Reagan Was Connected

Big government comes in handy when you really need it. Beginning in the 1940s, Ronald Reagan earned the friendship of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI by informing on his Hollywood colleagues. According to author Seth Rosenfeld, the FBI reciprocated by overlooking Reagan's omissions in his national security paperwork as governor and, on the eve of his gubernatorial candidacy, saving him from the scandal of his son Michael associating with the son of a mobster. Rosenfeld was interviewed by Terry Gross on the Aug. 21 "Fresh Air":

The FBI did a personal and political favor for Ronald Reagan in 1965. FBI agents at the time were investigating the Bonanno crime organization. Joe Bananas, as he was known, was one of the most notorious mobsters in America and had recently moved to Arizona.

FBI agents in Phoenix were investigating him when they discovered that Joe Bananas' son, Joseph Jr., was hanging out with Michael Reagan, who was the adopted son of Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman, and they reported this to headquarters.

The agents proposed that they should interview Ronald Reagan to see if he had learned anything about the Bonannos through his son. This investigation, after all, was a top priority. But Hoover interceded. He ordered them not to interview Ronald Reagan, and he instead told the agents to warn Ronald Reagan that his son was consorting with the son of Joe Bananas....

This happened in early 1965, just as Ronald Reagan was about to embark on his first run for public office, the governorship of California. And when FBI agents warned him that his son was hanging out with Joe Bonanno's son, he was very grateful. And according to an FBI report, Reagan said "he was most appreciative and stated he realized that such an association and actions on the part of the son might well jeopardize any political aspirations he might have." Reagan stated he would telephone his son and instruct him to disassociate himself gracefully and in a manner which would cause no trouble or speculation. He stated that the bureau's courtesy in this matter would be kept absolutely confidential. Reagan commented that he realizes that it would be improper to express his appreciation in writing, and he requested that the agent convey the great admiration he has for the director and the bureau and to express his thanks for the bureau's cooperation.

Chris Rock's College Of Preachers

Appearing Aug. 9 on Terry Gross's "Fresh Air," comedian Chris Rock on what he learned from his paternal grandfather, the Rev. Allen Rock:

I used to hang out with my grandfather all the time. Because he used to have to pick me up from school sometimes or, you know, drive me to my mother's or whatever, but - so I would be with my grandfather a lot. I used to watch him write his sermons. He writes his sermons pretty much the same way I write my act. He would never write the exact sermon. He'd always write the bullet points, whatever would hit him, and he would write it when he was driving. And I probably come up with half of my standup when I'm driving....

His preaching, it's weird, it's not a lot different than my style on stage. And he let things move him and he, you know, he never locked into, you know, exact words, and he tried to, you know, to bring a little Bible but also try to bring in something that is happening to people today; that way the Bible went down a little bit smoother, if you can relate it to their lives. No, he was a pretty good preacher....His vocal style was...old-time black preacher. And the Lord said!, you know, so I take what he said and turn it down a little bit...

[W]hen you grow up with a preacher, it's almost like--it's like seeing a magician stuff the rabbit in his side jacket. Like, I knew all the tricks....I don't think he thought of it as tricks, but every job becomes a job, and you figure out shortcuts and you figure out, you know, ways around things. I mean, I could watch a preacher now...I watch [Joel Osteen and TD Jakes....I can see when they're preaching, and I can see when they're...kind of losing the crowd and have to go to something. I can tell when they make audibles and have to go to something else so they can get the crowd back.

[I watch them half] for performance reasons and half of it just because I like a good sermon, and [you're] always looking - A, a good sermon's always great, and, B, you know, these guys, they're always - they have this task of coming up with a new with new material every week....

I like how a preacher can talk about one thing for an hour and ten minutes. I keep trying to figure out how I can do that in stand-up. So, how I can, like, OK, how can I just be funny about, you know, jealousy? You know, a preacher will pick a topic, and they'll run with it for the whole sermon, like, and, you know, take you on a ride talking about literally one thing. And I just love that style. So I'm always-- I've always been trying to figure out how do I do that in stand-up.

Holy Toledo

Rt. Rev. Leonard Blair, the Roman Catholic bishop of Toledo, is the man whom the Vatican assigned to quiet the Leadership Council of Women Religious (which represents most U.S. nuns) because of its members' views on contraception, the sacramental status of gay and lesbian people, and women's ordination. During a proper grilling this week by Terry Gross on her program, "Fresh Air," Bishop Blair paused to gloat about reflect on another troubled denomination:

You know, it's very interesting. In the New York Times earlier this month, there was an article, "Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved?" And, you know, the author - and I don't mean to pick on Episcopalians, because I'm just quoting what this writer said in the New York Times, but he said today the Episcopal Church looks roughly how Roman Catholicism would look if Pope Benedict suddenly adopted everything urged on the Vatican by, you know, liberal theologians and thinkers and people who dissent. But he said instead of attracting a younger, more open-minded group, he said the church is really experiencing a tremendous drop in its - in practice. And I mean Catholicism is too having its share of problems. But, you know, this is - just becoming like the world and just accepting the secular culture's answer to all these things is not really a solution for people of faith.

The photo below of our bishops suffragan in the Diocese of Los Angeles, Mary Douglas Glasspool and Diane Jardine Bruce, shows exactly how our church looks. Our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters should be so blessed. But the Vatican's only solution is that the nuns and everyone else must continue to obey celibate male priests and bishops:

[W]hen it comes to the priesthood, and I don't know that on a program like this we're able to explore the theology of it, because it is a theological one; it's not political. It's not sociological. It's theological. About what the sacraments are and what it means for a man to stand at the altar and act in the very person of Christ as a priest.

I mean, St. Paul talks about Christ being the groom and the church being his bride. That symbolism, theologically, is very much a part of our understanding of the Mass and the priesthood. And that's, I think, also why Christians who maintain their faith in a priesthood - namely, the Catholics and the Orthodox - do not have a female priest.

But churches such as in Protestantism, that speak only about ministry rather than priesthood, for them it's much easier to have women do that because it's a very different kind of faith about the meaning of these things.

The church doesn't say that the ordination of women is not possible because somehow women are unfit to carry out the functions of the priest, but because on the level of sacramental signs, it's not the choice that our Lord made when it comes to those who act in his very person, as the church's bridegroom.

Most of Jesus's followers and apostles were male. It could hardy have been otherwise in first-century Palestine, where women and children were devalued. The Son of Man taught in terms that men and women of his time could understand. Bishop Blair believes that the 21st century church must be governed according to these relatively primitive human standards, redolent with injustice and sin.

Not all Christians agree. The bishop's brief summary of Protestantism notwithstanding, in the 1970s and 1980s the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States decided that women should and must be priests and bishops. With the guidance of the Holy Spirit -- and having recovered, through careful study of the Bible and the church's early history, an understanding of Jesus's and St. Paul's high and highly counter-cultural regard for women as leaders in the church -- we have concluded that the Savior of all humanity is just as fittingly represented at the altar by a woman as a man. Roman Catholic scholarship helped make this leap of faith possible.

When The Episcopal Church shed 2,000-year-old Mediterranean gender norms, the harder debate about gay and lesbian people awaited. For making a place for all people as God made them, critics accuse us of moral relativism and abandonment of the authority of scripture. I can only speak for myself, an orthodox Christian who believes in the saving power of Christ's life, suffering, death, and bodily Resurrection as revealed in the New Testament and the creeds and traditions of the church. I'm skeptical only about the few passages that seem to command us to discriminate against woman and gay people -- friends, relatives, and colleagues living gracious, generous, faithful lives.

Perhaps because they've seen how gender and identity debates have roiled our and the other mainline denominations, Bishop Blair and his colleagues don't want any of it. That's why he doesn't quite hear what his sisters in the Leadership Council of Women Religious mean when they plead for open dialogue. He tells Gross:

[I]f by dialogue they mean that the doctrines of the church are negotiable and that the bishops represent one position and the LCWR presents another position, and somehow we find a middle ground about basic church teaching on faith and morals, then no. That's - I don't think that's the kind of dialogue that the Holy See would envision.

But if it's a dialogue about how to have the LCWR really educate and help the sisters to appreciate and accept church teaching and to implement it in their discussions and try to heal some of the questions or concerns they have about these issues, then that would be the dialogue.

I think that the fundamental faith of the Catholic Church is that there are objective truths and there are teachings of the faith that really do come from revelation and that are interpreted authentically through the teaching office of the church, by the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and that are expected to be believed with the obedience of faith.

And those are things that are not negotiable.

Many Catholics have left the negotiating table and their church. Some have even turned up at the Lord's table in our parishes. After alluding to declining membership in the Episcopal Church, Bishop Blair seemed to bring himself up short. He may have remembered the statistics that have crossed his desk about Catholics' declining attendance at mass. Gross, his interviewer, had also reminded him about clergy abuse scandals and Catholic women's disregard for the Vatican's teachings about birth control. "Catholicism is too having its share of problems," he admitted. Indeed: A spirit-killing, extra-biblical insistence on priestly celibacy. A penchant for secrecy and coverup. And a continued insistence on the diminishment of women.

Yes, the Episcopalians are struggling because our reforms are pressing the outside of the envelope. The Roman Catholics are struggling because, for the current Vatican leadership, reform is a dead letter. I know what page I'd rather be on.

"Wide River to Cross," Levon Helm

I'm only halfway home; I've got to journey on to where I'll find, I'll find the thing that I have lost. Written by Buddy Miller and performed by Helm on his Grammy-winning 2007 album, "Dirt Farmer." He's singing with Teresa Williams and his daughter and co-producer, Amy Helm.

When the album came out and Terry Gross interviewed him for "Fresh Air," he reflected on his recovery from cancer in his vocal cords, which had kept him from singing and sometimes even talking for years:

I've always appreciated my family and friends, you know, and those ties that bind us together. But it's like my music, this much later and after you've almost got everything taken away from you, once you get that back, boy, it's a joyful life that we've all been given.

And, you know, you can really - you know, when you see a young nephew or a young person in your family that's blood related, and you see them for the first time and they're not old enough to know that they're all related, but you can look into their face and you they look into your eyes and you both know it. You know, we take it for granted. You know, we enjoy that kind of thing without even a big thank you most of the time.

I'm pretty sure that preaches. My music buddy Boom Baker and I are offering a big thank you that we had the blessing of making the trip to Levon's Woodstock barn in 2009.

Drifting Together

It won't surprise MSNBC host Rachel Maddow's fans that her new book, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, explores how those who wage war have become less accountable to the public. It might surprise them Fox News founder Roger Ailes gave her a blurb. When it comes to issues of war and peace, are the left and right converging? Maddow explored the possibility in a March 27 conversation with Terry Gross on "Fresh Air":

I think the discomfort that we have as civilians in terms of our distance from the military that's been fighting these wars for 10 years is something that people feel on the left and people feel on the right. And I think the problematic political decisions that got us to this point were not made, mostly, for ideological reasons. They were made by politicians on the left and the right for what they thought were pragmatic short-term reasons.

And they've had long-term problematic consequences. And I think Republicans and Democrats are getting closer to each other in terms of how fast we should end the Afghanistan War, for example. I think Republicans and Democrats are finding a lot of overlap among themselves on whether or not the defense budget is where it ought to be.

This is just one of those issues where there isn't a real sharp right/left axis. And I know because I am a liberal and I am known as a liberal, that people might have thought this was going to be a real liberal, anti-war book. This isn't a liberal anti-war book. It's a book about the politics of making war and whether or not they've changed in a way that's bad for the country.

Hoover Reconsidered And Redressed

On Feb. 14's "Fresh Air," Terry Gross interviewed Tim Weiner, author of the newly published Enemies: A History of the FBI. Weiner's extensive research and measured analysis make it impossible to dismiss J. Edgar Hoover, despite his bigotry and systematic abuses of power, as the monstrous cartoon figure to which we're becoming increasingly accustomed. Weiner describes him instead as the quintessential Cold War national security zealot. Some excerpts from the fascinating conversation (all quotations are Weiner's words):

The roots of the national security state:

Hoover had a terrible premonition after World War II, that the United States was going to be attacked, that New York or Washington was going to be attacked by suicidal, kamikaze airplanes, by dirty bombs of cobalt-60 or another radioactive material. And he never lost this fear. It stayed with him for 25 years, 'til his death. It was a premonition, if you will, of the 9/11 attacks. He never forgot Pearl Harbor....Hoover is the inventor of the modern American national security state. Every fingerprint file, every DNA record, every iris recorded through biometrics, every government dossier on every citizen and every alien in this country owes its life to him. And we live in his shadow, though he's been gone for 40 years....

Hoover did not want any limits on him. He wanted no charter. He wanted no rules imposed by outsiders. He wanted the FBI to, as the secretary of state had said under Roosevelt, investigate the so-and-so's. And he believed that the Soviet Union was trying to steal America's atomic secrets, to burrow into the State Department, the Pentagon, the FBI and the White House, and he was right.

The source of Hoover's suspicions about Martin Luther King:

Hoover saw the civil rights movement from the 1950s onward and the anti-war movement from the '60s onward, as presenting the greatest threats to the stability of the American government since the Civil War. These people were enemies of the state, and in particular, Martin Luther King was an enemy of the state. And Hoover aimed to watch over them. And if they twitched in the wrong direction, the hammer would come down.... The fact -- and it is a fact, although it's an uncomfortable fact -- that Martin Luther King's most prominent white adviser, ghostwriter of books, writer of speeches, legal counselor, confidante, was a man named Stanley Levison, who had been, at least up until the time he joined ranks with Martin Luther King in 1957, a secret member of the communist underground in the United States.

Hoover and homosexuality:

[Hoover] conflated -- and he was not alone -- communism with homosexuality. Both communists and homosexuals had secret, coded language that they spoke to each other in. They had clandestine lives. They met in clandestine places. They had secrets. And in, you know, certain cases, such as the British spy ring that penetrated the Pentagon and the CIA in the '40s and early '50s, they were both communists and homosexuals. Hoover didn't see a dime's worth of difference there. They were one and the same. This was hammered into him when the FBI dealt with one of the most famous informants in the history of American government, Whittaker Chambers (right), who helped bring down secret Soviet espionage rings in this country. He was a well-known writer at Time magazine - writer and editor. Chambers was a secret homosexual and a secret communist. Hoover saw a nexus there, and he never let that thought go....

Now, of course, the $64,000 question was: Did Hoover do this because he was a repressed homosexual closet case, and he was using his rage to destroy homosexuals?...This is a myth. It's been around since 1937, since Hoover went after homosexuals and government. It was - gasoline was poured on the embers of this by Bill Donovan, Hoover's mortal enemy in government. It's been around forever. Now, what do we know that this? Hoover never married. He never had an adult relationship with a woman, other than his mother, whom he lived with until he was 43, the day she died. Hoover was also inseparable from his number two man at the FBI, Clyde Tolson. Now, the evidence -- if you can call it that -- that Hoover was a secret homosexual rests almost entirely with an account by a British journalist who's only witness is a convicted perjurer. The evidence on the other side is strong. Hoover never loved anyone, except his dogs. He was married to the FBI. And the idea that he was a secret homosexual who, you know, wore tutus for fun is a myth. Unfortunately, that's the only thing anybody seems to know about him today....

If you look at the man and you listen to people who knew him and worked with him, it's almost inconceivable for this man to have had a secret life. His entire life was devoted to the uncovering and collection of secrets on other people, including their sex lives. Could he have carried off a double life like that? When you read his work, when you listen to his tapes, when you investigate the great investigator, there's no there there.

Hoover and the roots of Watergate:

The Pentagon Papers, as your listeners of a certain age will remember, was the secret history of the Vietnam War that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara commissioned in the Johnson years. It ran to 17 volumes, and it essentially said that, you know, we kept pushing on into the big muddy, even though we weren't going to win the war. It was a political war, not a military battle. These papers walk out of the Pentagon, out of probably the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington. Nixon knows within days that it's a former Pentagon officer named Daniel Ellsberg who's done it, and by God, he wants Ellsberg destroyed and tried, and he wants the evidence. You know, he wants to break into the Brookings Institution, firebomb it, send a fake, you know, fire team in there and blow the safe, as he said.

Hoover doesn't want to do this for a lot of reasons, one of which they're going to get caught. Second is that Ellsberg's father-in-law is a friend of his who gives a lot of toys to the FBI,... Louis Marx. And Hoover won't do it. Nixon goes ballistic, and that's when the Plumbers are created to do the work that J. Edgar Hoover wouldn't do.

And two generations after Hoover's death, George W. Bush with "chalk on his spikes":

There is an incredibly dramatic moment in 2004 where the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller...confronts the president of the United States in the Oval Office over the White House's secret eavesdropping program that has transgressed its boundaries and overstepped the law and the Constitution. Through its data mining tactics, through its eavesdropping technologies, they've gone beyond what even the secret court that oversees eavesdropping will authorize....And Mueller tells the president, in the Oval Office, face to face, with a handwritten letter of resignation in his breast pocket that either the program is curtailed and brought within the law or he, the head of the FBI, will resign, as will the entire command structure of the Justice Department, from the attorney general down.

And President Bush says, according to his memoirs: What are you talking about? What program? What problems? What legal issues? And Mueller looks at him with a very steely gaze and says: I think you know what we're talking about, Mr. President. And at that point, it's a crime to lie to the FBI. It's punishable by five years in prison. And that's where we were.

[T]he president had chalks on his spikes at that moment. He was at the line, and about to cross it. And he says, Bush says in his memoir: Visions of the Saturday night massacre during Watergate dance in his head when, you know, two attorneys general and the command structure of the FBI resigned rather than cover up for the president. Mueller wins. Bush eventually backs down, and that is a triumph of the rule of law.

The Whole Deal According To Meryl

For Meryl Streep, great acting is all about fooling the other actors, which is why she wanted to keep the prosthetics and makeup to a minimum as she aged four decades in "The Iron Lady." Check out her wonderful conversation with Terry Gross on NPR's "Fresh Air":

STREEP: It's all about being free and having -- so I can look in the mirror and see me, not stuff. And it all has to do with, you know, it's not about the audience. It's all about fooling the other actors into believing that you are who you say you are because that's hard when you walk on set, and it's a big makeup job, and it makes it hard for them.

And I take my entire performance from them, so if they don't look at me and hate me appropriately or love me the way they're supposed to or find, you know, an old face but see the young one underneath, which is Jim Broadbent's task as Dennis Thatcher, then I'm lost. I don't have anything to go on because I can read that immediately in their eyes, you know.

GROSS: Gee, I never thought of it that way, that you have to convince the other actors that you're Margaret Thatcher.

STREEP: That's the whole deal, the whole deal.

Higher Powers, In And Out Of The Newsroom

David Carr is media columnist for the New York Times and author of a harrowing drug addiction memoir, Night Of The Gun. On Dec. 28 NPR rebroadcast an October Carr interview by "Fresh Air"'s Terry Gross. Re-listening to a Carr interview is almost as good as a repeat of "Dexter." While his voice, injured by smoking, radiation treatments, and possibly exposure to toxins while he covered the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, is a little rough, he speaks about my parents' beloved business in smooth, graceful cadences. Transcript here, podcast here.

Excerpt one, on the omniscient and indispensable elite editorial intelligence behind daily newspapers:

When I wake up in the morning and the gun goes off, I'm checking Twitter. I'm checking RSS feeds, and I get four newspapers at my house every day. I get the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Star Ledger - because I live in New Jersey - and, of course, the New York Times.

And the reason I do is because the day before this, all this stuff has gone whizzing past me, and I seem to know a lot. But I don't really know what part of it is important. And I used to think it was so silly that newspapers would - like, I'd go to our page one meeting, and they'd be organizing the hierarchy of the six or seven most important stories in Western civilization. Meanwhile, the Web is above them, pivoting and eliding, and all these stories are morphing and changing. And I thought: Well, how silly is this?

But you know what? I came to want that resting place, where someone yelled "stop" and decided, "Look, this is stuff you need to know about going forward." Newspapers have become a kind of magazine experience for me, where they're - where it's a way to look back at what has happened.

And on his faith life and the great mystery of altruism:

I am a churchgoing Catholic, and I do that as a matter of - it's good to stand with my family. It's good that I didn't have to come up with my own creation myth for my children.

It's a wonderful group of people that I go to church with, and it's community. It's not really where I find God. And sort of what the accommodation I've reached is a very jerry-rigged one, which is: All along the way, in recovery, I've been helped - without getting into the names of specific groups - by all of these strangers, you know, who get in a room and do a form of group-talk therapy and live by certain rules in their life.

And one of the rules is that you help everyone who needs help. And I think to myself: Well, that seems remarkable. And not only is that not a general human impulse, but it's not an impulse of mine. And yet I found myself doing that over and over again.

So, am I underneath all things, just a really wonderful, giving person? Or is there a force greater than myself that is leading me to act in ways that are altruistic and not self-interested and lead to the greater good?

And so that's - that's sort of as far as I've gotten with a higher power thing, is I'm - you know, I'm kind of a pirate, kind of a thug. I mean, I've done a bunch of terrible things, and yet I'm able to, for the most part, be a decent person. How is that? Do I have some inner strength of character? I think not. I think something else is working on me.

You know, I think it's okay to sort of like have a superstitious belief in God and not really have thought it through. I think it's okay to just - I think there's freedom in allowing for the possibility of it. Like, I don't have a presence. I don't have some idea in my mind of a woman or a man figure or anything like that.

But I find the spaces between people, whether I'm making a newspaper with them or in recovery or living with them as family or friends or - I find something really godly in that. I don't have trouble acknowledging that.

Save Those Stem Cells!

Having an oncologist in the delivery room with his wife can be interesting. Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, told this story about the birth of his first child to NPR's Terry Gross on Nov. 17:

I'm trying to cut the umbilical cord, but on the flipside of my mind, it's almost a split of my right brain and my left brain, and here I am in sort of the most glorious moment of my life, the birth of my child, and on one side of my brain I'm saying to myself, I have got to harvest her umbilical cord blood cells because these cells are useful in transplantations for kids who have leukemia....

[T]he tragedy of it [is that the umbilical cord is] often flushed down the sink and often not collected all. I think, you know, we absolutely need to have better centralized banking facilities free of charge which allow us to bank these cells because kids with leukemia can benefit from cord blood transplantation and they need these - these are very precious cells....

[T]hey contain blood-forming stem cells that can go into the blood and create new blood. And they are so precious because they can be transplanted into another child and give rise to the blood system of the child and you can therefore eliminate the leukemia. And if you eliminate leukemia you can often eliminate the normal - the child's blood stem cells and you can replace it with the cord blood from another child, and that's why they're incredibly precious.

The fuss over embryonic stem cells has died down since March 2009, when President Obama overturned the Bush administration's ban on the use of federal funds for new stem cells lines. While I favored the Obama policy, it bothered me that, during that lengthy debate, the coloration of being ideological was applied only to the pro-life side. And now we learn that hospitals have been flushing billions upon billions of stem cells down the drain that could help patients immeasurably, and without so much as a peep from either megaphone.

Beer Summits Take Two

Ask most Washington observers who the obstructionists will be over the next two years, and they're likely to say congressional Republicans. But in a Nov. 3 interview with Terry Gross on "Fresh Air," veteran political writer Todd Purdum tells a somewhat different story. He describes the incoming GOP speaker, John Boehner, as likable and willing to work with Democrats, the kind of guy you'd like to have a beer with. His relationship with the tea party crowd is, in Purdum's word, correct. He's not interested in radically reforming government. He is interested in creating jobs and getting spending under control.

The problem, Purdum said, may end up being the president's worldview:

Certainly John Boehner and Barack Obama do not have the kind of personal reality and experience in common that you could say Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton had [after Republicans took control of Congress in 1995]. There was a level at which Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich were able to take the measure of each other as wonky, super-political Southern guys of a comparable generation, and I think they each felt they had the other's number and could somehow understand each other. I don't think there's much in Barack Obama's life experience or worldview that would make him a natural, give him natural affinities with John Boehner. So it'll be really interesting to see how they are able to work together.

Solomon Keith

Discussing his new autobiography, Life, on the Oct. 25 "Fresh Air," the Rolling Stones' Keith Richards tells host Terry Gross that he created most of the dense, overloaded guitar sounds on "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and "Street Fighting Man" (he says all the guitar sounds, but that can't be true) by playing an acoustic guitar through a cassette player. When the veteran broadcaster (to whom most guests speak with due respectfulness) asks which song he wants her to play to illustrate the technique, he replies:

I love 'em both, honey. Don't ask me to cut the babies in half.

Their Cultural Loss Is Our Pain

Journalist ("The New Yorker") and screenwriter ("The Siege") Lawrence Wright won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for his book about al-Qaeda. When Terry Gross asked him the other day on her NPR program, "Fresh Air," what inspires men to be terrorists, he mentioned political repression, cultural and civic stagnation, and especially the medieval oppression of women:

[I]f you're going to try to pin down a single word about what is it that characterizes the drive into this kind of radical reaction, I think a word might be despair. Because there are many different rivers that lead into despair, you know, there's poverty. There's political repression. There's gender apartheid. You know, there's a sense of a cultural loss. There's religious fanaticism. All of these elements are present in many different Muslim countries in varying degree.

And, you know, the world is full of poor countries that don't produce terrorists. And the world is full of repressive governments that don't have violent insurgencies. But when you start mixing all these different elements together then you get a very combustible combination, and I think that's what you see in so many of these countries....

[E]ach of these countries is entirely different entities, so the mixture is different. In Saudi Arabia, you have practically no civil society at all. You know, there's nothing between the government and the mosque. It's just, you know, it's a very, very diminished sense of what you're - what's available for you to do in life. And certainly, the gender apartheid is a real problem.

You know, these young men are not socialized. They haven't grown up learning how to please girls, which is a lot of what civilization is, in my opinion. And this absence of contact with females is just a profoundly negative influence on the development of young male minds, in my opinion.

Presidential Plattitudes

When Oliver Platt blazes onto the screen as White House counsel Oliver Babish in "West Wing" 2:19, called in to grapple with a brewing scandal about President Bartlett's health, he's an instant Nixon three-fer. In his first scene, fumbling with a microcassette recorder, he says, "It's stuck on record. It won't stop recording things. It's just what you want lying around the White House counsel's office, because there's never been a problem with that before." Platt also shows up in the best Nixon movie ever, "Frost/Nixon," playing one of British journalist David Frost's researchers, Bob Zelnick.

Finally, Platt's the son of diplomat Nicholas Platt, who accompanied Nixon to China in 1972 and later served as president of the Asia Society. The actor talked about the Nixon-Platt connection in an April 2010 interview with NPR's Terry Gross:

We were living in Japan when Nixon resigned. And I remember, very clearly, we were driving out to the country and the news came over the radio. My parents pulled the car over and they told us all to listen.... [My father] actually just published a memoir about it called China Boys, about the opening of China; and he really had a remarkable perspective on it. He literally - he has a home movie, you know, of Nixon getting off the plane and shaking Zhou Enlai's hand and he's standing literally, you know, 15 yards away from him when that happened. And so he really, I think my father had complicated feelings about it.

We're Gonna Hire Our Political Enemies

Thanks to an NPR retrospective on the death of Daniel Schorr (left), I've belatedly learned about a local angle (besides the man from Yorba Linda himself) on the 1974 articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon, namely Orange County businessman Larry Higby, once Nixon chief of staff Bob Haldeman's aide.

It all started when the White House decided it didn't like Schorr's reporting on the CBS Evening News. As Schorr told NPR's Terry Gross in a 1994 (rebroadcast on July 30, a week after Schorr's death; the transcript is here, and you check it out on iTunes here):

[Nixon] had Haldeman have his assistant Larry Higby call J. Edgar Hoover and simply say the boss, the president, wants to have some background stuff on a correspondent named Daniel Schorr.

But either Higby or the FBI's usually pretty canny director missed the point. Rather than dishing whatever dirt happened to be on hand, Hoover ordered a full field investigation, the kind the FBI does on those in line for high-level government jobs. When agents visited Schorr himself, inadvertently revealing that the White House and a federal police agency had developed a constitutionally unhealthful fixation on him, Nixon aides concocted the story that they were planning to offer one of Washington's most prominent journalists the lofty post of PR man for the Council on Environmental Quality.

This bumptious episode turned deadly serious, Schorr told Gross, when the use of the FBI against a journalist was cited by the House Judiciary Committee in one of the three articles of impeachment it approved in the summer of 1974.

Admiring Nixon for his final comeback, Schorr became a regular guest at Nixon Center events in Washington during the 1990s. At one, the ex-president smiled at him and said, "Damn near hired you once." To Gross's apparent surprise, Schorr chose to take Nixon's remark as a backhanded apology. "[Only] he who is without blemish should be casting stones around," Schorr said. "I consider life too short to have grudges, retain grudges, and furthermore, I find him interesting."

A Companion, Not An Enemy

Talking with NRP's Terry Gross about his new novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell explains how he domesticated the stammer that he had found paralyzing and isolating when he was younger:

It took a long, long time to understand that a stammer is more like a kind of a force field, and the more you throw at it, the more it throws back at you. You sort of have to outwit it rather than outfight it. And, in a way, not even outwit it.... I think of it now as a kind of a companion. It's a part of me. It has a right to exist as I do and I need to sort of come to a working accommodation with it.

A friend who was an alcoholic once said to me that an alcoholic never stops being an alcoholic. He may - but what you have to aspire to be is a teetotal alcoholic. And in the same way a stammerer, I think, certainly in my case, will never not be a stammerer but you have to aspire to becoming a non-stammering stammerer. And this involves certain strategies and techniques that you can sort of encrypt into how you speak so that I'm able to do this interview, for example, which 20 years ago would've been unthinkable. And in the end, these strategies can become so well-integrated into who you are and how you speak that they become behavior and speech patterns rather than techniques....

I view my stammer now as a companion and not an enemy. I might've been a writer without it, but I certainly wouldn't have been this writer. One of the strategies I was referring to, which you meet quite early on in your career as a stammerer, is you autocue sentences ahead of time. You see what words are coming up, and say right now I'd have difficulties with words beginning with S. If I, certainly as a younger person, if I saw an S word was approaching then I would try and reengineer that sentence to avoid needing that S word. And this teaches you how language can be employed many, many different ways to say the same thing.

And then the lesson from his experience for the rest of us:

If life is obstacleless, if you're just coasting along without responsibilities, without duties, without sort of having to take care of an elderly relative or an offspring with special needs or whatever, well, perhaps, that's what existential malaise is. Maybe that's sort of when you start to drift and have problems of another type. Maybe your problems and your obstacles, rather like your stammer, is in fact, a kind of friend in disguise for you. I don't know if we're venturing into self-help territory too much here, but it's something that I kind of believe in.

Youth Panels

Interviewing two women who were diagnosed with cancer while in their 20s, NPR's Terry Gross uses their experiences to demonstrate the advantages of health care reform. One of her subjects, after being diagnosed with colon cancer, returned to her native Czech Republic to escape the inconvenience of her insurance company's paperwork. Saying that she didn't have to wait for doctors' appointments, as critics of state-run health systems might expect, she explains why:

I really did not have that problem, just because I think everybody felt that I was young, and they needed to push me ahead of people who were just going for checkups. So I really did not have to wait any more than I wait when I go to see my doctor in the U.S.

The older people get, in Prague as elsewhere, the less likely that they are just waiting around for checkups. Perhaps this demonstrates nothing more than the shortcoming of arguing by anecdote when considering massive, complex reforms. But the idea of younger patients being pushed ahead didn't exactly warm the cockles of at least one nearly 55-year-old, politically conflicted heart.

"As Good As Dead": Sermon For II Lent

Reading "Watchmen" (to catch up with a 20-year-old pop cultural phenomenon as well as plumb its Nixonian resonances), I started having apocalyptic dreams as the story's looming nuclear holocaust resonated with the world's real-life economic nightmare. Friends and fellow worshipers tell me they're feeling oppressed by dread that bad times will get even worse as well as by the private emergencies of sickness and alienation that plague the people of God irrespective of the Dow Jones average.

One friend told me that her limbs felt heavy and weak from constant worry over a problem at home. Because of the scripture readings for this week, her comment reminded me 100-year-old Abram (later Abraham). He and his wife Sarai had no heir. Everybody in town was no doubt gossiping about him. He was exhausted and disillusioned and probably didn't have a tooth in his head. In his letter to the Romans, Paul says Abram was "as good as dead." And yet on whom did God settle the responsibility for building a whole universe of faith? None other than Abraham, father of many nations.

In a riveting interview last week with Terry Gross, Donovan Campbell, who commanded a Marine platoon in Iraq in 2004, said the only way he could do his job was decide that he was already dead, a mind trick that freed him to make effective and indeed moral choices in the most chaotic, amoral environment possible. By the same token, Jesus counsels his followers to accept the inevitability of his death so his (and our) triumph over it (and over all deathly things, including dread) could be revealed.

We're all as good as dead. And yet God wants us to feel safe, free, and bracingly alive. Check out Campbell's book, Joker One. My Sunday sermon is here.

One Person's Myth Is Another's Mission

If you have iTunes, download this conversation between "Fresh Air" host Terry Gross and Will Bunch, who argues in a new book, Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future, that Reagan's tax cuts didn't end the 1981-83 recession and that his tough policies vis a vis the Soviet Union didn't end the Cold War.

On the tax cuts, scholars and politicians differ. As for bringing down the Soviets without a nuclear war, a long line of postwar Presidents share the credit, with Richard Nixon perhaps due more than most. But Reagan's hard line just as Moscow was going broke didn't hurt. I won't pre-judge Bunch's arguments, because I haven't read them. Nor did I hear about them on "Fresh Air," because Gross, usually a pretty penetrating interviewer, accepted them as axioms and spent most of her time asking how today's GOP politicians use their manufactured view of the Reagan legacy to further their nefarious goals. For the high crime of wanting to cut our income taxes, Gross and Bunch single out Grover Norquist for special opprobrium as an example of "a new, aggressive breed of conservative." Somebody get out the Lysol!

Ever the pro, Gross rectified the imbalance by inviting historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited the Reagan diaries and thinks 40 was one of the top Presidents of the 20th century, to address Bunch's theories. Said Brinkley:

I don't think it's so much as a myth. I think Presidents have legacies, and they get advocates. There's people that believe Theodore Roosevelt was great, or FDR was great, or Kennedy, or Reagan. And it's...reasonable to think that people want to admire Ronald Reagan. I think the distortion comes when people leave the history books and try to create saints out of people. Ronald Reagan was not a saint. He was a good President for his times. He was good because there was a kind of malaise in the country due to double-digit inflation, due to the hostages in Iran, due to the excesses of the Great Society, or at least the misappropriation of funds going on for government programs. Taxes were being raised left and right. So we were naturally going to find a force in this country to try to bring us back in the right direction. Reagan was that. Even Barack Obama, during the campaign trail, had nice things to say about Ronald Reagan....

Brinkley went on to advise Obama, whom he characterized as a TR-style progressive, to resist the lure of the middle way and live out his destiny, just as Reagan lived out his.

Republicans Are More Fun

Updating Army Archerd's coverage of President Nixon's famous 1968 appearance on "Laugh-In" ("Sock it to me?"), "Variety" provides this detail:

"Laugh-In" hoped to get opposition candidate Hubert Humphrey to appear, saying "What a good IDEA!!!" in response to Nixon's "Sock It To ME!!!" But they could never get the Demos to OK his appearance.

On Dec. 29, NPR's Terry Gross, on her "Fresh Air" program, rebroadcast a fall 2008 interview with "Saturday Night Live" head writer Seth Myers (available here on a podcast) in which Myers describes how easy Gov. Palin and her staff were to work with during her famous SNL appearance. As a matter of fact, he said Republicans were typically easier to work with than Democrats. When Gross asked why, Myers replied that Democrats are afraid that Republicans will use comedy show appearances against them, whereas Republicans know Democrats won't reciprocate.

What a deft and impossible-to-prove way of turning Republicans' game attitude against them. There's an alternative theory Myers ought to consider. It was offered by legendary LA Times political reporter Bill Boyarsky when he visited the Nixon Library about 15 years ago. He'd partied with politicians for years, he said; "Republicans are more fun."