National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform

Over the next few weeks, it will be extremely interesting to follow reactions to the recent report of Erskine Bowles and Alan K. Simpson, co-chairmen of this bipartisan panel, which is looking into ways of making America solvent again. One thing is certain: there are profound implications for federal employees and prospective federal employees. Joe Davidson explores some of them in his Washington Post column, "The Federal Diary," of November 12. Meanwhile, Dana Milbank offers his views on how the No Regrets Democrats and the No Compromise Republicans are likely to view the unsettling prospect of fiscal responsibility.

It seems that the Glenn School's policy forum, "Avoiding Catastrophic Budget Failure," will be very timely, especially since the Commission is scheduled to release a report the next day. We're hoping for a big crowd of Washington-based Buckeyes on November 30.

November 17 update: Norman Ornstein weighs in on the Deficit Commission in today's Roll Call.

November 18 update: Roll Call's Morton Kondracke reviews three tax reform plans and urges President Obama to seize this opportunity to do something that would win popular approval because it would create jobs.

November 24 update: Today's Post has a terrific chart that compares the recommendations of the three panels (Simpson-Bowles, Rivlin-Domenici, and Galston-MacGuineas) that are looking for ways to reduce the deficit. Accompanying the summary table is a column by Ezra Klein.

November 29 update: The Brookings Institution's William Gale reviews five myths about cutting the deficit in the Outlook section of Sunday's Post.

December 2 update: Here, finally, is "The Moment of Truth: Report of the President's Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform." And here is a persuasive argument by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities that the Rivlin-Domenici plan is better.

An Intellectual's Guide to Public Service

On the morning after the 2010 midterm elections, The Washington Post published a column by Steven Pearlstein that congratulated the winners while offering a "reading list" to those who will be new members of the 112th Congress that convenes in January, 2011. The "reading list," it turns out, consisted of a single book: a collection of the letters of the late New York Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, edited by Steven R. Weisman.

The 720-page volume of letters has been getting rave reviews. One of the most entertaining of which is Hendrik Hertzberg's "Politics and Prose," in the October 25, 2010, issue of The New Yorker. Moynihan was a larger than life character, to be sure. George F. Will couldn't resist pointing out that Moynihan had written wrote more books than most Senators had read. On the other hand, the droll Eric Severaid once complained that the trouble with Senator Moynihan was that he threatened to make it respectable to be a sociologist.

Once, long ago in a galaxy far away, I wrote a review of Moynihan's book about the United Nations, where he had served as U.S. Ambassador. His book was called A Dangerous Place. I thought it would be clever to submit a review entitled "A Dangerous Man," the point of which was that Ambassador Moynihan might have enough rhetorical power all by himself to pose a threat to the mendacity from which the U.N., and particularly the General Assembly, suffered in those days.

My editor had different ideas. He replaced my title with one of his own, which made my reference in the body of the review to Moynihan as "a dangerous man" seem very odd indeed. I was not happy when the review appeared in print, but I didn't expect any real fallout from it.

But I was wrong. Late in the summer of 1979, I received the following letter on the stationery of the United States Senate:

Pindars Corners, N.Y.
August 31, 1979

Dear Dr. Kolson,

Help me. My friends say yours was the most hostile review A Dangerous Place has received. I thought it friendly. Am I bonkers? Please write, as I need to know!

Best,

DPM

Not being all that accustomed to receiving letters from United States Senators asking me whether I considered them "bonkers," I sat down at once to compose something reassuring. I think I managed to explain the confusion over the title convincingly enough, but in the process I'm sure I demonstrated that as a correspondent I had very little entertainment value. Senator Moynihan's framed letter occupies a prominent place on the wall of my den at home. But he never wrote back.

A Diplomat's Progress--Book Review (reprise)

This week the Fall 2010 class of Glenn Fellows is reading Samuel Huntington's famous Foreign Affairs article on "The Clash of Civilizations." As an introduction to the not-always-glamorous world of professional diplomacy, I have also assigned a book called A Diplomat's Progress, written by Henry Precht, a retired foreign service officer. Mr. Precht was born in Savannah, Georgia, and educated at Emory University. He joined the foreign service in 1961 and served in U.S. embassies in Italy, Mauritius, Iran, and Egypt. He was the Department of State’s Desk Officer for Iran during the revolution and hostage crisis when the Shah was overthrown, and he was deputy ambassador in Cairo when Anwar Sadat was assassinated. His nomination by President Jimmy Carter to the post of U.S. ambassador to Mauritania was blocked by Senator Jesse Helms.

After leaving the foreign service, Mr. Precht served as president of the World Affairs Council in Cleveland, Ohio, where he also taught at Case Western Reserve University. A few years ago, he published A Diplomat’s Progress, a work of fiction consisting of a series of vignettes about a State Department official named Harry Prentice. It is an engaging work that reveals, as one reviewer has put it, the “grittier side of embassy life with a wry sense of humor and a bit of an edge.” To the extent that the work is autobiographical, A Diplomat’s Progress is rather remarkable.

For one thing, the “grittier” aspects of diplomacy are portrayed warts and all. In one of the vignettes, the young Harry Prentice and his wife attend a dinner party at the home of the foreign minister of Mauritius, during which the lecherous host assaults the drunken daughter of the Japanese ambassador. In a vignette set in Egypt, the protagonist must tend to a dead body and a suitcase full of drug money. In “Caviar and Kurds,” Prentice unwittingly leads the Shah’s secret police to an underground freedom fighter named Hassan, whom Prentice finds hanging from a lamppost the next day. In this account of embassy life, no good deed goes unpunished.

Most remarkable as an autobiography—and surely it must be regarded as partly that, in spite of the veneer of fiction—is the book’s unflattering portrait of its protagonist. Throughout A Diplomat’s Progress, Harry Prentice’s diplomatic efforts are undone by either his naivete or his cynicism. Typically, the reader is given a glimpse of a career diplomat preoccupied, not with the national interest, as one might suppose, but rather, with his own career advancement. At one point, for instance, Prentice seems to have been the unwitting accomplice of a Palestinian terrorist. What does he do about it? He gets up in the middle of the night to compose a somewhat Bardachian “balance sheet of possible courses of action.” There appear to be two:

First, the natural inclination of every Foreign Service Officer: Do nothing. Wait on events and react as necessary and as seems prudent at the time. . . . Alternatively, I could report my suspicions to the police. Playing it straight and admitting wrong might be partially redeeming. The key word was “partially.” The embassy surely would be informed and handle my future as if it had no value. The same with the Israeli authorities. I had to face it: Only I really cared about my future, not any American or Israeli career-building bureaucrat.

During his posting to Cairo, Prentice is asked to interview a Sheikh who might have been in a position to influence the extremists holding a number of American hostages in Beirut. Prentice’s efforts fail. “But never mind,” seems to sum up his reaction. “I could only hope that someone—the ambassador or an unknown friend in the department—would make an excellent report of my performance for my file.” The adventure, he concludes, “just might be a turning point—upward—in my career.” On the basis of the evidence provided by the author, the judgment handed down by Prentice’s first wife seems just: He has “a pretty good soul, even though sometime it seems quite lost in the bureaucratic maze.”

Mr. Precht is a charming gentleman who has visited our seminar in the past. Unfortunately for us, he is spending this fall in Paris.