Civil War Sesquicentennial Quote (Unrevised) Friday, Mar 11 2011 

History , victorgold 12:08 pm

“I don’t know, gentlemen, but they paid off on Grant.”

— Gambler Wilson Mizner, on being asked whether he thought Grant or Lee was the greater general

 

Hail to the Chiefs Tuesday, Feb 1 2011 

History and Politics , , victorgold 2:13 pm

Re the White House re-staffing, a little history to remind us how far we’ve come in pursuit of administrative efficiency at the Executive level.

Before Eisenhower there was no such office as “chief of staff” in the White House. There were presidential assistants like FDR’s Marvin McIntire and Truman’s Clark Clifford but no administrative boss over the president’s staff. Ike introduced the chief of staff concept because, having served his entire life in the military, he liked things channeled through a single deputy.

The idea took hold and all succeeding presidents have had chiefs of staff, including Jimmy Carter who, in typical Carteresque fashion, said he was abolishing the position, then appointed Hamilton Jordan to carry out its function. Nixon had his Haldeman, Reagan his Jim Baker and Donald Regan, Bush 41 his John Sununu and Bush 43 his Andy Card.

Now comes Barack Obama’s second chief of staff, William Daley, said to be a business-oriented functionary with an eye to carrying out his President’s State of the Union pledge to give the American people “a government that’s more competent and more efficient.”

Daley’s first act? He has, according to the Washington Post, “hired his own chief of staff, Emmett Beliveau.”

So now we have a chief of staff to the chief of staff. What, I wonder, would General Ike think?

 

Day of Infamy Quiz Tuesday, Dec 7 2010 

History victorgold 1:25 pm

So tell me, where were you 69 years ago today, when you first heard the news about the bombing of Pearl Harbor? (You don’t have to answer if you’re too young to be eligible for Social Security.)

 

Advice to Wikileaking U.S. Diplomats Tuesday, Dec 7 2010 

History and Politics , victorgold 1:25 pm

“Don’t write anything you can talk, don’t talk anything you can nod, don’t  nod anything you can wink.”

— Louisiana Governor Earl K. Long, circa 1955

 

The Woe Is Me Presidency Tuesday, Nov 23 2010 

History , victorgold 3:58 pm

Sub-headline,  Newsweek cover, November 2010:  WHY THE  MODERN  PRESIDENCY  MAY  BE TOO MUCH  FOR  ONE  PERSON TO  HANDLE.

Here we go again. Sixty years ago, while Harry Truman was grappling with post-war problems  at home and a Cold War overseas,  the contrarian Senator William Fulbright — called by Truman “an over-educated Oxford  SOB” — questioned the one-man presidency and suggested the country’s sole hope for survival lay in adopting the British parliamentary system.

Thirty years later the one-man presidency again came into question with Jimmy Carter in the Oval Office micromanaging  both the Tehran hostage rescue mission and his staff’s  use of the White House tennis courts.

Now it’s Barack Obama’s turn, weighed down as he is with the burden of getting Senate confirmation of  the  New START treaty  on  one hand, while writing children’s books with the other.

All of which leads this under-educated White House observer to think that while  the  modern presidency might be  too much to handle for some incumbents,  it isn’t for others.

Or am I simply being querulous in asking why Newsweek editors didn’t raise the same banal question when  Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan were calling the shots in the Oval Office?

 

When Is An Issue Not An Issue? Monday, Nov 8 2010 

History and Politics , , victorgold 4:03 pm

Let  me  show my age by revealing that I grew up in a time when there was no penalty for face-masking in football  because there  were no face masks;  when people rode in vehicles called streetcars to baseball games that were played in daylight;   when characters in movies could smoke but not curse;  and when the  ­Number One issue in any election held while Americans were fighting and dying overseas was that Americans were fighting and dying overseas.

That said, please tell this relic of the 20th century how the most heated, divisive mid-term election in a generation could take place with candidates venting their feelings over health care, bailouts, taxes, deficits, immigration, but with no question raised over a decade-old war in which young Americans are fighting and dying.

What’s more, fighting and dying with no clear objective and, as the man in charge of the war, General David Petraeus, tells us, no end in sight. This, says Petraeus, is a war our children will inherit, the same view held by that great sage of the Vietnam era, Henry Kissinger, who warns that Americans “must be prepared for a long struggle.”

Read now, as quoted by Andrew J. Bacevich in “The New American Militarism:  How Americans are Seduced by War,” what another sage observer once said about long struggles: (more…)

 

The more things change…. Tuesday, Oct 5 2010 

History victorgold 4:54 pm

“Never could notoriety exist as it does now, in any former age of the world, now that the news of the hour from all parts of the world, private news as well as public, is brought day by day to every individual  . . .  by processes so uniform, so unvarying, so spontaneous, that they almost bear the semblance of natural law.”

— John Cardinal Newman (1849)

 

« Previous Page — Next Page »