How to End a Blog?

 

Exactly seven years ago, in December of 2006, I had to decide what to do with the blog I had maintained to document my experience as a Fulbright scholar in Finland.  At the time I felt a little like an actor in a soap opera who is asked for ideas about how to kill off his own character.  I didn’t want it to end, so I just stopped posting but left everything intact so that people could still comment on old posts.  I have been glad ever since, because it has allowed the old girl to spring to life once in a while when someone stumbles onto the site, gets interested in an issue that I wrote about, and then steps forward to offer an update or further reflections.  Just a few weeks ago, for instance, someone reported anonymously that the municipal government of Oulu had torn down an unusual building that had played an important role in the history of the city; I had argued for its preservation.  And I thought to myself, you know, I’m glad I never pulled the plug on Fulbrighter in Finland.

Now, as I prepare to take my leave from the John Glenn School of Public Affairs, and as I work on designing a new blog to document another Fulbright adventure—this time in Lithuania—I need to decide what to do about the Washington Buckeye, my avatar for the past five and a half years.  And serendipity being what it is, I probably should not have been surprised to find two articles in today’s Washington Post that together raise a number of questions about why, and how, we should study public affairs.  In “Want to Govern?  Skip Policy School,” James Piereson and Naomi Schaefer Riley take schools of public policy to task, and in “No Such Thing as a Global Citizen,” Jakub Grygiel argues that global citizenship is a chimera and that our efforts to transcend national allegiances are both naïve and dangerous.  There is much food for thought here, and in any case these essays bring us around full circle to the question of whether civic virtue can be taught.

So I think I'll just stroll away, and hope that the Washington Buckeye might endure, for a while at least, by running on the fumes. 

 

 

 

Friending the Lonely Crowd

I have discovered to my chagrin that the Glenn Fellows—or some portion of them, anyway—are aware of my dalliance with Facebook.  I put it this way because I don’t entirely approve of Facebook, and I almost never use it to report my own random activities or idle ruminations (I have a blog for that).  Frankly, I find Facebook useful mainly for unobtrusive parental surveillance, a tool the efficacy of which is inversely related to my level of overt activity.  At one point, my children, both of whom are adults, had to approve my request to “friend” them—in doing so they must have known that they were devaluing the currency—but at this point I suspect they have forgotten that their old man is still lurking in the shadows. 

One oft-lamented feature of Facebook is its habit of using “friend” as a verb, and that is only one of the ways in which Facebook has corrupted our language.  Even more objectionable, in my view, is the site’s propensity to inform me that my friend Mary Jane has updated “their” Facebook profile.  This infelicity no doubt stems from the difficulty of engineering a distinction between male and female Facebook members, English lacking as it does a neutered version of “his” and “hers.”  Perhaps it’s time to borrow from Finnish its versatile, trans-gendered, third-person pronoun, hän.

It was in Finland, in fact, that I first encountered Facebook.  Oulu, the home of the university where I taught as a Fulbrighter in 2006, is a city of about 110,000 in what is known as Finland’s Silicon Valley.  (In the late 1980s, when perestroika was in full swing and Mikhail Gorbachev visited Finland, he caused a sensation by electing to visit a Nokia factory in Oulu instead of the Lenin Museum in Tampere.)

I created my own Facebook account because I thought it would be rude to resist the overtures of my Finnish hosts and my students at the University of Oulu.  Over time, I noticed that many of my Finnish “friends” were migrating to LinkedIn, a social networking Web site designed more explicitly to serve professional purposes, and another place for yours truly to hang out.

Perhaps because I was introduced to social networking overseas, I was unaware that Facebook was founded as recently as 2004, and that it began as an extracurricular intramural activity at Harvard University.  This I learned a few years ago from The New York Review of Books.  In an insightful article, Charles Petersen argued that the secret to Facebook’s success lies in the way that it exploits the dynamics of social stratification.

In his explication of Facebook’s “snob appeal,” Petersen refers to the concept of “position taking” associated with the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.  It has to do with the branding and marketing of self, to wit:  “When Facebook had been limited to a few elite schools, listing Beethoven among one’s ‘favorite music’ could easily stand as a statement of aesthetic discovery.  This was due to that other salutary fiction of an elite meritocratic education:  that class distinctions disappear, to be replaced by pure judgment and analytic reason.”[1]  To me this has the ring of truth.  It also is reminiscent of a classic work of sociology that, these days, is more often cited than read.  I refer to David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1950), the most popular work of modern sociology—1.4 million copies sold—ever. 

The Lonely Crowd attempts to demonstrate that large, impersonal societal forces tend to call forth certain character traits or personality types.  In medieval times, a relatively stable and static society favored pious and traditional individuals.  The industrial age, by contrast, was all about production and destruction.  Its “self-made” men were driven by internalized values; Riesman refers to them as “inner-directed.”  In an age of consumption, by contrast, it is appropriate for individuals to look outside themselves when they engage in “position taking.”  These “other-directed” souls become masters of the art of exchanging tastes with their peers, though that condemns them to being forever buffeted by the fickle winds of fashion.  If inner-directed people have gyroscopes that govern their movements, other-directed people are propelled by highly sensitive radar systems.  That’s why they join Facebook, and then maybe they worry about what inadequacies they are revealing in the process.

That the young David Riesman served as law clerk to Mr. Justice Brandeis, the obsessive collector of facts who would usher in a meritocratic age in the American judiciary, is probably no coincidence.  That The Lonely Crowd touched a nerve in the American psyche is a testament to the power of Riesman’s analytical skills.  The popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook also may be a measure of the insecurity that other-directed people feel about their “position taking,” and of what another great sociologist called the “quest for community.”[2]  Then again, come to think about it, this may have nothing whatever to do with the American political culture, but rather, with the small-d democratic soul wherever it may be found—and an extremely egalitarian version of it is to be found in Finland.  But that’s another story.

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[1] Charles Petersen, “In the World of Facebook,” The New York Review of Books, February 25, 2010, 8-9.

[2] Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community:  A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1953).

The Strange Career of Pithole City (reprise)

It's week 12, which means that the Autumn 2013 edition of the Washington Academic Internship Program is starting to wind down. I like to wrap things up by reading several public policy classics, including Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons," which tries to explain why fouling one's own nest is both unnatural and widespread.  This semester I'm asking the fellows to read a case study that I recently published about the environmental degradation accompanying the world's first oil boom, which occurred in the 1860s not far from where I grew up--though it antedated me by a few years--in western Pennsylvania. There is a link to my essay, "Pithole City: Epitaph for a Boom Town," over on the right-hand side of this blog. And here is a link to a 7-minute summary of the astonishingly brief but intense history of Pithole City. The photo above is the view down Second Street today. Obviously, Pithole exists today mainly as an archaeological site; it could scarcely even be called a ghost town.

Pearls Before Swine, November 10, 2013

Lessons from a Diplomatic Life (reprise)

Marshall P. Adair, the author of the book under review here (Lessons from a Diplomatic Life, Lanham, MD: Rowman, Littlefield, 2013) is the scion of one of those splendid Mandarin families—the progeny of John and John Quincy Adams—who have played such a prominent part in the history of the U.S. foreign service. The son of a former U.S. Ambassador (Charles Wallace Adair) and grandson of a gentleman who participated in the drafting of the peace treaty that ended World War I (Hugh Dow Marshall), Marshall P. Adair retired as a Minister-Counselor in the Senior Foreign Service in 2007. Those of us in the Glenn School got to know him at an event that we co-sponsored with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Like most seasoned foreign service officers, Mr. Adair has interesting stories based on a string of exotic postings abroad (in chronological order: Paris, Lubumbashi, Taipei, Hong Kong, Beijing, Rangoon, Chengdu, and Tuzla). And he has worked with a few of the world’s most charismatic and colorful characters, including Aung San Suu Kyi, whom he befriended during his tour in Burma, and uber-diplomat Richard Holbrooke, with whom he worked in Bosnia. Of the lessons he learned in the foreign service, some are fairly mundane: for example, that there always will be tension between the experts (i.e., professional diplomats) and the amateurs (i.e., political appointees). Others are a little more nuanced (for example, that an embassy staffer cannot afford to be completely dependent on his or her official hosts, or the U.S. will have no credibility among opposition elements). Mr. Adair was reminded repeatedly that in recent decades the role of the Department of State in making U.S. foreign policy has been significantly diminished by the Almighty Department of Defense, which has perfected the art of ingesting the massive military-industrial budget, converting it to pork, then channeling it back to carefully selected Congressional districts.

In Lessons from a Diplomatic Life, Mr. Adair demonstrates the many advantages that foreign policy professionals have over the rest of us by virtue of their having a historical context in which to fit contemporary events. Consider the case of Tibet. Adair clearly is drawn to Buddhism, and so he admittedly is fascinated by “exotic and mysterious” Tibet; that is why he welcomed (as “a dream come true”) his posting to Chengdu, which is relatively close by in China. Thanks to that proximity, and a close study of the history of the region, his perspective on Tibet-China relations changed substantially during his time there. He discovered, somewhat to his surprise and chagrin, that there is some truth in China’s claim that prior to its intervention in the 1950s, Tibet, far from being the Shangri-La of romantic myth, was in many ways a feudal theocracy heavily dependent upon slave labor. He learned that Tibet, contrary to myth, was for many hundreds of years not a separate state but rather an integral “part of the Chinese empire.” He came to understand that China has good reason to regard Tibet as a potential threat. Finally, he learned to appreciate a painful irony: compared with the treatment of native Americans in the Western Hemisphere, China’s relationship with Tibetans and Tibetan culture could be considered “a model of respect and restraint.”

The nine chapters (plus preface and coda) of Lessons from a Diplomatic Life are free-standing in many ways, but there are a few themes that run throughout the book. One, already alluded to, is the pathetic status—in terms of budgetary and political clout—of the Department of State compared with the Department of Defense. Another, related to the first insofar as it is a function of draconian budget cuts, is the status of foreign language training in the U.S. foreign service. Americans in general are not good at foreign language acquisition, in part because we haven't had to be multilingual. But wholly inadequate resources exacerbate the problem for our foreign service. Take the case of Zaire: “Because most of us did not speak the indigenous languages or Kiswahili,” Adair writes of the embassy staff, “we were not able to communicate with about 80 percent of the population except in the most rudimentary fashion. Communicating with a country’s elite is insufficient.”

I’ll say. The problem is particularly acute in countries that have indigenous languages beyond the official national languages that are usually a vestige of colonialism. We have a very unimpressive record of training FSOs in indigenous languages, and our performance, according to Adair, is getting worse, not better. “Inadequate financial resources limit the number of teachers and classroom space. A shortage of Foreign Service positions makes it impossible to assign existing Foreign Service officers to more extensive language training.” It’s not a pretty picture.

Mr. Adair has written a most thoughtful account of his career as a third-generation diplomat, one that offers real insight into the changing status of spouses and children accompanying foreign service officers in the field. His anecdotes are informed by his own youthful experience as an embassy brat in Uruguay, Panama, and elsewhere. I was moved by his sensitive treatment of the often uncomfortable role that his wife, Ginger—a Taiwanese-American—was called upon to play during various tours of duty, particularly in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Chengdu. Adair introduces us to his son, Charles, and ruminates about the agonies and ecstasies of living abroad (and changing schools!) as a teenager.

Mr. Adair does an excellent job of demonstrating how the personnel policies of the U.S. Department of State often impacted his career. Rotational assignments, for example, require junior officers to float through the different parts of a U.S. embassy, where they will learn about cultural, political, economic, and consular affairs, in sequence, thereby becoming acquainted with the many dimensions of diplomatic work; he seems to think rotational assignments are a good thing, and I am inclined to agree. Hiring decisions, training opportunities, short-term details, performance evaluation, and the system of bidding on jobs are among the standard operating procedures (SOPs) that Human Relations administers, and that shape a working environment that any federal employee will recognize as profoundly bureaucratic—again, it’s a mixed bag.

Most impressively, Mr. Adair owns up to his own errors, whether of commission or omission. For example, he relates the story of a senior Defense Department official who asks him in Bosnia about lessons learned that could perhaps be applied to Iraq in the aftermath of a war waged in the name of regime change. Based on his experience working with war criminals in Bosnia, Mr. Adair took the opportunity to argue in favor of “cleaning house”; after 2003, he wonders how much that conversation contributed to the forging of a campaign to purge the Iraqi government and military of Baathist party members, a policy that was “probably a huge mistake.” Readers who take public service seriously will sympathize with the author and value his unusually candid reflections on his diplomatic career.

A Diplomat's Progress (book review)

Last week the Autumn 2013 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 this week 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, who blamed him for "losing Iran."

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,” set in Iran, Prentice unwittingly leads the Shah’s secret police to an underground freedom fighter named Hassan, whom Prentice discovers hanging from a lamppost the next morning. In this account of embassy life, it seems that 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 his unusual combination of naivete and 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.”

The Quiet American--Book Review (reprise)

I think it’s fair to say that most Americans of my generation were introduced to the English novelist Graham Greene by way of a film, The Third Man, about which Wikipedia—whatever did we do without it?—has this to say:

The Third Man is a 1949 British film noir, directed by Carol Reed and starring Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles and Trevor Howard. It is particularly remembered for its atmospheric cinematography, performances, and unique musical score. The screenplay was written by novelist Graham Greene, who subsequently published the novella of the same name (which he had originally written as a preparation for the screenplay). Anton Karas wrote and performed the score, which used only the zither; its title music, “The Third Man Theme,” topped the international music charts in 1950. It is often ranked among the greatest films of all time.

One can quibble with the Wikipedia write-up—I am inclined to think that the Vienna sewers are the real star of The Third Man—but there’s no doubt that it is an unforgettable movie, and it was an important literary event to the extent that it led to wider appreciation of the oeuvre of Mr. Greene.

In my case, The Third Man led to The Power and the Glory, which I read in college, and finally, just last year, to The Quiet American. The Quiet American is set in Indochina during the early 1950s, when the Vietnamese were trying mightily to throw off the yoke of French imperialism. They succeeded, finally, in 1954, with the victory of the Viet Minh over the French at Dien Bien Phu. The Viet Minh were aligned with international communism, but there were a number of other movements competing with them for the honor of taking Vietnam back from the French. These groups included the Hoa Haos, a Buddhist movement; the Caodaists, an oddball religious grouping; the Binh Xuyen, an independent militia; and various freelancers and gangsters, such as the character whom Greene calls General Thé. In the context of the Cold War and the United Nations’ “police action” in Korea, there seemed to be a great deal at stake in Indochina during the early 1950s. That’s why there was so much covert action there on the part of foreign governments, including the United States.

There are three main characters in The Quiet American. Thomas Fowler is a worldly British journalist who is separated from his English wife, whose Catholicism would seem to render a legal divorce impossible. Fowler, a cynical and perhaps corrupt man who appears to have “gone bush,” manages to console himself with a beautiful young woman named Phuong (whom he can never marry so long as his wife refuses to file for divorce), and a serious opium habit. The third character, Alden Pyle, is a young American—a Harvard man—whose mission in Viet Nam, we eventually are made to understand, involves terrorist bombings undertaken in the name of freedom and democracy. Pyle and his masters, whoever they may be—probably the CIA—believe that it’s in the best interest of the United States to nurture indigenous liberation movements (so long as they are anti-communist) in all parts of what is now called the Third World.

The adjective “quiet” appears many times in many contexts in Greene’s novel, and while the title of the book may be, as the critic Robert Stone puts it, “a joke” (since Alden Pyle is a “prattling fool"), there may be a kind of rough justice in the fact that Pyle’s indiscretion contributes to his own demise--never mind that Fowler earns an assist along the way. The Englishman's impatience with Pyle looks like pure anti-Americanism alloyed with the perception that innocence of any kind is dangerous in the real world. The lesson of The Quiet American is that idealists have an uncanny knack for wreaking havoc not only on themselves but upon everyone in their general vicinity. Fowler’s problem is that his motives inevitably will be questioned by all who know--and that would include the French provincial police--that Pyle was Fowler's rival for the affections of the same woman: Phuong.

This 21st-century reader of The Quiet American was struck by two things. First, the book makes such a strong and persuasive case against intervention in Vietnam that it seems incredible—more so now even than it did at the time—that the U.S. was willing blithely to wade into the same Vietnamese morass--guns, ideals, and naïveté blazing. The second is that American innocence lingered long aferwards, long enough to inspire our more recent adventure in Iraq, where regime change unfolded in just about the way that Greene would have predicted. It’s hard to believe that any policy could have been better calculated to enhance Iran’s geopolitical fortunes in the Persian Gulf.  It occurs to me that The Quiet American may do a better job of arguing against America’s permanent war on terror than other sources I have used in past WAIP seminars.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't put in a plug for the 2002 film adaptation of The Quiet American starring the redoubtable Michael Caine.      

The Guns of August (reprise)

When I was a high-school sophomore, I was assigned on the basis of standardized testing to Advanced Placement social studies. After suffering for a year—I wasn’t mature enough to appreciate primary resources or to contribute to seminar discussions—I bailed out of AP. Unfortunately, that meant that I had missed the standard Plato-to-NATO narrative of Western Civilization that the mainstream kids had taken in tenth grade.  As a result, my knowledge of European history remains spotty to this day. What were the Wars of the Roses all about? Who was Albert Dreyfus, anyway? And when, exactly, was the Italian Risorgimento? I have to look these things up every time.

At about the time I was seceding from Western Civ, Barbara Tuchman was putting the finishing touches on The Guns of August, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for 1962. I have imagined ever since that the book might offer a painless way of addressing some of the deficiencies resulting from my misspent youth. The Guns of August has been on my reading list for a very long time.

Now, a half-century later, I have done my duty. All in good time. The Guns of August turns out to be an extraordinarily good read, as President Kennedy recognized while it was sitting atop the best-sellers lists fifty years ago. Kennedy gave copies to members of his cabinet and top military advisors. There are those who say that Tuchman’s analysis of the first month of the Great War influenced Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

It’s hard to know which of the book’s many virtues Kennedy valued the most, but for me it’s Tuchman’s vivid account of how military goals are routinely undermined by the random blundering and miscommunication that inevitably occur in the fog of war.

For example, Tuchman relates the story of the Goeben and Breslau, two of a handful of German warships that happened to be in the Mediterranean in early August, 1914. When Germany attacked France, the Goeben and Breslau got busy shelling French ports in Northern Africa. The British naturally assumed that the German ships would worry about getting trapped in the Mediterranean and so would make a break for the Strait of Gibraltar and the open seas in the event of a British declaration of war against Germany. And so, when Admiral Milne cabled London to report the position of the German ships at 37.44 North, 7:56 East, Prime Minister Winston Churchill telegraphed back: “Very good. Hold her. War imminent.” Unfortunately, Tuchman writes, “when reporting their position, Admiral Milne had neglected to say which direction the Goeben and Breslau were steaming. Churchill naturally assumed they were heading west with further evil intent upon the French.”

In fact, the ships were heading east, and so Admiral Milne was halfway between Malta and Greece when he was informed by the Admiralty that Austria had declared war on England. Milne abruptly gave up the chase to avoid an encounter with any Austrian fleet that might emerge from its base in the Adriatic. “Unfortunately the word [i.e., the cable from Admiralty] was an error by a clerk who released the prearranged code telegram for hostilities with Austria by mistake. . . . One more opportunity was lost.” That meant, to make a long story short, that the Goeben and Breslau were now free to proceed to Constantinople, where the Germans negotiated an alliance with Turkey. From there, the German ships moved into the Black Sea, blocking Russian access to the Mediterranean and provoking them into declaring war on Turkey.

Then there were the French, whose military was smitten with the idea that effective warfare consisted of two things: élan, or the will to conquer, and a policy of relentless offense, even to the point of neglecting national defense. Britain’s Lord Kitchener was among those who recognized the absurdity of such a plan of campaign, but “it had to be accepted because there was no time to make another. . . . The momentum of predetermined plans had,” Tuchman concludes, “scored another victory.”

But none of Tuchman’s stories about the futility of master planning is better than the one about the German plan to attack France by sending an enormous army through the heart of Belgium, which was a neutral country whose security was guaranteed by the five Great Powers, including both France and England (not to mention Germany herself!). The great disadvantage of this plan was that it would draw England into the war on the side of Belgium and France. And yet, the Belgian route had been the Germans’ game plan for many years.

And for the Chief of the German General Staff, General Helmuth von Moltke, the predetermined plan was the only thing that mattered. And so, on August 1, 1914, the night before the start of World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm (pictured above), finally recognizing the grave risks inherent in the default plan of attack against France, announced to General Moltke that he wanted him to turn his armies east, initiating a Russo-German war instead. Moltke, we are told by Tuchman, “refused point-blank.”

Moltke was in no mood for any more of the Kaiser’s meddling with serious military matters, or with meddling of any kind with the fixed arrangements. To turn around the deployment of a million men from west to east at the very moment of departure would have taken a more iron nerve than Moltke disposed of. He saw a vision of the deployment crumbling apart in confusion, supplies here, soldiers there, ammunition lost in the middle, companies without officers, divisions without staffs, and those 11,000 trains, each exquisitely scheduled to click over specified tracks at specified intervals of ten minutes, tangled in a grotesque ruin of the most perfectly planned military movement in history.

Tuchman’s book destroys a number of shibboleths along the way, including the idea, prevalent in the early years of the twentieth century, that free trade had made the leading economies so dependent on one another that major, continent-wide wars had become unsustainable, which meant in turn that 20th-century wars were likely to be short and to turn on a small number of decisive battles. No such luck! Finally, The Guns of August excelled at demonstrating that military men stubbornly refused to appreciate the significance of Clausewitz’s dictum that war is the extension of politics by other means; in other words, they underrated the importance of politics.

In addition to influencing actual decision makers in the Kennedy Administration, The Guns of August profoundly affected the academic study of public policy by shaping the thinking of a young scholar named Graham T. Allison, who came up with a model of decision making based on Tuchman’s insights, one that he posited as an alternative to the notion of unitary states basing policy on a perfectly rational calculation of costs and benefits.

Allison’s Organizational Process model of decision making stressed the importance of pre-established routines in limiting policy options to Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). Organizations, Allison argued, are “blunt instruments,” which is why they cannot be expected to come up with nuanced policies, and why the decisions taken by their leaders are “frequently anticlimactic” and not necessarily rational in any conventional sense.  Maybe it could be said that they are about as rational as the curriculum-planning decisions of fifteen-year-olds.

Autumn 2013 Glenn Fellows Visit Lockheed Martin Space Experience Center

The David Brandt Show is educational in a number of ways.  It's not just about space travel.  It's about government contracting, too.  And it's fun.  Shown with their backs to the camera are Daenayia Hudson and Tom McGraw.

Affirmative Action on the Docket for Today

Our speaker this Friday afternoon, Scott A. Greytak, will be talking about affirmative action issues facing the Supreme Court during the present term.  His interest in the subject seems to be rooted in a case being argued today before the Supreme Court of the United States.  Here's a related Yahoo story. 

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 received rave reviews. One, written by the late 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 Autumn 2013 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 been responsible for a great deal of legal and political mischief in the century since Muller v. Oregon.

June 16, 2013, update:  It turns out, according to Nancy Scola in the Washington Post, that another Harvard Law graduate, Barack Obama, has an obsession with "big data" that is similar to that of Justice Brandeis.

June 17, 2013, update: Robert Barnes reports in the Washington Post that the Court will be handing down some important rulings over the next two weeks, and it looks as if the heavy lifting on the opinion writing front will be borne by members of the Court's conservative bloc.  Still, as we found out last year with the Affordable Care Act case, predicting the Court's rulings is not so easy.

Mr. Justice Scalia and the Moritz College of Law (reprise)

In one of my first posts on this blog I observed that easterners are inclined to dismiss midwesterners as rubes and that Glenn Fellows, who tend to be professionally ambitious and have every reason to be, forget or ignore this at their peril.

There could be no more dramatic example than that provided a few years ago by Antonin Scalia, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. As Adam Liptak reported in May, 2009, in The New York Times, Justice Scalia, speaking at American University in Washington, D.C., explained to an audience of law students that their chances of landing a clerkship with a Supreme Court justice were slim or none because those plums are reserved for students from America’s most prestigious law schools. According to Liptak, the “hard truth” is that “Over the last six years, the justices have hired about 220 law clerks. Almost half went to Harvard or Yale. Chicago, Stanford, Virginia and Columbia collectively accounted for 50 others.” Liptak reports that “Justice Scalia said he could think of one sort-of exception to this rule favoring the elite schools.” To wit:

"One of my former clerks whom I am the most proud of now sits on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals” in Cincinnati, the justice said, referring to Jeffrey S. Sutton. But Justice Scalia explained that Mr. Sutton had been hired by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. after his retirement and then helped out in Justice Scalia’s chambers. “I wouldn’t have hired Jeff Sutton,” Justice Scalia said. “For God’s sake, he went to Ohio State! And he’s one of the very best clerks I ever had.”

As one can readily imagine, Justice Scalia’s remarks inspired a kerfuffle in Buckeyeland. The Columbus Dispatch reported that Scalia was “not a big fan of OSU law graduates,” and the Ohio State Bar Association objected to the “insult” and issued a sharp rejoinder, arguing that “Intellect, skill and fundamental integrity are not measured by the school someone attends. Birthright, money, LSAT scores and magazine rankings of law schools are not the standards by which this profession judges itself.” My reading of this story is that Justice Scalia was conveying brute facts that are not really in dispute, and that his enthusiastic endorsement of Judge Sutton indicates that he understands that the prejudice in favor of elite law schools ultimately is not fair, and not even entirely rational. True, he would seem disinclined to buck the system from which he has profited, yet I think it’s pretty clear that his “For God’s sake” remark was intended as irony. They learn that sort of thing at the elite law schools, such as Harvard, where Scalia earned his law degree.

September 14, 2009, update: Further evidence that Harvard law graduates tend to be lovers of irony comes from an AP story that Lawrence Hurley cites in his Supreme Court blog, Washington Briefs. Elitist joke alert: Asked if too many of the justices came from elite law schools, Chief Justice John Roberts says no—some went to Yale (AP).

October 6, 2013, update:  The Washington Post reports on Scalia/Ginsburg, a new opera inspired by the Supreme Court opinions of Justices Scalia and his friend and rival on the bench, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, both of whom are huge opera fans.  My wife and I used to see Justice Scalia at productions of the now-defunct Baltimore Opera Company.  And we once spotted Justice Ginsburg getting out of a limo at the Glimmerglass Opera Festival in upstate New York.  Anyway, Scalia/Ginsburg sounds great.

October 9, 2013, update:  Also in the Post over the weekend is an article in the Sunday magazine that features Justice Ginsburg, her friendship with Justice Scalia, their shared love of opera, and the possibility of her retirement from the Court (it's not gonna happen anytime soon).
  

On Why There is No Socialism in America (reprise)

In a lecture reprinted by The New York Review of Books, the late Tony Judt of New York University tells us that this query—why is there no socialism in America?—was posed a century ago by a German sociologist, Werner Sombart. The question remains pertinent, for reasons that I try to explain below, despite the enactment of a great deal of “social democratic” legislation in the course of the twentieth century.

Judt’s lecture explores some of the many answers that have been formulated in response to Sombart’s question. I was surprised, however, that Judt never mentions Louis Hartz (1916-1986), a political philosopher with an original take on American political history that he published during the McCarthy Era as The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, 1955).

Somewhat surprisingly, Hartz’s answer boils down to this: there can be no genuine socialism in America because there was never any genuine conservatism here. And we have no conservatives because in the New World there was no Old Order to conserve. Early settlers came to the British colonies in North America in an effort to get away from vestiges of feudalism (primogeniture and the divine right of kings, for example) that retained their oppressive potency in Europe. We Americans are the descendants of religious dissenters and others who voted with their feet against the Old Order. The deal was sealed when our few remaining Tories, aristocrats, and monarchists escaped, or were chased, to Canada after the American Revolution.

Canada, in fact, proves Hartz’s point. Even today there are a few honest-to-God Tories, and roughly the same number of authentic socialists in Canada, and neither feels obliged to offer apologies for itself. The result, to take just one example, is that the Canadians were able to create something akin to socialized medicine; it couldn’t be rejected, as it has been in the U.S., as part of a wholly alien tradition.

In the United States, by contrast, liberalism (think John Locke, for whom society is atomistic, i.e., the sum of its individual parts) is the only tradition we have. Some American liberals may be inclined to promote equality, even at the expense of personal liberty; Hartz calls them “liberal democrats.” Others may favor liberty over equality; Hartz calls them “liberal whigs.” We have neither a Far Right reminiscing about an organic, corporate order dominated by a benign and paternalistic gentry, nor a Far Left intent on overthrowing bourgeois capitalism and replacing it with a collectivist Social Welfare state (i.e., a Workers’ Paradise). The good news is that there is nothing in our tradition for fascism to feed on. Never mind all the dire warnings over the years about indigenous fascism that have been issued by the Far Left; the closest we’ve ever come was Father Coughlin in the 1930s, and that wasn’t very close. BTW, that's Ben Shahn's image of Father Coughlin and his Hitlerian fist pump up top.

The result, according to Hartz, is that American politics oscillates between the two “extremes” of liberal democracy and liberal whiggery, which aren’t extreme at all, but variations on the same theme. Thus, it is very much in the Hartzian tradition for Judt to pose the following musical question about American politics: “Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?” It’s because our liberal tradition is so capacious it makes everything else seem beyond the pale.

In the United States, the liberal democrats (i.e., people like Judt) have traditionally had the upper hand. This is because they (unlike, say, the author of Federalist No. 10) have no real reservations about majority rule, and they know how to appeal to majoritarian instincts, some of which are not very honorable (e.g., the abolition of debts). Liberal whigs (e.g., today’s Republicans) have a harder time of it, because if they articulate their principles clearly they run the risk of offending the many who stand to profit from majority tyranny. Still, the liberal whigs are able to compete by planting seeds of fear and doubt in the American democrat. Conjuring up the rags to riches fantasy (e.g., Andrew Carnegie’s “gospel of wealth”) allows the American right, such as it is, to enjoy what Hartz called the Great Law of Whig Compensation, by which he meant that for the death of Hamilton (and genuine Toryism) they are rewarded with the perpetual triumph of McKinley (an Ohioan, of course). You take what you can get. Come to think of it, Hartz himself was born in Youngstown, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants.

Still with me? Hang on, there’s just a bit more. Implicit in Hartz’s description of a consensual and monotonous liberal order is the idea that the parameters of American political discourse are unusually narrow. Tony Judt is on exactly the same page when he says, apologizing for the academic jargon, that the great shortcoming of American politics is discursive. One of the effects of that is that the stakes of American politics are fairly low, though politicians do everything they can to try to make them seem much higher, especially during an election year.

Some will note that the U.S. has had its collectivist moments: the Progressive movement at the turn of the twentieth century; the New Deal during the Great Depression; Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. And that is true, though each was more of an improvisation than part of a Grand Design, which explains why American institutions differ so markedly from their European counterparts. During our spasms of Social Democracy (to use Judt’s term) in the 1900s, the ‘30s, and the ‘60s, we were trying to solve practical problems; we harbored no wish to create a Brave New World. From the days of Benjamin Franklin at least Americans have been practical-minded empiricists (the Branch method, not the Root method), not theoreticians.

What Judt has to say at the very end of his lecture is extremely interesting. He is clearly disgusted with the American left for not recognizing that it “has something to conserve,” i.e., the collectivist, social democratic heritage of the twentieth century. He notes that the left often seems intent on apologizing for its own legacy. Judt also criticizes the left for not recognizing that the right (thanks largely to George W. Bush, though he doesn’t say that in so many words) has put itself in the awkward position of advocating utopian ideas such as not worrying about budget deficits (“Deficits don’t matter,” according to Dick Cheney) and making the world safe for democracy. The right, according to Judt, “has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project.” They ought to feel more uncomfortable in that position than they seem to be.

This, in my view, is astounding, especially when one considers that (quoting Judt again, but now with a bow in the direction of Charles Lindblom) “If we learned nothing else from the twentieth century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences.” (Consider, for example, Hitler’s answer to “the Jewish question,” or Stalin’s answer to the challenge posed by the kulaks--that is, prosperous peasants--whose very existence as a class was an affront to Marxist ideology.) Yes, what we have here is another argument for muddling through.

The Empty Chambers (reprise)

I've always been a little ambivalent about the "broken branch" thesis. On the one hand, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein make a good case that things have gone downhill in both houses of Congress since the glory days of Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn. George Packer has made the same argument, specifically about the Senate, in The New Yorker. Actually, no one has issued the indictment more eloquently than former Senator John Glenn. Looking back on his long career, he writes:

In my twenty-two years in the Senate, I had watched the legislative process change. There was always partisanship--that was the nature of the system. Although it produced disagreement and debate, it ultimately forged budgets and laws on which reasonable people could differ but that worked for most. In general, lawmakers performed their duties in an atmosphere of mutual respect.

This was no longer the case. By the 1994 election, we had single-issue candidates, the demonization of government, the sneering dismissal of opposing points of view, a willingness to indulge the few at the expense of the many, and the smug rejection of the claims of entire segments of society to any portion of the government's resources. Respectful disagreement had vanished. Poisonous distrust, accusation, and attack had replaced it.

On the other hand, sometimes it seems to me that maybe the good old days weren't all they're cracked up to be--maybe, as a wag once suggested, the good old days aren't what they used to be--and never were! Certainly, the vicious caning of Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts by South Carolina's Preston Brooks in 1856 (pictured above) hardly qualifies as "respectful disagreement."

On the third hand, you can make the case that what's wrong with Congress is that its powers have been usurped by an all-consuming executive branch whose mandate comes from what James Madison referred to as "the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority." Or you could argue that Congress has simply abdicated while the executive--and the judiciary--have been flexing their muscles. Either way, the explanation for Congressional irresponsibility starts to sound like the old saw about academic politics: it's vicious precisely because "the stakes are so low."  Then again, the stakes don't seem low at all.

DC Idealist Fair

The foundation called Idealist "connects people, organizations, and resources to help build a world where all people can live free and dignified lives."  As a non-profit institution, Idealist is "independent of any government, political ideology, or religious creed," its work guided "by the common desire of our members and supporters to find practical solutions to social and environmental problems, in a spirit of generosity and mutual respect."  It is, thus, ideally suited to connect idealistic young people with graduate programs that share something of the Idealist's mission to promote volunteer work undertaken in the public interest.

Last night, at the Washington Convention Center, the Glenn School was on hand for the Idealist Fair.  Exhibitors were assigned places alphabetically, meaning that those of us representing The Ohio State University had a booth directly adjacent to the Peace Corps.  Except that the Peace Corps was missing in action, so to speak, a victim of the government shutdown.  It may not be as dramatic as photos of veterans storming the gates of the World War II Memorial on the National Mall, or footage of surly tourists who find themselves locked out of Yellowstone or Yosemite, but the Peace Corps's empty table looked awfully forlorn to us.  And to others, as it turned out.

One young woman asked us what the government shutdown is likely to mean to her a few weeks hence when she reports for Peace Corps duty in the Republic of Uganda.  Who knows?  It caused us to wonder about the status of young Americans serving there now.

The Federal Diary and the Government Shutdown

Joe Davidson writes a regular column, The Federal Diary, for the Washington Post.  His beat is the federal work force, and his perspective is usually that of the anonymous federal bureaucrat.  And since so many faceless bureaucrats are members of government unions, a labor-leaning spin can sometimes be detected in his work.  That means a certain amount of Republican-bashing is to be expected in his coverage of the controversy over today's government shutdown.    

That said, Davidson is good at getting the facts straight.  And what's interesting about his column in yesterday's Post is that he quantifies the impact that the shutdown is likely to have on a number of different agencies.  Read Davidson's column here.

Amartya Sen on the Female-Male Ratio in India

Amartya Sen won a Nobel Prize for his work in welfare economics.  He also is a past winner of the National Humanities Medal, and he writes often for The New York Review of Books.  In the current issue, Sen has a piece on the status of women in India, in which he wonders why the ratio of women to men is markedly higher in the southern and eastern parts of the country than it is in the west (see the map above).

I'm linking Sen's article here because the Glenn Fellows are beginning to refine their policy paper research projects, and it seems to me that Sen does an exemplary job of marshaling quantitative data to explore the relationship between his two variables, culture and sex-selective abortion.  Sen says he doesn't know of "any convincing clear-cut answer" to the question that he poses, but one wonders if it has something to do with Muslim attitudes toward women.  (There are many fewer Muslims in eastern and southern states, which are predominantly Hindu.)  Yes, I know that it is politically incorrect to suggest such a thing.

The point is that quantitative data can be extremely useful in policy analysis, and one doesn't have to do anything fancy with the numbers to explore their meaning.  Sen's article strikes me as in many ways a much more transparent, and therefore better, "specimen" of policy analysis than the one that appears in Bardach's Appendix A.

Glenn Fellows Pose with James A. Garfield. . .

. . . at the U.S. Capitol:  Joe Sadek, program coordinator; Mike Vrabel; Tom McGraw; Ryan Falin; Corey Damron; Daenayia Hudson; J.P. Suffron.

The New Deal as Public Policy

Ira Katznelson has written a new book, Fear Itself:  The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, that approaches its subject very much as a student of public policy would be advised to do.  According to the recent review by Nicholas Lemann in The New York Review of Books, the book is distinctive in that its focus is Congress, not President Franklin D. Roosevelt.  Sounds to me as if this 706-page tome might reward a close inspection.

Autumn 2013 Glenn Fellows Visit Mount Vernon

Left to right:  Daenayia Hudson; Ken Kolson, Director; Ryan Falin; J.P. Suffron, Tom McGraw; Mike Vrabel; Corey Damron; Joe Sadek, Program Coordinator.

Garfield: A Book Review (reprise)

My first full-time teaching job was at Hiram College in northeastern Ohio. When I washed up on the shores of that bucolic campus in the summer of 1970—I was 25 years old—I was vaguely aware that the school was the descendant of something called the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, and that it had been founded by the Disciples of Christ in 1850. I also was aware that its most famous alumnus was James Abram Garfield, the twentieth president of the United States. Somewhere along the way I had learned that Garfield was assassinated by a "disappointed office seeker" and that he was succeeded by a non-entity named Chester A. Arthur.

That was about it. For me Garfield was merely one of several post-Civil War Ohio Republican presidents who had been officers in the Union Army during the Civil War and wore full beards. I probably could not have picked Garfield out of a lineup if it had included Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison. Over the next decade and a half, I was to learn a lot more, some of it from Allan Peskin’s definitive biography, Garfield (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1978), and some of it from my faculty colleagues, alumni of the college, and local townspeople.

Early on, It was pointed out to me that one of the handsomest houses in Hiram Village, still in use as a private residence, had been Garfield’s home while he served as teacher and principal of the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute. Several alumni of the college were, it was said, on friendly terms with direct descendants. Faculty colleagues supplied some important biographical details. Garfield, I was to learn, was born in a very rude log cabin on the Ohio frontier, endured desperate poverty through much of his childhood, and went to work early on the Erie and Ohio Canal. Garfield’s was a Horatio Alger story—literally, I read the book. He worked his way through the Eclectic as a janitor, proving to be a brilliant and industrious scholar with a gift for friendship and leadership. He wrestled with his students, and he debated itinerant atheists. There were persistent rumors about his having carried on a love affair with Almeda Booth, one of his teachers at the Eclectic. In 1858, he married a local girl, Lucretia Rudolph; their love letters were collected and edited by one of my colleagues on the Hiram faculty. Another produced a play about Garfield’s assassination.

Garfield was an accomplished scholar in several fields, including Latin and Greek. Though he studied ancient languages, he was enlightened in many ways that we would consider modern. He was a voracious reader; he was one of the few Members of Congress who made good use of his lending privileges at the Library of Congress; he was a confirmed abolitionist before the war and remained committed to full racial equality afterwards. He treated everyone with respect, had a playful sense of humor, and saw both the tragic and comic aspects of the human condition. In an age of rampant political corruption, Garfield was a man of honor, though he was no goody two-shoes.

That Garfield was “not just a tragic figure, but an extraordinary man” is one of the major themes of a new book: Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President. The book is a careful study of the assassination based on extensive research in what appear to be the most relevant sources. The madman at the center of the tale is, of course, the assassin, Charles Guiteau. The practice of medicine was very much in flux at the time, with older physicians in the United States being strongly inclined to resist the revolutionary ideas of England’s Dr. Joseph Lister, who called for antisepsis in the operating room based on his understanding of the role of germs in the spread of disease. As for murder, Millard endorses the testimony that Guiteau provided at his trial: Guiteau might have done the shooting, but Garfield’s attending physicians murdered him with two months of wrong-headed, agonizing treatment. The chief physician, the ironically named Dr. Bliss, introduced infection when he and many others repeatedly stuck their fingers in Garfield’s wound searching for the bullet. Later, they failed to recognize the infection that had set in, and then to stop its spread. Millard is unable to resist the temptation to assert that this was a case in which ignorance, literally, was Bliss. The other major character in this sad tale is Alexander Graham Bell, who invented a metal detector called the Induction Balance that he hoped would aid Garfield’s physicians in their search for the bullet. Unfortunately, the perfection of the device came too late to save the intended beneficiary.

This is a wonderful book, though in a recent Washington Post review, Del Quentin Wilber makes a legitimate point when he complains that the story of Bell’s Induction Balance is somewhat tangential to the Garfield drama. I am inclined to concede the point, but for me it doesn’t begin to ruin what is an informative and moving story. I do, however, have two reservations of my own.

The first has to do with Guiteau and his motives. Invariably, Guiteau is described as a “disappointed office seeker,” and Millard shows that he lobbied shamelessly to be appointed to a consulship to Paris. There can be no question about his having been a disappointed office seeker. But, as Millard makes clear, he was also a lunatic, a religious fanatic who was convinced that his deed had been divinely inspired. It suited the enemies of the spoils system and the advocates of civil service reform to play down his derangement while stressing the role that the patronage system played in causing a disappointment keen enough to inspire assassination.

The second has to do with the book’s title, which asserts that the destiny of the republic was at stake during the many weeks that Garfield’s physicians attended so incompetently to their patient. This is a little overwrought. For one thing, it doesn't consider the extent to which the powers of the presidency were circumscribed in the late 19th century, despite Lincoln’s aggrandizement of the office during the Civil War. And in any case it isn't clear what public policies were at stake as the honest and enlightened Garfield lay on his deathbed and the hapless Chet Arthur, the creature of a political machine, cowered in a Manhattan townhouse. Garfield may have been the one politician of the Gilded Age who had it in him to put an end to the spoils system, introduce the principle of merit into public service, and put a hammerlock on Jim Crow—had he not been thwarted by an assassin’s bullet. But, as it happened—and Millard tells this story very well indeed—mediocre Chet rose to the occasion to an extent that no one had imagined possible, which is further cause for wondering whether Guiteau's heinous deed altered the course of American political history in any significant way.

If it seemed to some people at the time that the destiny of the republic truly was at stake, it may be because the president of the United States, in addition to being chief legislator, chief diplomat, and leader of his party, serves as head of state—part of what Walter Bagehot called the “dignified” aspect of government, in contradistinction to the “efficient” exercise of political power. The American people will mourn a president—even one who is practically unknown to them, like William Henry Harrison, or one who was unloved because he was unlovable, like William McKinley—because the president is, among other things, the embodiment of the state. In Garfield’s case, the mourning was profound, because his many virtues, which included his gregarious and passionate nature, were so conspicuous. He must have been an easy man to love. Careful readers of Millard’s admirable book will mourn his loss still.