Slate eBook Club - Best of 2003

by Slate. com

  If Brussell was the first writer to link Dallas and Watergate, the most earnest was the New Left activist Carl Oglesby, who hoped to solve, as he put it, "not just the murder mystery but the political mystery." A former president of Students for a Democratic Society, Oglesby was devastated by the organization's implosion in 1969. In the Watergate years he moved to Cambridge, Mass., where he founded a group called the Assassination Information Bureau that sought "to politicize the question of John F. Kennedy's assassination." The bureau's activism helped bring about a congressional committee that in 1979 concluded, on the basis of acoustic evidence, that a second gunman had in fact shot at Kennedy (although later findings cast doubt on that conclusion).

  The congressional committee, alas, did not endorse Oglesby's larger theory, what he called "a drama of coup and countercoup" that stretched from Dealey Plaza to the Nixon White House. In The Yankee and Cowboy War (1976), Oglesby posited two oligarchic cabals of businessmen, once allied in supporting the Cold War, that split in the 1960s over Vietnam and Cuba. The "Yankees," old-money Northeastern businessmen and liberal internationalists, had begun to oppose the Indochina war and soften their hostility toward Castro. In contrast, the "Cowboys," the extreme anti-communist real-estate and oil moguls of the Southwest, wanted to keep expanding America's economic frontiers in Asia. In Oglesby's theory, the Cowboys killed Kennedy because of his timidity in foreign policy and supported Nixon; but eventually the Yankees, through the CIA, struck back and sabotaged the Watergate break-in to bring Nixon down. "Kennedy was offed so that Vietnam could be escalated," Oglesby said. "Nixon was offed so that Vietnam could be brought to a close."

  Oglesby's journey from New Left activist to full-time assassination buff was emblematic of a trend. While some radicals abandoned politics in the '70s to take up personal searches for meaning, others sought answers in sorting out the disaster-ridden history of recent times, trying to explain what went wrong. Baroque conspiracy theories, illustrating how a power elite blocked avenues for radical change, promised to restore logic to the broken narrative of the 1960s.

  As Ramparts had proclaimed on the 10th anniversary of the assassination, research into its history represented "a social and political affair, aligned in spirit with the antiwar movement." The rise of conspiracy theories can be understood in this way, as an effort to make sense of the lost promise of the previous decade. Rejecting the Warren Commission's explanations meant sharing the left's distrust of official, spoon-fed answers; despairing over the protracted war often entailed seeking solace in the wish that Kennedy might not have escalated the conflict as Johnson did.

  Above all, in the 1970s increasing numbers of Americans were concluding that the government was hopelessly unresponsive to the popular will. After a decade of seemingly fruitless protest, once-impassioned activists withdrew into cynicism, accepting the bleak view that all politics was a rigged game. "Since the assassination of John F. Kennedy," Norman Mailer later wrote, "we have been marooned in one of two equally intolerable spiritual states, apathy or paranoia."

  Today the political climate is cooler than in 1973. But if frustration over an open-ended war, misgivings about the honesty of government officials, and cynicism about the health of our democracy tend to foster a belief in conspiracies, then it shouldn't surprise us that most Americans still doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

  Monumental Folly

  A look at telling absences in art history tells us why not to build a monument at the WTC.

  By Christopher Benfey

  Posted Monday, June 16, 2003, at 1:11 PM PT

  The Lower Manhattan Development Corp. has announced an open competition, with submissions accepted until June 30, to design a memorial for the victims of Sept. 11 and the attack on the World Trade Center in February of 1993. The memorial site takes up some 4.7 acres within Daniel Libeskind's planned building complex and includes the "footprints" of the two original towers, bounded on one side by an exposed slurry wall, the only part of the original structure of the World Trade Center to have survived the attacks. According to the New York Times, the victims' families, New York firefighters, and downtown residents have already launched an "intense lobbying effort" to influence the 13-member jury. There have been calls for separate recognition of rescue workers and for filling in the sunken pit so that the memorial will be at street level. In the end, we're likely to get a celebrity sculptor who burnishes his or her reputation with an idiosyncratically designed—and inevitably "controversial"—monument. Or a sentimental and crowd-pleasing idea like the "soaring" memorial envisaged by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. So, I have a simple proposal. My proposal is that we put nothing at all in that space—that it be left as a hollowed-out void.

  There are powerful precedents for such a thing. Libeskind himself built empty spaces—or "voids"—into the design of his Jewish Museum in Berlin, which opened in 2001. When I visited the museum with my father, a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Berlin, both he and I found these to be the most moving parts of the museum. Elsewhere in Berlin, on the cobblestone expanse called the Bebelplatz, Micha Ullman, an Israeli-born artist, has commemorated the Nazi book-burning there of May 10, 1933, with a window at ground level that looks down into an empty subterranean white room lined with empty bookshelves. And then there's van Gogh's haunting "portrait" of Gauguin's Chair, empty since Gauguin abandoned him in Arles—an idea repeated in the one empty chair per victim of the monument for the Oklahoma City bombing victims.

  An empty chair was also a mourning motif in early Buddhist art, and lately I've found myself thinking about how the Japanese, as the first wave of American visitors discovered during the Gilded Age, have always known the power of understatement. When Henry Adams, himself a literary master of absence, traveled to Japan in 1886, he particularly admired the Great Buddha at Kamakura, where a 15th-century tidal wave had swept away the huge temple housing the 40-foot statue. Did the Japanese rebuild the temple? No. Its very absence, with its "footprint" marked by broken pillars, was a powerful presence. Adams' guide in Japan, the connoisseur and author of The Book of Tea, Kakuzo Okakura, deplored the way Westerners filled their houses with pictures, statuary, and bric-a-brac. He proposed that the tearoom be an "abode of vacancy," a description that directly inspired Frank Lloyd Wright's absence-creating "architecture from within."

  In the heart of Adams' autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, there is a gap or void of 20 years, a period during which he got married; his wife, Clover, committed suicide; and he went to Japan on a journey of mourning in the company of painter and designer John La Farge. Recently I was on a panel at Yale to discuss it, along with Peter Gay, a distinguished historian of psychoanalytic bent. "What kind of man leaves his marriage out of his autobiography?" he asked, expecting—I suppose—the answer: an immature man in need of therapy. (Gay isn't the first to complain. In a long piece on Gertrude Stein in a recent New Yorker, Janet Malcolm quotes a 1933 letter from Thornton Wilder in which he remarks on Adams' silence about his wife: "It's possible to make books of a certain fascination if you scrupulously leave out the essential.")

  I myself find Adams' decision perfectly justified and deeply moving. Clover Adams, a gifted photographer devastated by her father's death, hated monuments anyway. During her honeymoon on the Nile, she complained that Egyptian mortuary art was oppressive; and during a stopover in Rome she chastised the sculptor William Wetmore Story for spoiling "nice blocks of white marble." Adams' 20-year gap is the perfect "countermonument," to borrow a term—for a monument that refuses to be a traditional monument—from James E. Young, a scholar of memorials who serves on the selection committee for the World Trade Center memorial competition.

  We all know that memory is primarily an inner, not an outer, process. No monument can do justice to the horror of the Civil War, which is why Lincoln's simple words at Gettysburg (often invoked after Sept. 11) remain its most compelling monument. The movingly minimalist wall designed by Maya Lin (a member of the WTC jury) came more than a deca
de after the American pullout from Vietnam, at a time when many Americans wanted to consign the war to oblivion. During the months after Sept. 11, thousands of people came to view the site of the devastation, contemplating what Wallace Stevens called "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." We need to heed the message in Emily Dickinson's stanza about "a certain slant of light":

  Heavenly hurt it gives us;

  We can find no scar,

  But internal difference

  Where the meanings are.

  There may be a time during the coming decades when memory will require some more specific physical reminder of what happened on Sept. 11. That time is not now. We should be looking instead for ways to honor the "internal difference," starting with the void at the heart of Ground Zero.

  Everybody Loves Reagan

  How a divisive president became an American Idol.

  By David Greenberg

  Posted Thursday, Nov. 13, 2003, at 9:30 AM PT

  Anyone who has taken the time to read the script of the two-part miniseries The Reagans, which CBS deep-sixed after much hectoring from the rabid right, will note an irony: For all the attacks on its portrait of Ronald Reagan—painted as something less than Albert Einstein in his intelligence and something less than Albert Schweitzer in his compassion—the program is in fact mild as criticism, silly as politics, and toothless as a weapon in the culture wars (if it were even conceived as such). Judging from this teleplay, no viewer could possibly carry away from it a diminished view of Reagan's presidency, for the simple reason that it barely deals with the substance of his presidency at all.

  Much of the script is given over to cornball incidents from the Reagan family soap opera. Whole scenes exhume forgotten tabloid fare such as Patti Reagan telling her mother, "I got my tubes tied. … I'll be damned if I bring any kids into this world," or Ron Jr., a dancer, coping with insinuations of his homosexuality. To be sure, these episodes are not always flattering to the Reagans, especially to Nancy, who comes off as stereotypically shrewish. But Ronnie emerges, to the degree that he figures in these scenes, as a cheery, loving dad. Amid such bathos, most substantive issues of the presidency are either omitted altogether or dealt with cursorily. The script dispatches the landmark 1981 tax cuts with a mere glimpse of newspaper headline. Homelessness is treated by a shot of three protesters bearing anti-Reagan placards outside the White House gates.

  In fairness to the conservatives' gripes, Reagan is rendered in classic space cadet form. He relies on aides to brief him on the most elementary matters. ("This is Nicaragua," CIA chief William Casey tells him. "These are the Contras. They're fighting to overthrow the Nicaraguan dictator. … ") He mixes up Hollywood movies and reality, as of course he did in real life. And Iran-Contra, not inappropriately, is featured prominently. But in the end, the general inanity of the whole miniseries is enough to keep it from being deployed either for or against Reagan's record. The only ones who should take offense are defenders of quality network television.

  All of which points to a more important conclusion to be drawn from last week's donnybrook. That this innocent treatment of Reagan should elicit the ire it did shows one thing above all: how successful the Reaganauts have recently been in goosing his reputation beyond recognition. It is a second irony of the recent row that the complaints about Reagan-bashing come at a time when the former president has never been more popular or impervious to criticism. America of late has not only been bathing Reagan in a warm glow but forgetting just how controversial—and at many points, how unpopular—he really was.

  Every president's reputation fluctuates after he leaves office. Harry Truman quit the presidency with a 32 percent approval rating and is now roundly saluted. But people noticed Truman's rehabilitation, whereas Reagan's has occurred imperceptibly over the last few years. Most people would be surprised to hear that in 1992, significantly more people viewed his presidency unfavorably than favorably—and that his approval ratings stayed in the middling range until about 1999.

  This fall marks the high-water mark in the Reagan comeback bid. Along with the miniseries, two new collections of his letters have appeared, intended (in the spirit of a 2001 anthology of his radio-speech drafts, In His Own Hand) to dispel the airhead image of liberal lore. In another new book, a former speechwriter has written the idolatrous How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life. Even Reagan's longtime Boswell, Lou Cannon, has gotten into the game, with a fair-minded but strikingly admiring portrait of his subject's pre-presidential years, Governor Reagan.

  All these efforts come on the heels of years of lobbying to permanently enshrine a mythic image of the former president. The Reagan Legacy Project, founded by antitax zealot Grover Norquist, scored a coup in 1998 by renaming Washington National Airport for its hero (although everyone still calls it "National"). The outfit is now hoping to remove Alexander Hamilton from the $10 bill to make room for Reagan's visage and to build a Reagan Memorial on the Washington Mall, despite a law barring the erection of any monument there until a quarter century after its namesake's death—a law signed in 1986 by President Reagan.

  The current love-in stems from more than conservative cheerleading. It has received unintentional help from many of the president's liberal biographers—Frances FitzGerald, author of Way Out There in the Blue, being the most recent—who persist in denigrating his achievements as nothing but public relations. And it probably owes its strength mostly to the 92-year-old's sad, senescent condition. Afflicted with Alzheimer's and unable to appreciate much of what goes on around him, Reagan lives in a twilight limbo, arousing the kind of sympathy normally associated with the deceased.

  Whatever its causes, the Reagan celebration obscures the divisiveness that followed him during most of his public life. As Tim Noah has written, many traits of Reagan's that the CBS show was censured for showing—mainly, his intellectual deficiencies—were once routinely acknowledged, even by close aides. Furthermore, for most of Reagan's career whole segments of the public—often majorities—looked upon him with dismay, scorn, or disapproval. We forget that only in the years just preceding and following his landslide 1984 re-election did Reagan enjoy truly wide popularity. In the first and last phases of his presidency he rarely won approval from a sizable public majority.

  Consider the early years. As Elliot King and Michael Schudson pointed out in a classic Columbia Journalism Review article, for the first 24 months of Reagan's first term he was one of the least popular presidents of recent times. At the end of his first year in office, he was less popular than were Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, John Kennedy, and Dwight Eisenhower (his four predecessors elected into the presidency) at the end of their first years. At the end of his second year, he posted only a 37 percent job-approval rating from Gallup, again lower than the four elected predecessors.

  The middle years of Reagan's presidency did see a rebound in his fortunes, fueled by a rebound in the economy, and into late 1986 he commanded high (though never astronomical) approval ratings. But with the revelation of the Iran-Contra scandal, his popularity plummeted, not to recover until his administration's tail end, when it was buoyed by farewells and retrospectives. (In February 1987, for example, 53 percent of the public disapproved of Reagan's performance while just 40 percent approved.)

  For most of his career, Reagan took bold and provocative (and often wrongheaded) positions. For that boldness, he elicited affection but also distrust and even hatred, and not just from a small band of liberals in Hollywood. By airbrushing out those qualities that made Reagan controversial, by trying to turn him into a beloved George Washington-like icon, his boosters are doing him a disservice. In forsaking insight into the antipathy he often engendered, they seek to render him a sunny, universally adored, wholly benign, and two-dimensional figurehead—a portrait that, even more than this idiotic docudrama, would utterly conceal for posterity the reasons that Ronald Reagan mattered.

  Adolf's Alive!

  Saddam Hussein and the persistent myth of Hitler's survival.
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  By David Greenberg

  Posted Monday, June 2, 2003, at 8:44 AM PT

  The question of whether Saddam Hussein is alive or dead may not affect the future of Iraq, but it has consumed the attention of the press and the public. Did he die in the attacks on Baghdad? Was that him on the videotape? Did he abscond with his treasure, and to where?

  All this conjecture about Saddam's fate, however beside the point, has ample precedent in the annals of deposed tyrants—most memorably in the feverish speculation after World War II about whether Adolf Hitler survived the fall of Berlin. The Hitler mystery—born of real confusion, stoked by the Soviet Union for political purposes, nurtured by conspiracy theorists, and spun into kitschy movies and novels—has spawned a full-fledged body of lore, what historian Donald McKale labeled (in the title of his book on the subject) "The Survival Myth." The myth that McKale documents is worth revisiting since its longevity indicates the tenacious hold that fallen dictators have over our imagination—and reveals our surprising ambivalence about total victory.

  In the last months of World War II, as the Allies closed in on Berlin, rumors spread about what happened to Hitler. Many of those rumors have found echoes in today's guesswork about Saddam. Some said that Hitler had a body double who had died in his place, even as the Nazi leader decamped to South America or to his Bavarian mountain retreat. Others held that Eva Braun had borne Hitler a child who might someday revive Nazism—worries akin to the fear that even if Saddam has died, his sons may be alive.