Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial

Last week’s brush with Hurricane Irene caused the ceremonial dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial on the National Mall to be indefinitely postponed. That doesn’t mean that the memorial isn’t open for business, however. In fact, my colleague, Michael McCandlish, and I spent part of yesterday afternoon at the site, four acres of hallowed ground on the Tidal Basin between the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials. As usual, the opening of a new memorial on the Mall has been marked by controversy.

To begin with, charges of “profiteering” have issued from critics offended by the King family’s insistence that they be paid licensing fees for use of Dr. King's image.

Then there was a dust-up when it was revealed that Lei Yixin, a Chinese sculptor noted for his work on a statue of Mao Zedong, had been commissioned to use Chinese laborers to sculpt Dr. King’s likeness from an enormous piece of Chinese granite. Naturally, none of this sat well with African American artists or U.S. labor unions.

The completed composition is said to express the idea of a “stone of hope” emerging from a “mountain of despair,” the stone in this case being a colossal image of the martyred Civil Rights leader (see photo above). There are those who say the sculpture doesn’t look much like Dr. King, or that his facial expression is wrong. Others complain about its alleged “Stalinist” overtones. I’ll confess that the sculpture looks to me like a faithful rendering of Dr. King, and I would think that the National Mall might be the one place in America where bombast on a colossal scale seems right at home.

Now it turns out that Maya Angelou and others are unhappy with the inscriptions that adorn the central composition and the surrounding stone wall. Their grievance has to do mainly with a passage on the side of the central sculpture that reads “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness,” though without the quotation marks, because the passage was abridged and yanked out of context from one of Dr. King's speeches. Angelou says that the resulting inscription makes him sound like an “arrogant twit.” I’m not sure I see that, but I agree that it’s trivializing, which is to say not appropriate for a memorial, where dignity and sense of decorum count for a lot.

I found the memorial moving, and definitely worth the trip. It brought back memories of the man of peace and of how polarizing his message was at the time. It’s a little unsettling to reflect on the many ways that later generations manage to dishonor fallen heroes--usually unwittingly, and often by sanitizing their disturbing messages. Even the formal study of history, a noble calling too often treated as just one damn thing after another, can have the same effect.

A case in point: In the early 1990s, I was in Memphis, Tennessee, to attend a meeting of faculty members and administrators from many of the nation’s historically black colleges and universities. The organizers had arranged for us to have a private tour of the newly opened National Civil Rights Museum, which was very cleverly designed to incorporate the Loraine Motel, where Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, as part of the museum. As it happened, the young woman who served as our tour guide was a history graduate student, and she had memorized a script containing what seemed like an infinite number of arcane factoids and random statistics more or less bearing on the Civil Rights movement. But it was all book-learnin’, stuff suitable for cramming on the night before the final exam. For her, Martin Luther King, Jr., was nothing more than a name in a textbook.

Not so for my colleagues on the tour. Most had participated in boycotts, sit-ins, and demonstrations during their youth. Some had been arrested. Some had traveled to Washington for Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. They had seen Jim Crow up close, and felt his wrath. They were moved by the National Civil Rights Museum, and visibly distraught and embarrassed by the tour guide who, not having lived through the Civil Rights Era, was simply tone-deaf to its drama. As mementoes, factoids just don't cut it.

Hurriquake Week in DC

Word from the National Building Museum is that their popular exhibit, "Lego Architecture: Towering Ambition," sustained only minor damage during the earthquake. We'll see what happens this weekend with the hurricane. Then there's the tidal wave and the plague of locusts....

Turkey on the World Stage

Anyone who has ever taught for a living will understand that a large part of the appeal, and the challenge, lies in trying to package a wide range of scholarly sources in such a way as to tell a compelling story. Unfortunately, the charms of syllabus development can lead to the folly of imagining that it can ever be a completely finished product; in this way a reading list is akin to public policy. To quote Lord Salisbury: "There is no such thing as a fixed policy, because policy like all organic entities is always in the making."

The result is that a syllabus or a reading list can be the occasion for unanticipated intellectual excursions. Three years ago, when I began leading the WAIP policy seminar, PUBPOLM 689, it never occurred to me that modern Turkey, a remnant of the old Ottoman Empire regarded as "the sick man of Europe" prior to World War I, is a remarkably useful lens for viewing world affairs.

The seminar has evolved in such a way that Turkey intervenes at three different points in the course of the quarter. First, there is the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, a classic case study in crisis management and a staple of all introductory courses in public policy. The standard treatment has President Kennedy staring down Premier Khrushchev, with the Soviets finally blinking, removing their missiles, and dismantling their Cuban bases, all in exchange for our promise to leave Castro alone. It turns out that there was more to it than that. Robert F. Kennedy, JFK’s Attorney General, offered discrete assurances to Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin that we would take our Jupiter missiles out of Turkey, which shared a tense border with the U.S.S.R. at the time. We did so less than six months later.

Second, we read Samuel P. Huntington’s famous, or infamous, "clash of civilizations" essay, in which Turkey is treated as the epitome of a “torn” country, having been riven by competing traditions, some of them Muslim (though not Arabic), and some European (though not Christian). Turkey—the secular, Western-oriented republic created by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (pictured above)—rejected Mecca, only to be rejected in turn by Brussels; at the end of the 20th century Huntington saw Turkey as "making strenuous efforts to carve out [a] new identity for itself.”

Turkey, mainly a sidebar in the history of the 20th century history, promises to feature much more prominently in the narrative of 21st-century world affairs. In a recent issue of The New York Review of Books, Stephen Kinzer discusses four books that assess the profound policy initiatives being pursued by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development party. Erdogan’s Turkey is a modernizing republic inclined to put the military in its place and turn its back on secularism--though not on economic growth or autocracy. Tellingly, Kinzer’s piece is entitled “Triumphant Turkey?”

Kinzer raises a number of interesting questions about Turkey's changing place on the world stage, and given the current condition of Europe, it may inspire one to ask why the Turks are so keen to join the European Union. To help bail out the Greeks, perhaps?

September 16, 2011, update: For the Washington Post, Craig Whitlock reports that the U.S. and Turkey have signed an agreement that will allow the U.S. to install a radar station that will be part of a system designed to fend off missile attacks from either Iran or Russia. Separate negotiations about predator drones continue.

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

Last week the Summer 2011 class of Glenn Fellows read 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.”

Moment of the Summer: Witnessing Gabby Giffords' Return

Below is a post recently published on the WAIP blog by S.R., one of our summer Glenn Fellows.

I'm not a lucky guy, nor do I have a particularly good sense of timing (just ask the girls I asked to any of my high school dances). But in what is hopefully a sign of more good luck to come, I happened to witness what might be the defining moment of the 112th congress.

To give a little context, I've been following the debt ceiling debate pretty closely over the past two weeks. It's almost impossible not to living only two blocks away from the capitol building. Even so, I've gone a little overboard - listening to c-span for hours every day as I complete database work for my internship, reading the Washington Post on my phone during lunch breaks, and I’ve had this recurring dream where President Barack Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner get married in New York.

As such, I was naturally quite excited to hear that a solution was on the horizon just before Tuesday's final deadline. Since I had invested so much time over the past month following the debate, I decided to call up my good friend and fellow Glenn Fellow Joe Flarida to see if he’d be interested in trying to catch the vote after work.


We met up at the Capitol Visitors Center around 6:30, checked our cell phones and bags with security, and headed into the gallery. The chamber of the House of Representatives is a beautiful room and absolutely buzzing with energy when full of frenzied congressmen. We arrived just as they announced that the bill was to be voted on, but we were only permitted to stay for 20 minutes. Luckily enough, this vote took 15 minutes, a pretty standard time allotment because of the limited number of voting devices. There was little to do other than sit back and people watch as the Representatives milled around. Some Congressmen were talking quickly in groups and trying to figure out if they’ll have enough votes, others were chatting amicably with friends.

Joe and I were pointing out various "celebrity" congressman. We took note of famous republicans Ron Paul and Paul Ryan, the Representatives who had been running the debates David Dreier and Louise Slaughter, as well as minority leader Pelosi and Speaker Boehner. Soon, it became very apparent that the house would succeed in passing the compromise. I thought that would be the piece of history I got to take with me back to Columbus in the fall.


That’s when Gabrielle Giffords showed up.


With two minutes left in the debate, Rep. Giffords tentatively walked into the chamber. Slowly, as people realized what was going on, thunderous applause filled the room. Everyone was stunned; only a few congressmen had been informed that she’d be coming to vote. It’s difficult to recall in the excitement, but the first standing ovation had to have lasted at least three minutes. There were several more to come after the congresswoman had voted and Speaker Boehner announced the bill had passed. Despite the bitter partisanship of recent months, both republicans and democrats united in honoring Giffords’ tenacity.


The vote was her first after six months of recovery from an assassination attempt. It signifies not only an incredible amount of personal strength and courage, but it also indicates the importance that the debt issue has for the short and long term future of our country.


I am honored to have borne witness to her return. It’s amazing how lucky we were – 15 minutes earlier or 15 minutes later and we would have missed the moment completely, a moment that will give me chills every time I think about it for years to come.


tl;dr: Rep. Gabby Giffords left me and everyone else in the House of Representatives totally stunned tonight.


Steven

Meeting History

Below is a post recently published on the WAIP blog by J.T., one of our summer Glenn Fellows.

Being in D.C. allows you to be around a group of people who play a major role in shaping policy that can affect your daily lives and even your future. However, there are only a couple of current politicans I can think of who really have made history. One of those is current Congressman John Lewis ( D- Georgia), who is considered one of the "Big Six" from the Civil Right Movement of the 1960s, one of the 10 speakers from the March of Washington, and one of the founders of the Nashville sit-ins that integrated the city's public facilities. Needless to say, he's a politician AND a historical figure who played a major role in ending Jim Crow segregation in our country.

I hadn't heard much of Congressman Lewis' story until this past Winter Quarter, where his autobiography was assigned for my Sixties history class. After reading his story, I was completely inspired and moved by the amount of dedication and faith Lewis carried throughout the movement. During the Freedom Rides, Lewis was almost beaten to death by a violent mob of bigots and had his skull fractured during the March to Selma now known as Bloody Sunday.

When I arrived here for the summer I thought it would be a fun idea to at least see if I could arrange a meeting with him. I knew it would be a difficult task given that it seems that most Reps and Senators have crazy schedules, but I thought it would be worth a try. I definitely wasn't expecting to actually make it happen but I was approved for an appointment with Congressman Lewis!

I was so nervous walking to his office knowing that I would be meeting someone that has been so important to the Civil Rights Movement. Barack Obama had signed a picture after his presidential inauguration with the phrase, "Because of you, John." YEAH THAT'S HOW IMPORTANT HE IS! Luckily, Congressman Lewis was as friendly and humble as I could have imagined. I was shocked that I was speaking to walking history, as he gave insight into his relationships with Martin Luther King to SNCC members to his violent encounters with the KKK.

I was so fortunate for Congressman Lewis to have given me an hour of his time and will always remember that meeting!

- JT

The Brief against Brandeis (reprise)

There is no denying that the long-lived Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941) was an American treasure. The son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, he graduated at age 20 with the highest GPA in the history of Harvard Law School. He made his reputation as a Progressive lawyer and as a leader of the worldwide Zionist movement. In 1916, he was nominated for a seat on the United States Supreme Court by President Woodrow Wilson.

The definitive biography of Justice Brandeis was published by Pantheon in 2009. The work of Melvin I. Urofsky of Virginia Commonwealth University, the 955-page tome has received rave reviews. One, written by Anthony Lewis, appeared in The New York Review of Books. Brandeis, according to Lewis,

was intensely interested in facts. His law clerks did research on facts as much as law. When the Court considered a case on presidential appointment power that involved the 1867 Tenure of Office Act, Brandeis had his law clerk, James M. Landis (who became the dean of Harvard Law School), go over the Senate journals of 1867 to see what the views of the times were. Landis spent months in the Library of Congress reading the journals page by page.

Brandeis even tried to get Justice Holmes, who read philosophy in the original Greek, to take more interest in facts. He urged Holmes to spend the summer break reading up on working conditions and visiting the textile mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts. A year later Holmes wrote Harold Laski that “in consideration of my age and moral infirmities, [Brandeis] absolved me from facts for the vacation and allowed me my customary sport with ideas.”

Brandeis’s obsession with facts continues to reverberate through American law and politics. Consider, for example, what Wikipedia has to say about the term “Brandeis brief,” which refers to

a pioneering legal brief that was the first in United States legal history to rely not on pure legal theory, but also on analysis of factual data. It is named after the litigator Louis Brandeis, who collected empirical data from hundreds of sources in the 1908 case Muller v. Oregon. The Brandeis Brief changed the direction of the Supreme Court and of U.S. law. The Brandeis Brief became the model for future Supreme Court presentations in cases affecting the health or welfare of classes of individuals. This model was later successfully used in Brown v. Board of Education to demonstrate the harmful psychological effects of segregated education on African-American children.

This week members of the Summer 2011 class of Glenn Fellows are reading essays and court cases organized around the theme of fact-finding and its jurisprudential consequences. As they read these materials, my hope is that they will perform a little thought experiment by asking themselves about the facts that the Court recognized in Muller, Brown, and Roe v. Wade, and whether it would have been wiser for the Court to base its rulings on strictly legal grounds, rather than conducting fact-finding expeditions.

In Brown, for example, the Supreme Court had the option of resurrecting Justice Harlan’s stirring dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, which would have meant striking down school segregation on the grounds that “our constitution is color-blind,” rather than on the less substantial grounds that segregated schools inflict psychological damage upon African-American children. Likewise, in Roe v. Wade, there were a number of precedents that the Court, rather than wrestling with the question of fetal viability and formulating a national “right of privacy,” might have used to finesse the issue of abortion by declaring that public health is a matter that the Constitution, through the Tenth Amendment, reserves to the states. I hope the Fellows will ask themselves, in short, whether the Brandeis brief, so well intentioned, has inflicted a great deal of legal and political harm in the century since Muller v. Oregon.