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 we now call 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. 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 Americanis 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 his 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.

Finally, 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. I am thinking hard about that as as I put the finishing touches on the syllabus for autumn, 2013.

Glenn School, Wilson Center, present joint panel on diplomatic careers

Yesterday the Glenn School and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars co-hosted a panel focusing squarely on the United States foreign service and a number of issues bearing on the conduct of U.S. diplomacy in the 21st century. As if on cue, the Washington Post has announced that through the good offices of the United States Israel and Turkey have reestablished full diplomatic relations. Yes, diplomacy is an academic subject, and yes, it does have important practical applications. The Wilson Center panel, pictured above, included four American diplomats, from left to right: William Milam (chair), Marshall Adair, Molly Williamson, and William Bent. Our joint publicity efforts, masterminded by Joe Sadek, yielded an audience of about 60 people, including our five Glenn Fellows.

Turkey on the World Stage (reprise)

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. Five years ago, when I began leading the WAIP policy seminar that is now PUBAFRS 4020, 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 and 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 particularly Arabic), and some European (though not especially 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 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?

Finally, there is much talk of the civil war in Syria creating instability throughout the Middle East, and Turkey may be the first case in point.

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.

November 12, 2011 update: Soner Cagaptay has a column in the Washington Post on U.S.-Turkish relations.

November 3, 2012 update:  Anthony Faiola reports in today's Post that Turkey's economic boom seems to be petering out, and that problems caused by events in neighboring Syria have put new pressures on Turkey's prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
March 22, 2013 update: Israel, Turkey, normalize diplomatic relations in wake of Obama talks with Netanyahu.

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 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 Spring 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.

October 8, 2012 update: It turns out that this could be a big week for affirmative action. Oral arguments are scheduled for Wednesday in Fisher v. University of Texas, a case filed by a white woman who claims to have been a victim of racial discrimination when she was rejected for admission to the university. According to Robert Barnes in the Washington Post, the case has elicited 92 amicus curiae briefs. It also has inspired an op-ed piece in Sunday's Post co-authored by the law school deans at both Harvard and Yale. Ready to hear the case against affirmative action? Tomorrow is the publication date for a book by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., called Mismatch, which is attracting rave reviews mainly, but not exclusively, from the right.

Glenn School/NYU Career Planning Panel, 02/28/2013

From left to right: Trudy Steinfeld, NYU, at podium; Christian Peele, White House; Steve Kowal, USAID; Adrienne Alberts, American Red Cross; Larry Myers, NEH; Jacqueline Wasson, Secret Service; William Wind, Secret Service.