Roosevelt and the Jews: A Debate Rekindled

From Left, The New York Times; Associated Press; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Above, from left, President Roosevelt in 1937; Arthur Sweetser, a director of the secretariat of the League of Nations; members of Roosevelt’s advisory committee on political refugees, Hamilton F. Armstrong, Sumner Welles, George Warren and James G. McDonald

• SIGN IN TO E-MAIL
• PRINT
• REPRINTS

By PATRICIA COHEN

Published: April 30, 2009

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s legacy has been slid back under the microscope recently as his efforts to pull the country out of the Great Depression are scrutinized. Now a piece of his foreign policy is also being re-evaluated in a soon-to-be published book that upends a widely held view that he was indifferent to the fate of Europe’s Jews, and asserts that new evidence shows that the president pushed for an ambitious secret rescue plan before the war began.

Related

Times Topics: Franklin Delano Roosevelt

A Memo by Mr. Sweetser: Page 1| Page 2
Related Links
Advocate for the Doomed: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1932-1935 | Wyman Institute | Center for Jewish History

Enlarge This Image

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Jewish refugees in 1940 on the steamship Quanza at Norfolk, Va.

Enlarge This Image

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

American leaders concerned with refugee issue met with President Roosevelt at the White House, April 13, 1938.

The book, an edited collection of official documents, diaries, internal memos and more, contends that Roosevelt hatched a scheme in 1938 to rally the world’s democracies and relocate millions of European Jews to undeveloped areas in Latin America and Africa.

“It is a book that will change the consensus about the role of President Roosevelt,” said Deborah Lipstadt, a leading expert on the Holocaust, who has read some sections. It “compels historians — both those who have vilified F.D.R. and those who have sanctified him — to rethink their conclusions.”

The book, “Refugees and Rescue: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1935-1945,” will undoubtedly reignite the charged debate over whether Roosevelt could have done more to rescue millions of Jews, Gypsies, gay people, dissidents and others who died in Nazi death camps. To his detractors, the refusal in June 1939 to take in any of the more than 900 Jews aboard the ocean liner St. Louis who were seeking a haven after Germany’s deadly Kristallnacht is much more emblematic of the United States’ response. Many of those passengers ultimately died.

This is the second of a three-volume set of Mr. McDonald’s papers being published by Indiana University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Mr. McDonald was the high commissioner for refugees for the League of Nations, the chairman of a presidential advisory committee on refugees and later the first American ambassador to Israel. The book also includes material from the Center for Jewish History and the Holocaust Museum.

The editors — the historians Richard Breitman, Barbara McDonald Stewart and Severin Hochberg — maintain that Roosevelt did a lot, given Congress’s implacable resistance to raising the quota on immigrants. Rather than publicly support measures revising the quotas, which he was sure would fail, he instead proposed an alternate means of escape behind the scenes, even pledging at one point to ask Congress to appropriate $150 million for resettlement.

“He was a man of grand vision who wanted to resettle a much larger number of refugees from Germany” and elsewhere, the editors conclude, citing a directive from Washington in June 1938 indicating that officials should deal with “the problems of refugees from all countries.” They agree that such efforts were completely dropped in 1940 when Roosevelt turned his attention to the war.

One of the new pieces of evidence that the editors point to is a summary written by Arthur Sweetser, a director of the secretariat of the League of Nations, describing a meeting between himself and the president on April 4, 1938:

Mr. Sweetser wrote that Roosevelt asked him how he liked his refugee proposal. “ ‘That was my proposal,’ the president quickly interjected, tapping his chest with obvious pleasure. ‘I worked that out myself.’ ”

The summary continues, with Mr. Sweetser quoting Roosevelt: “ ‘Suddenly it struck me: why not get all the democracies to unite to share the burden? After all, they own most of the free land of the world, and there are only ... what would you say, 14, 16 million Jews in the whole world, of whom about half are already in the United States. If we could divide up the remainder in groups of 8 or 10, there wouldn’t be any Jewish problem in three or four generations.’ ”

In a confidential memo to Mr. McDonald dated May 17, 1938, Mr. Sweetser wrote, “The President’s proposal took a large place in the League’s refugee deliberations this past week.”

Paul Shapiro, director of the museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, said, “What is quite striking here is that at this moment in 1938 Roosevelt is very seized by this issue of rescuing the Jews.” Germany’s occupation of Austria showed how much life changed overnight for Jews there. The book includes “important new documentation about F.D.R. and his efforts to save the Jews,” he added. Roosevelt supported using German, French and British colonies in Africa and elsewhere as well as countries in South America as possible havens. And he privately nudged the British to let more Jews intoPalestine, said Mr. Breitman, a history professor at American University.

Mr. Hochberg, who teaches at George Washington University, said: “As a result of these efforts, Bolivia saved over 20,000 Jews between 1938 and 1944 — in proportion to its size, more than any other American nation. Without the Bolivian option, many of these Jews would have died during the Holocaust.”

By the spring of 1939, the most promising strategy seemed to be an agreement with Berlin that would permit a privately financed foundation to resettle refugees, the editors state. The proposal was contentious because some Jews didn’t trust Germany and feared that it amounted to tacit approval of confiscation of Jewish assets.

On May 4, 1939, Roosevelt met at the White House with Jewish leaders and told them that there was no time to set up a new foundation, but that an existing organization should immediately agree to the plan.

“It was not so much a question of the money as it was of actual lives, and the president was convinced that the warnings given by our embassy in Berlin were sound and not exaggerated,” according to the diary of Jay Pierrepont Moffat, a State Department official at the meeting.

Refugee leaders were still at odds when Hitler invaded Poland on Sept. 1.

David Wyman and Rafael Medoff of the Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington, who have written extensively about America’s response to the persecution of Jews, are unimpressed with the excerpts from “Refugees and Rescue” that they’ve read.

Most of the actions have been mentioned in some form before, they said in a statement. In their view, Roosevelt may have talked about some pie-in-the-sky plans, but when it came to taking substantive action, he did nothing. For instance, they said, he opposed the 1939 Wagner-Rogers bill that would have permitted the United States to take in 20,000 Jewish children from Germany in addition to the existing German-Austrian quota of 27,370.

“F.D.R. failed to ask for that $150 million, just as he failed to support Wagner-Rogers,” they said. “Both actions by F.D.R. indicate his lack of seriousness about helping Jewish refugees.” They added that his “administration discouraged and obstructed would-be immigrants.”

To Mr. Shapiro, whether this new material will drastically change the way people see Roosevelt depends on their existing disposition. “Probably none of us will ever know what was really in F.D.R.’s mind at a given time,” he said. For those who see the potential of an individual’s being moved by the Jewish tragedy, “they will find that here.” As for others, he added, they will say, “in the end, it didn’t stop the murder of six million Jews.”

Unrepentant and Telling of Horrors Untellable

• E-Mail
• Print
• ShareClose
  • Linkedin
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • Mixx
  • My Space
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • Permalink
  • 
    

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: February 23, 2009

Originally published in France in 2006, “Les Bienveillantes” (“The Kindly Ones”) won the Prix Goncourt, that country’s most prestigious literary award, as well as a prize from the Académie Française. The novel, told from the point of view of an unrepentant Nazi and written in French by the American-born Jonathan Littell, was hailed by the weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur as “a new ‘War and Peace.’ ” It became an international best seller and the talk of the Frankfurt Book Fair, and its English-language rights, Publishers Weekly reported, went for “1 million-ish” dollars. A review in Foreign Policy magazine hailed the book as “one of the greatest accomplishments of postwar fiction.”

Skip to next paragraph

Catherine Hélie/Gallimard

Jonathan Littell

THE KINDLY ONES

By Jonathan Littell

Translated by Charlotte Mandell.

983 pages. Harper. $29.99.

Related

Browse Inside 'The Kindly Ones' at HarperCollins.com

The novel’s gushing fans, however, seem to have mistaken perversity for daring, pretension for ambition, an odious stunt for contrarian cleverness. Willfully sensationalistic and deliberately repellent, “The Kindly Ones” — the title is a reference to the Furies, otherwise known in Greek mythology as the Eumenides — is an overstuffed suitcase of a book, consisting of an endless succession of scenes in which Jews are tortured, mutilated, shot, gassed or stuffed in ovens, intercut with an equally endless succession of scenes chronicling the narrator’s incestuous and sadomasochistic fantasies.

Indeed, the nearly 1,000-page-long novel reads as if the memoirs of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss had been rewritten by a bad imitator of Genet and de Sade, or by the warped narrator of Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho,” after repeated viewings of “The Night Porter” and “The Damned.”

There are pages and pages in which the narrator, Max Aue, tries to rationalize the Nazis’ anti-Semitism, and pages and pages in which he describes the dead bodies he saw on the Eastern front in Russia, and later, at Auschwitz, where he served as a kind of efficiency expert, worrying about the overloading of the ovens and the basic rule of warehousing: “first in, first out.”

We are subjected to pages and pages of Max’s grotesque sexual fantasies (like sodomizing his twin sister, Una, on a guillotine plank); his leering descriptions of the genitalia of male lovers and female corpses; and his frequent bouts of vomiting and diarrhea. He also tells us about his hatred of his mother and stepfather, both of whom he has possibly murdered, and his killing of his best friend.

Although Aue contends that he is “a man like other men,” “a man like you” and depicts himself as a cultivated intellectual who reads Flaubert and Kant, his story is hardly a case study in the banality of evil. Whereas the heroes of the play “Good” and the movie “Mephisto” were ordinary enough men who out of ambition or opportunism or weakness turned to the dark side and embraced the Nazi cause, Aue is clearly a deranged creature, and his madness turns his story into a voyeuristic spectacle — like watching a slasher film with lots of close-ups of blood and guts.

Unable to understand Aue, much less sympathize with him, the reader is not goaded, as in the case of “Good” and “Mephisto,” to question his or her own capacity for moral compromise. Instead Mr. Littell simply gives us a monster talking at monstrous length about his monstrous deeds, encouraging us to write off Nazis as cartoonish madmen — strutting psychopaths in black SS uniforms, murdering Jews out of the same Freudian kinks that might drive them to murder members of their own families. And he does so while wallowing in the most sordid details of Aue’s story.

When Aue isn’t talking dispassionately about the mechanics of rounding up Jews (spreading rumors that they were going to Palestine so they would not panic) or the difficulty of disposing of bodies (“it wasn’t so much the gassing that posed a problem, but the ovens were overloaded”), he’s describing grotesque scenes of degradation and slaughter: Jews being lashed with a horsewhip; a baby being cut out of its dying mother by Caesarean section, then smashed to death against the corner of a stove; hanged men with “their tongues sticking out,” streams of saliva running “from their mouths to the sidewalk”; emaciated prisoners covered in excrement, forced to defecate “as they walked, like horses.”

Aue’s own remarks tend to be insufferably pompous (“Doctor, I suffer from only one disease, sexually transmissible and irremediably fatal: life”), while those of associates tend to devolve into raw, anti-Semitic rants. Asked about the unsanitary condition of the prisoners, one man says: “Anyway, Jews are like venison, they’re better when they’re a little gamy.” Another talks of building “an anthropological garden” in Krakow, Poland, a kind of zoo where “we will gather together specimens of all the peoples who have disappeared or are about to disappear in Europe.”

No doubt the author intends such remarks to convey the horrors of the Holocaust, but “The Kindly Ones” instead reads like a pointless compilation of atrocities and anti-Semitic remarks, pointlessly combined with a gross collection of sexual fantasies. That such a novel should win two of France’s top literary prizes is not only an example of the occasional perversity of French taste, but also a measure of how drastically literary attitudes toward the Holocaust have changed in the last few decades.

Whereas the philosopher Theodor Adorno warned, not long after the war, of the dangers of making art out of the Holocaust (“through aesthetic principles or stylization,” he contended, “the unimaginable ordeal” is “transfigured and stripped of some of its horror and with this, injustice is already done to the victims”), whereas George Steiner once wrote of Auschwitz that “in the presence of certain realities art is trivial or impertinent,” we have now reached the point where a 900-plus page portrait of a psychopathic Nazi, dwelling in histrionic detail on the barbarities of the camps, should be acclaimed by Le Monde as “a staggering triumph.”

Icon of Evil: Hitler’s Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam

BOOKS: Mufti – Hitler’s man in the Middle East

February 18, 2009 12:00 am admin arts

Icon of Evil: Hitler’s Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam

by David G Dalin and John F Rothmann

Random House, $26

THIS book, which has already achieved iconic status in the United States, is going to make seriously disturbing reading for those who subscribe to the view that the pathological hatred that divides Arab and Jew in the Middle East is attributable to the Israelis alone.

Haj Amin al-Husseini was probably one of the most influential Arab leaders in Palestine and the wider Arab world during the Second World War. In a supreme act of irony, it was the Jewish High Commissioner for Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuel, who appointed him Mufti in 1921. Thereafter, al-Husseini, indoctrinated in the belief that the Jews were intent on destroying Islamic civilisation, set out to kill them wherever he could.

He decreed: “There is no punishment for killing Jews.” He instigated riots in Jerusalem and pogroms in Hebron and Safed where the centuries old Jewish communities were ethnically cleansed in 1929. More moderate Palestinian Arab leaders, such as the Nashashibi dynasty, who were looking for an accommodation with Palestinian Jewry, were intimidated and murdered by the Mufti’s forces. The Mandatory authorities eventually outlawed al-Husseini’s Arab Higher Committee and the Mufti fled to Baghdad in 1937.

There he attempted to stage a pro-Nazi coup in 1941 which was eventually repressed. But not before the Mufti waged a pogrom against Iraq’s large Jewish population that left more than 100 dead and thousands homeless. In November 1941 he was granted sanctuary in a luxurious mansion on Berlin’s fashionable Klopstock Street.

The war years saw the Mufti form a close alliance with Adolf Hitler, both of whom declared an intent to rid Europe of its “Judeo-Communist” empire. Al-Husseini established a close working relationship with Heinrich Himmler and recruited 100,000 Moslems, mainly from Yugoslavia, to serve in Waffen SS units. The SS Handschar division was responsible for the extermination of 90 per cent of Bosnian Jewry. The brutality they deployed made a contrast with the mechanised killing in the extermination camps. The Mufti’s SS divisions favoured killing Jewish families face to face with knives. They destroyed hundreds of Serbian churches and hunted down Communist partisans.

The authors, though, neglect to mention that the Mufti’s SS units were some of the most ferocious and fanatical defenders of Berlin when the Red Army advanced to crush the last vestiges of the Nazi empire. They do, however, include a series of nauseating photographs depicting the Mufti in close embrace with virtually every Nazi leader and inspecting his SS troops.

Adolf Eichmann’s deputy, Dieter Wisliceny, testified at the Nuremberg trials that the Mufti encouraged his principal to accelerate the mass extermination of Jews – and even accompanied Eichmann on a visit to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. He also convinced the Nazi leaders not to go ahead with an exchange of 20,000 German prisoners of war for 4,000 Hungarian and Romanian children who were subsequently exterminated in German death camps at Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor.

In late 1944, the Mufti arranged for five parachutists armed with 10 containers of toxin to try and poison Tel Aviv’s water supply and murder 250,000 Jews. Fortunately, British forces in Jericho captured the five before they could carry out the carnage.

Calls to have the Mufti tried at Nuremberg were rebuffed by, among others, Clement Attlee, who thought such a move might enrage Arab sentiment. Instead King Farouk of Egypt granted him sanctuary. Following the UN partition of Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states, the Mufti and his old comrade Fawzi al-Kawukji, with whom he had spent the war as Hitler’s guest, formed the Arab Liberation Army whose objective was to fight the partition plan and wage a “total war of extermination” against the Jews.

The latter part of this study charts the influence of al-Husseini on modern day jihadi terror groups such as Hizbollah and Hamas. The authors attribute al-Husseini’s widespread dissemination of anti-Semitic texts such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a primary reason behind the refusal of Islamic fundamentalism to come to terms with the reality of the existence of Israel.

A Hamas text declaring “the war is open until Israel ceases to exist and until the last Jew in the world is eliminated” is lifted virtually verbatim from the ravings of the Mufti, who died peacefully at the age of 79 in Beirut in 1974, no doubt utterly content with the murderous legacy he had bequeathed to his fundamentalist heirs.

David Harounoff

books: Reading between the lines.

Philip Roth's Nightmare: And you thought Jewish repression was bad …

By Jonathan Rosen
Posted Monday, Sept. 15, 2008, at 7:20 AM ET

Indignation has been good for Philip Roth. The cry of impotent rage and strangled rebellion that ends Portnoy's Complaint, though it all but kills Portnoy, has fueled one of the great careers in American letters over the past four decades. The hero of Roth's latest novel, Indignation, is not so lucky. He is destroyed almost before he has exited puberty. And so this is one of Roth's counter-life books, where the author seems to be confronting what might have happened had things gone just a little differently for him. Like the hero of Henry James' "The Jolly Corner," who visits the house he once lived in and encounters the wounded specter of the man he might have been had he not left Washington Square and become a novelist, Roth imagines a young man from Newark, N.J., without a writer's aspirations, wit, or imagination—and with extremely bad luck. Though the Korean War lurks in the background waiting to swallow young men, this novel, despite dust-jacket claims, is not really about history and its vicissitudes. It is another in a series of self-portraits in a convex mirror.

From the outset, Indignation has the quality of ghost story, which it technically is, since we are told—this is a very mild spoiler; the news comes on Page 54—that the narrator, Marcus Messner, is dead. How Marcus comes to be dead is partly the story he has to tell. His death is the result of a series of unfortunate events that unfold with a sort of nightmare logic and add to the book's ghostly quality by making tiny moments pregnant with surreal portent.

Marcus, aka Markie, is a nice Jewish boy. He is called nice by everyone, including himself. He works hard; he is a fine student; he is polite; he is a good athlete and the devoted helper of his father, who runs a kosher butcher shop in Newark. These scenes in the butcher shop are rich with the persuasive evocation of Jewish working-class life that is one of the great pleasures of many Roth novels. "Flick two chickens, Markie, will ya, for Mrs. So-and-So?" Roth captures masterfully the strain, intimacy, and familial intensity of urban Jewish postwar striving, with a special place reserved for fathers, who exhibit a particular sort of first-generation manliness, small men with thick forearms damping down emotions and private longings and maybe even terminal illness so that they can lay down the bedrock on which their beloved sons are expected to build bright white-collar American lives.

---

---

But when Markie is in the first year of a local Newark college, still living at home and laboring alongside his father in the butcher shop, his father is suddenly overtaken by paranoia and dread for his son, a sense that everything is fragile and that his son is not to be trusted with his own future. A terror that death is lurking everywhere. Oppressed by his father's mania, Marcus transfers to Winesberg College in Ohio.

If Marcus were an aspiring writer, he might have known that Winesburg, Ohio was the name of a famous novel describing stunted, smothered, Midwestern lives. The leafy goyish institution, which from afar seemed like a picture postcard of an American WASP haven, turns out to be a private hell for Marcus, who, for starters, is roomed with three other Jews, one of whom—a theatrical, gay, anarchic student named Flusser—taunts Marcus mercilessly for being dutiful and hardworking. Markus flees to a different dorm and to ever-greater isolation. But when he finally dates Olivia, a beautiful undergraduate with red hair, a history of alcoholism, and an ominous scar on her wrist, everything changes.

A remarkable amount of the plot, both psychologically and narratively, revolves around an unexpected blowjob Marcus receives from Olivia. Though this is not in fact narrated as a comic episode, I kept thinking of a short movie W.C. Fields made in the 1930s called "The Fatal Glass of Beer"—a parody of temperance sermons, among other things. Fields sings a hilarious song about a dutiful boy who leaves home, is tempted by college students into having a single glass of beer, and is comically destroyed. This being a Roth novel, alcohol plays no part—it is the fatal fellatio that ruins the hapless hero. There is no going back to his earlier, dutiful grade-getting, self-abnegating focus.

And so, as in a Kafka story, all the father's irrational fears, from which Markie justifiably fled, are indeed born out. If Marcus could just go with the flow, accept Olivia for who she is, join the Jewish fraternity that keeps wooing him, attend mandatory chapel, and pay whatever lip service is required of him, he would of course be fine. But Marcus will not bow. Always it is Marcus' mounting sense of outrage, his inability to conform (though his entire childhood has been one of conforming, and so it may be his fear of his own propensity for it driving him on), and his need for confrontation that facilitate one blunder after another, as he is pursued by the moralizing dean of students and we realize he is racing inevitably toward expulsion and death.

The novel is not really on Marcus' side, taking an almost sadistic glee in destroying him. The world of the novel operates on the principles of a horror movie—illicit sexual gratification is punished by ghastly death. This is not to say that Roth is on the side of the forces of repression, but he has always been a deeply divided writer, sentimentally enamored of the Newark childhood against which he is endlessly in rebellion. Or perhaps Roth is striving for a sort of mythic structure: Marcus is like Sleeping Beauty—nothing his father does can keep him from the fatal prick, though whether he is awakened or put to sleep or both is ambiguous.

To some extent, Marcus' situation is generalized: Toward the end of the novel there is a "panty raid," in which frustrated frat boys attack the women's dorms, masturbate into the panties of the terrified young women, and, in general, rebel against all the strictures of the school. The enraged college president, though ultimately a lampoonable martinet for Roth, delivers a speech that gives voice to a recurrent Rothian theme: "Beyond your dormitories, a world is on fire and you are kindled by underwear." This might be any number of Jewish parents in any number of his novels speaking of the 6 million to chasten the carnal needs of a maturing adolescent.

Indignation makes plain just how much of Roth's fiction, however clothed in history or politics, is a sort of elaboration of Civilization and Its Discontents. Repression is bad and the release of repression is bad. The narrator sounds like a medieval chronicler writing about bubonic plague as he describes the widespread effects on campus of sexual frustration, which "set strapping young men to hobbling about like cripples until the searing, stabbing, cramping pain of the widespread testicular torture known as blue balls would slowly diminish and pass away." But release is not relief, as Roth makes clear; the panty raid is hardly a noble revolt.

What intensifies the nightmare quality of Roth's recent fiction is that Jewish repression has been transferred into the hands of the Christian America into which Roth's hapless heroes flee for refuge. The Marcus family deals in kosher meat, that living symbol of the Law. ("Renunciation is all, cries the koshered and bloodless piece of steak" on the Portnoy dinner table.) But it is Christian Olivia, crushed by an oppressive WASP world, who attempts suicide by draining out her blood: "Had she succeeded," Marcus tells us, "she would have rendered herself kosher in accordance with rabbinical law."

In other words, Christian America turns out to be a kosher world writ large.

This is a private hell for Marcus Messner, but I suspect that the misrepresentation of kosher law, linked preposterously to self-slaughter, is not just a symptom of Marcus' bitter, death-induced derangement. I can't help feeling that Roth is having a Judeo-Christian nightmare, possibly intensified by the rise of evangelical Christianity in America, which turns precious Rothian fluids into human stains. Or that he has discovered that since American culture has Jewish genes, there is for him no escape from the yoke of the Law.

But I'm not sure. There are, I find, several difficulties in attempting to read Roth accurately, though aesthetically he is certainly easy enough to read, so assured is his narrative voice. Some of the confusion is the fruitful ambiguity of a master of ambivalence, a writer who has been for much of his career a sort of puritanical libertine, full of hunger and self-recrimination. But it isn't always easy to know what is irony, what is postmodern sleight of hand, and what is literary failing.

His characters, physically evoked with such mimetic ease, are often more symbol than body—the suddenly paranoid father or beautiful, afflicted Olivia—rendering them strangely diaphanous. One might say the burden of creating the veil of appearance in order to rip it aside is wearisome, or that this is a postmodern novel, or that many characters in Roth's novels are like the imaginary friend in the film A Beautiful Mind: We accept the verbally incarnated character until later, when we suddenly realize—of course—it was a figment, not, in fact, believably drawn but simply useful in illuminating a single troubled consciousness.

The built-in protection against our ever wholly passing judgment is that the narrator is often a writer himself who may be deceiving us with art. Marcus isn't a writer, and yet by dint of being dead he becomes one: A condition of death, we are informed, at least for Marcus, is endlessly revisiting the elements of one's earlier life. Whether this offers a chance for a sort of verbal redemption or is, in fact, a form of damnation is perhaps the darkest of Roth's ambiguous jokes at his own—and the reader's—expense.

Madness and Shame

Madness and Shame

By BOB HERBERT
Published: July 22, 2008

You want a scary thought? Imagine a fanatic in the mold of Dick Cheney but without the vice president’s sense of humor.

In her important new book, “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals,” Jane Mayer of The New Yorker devotes a great deal of space to David Addington, Dick Cheney’s main man and the lead architect of the Bush administration’s legal strategy for the so-called war on terror.

She quotes a colleague as saying of Mr. Addington: “No one stood to his right.” Colin Powell, a veteran of many bruising battles with Mr. Cheney, was reported to have summed up Mr. Addington as follows: “He doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”

Very few voters are aware of Mr. Addington’s existence, much less what he stands for. But he was the legal linchpin of the administration’s Marquis de Sade approach to battling terrorism. In the view of Mr. Addington and his acolytes, anything and everything that the president authorized in the fight against terror — regardless of what the Constitution or Congress or the Geneva Conventions might say — was all right. That included torture, rendition, warrantless wiretapping, the suspension of habeas corpus, you name it.

This is the mind-set that gave us Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and the C.I.A.’s secret prisons, known as “black sites.”

Ms. Mayer wrote: “The legal doctrine that Addington espoused — that the president, as commander in chief, had the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries if national security demanded it — rested on a reading of the Constitution that few legal scholars shared.”

When the constraints of the law are unlocked by the men and women in suits at the pinnacle of power, terrible things happen in the real world. You end up with detainees being physically and psychologically tormented day after day, month after month, until they beg to be allowed to commit suicide. You have prisoners beaten until they are on the verge of death, or hooked to overhead manacles like something out of the Inquisition, or forced to defecate on themselves, or sexually humiliated, or driven crazy by days on end of sleep deprivation and blinding lights and blaring noises, or water-boarded.

To get a sense of the heights of madness scaled in this anything-goes atmosphere, consider a brainstorming meeting held by military officials at Guantánamo. Ms. Mayer said the meeting was called to come up with ways to crack through the resistance of detainees.

“One source of ideas,” she wrote, “was the popular television show ‘24.’ On that show as Ms. Mayer noted, “torture always worked. It saved America on a weekly basis.”

I felt as if I was in Never-Never Land as I read: “In conversation with British human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, the top military lawyer in Guantánamo, Diane Beaver, said quite earnestly that Jack Bauer ‘gave people lots of ideas’ as they sought for interrogation models.”

Donald Rumsfeld described the detainees at Guantánamo as “the worst of the worst.” A more sober assessment has since been reached by many respected observers. Ms. Mayer mentioned a study conducted by attorneys and law students at the Seton Hall University Law School.

“After reviewing 517 of the Guantánamo detainees’ cases in depth,” she said, “they concluded that only 8 percent were alleged to have associated with Al Qaeda. Fifty-five percent were not alleged to have engaged in any hostile act against the United States at all, and the remainder were charged with dubious wrongdoing, including having tried to flee U.S. bombs. The overwhelming majority — all but 5 percent — had been captured by non-U.S. players, many of whom were bounty hunters.”

The U.S. shamed itself on George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s watch, and David Addington and others like him were willing to manipulate the law like Silly Putty to give them the legal cover they desired. Ms. Mayer noted that Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the late historian, believed that “the Bush administration’s extralegal counterterrorism program presented the most dramatic, sustained and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history.”

After reflecting on major breakdowns of law that occurred in prior administrations, including the Watergate disaster, Mr. Schlesinger told Ms. Mayer: “No position taken has done more damage to the American reputation in the world — ever.”

Americans still have not come to grips with this disastrous stain on the nation’s soul. It’s important that the whole truth eventually come out, and as many of the wrongs as possible be rectified.

Ms. Mayer, as much as anyone, is doing her part to pull back the curtain on the awful reality. “The Dark Side” is essential reading for those who think they can stand the truth.

Standard Operating Procedure - Book and Film Review

View from the booth:

Did YOU sign up to have this stuff done in YOUR name? Ya gotta wonder about a culture that puts up with this stuff. While the issue of these "enemy combatants" is a difficult one, it's clear that what happened at Abu Ghraib was the logical conclusion of what the mood is/was at the White House toward prisoners of "the war on terror". One can only hope that at some point, justice (whether of the earthly or heavenly variety) will come to those people in the upper echelons of the armed forces and the government which it is supposed to serve. Do none of Socrates' "just men" exist at those levels?

The only thing we can hope is that if we should ever get engaged again in fighting the Taliban and the rest of the jihadis, they do not reciprocate. But then, last I checked, they weren't treating our guys with too much TLC, either. But we're better than that, aren't we?

Randy Shiner


Volume 55, Number 11 · June 26, 2008
Ghosts
By Ian Buruma
Standard Operating Procedure
a film directed by Errol Morris
Standard Operating Procedure
by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris
Penguin, 286 pp., $25.95

Two photographs, taken by digital camera at Abu Ghraib prison, on the night of November 5, 2003. The first picture shows a person in a ragged black poncho-like garment standing precariously on a tiny box. Hairy legs and arms suggest that this person is a man. His head is covered in a pointed black hood, his arms are spread, and his fingertips are attached to wires sticking from the concrete wall behind him. The pose hints at a crucifixion, but the black poncho and hood also suggest a witch or a scarecrow.

The second picture shows a young woman hunched over the corpse of a man. The corpse lies in a half-unzipped black body bag filled with ice cubes wrapped in plastic. His mouth is open; white bandages cover his eyes. The young woman grins widely at the camera. She holds up the thumb of her right hand, encased in a turquoise latex glove (see the photograph).

The photographs look amateurish, a crude mixture of the sinister and lighthearted. When they were published, first in The New Yorker magazine, we were provided with some background to them, but not much. The anonymous man in the first picture had been told that he would die of electric shock if he fell off the box. Hence the wires, which were in fact harmless. Information about the second picture was sketchy, but the woman seemed to be gloating over the man's death. The bandages suggested serious violence. There were other Abu Ghraib photographs, published widely on the Internet: of terrified Iraqi prisoners, stripped of all their clothes, being assaulted and bitten by dogs ("doggie dancing"); of a naked prisoner on all fours held on a leash by a female American guard; of naked men piled up in a human pyramid; of naked men made to masturbate, or posed as though performing oral sex; of naked men wearing women's panties on their heads, handcuffed to the bars of their cells; of naked men used as punching bags; and so on.

The photographs evoked an atmosphere of giddy brutality. The reputation of the United States, already tarnished by a bungled war, hit a new low. But interpretations of the photographs, exactly what they told us, varied according to the observer. After he was criticized for failing to apologize, President Bush said in a public statement that he was "sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners, and the humiliation suffered by their families." But he felt "equally sorry," he said, "that people who have been seeing those pictures didn't understand the true nature and heart of America." Donald Rumsfeld deplored the fact that the pictures had been shown at all, and then talked about charges of "abuse," which, he believed, "technically is different from torture." The word "torture" was carefully avoided by both men. President Bush, confronted much later with questions about a damning Red Cross report about the use of torture by the CIA, spelled out his view: "We don't torture."[1]

Susan Sontag, writing in The New York Times Magazine, had a different take on the pictures. She thought the "torture photographs" of Abu Ghraib were typical expressions of a brutalized popular American culture, coarsened by violent pornography, sadistic movies and video games, and a narcissistic compulsion to put every detail of our lives, especially our sexual lives, on record, preferably on public record. To her the Abu Ghraib photos were precisely the true nature and heart of America. She wrote:

Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send the pictures to their buddies. Secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given anything to conceal, you now clamor to be invited on a television show to reveal. What is illustrated by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality.[2]

Many liberal-minded people would have shared instinctively not only Sontag's disgust but also her searing indictment of modern American culture. One of the merits of Errol Morris's new documentary on the Abu Ghraib photographs, and even more of the excellent book written by Philip Gourevitch in cooperation with Morris, is that they complicate matters. What we think we see in the pictures may not be quite right. The pictures don't show the whole story. They may even conceal more than they reveal. By interviewing most of the people who were involved in the photographic sessions, delving into their lives, their motives, their feelings, and their views, then and now, the authors assemble a picture of Abu Ghraib, the implications of which are actually more disturbing than Sontag's cultural critique.

At first no one knew the dead man's name. He was one of the "ghost prisoners," brought into the "hard site" of Abu Ghraib by anonymous American interrogators, dressed in black, also known to the MPs as "ghosts." These ghosts belonged to the OGA, Other Government Agency, which usually meant the CIA. Ghost prisoners were not formally registered before their interrogation in shower cubicles or other secluded parts of the prison. They disappeared as swiftly as they came, after the ghost interrogators were done with them. All that the MPs heard of their presence were screams in the night. If the Red Cross visited, the ghost prisoners were to be hidden away.

The man who would soon die arrived in the night before the photographs published in The New Yorker were taken, with a sandbag over his head, and nothing but a T-shirt on. MPs were told to shackle his hands to a window behind his back in "a Palestinian hanging position" (a technique allegedly used but certainly not invented by the Israelis). The man was breathing heavily. Then the MPs were dismissed. An hour or so later, they were called back in to help. The prisoner was no longer responding to questions. They hung him higher and higher, until his arms seemed at breaking point. Still no response. A splash of cold water. His hood was lifted. The MPs noticed that his face had been reduced to a bloody pulp. He had been dead for some time. The ghosts quickly left the scene. Medics were called in to clean up the mess, bandages were put over his puffed-up eyes, and the corpse was zipped into an ice-filled body bag and left in a shower room until it could be removed. The officer in charge of the MPs at Abu Ghraib, Captain Christopher Brinson, declared that the man had died of a heart attack.

Meanwhile, in the same prison block, another torment was taking place. Another nameless prisoner had been brought in, suspected of having killed an agent from the US Army's Criminal Investigative Division (CID). He refused to divulge his name, so he was handed over to Specialist Charles "Chuck" Graner, an army reservist. Graner, a hulking mustachioed figure, seen laughing at the misery of Iraqi prisoners in many Abu Ghraib pictures, was not trained as an interrogator; nor did he have more than the vaguest idea of the rules and conventions that are supposed to guide interrogations. A corrections officer in civilian life, Graner enjoyed a "bad boy" reputation, with a taste for sinister pranks and an eye for the girls. He should never have been put in charge of terror suspects. He did not even have the security clearance to be a military policeman with custody over prisoners.

Nonetheless, Graner was put in charge of the nameless prisoner and told by CID agent Ricardo Romero to "make his life a living hell for the next three days and find out his name." Graner did his best, aided by Sergeant Ivan Frederick and other members of their Maryland reserve unit who happened to be around and were equally untrained in interrogation work. The prisoner was stripped of his clothes, yelled at, made to crawl on the floor, deprived of sleep, forced to stand on a tiny box, hooked up to wires sticking from the wall and told he would die if he so much as moved. This last game lasted for about fifteen minutes, long enough for Graner to take his photographs.

Morris didn't manage to interview Graner. He is still in a military prison. But other witnesses of what happened that night, such as Specialist Sabrina Harman, claim that not much harm was done to the prisoner they nicknamed "Gilligan." She said that he ended up laughing at the Americans, and actually became a popular guy of sorts, being given the privilege of sweeping up the prison cells. "He was just a funny, funny guy," she said. "If you were going to take someone home, I definitely would have taken him."

Sabrina Harman also happens to be the young woman in the second picture, hunched over the corpse. Like Graner, she worked as a guard on the night shift at Abu Ghraib. Harman is described by other interviewees in Morris's film as a sweet girl who, in the words of Sergeant Hydrue Joyner, "would not hurt a fly. If there's a fly on the floor and you go to step on it, she will stop you." The reason she joined the army was to pay for college. Her dream was to be a cop, like her father and brother. Not just a cop, but a forensic photographer. She loved taking pictures, with a special interest in death and decay. Another prison colleague, Sergeant Javal Davis, said: "She would not let you step on an ant. But if it dies, she'd want to know how it died."

So when water started seeping out of the locked shower cell, and she and Graner uncovered the dead man in his body bag, her first instinct was to take pictures. She told Morris and Gourevitch that she kind of realized right away that there was no way he died of a heart attack, because of all the cuts and blood coming out of his nose. You don't think your commander's going to lie to you about something. It made my trust go down, that's for sure.

This is when Graner asked her to pose with the body. Harman adopted the pose she always did in photos, with her friends, with prisoners, in the morgue, and now in the shower: she grinned and stuck her thumb up.

Later, she returned to the same place alone, curious to find out more. She took off the gauze over the dead man's eyes and "just started taking photos of everything I saw that was wrong, every little bruise and cut." She realized how badly the man had been beaten up:

It looked like somebody had either butt-stocked him or really got him good, or hit him against the wall.... I just wanted to document everything I saw. That was the reason I took photos. It was to prove to pretty much anybody who looked at this guy, Hey, I was just lied to. This guy did not die of a heart attack. Look at all these other existing injuries that they tried to cover up.
In her interview with Morris, Harman looks rather impressive: intelligent, articulate, plausible.

The interviews are actually more like monologues, for with rare exceptions Morris's questions are never heard. His genius is to get people to talk, and talk, and talk, whether it is Robert McNamara in The Fog of War or Sabrina Harman in Standard Operating Procedure. The fact that he paid some of his interviewees for their time has been held against Morris by some critics. It seems of little importance. There is no reason to believe that cash changed their stories. If only the film had stuck to the interviews. Alas, they are spliced together with gimmicky visual reenactments of the scenes described in words, which take away from the stark air of authenticity. But perhaps that is Morris's point. Authenticity is always elusive. Nothing can be totally trusted, not words, and certainly not images, so you might as well reimagine them.

But I think we are meant to believe that Harman is telling the truth. Her letters from Abu Ghraib to her lesbian partner, Kelly, suggest as much. On October 20, 2003, she wrote about a prisoner nicknamed "the taxicab driver," naked, handcuffed backward to the bars of his cell, with his underwear over his face:

He looked like Jesus Christ. At first I had to laugh so I went on and grabbed the camera and took a picture. One of the guys took my asp and started "poking" at his dick. Again I thought, okay that's funny then it hit me, that's a form of molestation. You can't do that. I took more pictures now to "record" what is going on.

Two pictures, then. The first one, of Gilligan and the electric wires, was analyzed by Brent Pack, a special forensic expert for the CID. After much thought, he concluded:
I see that as somebody that's being put into a stress position. I'm looking at it and thinking, they don't look like they're real electrical wires. Standard operating procedure—that's all it is.
He was technically right. A memo drawn up by the Pentagon's general counsel, William J. Haynes, on November 27, 2002, recommending authorization of interrogation techniques in Category II—which included humiliation, sensory deprivation, and stress positions—was formally approved by the secretary of defense. Donald Rumsfeld even scribbled his famous quip at the bottom of this memo, stating: "However, I stand for 8–10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours? D.R."[3]

And yet this picture, more than any other, including the ones featuring attack dogs and wounded naked bodies, became the most notorious, an icon of American barbarism, the torture picture par excellence, perhaps because, as Gourevitch writes, it left so much to the imagination. That, and its evocation of the crucifixion, Christ at Abu Ghraib. And Sabrina Harman? She was sentenced to six months in prison, a reduction in rank to private, a forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and a bad conduct discharge. None of the men who were responsible for her subject's death were ever prosecuted. No one above the rank of sergeant was even tried. As Morris said in an interview to promote his film, Harman and her friends caught in the photographs
were punished for embarrassing the military, for embarrassing the administration. One central irony: Sabrina Harman was threatened with prosecution for taking pictures of a man who had been killed by the CIA. She had nothing whatsoever to do with the killing, she merely photographed the corpse. But without her photographs we would know nothing of this crime.
It was just another death of a ghost delivered by ghosts.

2.

Morris has been faulted for not pointing his finger more directly at people more senior than Harman, Graner, Frederick, or Lynndie England, Graner's girlfriend at the time, who held the naked prisoner on a leash. But this is missing the point of the film. For it is not about Washington politics or administration lawyers, or at least not directly, but about a particular kind of concealment, the way photographs which seem to tell one story actually turn out to hide a much bigger story. Compared to what was really happening at Abu Ghraib, where men were tortured to death in hidden cells, where children were incarcerated with thousands of other prisoners, most of them blameless civilians, exposed to daily mortar attacks, living in unspeakable conditions of filth and squalor, where there was no way out even for men who had been declared innocent, where unarmed prisoners were shot dead by nervous guards—compared to all that, the photograph of Gilligan was just fun and games.

The first thing human beings do when the unspeakable becomes standard operating procedure is to change the words. Even the Nazis, who never seemed to have been unduly bothered by what they did, invented new words, usually of a cold bureaucratic nature, to conceal their crimes: "special treatment" and so on. In public, the US policy toward "security detainees" or "unlawful combatants," to whom, according to White House and Pentagon lawyers, the Geneva Conventions did not apply, was couched in the kind of language favored by Vice President Dick Cheney: "We need to make certain that we have not tied the hands, if you will, of our intelligence communities in terms of accomplishing their mission."

The phrase "the gloves are coming off" gained currency. As in an e-mail, quoted by Gourevitch, sent to MI unit commanders in Iraq by Captain William Ponce of the Human Intelligence Effects Coordination Cell: "The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees. Col. Boltz"— Colonel Steven Boltz, the deputy MI commander in Iraq—"has made it clear that we want these individuals broken." The likes of Harman, Graner, England, and Frederick were at the very bottom of the chain of command. They were told to "soften up" the prisoners, to make their lives hell. They should "treat the prisoners like dogs," in the words of Major General Geoffrey Miller, commander of the prison and interrogation camp at Guantánamo Bay. He said this before the photographs were taken, during a visit to Abu Ghraib, where he felt the prisoners were treated too well. His methods, honed at Guantánamo, were soon adopted. One of Morris's (or Gourevitch's) more arresting ideas is that the photographs of the treatment meted out to the prisoners are evidence that the people who were ordered to take their gloves off, if you will, had not entirely lost their moral way. Gourevitch writes:

Even as they sank into a routine of depravity, they showed by their picture taking that they did not accept it as normal. They never fully got with the program. Is it not to their credit that they were profoundly demoralized by their service in the netherworld?

Credit is perhaps not the mot juste. Nazis who took pictures of naked women lined up in front of their own mass graves might not have considered the scene quite normal either, but this does not mean that they were not with the program. Heinrich Himmler was well aware that what he was asking from his SS men was not normal. That is why he told them to steel themselves against any feelings of humanity that would hamper them in their necessary task.

That Harman, for one, was often disgusted with what she saw at Abu Ghraib is indeed clear from her letters to her partner, Kelly. And even Graner, the baddest of the bad apples, was apparently taken aback when he was told by "Big Steve" Stefanowicz, a contract civilian interrogator, just how roughly prisoners were to be "broken." Graner was reminded of 24, the popular television series, starring Kiefer Sutherland, about the necessity of using any means, including torture, to stop terrorists. Graner claims that he told Big Steve: "We don't do that stuff, that's all TV stuff." Graner was surely unaware that 24 had actually been discussed in all seriousness at brainstorming sessions at Guantánamo led by the staff judge advocate, Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver. She recalled the mounting excitement among her male colleagues, including men from the CIA and the DIA, as different interrogation techniques were being bandied about. She told Philippe Sands, author of Torture Team: "You could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas."

That was in Guantánamo, where ideas were hatched, noted on legal pads, recorded in memos, debated in air-conditioned offices. Now back to Graner in the filth, noise, and menace of constant violence in Abu Ghraib prison. As the authors point out, there is a kind of pornographic quality to many of the pictures which would indicate that Susan Sontag's cultural critique was not entirely off beam.

The deliberate use of women, for example, in the humiliation of Arab prisoners is striking. Graner may have asked his girlfriend, Lynndie England, to pose for a picture holding a prisoner on a leash. This might have given him, and possibly her, an erotic frisson. And Sabrina Harman, too, is seen to have been a grinning accomplice in several of Graner's pranks with naked prisoners. That is why she ended up being convicted. But in fact these games—some clearly staged for the camera as cruel photo-ops—were also part of the program. The women's panties, the nudity in front of women, the poking of the genitals, the enforced simulation of sexual acts, were all part of the program. Graner was told in writing by his commander, Captain Brinson, that he was "doing a fine job." He was told: "Continue to perform at this level and it will help us succeed at our overall mission."

The MPs at Abu Ghraib, as Gourevitch rightly observes, knew little about Middle Eastern culture, but they were given "cultural awareness" training at Fort Lee, before being flown out to Iraq. They were told that sexual humiliation was the most effective way to "soften up" Arab detainees. A person does not have to be corrupted by the popular culture deplored by Susan Sontag to be vulnerable to feelings of pleasure when the sexual humiliation of others is officially sanctioned, even encouraged. Graner's real sin for the administration was not that he went too far (which, measured by any moral yardstick, of course he did), but that he took pleasure in what should have been a grim job. As Dick Cheney said: "It is a mean, nasty, dangerous, dirty business out there, and we have to operate in that arena." Hard dicks should have been kept strictly out of sight, under conference tables. But Graner turned the dirty business into his own pornographic fantasies; and what is worse, he recorded them on film, for all the world to see.

Lynndie England played a walk-on part in these fantasies. She loved Graner. She would have done anything he wanted. That was her tragedy. England was sentenced to three years in a military prison for maltreating detainees. "All I did was what I was told to do," she said, in the oldest defense of men and women landed with the dirty work. "I didn't make the war. I can't end the war. I mean, photographs can't just make or change a war."

Harman, too, acted out her fantasies, of being a forensic photographer, of recording death. As a result, she made the program public, and forced the president of the greatest power on earth to issue a public apology. As Morris says, in his interview: "Under a different set of circumstances, you could imagine Sabrina winning a Pulitzer Prize for photography." Instead, she was charged not only with dereliction of duty and maltreatment, but with destroying government property and "altering evidence," by removing the bandages from the dead man's eyes. She told Morris: "When he died, they cleaned him all up, and then stuck the bandages on. So it's not really altering evidence. They had already done that for me." Since her pictures revealed the truth of this statement, these particular charges were eventually dropped.

Both Morris's film and the book based on it by Gourevitch are devastating, even without going into detail about the complicity, or indeed responsibility, of top officials in the Bush administration. The photographs embarrassed the United States, to be sure. But for the US government, this embarrassment might have actually helped to keep far greater embarrassments from emerging into public view. Preoccupied by the pornography of Abu Ghraib, we have been distracted from the torturing and the killing that was never recorded on film and from finding out who the actual killers were. Moral condemnation of the bad apples turned out to be a highly useful alibi. By looking like a bunch of gloating thugs, "Chuck" Graner, Ivan Frederick, et al. made the law-yers, bureaucrats, and politicians who made, or rather unmade, the rules—William J. Haynes, Alberto Gonzales, David S. Addington, Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Douglas J. Feith, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney—look almost respectable.

And Gilligan, by the way, was probably not the man anyone thought he was after all, but an innocent who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Just like up to 90 percent of the men and boys locked up in Abu Ghraib.

Email to a friend
Notes
[1] White House press conference, August 9, 2007.
[2] "Regarding the Torture of Others," The New York Times Magazine, May 23, 2004.

Who Is John McCain?

From the booth: The reviews of the books under analysis here should provide all the reasons a thoughtful person would need to make an informed assessment of what kind of person John McCain is and what kind he is not. For core issues that affect your wallet/purse/checking account, skip to the last paragraph. Then go back and figure out how this guy got to be the nominee of a major political party. He has manufactured his bona-fides out of polyester with the aid of a willing media that has cut him so much slack that it's hard to find where the rope begins. Gimme a side of chopped liver.

Randy Shiner

Volume 55, Number 10 · June 12, 2008
Who Is John McCain?
By Michael Tomasky

Free Ride: John McCain and the Media
by David Brock and Paul Waldman
Anchor, 218 pp., $13.95 (paper)

The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don't Trust Him—and Why Independents Shouldn't
by Cliff Schecter
PoliPoint, 186 pp., $14.95 (paper)

McCain: The Myth of a Maverick
by Matt Welch
Palgrave Macmillan, 226 pp., $27.95

It is little remembered today that the political career of John Sidney McCain III, a career now thoroughly laundered in mythology, began with the help of several fortuities. In 1973 he returned from his five and a half years of captivity in North Vietnam to Washington, or technically Arlington, Virginia, which had been his childhood home for more years than any other single place as he followed his father, a celebrated four-star admiral, on the elder McCain's naval assignments. He was one of 591 prisoners of war repatriated early that year as a result of Operation Homecoming, and was selected by the editors of US News & World Report as the one returning POW who would be given a thirteen-page spread in the magazine to describe his ordeal (having a famous father never hurts), which brought him the same kind of attention and acclaim that had earlier, for different purposes, been showered upon the young Hillary Diane Rodham and the young John Forbes Kerry.

By 1977 he held the post of naval liaison to Congress, his father's old position, and shortly thereafter attained the rank of captain. It was on Capitol Hill that he met and befriended important senators—Gary Hart of Colorado, William Cohen of Maine, and most of all John Tower of Texas, the buddy to whom he was closest during a period of his life that included its share of carousing and irreparably strained his marriage to his first wife, Carol. When asked to explain the dissolution of their marriage in the late 1970s, she said, "I attribute it more to John turning forty and wanting to be twenty-five again than I do to anything else."

But here was the first piece of luck, for his split from Carol enabled him to romance Cindy Hensley, an Arizonan seventeen years his junior whom he had met while vacationing in Honolulu in 1979 (he was separated) and with whom he was in love, he has written, by the end of their first evening together.

They married in May 1980, and from this union tumbled other fortuities. That she lived in Arizona meant that McCain would be moving to a state—with which he'd had even less association than Hillary Clinton had had with New York in 1999—whose growing population would gain it an extra congressional seat after the 1980 census, a circumstance on which his eye was keenly fixed. Her background—her father, Jim, ran the country's largest Anheuser-Busch distributorship—meant he would have the money and connections to launch the political career he had been coveting since he started meeting those famous pols. McCain hardly knew a soul in Arizona, but already he was telling friends in 1981 that he would swoop into the new seat in 1982 and then succeed Barry Goldwater in the Senate when Goldwater retired.

Then, one piece of bad luck: the new district would be cut in Tucson, not Phoenix. But this was soon followed by the greatest fortuity of all. John Rhodes, the Phoenix Republican who was the House minority leader, unexpectedly announced his retirement. The McCains lived just outside the Rhodes district, but Cindy's money ensured that they were able to buy a house in it and move in immediately. During a primary campaign against three other Republicans, he was, inevitably, branded a carpetbagger and opportunist. Confronted with these allegations at a candidates' forum, he delivered a riposte that would win him the seat and would foreshadow the kind of rhetorical agility that has so impressed reporters. The point of his zinger of a last sentence was not lost on his audience even then:

Listen, pal. I spent twenty-two years in the Navy. My father was in the Navy. My
grandfather was in the Navy. We in the military service tend to move a lot. We
have to live in all parts of the country, all parts of the world. I wish I could
have the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life
in a nice place like the First District of Arizona, but I was doing other
things. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived
longest in my life was Hanoi.

As Matt Welch notes in McCain, this wasn't exactly true; but invoking northern Virginia, where he had actually lived for a combined decade or more, would hardly have put across the desired point. As McCain's career has shown, sometimes the narrative is far more powerful than mere facts.

Twenty-six years later, McCain has secured the Republican presidential nomination and launched his general election campaign, itself the result of even more happy coincidences—Rudy Giuliani's inexplicable decision to skip all the early contests, Mitt Romney's unsteadiness on the national stage, the absence of a consensus on a "real conservative" choice, and press reports suggesting that the initially unpopular troop surge in Iraq, on which he'd placed his bet in late 2006 when President Bush was considering the Iraq Study Group report, was beginning to achieve some success. This should by all rights be a Democratic year, but the Democrats have been locked in ferocious battle, ensuring that one final piece of good fortune awaits McCain in that he will in all likelihood face a black man who no longer "transcends race" in anything like the way he did a few months ago or, if she keeps fighting and somehow manages to pull it off, the country's most polarizing woman, who could secure her party's nomination only by alienating large sections of its base.

But as Arnold Palmer reportedly once said, "It's a funny thing, the more I practice, the luckier I get." McCain's career is undeniably built also upon skill and shrewdness unusual among contemporary American politicians. It's not that he's been an especially accomplished legislator, although passage of the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act ("Bickra," in wonk-speak) took years and much resolve, as Elizabeth Drew shows in her engrossing Citizen McCain from 2002.[1] Nor has he been an especially energetic servant of his Arizona constituents. Welch even asserts that McCain "is infamous throughout his home state as someone who studiously avoids mixing with the little people."

But what McCain has been, of course, is a brilliant strategist of the culture of Washington, and particularly of the arbiters of conventional wisdom in the national press. "The press loves McCain," Chris Matthews said in 2006. "We're his base." McCain understands intuitively how reputations are built and maintained. As David Brock and Paul Waldman of the liberal nonprofit group Media Matters for America put it in Free Ride, McCain has "cracked the media code" of how to turn these ostensible adversaries into his allies and, on numerous occasions, even his apologists.

He became the press's darling in 1999 and 2000, during his first presidential run, the famous "Straight-Talk Express" days. He has since transformed himself into a very different and much more conventional conservative politician. But the fact of that transformation hasn't really taken hold yet in the national press. There is therefore the expectation—or, among liberals, fear—that the mass media will give McCain the benefit of every doubt against Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. The tendency is already in evidence here and there—the proposed elimination of the federal gas tax for the summer, endorsed first by McCain and then by Clinton, resulted in Clinton receiving far more criticism for pandering than McCain did.

So the season has come for anti-McCain books from detractors. Whether the three under review here have any impact on the election discourse will depend, to some extent, on the course of events and the effectiveness of the Democratic fall campaign. But each of the three—all follow the same basic template of critically reassessing the stages of McCain's career—makes persuasive arguments that while there has been much to respect in McCain in the past, there remain today only shards and vestiges of that man; that in doing what he had to do to become the nominee of a party of orthodox conservatism, he has so sublimated his honorable instincts that they have all but atrophied. He's not only adopted domestic policy positions he'd long opposed, he has openly pandered to the conservative Republican base by supporting most of Bush's positions in legislation on the treatment of detainees.

The McCain myth, as we know, is built on the foundation of his five and a half years of captivity in Hoa Lo Prison, aka the "Hanoi Hilton." He was flying a bombing raid in October 1967; his plane was shot down, he parachuted into the middle of a lake in Hanoi, and, with two broken arms and one broken knee, swam to shore. He was stabbed and beaten—bone sticking out of his right knee—and taken to Hoa Lo. His captors did not set his fractures and tortured him regularly, trying to drag false admissions out of him. When they learned that he had a famous father—who was, by 1968, the commander of all US naval forces in the Pacific—they offered him an early release for PR purposes. Because military regulations held that captured prisoners must be released in the order in which they were captured, he refused, spending much of the remainder of his captivity in solitary confinement. It's a staggering story, told most grippingly, in my reading, by David Foster Wallace.[2]

It is also just the right tale of heroism for an unwanted war. If McCain had shot down the greatest number of North Vietnamese, who would celebrate him? If he had led a great raid, most people would be indifferent to him, or—worse—Seymour Hersh or some other investigative journalist would likely have found out by now that innocent women and children were slaughtered. It was by suffering in a cell, serving as a kind of metaphor for American suffering in a war most Americans gave up on early in his confinement, but at the same time holding fast to principle under the most unimaginable circumstances, thereby redeeming some notion of American honor in a dishonorable situation, that McCain became an American hero. Liberal opponents of the war, who seldom acknowledged the repressive brutality of the North Vietnamese regime, were put on the defensive by the story of how he was tortured.
The tale has had a particularly talismanic effect on Baby Boomer journalists, many of whom probably opposed the war when they were young, or did not serve, or both, and thus reflexively grant McCain great moral authority. Brock and Waldman write:

And since few of the reporters who cover him were themselves in the armed forces
in Vietnam, there may be no small amount of guilt involved, or at least the
belief that they have not earned the right to ask him critical questions. On a
2006 episode of Hardball, Bloomberg News reporter Roger Simon noted that
reporters have given McCain "a break or two or three or four or five hundred,"
to which host Chris Matthews immediately replied, "Because he served in Vietnam,
and a lot of us didn't." ...[Journalists] testify that his POW experience is not
only the sum total of McCain's "character," but constitutes the lens through
which character itself must be viewed in any race in which McCain
participates.

Even so, attaining icon status took a while. He first made national headlines as a senator in the late 1980s, as part of the Keating Five, a group of senators who had lobbied in defense of a failing savings-and-loan company, owned by Charles Keating, that was under investigation during the S&L scandals. Keating had made large campaign contributions, including $112,000 to McCain, as well as paid for trips to his Bahamas house. But McCain was less involved with Keating than some of the other senators, and he got only a minor rebuke from the Senate Ethics Committee, which said his conduct was "questionable."

McCain seems to have learned two lessons from the episode. First, he decided that campaign finance reform was an important issue to pursue (partly on the merits, partly to repair his reputation). Second, as Welch notes, he learned "the practical benefits of media over-exposure":

By answering hostile questioning for nearly two full hours, until the reporters
had exhausted their lines of inquiry, McCain found himself praised by his
hometown paper for manfully owning up to his misdeeds. By making himself
available to almost any reporter at any hour, he found that he had sown some
useful empathy.

So the courtship started there. And McCain's new openness with the press may have extended beyond merely "owning up to his misdeeds." Brock and Waldman, citing a 2000 Boston Globe article, say "there is considerable evidence that McCain's office was the source of leaks...that...undermined three of the four other senators." One of the alleged leaks was of a memo that made the role of another Keating senator, Dennis DeConcini of Arizona, seem more incriminating than had been known. Another leak, of a Senate ethics panel report recommending that McCain be dropped as a target of inquiry, led to a New York Times article the very next day. McCain denied under oath in 1992 that he was responsible for any leaks, but according to Brock and Waldman, the man who led a probe of the leaks for the General Accounting Office has said he thinks McCain was responsible, as do DeConcini and former GOP senator Warren Rudman.

McCain's post-Keating efforts on campaign finance attached him to a good-government issue that liberal editorial boards love. It also separated him from most of his fellow Republicans. This is when the words "McCain" and "maverick" started appearing together regularly—also with regard to his effort during the same period to raise the federal tobacco tax. It all culminated in his first presidential run in 2000, when journalists were astounded to be invited into his inner sanctum and made privy to his unfiltered thoughts. Brock and Waldman cite a column by the conservative writer Andrew Ferguson describing the seduction process:

Here's what happens. The reporter—call him Joe—hops aboard McCain's old
campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express. He knows the Arizona senator's
well-known charms. He will not be seduced.

Chatting amiably, Joe asks about a Republican colleague. With ironic
solemnity, McCain responds by describing his fellow senator with an anatomical
epithet. Against his better judgment, Joe chuckles. (Never heard that from a
presidential candidate before!)

He asks a probing question about McCain's personal life—and the senator
answers without hesitation, never asking to go off the record. (Is there nothing
this guy won't be candid about?)

Joe's detachment is already crumbling when McCain offhandedly mentions a self-deprecating anecdote from his time "in prison." The reporter knows the reference is to McCain's years as a POW in Vietnam, back when Joe was sucking bong hits at Princeton. (Guilt, guilt, guilt...)

McCain asks Joe about his kids, by name, then recommends a new book
he's been reading—something unexpectedly literary (I.B. Singer's short
stories?). Seamlessly, he mentions an article Joe wrote—not last week, but in
1993!

The reporter has never voted for a Republican in his life. But he's a
goner.

The vicious campaign that George W. Bush ran against McCain in South Carolina, finally forcing him out of the race after McCain had won seven primaries, only made him an even more sympathetic figure. He emerged from the race the closest thing American politics has had to a hero, even to many liberals, since possibly Bobby Kennedy.

In the Bush years, the halo got brighter. He was of course much sought after by television after September 11. His imprimatur was crucial to Bush's "war on terror." And he still continued to go his own way here and there. Campaign finance reform finally passed in 2002, over the howling objections of conservatives, who continued to loathe McCain because of his various apostasies and on the simple grounds that if that many liberals and journalists liked him, something had to be wrong. He considered, for a few fleeting moments, John Kerry's 2004 offer to be his running mate. The love affair with the press only intensified.

Those few who bothered to try to lift the curtain noticed, especially as the Bush years progressed and he began to prepare for 2008, that there were aspects to McCain's personality and career that didn't quite fit the myth. There are three main ones.

First of all, we have the matter of his famous temper. This has received press attention from time to time. But it hasn't really hurt him, because it's so easy to spin "violent temper" into "passionate beliefs" and make it sound positive. In fact it's not too much to say that a trait that might have mortally wounded other politicians has been described as a strength: "The flip side of 'temper' is feistiness," The Economist explained in a typical assessment from 2007.

Brock and Waldman, Welch, and Cliff Schecter each write at length on McCain's anger, cataloguing instances of him popping off at fellow senators and others and holding grudges for long periods of time, and then denying flatly in on-the-record quotes that he ever loses his temper or holds a grudge. Schecter, a freelance liberal commentator who contributes frequently to The Huffington Post, recounts, for the first time, a tale—confirmed to him, he writes, by three Arizona reporters—that in 1992, after Cindy McCain teased her husband about his thinning hair, McCain snapped at her, in front of the reporters and two staffers: "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you c—." One wonders if on such occasions she reminds her husband who it was that made his political career possible. She has recently called the idea that her husband has a temper "a concoction."

The second issue is more substantive and deals with McCain's policy record—both his votes as a senator and the positions he's taking as presidential candidate. In many matters, it is far from consistent. Schecter's The Real McCain chronicles, in fine-grain detail, McCain's votes and positions, showing that they often seem to reflect hypocrisy, flip-flopping, and pure expediency, rather than the political courage for which he is famous.

In a telling example, McCain has backed off the very issue that first won him such goodwill. For a while after the passage of the McCain-Feingold bill, McCain stuck with the issue, supporting reform of the so-called 527 groups that can spend large sums for advertisements attacking an opposition candidate and not exceed the limits on contributions (the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were one such). But by July 2006, his old allies on campaign finance—Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, Republican Congressman Chris Shays, and Democratic Congressman Marty Meehan—introduced a bill to shore up the public financing of presidential campaigns. McCain had put his name on essentially the same piece of legislation in 2003. Three years later, it was absent.

Earlier this year, McCain unilaterally informed—by law, he was supposed to ask—the Federal Election Commission that he would not abide by primary spending limits he had previously accepted. He faces potentially severe financial penalties for doing so, although the FEC has become deeply politicized and hamstrung. In any event, McCain doesn't talk much about campaign finance reform today, instead concentrating his rhetoric about reform on the far more conservative-friendly topic of cutting government spending and pork.

Such instances are numerous. He voted against the Bush tax cuts originally; he now supports extending them. On immigration reform—another issue on which his views were welcome in the press and among liberals—he has stopped talking about "comprehensive" reform that would include a path to citizenship for undocumented aliens, and begun emphasizing the border fence. In 1999, he said, "I would not support the repeal of Roe v. Wade, which would then force X number of women in America to [undergo] illegal and dangerous operations." By 2006, he said its repeal "wouldn't bother me any." And last month, McCain's campaign indicated that he would no longer continue his long-held support for adding rape-and-incest exceptions to the GOP platform plank that opposes abortion. This is as extreme a position on abortion as exists in American electoral politics.

Most strikingly of all, the man who was repeatedly tortured by the Vietnamese has backpedaled even on the issue of torture by American officials. In 2005, he inserted language into the Detainee Treatment Act that Bush disliked because it forbade the military to use some methods of interrogation. The next year, after the Supreme Court had rebuked the Bush administration positions on detention in its Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision, McCain fought the administration for long enough to receive favorable attention in the press. But he finally declared—in a much-discussed "compromise" with the administration—that he was satisfied with the infamous Military Commissions Act, which contained provisions that prevented prisoners from challenging the basis of their detention. The bill gave the White House the power to ignore the Geneva Conventions if it wished to.

The record, then, shows five serious shifts of position—four of them on some of the most contentious issues before the country, and one, on campaign finance reform, which was once the accomplishment most closely identified with him. Surely any other politician with this record would have been called a "flip-flopper" (he does appear to have remained consistent on global warming, whose existence he acknowledges and which he says he would address). The book by Brock and Waldman provides much critical insight into the important question of how the press failed to deal with McCain's actions.[3] They note that not only were no accusations of inconsistency made, but by and large the press shielded McCain from any such charges after theMilitary Commissions Act passed:

Yet in the week or so between the announcement of the "compromise" and the more
thorough analyses of the final product, McCain seemed to disappear from the
story. Though he had received reams of praise while the negotiations were going
on, once the bill's details were revealed, hardly anyone in the news media held
McCain accountable for his role in its creation.

There is a final matter about McCain, the new and reinvented McCain, that the press hasn't quite taken in. The McCain of 1999 and 2000 was running a campaign that was also a movement. His most famous quote from those days, which he used repeatedly, invoked the idea of public service and usually went something like this, from a convocation speech at Boston College in 2006:

Those who claim their liberty but not their duty to the civilization that
ensures it, live a half-life, having indulged their self-interest at the cost of
their self-respect. But sacrifice for a cause greater than your self-interest,
and you invest your lives with the eminence of that cause, your self-respect
assured.

This belief was at the core of his earlier campaign. Welch, an editorial-page editor at the Los Angeles Times of libertarian bent and a former editor at Reason magazine, devotes considerable space to exploring this aspect of McCain's professed values. His book is the best of the three. The other two, though useful, would have little rationale if McCain weren't a presidential candidate; but Welch has produced a thorough critique that digs deep into McCain's belief system and will have a shelf life beyond this election cycle.

As a libertarian, Welch finds the above quotation about "sacrifice" monstrous, a prettily packaged recipe for putting the people before the individual and trampling liberty. But it was something that I think many journalists and liberals and especially young people found appealing. David Foster Wallace certainly loved it, and he points out in his essay that the idea was part-and-parcel of the whole McCain package—the straight talk and the POW years conferred upon McCain a legitimacy to demand sacrifice of citizens, and his credentials made the call real and not "just one more piece of the carefully scripted bullshit that presidential candidates hand us as they go about the self-interested business of trying to become" president.

McCain's Web site features a section called "A Cause Greater," with links to volunteer organizations and such, and he still uses the phrase at times. But he's certainly cooled down the inspirational rhetoric aimed particularly at young people (I was struck reading both Welch and Wallace at how much of what they said about the vintage 2000 McCain has been said this time around about Obama). McCain's favorite literary character is Hemingway's romantic adventurer Robert Jordan from For Whom the Bell Tolls. His film hero is Brando's Emiliano Zapata, who walked out into the village plaza alone to meet certain death. McCain says he believes in the "beautiful fatalism" of noble lost causes, and he confounded reporters in 2000 by exhibiting apprehension after his New Hampshire win and relief after his South Carolina defeat. Such responses captivated many people. That McCain is probably still in there somewhere, if you dig deep enough. But the McCain we see publicly now is determined to do anything he has to do to win.

It's probably unlikely that the larger national press will arrive at this interpretation by November. The image of the straight-talking maverick who bled in a cell while Baby Boomers indulged themselves is just too hard-wired into their systems. In addition, McCain, still adept at the seduction of journalists and the self-deprecating witticism, hides his rank ambition better than, say, Hillary Clinton does.

Nevertheless, he has equally evident weaknesses. He is saddled with an unpopular incumbent whom he will nevertheless have to embrace because he'll need every vote he can squeeze out of the 29 percent who still like Bush. The recent Republican losses in special House elections in strong GOP districts in Illinois and Louisiana suggest a badly damaged brand, and McCain has not so far proven himself the kind of leader who can fundamentally redefine his party. Finally, his age might matter. If elected, he will turn seventy-three seven months into his first term. A senior moment or two—further confusing Sunni and Shia, which he's done twice now—would come in handy for his opponent.

But for the most part, the Democrats will have to defeat McCain on substance. They will begin with Iraq. McCain was much criticized for a previous statement that a hundred-year US presence in the country would "be fine with me"; so in a May 15 speech he bowed to political reality. He said that "among the conditions I intend to achieve" would be victory in Iraq, and withdrawal of "most of the service men and women," by 2013. But he presented no analytic vision of how he would accomplish that, and trying to distance himself from Bush's war policy after all this time may anger the neocons in his base more than it placates moderate voters.
His rhetoric about Iran—which inevitably will be a factor in any solution—has been belligerent. He calls it a "rogue state" and has spoken often of "rogue-state rollback," deliberately invoking a word favored by the hardest-line cold warriors; he recently said he never meant by the phrase "that we should go around and declare war." On the Middle East, he said in late April that "people should understand that I will be Hamas's worst nightmare."

On health care, McCain's plan is built around tax credits ($5,000 for families) that would cover less than half the cost of today's average family plan and lead to high deductibles and much greater risk. His economic policies would, if enacted, combine Bush's tax cuts with far more severe spending cuts in a way that could ultimately destabilize Social Security and Medicare, a goal fiscal conservatives have sought for decades; and he recently announced that he would nominate Supreme Court judges like John Roberts and Samuel Alito. So there's plenty for the opposition to work with. Whether these matters will carry more weight than lapel pins or pastors or the ghosts of Hanoi may well be the question of this year's campaign.

—May 15, 2008


Email to a friend
Notes
[1] Drew and Simon & Schuster have reissued Citizen McCain this year with an excellent new introduction by the author that raises all the pertinent questions about McCain today and is well worth reading.
[2] Wallace covered the Straight-Talk Express for Rolling Stone in 2000. His extended essay, "Up, Simba," appears in his Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (Little, Brown, 2005). "Up, Simba" is being reissued this month as a book, with an introduction by Slate editor Jacob Weisberg, under the title McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight-Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking about Hope (Back Bay). This new edition was not yet available at press time.
[3] Since their book's recent publication, Brock and Waldman have added a new chapter on press coverage of McCain, which is available at mediamattersaction.org/freeride/addendum.