"Something Bigger Than The World We Live In"

Historian Tony Judt, who died on Aug. 6 of ALS, offered an atheist's conception of the afterlife to NRP's Terry Gross in a March interview (rebroadcast last week):

I don't believe in an afterlife. I don't believe in a single or multiple godhead. I respect people who do, but I don't believe it myself. But there's a big but which enters in here.

I am much more conscious than I ever was, for obvious reasons, of what it will mean to people left behind once I'm dead. It won't mean anything for me. But it will mean a lot to them. And it's important for them by which I mean my children or my wife or my close friends that some spirit of me is in a positive way present in their lives, in their heads, in their imaginings and so on.

So in one curious way I've come to believe in the afterlife as a place where I still have moral responsibilities, just as I do in this life except that I can only exercise them before I get there. Once I get there, it'll be too late. So no god, no organized religion but a developing sense that there's something bigger than the world we live in, including after we die, and that we have responsibilities in that world.... The risk with something like ALS, where you sit on the wheelchair all day where you're looked after by professional nurses, and it's way beyond anything your family could do, where you live in one space, (unintelligible), while other members of the family live their normal lives, and you encourage them to, the risk is not that you do mean or bad things. It's that they lose a sense of your presence, that you stop being omnipresent in their lives. And of course, to the extent that you are present, you are surrounded by nurses, equipment, a sort of smell of a hospital, so to speak.

So it seems to be my responsibility, particularly to my children, also to my wife and friends, is not to be Pollyanna and pretend everything's okay no one would take me seriously if I said that but it's to be as present in their lives now as I can be so that in years to come, they don't feel either guilty or bad at my having been left out of their lives, that they feel still a very strong not a memory of particular actions but a memory of a complete family rather than a broken one. That seems to be something I can do or try to do.

Or We Could Just Get Over Ourselves

Republican leaders think there shouldn't be a mosque near the World Trade Center because of what happened on Sept. 11, 2001.

Civil rights leaders think Glenn Beck shouldn't have a rally at the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28 because of what happened on Aug. 28, 1963.

Grasp The Nettle!

At the British "Spectator," another of Mary Killen's circuitous British solutions to vexing social problems:

Q. We have taken a house in Italy and are bringing out some good old friends to stay. Now we learn that some very friendly neighbours in England will be three miles away during the same week. We will certainly run into them while we are out there and they will definitely want to meet up. My husband will go mad if we see them even once but I do not want to offend them. What should I do?

Name and address withheld

A. Grasp the nettle. Ring the neighbour crooning that you have been maddened to hear that they will be there at the same time because you will not be able to see them. Say that it will not be a holiday for you as you have a VIP coming to stay and have to comply with all sorts of security regulations and anyone coming over will have to be vetted. Will they forgive you for not saying who the VIP is and for not asking them over? In the meantime, can you book them to come over to you for dinner when you are all back?

Hey Rahm, About Those Tax Cuts...

In a Washington Post comparison of the Carter-Reagan and Bush-Obama recessions, we learn why some experts think Obama's 2012 economy might not look as rosy as Reagan's in 1984:

[R]ecessions caused by financial crises linger longer because of the shattered confidence of both consumers and businesses. [The Congressional Budget Office] went on to state, "In addition, under current law, both the waning of fiscal stimulus and the scheduled increases in taxes will temporarily subtract from growth, especially in 2011."

Dancing On A Three-Legged Stool

Robert Malley, a Middle East watcher, gives three reasons for optimism as new talks get underway -- and they all have to do with the temperaments and political positioning of the key leaders:

[A] Palestinian leader who needs an achievement; a U.S. president who appears deeply invested, and a hard-line Israeli prime minister who, if he were to sign an agreement, would be better placed than most to sell it.

Simi, Hear Me

Exciting expansion plans at the Reagan library.

"Settle For Love," Joe Ely

Texas's great high-tech honky-tonker and poet rocks the house in Nashville. The song's from his 1993 album "Love And Danger," and the video's apparently the same vintage. Read about Joe here.

Take My Library. Please.

In an editorial this morning, which bodes extremely well for Nixon library director Tim Naftali, the New York Times takes a firm if unsurprising position in favor of the library's Watergate exhibit:

It is all a rich and [an] educational story. We can’t wait for the National Archives’ forthright telling of it, right down to Nixon’s instruction to his team: “Play it tough.”

About the opposition, the Times says:

Congress took away their control of the library in 2007, but they still serve as an advisory panel, and they are demanding to first vet the exhibit for their version of historical accuracy.

Not so rich and educational an editorial. The "advisory panel" is the presidential foundation that spent $40 million building and expanding the library and operated it privately for 17 years. As for saying that Congress took away the library in 2007, that's only because for ten years we'd left it in the garage with the door open and light on and a big red bow wrapped around it.

The library would've been federalized in 1996 as part of a lawsuit settlement I engineered as the president's co-executor, but Nixon family politics tanked the deal. Beginning in the early 2000s, we humble advisory panelists scraped together $1 million for some blue-chip Washington lobbyists. First, they got Congress to pass a law to permit Nixon's White House records to be moved to California. Then they obtained federal funding for a wing at the library in Yorba Linda to house them, which opened on July 1. A hostile takeover, it definitely wasn't.

Pray For The President And Jerusalem Peace

It was surprising that as soon as he was sworn in in 2009, Barack Obama put the full authority of his office behind a Middle East peace initiative, which soon stalled because of Israel's stubbornness about building new West Bank settlements and Palestinian intransigence about coming back to the table. And it's astonishing that he's trying again in the teeth of a midterm election. To satisfy the Palestinian side, Secretary of State Clinton gave the talks a one-year limit, which means that Obama could have a massive embarrassment on his hands at the end of 2011, just as he tools up for a reelection bid.

Which is why it's important to understand that we're seeing Obama at his substantive best here, betting on nebulous hopes for peace instead of acting through the understandable fear of failure by which the last two presidents chose to leave the Middle East until the ends of their terms, when they had virtually nothing to lose (and correspondingly less leverage).

Obama has played his cards skillfully. After the U.S. was humiliated in March when the Israeli government announced new housing in East Jerusalem as VP Biden was visiting, Obama turned up the heat on Prime Minister Netanyahu, making him earn his way back into the our graces. Worried friends of Israel said they feared he was turning out to be the most anti-Israel president in recent memory. In certain quarters, speculation no doubt abounded that that he was under secret Muslim discipline, taking late-night calls from a cabal of imams. But he let Bibi come in from the wilderness soon enough. Now, as "Politico" notes:

[T]he United States will enter the new talks with new assets: a stronger public relationship with Israel's hawkish prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, confidence in Palestinian efforts on the ground and an appreciation for the tedious, incremental path forward.

This seemingly impossible challenge is ideally suited to Obama's ability to listen to all sides and inspire them to move forward together. If he succeeds and gets a final-status deal, he'll have earned his Nobel Peace Prize and perhaps more.

Alger Hiss Is Daniel Galt

The best Nixon-themed "West Wing" episode ever is the Alger Hiss story line in episode 2:16, oddly titled "Somebody's Going To Emergency, Somebody's Going To Jail," a line from the Don Henley song "New York Minute," with which the episode begins and ends. I don't remember an earlier episode using a rock and roll song, and while later choices by series creator Aaron Sorkin and his crew are sublime, this one I don't get. In view of the episode's dominant father theme, "The End Of The Innocence," one of the great paternal betrayal songs of all time and the title cut from the album on which "New York Minute" appears, would've been more apt, but maybe it was thought to be too obvious.

The episode aired in February 2001, a month after George W. Bush (speaking of father issues) took office. Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) has just learned that his dad had been conducting a long-term affair. Then Stephanie Galt worms her way into his office to enlist support for a presidential pardon for her grandfather, Daniel Galt, the Hiss of the piece. He'd died in prison in the early 1950s, six months after a perjury conviction in connection with his alleged spying for the Soviets. (Read about the details here.) Stephanie's father -- "a sweet man in a bow tie," she says -- is dying, and she's driven to try to clear his father's name.

Having argued Galt's innocence in his senior thesis at Princeton, Sam swings into action with prophetic vigor, only to learn from the national security adviser that Galt had been guilty as charged. At first shocked he'd been so wrong, his rage at his own father nearly gets the better of him. He stops just short of denouncing Galt to his granddaughter and finally sends her away with just enough hope to comfort her father through his last three months. Then Sam gets a hug from Donna Moss (Janel Moloney) and calls his dad.

When the episode first aired, I wrote a mash letter to Sorkin, who wrote the script, praising his courage. The only discordant note (and it's hardly the show's fault) are the decrypted cables that the NSC adviser shows Sam. They're the fictional equivalent of the VENONA papers, Soviet cable traffic that the U.S. and British intercepted and decoded during and after World War II. The VENONA intercepts clearly implicated Alger Hiss.

In "The West Wing," Sam learns that the intercepted cables weren't made available to those prosecuting Galt because their codes hadn't been broken until the 1970s. The reality is far more dramatic. When Richard Nixon and the House Committee on Un-American Activities were investigating Hiss in 1948, the government had the intercepts but, to keep the Soviets in the dark, didn't reveal them to Congress. Federal prosecutors didn't have them for Hiss's perjury trial. During all the years Hiss and his family proclaimed his innocence, nobody knew about VENONA. As two generations of American liberals castigated Nixon for having unfairly persecuted Hiss, the feds kept their own counsel.

As far as I know, Nixon was never told the cables implicating Hiss existed, not even when he was president. It's an irony at best and an injustice at worst that VENONA was only made public in 1995, decisively vindicating his actions in the first of his many political crises. Too bad it was the year after he died.