantic on its way from Sao Paulo to Paris, several talking heads appeared on television to assure us that today’s aircraft simply cannot be shot down by turbulence or lightning strikes.
One of the experts opined that there was at least a 50% likelihood that a terrorist’s bomb had brought the plane down. It was SO unlikely that a storm could have done it. Of course, today we are told that a similar flight was threatened by an anonymous phone call in May. It might have been a bomb.
Or it might have been an all too human hubris. All the experts assured us that the Titanic wasn’t sinkable, either. What comes to my mind is some dialogue common to episode after episode of “Star Trek”.
The Enterprise would be under attack by Klingons, Romulans or some space/time anomaly. The order would go out, “Divert all power to the port shields”. And we would all wonder what might happen if somebody decided to shoot at the starboard side.
The Air France plane faced a massive, violently active storm. What if three or four major strikes hit one side—and the onboard computer reacted like the crew of Enterprise? Everything was momentarily diverted to the injured side. Then—perfect storm—three or four major hits came in on the other side.
I’ll venture no plane made could survive that. A fluke, no doubt, but a very credible fluke. A jolt with enough power to light up much of Manhattan hits an unprotected fuel tank—Amen.
Storms—like the Titanic’s iceberg—are irrational. They can step outside of computer models and do things we could never plan for or protect against. They can be huge—with power that doesn’t fit any of our contingency plans. Human ingenuity may NEVER come up with a final guarantee that something is made that cannot, ever fall prey to nature’s violence.
It is hubris to think we can. The best remedy for a storm is NOT TO FLY THROUGH IT. Even if this means turning around to Brazil. I know that costs money. But so does the liability for hundreds of dead passengers and crew members.
AUTOS: WHISTLING IN THE WIND?
Somehow there is the expectation that General Motors will come out of bankruptcy back at fighting weight and, like Sampson, it will smite all of its competitors—thus paying back the taxpayers the $50 or so billion it owes them.
Nice thought. What’s going to make the East and West coasts—which have long ago given up American cars for niftier Japanese and German cars—fall back in love with GM again? It may be a few decades too late even to try. Gen Y consumers apparently have no feelings for GM at all.
That’s the next market. Lose them and it’s like watching a dying church—where everybody inside has gray or white hair. Not a lot of future there. Another factor—I just bought gas for $1.95. It’s gone up fifty cents or more in a few weeks. That’s no way a plus for American car makers!
“BusinessWeek” brought something to my attention this week. Planetary auto sales right now are at about 55 million. World-wide auto production capacity is at 90 million. There is going to be some savage discounting and competition to start using that excess capacity!
General Motors is really not in very good shape to start wrestling in that kind of arena. It will begin the race, coming out of bankruptcy, owing—and having to make payments on—over $50 billion in debt to the government. That’s not just an albatross around the neck; that’s a five hundred pound albatross.
Those payments have to be made before a cent is paid in wages or a dime in raw materials and benefits. Let alone profits. Ouch.
There is no guarantee that GM, once out of bankruptcy will survive. Many businesses that emerge from the process don’t make it more than five years or so.
CHRYSLER/FIAT?
Now Chrysler will have all sorts of little Fiats to sell at its dealerships. And why should Americans like Fiats more than they did thirty years ago? I remember riding the circle around the Coliseum in Rome some decades ago. The cars all looked so incredibly tiny.
Then I saw what seemed to be a large vehicle. I looked again—it was a Volkswagen bug. Fiats just didn’t make it here. Furthermore, it doesn’t look like Fiat is going to win out on the bidding for Opel either. So it will just be Fiat and Chrysler—with a little help from Jeep.
Ouch. And they have their debt load, too.
Fiat apparently hasn’t made up its mind whether or not to keep the Chrysler brand on the road. What they seem to be buying is a chain of dealerships. That’s no vote of confidence.
Will the American auto industry go the way of television manufacturing, shoe making, the garment trade or, increasingly, computer manufacturing? Nothing’s impossible. Ford, anyone?
One of the experts opined that there was at least a 50% likelihood that a terrorist’s bomb had brought the plane down. It was SO unlikely that a storm could have done it. Of course, today we are told that a similar flight was threatened by an anonymous phone call in May. It might have been a bomb.
Or it might have been an all too human hubris. All the experts assured us that the Titanic wasn’t sinkable, either. What comes to my mind is some dialogue common to episode after episode of “Star Trek”.
The Enterprise would be under attack by Klingons, Romulans or some space/time anomaly. The order would go out, “Divert all power to the port shields”. And we would all wonder what might happen if somebody decided to shoot at the starboard side.
The Air France plane faced a massive, violently active storm. What if three or four major strikes hit one side—and the onboard computer reacted like the crew of Enterprise? Everything was momentarily diverted to the injured side. Then—perfect storm—three or four major hits came in on the other side.
I’ll venture no plane made could survive that. A fluke, no doubt, but a very credible fluke. A jolt with enough power to light up much of Manhattan hits an unprotected fuel tank—Amen.
Storms—like the Titanic’s iceberg—are irrational. They can step outside of computer models and do things we could never plan for or protect against. They can be huge—with power that doesn’t fit any of our contingency plans. Human ingenuity may NEVER come up with a final guarantee that something is made that cannot, ever fall prey to nature’s violence.
It is hubris to think we can. The best remedy for a storm is NOT TO FLY THROUGH IT. Even if this means turning around to Brazil. I know that costs money. But so does the liability for hundreds of dead passengers and crew members.
AUTOS: WHISTLING IN THE WIND?
Somehow there is the expectation that General Motors will come out of bankruptcy back at fighting weight and, like Sampson, it will smite all of its competitors—thus paying back the taxpayers the $50 or so billion it owes them.
Nice thought. What’s going to make the East and West coasts—which have long ago given up American cars for niftier Japanese and German cars—fall back in love with GM again? It may be a few decades too late even to try. Gen Y consumers apparently have no feelings for GM at all.
That’s the next market. Lose them and it’s like watching a dying church—where everybody inside has gray or white hair. Not a lot of future there. Another factor—I just bought gas for $1.95. It’s gone up fifty cents or more in a few weeks. That’s no way a plus for American car makers!
“BusinessWeek” brought something to my attention this week. Planetary auto sales right now are at about 55 million. World-wide auto production capacity is at 90 million. There is going to be some savage discounting and competition to start using that excess capacity!
General Motors is really not in very good shape to start wrestling in that kind of arena. It will begin the race, coming out of bankruptcy, owing—and having to make payments on—over $50 billion in debt to the government. That’s not just an albatross around the neck; that’s a five hundred pound albatross.
Those payments have to be made before a cent is paid in wages or a dime in raw materials and benefits. Let alone profits. Ouch.
There is no guarantee that GM, once out of bankruptcy will survive. Many businesses that emerge from the process don’t make it more than five years or so.
CHRYSLER/FIAT?
Now Chrysler will have all sorts of little Fiats to sell at its dealerships. And why should Americans like Fiats more than they did thirty years ago? I remember riding the circle around the Coliseum in Rome some decades ago. The cars all looked so incredibly tiny.
Then I saw what seemed to be a large vehicle. I looked again—it was a Volkswagen bug. Fiats just didn’t make it here. Furthermore, it doesn’t look like Fiat is going to win out on the bidding for Opel either. So it will just be Fiat and Chrysler—with a little help from Jeep.
Ouch. And they have their debt load, too.
Fiat apparently hasn’t made up its mind whether or not to keep the Chrysler brand on the road. What they seem to be buying is a chain of dealerships. That’s no vote of confidence.
Will the American auto industry go the way of television manufacturing, shoe making, the garment trade or, increasingly, computer manufacturing? Nothing’s impossible. Ford, anyone?
Sunday, May 31, 2009
The Man Who Came To Dinner
I have to admit that the thing I would hate most if I woke up and found myself stuck in the White House would be the sense of imprisonment. I’m a walker. I’ve walked all over Rome, New York, Beirut, Boston, Los Angeles, Athens, Grand Rapids, et cetera. That’s my exercise.
I walk. The last president who did that was Harry Truman—and he drove the secret service nuts. In this era, if a president wants to go for a walk—let alone out for pizza and a movie—it takes advance notice and planning like the D-Day Invasion. I would hate that dreadfully.
So I perfectly understand the impulse that sent the Obamas to New York for dinner in the Village and a show. I really do. But, in politics—and for a president every sneeze, sniffle and tickle becomes a political act—appearance is everything.
However limiting the need to keep up appearances may feel, it is a stark necessity for a man who is both the sovereign head of state and the national symbol to do. He or she has no choice in the matter. Before Watergate blew the lid off things, a president could serve four terms in a wheelchair (or have several mistresses) and his secret was safe.
Today’s presidents are allowed to have no secrets. There are no quiet diversions, licit or illicit. When Bill and Hillary Clinton had a few knockdown, drag out fights early in his administration, it got reported. We even know now that Richard Nixon wouldn’t take off his shoes to walk the beach.
Jimmy Carter is still held up to derision because he rowed hastily away from what may well have been a rabid rabbit—a real danger that a citified reporter probably wouldn’t have known anything about. So forth and so on.
We insist on knowing whether or not our Hollywood celebrities are wearing underwear; we go nearly as far with our presidents. We demand to know—and, on top of that, we guard them so zealously that it becomes a significant budget item if they move at all.
For President Obama to take his wife to dinner in New York—I’ve made the trip by car, plane and train many times; for a private citizen it’s not a big deal—it required flying two huge airplanes (one of them carrying his armored limousine) and scrambling some escorting air force jets.
You or I could probably make the roundtrip nearly every week for a year for the cost of his one night out. (And he really isn’t given the choice to use public transportation or his own car.) That’s a lot of tax payers’ dollars for one dinner, one show.
He also picked an unfortunate weekend. General Motors is poised to enter bankruptcy just this following Monday morning. Tens of thousands—to millions—of American wage-earners are caught in a sudden, so recently, unimaginable limbo by this.
Vast wage pools, huge tax bases, all up in the air. No one can say for certain where it will all come down or in what form or on whose back. Fifty years ago GM was featured on the cover of TIME magazine as the ultimate corporation—twice the size of any other in the world.
Now, in a development that Ralph Nader concedes would have been beyond his “wildest imagination”, GM is going broke. It will shed nameplates; it will close factories and dealerships; it will shed workers and cut wages and/or benefits for the survivors.
As people with experience with bankrupt corporations will tell you, even among those companies who come out the other side of Chapter 11 still alive, many often don’t last another five years. For a nation that won the last World War simply by outproducing everyone else, the fall of General Motors is not a small thing! We have no idea what the ultimate consequences may be.
It is a truly ghastly moment in American corporate history. As a catastrophe it probably outstrips Pearl Harbor. June 1st may well become another infamous day to remember.
In short, the thought of the president and his lady spending huge amounts of money to go out for a single evening just before this bankruptcy suggests a “tin ear” in a politician. Surprising in a man who won so skillfully last year.
There is almost the feeling of a Nero fiddling while Rome crashes and burns around him. That is not a wise image for a politician to cultivate. It just might come back to haunt Mr. Obama.
Some other evening when the news is not so dire. Or, drive the secret service nuts—take a walk. Have a pizza in Georgetown. Take in a movie there or a show in Washington. Do what a smart businessman does—find a business reason to travel to New York. Then go to a show.
Much as I’m sympathetic with the desire to escape 1600 Pennsylvania, this was a misstep.
I walk. The last president who did that was Harry Truman—and he drove the secret service nuts. In this era, if a president wants to go for a walk—let alone out for pizza and a movie—it takes advance notice and planning like the D-Day Invasion. I would hate that dreadfully.
So I perfectly understand the impulse that sent the Obamas to New York for dinner in the Village and a show. I really do. But, in politics—and for a president every sneeze, sniffle and tickle becomes a political act—appearance is everything.
However limiting the need to keep up appearances may feel, it is a stark necessity for a man who is both the sovereign head of state and the national symbol to do. He or she has no choice in the matter. Before Watergate blew the lid off things, a president could serve four terms in a wheelchair (or have several mistresses) and his secret was safe.
Today’s presidents are allowed to have no secrets. There are no quiet diversions, licit or illicit. When Bill and Hillary Clinton had a few knockdown, drag out fights early in his administration, it got reported. We even know now that Richard Nixon wouldn’t take off his shoes to walk the beach.
Jimmy Carter is still held up to derision because he rowed hastily away from what may well have been a rabid rabbit—a real danger that a citified reporter probably wouldn’t have known anything about. So forth and so on.
We insist on knowing whether or not our Hollywood celebrities are wearing underwear; we go nearly as far with our presidents. We demand to know—and, on top of that, we guard them so zealously that it becomes a significant budget item if they move at all.
For President Obama to take his wife to dinner in New York—I’ve made the trip by car, plane and train many times; for a private citizen it’s not a big deal—it required flying two huge airplanes (one of them carrying his armored limousine) and scrambling some escorting air force jets.
You or I could probably make the roundtrip nearly every week for a year for the cost of his one night out. (And he really isn’t given the choice to use public transportation or his own car.) That’s a lot of tax payers’ dollars for one dinner, one show.
He also picked an unfortunate weekend. General Motors is poised to enter bankruptcy just this following Monday morning. Tens of thousands—to millions—of American wage-earners are caught in a sudden, so recently, unimaginable limbo by this.
Vast wage pools, huge tax bases, all up in the air. No one can say for certain where it will all come down or in what form or on whose back. Fifty years ago GM was featured on the cover of TIME magazine as the ultimate corporation—twice the size of any other in the world.
Now, in a development that Ralph Nader concedes would have been beyond his “wildest imagination”, GM is going broke. It will shed nameplates; it will close factories and dealerships; it will shed workers and cut wages and/or benefits for the survivors.
As people with experience with bankrupt corporations will tell you, even among those companies who come out the other side of Chapter 11 still alive, many often don’t last another five years. For a nation that won the last World War simply by outproducing everyone else, the fall of General Motors is not a small thing! We have no idea what the ultimate consequences may be.
It is a truly ghastly moment in American corporate history. As a catastrophe it probably outstrips Pearl Harbor. June 1st may well become another infamous day to remember.
In short, the thought of the president and his lady spending huge amounts of money to go out for a single evening just before this bankruptcy suggests a “tin ear” in a politician. Surprising in a man who won so skillfully last year.
There is almost the feeling of a Nero fiddling while Rome crashes and burns around him. That is not a wise image for a politician to cultivate. It just might come back to haunt Mr. Obama.
Some other evening when the news is not so dire. Or, drive the secret service nuts—take a walk. Have a pizza in Georgetown. Take in a movie there or a show in Washington. Do what a smart businessman does—find a business reason to travel to New York. Then go to a show.
Much as I’m sympathetic with the desire to escape 1600 Pennsylvania, this was a misstep.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
More Auto Woes
I recently talked to a friend of mine who is a plant engineer at an auto parts supplier in this area. His shop laid off a large part of its workforce last January. He tells me that the lights are turned out in half the plant; the machines stand idle.
“How are you surviving?” I asked.
“A couple of major office furniture manufacturers in the area have decided that they are going to see a huge demand for new office chairs. So the wing of our plant that makes office furniture is keeping us going.” He shrugged, “I don’t know where they are going to find bottoms to fill those chairs, but it pays the bills for now.”
“How long do you think that will last?”
He squinted his eyes. “I kind of think reality will set in sometime next fall. But, until then … .”
It came as no big surprise to me when I read through this week’s issue of “BusinessWeek” and learned that the lack on sales in the auto business is squeezing parts suppliers toward bankruptcy. This could leave restructured auto companies left with too few parts to build cars with.
The suggestion was raised that as soon as the government is finished bailing out what’s left of General Motors and Chrysler, it may have to go bail out some major parts makers. Compared to the banks, that’s just a few billions—but, as the old saying goes, “a billion dollars here; a billion dollars there—that can add up to real money.”
General Motors is braced to enter bankruptcy proceedings in a day or two. Even though all sorts of creditors, unions and bond holders are agreeing to major losses, it looks like Chapter 11 will be inevitable.
And now the heavy hitters are at the plate trying to turn an amalgam of Chrysler, Fiat and Opel into a single entity. Chrysler I know about—it’s been teetering at death’s door for half a century. Fiat has always had problems building cars that ran better than the Italian Army.
But Opel? They’ve been making cars since 1898; they were once the largest auto maker in Germany (back in 1913). General Motors bought them out in 1929-31. As a GM brand they’ve competed successfully against the likes of Volkswagen, Audi, and BMW for decades. At one point, in the 1980s, they were the biggest GM brand in Japan.
They came back from the rubble of World War II (Hitler once decorated a GM vice president for his contributions to the mechanized Wehrmacht) and again competed throughout Europe very successfully. In some countries Chevrolet models were sold as Opels.
How did GM let this brand go to the point that it needs to be sold? This will certainly cut back on General Motor’s presence as an international brand! Can people who have let Saturn, Opel, Oldsmobile and (soon) Pontiac go to smash be trusted to run anything?
The people who are trying to meld Opel into a Chrysler/Fiat merger feel that only if the three are together can any one of them survive. You need to be huge to survive in today’s auto market. Remember when General Motors was the hugest of all?
For now, whole factories (and their towns) in Germany are left as desolate as Detroit. My friend, here in Michigan, goes on setting up machines to build furniture for new offices that may never materialize.
Americans all over the map are deciding not to afford cars that easily cost as much as a nice house did only a few decades ago. We may not have seen the end of the auto shakeout yet.
We can only hope that when GM comes out of bankruptcy it can find a way to see lots and lots of the brands it still has left—and find the parts companies to build them with. Ditto for FiatOpelChrysler—and Ford--and, for that matter, all those Japanese auto factories in Tennessee and Alabama.
I just don’t think the “fat lady” has sung yet.
“How are you surviving?” I asked.
“A couple of major office furniture manufacturers in the area have decided that they are going to see a huge demand for new office chairs. So the wing of our plant that makes office furniture is keeping us going.” He shrugged, “I don’t know where they are going to find bottoms to fill those chairs, but it pays the bills for now.”
“How long do you think that will last?”
He squinted his eyes. “I kind of think reality will set in sometime next fall. But, until then … .”
It came as no big surprise to me when I read through this week’s issue of “BusinessWeek” and learned that the lack on sales in the auto business is squeezing parts suppliers toward bankruptcy. This could leave restructured auto companies left with too few parts to build cars with.
The suggestion was raised that as soon as the government is finished bailing out what’s left of General Motors and Chrysler, it may have to go bail out some major parts makers. Compared to the banks, that’s just a few billions—but, as the old saying goes, “a billion dollars here; a billion dollars there—that can add up to real money.”
General Motors is braced to enter bankruptcy proceedings in a day or two. Even though all sorts of creditors, unions and bond holders are agreeing to major losses, it looks like Chapter 11 will be inevitable.
And now the heavy hitters are at the plate trying to turn an amalgam of Chrysler, Fiat and Opel into a single entity. Chrysler I know about—it’s been teetering at death’s door for half a century. Fiat has always had problems building cars that ran better than the Italian Army.
But Opel? They’ve been making cars since 1898; they were once the largest auto maker in Germany (back in 1913). General Motors bought them out in 1929-31. As a GM brand they’ve competed successfully against the likes of Volkswagen, Audi, and BMW for decades. At one point, in the 1980s, they were the biggest GM brand in Japan.
They came back from the rubble of World War II (Hitler once decorated a GM vice president for his contributions to the mechanized Wehrmacht) and again competed throughout Europe very successfully. In some countries Chevrolet models were sold as Opels.
How did GM let this brand go to the point that it needs to be sold? This will certainly cut back on General Motor’s presence as an international brand! Can people who have let Saturn, Opel, Oldsmobile and (soon) Pontiac go to smash be trusted to run anything?
The people who are trying to meld Opel into a Chrysler/Fiat merger feel that only if the three are together can any one of them survive. You need to be huge to survive in today’s auto market. Remember when General Motors was the hugest of all?
For now, whole factories (and their towns) in Germany are left as desolate as Detroit. My friend, here in Michigan, goes on setting up machines to build furniture for new offices that may never materialize.
Americans all over the map are deciding not to afford cars that easily cost as much as a nice house did only a few decades ago. We may not have seen the end of the auto shakeout yet.
We can only hope that when GM comes out of bankruptcy it can find a way to see lots and lots of the brands it still has left—and find the parts companies to build them with. Ditto for FiatOpelChrysler—and Ford--and, for that matter, all those Japanese auto factories in Tennessee and Alabama.
I just don’t think the “fat lady” has sung yet.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Law, Equity and Sonia Sotomayer
Barack Obama has finally done and said something that scares me. He has even pushed me into a corner where I find myself agreeing with two men I never thought I’d EVER agree with. Forty-five years ago I sat up all night arguing with two lawyers.
We got drunk as skunks as we battled back and forth. I was a first year law school student eager to take up my lance and rush forth to do justice. One of the other two gentlemen was chief legal counsel for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; the other—his best friend—was a Duke Law School Professor.
I prattled of justice, fairness and equity; they kept bringing the discussion back to LAW. By four a.m., we probably weren’t as coherent as a jury might have liked, but they had thoroughly disabused me of my naïve view of the legal profession.
“Justice, as a concept, has no place in LAW,” they kept repeating. It is an absolutely alien notion. Horrified—and not understanding them (for decades after)—I dropped law school and went back to writing in one form or another.
But I never forgot the night, and I kept replaying their words in my head. Charlie Markham, the EEOC counsel was a trusted mentor, and I had learned to take his ideas seriously. It has required a long, long time to see the wisdom and truth in what he and his friend were saying.
It all came back to me, with brutal clarity, when I read in the “Washington Post” that President Obama had nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayer for the Supreme Court. He did so very much because Judge Sotomayer has stated (I quote the Post) that “legal decisions [must be] informed by life experiences as well as legal research.”
(What DO they teach them at Harvard Law?)
“Life experience” by its very nature leads one to an emotional response. What my two legal acquaintances were trying to tell me is that LAW, by its very nature, MUST be dispassionate. It allows no place for decisions based on passion or even pity.
As Oliver Wendell Holmes warned of cases that enflame passions or arouse an excess of compassion, “Hard cases make bad law”. This is because law is built (like Legos) block by block on previous cases. If an impassioned desire to do “justice” for an aggrieved widow opens the precedent door to a rampage by large banks and corporations, justice may have been done, but the nation and the law have been effectively raped.
Admittedly judges are human. They can get as angry as the next man. But to an unusual degree they must strive to take an impartial, balanced and unemotional view of each case. Ideally, at its core, law works very much like a computer.
Did X defraud his investors? Yes/No. Did X commit murder? Yes/No. Did X violate the 14th Amendment rights of Y? Yes/No. Is X entitled to such and such a judgment? Yes/No.
The decisions may go on for pages, but the nub of the decision is that computer processor like answer to the Yes/No question. That Yes or No has NOTHING to do with “life experience”. No question, having been raised white, anglo-saxon protestant will mean that certain opinions will have been hard wired into me that will be different from someone who was raised poor in Harlem.
But if I were a judge, I would be obliged to look at the law, the cases presented as precedent and then make as unemotional decision—based on the Yes/No answer to the facts—as I could possibly muster.
If I were to go into the case predisposed to let my background opinions and feelings govern the out-come of the legal decision, I would do a dangerous disservice to my nation, to the court, and to the law itself. I wish I could bring Charlie and his friend back (both liberal Democrats) and let her and Obama spend a night getting drunk with them.
I believe the mistake that both Obama and Sotomayer are making is to confuse the ancient concept of EQUITY with LAW. They are NOT the same. Law is simply the question: Did you or did you not exceed the speed limit? Yes or No. (It matters not if the judge has had a long life experience getting tickets she felt she did not deserve.)
Equity, in its most egregious form, is the story of King Solomon faced with two women arguing over whose baby was dead and whose was alive. He ordered a sword to be brought in and suggested that the living baby be cut in half, one half for each woman.
He concluded that the woman who begged him to spare the child and give it to the other claimant was the real mother. He gave the infant to her. That was a simple form of “justice”. It established no precedent, opened the doors to no depredations by large corporations or financiers. It was simply an isolated incident in which the king’s justice was done—completely apart from law.
Medieval kings established Equity Courts along side of Legal Courts just for that purpose. The king, moved by anger, compassion, pity—emotions all—could dole out what he saw as justice without any law being involved. Here life experience may play a valid role.
(Presidents still have the power to pardon—completely outside of law or legal constraint. That is a carryover from Equity. The United States recognized Equity as a form of law until it was abolished in the 1870s. We have had it here.)
If President Obama wishes to drop back a century and establish an Equity Court under his Executive Wing, that might be acceptable. He could appoint Sonia Sotomayer to such a panel along with other like minded jurists who weigh their own life experiences when making a decision.
The executive branch is where such a court would belong. It is something kings—executives—did, not legal judges.
But, finally sober—and understanding my mentor and his friend—I am uncomfortable with mixing something that so clearly resembles equity with law at the bar of the Supreme Court. Do you really want a court with the motto: “If it feels good, do it”?
It could remove a lot of legal restraint in court decisions. Over time, a whole lot of us might find we didn’t like the result. Charlie’s friend from North Carolina said something to me that night I never forgot—“That kind of law leads to Fascism.” I hope he’s wrong.
We got drunk as skunks as we battled back and forth. I was a first year law school student eager to take up my lance and rush forth to do justice. One of the other two gentlemen was chief legal counsel for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; the other—his best friend—was a Duke Law School Professor.
I prattled of justice, fairness and equity; they kept bringing the discussion back to LAW. By four a.m., we probably weren’t as coherent as a jury might have liked, but they had thoroughly disabused me of my naïve view of the legal profession.
“Justice, as a concept, has no place in LAW,” they kept repeating. It is an absolutely alien notion. Horrified—and not understanding them (for decades after)—I dropped law school and went back to writing in one form or another.
But I never forgot the night, and I kept replaying their words in my head. Charlie Markham, the EEOC counsel was a trusted mentor, and I had learned to take his ideas seriously. It has required a long, long time to see the wisdom and truth in what he and his friend were saying.
It all came back to me, with brutal clarity, when I read in the “Washington Post” that President Obama had nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayer for the Supreme Court. He did so very much because Judge Sotomayer has stated (I quote the Post) that “legal decisions [must be] informed by life experiences as well as legal research.”
(What DO they teach them at Harvard Law?)
“Life experience” by its very nature leads one to an emotional response. What my two legal acquaintances were trying to tell me is that LAW, by its very nature, MUST be dispassionate. It allows no place for decisions based on passion or even pity.
As Oliver Wendell Holmes warned of cases that enflame passions or arouse an excess of compassion, “Hard cases make bad law”. This is because law is built (like Legos) block by block on previous cases. If an impassioned desire to do “justice” for an aggrieved widow opens the precedent door to a rampage by large banks and corporations, justice may have been done, but the nation and the law have been effectively raped.
Admittedly judges are human. They can get as angry as the next man. But to an unusual degree they must strive to take an impartial, balanced and unemotional view of each case. Ideally, at its core, law works very much like a computer.
Did X defraud his investors? Yes/No. Did X commit murder? Yes/No. Did X violate the 14th Amendment rights of Y? Yes/No. Is X entitled to such and such a judgment? Yes/No.
The decisions may go on for pages, but the nub of the decision is that computer processor like answer to the Yes/No question. That Yes or No has NOTHING to do with “life experience”. No question, having been raised white, anglo-saxon protestant will mean that certain opinions will have been hard wired into me that will be different from someone who was raised poor in Harlem.
But if I were a judge, I would be obliged to look at the law, the cases presented as precedent and then make as unemotional decision—based on the Yes/No answer to the facts—as I could possibly muster.
If I were to go into the case predisposed to let my background opinions and feelings govern the out-come of the legal decision, I would do a dangerous disservice to my nation, to the court, and to the law itself. I wish I could bring Charlie and his friend back (both liberal Democrats) and let her and Obama spend a night getting drunk with them.
I believe the mistake that both Obama and Sotomayer are making is to confuse the ancient concept of EQUITY with LAW. They are NOT the same. Law is simply the question: Did you or did you not exceed the speed limit? Yes or No. (It matters not if the judge has had a long life experience getting tickets she felt she did not deserve.)
Equity, in its most egregious form, is the story of King Solomon faced with two women arguing over whose baby was dead and whose was alive. He ordered a sword to be brought in and suggested that the living baby be cut in half, one half for each woman.
He concluded that the woman who begged him to spare the child and give it to the other claimant was the real mother. He gave the infant to her. That was a simple form of “justice”. It established no precedent, opened the doors to no depredations by large corporations or financiers. It was simply an isolated incident in which the king’s justice was done—completely apart from law.
Medieval kings established Equity Courts along side of Legal Courts just for that purpose. The king, moved by anger, compassion, pity—emotions all—could dole out what he saw as justice without any law being involved. Here life experience may play a valid role.
(Presidents still have the power to pardon—completely outside of law or legal constraint. That is a carryover from Equity. The United States recognized Equity as a form of law until it was abolished in the 1870s. We have had it here.)
If President Obama wishes to drop back a century and establish an Equity Court under his Executive Wing, that might be acceptable. He could appoint Sonia Sotomayer to such a panel along with other like minded jurists who weigh their own life experiences when making a decision.
The executive branch is where such a court would belong. It is something kings—executives—did, not legal judges.
But, finally sober—and understanding my mentor and his friend—I am uncomfortable with mixing something that so clearly resembles equity with law at the bar of the Supreme Court. Do you really want a court with the motto: “If it feels good, do it”?
It could remove a lot of legal restraint in court decisions. Over time, a whole lot of us might find we didn’t like the result. Charlie’s friend from North Carolina said something to me that night I never forgot—“That kind of law leads to Fascism.” I hope he’s wrong.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I Miss NEWSWEEK
“The first issue of the reinvented NEWSWEEK” finally came. I read through it page by page: four sections, about 30 individual pieces, at least half written by Big Name columnists like Tina Brown, Jacob Weisberg and George Will. The other one to four page articles were written by by-lined editors.
As NEWSWEEK editor, Jon Meacham writes: “What is displaced by the [new] categories? The chief casualty is the straightforward news piece and news written with a few (hard won, to be sure) new details that does not move us significantly past what we already know.”
But that’s what I valued about news magazines. I live in an area where the local newspaper is on the verge of bankruptcy and has eliminated nearly all news pieces other than local weddings and funerals. Like my busy father before me, I used to rely on NEWSWEEK (or TIME) to recap inside a single cover all the facts and news I might have missed.
I know—I’m supposed to read all the real news online. But I’m an atavist. I ENJOY reading real news papers and real news magazines. I don’t mind getting a little ink on my hands as I imbibe my daily quota of news. I shall miss NEWSWEEK.
This was the magazine that started coming into my family home the year I was born. It still comes in the name of my favorite aunt who subscribed to it back in 1939. I never wanted to remove her name from the address label. It’s a memorial.
Every weekend I looked forward to the new issue. As I hurried back from the mailbox, I would flip through the catalogs and bills to look at the cover and see what the featured stories were. If my wife or my kids went out to get the mail first, they would drop the magazine on my chair.
Now, it saddens me to admit it, I really don’t care if next week’s issue comes or doesn’t. Many last week’s page long editorials and essays seemed slightly tedious. I’m not sure if I finished the entire magazine or not. I have no real desire to look through it again.
I can’t believe I wrote that. But I did. And, what’s really sad, I meant it.
It doesn’t sound like working there would be as much fun as it was in 1960-61 when I enjoyed a stint on the editorial make-up desk. It was kind of like being a fireman. When there was nothing to do, you freely read your own book (I read the entire “Rise And Fall of the Third Reich” by William Shirer, among others, on that desk) combed through the morgue, read the tickertapes or watched the Kentucky Derby in the TV room—I scored my only office pool victory on the 1961 Derby.
When it got busy, oh boy. The editors and writers tended to approach us in a somewhat defensive and grouchy mood. Once the copy was written, all the power was ours. We need a bold subhead here; you cannot have a page break between paragraphs—kill a line in this paragraph; add one in that. Sense be hanged.
They’d sweat, snarl and steal my cigarettes. There was one writer in the “International Section” that I really enjoyed—Fillmore Calhoun, as much a southerner as his name sounded. He was a grizzled old veteran who could type better copy drunk and two-fingered than most others could sober.
I liked hearing Fillmore tell his stories. So to make sure he chose my desk, I bought a bottle of excellent Bourbon and kept it in my drawer. Whenever we passed midnight, I would open the bottle-- “Mr. Calhoun, it is time for our evening oblation.” He would ceremoniously agree. I poured our shots and we went back to work.
Is there anybody like Fillmore Calhoun still there today? Or the chief international editor, a chap from London, who passed around the Christmas booze like candy and told alternately ribald and politically incorrect jokes about African revolutionaries (straight out of Evelyn Waugh).
Christmas Eve, 1960, I remember realizing that I was in no condition to lay out a page. So I took the elevator down to Madison Avenue, walked across the street to a drug counter (whose chief claim to fame seemed to be that Jack Kennedy would wait there for Jackie while she shopped) and ordered four cups of coffee—carried them back to my desk and helped put the New Year’s issue to bed.
There was Walt Rundle, editor of the international book, who was full of fascinating stories about covering news during World War II. There was Dick Schaap, sports editor, who ALWAYS took one of my cigarettes when he flashed by.
There were all the wealthy female editorial assistants whose rich daddies subsidized them so that could have a prestigious job working for a major magazine at almost zero pay. They could look really smashing as they finished the night’s work at one a.m. in an evening gown, ready to party.
Speaking of attractive editorial assistants, I’ll never forget one Monday morning when I spent three or four hours squeezing, cutting, fitting and filling a book review into the back of the book. The books editor was an extremely fastidious man, always in a suit, tie and vest, who never, ever raised his voice or became noticeably upset.
I must have tried him to the utmost that morning with my insistence on stylistic rules. He never showed a hint of annoyance, quietly writing and rewriting to fit. When we were done, he got up, very quietly, deliberately gathered his materials, wished me a good day and walked away, rigid in posture and mood.
He passed a well endowed young lady in a summer smock. Without missing a step or even looking down, he placed his pencil between her breasts and waggled it for an instant. As he walked on, never looking back, she looked up at me, bemused, shook her head and went back to work.
I had tried him to the utmost. There were writers I played chess with. One chap always whipped me. He quit while I was there and went off to New England to write novels. There was a senior editor who always asked when he returned from lunch, “Did anything happen? Did the pope get married?”
Of course there was the Monday morning when we threw away hundreds of thousands of copies of the magazine and rewrote one paragraph. A feature article had stated dogmatically that we would not invade Cuba. That was the morning we went in to the Bay of Pigs. It was a memorable morning.
All in all, editorial make-up at NEWSWEEK was a fun job. I doubt if I’ve ever had one I enjoyed more. But I’m not at all sure the present magazine and staff would be nearly as much fun. What came the other day simply isn’t the same magazine.
I have to say it: I miss NEWSWEEK.
As NEWSWEEK editor, Jon Meacham writes: “What is displaced by the [new] categories? The chief casualty is the straightforward news piece and news written with a few (hard won, to be sure) new details that does not move us significantly past what we already know.”
But that’s what I valued about news magazines. I live in an area where the local newspaper is on the verge of bankruptcy and has eliminated nearly all news pieces other than local weddings and funerals. Like my busy father before me, I used to rely on NEWSWEEK (or TIME) to recap inside a single cover all the facts and news I might have missed.
I know—I’m supposed to read all the real news online. But I’m an atavist. I ENJOY reading real news papers and real news magazines. I don’t mind getting a little ink on my hands as I imbibe my daily quota of news. I shall miss NEWSWEEK.
This was the magazine that started coming into my family home the year I was born. It still comes in the name of my favorite aunt who subscribed to it back in 1939. I never wanted to remove her name from the address label. It’s a memorial.
Every weekend I looked forward to the new issue. As I hurried back from the mailbox, I would flip through the catalogs and bills to look at the cover and see what the featured stories were. If my wife or my kids went out to get the mail first, they would drop the magazine on my chair.
Now, it saddens me to admit it, I really don’t care if next week’s issue comes or doesn’t. Many last week’s page long editorials and essays seemed slightly tedious. I’m not sure if I finished the entire magazine or not. I have no real desire to look through it again.
I can’t believe I wrote that. But I did. And, what’s really sad, I meant it.
It doesn’t sound like working there would be as much fun as it was in 1960-61 when I enjoyed a stint on the editorial make-up desk. It was kind of like being a fireman. When there was nothing to do, you freely read your own book (I read the entire “Rise And Fall of the Third Reich” by William Shirer, among others, on that desk) combed through the morgue, read the tickertapes or watched the Kentucky Derby in the TV room—I scored my only office pool victory on the 1961 Derby.
When it got busy, oh boy. The editors and writers tended to approach us in a somewhat defensive and grouchy mood. Once the copy was written, all the power was ours. We need a bold subhead here; you cannot have a page break between paragraphs—kill a line in this paragraph; add one in that. Sense be hanged.
They’d sweat, snarl and steal my cigarettes. There was one writer in the “International Section” that I really enjoyed—Fillmore Calhoun, as much a southerner as his name sounded. He was a grizzled old veteran who could type better copy drunk and two-fingered than most others could sober.
I liked hearing Fillmore tell his stories. So to make sure he chose my desk, I bought a bottle of excellent Bourbon and kept it in my drawer. Whenever we passed midnight, I would open the bottle-- “Mr. Calhoun, it is time for our evening oblation.” He would ceremoniously agree. I poured our shots and we went back to work.
Is there anybody like Fillmore Calhoun still there today? Or the chief international editor, a chap from London, who passed around the Christmas booze like candy and told alternately ribald and politically incorrect jokes about African revolutionaries (straight out of Evelyn Waugh).
Christmas Eve, 1960, I remember realizing that I was in no condition to lay out a page. So I took the elevator down to Madison Avenue, walked across the street to a drug counter (whose chief claim to fame seemed to be that Jack Kennedy would wait there for Jackie while she shopped) and ordered four cups of coffee—carried them back to my desk and helped put the New Year’s issue to bed.
There was Walt Rundle, editor of the international book, who was full of fascinating stories about covering news during World War II. There was Dick Schaap, sports editor, who ALWAYS took one of my cigarettes when he flashed by.
There were all the wealthy female editorial assistants whose rich daddies subsidized them so that could have a prestigious job working for a major magazine at almost zero pay. They could look really smashing as they finished the night’s work at one a.m. in an evening gown, ready to party.
Speaking of attractive editorial assistants, I’ll never forget one Monday morning when I spent three or four hours squeezing, cutting, fitting and filling a book review into the back of the book. The books editor was an extremely fastidious man, always in a suit, tie and vest, who never, ever raised his voice or became noticeably upset.
I must have tried him to the utmost that morning with my insistence on stylistic rules. He never showed a hint of annoyance, quietly writing and rewriting to fit. When we were done, he got up, very quietly, deliberately gathered his materials, wished me a good day and walked away, rigid in posture and mood.
He passed a well endowed young lady in a summer smock. Without missing a step or even looking down, he placed his pencil between her breasts and waggled it for an instant. As he walked on, never looking back, she looked up at me, bemused, shook her head and went back to work.
I had tried him to the utmost. There were writers I played chess with. One chap always whipped me. He quit while I was there and went off to New England to write novels. There was a senior editor who always asked when he returned from lunch, “Did anything happen? Did the pope get married?”
Of course there was the Monday morning when we threw away hundreds of thousands of copies of the magazine and rewrote one paragraph. A feature article had stated dogmatically that we would not invade Cuba. That was the morning we went in to the Bay of Pigs. It was a memorable morning.
All in all, editorial make-up at NEWSWEEK was a fun job. I doubt if I’ve ever had one I enjoyed more. But I’m not at all sure the present magazine and staff would be nearly as much fun. What came the other day simply isn’t the same magazine.
I have to say it: I miss NEWSWEEK.
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