Jesus and the Martian

"A sad time for all people"

Imagine the world becoming obsessed with the survival of one person. Can you imagine anyone who would actually deserve it?

For Christians, the answer should be easy, especially in this season after Holy Week and Easter Sunday. During those precious few days, our ritual and liturgy focused like a laser on the person of Jesus of Nazareth. We rejoiced while remembering his entry into Jerusalem and deplored his followers’ neglectfulness in the garden and his delivery into his tormentors’ hands. Especially if we re-watched Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” we winced as the whip tore the flesh from his back and the nails pierced his hands and feet. Finally, inevitably, all Christians shouted, “Alleluia, Christ is risen!”

For us modern people, divided by language, creed, race, and station, by borders and ancient resentments and suspicions, it’s hard to imagine one person drawing the world together as Christ does his followers. Sometimes it does seem to happen, if only for a moment and almost always as the residue of tragedy. Those of a certain age remember the events of Nov. 22, 1963 as an outrage against all humanity. President Kennedy’s successor certainly did. During a recent visit to the LBJ Library in Austin, I saw the typescript of the brief remarks a staff member prepared for President Johnson to use when his plane arrived in Washington from Dallas with Kennedy’s body aboard. The aide wrote, “This is a sad time for every American.” Johnson crossed out the last two words so it would read, “[F]or all people.”

And so it was, although our species’ sadness didn’t ameliorate our Cold War rivalries. It makes me wonder what we could accomplish if the fragile bubble of unity never burst, if two billion Christians acted together in the spirit of our common alleluia, if people could just agree on how to achieve peace, justice, and freedom for all. After all, writes novelist Andy Weir, “[E]very human being has a basic instinct to help each other out. It might not seem that way sometimes, but it’s true….This is so fundamentally human that it’s found in every culture without exception.”

Left behind

Actually, that’s not Andy talking but astronaut Mark Watney, a character in Weir’s book, The Martian. Mark is one of six NASA astronauts who land on Mars. When the mission is aborted because of a sandstorm, his colleagues leave without him because they mistakenly think he’s been killed. He has to survive using only the food, air, water, shelter, and transportation (two four wheel-drive rovers) left behind with him.

The novel, which features no extraterrestrials, is a space geek’s dream. At first, no one knows Mark’s alive. Then a NASA staffer studying satellite photos of the landing site notices that someone has moved one of the rovers. Within hours, everyone realizes that Mark is puttering around on Mars, and it turns out that almost all seven billion people on the novel’s fictional but highly realistic planet Earth want him to make it home. The U.S. invests hundreds of millions of dollars in desperate rescue missions. Even our geostrategic rivals the Chinese decide to help.

The Martian deftly invokes a unity of purpose that reminds me of Christians’ Easter acclamations, that laser-like fixation of ours on the miracle of Resurrection. We are prone to lose our unity all too soon, falling back on our enervating squabbles with one another at home, work, and church. By the same token, reading Andy Weir’s book, I had no trouble accepting that people would become fixated on an astronaut stranded 140 million miles away while overlooking the victims of injustice and circumstance on their own planet and even their own doorsteps. If God’s people ever gave full expression to the instinct to help each other out that Weir correctly identifies, then (pace Matt. 11:5) the blind would surely see, the deaf hear, and the lame walk, and good news would be continually proclaimed to the poor. Alleluia! 

This post first appeared in the Vaya Con Dios, the newsletter of St. John Chrysostom Episcopal Church.

Anna Another Thing On Watergate

Ken Hughes argues that Richard Nixon ordered a break-in at the Brookings Institution in 1971 not because of his rage over the leak of the Pentagon Papers during wartime, as I've always contended, but because he was worried about what his political opponents might've known about his effort to torpedo the Johnson administration's Vietnam peace process.

The Brookings break-in never occurred. Still, Hughes asserts somewhat dramatically that if the House Judiciary Committee had known about the Brookings tape segment in 1974, and it had led investigators to the Anna Chennault file (she told the South Vietnam they'd get a better deal under Nixon), the articles of impeachment drawn up against Nixon might have included treason (based on the law against private citizens interfering with official U.S. diplomacy).

Hughes says there's no evidence that presidential politics were behind Lyndon Johnson's ordering a bombing halt in Vietnam a few days before the 1968 election, when Nixon was running against Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey. About this, Nixon's advocates beg to differ -- for example, Conrad Black:

[P]erhaps the all-time nadir in American presidential-election ethics was achieved in 1968, when Lyndon Johnson tried to salvage the election for his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, with a completely imaginary claim of a peace breakthrough in the Vietnam talks a few days before the election. LBJ announced an enhanced bombing halt and more intensive talks in which the Viet Cong and the Saigon government would be “free to participate” (i.e., Saigon declined to attend since there had been no breakthrough).

So who did worse playing politics with war: The candidate or commander-in-chief?

Maarja Krusten reflects on Hughes' startling allegations here.

Nixon's Still The One?

Richard Nixon's friend R. Emmett Tyrrell, founder of the American Spectator, was in the middle of Robert Caro's latest volume on Lyndon Johnson when he came across Woodstein's latest on Nixon and Watergate. Tyrrell writes:

[H]ow would Woodward, or for that matter Caro, compare Nixon and Johnson? Nixon labored to end the war that John Kennedy created and Lyndon Johnson bungled at massive expense in lives and treasure. Nixon was on track to save South Vietnam before he was driven from office. Nixon did save the state of Israel even as he was fighting off impeachment. He and Kissinger played the Soviet Union and China like a Stradivarius, ending the performance with China as a virtual ally. All and all, it was not a bad record.

Then there is Johnson. Among Caro's many infelicities, lazy research is not one of them. He faithfully records how President Johnson turned the purchase of a $17,500 radio station into a vast media fortune through the manipulation of such federal agencies as the FCC. By middle age, he, a lifelong government employee, was a millionaire. He stole his first election -- in high school! -- his Senate seat in 1948, and the state of Texas for his running mate in 1960. That last race was against Nixon, who would not contest the contest. Then there is his psychological makeup. He was insecure, unstable, often a wreck. As vice president, he was an emotional ruin from run-ins with the Kennedys until that sad day in Dallas, when in a car ahead of him, John Kennedy was shot.

Almost eerily within minutes of the president's death, Johnson underwent a kind of emotional epiphany, rising to his former bluff, albeit phony, self. Very rudely, within a half hour of Bob Kennedy's discovery of his brother's death, President Johnson called to conduct business. The insensitivity is shocking.

Yet ever since Nixon was driven from office, we have been led to believe Nixon was squirrely and a threat to our democratic ways, and Johnson was...well, what was Johnson? We are on the road to national bankruptcy because of his poorly funded policies today. I say, wherever he is, bring back Nixon. Nixon's the one.

Taking Charge In Dallas

The April 2 New Yorker presents a meticulously researched account by LBJ biographer Robert Caro of the day Lyndon Johnson became president. It culminates with his stage-managing this iconic scene above Air Force One as it idled on the tarmac in Dallas -- making sure Mrs. Kennedy and her husband's casket were aboard and that she would be present to lend her legitimacy to the transition of power, for the same reason demanding that as many Kennedy assistants as possible cram into the stiflingly hot stateroom, arranging the placement of the photographer and witnesses, researching the words of the oath, and deciding that it would be administered a federal judge, Sarah T. Hughes, whose appointment he'd favored as vice president but whom the Kennedys at first had blocked:

The scene was still eerie: the gloom, the heat, the whispering, the low, insistent whine of the jet engine, the mass of dim faces crowded so close together. But one element had vanished: the confusion. Watching Lyndon Johnson arrange the crowd, give orders, deal with [Kennedy aides Ken] O'Donnell and [Larry] O'Brien, [Johnson aide] Liz Carpenter, dazed by the rush of events, realized that there was at least one person in the room who wasn't dazed, who was, however hectic the situation might be, in complete command of it.

In the agony of the moment, Johnson encountered resistance from Kennedy aides, some of whom didn't like him and didn't think having the ceremony in Dallas was necessary. Johnson had become president the moment Kennedy died; wasn't that enough? But Johnson understood the stricken country needed to witness the continuity of authority, and there was no better way than to conduct this sacred ritual. His left hand rested not on a Bible but a pocket-sized Roman Catholic missal.

Three Great Lincolns

On display at the Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, the "bubble top" limousine used by FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower and briefly by Kennedy

The car in which President Kennedy lost his life; also used by Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter

President Reagan was about to step into this car at the moment of the 1981 attempt on his life, when a bullet struck him after ricocheting off the armor plating on the side; previously used by Ford and Carter

Good Paranoia

From Glenn Garvin at the Miami Herald (my mother's paper for a few months in 1965, during one of Detroit's periodic newspaper strikes, many of which were called by my genial journalistic Joe Hill of a godfather), a balanced take on Vietnam-era antagonists Richard Nixon and Daniel Ellsberg, subjects of a new public television documentary:

The fundamental problem with The Most Dangerous Man is that it's not really a documentary at all. Narrated by Ellsberg and based largely on his 2002 autobiography, it's more of an illustrated memoir. Though it includes interviews with reporters, Ellsberg colleagues and other figures in the case, virtually all of them treat him as an unalloyed hero.

The exceptions are Richard Nixon and a few henchmen who can be heard on White House tapes cursing Ellsberg and plotting vengeance. ``We've got to get this son of a bitch,'' snarls Nixon in one of the milder excerpts. They tried, filing criminal charges and even burglarizing the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist in search of dirty laundry -- an act of over-enthusiasm that would help topple Nixon's presidency.

Nixon and his minions make easy (and, in many ways, appropriate) villains. But The Most Dangerous Man makes no attempt to put the government's side of the story in perspective. Ellsberg had just leaked 7,000 pages of classified documents and not just to reporters: A Russian double agent told the FBI a set had been delivered to the Soviet embassy in Washington.

Nobody knew what else Ellsberg had lifted from Pentagon files or what he might be planning to do with it. His ex-wife, though an anti-war activist, told the FBI she thought he was having a mental breakdown. Some of his accomplices were not merely anti war but pro communist, openly supporting North Vietnam's Stalinist government. If Nixon was paranoid about Ellsberg, he had good reason.

The Most Dangerous Man goes beyond omission to outright falsification in its implication that Nixon was trying to suppress the Pentagon Papers because they showed he was thinking of using nuclear weapons in Vietnam. In fact, the papers contained not a single word about his presidency; their account of the war ended in 1969, before Nixon took office. Nor was he escalating the war, as The Most Dangerous Man implies. When Ellsberg leaked the papers, Nixon had reduced the number of troops from the 536,000 deployed by Lyndon Johnson to 157,000.

"Come Home, America" Watch, Day 65

On Afghanistan, is President Obama displaying indecision, as his partisan critics proclaim, or taking the appropriate amount of time to make the right decision? I'm still inclined to think the latter. I'd be more certain if there weren't so many leaks, which do tend to make him look weak, as he and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates obviously realize, hence their threats to fire the leakers.

As for judging the outcome of his deliberations, we may not know until he's long out of office. Same with George W. Bush's Iraq intervention. Sometimes blink decisions are the best ones, though if the repercussions will last for decades or more, and if hundreds or thousands of lives are at stake, it's wise to take as much time as you have. Imagine if Kennedy and Johnson had done the same thing in Vietnam.

"Everybody Ought To Shut Up"

Though the Obama campaign was famous for its imperturbability and also its discipline when it came to dealings with the media, the Obama White House's private deliberations about an important national security question are essentially being conducted in public as weekly and sometimes daily stories are leaked purporting to represent the mind of the President and his advisers. If this is by design as far as the White House is concerned, it doesn't appeal to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, former director of the CIA and a former NSC adviser in his own right. On a flight to Wisconsin yesterday, Gates said he was appalled by the leaking and hinted he would fire Pentagon leakers if he finds them (Who you gonna call?: The Plumbers). He added, "Everybody ought to just shut up."

The New York Times, which reported Gates' outburst, is also carrying this story, in which we learn that the ambassador to Afghanistan, retired Army Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, sent a cable to Washington opposing sending more U.S. troops, as requested by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, for fear that the Afghan regime will become too dependent on the U.S. for security. It seems likely that Eikenberry, who has advanced degrees from Stanford and Harvard, is remembering the deepening of South Vietnam's dependency on the U.S. that occurred after President Ngo Dinh Diem was murdered with our acquiescence in 1962 and President Johnson massively escalated our military involvement in 1965.

As we already know, Vietnam is also on the mind of the U.S. commander in Afghanistan. The Times article hints that McChrystal took Eikenberry to the woodshed, getting him to soften his stance in subsequent cables. During a meeting in Kabul, according to the Times:

General McChrystal did not refer to the cable directly, but specifically challenged General Eikenberry’s conclusions, according to one official familiar with the meeting. General McChrystal, he said, said that no alternatives had been offered besides “the helicopter on the roof of the embassy,” a reference to the hasty American withdrawal from Saigon in 1975.

It's a pregnant analogy. It suggests that McChrystal fears another U.S. humiliation if we withdraw hastily and also, knowing the ruthlessness of the Taliban, that he has a pretty good idea of the fate that would likely befall anyone in Afghanistan associated with the U.S. intervention. Obviously Obama wants to avoid both that outcome as well as the kind of lavish, open-ended commitment that would essentially turn Afghanistan into a U.S. protectorate. All the news accounts make clear that this is the line he's trying to walk.

It's a fascinating challenge for a President: Believing he has the opportunity to make a discerning decision that takes Vietnam's lessons into account without being obsessed with them. One lesson he should not neglect is Lyndon Johnson's own unavailing efforts to control a fluid and unpredictable military and political environment by his daily micromanagement of the Vietnam war. Once Obama finishes agonizing, he had better get out of the way.

As I've said before, I'm glad Obama is taking his time on the policy reappraisal. But Gates is right about the leaks. They are beginning to make the President look silly and even weak. For instance:

At a National Security Council meeting on Wednesday...Mr. Obama picked up on General Eikenberry’s arguments about growing Afghan dependence, according to a senior official. The president, he said, was far more assertive than in previous sessions, pressing his advisers about the wisdom of four proposals for adding troops. The change in his tone, from listening to challenging, was palpable, officials said.

Next they'll be counting the number of times he arches his eyebrows. This sounds like a Biden dove trying to demonstrate to the press and public that the Clinton hawks are losing favor with the prince. Once I would've thought that someone authoritative was trying to signal what the President was really thinking, but it appears that the White House may just be incompetent, at least in this area. While Obama takes his responsibilities in this weightiest of matters seriously, those around him may not take them seriously enough to enable him to do his deciding, undeciding, and redeciding (as Ray Price used to say about RN) in private. For Presidents, Hamlet is not a good paradigm.

McNamara, Again

In his last extensive interview, offered to the Washington Post in August 2007, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who died in July, lashes out at President Johnson for failing to listen to his advice about Vietnam. It was too early for the Post to apply McNamara's insights about Vietnam to President Obama's agonized reappraisal of the Afghanistan war, though the reporters, Bob Woodward and Gordon M. Goldstein, sum up as follows:

The debate now unfolding -- in the White House, in Congress and in the public square -- about the way ahead in Afghanistan is one that McNamara and Bundy, given their efforts late in life to come to terms with Vietnam, would have no doubt followed with keen interest. In his final interview, McNamara was asked how a country truly learns from its mistakes. "I think you break" from replicating history, he said, "by writing thoughtful retrospective reviews of what we've done in the past that may apply to the current situation or the future."

Fair enough. But I wish I read as much about what Democratic congressional leaders could have done in 1973-75 to save South Vietnam as I do ritualistic flagellations of Johnson and McNamara for what they did in escalating the war. The war wasn't lost until it was lost, after the Watergate Congress systematically set about to deprive our allies of bullets. As a matter of fact, there's a lesson in that for Obama, too.

Hat tip to Maarja Krusten

Bobby Kennedy Sought Vietnam Peace Mission

A peek at Sen. Kennedy's soon-to-be-published memoirs:

Mr. Kennedy tells of a secret meeting in the spring of 1967 between President Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert Kennedy, whose increasingly outspoken criticism of the war in Southeast Asia was becoming a political threat to Mr. Johnson. According to the book, Robert Kennedy proposed that Mr. Johnson gave him authority to personally negotiate a peace treaty in Vietnam. This, implicitly, would have kept Mr. Kennedy out of the 1968 race for the Democratic nomination, a prospect that Mr. Johnson had come to worry greatly about.

“If the president had accepted his offer,” the book says, “Bobby certainly would have been too immersed in the peace process to become involved in presidential primary.” Mr. Johnson could not take the offer at face value, concerned that Robert Kennedy had ulterior motives.

Afghan Hearts And Minds

Because I think that, thanks to Richard Nixon's policies, South Vietnam might have held on indefinitely if the U.S. Congress hadn't deprived it of guns and bullets after our troops came home in 1973, I resist Vietnam-Afghanistan comparisons. Yet it's a weird experience reading this "Economist" survey of recent developments and substituting "Viet Cong" for "Taliban" and "Diem" for "Karzai."

To venture further into the analogy, Afghanistan was Bush's intervention (substitute the Vietnam-era "JFK") and Obama's escalation ("LBJ"). The danger is whether the U.S. will end up taking ownership of the Afghans' faltering regime as we did when we acquiesced in the coup against Diem in 1963.

Bush managed to commence the U.S. extraction from Iraq before its government could lose legitimacy as the result of being pegged as a U.S. puppet. Obama will have that model to follow, ironically enough. If he doesn't, and if the U.S. military effort escalates as the Afghan regime grows weaker, we'll need another new Nixon to try to clean up the mess.

You Can't Call Him Johnson

Former Lyndon Johnson aide Tom Johnson -- and, as publisher of the LA Times when it was still the LA Times, my mother's former boss -- is circulating this account of how the one-time Senator majority leader would've passed a health care bill:

LBJ would have:

A list of every member of Congress on his desk

He would be on the telephone with members (and their key staffers) constantly. "Your President really needs your vote on this bill"

He would have a list of every special request every member wanted---from WH tours to appointment of federal jobs and commissions

He would make phone call or have an in-person personal visit with every member individually or in a group. Charts, graphs, coffee. They would get the Johnson Treatment as nobody else could give it.

He would have a willingness to horse-trade with every member

He would keep list of people who support each member financially. A call to each to tell them to get the vote of that representative. (Arthur Krim, Lew Wasserman)

He would have Billy Graham calling Baptists, Cardinal Cushing calling Catholics, Dr. King calling blacks, Henry Gonzales calling Hispanics, Henry Ford and David Rockefeller calling Republicans.

He would get Jack Valenti to call the Pope if it would help.

He would have speeches written for members for the Congressional Record and hometown newspapers.

He would use up White House liquor having nightcaps with the leaders and key votes of BOTH parties.

Each of them would take home cufflinks, watches, signed photos, and perhaps even a pledge to come raise money for their next reelection

He would be sending gifts to children and grandchildren of members.

He would walk around the South Lawn with reporters telling them why this was important to their own families.

He would send every aide in The White House to see every member of the House and Senate. He would send me to see Senator Russell and Carl Vinson because I am a Georgian.

He would call Kay Graham, Frank Stanton, Robert Kintner, and the heads of every network.

He would go to pray at six different churches.

He would do newspaper, radio and TV interviews. Especially with Merriman Smith, Hugh Sidey, Sid Davis, Forrest Boyd, Ray Scherer, Helen Thomas, Marianne Means, Walter Cronkite, Phil Potter, Bob Novak.

He would threaten, cajole, flirt, flatter, hug, and get the bill passed.

GOP: Banking On Disaster

A former Bush speechwriter, mapping the GOP's road to recovery, enunciates the difficult truth that the phoenix usually needs ashes to rise from, such as RN from LBJ's Vietnam failure and Ronald Reagan from Jimmy Carter's economy:

In the most recent instance, the blow dealt to congressional Republicans in 2006 was primarily an expression of public fatigue with the war in Iraq. By the time the 2008 elections came around, that feeling had subsided considerably, but even in its diminished state it paired with the financial crisis to create a toxic atmosphere for Republican candidates. Thus, any sensible strategy for a Republican resurgence will recognize a timeless, if frustrating, truth of party politics - sometimes you have to wait for the mountain to come to you.

It's Rented, But Still.

What a treat to find a transcript of my MC remarks at the Nixon Center's Jan. 12 dinner in Washington in honor of Mike Mullen, chairman of of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. After spending 20 minutes getting the assembled elites to take their seats (I do believe this task is the main reason my brilliant but introverted Russian brother Dimitri Simes invites me each year), I find I said this:

We are living in a time of change and tumult. In not too many days, we will celebrate a peaceful change. For many, although not all, a welcome change, but all Americans celebrate a peaceful change. And we've had a whole election year in which change has been the mantra.

But there is another word that begins with "c," and that is continuity. Consistency. We honor today someone who was commissioned in the United States Navy forty years ago last year, in the tumultuous year of 1968, when he graduated from the Naval Academy in Annapolis and received his first commission.

In case you're counting, that means he has already served eight presidents of the United States, eight Commanders-in-Chief, beginning with Lyndon Johnson, and he has experienced the disappointment and, according to many, the tragedy of America's failure in Vietnam, which many say was as much a political failure as any other kind. He has experienced the clarity of the West's victory in the Cold War, and now he is a vital part of the malleable and front-changing war on terrorism.

And throughout that entire era, which encompasses so many different aspects of our lives as Americans, so many different kinds of conflict, he has provided expertise and sanity and consistency and brilliance in his work and service to, soon, nine Commanders-in-Chief and to all of us.

And if you guessed the main reason for this post is to display the photo, you're right. Someone said every man looks great in a tux, and I need all the help I can get.