Our Editors' Favorite Pieces
* Jonathan Chait, TNR Staff
* November 6, 2010 | 12:00 am
Jonathan Chait: For The New Republic’s 96th anniversary, we’re running a feature where some longtime writers and editors highlight a favorite article. Wait, you ask—96th anniversary? Why? I think it’s because we forgot to do anything for the 95th, and the 97th through 99th anniversaries are at least as silly as the 96th, and by the 100th anniversary, we’ll be living under the Palin regime, where all forms of reading will have been forgotten, and we’ll all be wearing animal skins and subsisting on wild plants. So, before that happens, enjoy!
Anyway, my choice is “The Mystery of the Free Lunch,” by Michael Kinsley. It was devoted to a relatively esoteric point. Ronald Reagan's tax program was centered around the then-novel argument that marginal tax rates on the rich held the key to economic growth. However, Kinsley argued, a massive amount of upper-class consumption was completely tax-free, under the guise of business expense. He made the point by describing the lavish tax-free consumption taking place during and around Ronald Reagan's inauguration. It features one of my favorite passages ever:
Fortune magazine ran a color photo essay featuring some of these functions under the title, "Business Goes to Washington," Ford chairman Phillip Caldwell (1980 losses: $1.5 billion) was quoted commenting with pleasure on the new mood Reagan had brought to Washington: "Hope feeds on itself, just as defeat feeds on itself," Caldwell, however, was feeding on poached steelhead salmon, or, in the other sense, was feeding on the Pepsi Cola Company. He did not feed on himself all week.
Another "definitely BT" affair was a "sumptuous" (said the Post) dinner given by Roy Cohn and his law partner at the Madison Hotel. Cohn, who is innocent of a variety of federal crimes, takes an "I dare you" attitude toward deductions. He told the New York Times recently that his firm pays him a salary of $75,000 to $100,000, but picks up (and deducts, I presume) $500,000 a year of his expenses, including houses in New York, Connecticut, and Acapulco.
Franklin Foer: "The Passion of Joshcka Fischer" by Paul Berman. Intellectual history can be thrilling! Paul is the heir to Edmund Wilson, another alum on the magazine. And this is the piece that unlocks the politics of the late twentieth century.
"The Choke Artist" by Jason Zengerle. This is a baroque story about America's most famous doctor that keeps twisting and twisting. Bizarre and completely gripping.
"Pin Prick" by Ryan Lizza. Ryan essentially destroyed George Allen's political career with this piece. It's the perfect marriage of narrative and investigative journalism.
"Hitler is Dead" by Leon Wieseltier. Leon's definitive piece on—what else?—the Jewish Question. One of those pieces that ends an argument.
Jonathan Cohn: "Cloaks and Daggers" by Jonathan Chait. OK, as you'll see below, I initially read the instructions for this assignment too quickly. The idea was to highlight somebody else's article, not your own. Duh. Anyhow, that's a lot more difficult. I'm not sure how to choose among the many weighty, historically important articles I've read in these pages over the years. But one piece does stand out in my mind, not as the most influential but certainly as among the most entertaining. It also captures the essence of this particular writer, who happens to be one of my closest friends. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Jonathan Chait, reporting from January 20, 1997.
"Irrational Exuberance" by Jonathan Cohn. Health care is the subject most people associate with me and, without question, it's my coverage of health care for TNR that makes me most proud. But if I had to pick out one article that I remember most fondly, it's an article on something entirely different: Political science. I had majored in political science in college and had kept up with it after graduation. But it seemed less and less relevant to the work I did as a journalist covering policy and politics. And one reason was the rise, within the profession, of rational choice—a method of scholarship that took the "science" in political science very seriously, to the point of ignoring real-world application. My article, the product of many months' reporting, told the story of that transformation and its effect on the discipline. It turned out to be a surprisingly compelling narrative, full of interesting characters. (Stanley Hoffman's quip about the study of noodles remains one of my all-time favorite quotes.) And it had many layers of complication. As I discovered, and reported, the field was clearly richer for the presence of rational choice. There was more value to rational choice than many critics acknowledged. The problem was that rational choice was dominating scholarship, crowding out other methods of inquiry.
Michelle Cottle: "The Griz" by Michael Lewis.
John B. Judis: “The Eclipse of Progressivism” by Herbert Croly. I am always drawn back to an essay by Herbert Croly that appeared when I was just a young whipper-snapper. In October 1920, on the eve of an election pitting Republican Warren Harding against Democrat James Cox. In his essay, titled “The Eclipse of Progressivism,” Croly lamented that neither candidate shared the progressive or liberal faith that “the public welfare demanded more or less drastic changes in national organization and policy.” But Croly was unrepentant. He recommended that New Republic readers back Parley Parker Christensen, the candidate of the Farmer-Labor Party, who ended up getting one percent of the vote.
Croly’s essay anticipates and bemoans the reign of conservative Republicanism that would prevail in the 1920s, but he also held high the banner of a progressive politics that would contest the power of “one class” to dominate American politics. He wanted American workers to “become conscious of the need of collective action, not for the purpose of undermining the loyalty of wage-earners to the state, but for the purpose of creating in a redistribution of power among classes the needed foundation for an ultimate class concert.” Croly was not invoking the traditional idea of the blue-collar worker arrayed against the Robber Baron. His idea of the working class included “those who work with the body and with the mind and those who work on the farm and office as well as in the factory.” He was also not advocating proletarian socialism, but a more egalitarian capitalism.
Croly’s ideas in this essay thus anticipated not only the retrograde politics of the 1920s, but the liberalism of the 1930s and of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Is it relevant now? Well, some of the language may seem archaic, but the basic idea of democracy is not.
Hitler Is Dead
Against ethnic panic.
* Leon Wieseltier
* May 27, 2002 | 12:00 am
Has history ever toyed so wantonly with a people as history toyed with the Jews in the 1940s? It was a decade of ashes and honey; a decade so battering and so emboldening that it tested the capacity of those who experienced it to hold a stable view of the world, to hold a belief in the world. When the light finally shone from Zion, it illuminated also a smoldering national ruin; and after such darkness, pessimism must have seemed like common sense, and a holy anger like the merest inference from life. But it was in the midst of that turbulence, in 1948, that the scholar and man of letters Simon Rawidowicz published a great retort to pessimism, a wise and learned essay called "Am Ha-Holekh Va-Met," "The Ever-Dying People." "The world has many images of Israel," Rawidowicz instructed, "but Israel has only one image of itself: that of an expiring people, forever on the verge of ceasing to be. ... He who studies Jewish history will readily discover that there was hardly a generation in the Diaspora period which did not consider itself the final link in Israel's chain. Each always saw before it the abyss ready to swallow it up. ... Often it seems as if the overwhelming majority of our people go about driven by the panic of being the last."
In its apocalyptic season, such an observation was out of season. In recent weeks I have thought often of Rawidowicz's mordant attempt to calm his brethren, to ease them, affectionately and by the improvement of their historical sense, out of their tradition of panic. For there is a Jewish panic now. The savagery of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the virulent anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in the Arab world, the rise in anti-Jewish words and deeds in Europe: All this has left many Jews speculating morbidly about being the last Jews. And the Jews of the United States significantly exceed the Jews of Israel in this morbidity. The community is sunk in excitability, in the imagination of disaster. There is a loss of intellectual control. Death is at every Jewish door. Fear is wild. Reason is derailed. Anxiety is the supreme proof of authenticity. Imprecise and inflammatory analogies abound. Holocaust imagery is everywhere.
In the discussion of the atrocities that the Palestinians have committed against the Israelis, the subject is Hitler. "I am convinced that we are facing a threat as great, if not greater, to the safety and security of the Jewish people than we faced in the '30s," the head of a national Jewish organization announced in February. In the New York Observer in April, Ron Rosenbaum warned of "the Second Holocaust": "It's a phrase we may have to begin thinking about. A possibility we may have to contemplate." Indeed, "there's likely to be a second Holocaust. Not because the Israelis are acting without restraint, but because they are, so far, acting with restraint despite the massacres making their country uninhabitable." George F. Will admiringly cited Rosenbaum in a column that he called "`Final Solution,' Phase 2." "Here in Washington, D.C., a few blocks away, is the Holocaust Museum," William Bennett told the rally in support of Israel at the Capitol on April 15. "What we are seeing today, what Israel is feeling today, was not supposed to happen again." On the same occasion Benjamin Netanyahu compared Arafat to Hitler, and also to Stalin. ("We don't have to be afraid that the international community doesn't see eye to eye with us," he proclaimed at the Likud Party conference this week. "Did the international community see the danger of the Holocaust?") "THE NEW KRISTALLNACHT," screamed the headline of a Jewish paper in New York about the Passover massacre in Netanya. "This is Kristallnacht transposed to Israel," wrote Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post. And doves are as unnerved as hawks. "As I've said before," Nat Hentoff told New York magazine, "if a loudspeaker goes off and a voice says, 'All Jews gather in Times Square,' it could never surprise me."
Call me a simple soul, but it could surprise me. The Jews that I see gathered in Times Square are howling at Nazis in Mel Brooks's kick lines. Hentoff's fantasy is grotesque: There is nothing, nothing, in the politics, the society, or the culture of the United States that can support such a ghastly premonition. His insecurity is purely recreational. But the conflation of the Palestinians with the Nazis is only slightly less grotesque. The murder of 28 Jews in Netanya was a crime that fully warranted the Israeli destruction of the terrorist base in the refugee camp at Jenin, but it was not in any deep way like Kristallnacht. Solidarity must not come at the cost of clarity. Only a fool could believe that the Passover massacre was a prelude to the extermination of the Jews of Israel; a fool, or a person with a particular point of view about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If you think that the Passover massacre was like Kristallnacht, then you must also think that there cannot be a political solution to the conflict, and that the Palestinians have no legitimate rights or legitimate claims upon any part of the land, and that there must never be a Palestinian state, and that force is all that will ever avail Israel. You might also think that Jordan is the Palestinian state and that the Palestinians should find their wretched way there. After all, a "peace process" with the Third Reich was impossible. (Even if Chaim Weizmann once declared, about his willingness to enter into negotiations with Nazi officials, that he would negotiate with the devil if it would save Jews.) So the analogy between the Passover massacre and Kristallnacht is not really a historical argument. It is a political argument disguised as a historical argument. It is designed to paralyze thought and to paralyze diplomacy.
All violence is not like all other violence. Every Jewish death is not like every other Jewish death. To believe otherwise is to revive the old typological thinking about Jewish history, according to which every enemy of the Jews is the same enemy, and there is only one war, and it is a war against extinction, and it is a timeless war. This typological thinking defined the historical outlook of the Jews for many centuries. It begins, of course, with the Amalekites, the nomadic tribe in the Sinai desert that attacked the Israelites on their journey out of Egypt. "The Lord hath sworn that the Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation. ... Thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget it." From generation to generation: An adversarial role, a diabolical role, was created in perpetuity. And so Amalek became Haman (who actually was an Amalekite), who became the Romans, who became the Crusaders, who became Chmielnicki, who became Petlura, who became Hitler, who became Arafat. The mythifying habit is ubiquitous in the literature of the Jews. In some instances, it must not have seemed like mythifying at all. "A tale that began with Amalek," wrote the Yiddish poet Yitzhak Katznelson in the concluding lines of "The Song of the Murdered Jewish People" in 1944, not long before he died at Auschwitz, "and ended with the crueler Germans. ..."
But it is mythifying, and the habit is back; and so a number of things need to be said about Amalek, and about the Amalekization of the present enemy. For a start, the prescription of an eternal war with Amalek was a prescription for the Jews to be cruel. Here is Rashi's brutal gloss, in the eleventh century in France, on the commandment to "blot out the remembrance": "Every man and every woman, every babe and every suckling, every ox and every sheep. The memory of Amalek cannot be said to survive even in an animal, such that someone could say, `This animal once belonged to an Amalekite.'" This extreme of heartlessness was responsible for the most chilling sentence uttered by an Israelite in the Bible: "What meaneth then this bleating of the sheep in mine ears, and the lowing of the oxen which I hear?" That was what Samuel furiously demanded to know of the poignantly human Saul, the king who could not bring himself to slaughter his enemy completely. So if Amalek is waging a war of extermination against the Jews, the Jews are waging a war of extermination against Amalek. It was perhaps this pitilessness against which some (but certainly not all) medieval and early modern Jewish intellectuals revolted, when they wondered about the precise identity of Amalek in their own day, and proposed various kinds of symbolic action that would allow Jews to acquit themselves of the law about the erasure of the enemy, and deferred the application of the law to the messianic age. I wish also to record an extraordinary comment by Isaac Abarbanel, the thinker and statesman who failed to persuade the king and the queen of Spain to revoke the edict of expulsion in 1492 and promptly fled to Naples. The sin of the Amalekites, he explained, was that their aggression against the Israelites was groundless: "Amalek attacked them without reason. ... For the Israelites possessed no land that the Amalekites coveted." It would appear that there is no place for Abarbanel in the Likud. For his implication is decidedly a moderate one. If the Israelites had possessed land that the Amalekites coveted, then this would not have been a war to the end of time. It would have been an ordinary war, a war that can be terminated in a peace.
But the real problem with typological thinking about history is that it is not historical thinking at all. It is ahistorical thinking. It obscures and obliterates all the differences between historical circumstances in favor of a gross, immutable, edifying similarity. It is an insufficiently worldly way to judge the world. For this reason, such thinking was overthrown in the modern period by Jews who decided that their myths would not ameliorate their misery; that there was not only one question and only one answer; that the entire universe was not their enemy and their enemy was not the entire universe; that the historical differences mattered as much as the historical similarities, because a change in history, progress, normality, tranquillity, was possible; that historical agency required historical thinking, that is, concrete thinking, empirical thinking, practical thinking, secular thinking. All these notions amounted to a revolution in the Jewish spirit, without which the Jewish national movement and the Jewish state could not have been brought into being. A historiosophy is not a strategy. The Jews taught themselves to attend not only to their fates, but also to their interests. That is to say, they taught themselves no longer to regard themselves as the last Jews. The lesson was called Zionism. The last Jews have nothing to do but fight or die; but Zionism has more to do. Israel was not created to destroy Amalek. Israel was created to deny Amalek.
Is Hamas Amalek? I have no idea. Also I do not care. It is bad enough that Hamas is Hamas. (Was Hitler Amalek? No, he was worse.) Anyway, Amalek is not all that justifies the use of force. But the important point is that Amalek justifies nothing but the use of force. There is no other solution to the Amalek problem. And that is why all this pessimism is not only intellectually sloppy, it is also operationally superfluous. It is a view of history that provides no foundation for Israeli restraint, and sometimes restraint is the intelligent policy. Consider this week's calamity. If Netanya was Kristallnacht, then Rishon Letzion was Kristallnacht. The villain in Netanya came from Jenin, and Israel turned its might on Jenin. The villain in Rishon Letzion came from Gaza, but Israel is not turning its might on Gaza. Why not? The logic is the same. The answer, of course, is that this is not the logic of statecraft. If, as the Israeli press is reporting, there may be signs of flexibility on the Palestinian side, it is the duty of the Israeli government to stay its hand and have a look. These signs may be false; but too many people have perished not to take their measure. The exploration of opportunities for accommodation and understanding is a matter of both prudence and principle. It may be that Ariel Sharon, of all people, has comprehended this. As long as the prime minister of Israel continues to speak of the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state, Kristallnacht is over. (For Netanyahu, by contrast, every Nacht is Kristallnacht.)
The fright of American Jewry is owed also to a new recognition of the reality of anti-Semitism. Up to a point, this is as it should be: The happiness of the Jews in the United States certainly demands a regular refreshment of their awareness of evil. There is something a little odd, though, about the shock with which the news of European anti-Semitism has been met, since it is for the Jews the oldest news. There was one blessing, and one blessing only, that the Second World War conferred upon the Jewish people, and it is that the future of the Jewish people forever departed Europe. Anti-Semitism in Europe must be fought, but not with the confidence that this will be a European fight, too. European nationalism includes no conception of the multiethnic state. European culture is permeated with a contempt for otherness. Indeed, the moral incompetence of European culture with regard to otherness now falls more heavily upon Muslims than upon Jews.
The acknowledgment of contemporary anti-Semitism must be followed by an analysis of contemporary anti-Semitism, so that the magnitude of the danger may be soberly assessed. Is the peril "as great, if not greater" than the peril of the 1930s? I do not see it. Jewish history now consists essentially in a competition for the Jewish future between Israel and the United States, between the blandishments of sovereignty and the blandishments of pluralism; it is a friendly competition, and by the standards of Jewish experience it is an embarrassment of riches. In many significant ways, the Jewish present is discontinuous with the Jewish past, and some of these discontinuities will stand among the finest accomplishments of Jewish history, though the ruptures were sometimes very bruising. The predicament of contemporary Jewry cannot be correctly understood except in terms of these saving discontinuities. Anti-Semitism has not disappeared, obviously; but Zionism was not premised on the expectation that anti-Semitism would disappear, it was premised on the expectation that anti-Semitism would not disappear, and in the United States the prejudice has never been granted political or philosophical legitimacy. (It was the legitimacy of Jew-hatred in European society that made it lethal.)
In Israel and in the United States, moreover, the Jews found not only safety, but also strength. The blandishments of pluralism in America have included the fierce and unembarrassed pursuit of Jewish interests, and so brilliantly that the American Jewish community has become the model for what an ethnic group can accomplish in such conditions of freedom. The blandishments of sovereignty in Israel have conspicuously included military power. Suicide bombs are sickening; but it is the Israelis who command an army and an air force, and also a nuclear arsenal. These instruments of warfare are themselves conclusions properly drawn from a severe history in which Jews lacked the means of self-reliance and self-defense. There is nothing vexing about the strength of the Jewish state, though there may be something vexing in the manner in which the Jewish state sometimes (but not often) exercises its strength. And military power has political purposes as well as military purposes.
So Israel has adversaries, but Israel is stronger than its adversaries. That is why the real threat to Israel comes not from Jenin and Gaza, but from Baghdad and Tehran; not from booby-trapped casbahs, but from advanced missile technologies. But not even that threat, and it is grave, can be accurately compared to the plight of the Jews in Hitler's Europe. The comparison breaks down over more than the fact that this time the Jews have a spectacular deterrent. The Jews in the 1930s and 1940s were fighting, when they fought, for nothing more than a splendid death. They knew that the fight was futile, which makes their courage almost unbearable to contemplate. The Jews in Israel have no reason to believe that the fight is futile. And they are fighting for their home.
The fright of American Jewry is finally not very surprising, and not only because we are an "ever-dying people." To a degree that is unprecedented in the history of the Jewish people, our experience is unlike the experience of our ancestors: not only our ancient ancestors, but also our recent ones. It is also unlike the experience of our brethren in the Middle East. Their experience of adversity in particular is increasingly unrecognizable to us. We do not any longer possess a natural knowledge of such pains and such pressures. In order to acquire such a knowledge, we rely more and more upon commemorations--so much so that we are transforming the Jewish culture of the United States into a largely commemorative culture. But the identifications that seem to be required of us by our commemorations are harder and harder for us to make. In our hearts, the continuities feel somewhat spurious. For we are the luckiest Jews who ever lived. We are even the spoiled brats of Jewish history. And so the disparity between the picture of Jewish life that has been bequeathed to us and the picture of Jewish life that is before our eyes casts us into an uneasy sensation of dissonance. One method for relieving the dissonance is to imagine a loudspeaker summoning the Jews to Times Square. In the absence of apocalypse, we turn to hysteria.
In America, moreover, ethnic panic has a certain plausibility and a certain prestige. It denotes a return to "realism" and to roots. A minority that has agreed to believe that its life has been transformed for the better, that has accepted the truth of progress, that has revised its expectation of the world, that has taken yes for an answer, is always anxious that it may have been tricked. For progress is a repudiation of the past. Yes feels a little like corruption, a little like treason, when you have been taught no. For this reason, every disappointment is a temptation to eschatological disappointment, to a loss of faith in the promise of what has actually been achieved. That is why wounded African Americans sometimes cry racism and wounded Jewish Americans sometimes cry anti-Semitism. Who were we kidding? Racism is still with us. Anti-Semitism is still with us. The disillusionment comes almost as a comfort. It is easier to believe that the world does not change than to believe that the world changes slowly. But this is a false lucidity. Racism is real and anti-Semitism is real, but racism is not the only cause of what happens to blacks and anti-Semitism is not the only cause of what happens to Jews. A normal existence is an existence with many causes. The bad is not always the worst. To prepare oneself for the bad without preparing oneself for the worst: This is the spiritual challenge of a liberal order.
The Jewish genius for worry has served the Jews well, but Hitler is dead. The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is harsh and long, but it is theology (or politics) to insist that it is a conflict like no other, or that it is the end. The first requirement of security is to see clearly. The facts, the facts, the facts; and then the feelings. Arafat is small and mendacious, the political culture of the Palestinians is fevered and uncompromising, the regimes in Riyadh and Cairo and Baghdad pander to their populations with anti-Semitic and anti-American poisons, the American government is leaderless and inconstant; but Israel remembers direr days. Pessimism is an injustice that we do to ourselves. Nobody ever rescued themselves with despair. "An ever-dying people is an ever-living people," Rawidowicz sagely remarked. "A nation always on the verge of ceasing to be is a nation that never ceases to be." It is one of the lessons that we can learn from the last Jews who came before us.
The Eclipse of Progressivism
* Herbert Croly
* October 27, 1920 | 12:00 am
I.
The chief distinguishing aspect of the Presidential campaign of 1920 is the eclipse of liberalism or progressivism as an effective force in American politics. In every previous election, at least since 1896, one candidate or one party advanced a valid claim for support of those voters who believed that the public welfare demanded more or less drastic changes in national organization and policy; and since 1904 the preponderant preference of this progressive vote has determined the result of the election. In 1920, however, the voters with progressive opinions are confused, scattered, distracted and impotent. The Democratic candidate is bidding for their support; but his bid is low and, considering the record of his party, of more than doubtful cash value. It attracts few former progressives except those who are Democrats first and progressives second. On the other hand the Republican candidate not only dares to defy progressivism by being unmistakably reactionary, but he is counting on his partiality for private business and his renunciation of any meddling with it in the public interest to win the election for him. It is this fact which most clearly betrays and proves the contemporary political impotence of progressivism.
Harding's frank resurrection of pre-Roosevelt Republicanism is a natural result of the-practically confessed political bankruptcy of every group of progressives from those of the extreme right to those of the extreme left. Progressivism or liberalism is fundamentally the attempt to mould social life in the light of the best available knowledge and in the interest of a humane ideal. It lives by the definite formulation of convictions, by the initiation of specific programs and by the creation of opportunities to try them out. It is necessarily aggressive. In order to be successfully aggressive it must know what it wants; it must know how to get what it wants; and it must be willing to make the sacrifices which are necessary for the success of its aspirations and plans. The various progressive groups are no longer sure or clear about what they want. They do not know how to get what they want; nor are they willing to pay the price. Their political futility is born of the equivocal meaning of American liberalism, its failure to keep abreast of the best available social knowledge and its inability to interpret candidly the lessons of its own checkered career.
The Roosevelt progressive party was an extremely composite political camp-meeting. It included not only every shade of liberalism but almost every degree of conservatism. It sheltered millions of Mr. Roosevelt's personal followers who never possessed any sincere or intelligent grasp of progressive principles. Those who may recall the spectacle of such political heathen as the present directors of the New York Sun, the Chicago Tribune and the Philadelphia North American standing at Armageddon and battling for the Lord will take off their hats to Theodore Roosevelt as the evangelist of a progressive faith. But too often he beguiled rather than convinced his converts, and they soon fell away from him or he from them. The party never possessed any body of common conviction or of economic impulse sufficient to preserve its members from backsliding during the intervals between camp meetings. Mr. Roosevelt himself by his behavior before and during the convention of 1916 took away from the remnant of the party its integrity of principle. He was willing to sacrifice essential progressive interests and convictions to the satisfaction of an intense personal animosity to the President and the Democratic party. The result was to pass on to Mr. Wilson the temporary leadership of American progressivism. The mass of progressive voters rallied to the support of the Democratic candidate as the most promising way out of a 'bad business. But they never entirely trusted him and his party. Nor did they accept without substantial qualifications his formulation of progressive principles. He finally justified these misgivings- By his behavior since the armistice he, like Mr. Roosevelt, forced his progressive supporters to choose between their loyalty to their principles and their loyalty to him. He shattered what was left of American progressivism as a coherent body of conviction. The hodge-podge of factions and sects which remain of the progressive movement know neither their own minds nor the dangerous world in which they live.
The behavior of these groups during the primary campaign betrayed their political negligibility. Throughout the early months of 1920 an unusually large, disinterested and intelligent mass of progressive opinion, knowing that the existing problems of American domestic and foreign policy needed more liberal and statesmanlike treatment than they would receive from the dominant leadership of either party, looked around for some effective political embodiment of their point of view. They finally concentrated on Mr. Hoover— himself an almost perfect mouthpiece of both their misgivings and their liberal convictions. Yet they failed from the start to impart any vital impulse to Mr. Hoover's candidacy. For the candidate with the undoubted approval of the majority of his supporters early announced that he was first, last and always a good party man and a liberal only in so far as liberalism did not conflict with party loyalty. This was what the politicians wanted to know. They could and did ignore and defy him and his supporters just as they always will defy such docile and well-behaved insurrections against their authority. Neither did they lose anything by their defiance. In the end the Republican machine secured the support of Mr. Hoover and most of his followers without paying for it even in an issue of irredeemable paper promises. When Mr. Hoover rallied to a candidate such as Harding, middle-of-the-road liberalism skidded far away from the middle of the road. It did not stop skidding until it almost reached the declivity on the extreme right, and it is now engaged in maintaining its balance by shutting its eyes to the dangerous actualities of its situation.
The factions and sects who were ready and anxious to break away from the older parties did not succeed in putting up a better showing for liberalism in politics than did their more amenable former associates. The Committee of 48 started out expressly to capitalize liberal and radical discontent the existing parties and to formulate a program which would focus and clarify the new progressivism. But it did not start with the support of enough voters to constitute by itself a formidable political group. Its few thousands of urban middle class members were politically negligible unless they could adjust their own program to that of some large body of wage-earners and farmers. In July at Chicago they tried and failed to accomplish this adjustment. Although they themselves represented only an insignificant fraction of the middle class they insisted on a middle-class program—one which ignored the fact that no mere redistribution of property will give the needed dignity and power to labor. The original group separated after the usual manner of progressives into several smaller sects, the largest of which joined the Farmer-Labor Party while the others, deprived even of this frail habitation, were left completely exposed to the inclemency of the political weather.
Thus those liberals who declared war on the existing parties proved as incapable of imparting an effective political expression to their convictions as did those liberals who put their Democracy or Republicanism first. American progressives seem unable either to dispense with party organizations or to control them in the interest of a liberal purpose. Fifty years of reforming agitation, during which in the great majority of cases the reformers have had to fight the national parties, have left those organizations with their prestige unimpaired. The party politicians are for the time being completely triumphant over their progressive adversaries and they are consequently fairly wallowing in the trough of equivocal verbosity which the eclipse of aggressive liberalism permits them to substitute for the honest definition of conflicting issues. Their success makes it look very much as if they and their combination of realistic machine methods with unlimited patriotic pretense must represent something more fundamental in the American democracy than the reformers and progressives have represented.
II.
As a progressive democrat whose faith survives the contemporary eclipse of progressivism I am not willing to impute the triumph of unreformed and unrepentant party politics and economic privilege to the superior reality of their principles. It is due rather to the unreality which liberals have allowed to pervade liberalism. They have not studied the meaning of their experience and failures during the last twenty-five years. They have not as the result of this experience divined the need of adopting a more radical and realistic view of the nature and object of a liberal agitation under the conditions of the American democracy. They accepted in the beginning and continue to accept certain assumptions about the seat of effective power in. the American commonwealth and the relation between the state and social progress which condemn them to remain either the uneasy accomplices or the impotent enemies of the powers that be in American society. Progressives have assumed that the American commonwealth, as now instituted and operated, is a complete and essentially classless democracy whose citizens can cure its ailments and adjust its conflicts by virtue exclusively of political action, agitation and education. This assumption they share with their adversaries. It has falsified and will continue to falsify the American progressive movement If progressives wish to vindicate their claim to serve as indispensable agents of American national fulfillment they will need consciously to abandon it.
The American commonwealth ought to be, as its apologists insist that it is, an essentially complete democracy in which class divisions exist only to be overcome. The more aspiring American political: leaders have always hoped and aimed to create a state which was capable of curing all its conflicts and ailments by the use of political remedies. During the period before the Civil War when natural resources were still so abundant that all smaller classes were merged into the dominant class of the pioneer farmer, merchant or manufacturer, the American commonwealth came nearer to being an equalitarian democracy than any previously existing state. But it never succeeded even at its best in living up to the idea of the more democratic of its founders; and now that its rich inheritance of natural resources is so largely dissipated or appropriated, the existing American union fails as completely to be a flexible, classless and consummate democracy as do the older European states. Our existing institutions are, it is plain, actually provoking class divisions and conflicts similar to those which have existed in undemocratic societies. These divisions and conflicts have steadily increased during the past fifty years and the state has not only done nothing to cure them, but it has done nothing to prevent them from becoming more numerous and more acute.
The class cleavage is spreading and intensifying in certain respects because of our existing institutions. It is spreading because the existing national economy is too largely a one class economy and the existing state too largely a one class state. Liberalism has always believed that popular self-government can ultimately overcome such a partial appropriation of the state by one class; and I would be the last to suggest the abandonment of this article in the liberal creed. But just at present popular self-government is sick, and as long as it is sick, it lacks the recuperative power to come to the assistance of a divided society. Class cleavage born of one-class domination itself poisons the democratic government which should be able to cure its own maladies. Political democracy must call to its assistance social and industrial democracy in order to regain its health. Those progressives who refuse a radical diagnosis of the sickness of political democracy will cease to be progressives. If they wish to renew the original formative American ideal—that of a moralized democracy righteously triumphant over class divisions—they must admit the temporary need of strengthening the wage-earners to resist capitalist domination and so of helping to restore a wholesome balance of economic and social power in the American commonwealth.
The excessive preponderance of one class has impaired the credit of that circulating medium upon which the whole system of democratic values rests. It has impaired the vitality of opinion and discussion by depriving them of their indispensable nourishment. It has deprived the American public of a full and fair account of the news about industrial and social conflicts. It has to a large extent substituted a policy of intimidation for the former patient and good humored toleration of radical criticism of existing institutions and drastic proposals for their reform. These departures from the American tradition have so far impaired the ability of American public opinion to understand its ailments and provide appropriate cures that the remedy must derive in part from an independent source.
Whenever an industrial conflict involves the majority of the employees in an important industry and so threatens to raise a question between the organized employer and employees as to the future control of the industry, the newspapers both in their reporting of the news and their comments on it line up with the employers and accept a class interpretation of the controversy and of its salient facts. With few exceptions they followed this course in respect to the steel and coal strikes of last year and prejudged those controversies in a sense prejudicial to organized labor. Moreover this prejudice implied a condemnation of the strikers much more serve than that which is ordinarily visited on the unpopular party in an industrial conflict. Public opinion was induced by the newspapers to condemn both strikes as anti-social conspiracies against the public welfare. There was a successful attempt to intimidate opinion and to prevent any but one side from obtaining a fair hearing. The result in both cases was a solution disadvantageous to organized labor and favorable to the growth of the previously existing class cleavage. The settlements have only prepared the way for a renewal of the conflict as soon as the defeated strikers consider conditions favorable.
These instances convinced me of the futility of expecting the American government to heal the class cleavage through the action exclusively of the existing machinery of political self-government. American law and practice place economic and social power preponderantly in the hands of one class. The class exploits the organization and shibboleths of democracy in order to disqualify any attack on its autocratic authority in industry as anti-social agitation. Its ownership of the press enables it to fasten the stigma of disloyalty upon wage earners who are threatening in the interest of their own independence the existing control of industry, or upon publicists who insist on the need of a radical redistribution of economic power. Its ownership of the party machines enables it to prevent any radical industrial issue from becoming the subject of controversy between the major parties. In so far as the class cleavage is based on real class grievances, the stability of the American state is being compromised. The continuation of this sacrifice of moral order to the preservation intact of the existing distribution of economic and social power will end by emasculating democracy, by converting the existing state into a completely and irrevocably class organization and by rendering ultimately inevitable violent class warfare.
III.
If the foregoing analysis is correct, the American Commonwealth is the partial victim of the preponderance and the dominion of one class, which while preserving the forms has corrupted the substance of popular self-government. Instead of beginning by recognizing the legitimacy of this perversion of democracy, progressivism must begin by repudiating it. The one effective way of repudiating it is to call in another class to redress the balance. The one group whose interests, whose numbers and whose existing social disfranchisement qualify it to redress the balance is that of the workers. It is important for them to become conscious of the need of collective class action, not for the purpose of undermining the loyalty of the wage-earners to the state, but for the purpose of creating in a redistribution of power among classes the needed foundation for an ultimate class concert. For labor and liberalism alike, class rule, disguised by protective coloration to look like traditional democracy, is the common enemy. They need to make common cause against it. The future political power of liberalism depends upon its ability to secure the voting support of those who live by labor, including under the phrase those who work with the body and with the mind and those who work on the farm and in the office as well as in the factory. The workers on their side will remain incapable of assuming either the full political or the social responsibility of American citizens unless they play their part in bringing about such a partnership. The lack of it accounts for the political impotence both of labor and of liberalism. Its consummation as an effective political force is the all-important task of progressive American democrats.
It is, however, the liberals rather than labor who should initiate such a partnership. In order to bring it about the majority of American liberals will have to alter their attitude towards the only organized and articulate group of workers. That attitude has usually been unsympathetic and unintelligent. The great majority of American progressives are educated and comparatively well-to-do business and professional men. They have never before sought social contacts with the leaders of organized labor and their understanding of the wage-earners’ point of view has suffered from ignorance of the impulses, necessities and the ideas which give form to labor unionism. They have regarded the contest between the employers and their organized employees as at bottom a fight between two social groups of equal power, both of which tended to pursue their class interests unscrupulously and both of which need regulative discipline in the public interest. Their proposed method of dealing with the contest has never gone further than some measure of compulsory arbitration or collective bargaining under the protection of the state. They have not regarded the participation of the workers in the management of the industry as an essential part of a democratic industrial policy and of democratic education for citizenship. They have always considered the intrusion of unionized wage-earners into politics as an example of disrupting class organization in what should be a classless democracy.
As long as liberals determine their behavior towards the labor movement by the foregoing ideas there is no chance of a political and social partnership. The conscious organized worker regards himself and rightly regards himself and his fellows not as a selfish group which is extorting all it can from the community, but as a group which, under the conditions of a modern industrial society, is not occupying the firing line in the battle for human liberation. The next advance in the art of human association demands the introduction into capitalist industry of the same government by the consent of the governed as that which the founders of the American republic intended to introduce into the state. If liberalism implies an interest in human liberation, the wage-earners who are fighting the battle for this advance deserve the sympathy and support of liberals. They are performing the same dangerous and disagreeable pioneer work on behalf of a humanized industry as the Wycliffites did on behalf of the Protestant Reformation or the unruly medieval communes did on behalf of political democracy.
Of course, like all engaged in a fight, they often borrow their weapons from their adversaries. But if they frequently use arrogant language or if they insist on conditions which restrict production or if they lack the ability wisely to employ the power which they are grasping, they are entitled to have their delinquency traced to its psychological and social cause. They situation of organized labor compels it to be aggressive, pugnacious and self-interested. Since the beginning of the labor movement the unions have never won a concession from their employers or from the state unless they possessed the power to extort it. Their masters have taught them the grim lesson of macht-politik—the importance of being irresistible rather than scrupulously just. Organized labor seeks power more than anything else and it does not always use the power which it conquers with wise moderation. But inasmuch as it would not survive unless it did seek power, liberals should allow this fact to deter them from lending support to the general aims and movement of labor. They should have the common sense to recognize the necessity of a civilization as callous as ours for a disfranchised class to force upon society its claim for greater social responsibility and consideration.
A socially enlightened government might have enabled the wage-earning worker to attain social equality, consideration and power by another route. It might have introduced a system of industrial and technical education which would have equipped the workers for positions of increased economic responsibility and social consideration. The unanswerable indictment against capitalism as an American institution is not that enterprising business men seized and exploited the opportunities and power which society placed at their disposal. It was natural and even necessary that they should organize production and distribution on a basis more profitable to themselves than to society. The offense against the American national welfare with which they are indictable is of a different kind. It is their blindness to the social penalties of their methods of hiring, firing and playing labor and their refusal to make the technical and social education of their employees a charge upon business or upon the business man’s state. While boasting of their citizenship in a commonwealth which abolished class distinctions, they deprived the typical wage-earner of sufficient leisure, sufficient remuneration and sufficient sense of security in his job to enable him to assume a position of social responsibility and dignity. His status as a wage-earner interfered with, if it did not prevent, the kind of education which he needed to qualify him for citizenship in an equalitarian democracy. The most notorious and nauseating example of this capitalist irresponsibility is the spectacle of the Steel Corporation working over fifty per cent of its employees twelve hours a day or seven days a week and of denying them an American standard of living and then accusing them, when they strike, of conspiring to destroy the American Republic. A system which is capable of such hypocrisy is corrupt at the core.
Exploited by their employers and deserted by the state, they wage-earners had to educate themselves in the only way they knew how—that is, by fighting to obtain as a group the power and the independence which society denied to them as individuals. Such is the final significance of the trade-union movement and until the American national conscience adjusts its valuation of the movement to some such conceptions of its significance, a dangerous class cleavage will rend American society. The whole established tradition in American politics, jurisprudence and social consciousness is impervious to this interpretation and refuses to act upon it. The conservatives, being blind to the existence of class domination and to the accompanying miseducation of both master and servant, cannot and will not recognize the temporary need to class consciousness on the part of the worker as a means of overcoming his class minority. They insist that such class consciousness, no matter how tentative it may be, constitutes a betrayal of the national ideal. Yet in truth it is they who are betraying the national idea. For their misinterpretation of the aims and necessities of organized labor and their blindness to the tendency of the wages system to deny to the industrial worker a position of individual independence and social dignity will, if it continues, prepare the way for a revolutionary class conflict.
It remains to be seen whether the American democracy can escape such a calamity by a wise prevision. It cannot escape by carrying on its recent policy of physical and moral intimidation, for that will accelerate rather than prevent the catastrophe. It cannot escape by welfare legislation, compulsory arbitration or any other expedient which ignores the need of wage-earning workers for the independence and dignity which must come from substantial economic power and social responsibility. It can only escape by crediting to the organized workers a salutary social purpose which transcends class interests but which under the circumstances they cannot attain without class organization and consciousness. If this class organization and consciousness is treated by good middle-class Americans as disreputable and maleficent, it may develop in a manner dangerous to social order. On the other hand with anything like fair and intelligent treatment it will serve as a stage in the educational adjustment of the wage-earner to society. It will not mean in the event the subordination of the American commonwealth to class domination but rather its triumph over such domination through a gradual moral reconciliation among classes.
American progressives will remain divided into impotent factions and sects until they come to understand what an essential part of progressivism must play in bringing about this adjustment. Organized labor cannot make the adjustment alone. If progressives do not interpret the movement as the march of a socially disfranchised class towards larger opportunities, it is likely to become blindly and destructively pugnacious and will tend more and more to depend exclusively on direct action. But if American labor can obtain the candid, discriminating yet loyal support of a sufficiently numerous group of liberals who belong to other classes, the consciousness of being understood and the new inter-class association will undoubtedly ameliorate its frequently harsh, suspicious and aggressive attitude.
The progressives will testify to the possibility of creating a political democracy superior to class by themselves rising above class misunderstanding and prejudice. A large fraction of the English liberals have already assumed this attitude towards the labor movement. They have joined the Labor party and so created a fighting organization, which is the conscious political instrument of the social and industrial enfranchisement of the wage-earning and salaried worker. The American progressive is under a heavier obligation to adopt this course than the English liberal. For while the British Commonwealth has frankly recognized class discriminations, the complacent acceptance of such discriminations is peculiarly abhorrent to the American national consciousness.
That is the reason why as an American who called himself a reformer from 1890 to 1908, a Republican insurgent from 1908 to 1912, and since 1912 a progressive, and who shared most of the mistakes and illusions of the reformers, insurgents and progressives, I shall vote for the Farmer-Labor candidate for the Presidency. The Farmer-Labor party is an attempt to unite the American workers, whether industrial or agricultural, whether by hand or brain, whether salaried or wage-earning as a homogeneous group which is capable of exercising and deserves to exercise its share of economic, social and political power. It seeks to adjust the American labor movement both to the interests of the other classes and to its place in a humane commonwealth. A party which itself overcomes the class conflict is necessary to reconstruct a state which is capable of providing for the moral reconciliation of the classes.
The arguments against voting for the Farmer-Labor candidate are numerous and formidable. The chief of them is that the new party is far more of an aspiration than a reality. It has failed to secure the support of any large number of farmers and laborers. It does not represent either organized labor or the organized farmer. Instead of being supported by the American Federation of Labor, the leaders of that organization are its bitterest enemies. Its platform includes some things that I should like to see omitted and omits much that I should like to see included. In voting for Christensen I shall vote for a group of principles of which I do not wholly approve and for a platform which the existing party does not possess the administrative ability to carry into effect.
These serious drawbacks are traceable chiefly to one underlying cause. Practically all of the educational groundwork in public opinion for a Farmer-Labor party still remains to be done. Marxian Socialism has the advantage both of a definite creed and a Bible which focuses the convictions and emotions of its adherents. The British Labor party is built upon the experience of the British trades-union movement throughout three generations and upon over thirty years of the educational work of Sidney Webb and the other Fabians. The older parties in this country possess all the advantages of custom. Their tradition of seeking remedies for social maladies by means exclusively of direct governmental action is deeply rooted in the American political consciousness, and is taken for granted by the enormous majority of good American citizens. Nothing has happened to impair its authority. Thus the Farmer-Labor party is starting out to capture votes and become a political force in spite of the fact that only a small part of the American people is prepared to welcome and to understand its proposal to vindicate the deepest American social tradition of an equalitarian commonwealth by means not of disregarding but of recognizing and overcoming class dissensions. Before its formative idea can become politically effective it will need not only a more thorough, a more lucid and a more persuasive presentation than it has yet received but a radical change of mental attitudes on the part of all the groups which the party seeks to unite—of organized labor, of the farmers and of the progressive members of other classes. This change of attitude can hardly take place except as the result of supplementing the political coalition of the groups by an association among them for economic cooperation as consumers.
Those who cast a vote for the Farmer-Labor candidates should not cherish illusions about the ability of the party to win easy and numerous future converts. Much as the new party needs votes, it needs even more than votes a candid understanding of the gulf which separates the formative idea upon which the party is built from the actual state of mind of the farmers, laborers and liberals whose cooperation is necessary to make it practically effective. That gulf is wide and deep—as wide and deep as the class cleavage which the party recognizes and proposes to overcome. In this sense a vote for Christensen becomes pale with an unreality similar to the unreality which afflicts every attempt in this abominable election to give effective political expression to the aspirations of a progressive to make his vote count on behalf of human liberation. But there is one merit in such a vote which to my mind is decisive in its favor. Plain as is the political unreality to which the lack of antecedent preparation condemns the Farmer-Labor party as an expression of liberal aspiration, the party is born of a sound application of the traditional American ideal of a homogeneous equalitarian democracy to the existing facts of American economic and social life. It looks like the best way in 1920 of vindicating American nationality as an expression of an essentially ethical and humane ideal. I am thankful, consequently, to those people who have unfurled the new party flag and afforded me an opportunity of saluting it. Although it floats over a castle in the air, it does not call for blood as does the red flag of socialism and it means more of the good which good Americans have meant by the Stars and Stripes than do the besmeared, tawdry and drooping flags of the Democratic and Republican parties. To vote for it is only an expression of faith, but it is an expression of faith at a moment when in my opinion the old parties afford the voter no opportunity of using his vote as an expression of humane power.
The Griz
Campaign Journal
* Michael Lewis
* February 5, 1996 | 12:00 am
January 11
Within minutes of landing in Des Moines you know that you have arrived in the American Midwest. The Midwest is the straight man of the Western world, millions and millions of square miles peopled with Abbotts without their Costellos. It's not that Midwesterners lack a sense of humor; it's just that they regard humor as second-rate behavior, the opposite of, rather than a complement to, seriousness. It's no wonder that professional Midwestern humorists—Garrison Keillor, David Letterman—have the feel of men who have spun out of some orbit.
I've come to Iowa to find Morry Taylor, the man who by a landslide won the hearts of the United We Stand delegates at Ross Perot's convention last fall. (After hearing him speak, 400 of the 2,000 people present signed up to work on his campaign.) Taylor has spent his entire life in the Midwest and counts as the only bona fide commercial success story out of the nine candidates in the Republican field. He started out as a tool and die maker, attended Michigan Tech and in the early 1980s, in his mid-40s, after a career selling wheels for farm equipment, began to buy distressed tire and wheel plants and turn them around. Today he is the chief executive of Titan Tire and Wheel International, which finished last year with $620 million in revenues, no debt and one of the highest profit margins of any company listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
The strange thing about Taylor is that he hasn't gotten more play in the press or the polls. He's the real thing: an extremely successful businessman who has behaved about as well as an extremely successful businessman can. He employs 5,500 people—1,200 of them in Des Moines—at a wage rate of $12 to $17 an hour, all of whom are included in a profit-sharing plan. He pays himself a modest salary and argues forcefully and often that CEOs of publicly held corporations should never be paid more than about twenty times the wages of their most menial workers. Actually, that's probably one of the reasons no one has heard of him until now.
January 12
We start our day just before 8:00 inside a motor home plastered all over with Morry's favorite screaming eagle logo—the one his campaign staffers plead with him to abandon. A ferocious-looking bird flies out of the T in Morry's last name, which is painted in huge letters across the side of the colossal machine. Morry's campaign manager tried to talk him out of the expense, but Morry insisted that the best way to start running for president was to buy six RVs—land yachts, they are called—and race them in a convoy across each of Iowa's ninety-nine counties and through every New Hampshire hamlet: six monstrosities all jammed together and churning down the highway at eighty miles per hour, with the Pointer Sisters blaring out of the lead vehicle, drowning out everything but Morry. Morry figured that he'd roll them into a town, surround the courthouse, flip on the loud speakers, tap a few kegs of beer, and everyone for miles would be talking about Morry Taylor for the next two weeks. (He was right.)
Today like every other day Morry is wearing his American flag tie. He's shouting over music and the roar of the land yacht into a telephone at a radio talk-show host. "Anyone who wants to come and help call 1-800-usa-bear." The talk-show host asks him some question. "Well," replies Morry, "I use the bear number because my nickname is the Griz."
"Why do they call you the Griz?" I ask, after he hangs up. It seems the natural next question.
"I got that when I took the company public," he shouts. "At the closing they gave me this plaque. It says—and they did it in Latin, which language I can't speak—but this is what it says: IN NORTH AMERICA THERE IS NO KNOWN PREDATOR TO THE GRIZZLY. So I became the Griz. Then I thought about it. Up until that time I kind of liked my other nickname, Attila. 'Cause of Attila the Hun, you know. People think Attila the Hun was a barbarian but he's not. He's the guy who ran the Roman Legion out of town."
Morry then shouts back at Lenny, an extremely resourceful young man whose job is to race around sorting out the chaos that Morry creates wherever he goes in Iowa and New Hampshire.
"Hey piss-boy. Are we in the Connecticut primary?"
There's some shuffling in the back of the land yacht. "I'm not sure," says Lenny.
"I'm on about the same as Dole," says Morry. "Dole and I are on the most ballots." Which is true. Although Morry's strategy is to focus on Iowa and New Hampshire ("If I win Iowa, New Hampshire's mine, too"), the United We Stand people have created a truly national organization for him. And while the other marginal candidates in the field—Alan Keyes and Bob Dornan—are running to win their 2 or 3 percent of the vote, which they can then cash in like chips in a casino for prestige and appointments, Morry has no interest in anything short of total victory. He is also the only candidate who is the least bit persuasive when he says he has no interest in being president for more than four years. "Why the hell would I want to do that?" he says. "I like my life." And he does.
At 9:00 the land yacht rolls up beside the front door of the Ames High School and disgorges Morry. Morry then does his usual trick of startling the locals. He bursts through both double doors leading into the school, which, like all the doors he will open for the rest of the day, slam violently against the wall behind them. He marches off down a long corridor with the rest of us trying to keep up, leaving a trail of startled adolescents in his wake. He swaggers like a quarterback on the way to a huddle.
"Did you play sports in high school?" I ask Morry, or rather, the back of Morry's head. He doesn't even look around. He's shaking his head; I have no trouble imagining the scorn on his face. My question is plainly ridiculous. "Did I play sports?" he asks. "I am the biggest jock who ever ran for president. I can beat you in anything." And with that he blows through the double doors leading into the auditorium. High school probably was not prepared for Morry Taylor the first time he passed through, and it most certainly is no match for him now that he's sitting on $40 million-plus of Titan stock and a fully fueled presidential campaign. About thirty kids file in, slump down into their seats and settle in for a snooze they'll never have.
"Your school is too big," booms Morry, and as the kids jolt and stir he enters his stream of consciousness. "This is what is wrong with America," he says, pointing at the kids. "Big, big, big. You don't see no little kids in here. No little kids with the big kids so that the little kids don't have anyone to look up to. When I was in school the third-graders looked up to the eighth-graders, and the eighth-grade boys were in love with the senior girls. The senior girls just thought they were cute little twerps, but it was good for them. Some kid comes to school with orange hair, you don't have to call the parents. Hell, we'll take care of the orange hair. A place like this breeds weirdos."
The students are now fully alert.
"I never could enjoy going to a school like this," concludes Morry. The kids seem to concur.
"How many of you ever take accounting?" he asks. The kids are now squirming and ducking: he's breaking down their resistance, making them nervous. Two hands go up. Morry shakes his head, a little sadly. His tone changes. "I know you got a lot of these teachers"—he waves nonchalantly at a couple of uneasy-looking older men in the rafters—"and they tell you a lot of ..." (he doesn't use the word "crap" but he might as well) "things ... but in your whole entire life you are only going to use one or maybe two of those things. Hell, I took 257 engineering courses, and I never used one of them."
He pauses and seems to reconsider. I wonder if he's about to make a little plea for the joy of learning for its own sake, the importance of a liberal education, that sort of thing. He isn't. "Now we all agree that the most important thing in your life is your family," he says. "Your momma and your daddy, your brothers and your sisters. But right after that there's something else. We all know what it is, and it's... GREEN."
With that he reaches into his pocket and produces a fat roll of $100 bills. He holds it high so that everyone can see. Five grand. Cash. The kids are now perched on the edge of their seats, giggling nervously, probably wondering what they feed presidential candidates.
"It all comes down to accounting," says Morry. "Accounting and money. You can't live without it. And the minute you make it someone is trying to take it away from you. So for god's sake, find out about money!"
"Can I have some?" asks a kid in the front row.
"It's mine!" shouts Morry, and puts the money back in his pocket, a nice illustration of some general business principle. The teachers are now frowning, but the kids are unable to preserve their original detachment.
It's time to talk politics.
Morry's positions are somewhat quixotic: he's pro-choice (rousingly so, if asked), for the death penalty (ditto), against sending troops to Bosnia. No economics professor is a match for his dissection of Steve Forbes's plan to cut the capital gains tax rate to zero. "I sold $15 million worth of stock to get into this thing," he says. "I paid $5 million to Uncle Sam. Under Steve Forbes's plan I wouldda paid nuthin. The guys who work for me would pay 17 percent on what they earn, and I would have paid no tax at all. And that's wrong." But even this is subordinate to his outrage at the inefficiency of our government. He's running on a platform of balancing the budget in eighteen months not by eliminating programs but by firing a third of the best-paid government employees. Having balanced the budget he will then cut both programs and taxes.
"How many of you want to give the government 40 percent of what you earn after you get outta here?" he asks the crowd. One of the kids—a "weirdo" with a wispy beard—raises his hand. "Mark his name down," says Morry. "An institution needs him. We're going to study his brain. He's not human. He's an alien."
And so it goes until Morry ends with a rousing call to arms: "This is it folks! This is the only time you have a choice: by November the only choice for president is between light grey and medium grey."
January 13
Tonight we flew in one of Morry's private planes to a Republican county dinner at Storm Lake, in northwestern Iowa. It was held in a large warehouse disguised as a convention hall. Morry, who is sitting at the head table, pops up and beats the crowd to the buffet table, where he snags a fried chicken breast, green beans, mashed potatoes and an anemic-looking salad. Surveying the crowd upon his return he says, "This is going to be wild tonight. That guy at the end of the table—crazier than hell. He writes for the conservative paper. There's going to be some smiles and some people pissed-off." I point out that, out of 150 people, two have availed themselves of the cash bar. All the rest are drinking iced tea. "If you were a Democrat you'd have a lot more fun," I say.
"You know something about these people?" he says. "Your wife gets sick, and every one of these people would visit her. They'd take turns bringing meals by your house. Maybe not that many of them dance,"—a Cheshire Cat smile—"but they would love watchin' me dance."
A bit later Morry rises to speak. He's on: within minutes he has the crowd laughing and clapping. They agree with him about everything, especially the lunacy of the Forbes tax plan. Then in the midst of the fun a woman rises and challenges his pro-choice position. "It's a religious issue," Morry says, "not a matter for the federal government." She presses him: you can see she's used to making public speakers either come around to her way of thinking or regret ever opening their mouths. She's picked the wrong guy today. Instead of backing down or wiggling, Morry goes on the attack: "Look ma'am, I think 99 percent of women never want an abortion. They go through a lot of mental anguish. They suffer a lot. I say leave it to them." She tries to speak. Morry interrupts: "I said, leave... it... to... the... WOMEN."
And there, at a banquet filled with Republican Party hacks, the sort of people who are meant to be rabidly pro-life, who Morry expected to be rabidly pro-life, a volcano of spontaneous applause erupted. All over the room women were clapping so hard I thought they'd break their hands. Here, I thought, is the benefit of having someone around who feels free to speak his mind. He liberates, however momentarily, those who don't.
January 14
I was waiting at the front desk of the Des Moines YMCA when Morry arrived just before 9 a.m.: "What, you thought I wouldn't show?" The racquetball game took just under twenty-two minutes. Morry won: 15-0, 15-5. I had figured that between the twenty-five extra pounds he's carrying around and the sixteen years he has on me I could outhustle him. I was wrong. He knew every angle and trick on the court and played each one with relish. "Too good!" he'd shout after he'd dropped the ball into the corner for the tenth time. As the rout progressed he shouted to his aides—who had at length turned up—to come and watch. "Fourteen to zip, not bad for an old guy," he shouted. And then, under his breath, "Some of my guys are betting on you. Dip shits." As we crawl through the hole out the back of the court he says, "Don't you go write that you lost because you were nervous the presidential candidate was going to have a heart attack." Camus identified the love of winning at games as one of the prerequisites of happiness in the modern world. And he did that without ever meeting Morry.
I went over to Titan Tire about an hour before the big debate—The Des Moines Register forum, it is called—and found Morry still in his sweat clothes with his feet up on his desk scratching out his two-minute closing statement. On the other side of his desk his campaign manager looks on with a mixture of affection and anxiety. "Hey," Morry says when he sees me, "tell me what you think of this," and over his manager's protests he reads his remarks aloud. Half of it isn't bad, but the other half is a series of wisecracks about Bob Dole that don't seem to belong in a presidential debate.
I offer my first strategic political advice: cut the Dole stuff, stress the unfairness of Forbes's tax plan compared to his own by using his own experience and find a place to let people know that he's pro-choice. His manager winces. The Taylor campaign feels the surest way to turn off Republican primary voters is to be loudly pro-choice, and its true that it didn't exactly work for Arlen Specter. I make two points: (a) half the people at the Storm Lake event—party hacks every one—had to restrain themselves from leaping to their feet and cheering when Morry came out with his beliefs; and (b) it's not as if Morry has any votes to lose.
Outside the Des Moines television station there were two chanting mobs of about 200 people divided by a street. One held bright orange signs that said expose the right; the other jabbed signs for Dole, Gramm and Morry. I slid past and into the studio, where I presented myself as attached to the Taylor campaign. They signed me in but did not quite believe me—the woman insisted on walking me down to Morry's studio. As we entered the back corridor we bumped into Morry on his way to the stage. He's strutting. Both arms are swinging, and a cluster of six people are failing to keep up with him.
Morry was seated exactly where he wanted to be, between Dole and Gramm. After the last debate, in South Carolina, he complained of being seated next to Keyes ("the guy nearly blew out my eardrums"). His situation facilitates one of his best lines, "I got a couple of million bucks of government pensions sitting on either side of me." The studio loves it, but it was probably lost on the TV audience, since the camera keeps to tight shots of the candidates. No one has any idea who Morry is sitting next to.
Very little separates the other candidates—it's merely a matter of emphasis. Light grey and medium grey, as Morry put it. Keyes and Buchanan stress their pro-life message. All the other candidates except Morry agree or at least refuse to disagree. The exchanges feel tentative, provisional. It's like one of those pick-up basketball games in which everyone who loses pretends he wasn't trying. About midway through it becomes clear that only the spinners will be truly pleased. Because no one clearly won or lost, their job of clearing up the ambiguity for reporters becomes more important. Still, one thing is clear: how organic and fluid the process is. Every one of the candidates stands a chance of shaping future policy. Anyone who lands upon an issue and proves its electoral merit is likely to have his issue poached by the winner. If Morry succeeds in making Forbes's tax plan look ridiculous, for instance, he will have struck one of the great blows for fairness, even though no one will remember his name. And he might: the other candidates are starting to pick up on his rap.
As we near the ninety-minute mark Morry is invited to offer his closing remarks. He has cut the jokes about Dole, stressed his views about the Forbes tax plan with a personal anecdote. As I realize what is happening a little shiver of concern runs down my spine. No, I think, he couldn't be so foolish as to take my advice. But then he says, "Since it has come up so often I think I should say a few words about a woman's choice."
"Time's up, Mr. Taylor," says the moderator.
"Okay," says Morry. He actually was going to do it, he tells me after the debate. But he's too busy telling reporters about his racquetball triumph to spin his performance.
I rush to the airport with one more bag than I came with to carry all the stuff Morry gave me: t-shirts, baseball caps, candy, literature. The American Airlines ticket counter is empty. As I stand there, up rushes a man who looks a little like Bob Dornan and asks if there are any seats left on the Chicago flight. He is Bob Dornan. B-1 Bob. The ladies behind the counter fail to recognize him. Dornan drops a hint: "I was just participating in the presidential debate," he says. This means nothing to the women behind the counter, who have found a seat but are now demanding a ticket and identification, which Dornan can't find. "I'm a congressman," he says, as if this explains anything. The women fail to be impressed by this fact. "I think I won the presidential debate," he says. They ignore him completely.
It is a nice illustration of a general principle: if a celebrity falls in the woods and the witnesses do not know who he is, no one hears him. Finally I say, "You did really well," which is only a slight exaggeration, and then explain to the ladies behind the counter who Bob Dornan is. His credibility skyrockets. They treat him as a big shot. You never can tell who might be president one day.
Dornan and I walk together to the end of the concourse. There we are nearly alone with a clear view of a row of private jets across the tarmac. He points to a Lear Jet. I tell him it belongs to Dole. Dornan is clearly upset. "You'd think the guy could give me a ride back," he says. "When I quit doing this he'll expect me to endorse him and act as a surrogate, and he can't even give me a ride back." The prospect lingers in the air between us. Then perhaps by way of explanation he says: "If I get 2 percent in New Hampshire I'll have done well."
Irrational Exuberance
When did political science forget about politics?
* Jonathan Cohn
* October 25, 1999 | 12:00 am
During the early '80s, Harvard University's James Q. Wilson was a role model for the political science profession: a leading specialist in organizational behavior and public administration and a bona fide expert on urban affairs, crime policy, and government reform. The winner of his discipline's most prestigious awards, he wrote several books that today remain standards for the profession—from The Politics of Regulation to his widely used textbook, American Government: Institutions and Policies. But Wilson was more than just a scholar; he was a public intellectual whose influence extended well beyond the gates of Harvard Yard. He served on several government commissions dedicated to addressing crime and urban problems; his byline was as apt to appear on some policy-related article in The New York Times (or The New Republic) as it was on a peer-reviewed paper in the American Political Science Review (apsr). Today, one has only to look at the introduction of community policing and zero-tolerance crime policy in New York City—reforms modeled in good part on an idea Wilson promoted in a 1982 cover story for The Atlantic Monthly called "Broken Windows"—to see his real-world legacy.
Of course, during the early '80s, Wilson was hardly unusual. At Harvard, he was emblematic of an elite group of scholars characterized by a broad interest in politics and motivated explicitly by their desire to change the world around them. Samuel Huntington, arguably his generation's most influential student of international relations, cofounded a foreign policy magazine and moonlighted as a government adviser. In the political philosophy wing, Judith Shklar would tell students that she decided to study political ideas because she wanted to understand the racist totalitarianism her family had witnessed firsthand in Eastern Europe—and to prevent its reoccurrence. Fellow theorist Harvey "C minus" Mansfield delighted in challenging liberal nostrums as much as he relished deflating smug undergraduates. Stanley Hoffman's grasp of language and history allowed him to span the nominally separate spheres of political theory, comparative government, and international relations; teach some of the most popular undergraduate courses; and still find time to write regularly for The New York Review of Books. And Richard Neustadt, whose classic book Presidential Power is said to have graced President Kennedy's night table at the White House, could speak from personal experience about what goes on in the senior levels of the federal government.
Today, this generation has nearly vanished from the scene. Shklar passed away in 1992. Wilson and Neustadt have retired (in Wilson's case, after leaving Harvard for the University of California at Los Angeles), with Hoffman, Huntington, and Mansfield likely to follow soon. Although a handful of younger faculty aspire to emulate these elder statesmen, the future of the Harvard Department of Government—and, quite possibly, the future of political science in general—lies in the hands of a different breed, which is epitomized by a man named Kenneth Shepsle.
Shepsle, too, is considered among his generation's leading scholars of American government; he is credited with advancing new theories about why Congress operates through a committee system, unlike the legislatures in other developed democracies. Yet if you look for Shepsle in the Lexis-Nexis database of newspapers and magazines, you will find not one quotation from him on a contemporary debate about congressional reform, let alone an op-ed or longer essay appearing under his byline. Shepsle, who majored in mathematics as an undergraduate and received his doctorate at the technically oriented University of Rochester, will proudly tell you that he is one of only a handful of political scientists elected to the National Academy of Sciences. But he has never served on a government commission, testified before one of the committees he's made a career of studying, or otherwise put his expertise to use in a public forum. Indeed, save for a brief stint advising the ABC News political unit more than a decade ago, his twelve-page curriculum vitae and his 30-odd-year career are devoid of any connection to current political issues. A visitor to his office, which is next to a computer lab in a hallway housing the Harvard-MIT Data Center, might look at the shelves of neatly stacked technical journals and the white marker board on the wall and assume that he was a scholar of physics rather than of politics.
If that seems at all strange, then you haven't been keeping up with developments in political science over the past two decades. Shepsle is a leading proponent of a controversial intellectual movement called "rational choice" that spans several disciplines but has recently been making its greatest inroads in the study of politics. Rational choice scholars seek to identify universal explanations for political behavior—for example, voting in elections or logrolling in legislatures—by treating it the way physicists treat atoms and subatomic particles. They make assumptions about political actors' motives, derive mathematical models representing a predictive theory of how those motives will cause people to behave, and then determine whether the predictions hold true by plugging in data—data, in this case, meaning numbers representing such intangibles as one's likelihood to vote, one's place in the ideological spectrum, or, well, you get the idea.
The rational choicers believe their quest for universal and logically consistent theories makes them the only true practitioners of political science. As for all the other, more familiar approaches to studying politics—looking at case studies, digging into history and culture, poring over survey research—the rational choice theorists believe those constitute lesser forms of inquiry: "history," "literary criticism," or, worst of all, "journalism." Although most rational choice scholars tend to be cautious with their public pronouncements these days, their writings and their conduct within faculty departments suggest that they would like to relegate these other scholars to a greatly diminished role—if any—within the discipline. And, while rational choice theorists might not be the first group with such aspirations, they've been among the most successful at realizing them.
Today, the ascendancy of rational choice is evident in its domination of professional journals (one recent count put the percentage of rational choice articles in the apsr at about 40 percent), in the increasingly mathematical curriculum standards for graduate students, and in the respect rational choice scholars command in faculty hiring. When the University of Pennsylvania was planning an upgrade of its lagging political science department, for example, it concentrated its efforts on one rising star in rational choice—Stanford University's Keith Krehbiel, a scholar of Congress. Penn was prepared to pay Krehbiel an "astronomical" six-figure sum, according to professors familiar with the search, that would have put him among the highest-paid scholars ever to teach in the university's School of Arts and Sciences. (Krehbiel, who remained at Stanford, said his discussions with Penn were informal and would not discuss salary figures.)
If you ask Shepsle, Krehbiel, or their fellow rational choicers how they've gotten so far so fast, they will tell you it's simply because they are that good—and because they are the only ones in the field who carry out work that qualifies as science. "We're a handful of people," says Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, who also teaches at Stanford. "The reason it appears to be this dominant thrust is because the clarity of work attracts attention." But critics say it's the scholars' strong-arm mentality, not their strong scholarship, that has propelled rational choice this far. Even discounting for the usual academic backbiting, the terms these critics use for rational choicers are strong: "imperialists," "colonizers," "Leninists." Thinking back to the qualifications his generation brought to the university when they were junior professors, Harvard's Hoffman concludes: "I don't think any one of us would get tenure under the current conditions."
He may be right: The next generation of political scientists looks increasingly like Shepsle and less like Wilson. Whether this is good for the discipline depends in part on whether rational choice scholarship really succeeds on its own terms—whether it really helps us understand the elements of political behavior it purports to explain. But beneath that question lurks a second issue more important to those of us outside the academy: whether political scientists have an obligation to do work that is not merely interesting as an intellectual enterprise but also helps us govern ourselves.
In person, shepsle presents an affable, unassuming face that hardly seems commensurate with his reputation as the Genghis Khan of the Harvard government department. But, if it's hard to imagine Shepsle as an intellectual marauder, it's easier to comprehend why so many political scientists hyperbolically call rational choice a "cult." Cults are notable for the almost hypnotic reverence that subsumes their members when they talk about their leaders and the histories of their movements. And it would be only a slight stretch to compare this reverence with the way rational choicers talk about their movement's founder, the late William Riker, and the intellectual compound he built at the University of Rochester. "Rochester is the mother ship," Shepsle says. "Its founder ... was William Riker. `Commander Riker,' as we like to refer to him. And `Starship Rochester.'"
During the 1940s, Riker was just another Ph.D. candidate at Harvard exploring American politics the old-fashioned way. His dissertation was an unremarkable treatment of an unremarkable topic—a study of labor-union political activity based on historical case studies—and he continued on that intellectual path at Lawrence College in Wisconsin, where he landed his first job. But a revolution was afoot elsewhere. During the 1950s, a group of economists and political scientists from the new rand Corporation were experimenting with using mathematics to explain social phenomena—in one early case, for example, a scholar developed a formula called a "power index" that measured the influence of legislators. In many cases, the scholars' models yielded sobering predictions about democratic government. The most famous of these was Kenneth Arrow's Possibility Theorem, which demonstrated that democratic systems don't always produce outcomes that conform to the wishes of the voters—since voters choosing from among more than two alternatives may be unable to consistently build a majority behind one. (Yes, it sounds like a blindingly obvious concept, particularly to anybody who followed, say, the 1994 health care debate. But in its day it was actually an important insight, as prior democratic theory held that democracies will reliably produce votes that match the interests of the majority of the public.)
Although Arrow's work would later win a Nobel Prize, few political scholars noticed it at the time. Riker did. Having become increasingly frustrated with the inherently subjective character of political science—based as it was on imprecise description in the form of reported observation and even less precise explanation in the form of prose—he began using the rand material in his own courses and developing it further himself. In a proposal for a fellowship, Riker laid out his grand plan: "I visualize the growth in political science of a body of theory somewhat similar to ... the neoclassical theory of value in economics. It seems to be that a number of propositions from the mathematical theory of games can perhaps be woven into a theory of politics."
Of course, Riker was borrowing more than merely a method. He was also buying into a basic assumption about the nature of political behavior—namely, that political actors reliably act "rationally." If you were "rational," that meant you had a defined and ordered set of priorities, and usually the top priorities were for some form of personal gain rather than public good—for example, "I want to keep my job as a member of Congress, and, then, if I've accomplished that, I want to pass good laws." Second, rationality meant that you acted in a way that you believed (not necessarily correctly) would serve those priorities—say, "I will vote for this bill because it pleases my constituents and thus makes it more likely that I'll keep my job, even though I think it will make a bad law." By assuming rationality, Riker believed political scientists could predict and explain political behavior in the aggregate in much the same way that economists thought their assumption of rational maximization of utility could predict and explain behavior in the market.
Riker's work attracted the attention of administrators at the University of Rochester, which during the 1960s had the nation's third-largest endowment, largely thanks to grants from one science-oriented foundation (the Haloid-Xerox Corporation). Long known for its strong programs in math and the hard sciences, Rochester was eager to develop world-class social science departments, too, and turned its politics department over to Riker—who set about building a department that would train a generation of scholars to conduct the kind of inquiry he believed constituted the only true form of political science. Under Riker, courses stressed mathematics and logic. Rochester required all graduate students to learn a second modern language; Riker got the school to count statistics toward that requirement for political science students. Then Riker went about recruiting students and faculty who shared his beliefs. "It was an incredible place," recalls de Mesquita, who taught at Rochester for 13 years. "William Riker was incredible.... It was a place where you could walk down the hall into anybody's office and learn something. And it was a department full of camaraderie. Virtually every member of the faculty ate together every day, just because we enjoyed each other." (De Mesquita is the coauthor of a paper, titled "The Rochester School," that is the source for much of this history and shares the reverential tone toward its subject.)
An extraordinary teacher, Riker was no less adept when it came to promoting his program and his intellectual progeny. By 1970, the department—unrated by the American Council of Education (ACE) in 1965—had leaped to fourteenth place. Rochester was second only to Yale in job placement, landing nearly 60 percent of its graduates teaching posts at ACE-accredited departments. Still, the first wave of rational choice evangelists didn't initially shake the academic world. They mostly found their way into second-tier institutions, many of which were best known as engineering schools, such as Cal Tech and Carnegie-Mellon. "Harvard or Yale or Princeton wouldn't give us the time of day," recalls Shepsle, whose first job was at Washington University in St. Louis, a pre-med haven. "They weren't interested in us. We weren't interested in them. So we ended up on minor tributaries.... It was big news if one of us landed a job at a major Big Ten university."
But the Rochester School's young scholars never strayed too far from one another in spirit. Folks at the American Political Science Association (apsa) didn't have the time—or the skills—to figure out rational choice, so the rational choicers created an organization of their own: the Public Choice Society, which held its annual winter meetings in New Orleans or some other sunny locale. Almost without fail, members of the group attended, carrying on their intellectual repartee as if they were back in the Rochester lunchroom. "I don't think there was any grand imperialistic design," says Shepsle. "We were too young. We were all true believers, to be sure. But we didn't know the rest of the world was going to pay attention to what we were doing."
Though one finds references to "political science" as far back as the late 1700s, within a century the discipline was moving away from its scientific pretensions. Woodrow Wilson, who was president of the apsa before he was president of the United States, exhorted his fellow scholars to eschew the term "political science" and simply study "politics." In the Progressive era, the apsa, like professional societies in economics and sociology, was explicitly reformist (although, as it happens, rather racist). Throughout the first half of this century, students of politics assumed that pragmatic ideas to guide government were not merely happy by-products of their work; they were, in many ways, the whole point.
The years following World War II, however, saw this mentality change. One reason for this was the increasing professionalization of academia generally. This professionalization had cultural roots, but it also reflected the fact that foundations and the government were underwriting ever-larger shares of university research budgets in an effort to allow scholars to pursue truth without feeling obliged to conduct research that might be popular with corporations or private individuals. The impact of this was particularly acute in political science, where previously the only way to make any serious money had been to write books for popular consumption. Now, thanks to funding from such organizations as the National Science Foundation, political scientists could afford to indulge in less popular paths of inquiry—particularly if they could do so in the name of pure scientific truth.
This was also the time when behaviorism, a new methodological approach to social science, appeared on the scene. Behaviorism sought to take advantage of newly available survey-research tools in order to provide a more detailed portrait of how political life actually transpired. Much as rational choice would decades later, behaviorism represented a radical break with the past. For the first time, political science became highly quantitative—issues of the apsr were filled with numbers, survey tables, and regression charts. The behaviorists eschewed advocacy and, more generally, any scholarship that sought to make value judgments. They focused on "is," not "ought"—arguing, not unreasonably, that excessive editorializing could undercut the intellectual integrity of the field.
Typical of academic fads, behaviorism eventually ran its course; after it yielded a few big insights into the nature of politics, further research necessarily focused on increasingly esoteric topics, simply because the tools of the behaviorists were useful in only a limited array of subjects. For example, behaviorism contributed genuine insights into the formation of voting habits—i.e., why people become Democrats instead of Republicans—but it couldn't tell you much about, say, why democratic governments in multiethnic societies break down into anarchy. Traditionalists, never comfortable with the statistical nature of behaviorism, managed to compartmentalize the field back into its own little corner of the profession.
But, even with the decline of behaviorism, there remained great interest in making the study of politics more closely resemble a hard science, and this was in no small part because the entire discipline of political science had developed a severe inferiority complex during the intervening years. While political science was spinning its wheels in the 1950s and 1960s, its scholarship caught in the cross fire between the traditionalists and the behaviorists (and, for a time, the Marxists, as well), economics was gaining ever more prestige for its increasing reliance on mathematics. Such prestige brought perks—particularly when it came to issues of department funding—and, increasingly, political scientists were jealous. Hitherto, political science had been more a clearinghouse united only by a subject; economists used to joke that while they had the "wealth of nations," political science had merely a "wealth of notions." Such criticism stung, and in the minds of many it merely confirmed the need for political science to find some methodological unity, too.
Into this environment entered Riker and his minions, who promoted a method of scholarship that explicitly embraced the scientific method of deductive reasoning and, as luck would have it, borrowed its mathematical techniques directly from economics. By the 1970s, the Rochester School seemed to have proven its mettle by developing a few key insights—much as behaviorism had done during its infancy. In addition to hammering out Arrow's Possibility Theorem for voting schemes, for example, Riker and his followers had given flesh to the so-called median voter theorem, which holds that, in an electoral system with two parties, the two platforms tend to merge until they nearly meet at the interests of the median voter. (One could, for example, look at the current ideological affinity of the Democrats and the Republicans and conclude that this theorem is right on the mark.) Rational choice scholars also developed intriguing theories about the paradox of collective action, also known as the "free-rider" problem: that is, the tendency of people to seek the benefits of membership in a political group without sharing the burdens.
In 1974, Riker became one of the first political scientists elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences followed shortly thereafter. Such recognition was crucial not only because it impressed fellow political scientists but also because it gave the Rochester School broad credibility with other disciplines closer to the hard sciences. Appointments at top universities often required the recommendation and assent of experts from other fields; insofar as deans, provosts, and other administrators came from economics and the hard sciences, many of them recognized rational choice as something close to their own ideals of legitimate scientific research. It wasn't long before rational choice began to crack walls at elite institutions—the University of Michigan, Stanford, Princeton University, and Harvard.
Naturally, there were objections from the get-go. Many traditionalists didn't like the math. Political theorists had little patience for a theory that they believed reduced all human behavior to a set of interests and preferences independent of things such as values, culture, or history. And many more pragmatically oriented scholars questioned whether rational choice, by focusing so heavily on universal laws of politics, disregarded important aspects of the discipline that were inherently idiosyncratic. For example, the work on the paradox of collective action offered a nice explanation of why people join aarp or AAA—because those groups offer membership perks. But rational choice was at a loss to explain the popularity of more idealistic organizations—why, for example, middle-class white kids from states such as Vermont joined the Freedom Riders in the 1960s at great personal risk.
But these critiques never seemed to catch on. Rational choicers could dismiss those put off by the math as mere Luddites. After all, if the theories had merit, wasn't it the critics' problem if they couldn't be bothered to take courses in calculus and probability? As for the more philosophical objections, the rational choice theorists could always demand that their critics come up with an alternative methodology. There was none—at least, there was none that satisfied the criterion of being a universal theory of political behavior provable with rigorous mathematical logic. And so, having committed itself to the proposition that it was a hard science, the study of politics was stuck—for better or worse—with the methodology that seemed most closely to resemble that of hard science.
Indeed, during the years that followed, the small but determined minority of rational choice scholars managed to transform the face of the entire discipline—often over the objection of hapless traditionalists who lacked the cohesiveness or savvy to stand in the way. One of the advantages of rational choice scholarship was that it lent itself so easily to new research projects: in effect, all you had to do was come up with a complication that confounded some existing rational theory and then derive a new, more complex equation to answer it. As a result, Rochester School research exploded into the literature to the point where the apsr, with its pages of laboriously derived equations, began to resemble a calculus text. At one point apsr's editor suggested, not unreasonably, "There is some danger of turning this journal into the `William H. Riker Review.'" This prominence gave the movement even greater credibility within the profession; it also padded the resumes of scholars who were coming up for tenure.
Equally important, the Rochester School disciples managed to preserve a unified front as the years wore on. They cited each other's papers, even if they didn't all agree on the conclusions, and preached a common gospel that their method was not merely the best method of political science—it was the only method of political science. Within fragmented faculty departments, their ability to stick together and agree on criteria for success allowed them to alter curriculum requirements for graduate students and establish litmus tests for faculty hiring: Did the scholar have a formal model? Had he or she used the scientific method to deduce a theory? Increasingly, it seemed to the rest of the discipline, the basis for intellectual judgment was not the result of scholarship but the method by which the scholarship was conducted. "Because they are not as broad-minded, they had the advantage," says one senior scholar at Harvard. "They'd support any candidate who did rational choice, oppose any non-rational-choice scholars." Although to this day prominent rational choice scholars call such description caricature, most everyone else in the discipline says essentially the same thing.
Then, in 1994, an intellectual counteroffensive began to take shape. That was the year two political scientists from Yale, Donald Green and Ian Shapiro, published Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory. Green and Shapiro raised no objection to the math, and they didn't even quibble with the Rochester School's goal of trying to find scientific truth in politics. But, if the goal of rational choice is to be more scientific, Green and Shapiro argued, quite reasonably, then it should pass the basic test of all true scientific theories: it should work in practice. Since Green and Shapiro were fluent in the mathematics, they were equipped with the tools to test this proposition. And they discovered that, lo and behold, rational choicers made the same series of mistakes over and over again—all of them rooted in dubious assumptions and oversimplifications calculated to make political behavior conform to neat mathematical formulas.
In one vivid argument from their book, Green and Shapiro examined a great rational choice "insight": the paradox of collective action as it applies to voting. In a typically dismal diagnosis, rational choice theory holds that people should not vote in elections. The reason? Since the chances of one vote changing the outcome of an election are so slim, no rational individual would find it worthwhile to invest time in, first, deciding how to vote and, second, going down to the polling place. This is a lovely theory that can be proven, quite conclusively, with relatively simple calculus.
Unfortunately, it happens to be incorrect. Voter turnout may be distressingly low in America, but tens of millions of people actually do vote in presidential elections, not to mention in congressional and local elections, too. Riker and his disciples were aware of this small glitch, of course, and they tried to account for it in various ways. And that's where Green and Shapiro busted them: Each rational choice explanation for the paradox of voting ended up undercutting the whole philosophy of rational choice by nullifying its core assumptions about human behavior, reducing its explanatory power to the most trivial of phenomena, or simply ignoring inconvenient facts. It was a classic case of the most basic of rational choice's internal contradictions—research being excessively driven by the need to validate the rational choice method rather than by the need to coherently explain real-world phenomena—and it had produced some unintentionally hilarious results.
For example, one of the earliest pieces of rational choice literature—coauthored by Riker and Peter Ordeshook—explained away the paradox by arguing that voters were indeed rational: they were voting because it gave them "psychic gratification." They then painstakingly derived an equation that took account of this; when the "psychic gratification" level was high enough, people actually voted, and the model worked. To this Green and Shapiro rightly responded: Tell us something we don't know. All Riker and Ordeshook had done was demonstrate that people vote when it makes them feel good or when they feel morally obligated to do so. A more significant question for scholars—indeed, the one traditionalists have been puzzling over for generations—is why people feel those obligations or incentives in the first place. Is it owing to inspiring candidates? Lofty causes? Concern for their country's future? Good civics classes in high school? At least, this is the question that matters if you're trying to figure out how to make democracy work better. Not surprisingly, it is a question that rational choice is ill-equipped to answer.
Other rational choice scholars had basically thrown up their hands and admitted that voting doesn't work particularly well in the rational choice framework, since it is a "low-cost," "low-benefit" affair. But, Green and Shapiro asked, since people in other countries have been known to vote despite the risk of death as a consequence, how can it be said to be "low-cost"? For that matter, if there is a standard equilibrium point (as there always is in formal political theory) for voter turnout, why does turnout vary so much from election to election and from country to country?
Green and Shapiro then proceeded to apply their critical framework to other major works of rational choice theory on American politics. Time and again they came to the same conclusion: If rational choice theorists had bothered to conduct even rudimentary empirical testing of their elegant theories, they would have discovered that the theories simply don't describe the real world of politics.
Controversy over the book began as soon as it was in galleys. Members of the Rochester School strategized ways to counter the offensive, and they packed a symposium at the 1995 apsa convention in New York, at one point whooping it up with tomahawk air-chops (it was right around the time when the Atlanta Braves baseball team was making one of its play-off runs) as one of their own laid out a point-by-point critique of the Green-Shapiro tome.
But the remarkable thing about the response was how much intellectual ground it conceded. In a symposium that subsequently appeared in the journal Critical Review, some Rochester acolytes objected—with at least some validity—that Green and Shapiro had overlooked a recent wave of rational choice scholarship that was more empirically grounded. But several other rational choicers basically acknowledged that much of their work didn't accurately describe much of what it purported to theorize about. This simply wasn't much of a problem, they said. They noted that rational choice theory was still young—as it continued to develop, they suggested, it would become more sophisticated and thus would better approximate real-world politics. More important, these scholars said, the point of their method was to pursue scientific truth; scientific truth lay in universal theories; universal theories require simplifying assumptions that may distort reality, at least in the early stages of development; ergo, even if the relation of rational choice theory to the real world is imperfect, it's better than the alternatives. "A theory cannot be rejected because of disconfirming facts," wrote Northwestern University's Dennis Chong. "It can only be supplanted by a superior theory."
For all their acrimony, then, both the practitioners and the critics of rational choice theory seemed to agree on a crucial piece of information: the theories didn't really offer a complete picture of how politics work, at least not yet. Throw in the fact that most rational choicers chose to study only the phenomena that lent themselves to the rational choice brand of analysis in the first place—a restriction that left out many of the previously dominant issues of political science—and a reasonable observer could boil the debate down to a simple question: Could an elegant and intellectually stimulating theory be the basis for an entire discipline even though it didn't address many of the big questions in politics and gave flawed answers when it did?
Whether or not Green and Shapiro's book was the catalyst, rational choice critics have begun to fight for political science's soul in the last few years. Shapiro himself recently became chairman of Yale's political science department, and he proudly declares that, in a current search for several senior faculty posts, the criterion for the search is subject area—not methodology. This spring, Stephen Walt, formerly of the University of Chicago and now of Harvard, published an article in the journal International Security called "Rigor or Rigor Mortis?" that essentially applied the Green-Shapiro treatment to rational choice scholarship in international relations, with similar results. Within departments, rational choice scholars have increasingly lost the backing of middle-of-the-road professors who once supported them in the interests of methodological pluralism. Two years ago, for example, Harvard's government department took up the tenure bids of two outside scholars in international relations—both of them rational choicers. It was the last year of Shepsle's term as department chairman, and many professors believed that Shepsle had stacked the three-member search committee in favor of the rational choice approach. Others worried that, with Huntington and Hoffman nearing retirement, the international relations wing of the department would be almost entirely devoid of traditionalists. While other factors were certainly involved, these two perceptions helped drive moderates who were otherwise sympathetic to rational choice into the camp of the hardened critics. The tenure bids were rejected.
Still, while the tide may finally be turning against rational choice, it's hard not to survey the discipline and wonder what damage its proponents have wrought. Graduate students and young professors now assume that fluency in rational choice is a de facto requirement for tenure, and at most schools that may be correct. Although there are signs that rational choice literature is increasingly empirical, critics say the new scholarship is prone to the same pathologies as the old—the insights it produces are either flawed or trivial. "The ideal study in political science today would be the comparative study of health regulation of noodles in one hundred and fifty countries," says Hoffman. "In this way you have a sufficiently large mass of material to reach generalizations, and you don't ever have to have eaten a noodle—all you need is that data." The impact of rational choice is also manifest in undergraduate education, as elite institutions must increasingly hire outside instructors to teach the broad, politically relevant courses that tend to attract college students—the kinds of courses that, a generation ago, inspired many of these students to pursue graduate studies. "If you want to teach undergraduates, which is supposed to be what we do, and explain how the courts work, it's increasingly difficult to find people who do that, because these people don't study these things," says James Q. Wilson. "They don't read Supreme Court decisions or history. They just sit around and make models."
What's more, even as it retreats elsewhere, rational choice is opening new fronts. Already ubiquitous in American politics and highly influential within international relations, the most recent battleground of rational choice is comparative politics. Once, this subfield of political science was dominated by area specialists—people who developed expertise in particular countries or regions by studying language, culture, and history, often with extensive fieldwork. Because it implicitly treats different parts of the world as, well, different, area studies is at odds with rational choice's demand that political science pursue universal laws of politics. And so a group of rational choice crusaders led by Harvard's Robert Bates has undertaken to make over this field. In a 1996 newsletter article, Bates declared that "within the academy, the consensus has formed that area studies has failed to generate scientific knowledge." Although he didn't call for purging area studies scholars, he did call for their "mutual infusion" with rational choice—which many in the discipline interpreted as academese for establishing a hierarchy in which area studies specialists essentially operate as the research arm of the only real theorists, the rational choicers.
It would be a mistake to dismiss Bates's critique of area studies out of hand. Most sober-minded political scientists outside the field agree that area studies has become far too parochial, that it focuses on local idiosyncracies to the near-total exclusion of broader theoretical issues—ignoring, say, the ways in which the dynamics of politics in Northern Ireland have resembled the dynamics in a place such as South Africa. (Area studies, especially Latin American studies, was also the subfield most infested with Marxism, making it even more in need of a shake-up.) Yet the pendulum can swing too far in the other direction, too, particularly if you believe political science should be of some practical value to society. Putting aside the fact that so many rational choice theories remain empirically suspect, too much emphasis on rational choice would leave political scientists ill-equipped to provide insights about other parts of the world—which would, in turn, deprive policymakers of an important source of guidance. After all, it might be intellectually rewarding and mildly informative to know that there were some parallels between the Serb massacres in Kosovo and the Hutu massacres in Rwanda. But if you're trying to figure out what the United States should do in Kosovo, that information would be a lot less useful than knowledge about the history of Serb militancy, the peculiar dynamics of Balkan governments, and other pieces of practical advice that only someone with expertise in the region can give.
Ironically, although Bates has probably done more than any other rational choicer in recent years to inflame the rational choice controversy, he also epitomizes a middleof-the-road ideal: a compromise for the discipline. Strictly speaking, he is not a member of the Rochester fraternity; he got his degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And he started out as an old-fashioned area specialist, earning his academic stripes through years of fieldwork in Africa. This fieldwork is what led him to rational choice—he found most of the prevailing theories about developing countries laughably out of touch with reality. So, while he has become a true believer in rational choice and thinks it should be required learning for all political scientists, in his own work he has always kept an eye toward reality and empirical testing. He still does extensive work in Africa, and his own motivations stem from his concern about inequality and about the economic health of developing nations—concerns that are apparent in his work. Even those who bitterly oppose his rational choice crusade acknowledge that Bates is one of the leading Africanists in political science.
Yet just as Bates would not be Bates if he couldn't draw upon the work of rational choice theorists, so he could not have accomplished what he has without the Africa specialists who came before him. And that's the rub. There is an opportunity cost to any new direction in political science. Graduate students have only so much time to get their degrees. Departments have only so many tenured posts. Universities have only so much money to finance research. Journals have only so many pages. The trouble with rational choice is not that it exists within the profession alongside other methodologies; the trouble with rational choice is that it is dominating the profession and displacing those other methodologies. If critics such as Green and Shapiro demonstrated anything, it's that the only way to understand politics is to embrace a variety of methodological approaches that can compensate for the complications of personality, culture, history, beliefs, and pure chance inherent when human beings vie for power. This may not satisfy the discipline's desire to emulate the hard sciences by discovering one grand, universal theory of politics—but, when you think about it, maybe that is just as well.
Cloaks and Daggers
What I saw at the coat revolution.
* Jonathan Chait
* February 10, 1997 | 12:00 am
I showed up at the Omni Shoreham Hotel at 4:00 in the afternoon to work as a coat-checker for the Caribbean, New Jersey and Gay & Lesbian Inaugural Balls. Coat-checking allows you to experience all the inaugural's glamour and pageantry--dressing up, occupying the same building as the president--except that instead of shelling out $150 you get paid $6 an hour plus tips. Also, you don't get the food or the drinks or the dancing or the opportunity to interact with anybody except other coat-checkers. And in the end, as it turns out, you get attacked by a mob screaming for your blood, and you get roughed up by large policemen.
The afternoon begins inauspiciously. My friend Rob (who agreed to join me) and I make it into the ballroom without facing any security precautions--background checks, metal detectors, etc.--whatsoever. The company that hired us, McM, had promised a staff of fifty to handle the more than 5,000 expected customers, but only twenty coat-checkers arrive. My co-workers, who had all worked for McM before, confide that the company takes half the tip pool for itself, in apparent violation of our contract. And before any guests even show up, Rob manages to misplace his own coat. "A bad sign," he notes, "considering that this is now my profession."
The coat-check room is a banquet hall approximately two-thirds the size of a football field. The staff divides up into taggers, who take the coats and affix numbered tags to them, and runners, who store the coats. In lieu of hangers or racks, we lay out the coats on long tables in stacks of three, arrayed numerically according to their coat-check number. Unfortunately (and this is of critical importance in understanding why, eventually, our well-heeled customers rose up against us) the tags do not come back to the runners in numerical order, which makes it hard to keep track of which coat is where.
8:15: The tables fill up. The coats pour in faster and faster. Unable to group them sequentially, runners toss them on the floor in piles. The line of customers seeking to check coats builds. As I wander off to the restroom I notice, down the hall, a "VIP Coatroom." A cheerful attendant relaxes in front of roughly five coats that occupy a tiny corner of one among many rows of empty tables.
9:15: The coatroom closes down in order to regroup. Earlier I had approached Rob with a plan: our labor was worth far more than $6 an hour to McM, which had invited crisis by skimping on staff. If we walked out, catastrophe would ensue, and McM would never check coats in this town again. I suggested that we use our leverage to bargain for higher wages, and he agreed. We now took advantage of the respite to propagandize the rank and file. Our technique was for me to sidle up to an unsuspecting colleague toiling away over a coat table and casually mention that McM was making a killing at our expense. Rob, just happening to wander by, would chime in his support using angry populist language--"You're getting shafted!"--of the sort usually frowned upon at the conservative economic think tank where he works as a research assistant. "I'm not trying to extract rents," he explains to me later. "I'm just trying to get my marginal product." Our agitation successfully riles up most of the runners. Alas, the taggers, who view themselves as a skilled elite, still identify more strongly with management than with the runners and hence remain difficult to radicalize.
9:30: As janitors march in to set up auxiliary coat tables, the throng around the door grows larger and more ornery. Before we can finish setting up the new tables, a Democratic National Committee staffer orders the coat room reopened. Ball-hopping customers begin demanding their garments. But because they aren't stored sequentially, locating them takes five to fifteen minutes. For every customer we help, ten more appear at the door. The situation grows exponentially more hopeless. With every minute that passes, we seem to be another five minutes behind. Customers demand to enter the coat room and recover their property personally. DNC staffers form a barrier at the door.
10:30: Any semblance of a line has disappeared. Hundreds of black-tied Democrats press up against the barricade, waving claim checks and cash and loudly threatening revenge at the hands of the lawyers and politicians to whom they have access. Some successfully talk their way into the back room, only to discover in horror that their fur coats are misplaced.
10:50: A customer at the door snaps a photograph of the sea of coats behind me. "Evidence?" I ask. She nods. The runners now take orders from walkie-talkie-toting DNC staffers, who are even less competent at coat-checking than McM. But, by now, there's probably nothing the DNC can do. The only way to avert total chaos is to distribute the coats about ten times faster. And the only way to do that would be to let customers in to find the coats themselves, which would invite anarchy. The system teeters on collapse.
11:50: The mob storms the barricades. Half a dozen customers shove their way past security before reinforcements plug the gaps. Movement in or out of the coatroom is no longer possible, a setback for staffers who need to use the restroom.
11:55: "You're about to have a coat riot here," warns a customer. This is a real threat. Coat riots, I had been told, are an enduring feature of inaugural balls. Police officers replace DNC staffers at the barricade. They bring a different perspective. The DNC considered the failure of guests to receive their garments the main problem, and the huge crowd a symptom. To the police, the crowd is the problem. Their solution is to order the crowd, via megaphone, to retreat--to which it shouts back, in unison, "No!"--and to force the door shut. The mob outside, unappeased by this solution, begins chanting, "We want our coats NOW!" The New Jerseyans and lesbians have patched up their differences in the face of a common foe. The police open the door again so they can megaphone more instructions. Cops begin screaming at runners not to give out any more coats. We defiantly toss the coats over the barricades to their owners. The crowd, now firmly siding with the runners against the police, cheers every successful completion.
12:45: The police crack down on coat smuggling. A customer tries to argue:
"Sir, it's just going to get worse," he pleads.
"No, it's not," an officer replies implausibly.
"It's gonna escalate."
"No it ain't."
1:00: Many of the taggers have fled. The DNC tries to round up the remaining staff. "Everyone on staff in the corner, now!" shouts one DNCer over and over. We gather in the corner. I hear cheers from the crowd, and look over to see more customers bursting through the police line. This distracts the police and the DNC, leaving the staff alone in the corner. Rob and I seize our chance to organize a strike. We don't have much to lose, anyway: the tip rate has plummeted. After a few minutes of debate, the runners authorize Rob and me to demand $20 an hour for everyone or else we walk. The manager sounds sympathetic, but has to discuss it with the owner, and his cellular phone is dead.
2:45: The police try a new method. A cop with a megaphone holds up one of the several thousand remaining coats and describes it, as if he's running an auction. The crowd laughs. He reads the claim number, only to be drowned out by more shouting and chanting. The police decide to let in customers ten at a time to find their own garments. Our leverage collapses as the job is outsourced to the customers, who have less coat-checking experience but work for free. The Democratic Party has broken our union. Some runners help look through the piles, while others rest in the corner. An McM staffer informs us that we have to stay until the end--which looks to be several hours away--or else we don't get a share of the tip jar, which she controls. We haven't had a break in close to ten hours.
3:25: I have alternated interviewing customers about the conditions outside--the wait ranges from one to two hours--and helping them search. In front of the barricade appears a TNR colleague. "Are you going to write about this?" she shouts to me. The cops take notice of my notepad and ask if I'm a journalist. Yes, I reply, but I also work here. "Out," insists a cop. My boss will confirm that I work for McM, I maintain, but he doesn't care. He grabs my arm, twists it behind my back and forces me out the door. I tell him that I don't get a share of the tips if I leave early. He ignores me, so I repeat it several times. He shoves me into the hallway and threatens that if I try to get back in, "I'm gonna knock you on your ass."
Rob returns to the hotel the next day to reclaim a scarf he left behind in the confusion. One man negotiating for his garment angrily recounts that he left his keys in his coat pocket and had to spend the night at a friend's house, forcing him to miss a meeting the next morning. More than a hundred coats remain.
Pin Prick
George Allen's Race Problem
* Ryan Lizza
* May 8, 2006 | 12:00 am
Senator George Allen is the only person in Virginia who wears cowboy boots. It's a warm and bright spring day in the swampy southeastern Virginia town of Wakefield, site of the annual Virginia political fest known as Shad Planking. Once a whites-only event where state Democrats picked their nominees, Shad Planking is now a multiracial affair where candidates from both parties come to show off their regular-guy bona fides and trade lighthearted barbs. Beer flows freely. Knots of tailgaters gossip about state politics. In a clearing amid tall pines, shad is cooked on long wooden boards. Though the two Democrats fighting for a shot to challenge Allen this year in his Senate reelection campaign both show up for the event, Allen clearly owns the crowd, as the sea of royal blue ALLEN T-shirts and baseball caps makes clear. The senator has emerged as the principal conservative alternative to John McCain in the early jockeying among 2008 Republican presidential candidates, and today's event is a reminder of what conservatives love about him.
But nobody else wears cowboy boots. The guy passing out the stickers that say I SUPPORT CONFEDERATE HISTORY MONTH is in sneakers. The libertarian who asks me to ask Allen about industrial hemp and abolition of the IRS is in very sensible shoes. The pink and pudgy sports-radio host drawling friendly questions at Allen is in loafers. A guy walks up to Allen and sticks a piece of paper in his hand. "Some people are handing out these, saying you aren't pro-gun enough," he tells the senator, a little menacingly. I look down at his feet. High-tops.
There is a guy in a bolo tie. This excites Allen, who is quoted in the newspaper the next day approvingly advising bolo guy, "If you're going to wear a tie, that's the one to wear." Allen has lots of finely honed opinions about red-state cultural aesthetics, and he is always eager to share them. He talks with the radio host about the merits of Virginia's different country music stations. Allen is dismayed about the modern country played on one AM station. "I like the real country music," he says.
It's credible enthusiasm given that, this afternoon, Allen resembles a froufrou version of Toby Keith. He is wearing a blue button-down shirt and brown pants accented with a fat brass belt buckle that says VIRGINIA in stylized, countrified letters. And, of course, he's wearing the cowboy boots. They are black, broken in, and vaguely reptilian. From his back pocket, he removes a tin of Copenhagen—"the brand of choice for adult consumers who identify with its rugged, individual and uncompromising image," according to the company—and taps a fat wad of the tobacco between his lip and gum using an impressive one-handed maneuver. As the scrum breaks up, Allen turns away and spits a long brown streak of saliva into the dirt, just missing one of his constituents, a carefully put-together, blonde, ponytailed woman approaching the senator for an autograph. She stops in her tracks and stares with disgust at the bubbly tobacco juice that almost landed on her feet. Without missing a beat, Allen's communications director, John Reid, reassures her: "That's just authenticity!"
It's a word they use a lot it the Allen world—"authenticity." His aides and the growing ranks of conservative backers hungry for someone to take out McCain emphasize Allen's down-home credentials and cowboy-boot charisma far more than his voting record. A glowing National Review cover story, to take one recent example, trumpeted Allen's preternatural fluency in the sports metaphor- laden language of American masculinity. This gift for communicating in the vernacular of John Madden doesn't just distinguish him; it makes him the ideal vehicle for a particular brand of Republican campaign strategy. As the GOP has grown increasingly adept at turning elections into contests about style and character rather than issues and ideas, some Republicans have become obsessed with finding candidates who can project the cultural identity of a red-state everyman. It sometimes seems that pro-NASCAR has replaced pro-life as the party's litmus test.
While Allen's shit-kickin' image may be the subject of certain Republican consultant fantasies, it may not be ideal in the current political climate. A certain someone has, after all, used that shtick before, effectively bludgeoning his Democratic opponents with his Texas brand of cultural populism. But, by now, that folksy act looks a little spent. And, although Allen is undoubtedly the hot new thing within the Beltway's conservative establishment, some denizens of K Street and right-wing newsrooms have begun doubting whether he represents their best hope to snuff out the burgeoning campaign of their enemy, McCain. "If my choice is, 'Who do I want to go out with to a fun dinner to drink our brains out,'" says one of the party's top fund-raisers who has met with Allen many times, "there's no question, it'd be Allen. He's a guy's guy, but he didn't blow me away in terms of substance."
Fortunately for Allen, he has a protean ability to shift political personas to adapt to the prevailing political fashions. In the 1980s, he was a Reagan revolutionary. As governor of Virginia at the height of the Gingrich insurgency, he promoted his own version of the Contract with America throughout his state. As Virginia modernized, with high-tech eclipsing the tobacco economy, he remade himself as a traveling-salesman governor, luring new companies to the state.
Even in these early days of his budding presidential campaign, he has slipped out of the self-styled image of Bush's most loyal foot soldier. He now says the president is welcome to campaign for him but expresses no enthusiasm for the idea. He tells reporters he is more like Ronald Reagan than George W. Bush. But it's not Bush from whom Allen ultimately needs to distance himself. There is a graveyard of old Allen personas—unpresidential personas, downright ugly ones—that could threaten his political ascendance. Even his authentic self—or, rather, the man described by his own family—might prove just as great a liability. His identity crisis has created the most intriguing duel of 2008: Before he runs for president, George Allen has to run against himself.
It's mid-April, and the private plane carrying Allen and his entourage has just landed at the Stafford Regional Airport. After months of out-of-state fundraising and sojourns into Iowa and New Hampshire, the senator is suddenly taking care of business back home with a three-day, eleven-city reelection announcement tour. Jim Webb, Reagan's Navy secretary, is running in the Democratic primary, Bush's job approval rating in the state is in the 30s, and there is some cautious talk about Virginia, once a presumed gimme for Allen, becoming a competitive race.
After all the heady presidential planning—the hiring of big-name consultants like Mary Matalin, Ed Gillespie, and Dick Wadhams and the first-place finish in fund-raising last quarter—nothing could bring Allen down to earth faster than the Stafford event. There are less than three dozen people here, including numerous Allen aides. The wind knocks over the American and Virginia flags that form Allen's backdrop. And then there is Craig Ennis, who says he's an independent candidate here to debate Allen. His T-shirt says U.S. SPECIAL FORCES: MOTIVATED, DEDICATED, LETHAL. He positions himself in front of the platform on which Allen and his wife, Susan, stand and holds a homemade sign: why do you hide from me?
Allen delivers a stump speech that rests heavily on his record as governor from 1994 to 1998 and skips rapidly over the details of his five years in the Senate. The soft-peddling of his legislative record may have struck the audience as a strange tack for an incumbent. But it has its own compelling political logic. Allen knows that senators have a dismal record as presidential candidates. There is, however, an equally compelling reason why Allen might not want to revisit his years in Richmond.
In the early '90s, Allen exuded the revolutionary spirit of the Republican insurgency. His 1994 inaugural address as governor promised to "fight the beast of tyranny and oppression that our federal government has become." That year, he also endorsed Oliver North for the Senate even as Virginia Senator John Warner and others in the party establishment shunned the convicted felon. At North's nominating convention, Allen proposed a somewhat overwrought approach for beating Democrats: "My friends—and I say this figuratively—let's enjoy knocking their soft teeth down their whining throats."
But, while Allen may have genuflected in the direction of Gingrich, he also showed a touch of Strom Thurmond. Campaigning for governor in 1993, he admitted to prominently displaying a Confederate flag in his living room. He said it was part of a flag collection—and had been removed at the start of his gubernatorial bid. When it was learned that he kept a noose hanging on a ficus tree in his law office, he said it was part of a Western memorabilia collection. These explanations may be sincere. But, as a chief executive, he also compiled a controversial record on race. In 1994, he said he would accept an honorary membership at a Richmond social club with a well-known history of discrimination—an invitation that the three previous governors had refused. After an outcry, Allen rejected the offer. He replaced the only black member of the University of Virginia (UVA) Board of Visitors with a white one. He issued a proclamation drafted by the Sons of Confederate Veterans declaring April Confederate History and Heritage Month. The text celebrated Dixie's "four-year struggle for independence and sovereign rights." There was no mention of slavery. After some of the early flaps, a headline in The Washington Post read, "GOVERNOR SEEN LEADING VA. BACK IN TIME."
Allen has described those early years as a learning experience. Indeed, he sanded off the rough edges and began molding himself to the Bush era, when conservatives began abandoning the crudeness of their old Southern strategy. During the second half of his gubernatorial term, Allen began positioning himself as the next cool thing in Republican politics, a governor more interested in results than partisanship. Indeed, at the Stafford Airport stump speech, there are no confederate flags or coded racial appeals. Instead, Allen talks about energy independence and the competitive challenge from rising economies like China's and India's. If it weren't for some of the rhetoric about "tax commissars," one might mistake Allen's stump speech for a Tom Friedman column.
Even if the moderate turn leads voters to remember the governor of fiscal responsibility rather than the Confederate history booster, there's still a problem. Before there was a Governor Allen, there was a state legislator Allen. Allen became active in Virginia politics in the mid-'70s, when state Republicans were first learning how to assemble a new political coalition by wooing white Democrats with appeals to states' rights and respect for Dixie heritage.
Allen was a quick study. In his first race in 1979—according to Larry Sabato, a UVA professor and college classmate of Allen's—he ran a radio ad decrying a congressional redistricting plan whose main purpose was to elect Virginia's first post-Reconstruction black congressman. Allen lost that race but was back in 1982 and won the seat by 25 votes. He spent the next nine years in Richmond, where his pet issues, judging by the bills he personally sponsored, were crime and welfare. But he also found himself repeatedly voting in the minority on a series of racial issues that he seems embarrassed by today. In 1984, he was one of 27 House members to vote against a state holiday commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported, "Allen said the state shouldn't honor a non-Virginian with his own holiday." He was also bothered by the fact that the proposed holiday would fall on the day set aside in Virginia to honor Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. That same year, he did feel the urge to honor one of Virginia's own. He co-sponsored a resolution expressing "regret and sorrow upon the loss" of William Munford Tuck, a politician who opposed every piece of civil rights legislation while in Congress during the 1950s and 1960s and promised "massive resistance" to the Supreme Court's 1954 decision banning segregation.
None of this means Allen is a racist, of course. He is certainly not the same guy today that he was in the '80s. But his interest in Southern heritage and his fetish for country culture goes back even further. And what's truly improbable is how someone with his upbringing ever acquired such backwoods tastes.
George Allen is the oldest child of legendary football coach George Herbert Allen, and, when his father was on the road, young George often acted as a surrogate dad to his siblings. According to his sister Jennifer, he was particularly strict about bedtimes. One night, his brother Bruce stayed up past his bedtime. George threw him through a sliding glass door. For the same offense, on a different occasion, George tackled his brother Gregory and broke his collarbone. When Jennifer broke her bedtime curfew, George dragged her upstairs by her hair.
George tormented Jennifer enough that, when she grew up, she wrote a memoir of what it was like living in the Allen family. In one sense, the book, Fifth Quarter, from which these details are culled, is unprecedented. No modern presidential candidate has ever had such a harsh and personal account of his life delivered to the public by a close family member. The book paints Allen as a cartoonishly sadistic older brother who holds Jennifer by her feet over Niagara Falls on a family trip (instilling in her a lifelong fear of heights) and slams a pool cue into her new boyfriend's head. "George hoped someday to become a dentist," she writes. "George said he saw dentistry as a perfect profession—getting paid to make people suffer."
Whuppin' his siblings might have been a natural prelude to Confederate sympathies and noose-collecting if Allen had grown up in, say, a shack in Alabama. But what is most puzzling about Allen's interest in the old Confederacy is that he didn't grow up in the South. Like a military brat, Allen hopscotched around the country on a route set by his father's coaching career. The son was born in Whittier, California, in 1952 (Whittier College Poets), moved to the suburbs of Chicago for eight years (the Bears), and arrived in Southern California as a teenager (the Rams). In Palos Verdes, an exclusive cliffside community, he lived in a palatial home with sweeping views of downtown Los Angeles and the Santa Monica basin. It had handmade Italian tiles and staircases that his eccentric mother, Etty, designed to match those in the Louvre. "It looks like a French chateau," says Linda Hurt Germany, a high school classmate.
Even the elder George Allen wasn't Southern—he grew up in the Midwest—but the oddest part of the myth of George Allen's Dixie rusticity is his mother. Rather than a Southern belle, Etty was, in fact, French, and, as such, she was a deliciously indiscreet cultural libertine. She would do housework in her bra and panties. She wore muumuus and wraparound sunglasses and once won a belly button contest. According to Jennifer, "Mom prided herself for being un-American…. She was ashamed that she had given up her French citizenship to become a citizen of a country she deemed infantile." When her husband later moved the family to Virginia, Etty despised living in the state. She was also anti-Washington before her son ever was, albeit in a slightly more continental fashion. "Washingtonians think their town resembles Paris," she once scoffed. "If Paris passed gas, you'd have Washington."
Allen is now so associated with football—he played at Palos Verdes High School and at UVA, speaks in famously complicated football metaphors, and frequently tosses around the pigskin at campaign events—that he is most often described in relation to his father. But his siblings have said he actually takes after mom. Like Etty, George saw himself as disconnected from the culture in which he lived. He hated California and, while there, became obsessed with the supposed authenticity of rural life—or at least what he imagined it to be from episodes of "Hee Haw," his favorite TV show, or family vacations in Mexico, where he rode horses. Perhaps because of his peripatetic childhood, the South's deeply rooted culture attracted him. Or perhaps it was a romance with the masculinity and violence of that culture; his father, who was not one to spare the rod, once broke his son Gregory's nose in a fight. Whatever it was, Allen got his first pair of those now-iconic cowboy boots from one of his father's players on the Rams who received them as a promotional freebie. He also learned to dip from his dad's players. At school, he started to wear an Australian bush hat, complete with a dangling chin strap and the left brim snapped up. He wore the hat for a yearbook photo of the falconry club. His favorite record was Johnny Cash's At Folsom Prison. Writing of her brother's love for the "big, slow-witted Junior" on "Hee Haw," Jennifer reports, "[t]here was also something mildly country-thuggish about Junior that I think George felt akin to."
In high school, Allen's "Hee Haw" persona made him a polarizing figure. "He rode a little red Mustang around with a Confederate flag plate on the front," says Patrick Campbell, an old classmate, who now works for the Public Works Department in Manhattan Beach, California. "I mean, it was absurd-looking in our neighborhood." Hurt Germany, who now lives in Paso Robles, California, explodes with anger at the mention of Allen's name. "The guy is horrible," she complains. "He drove around with a Confederate flag on his Mustang. I can't believe he's going to run for president." Another classmate, who asks that I not use her name, also remembers Allen's obsession with Dixie: "My impression is that he was a rebel. He plastered the school with Confederate flags."
Politically, Allen's years in Palos Verdes were dominated by the lingering racial tensions from the riots in nearby Watts in 1965—when that neighborhood was practically burned to the ground—and the nationwide riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, which left other parts of Southern California in flames. It is with that context in mind that four former classmates and one former administrator at Allen's high school described to me an event for which Allen is most remembered—and the first glimpse that the chateau-raised Californian might grow up to become a defender of the South's heritage.
It was the night before a major basketball game with Morningside High. The mostly black inner-city school adjacent to Watts was coming to the almost entirely white Palos Verdes High to play. When students arrived at school on game day, they found graffiti spray-painted on the school library and other places. All five people who described the incident say the graffiti was racially tinged and meant to look like the handiwork of the black Morningside students. But it was actually put there by Allen and some of his friends. "It was something like DIE WHITEY," says Campbell. The school administrator, who says he is a Republican and would "seriously consider" voting for Allen for president, says the graffiti said, "BURN, BABY, BURN," a reference to the race riots.
Soon after, Allen finally got the chance to become a Southerner. In 1971, his dad was hired to coach the Redskins, and the Allens relocated to Virginia. Allen transferred from UCLA, where he spent his first year of college, to UVA. The old "Hee Haw" fan was like a pig in slop. Even at Virginia's own state school, Allen stood out for his showy brand of good ol' boyness. Under the headline "ALLEN AND COUNTRY LIVING," a 1973 profile in the school paper noted his penchant for country music had earned him the campus nickname of "Neck." He drove a pickup truck (paid for by the Redskins). He wore cowboy boots. He supported Richard Nixon and the war in Vietnam. He once shot a squirrel on campus, skinned it, ate it, and hung its pelt on his wall. "He was trying to be more Virginian than the average Virginian," says Sabato.
After graduating, Allen stuck around UVA for three years of law school. Professors remember him as the guy in the back row of class spitting tobacco into a cup. "He was Mr. Cool," says a UVA law professor who taught him. "But, if you would have said he would go on to be governor, senator, and then run for president, people would have said that was the least probable thing that would ever happen."
I am standing in front of George Allen, but he doesn't seem to notice me. He's seated behind a tank-sized wooden desk in his Senate office, buried in paperwork. In front of him is a white spit cup, the outside of it stained a little brown by some errant saliva. Though I've been announced and walked the length of his football field of an office to greet him, he is distracted. I stand for an awkward moment before he finally bounds out of his chair, opening up his six-foot-four frame—perhaps five with cowboy-boot heels—and welcomes me with a hearty shake and a tobacco-specked smile.
His office might be called classically senatorial. In the reception area, there are three walls of power photos, political cartoons, and action shots of Allen. There's Allen driving a race car. Allen on a horse. Allen throwing a football. A cover story from Richmond magazine features his wife: "WHAT VIPS DRIVE—FIRST LADY SUSAN ALLEN ♥ HER 4WD."
Allen and I talk a little about being a senator versus a governor. He seems determined to keep his outsider cred in hopes of surviving the anti-incumbent wave building in Virginia. He casts his lot in with the angry voters. "I'm aggravated," he says. "I get frustrated by the slow pace of the Senate, as are most Virginians and most Americans. I like action. I like to see things get done."
But, mostly, Allen and I talk about race. It's a subject that's much on his mind these days, as he tries to make amends for his old pro-Dixie stances. He's trying to get more money for historically black colleges. And he has spent the last few years in what might be called civil rights boot camp. In 2003, he traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, on a "civil rights pilgrimage." "I wish I had [gone] sooner," he says. "I was listening to the old civil rights movement, the strategies, the foundations, the tactics, and—in watching all of it, and in my point of view—I don't see how you can stand being knocked off a stool at a lunch counter and just take it. My reaction is, 'I don't see how you can take it.' And they say, 'You understand, it's all peaceful and nonviolent.' And I say, 'I just don't understand this.'" Allen bonded at the event with a former Black Panther who agreed with his take on nonviolence. "Of course, he played linebacker, I find out, and we became wonderful friends for the rest of the pilgrimage." Allen says that, in a few days, he will travel to Farmville, Virginia, for another reconciliation pilgrimage—this one with Representative John Lewis, the heroic civil rights activist.
Allen also tells me about the anti-lynching resolution he sponsored and helped pass in 2005, launching into a soliloquy about what he's learned in recent years about genocide. Back when he was governor, a series of black churches in Virginia were burned down, and Allen attended a meeting with President Clinton and Vice President Gore on the matter. "I went to the Holocaust Museum, which is the best museum in this country," he says. "And you recognize that people knew what was going on." He thought about that experience when he decided to champion the anti-lynching apology.
Allen knows the trouble spots in his record and has ready answers. We talk about his sister's book ("It's the perspective of the youngest child, who is a girl"), about the noose ("It had nothing to do with anything other than the Western motif in my office"), and about the Confederate flag once hanging in his living room ("I have a flag collection"). As for his mischievous attempt to scare his classmates into believing that his school was going to be burned to the ground, Allen, who, as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, co-sponsored a resolution calling for a crackdown on school vandalism, denies the incident had anything to do with race. "It was something like eat crap or something like that," says Allen, who was suspended for the incident. "Your school sucks, and so forth. It wasn't racial. Bad enough what I did—didn't have that to it. The purpose was to get your team riled up against a rival."
We move away from race and onto energy independence. But there was one nagging question that, even as I sat there listening to Allen go on about soy diesel fuel and lithium ion batteries, I still wasn't sure I would ask. Two days earlier, while preparing for this interview, I had Allen's high school yearbook open in front of me. I kept thinking about the creepy game day prank and the classmates who described the rebel flag on the car and the e-mail from Patrick Campbell: "Some of my classmates and I became rather disturbed a few years ago when we learned that George was rising in the political scene," he had written me. "Mr. Allen is known as a racist in our Southern California society which is why we feel he relocated to an environment which was more supportive of his view points." Maybe I had just stepped into the middle of a revenge-of-the-nerds type spat; Allen was, after all, the quarterback of the football team, and Campbell was a biology lab assistant. And did anything that happened in high school really matter today?
I stared closely at Allen's smirk in his photo, weighing whether his old classmates were just out to destroy him. And then I noticed something on his collar. It's hard to make out, but then it becomes obvious. Seventeen-year-old George Allen is wearing a Confederate flag pin.
Still, I wasn't sure I'd ask him about it. And then he says something that changes my mind. As a child, Allen tells me, before he even moved to California, he learned about the painful history of the South when his dad would take the kids on long drives from Chicago to New Orleans and other Southern cities for football bowl games. There was one searing memory from those trips he shares with me. "I remember," Allen says, "driving through—somehow, my father was on some back road in Mississippi one time—and we had Illinois license plates. And it was a time when some of the freedom riders had been killed, and somehow we're on this road. And you see a cross burning way off in the fields. I was young at the time. I just remember the sense of urgency as we were driving through the night, a carload of people with Illinois license plates—that this is not necessarily a safe place to be."
Now the pin seemed even worse. Why would a young man with such a sensitive understanding of Southern racial conflict and no Southern heritage wear a Confederate flag in his formal yearbook photo?
I finally ask him if he remembers the pin, explaining that another of his classmates had the same one in his photo, a guy named Deke. "No," Allen says with a laugh. "Where is this picture?" He leans forward over his desk and tightens his lip around the plug of Copenhagen in his mouth. "Hmmm." He pauses. He speaks slowly, apparently searching his memory. "Well, it's no doubt I was rebellious," he says, "a rebellious kid. I don't know. Unless we were doing something for the fun of it. Deke was from Texas. He was a good friend. Let me think." He stretches back in the chair, his boots sticking out from underneath his desk. "Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. I'll have to find it myself." Another pause. "I don't know. We would probably do things to upset people from time to time."
He stammers some more, says he saw Deke in an airport recently. "I don't know, I don't know," he continues. "It could be some sort of prank, or one of our rebellious—we would do different things. But I remember we liked Texas."
The next day, at Allen's request, I send him a copy of the yearbook photo. A few hours later, his office confirms that the pin was indeed a Confederate flag. In an e-mail sent through an aide, Allen says, "When I was in high school in California, I generally bucked authority and the rebel flag was just a way to express that attitude." And then he's off. He explains that he "grew up in a football family where life was integrated sooner than most of the rest of the country." He reminds me of his parole, education, and economic achievements as governor. He also tells me about the money he's trying to secure for minority institutions and an upcoming speaking gig at St. Paul's College, a historically black school in Virginia. "Life is a learning experience," he muses. In fact, he says, he's continuing his education this very weekend at the civil rights pilgrimage. But, in the Allen versus Allen primary, every time the new Allen has the upper hand, the old Allen comes punching back. After Allen's stirring statement, an aide adds a coda to the e-mail: The senator doesn't remember the Confederate flag on his Mustang, "but it is possible."
The Choke Artist
Who are the mysterious critics hunting Henry Heimlich?
* Jason Zengerle
* April 23, 2007 | 12:00 am
"A serious matter has been brought to my attention," the letter began. Addressed to an official in the Office for the Protection of Research Subjects at the University of California at Los Angeles, it accused two UCLA medical researchers of participating in illegal human experiments on HIV patients in China. "These experiments consist of giving malaria to people already suffering from HIV and full-blown AIDS," the letter alleged, before going on to make an even more startling claim: "[T]hese experiments have been conducted under the direction of Dr. Henry J. Heimlich, known for the Heimlich maneuver."
The letter, which was sent via e-mail in October 2002 and was from a "Dr. Bob Smith," was merely the first in a series of epistolary attacks against Heimlich. A few months later, editors at more than 40 publications—ranging from The New York Times to the medical journal Chest—received missives from someone calling himself "David Ionescu" that accused Heimlich of improperly taking credit for inventing a type of esophageal surgery. And then, in September 2003, the website heimlichinstitute.com went online. Its URL was almost identical to the official website of Henry Heimlich's Heimlich Institute, heimlichinstitute.org, but, rather than being dedicated to burnishing the doctor's legend, it was devoted to tearing it down. The site featured a long, angry indictment of Heimlich and accused him of all sorts of medical misconduct. The site's proprietor was listed as "Holly Martins"—the protagonist in the 1949 film noir The Third Man.
The octogenarian Heimlich seemed an unlikely target of so many people's ire. He had entered into the pantheon of medical history not for inventing a disease-eradicating vaccine or for isolating the DNA of a killer virus but, rather, for developing an anti-choking maneuver that even a child could perform. And, yet, it is the very simplicity of Heimlich's lifesaving technique that makes it so ingenious; because anyone can perform the maneuver, anyone can save a life. Since its invention in 1974, it has become a standard First Aid procedure around the world; and, while it may have been hyperbole for Norman Vincent Peale to once declare that Heimlich "has saved the lives of more human beings than any other person living today," it was fair to say that, by the measure of name recognition at least, the maneuver had made Heimlich America's most famous doctor.
But, after the letters started arriving, Heimlich could no longer rest on such laurels. When I met him in his office at the Heimlich Institute, he was under siege. Heimlich is tall and thin with a sharp nose and watchful gray eyes, giving him an almost avian appearance. He wore a coat and tie and, as he sat at his desk, he told me that he still put in a five-day work week—but what he was working on was unclear. The impressive-sounding Heimlich Institute, in fact, consisted of just two rooms in an administrative annex behind Cincinnati's Deaconess Hospital. On the afternoon I visited, Heimlich had cajoled his old secretary, who had recently been laid off due to lack of funds, to come in to help find some files for me; otherwise, he was the only person at the Institute.
And, yet, even in its diminished state, Heimlich's office served as an impressive testament to his unique stature. Framed cartoon strips that referenced the Heimlich maneuver shared wall space with pictures of celebrities—Cher, Elizabeth Taylor, Ronald Reagan—who were saved by his anti-choking treatment. A giant toy caterpillar—"Heimlich," a ravenous character from the Pixar movie A Bug's Life—sat on the floor by his desk. Heimlich thumbed through a stack of newspaper articles. "I still get clippings from papers from all over the country whenever somebody saves a life," he said in a tone that sounded both boastful and surprised.
Heimlich was copied on some of the letters attacking his reputation; but, initially, he paid them little mind, assuming no one would take the allegations seriously. Soon, though, the attacks began to exact a toll. UCLA launched an investigation into its researchers' work with Heimlich and ultimately found that one researcher had violated federal laws. Meanwhile, The Cincinnati Enquirer, Heimlich's hometown paper, ran a front-page story in which a rival doctor called Heimlich "a liar and a thief." Other doctors soon followed suit. Even the American Red Cross began to take a second look at the Heimlich maneuver. Heimlich and his family were traumatized. "It's an incredibly painful and difficult thing for someone to go through in the twilight of his life," Phil Heimlich, the eldest of the doctor's four children, told me.
Heimlich eventually decided that he could no longer do nothing. He hired a lawyer and an investigator to determine who was behind the allegations—or, as Heimlich called them, "the hate campaign." It was an investigation that would take months and frequently run into dead ends. For a reason that Heimlich did not yet understand—a reason so shocking that, when he did discover it, it would shake him to his core—his mysterious critics had gone to great lengths to conceal their identities, wielding their anonymity as a potent weapon against his fame.
But, although he was pained by the attacks, in some ways Heimlich actually relished the confrontation—because he had never shied away from a fight. Lost amidst the tchotchkes and celebrity photos in his office that testify to the maneuver's success is the story of just how hard he fought to get the medical establishment to accept it in the first place. Indeed, Heimlich's achievement was not so much the maneuver itself but the vigorous and sometimes underhanded campaign he waged to promote it. Heimlich's genius—one that has been adopted lately by everyone from drug companies to war planners—was to circumvent the experts and take his case directly to the people. A showman as much as a scientist, a brawler as much as a doctor, Heimlich was the P.T. Barnum of medicine—his career serving as testament to the fact that even the supposedly fact-based medical realm is susceptible to the phantom powers of personality and salesmanship.
"This letter is to bring to your attention allegations that the International Society of Surgery, the World Journal of Surgery, and the American medical journal, Diseases of the Chest, have been defrauded by Dr. Henry J. Heimlich of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, best known for the Heimlich maneuver,"—letter from "David Ionescu," April 3, 2003.
In 1963, a Florida coroner named Robert Haugen published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that called attention to a frequently overlooked medical problem. Haugen detailed the cases of nine Florida diners who each collapsed and died while eating at a restaurant. Their deaths were initially attributed to natural causes, usually a heart attack. As Haugen wrote, it wasn't until his office performed an autopsy and discovered a large bolus of food lodged in each person's airway—"steak in four cases, beef in two, ham fat in one, kippered herring in one, and broiled lobster in another"—that the cause of death was correctly determined to be asphyxiation. Haugen dubbed this phenomenon "the cafe coronary" and implored the medical community to recognize choking as a serious problem.
Medical researchers began working to come up with an anti-choking treatment more scientifically advanced than the age-old backslap. One doctor invented the "Throat-E-Vac," which, after being inserted into the victim's mouth and creating an airtight seal, supposedly sucked up whatever was obstructing the airway. Haugen himself marketed a nine-inch-long pair of plastic tweezers—the "ChokeSaver"—that would-be rescuers could use to grasp the offending piece of food in the victim's throat and pull it out. As the public furor over choking grew—with radio stations running public service announcements about the threat posed by "the cafe coronary"—it was clear that the doctor who devised a successful anti-choking treatment would be hailed as a medical hero.
That Henry Heimlich found such a prospect appealing was hardly surprising. He had experienced his first taste of the glory that comes to those who save lives in 1941, when, as a 21-year-old passenger on a New York City-bound train, he rescued a fellow traveler after the train derailed in Connecticut—earning him a mention on the front page of The New York Times and a gold watch from the Greater New York Safety Council. After serving as a Navy doctor in World War II, during which he volunteered for "prolonged extra-hazardous" duty in the Gobi Desert, he returned to New York and specialized in thoracic surgery—a field that allowed him to hold a patient's beating heart in his hands. But even that proved unsatisfying. As a mere surgeon, Heimlich concluded, he was limited to the finite number of people on whom he could operate. By devising new and revolutionary treatments and procedures, he could exponentially increase the number of lives he saved.
Heimlich started off, in the mid-'50s, by introducing a surgery that made it possible for people with severe esophageal damage to swallow food. He called it the "Heimlich operation." Later, he devised a chest drain valve that could be used to treat a collapsed lung, which he named the "Heimlich valve." In 1969, Heimlich, along with his wife Jane (daughter of the dance hall impresario Arthur Murray), his sons, Phil and Peter, and his twin daughters, Janet and Elisabeth, moved to Cincinnati, where he became director of surgery at the city's Jewish Hospital. It was there that he turned his attention to choking.
Heimlich still relishes telling the story of his most famous invention. "No one was doing much about [choking] except for these gadgets," he says, dismissively waving his hand. He set out to develop a treatment that was, as he puts it, "so simple anybody could do it." From his thoracic surgery experience, Heimlich knew that at the moment of choking the lungs contained a substantial amount of air. He concluded that the best hope for devising a practical anti-choking treatment lay in harnessing that air to expel whatever was lodged in the larynx.
Heimlich's research methods, at least with the benefit of 30 years of hindsight, seem comical. In his hospital's animal lab, he partially anesthetized a 38-pound beagle—"the equivalent of having three or four good stiff drinks at dinner," he told his lab technician. Next, he "strangled" it with a cuffed endotracheal tube inserted into the larynx. Then Heimlich attempted to dislodge the tube. At first, he tried pressing on the dog's chest, but nothing happened; with the beagle on the verge of death, he dejectedly removed the tube. Then inspiration struck. "I just got the idea that if I push up on the diaphragm, the diaphragm comes up, the chest cavity decreases in volume, and that would compress the lungs," Heimlich recalls. Sure enough, when he did just that, the tube flew out. He tried the same technique on three other beagles, each time with the same result. Elated, he sent his lab tech down to the hospital commissary for some raw hamburger. That flew out of the beagles' mouths, too.
Of course, all Heimlich had proved with his experiments was that his anti-choking treatment worked on dogs. Whether it would work on humans was an open question. Seeking an answer, Heimlich prevailed upon the editor of Emergency Medicine—a "throwaway" journal that did not require its articles to be peer-reviewed—to let him propose his anti-choking treatment in its pages. Writing in the June 1974 issue, under the headline "Pop Goes The Cafe Coronary," Heimlich instructed would-be rescuers on how to perform the maneuver. He urged readers to report the results of their rescue attempts to him. The public would serve as both his researchers and his subjects.
Heimlich made certain that a copy of his Emergency Medicine article made it to Arthur Snider, the Chicago Daily News's nationally syndicated science writer. The week after Snider's article on Heimlich's proposed new anti-choking treatment appeared, a retired restaurant owner in Washington state used the new treatment to save his choking next-door neighbor. "News Article Helps Prevent A Choking Death" read the headline in The Seattle Times a few days later. Other Snider readers across the country made similar rescues, inspiring more headlines. But, despite the growing number of positive anecdotal reports, not everyone jumped on the Heimlich maneuver bandwagon. Based on the lack of hard scientific evidence, the American Red Cross—much to Heimlich's consternation—would only endorse the Heimlich maneuver as a secondary technique to be used if back blows were unsuccessful.
The only body that seemed capable of resolving the dispute between Heimlich and the Red Cross was the National Academy of Sciences. In June 1976, the academy's Committee on Emergency Medical Services convened a two-day conference on "Emergency Airway Management." The committee included such preeminent research doctors as Peter Safar, the co-inventor of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and James Jude, who discovered cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). On the conference's first day, Heimlich gave an impassioned speech, boasting of the more than 500 lives he said the maneuver had already saved. After his presentation, nine conference participants gathered in the academy's boardroom to try to reach an official consensus on choking treatments. For hours, they debated. Finally, as the clock ticked past midnight, they voted six to three in favor of elevating the Heimlich maneuver above the backslap.
But the group's chairman, an anesthesiologist named Don Benson, still harbored doubts, and, the next morning, he told the conference that the group had been unable to obtain a "universal opinion." Heimlich stormed out of the conference. He was convinced he had a proven lifesaving idea and that the only thing preventing the medical establishment from accepting it was professional jealousy. "These were the guys who were the experts ... but none of them, despite all their years of expertise, had come up with this idea," Heimlich says with bitterness that, three decades on, still seems fresh. "And then here comes this unknown guy in this field that they've been working their whole lives in, and not only does he discover this thing, but it's named after him."
From this point on, Heimlich decided to bypass the medical establishment and to take his maneuver directly to the public. He sold Heimlich maneuver posters and t-shirts (through a company he started with his son Phil) and made a slick film that featured choking actors being saved by his technique and a horror-movie-like score composed by his other son, Peter, a musician who performed in a band called "Choke." He barnstormed across the country, appearing on "The Tonight Show" and speaking to non-medical groups about the maneuver. In his dark suits and conservative ties, Heimlich looked the part of a somber doctor. But his presentations were anything but dull. He told stories of miraculous rescues and cracked risque jokes while watching Johnny Carson demonstrate the maneuver on Angie Dickinson; his speeches often ended with a massive group hug as he asked everyone in the audience to practice the maneuver on the person sitting next to them. By the late '70s, a booking agency ranked Heimlich as one of the top ten public speakers in the United States. "The guy was a dynamo," says Trevor Hughes, an anesthesiologist who became an outspoken advocate of the maneuver. "It was like when you see a tornado cutting across the plains or you come up against a force of nature. ... His charisma was incredible."
Eventually, the Red Cross and the rest of the medical establishment seemed to realize it was fighting a losing battle. Although Heimlich still lacked much in the way of convincing laboratory studies, he had managed to create a set of facts on the ground. In 1985, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop proclaimed the Heimlich maneuver "the only method" that should be used to treat choking victims. The next year, when the American Heart Association, in conjunction with the Red Cross, published its "Standards and Guidelines for Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation and Emergency Cardiac Care," it recommended the maneuver as the primary anti-choking treatment.
Heimlich had won—making himself a household name in the process—but he had also created a number of enemies. Thanks to Heimlich's constant criticism of the organization, enrollment in the Red Cross's first-aid classes dropped, and the organization had its lawyers explore the possibility of suing him for slander. The National Academy of Sciences also suffered indignities: Heimlich had declared backslaps "death blows" and accused the organization of engaging in a cover-up—a "medical Watergate," he called it. There were also the individual doctors with whom Heimlich had tangled—he even tried to initiate ethics proceedings against one doctor who opposed the maneuver.
Thirty years later, Heimlich knew that the campaign against him could have been the work of these old enemies. He told me he drew comfort from the words of the Belgian poet Maurice Maeterlinck, who wrote, "At every crossway on the road that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men assigned to guard the past." He thought about the many—if not necessarily 1,000—men who had opposed him, and he tried to determine who would engage in such attacks today. He came up with a short list, which he conveyed to his lawyer, who in turn passed it on to the investigator. But the investigator soon determined that none of the suspects were involved. Still, there was some progress. Although Heimlich's tormentors had signed their attacks with fake names, employed multiple e-mail accounts and Web-hosting services from far-flung places (such as the Czech Republic), and used phone numbers that were registered under even more pseudonyms, the investigator made the startling discovery that the attacks could be traced back to the same ISP number. In other words, Dr. Bob Smith, David Ionescu, and Holly Martins were likely the same person. But if that person wasn't one of Heimlich's suspects, then who could it be?
"Even after being made aware of potentially life-threatening risks associated with the Heimlich maneuver for drowning, did [Heimlich and a colleague] continue to encourage the public to test it on one another, putting at risk not only the victims but their rescuers? ... Was the Heimlich maneuver for drowning rescue nothing more than a scam?"—from "Conclusion," by "Holly Martins," heimlichinstitute.com.
Heimlich had based his antichoking maneuver on little science but much intuition. And, because his intuition had proved correct, his populist campaign on the maneuver's behalf appeared heroic. It was the act of an innovative—if maverick—doctor who wanted to save lives right away instead of waiting for the medical establishment to catch up and give his idea its seal of approval. In many ways, Heimlich's story—despite its rough edges—was inspirational. But that inspiration had a downside. What if Heimlich viewed his experience with the maneuver as a sign that he was uniquely equipped, perhaps even destined, to solve other, even more pressing medical problems? And what if Heimlich, convinced of his own rightness, started up his publicity machine in order to sell the public another medical treatment, but, this time, his intuition turned out to be incorrect?
In the early '80s, Heimlich, searching for an even grander lifesaving idea, became convinced there was another, wider-reaching use for his maneuver. In 1974, a surgeon named Victor Esch claimed he used Heimlich's anti-choking treatment to save the life of a man who had nearly drowned on a Delaware beach. "[W]ater gushed out of his mouth and he began breathing," Esch reported. In subsequent years, Heimlich received a handful of similar reports, and, in 1985, he argued that the maneuver should replace CPR at a joint American Heart Association-Red Cross meeting in Dallas, Texas.
As had been true nine years earlier at the National Academy of Sciences, Heimlich lacked any convincing scientific studies to support his claim, and he had even fewer anecdotal reports. There was also concern among drowning experts that the Heimlich maneuver was potentially dangerous, since it would delay resuscitation efforts and was likely to induce vomiting, which can lead to aspiration pneumonia. And yet, the four other members of the drowning panel agreed to add the maneuver to the drowning rescue protocols as a secondary treatment. Heimlich's public fight over choking seemed to play a role in their decision. "We were aware that there was controversy over the prior set of guidelines on choking," says Joe Ornato, the drowning panel's chairman and an emergency medicine doctor at the Medical College of Virginia. "I didn't want anyone to potentially not have his life saved if it turned out Dr. Heimlich's idea was correct."
But Heimlich was not mollified. He continued to agitate for the maneuver to replace CPR as the primary near-drowning treatment, and, eventually, the Institute of Medicine (IOM)—the nation's leading medical advisory group—agreed to give him a hearing. In 1993, Heimlich testified before an IOM committee. "[Heimlich] kind of impressed me as a guy who doesn't really know anything about research science," says Peter Rosen, who chaired the IOM committee and was then an emergency medicine doctor at the University of California at San Diego. "It was an old man telling tales." The IOM committee's subsequent report concluded that there was no good evidence to support the routine use of the Heimlich maneuver on drowning victims.
Just as he had done during his fight over choking, Heimlich decided to circumvent the medical establishment. In 1995, he appeared at a U.S. Lifesaving Association seminar and urged the assembled lifeguards to ignore the American Heart Association guidelines as an act of conscience, adding, "I think the Nuremberg trials told the story that no one can be excused for saying, 'I was ordered to do so or was taught to do so, to kill people.'" That same year, Jeff Ellis & Associates, the nation's largest private lifeguard company—which staffs many of the nation's major water parks and trains about 35,000 lifeguards annually—began teaching the maneuver as a first response. It continued to do so for the next five years, until a reporter for the water park industry trade magazine Fun World wrote a story documenting the questionable science behind Heimlich's crusade.
There is much speculation in the lifesaving community that Ellis's five-year embrace of the Heimlich maneuver compromised safety at the company's facilities, and there are rumors of rescues that went awry. An Ellis spokesperson refused to answer any questions about the company's experience with the maneuver. But James Orlowski, a pediatrician in Tampa, Florida, who has tracked the use of the Heimlich maneuver in drownings, says he knows of more than 30 cases (though not at Ellis pools) in which the use of the maneuver had "destructive" results—from stomach rupture to aspiration pneumonia to death. Orlowski says he knows of no instances where the maneuver saved a near-drowning victim.
Ellis's decision to drop the maneuver from its protocol was a severe blow to Heimlich. But he turned to his supporters for solace—none more so than his family. Although Heimlich still had many admirers among the general public, their regard for him could never approach the larger-than-life status in which his family held him. His eldest son Phil, who went from selling Heimlich maneuver t-shirts to a successful legal career to an eventual seat on the Cincinnati city council, credits his father for his decision to go into politics. "He really inspired me, because he used his abilities to have a real impact on society," he says. When Phil had his own son, he named him Henry. And, while Phil worked on the public stage to carry on his father's good name, Heimlich's younger son Peter toiled privately. Having left Cincinnati to live in San Francisco and then Portland, Oregon, Peter typically only saw his father when the doctor visited the West Coast—tagging along with him to "The Tonight Show." But Peter—who eventually put aside his musical ambitions to start a business with his wife importing fabrics from Asia—stayed close to his father in another way. For years, Henry would send Peter newspaper clips and medical journal articles about his latest accomplishments, and Peter would dutifully save every one—until he had assembled what may be the world's largest private archive devoted to the life and times of Henry Heimlich.
"[I]njecting malaria into people already sick with another disease, meanwhile denying them access to other aids treatments, is reminiscent of the Tuskegee syphilis research atrocities. Yet, according to Heimlich, Chen, et al., denying other treatments to their Chinese research subjects was a condition of participation in their study."—letter from "Dr. Bob Smith," October 2, 2002.
"I want to truly teach you about malariatherapy," Heimlich said one day in the office at his condominium, as he motioned for me to move my chair closer to his. He had pulled several large black binders from his bookcase and had one of them sitting open across his lap. "Malariatherapy, I'll tell you, is very important. ... I think there's nothing more important that we can talk about."
Of all the battles Heimlich has waged, none has proven as controversial as malariatherapy—the practice of intentionally infecting a patient with malaria in order to treat another ailment. And yet, perhaps because of its controversial nature—to say nothing of its grandiosity—malariatherapy is the medical crusade most dear to him. Like all of Heimlich's endeavors, malariatherapy does have one foot in the realm of legitimate science. In 1917, the Austrian psychiatrist Julius Wagner von Jauregg proved that a malaria-induced fever would kill the syphilis micro-organism after testing the theory on patients. Malariatherapy soon became the standard treatment for neurosyphilis, and, in 1927, Wagner von Jauregg was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for his work. The discovery of penicillin in the 1940s, however, rendered malariatherapy obsolete, and it was eventually abandoned as a medical treatment. But, in the mid-'80s, Heimlich started campaigning to resurrect the practice—not as a treatment for neurosyphilis but as a means to fight other, more intractable, diseases.
His first target was cancer. Although he had no expertise in oncology, Heimlich's idea of treating cancer with malariatherapy was not immediately dismissed. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) even invited him to Atlanta to discuss it. But the CDC was ultimately unwilling to supply Heimlich with malariainfected blood, so he took his work across the border. In 1987, he persuaded doctors at the Mexican National Cancer Institute in Mexico City to begin treating five patients with malariatherapy. The results were not promising: Less than a year after their first inoculations, four of the patients had died.
But Heimlich was not so easily discouraged. If malariatherapy didn't work on cancer, he believed there were other afflictions that it might cure. In 1990, he published a letter in The New England Journal of Medicine suggesting malariatherapy as a treatment for Lyme disease. It wasn't long before "Lymeys" from as far away as Hungary were requesting the treatment from Heimlich. But, when a New Jersey woman who was one of his first Lyme patients later denounced Heimlich—"[I]f anybody ever asked me about Dr. Heimlich and his supposed cure," she said, "I wouldn't hesitate to tell them to run away fast"—the tightly knit Lyme community turned against malariatherapy.
Nothing, however, could shake Heimlich's faith. In fact, each time malariatherapy failed, his ambitions for it seemed to grow—so much so that, by the early '90s, he was touting it as a solution to arguably the world's most pressing medical problem: AIDS. Eminent immunology experts, such as the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, dismissed Heimlich's idea as "quite dangerous and scientifically unsound." But Heimlich did not need their support. All he needed was money and a place to try out his idea. In Hollywood he found the former; and in China he found the latter. Using private donations from prominent members of the entertainment industry—including Amy Irving and Estelle Getty—Heimlich established a malariatherapy clinic for HIV patients in Guangzhao, China. There, beginning in 1994, a team of four Chinese doctors injected at least eight HIV patients with malarial blood; for each patient, the Heimlich Institute provided the doctors between $5,000 and $10,000 in funding.
In 1996, Heimlich went to the eleventh International Conference on AIDS in Vancouver and made a stunning announcement. He reported that the CD4 counts—which are depleted as HIV progresses to AIDS—in two of the Chinese HIV patients had increased after a course of malariatherapy and that the counts remained high two years later. Before the Vancouver conference, he had stopped in Portland to visit Peter, to whom he had touted his China study. "This will put us over," he told his son. But, when AIDS experts looked closely at Heimlich's results, they saw that the test the Chinese doctors had employed to measure CD4 levels was notoriously unreliable—rendering the data useless. After a falling out with the Chinese doctors, Heimlich began searching for other countries where he could do a clinical trial, but no one was interested.
Two years ago, Heimlich changed the name of malariatherapy. "People hear malaria and they shy away," he explained to me, "so we'll call it immunotherapy." Heimlich was seated in a large recliner, and, since he was working from home that day, he wore a plaid shirt and an old pair of blue bedroom slippers. For more than an hour, he flipped through the binders and read me portions of various medical studies that he said proved malariatherapy—as he still frequently called it—works. "So we're not without evidence," he said. But, when I later read the studies in their entirety, they showed no such thing; Heimlich was cherry-picking the passages that seemed to support his position. His method reminded me of something Peter Rosen, the emergency medicine doctor who clashed with him over drowning, had told me. "One of the differences between people who do science and people who don't is the people who do science realize that what you're trying to do in science is falsify a hypothesis," Rosen said. "And only after you examine all sorts of evidence and you can't falsify a hypothesis do you establish that the hypothesis is true. The people trying to prove a hypothesis look at any piece of positive evidence and then stop. Heimlich never understood that distinction."
As Heimlich droned on, he seemed more pathetic than dangerous—just an old man telling tales, one whose crackpot theories would, thankfully, never gain currency or be put into practice again. But then Heimlich opened his last binder, which was marked confidential, and pulled out two sheets of paper. "Now I will tell you about the malariatherapy, or immunotherapy as we now call it, in Africa." He began to read from one of the sheets. "The Heimlich Institute has been collecting CD4 and viral load data on patients who are HIV-positive and have become infected with malaria. This data will provide support for the concept of using malariatherapy for treating HIV infection." The study involved the questionable practice of initially withholding treatment for malaria, so Heimlich would not tell me where in Africa this new malariatherapy trial was being done. "You never know how the politicians will react in these countries," he explained. But, according to a public health physician who has worked on AIDS in East Africa and has knowledge of Heimlich's latest project, the study site is in Ethiopia. An official with the Ethiopian Ministry of Health told me that the ministry is unaware of any malariatherapy work being conducted in the country and that, if it is, it is being done without proper notification and permission.
Still reading from the papers, Heimlich boasted about the study's early results. Six of the first seven HIV patients treated with malariatherapy, he claimed, had experienced decreases in their viral loads. Now he was eagerly anticipating results from the 42 other patients in the study. He seemed to have little doubt about what those results would be. "I've been right in just about everything I've done," Heimlich said. "And when it gets to something like this, I know."
"Evidence does exist which raises doubts about the assumption that Dr. Heimlich is the inventor [of the Heimlich maneuver]."—from "The Patrick Maneuver?" by "Holly Martins," heimlichinstitute.com
While the web of fake names, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers obscured the identity of Heimlich's tormentor, the content and tenor of the attacks began to provide clues about their author. There was something about the campaign—in its form and its ferocity, in its penchant to begin with provable facts before spinning off into questionable, even wild, assertions—that, in fact, seemed reminiscent of Heimlich's own work. In one last desperate attempt, Heimlich's investigator conducted a massive Internet search on the phone numbers, hoping to come up with a match. It was a digital fishing expedition, but the investigator got a bite. One of the phone numbers used by Heimlich's nemesis had also been used in an Internet classified ad for a 27-inch television and VCR. The seller was located in Portland, Oregon, and the company he owned was called Global Fabric. The seller identified himself as "Pete." The culprit, it turned out, was not one of Heimlich's old medical opponents. Rather, the person responsible for the "hate campaign" was his onetime greatest fan: his son, Peter.
Peter Heimlich is 53 years old. He is tall and thin like his father and has the same watchful eyes. When I went to meet him, he had moved from Portland and was living with his wife, Karen, in a gated community outside New Orleans. He invited me into his large house, which was filled with musical instruments, kitschy art, and reams of Heimlichrelated material. Peter explained that, in late 2001, his relationship with his father, which had gradually grown more distant, effectively came to an end. Peter believed his father was not paying sufficient attention to what he cryptically describes as "medical problems" in his family, and, when he approached his father with his concerns, he felt he was ignored. It was then that Peter, along with Karen, began what he calls their "project"—an investigation into his father's career so far-reaching in its scope and so fevered in its conclusions that it has dominated their lives ever since.
"At the beginning, I'll be frank, I felt like I wanted to get back at my father," Peter said one afternoon, after he had spent the morning showing me the archive. "I was looking for a needle in a haystack, ... something I could just use against him." He began combing through the old newspaper articles and checking out medical journals from the library, searching for impropriety. It wasn't long before he thought he had found it. Indeed, Peter soon became convinced that the wrongdoing he had uncovered was so significant that his project became less a personal vendetta than an "ethical responsibility." He and Karen shuttered their fabric-importing company and devoted themselves to scrutinizing every chapter of Henry Heimlich's career. And, in the end, Peter concluded that everything—the esophagus operation, the maneuver, the drowning cases, even the youthful heroism at the train wreck—was a fraud. "I don't think my father invented anything," Peter said, "but his own mythology."
Peter Heimlich is a dogged and resourceful researcher. He has meticulously documented a number of instances of his father's less than honorable behavior, including his promotion of the Heimlich maneuver for drowning and his malariatherapy work. But some of the most damning accusations Peter has leveled against his father appear to be based on a combination of conjecture, leaps of logic, and assumptions of almost epic bad faith. I spent several months trying to confirm Peter's most explosive allegation—namely, that his father did not invent the maneuver but stole it from a colleague named Ed Patrick. But the tantalizing scraps of information that sparked Peter's suspicions ultimately led me nowhere, and I eventually concluded the claim was unfounded or, at the very least, unprovable. (Patrick, for his part, has stated that he and Heimlich "worked together to develop" the maneuver, but he refuses to substantiate that claim.)
Peter is nearly the same age his father was when he achieved greatness with the maneuver. And, in his own quest, Peter has appropriated many of the tactics favored by the man he seeks to destroy. At the beginning of his project, Peter tried to work through official channels—filing complaints against his father with several groups, including the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Ohio Medical Board. When those groups failed to take action, he accused them of a cover-up and took his complaints to the press. Portraying himself as a real-life David doing battle with a Goliath-like "celebrity doctor," Peter has developed a small but loyal following among reporters, leading to a steady stream of news stories about his father's various (real and alleged) misdeeds. Last year, the Red Cross—without explanation—amended its First Aid guidelines, reinstituting backslaps as the primary choking treatment and relegating the Heimlich maneuver (or, as the organization now calls it, "abdominal thrusts") to secondary-treatment status. Peter boasts that these changes are at least partly because of him.
While he once waged his campaign in secret—using pseudonyms and talking to reporters only on the condition that he not be identified—he has now stepped out of the shadows. Indeed, Peter's project is no longer just about destroying what's left of his father's good name; it's also about making a name for himself. He believes that, in his project, he has found his true calling. "They're always saying you only use so much of your brain in life," he told me. "And I felt like here was something where I could put all my resources." On his website—which he changed from heimlichinstitute.com to medfraud.info, after the Heimlich Institute initiated legal action—he now lists himself, not "Holly Martins," as the proprietor. He hopes in the future to become a guru of sorts, perhaps even an inspiration, to other whistle-blowers—not only in medicine but also industry and government—helping them with their efforts to expose wrongdoing. And, most important, he and Karen are writing a book. It will be, he said, "the unauthorized biography" of Henry Heimlich and the "authorized autobiography" of Peter Heimlich.
On a cold winter night in Cincinnati in 2005, several hundred people gathered in a hotel ballroom for the Cincinnati Business-Courier's annual Health Care Heroes awards banquet. Among the many honorees, the weekly business publication had selected Henry Heimlich as its "Lifetime Hero." The choice seemed uncontroversial enough—a relatively meaningless honor (the awards are a marketing event) bestowed upon the city's most famous doctor in the twilight of his life. But, of course, nothing with Heimlich is uncontroversial these days. And, when Peter Heimlich learned of the Business-Courier's decision, about four weeks before the banquet, he besieged the paper with phone calls and faxes demanding the honor to his father be rescinded. The Business-Courier ultimately stood by its choice, but not without some awkwardness, publishing a defensive editorial a few days before the banquet that emphasized the award was being given to Heimlich solely for his anti-choking treatment.
The night before the awards ceremony, I met Heimlich in his condominium. My flight into Cincinnati had been delayed by snow, and it was already late in the evening when I arrived, but Heimlich ushered me into his living room and asked me to sit down. He clearly wanted to talk. It had been a trying period for Heimlich. A few months earlier, Peter had managed to persuade the organizers of the PanAfrica AIDS Conference, which Heimlich had addressed several times in the past, to disinvite him as a speaker; and a growing number of other doctors, egged on by Peter, had recently denounced him. "He's very clever," Heimlich said of his son, his voice mixed with both sorrow and a strange sort of admiration. "He always was. And that's part of the hurt. He has such talent." He added, "This has been the most painful part of my life."
But the more marginalized and embattled Heimlich was, the more defiant he became. Leaning forward in his chair, he launched into a diatribe against his critics. "I call these people medical assassins," Heimlich said. "They're nobodies, they've done nothing, and they want to get their names known, so they attack a person who is famous." It wasn't long before he was offering disquisitions on the Heimlich maneuver for drowning and malariatherapy. He stood up and began to pace the room. "I understand this struggle," he said, stopping and looking me hard in the eyes. "I've been having it for too long. And invariably I've succeeded, invariably I've succeeded."
The next night at the awards banquet, Heimlich seemed serene as he sat at a table with his wife, Jane, and his son Phil—who, earlier that day, had told me that he fully supported his father and that his brother's behavior was "inappropriate and abusive." Heimlich laughed and talked with his tablemates throughout the meal. And, when it came time to deliver his acceptance speech, he kept it light and brief, mostly thanking Cincinnatians for taking him into theirs arms and supporting his endeavors. "[S]aving lives," he concluded, almost wistfully, "is still a worthwhile thing to do." After his speech, the ballroom began to empty, but a small crowd of people eagerly gathered around Heimlich. Pressing close to him, they told of relatives and friends who had been saved from choking by the maneuver. Then a woman stepped forward, and Heimlich stuck out his hand. But she brushed past it, opening her arms and embracing him. Heimlich smiled and wrapped his arms around her. "Thank you," he said, gladly accepting her gratitude. For one night, at least, it seemed to be enough.
The Passion of Joschka Fischer
From the radicalism of the '60s to the interventionism of the '90s.
* Paul Berman
* August 27, 2001 | 12:00 am
I.
Last January, Stern magazine in Germany published a set of five grainy photographs of Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister and vice chancellor, as a young bully in a street battle in Frankfurt. It was April 1973. The photos showed: a figure in a black motorcycle helmet, labeled as Fischer, facing off against another figure in a white policeman's helmet, with a dented Volkswagen squatting in the background; the black-helmeted Fischer drawing near, and a skinny girl or maybe a long-haired boy (this was an androgynous era) running to join him; Fischer and other people on the attack, the white-helmeted cop going into a crouch; Fischer's black-gloved fist raised as if to punch the crouching cop on the back, Fischer's comrades crowding around; the cop huddled on the ground, Fischer and his comrades appearing to kick him, with two additional people watching. And no more dented Volkswagen. The photographer has evidently been circling around the skirmish, snapping his camera in what must have been a frenzy of adrenaline, each picture taken from a different angle.
Those were brutal photographs. One glance at them and you were back in the days of left-wing street fighting from the late 1960s and 1970s, when young militants in West Germany were always pouring into the streets, and Volkswagens were getting dented right and left. And the photographs, having conjured the past, provoked an outcry. The Joschka Fischer of 2001 was a member of the party called, in expressively anti-bureaucratic fashion, "the Greens"—a man of the left on its hipper, friskier side. He happened to be the very first Green to hold a ministry in Germany's federal government, let alone the foreign ministry. A powerful man, therefore a man with enemies. The photographs gazed blearily at the world from the semi-glossy pages of Stern, and flames of Christian Democratic wrath erupted at once from those many partisan enemies. Germany's foreign minister had disgraced himself in those photographs; had embarrassed his nation; had lost the ability to represent Germany to the world; ought to be investigated, to be indicted, to resign.
The street battles of 1973 took place long ago, and it could have been supposed that Fischer's enemies, having given vent to a thousand pent-up furies and Christian Democratic resentments, would eventually calm down, and the scandal of those ancient photographs would fade. The editors of Stern seem to have anticipated that sort of development. The magazine advertised its photographs on the cover with a quotation from Fischer ("Ja, ich war militant"), but the big story in that week's issue was Europe's meat crisis, illustrated by a giant sausage skewered on the tines of an oversized barbecue fork. Mad cow disease, now that was a lasting story.
The weeks went by, though, and the Fischer affair, instead of fading, grew in intensity and scale. Like the broken tape on the door at the Watergate, or the girlish confessions on Linda Tripp's treacherous recording, the photographs in Stern seemed to pull slowly at a curtain that, as it opened, revealed ever more distant peaks of unsuspected scandals (or non-scandals, depending on your interpretation). The controversy spread to France. In London, The Observer, playing the part of the yellow press, gave the polemic a slightly demented sexual twist. The Italians weighed in. The Fischer affair achieved at last a large enough dimension and a sufficiently accusatory tone to be described rather grandly but not inaccurately as "the trial of the generation of 1968" by the editors of the Paris daily Liberation (who know something about the generation of 1968)—an unforeseeably rich and vivid scandal, fecund with implications for Europe and modern life and thirty or forty years of history.
The photographs were delivered to Stern by a thirty-eight-year-old woman named Bettina Rohl, who described herself as an "independent journalist" but whose notoriety was owed mostly to her family background, which could hardly have been more sensational. Bettina Rohl was the daughter of Ulrike Meinhof. In the heyday of the left-wing movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, Ulrike Meinhof was more than well-known in West Germany. She was a militant and a political theorist on the left's leftmost wing—one of the crazies, you would have to say, except that craziness and sanity were very much under interrogation.
In 1970, Ulrike Meinhof staged an armed jailbreak to free an imprisoned comrade named Andreas Baader, who was serving three years for his own violent antics. (He had set fire to a Frankfurt department store.) Baader and Meinhof, together with Horst Mahler and a few other desperadoes of the revolutionary left, organized what became casually known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, but was more formally and correctly called the Red Army Fraction. In American English, the German word Fraktion is usually rendered as "faction," which falls easily on the ear; but anyone who remembers the old Communist phrase book will recognize that "fraction," in English, used to be a perfectly legitimate and precise term, connoting a disciplined party unit akin to a cell—the opposite of a faction, which is a party unit that has escaped the party's discipline. A Marxist-Leninist party does not have factions, unless the party is in disarray. But a Marxist-Leninist party does have fractions, or party units that go out into the world and militate as best they can, according to plan.
Baader and Meinhof's Red Army Fraction was tiny. But it went out into the world and proved to be extremely violent. Kidnappings, bank holdups, murders: the group refrained from nothing. A bombing in 1972 killed four American soldiers. A few years later someone machine-gunned to death the prosecutor who wanted to try the group for killing the soldiers. Reprisals were a specialty. The Red Army Fraction was hardy, too. The West German authorities did their repressive best, but the guerrilla organization managed to keep itself alive, recruiting new members from ever younger generations to replace the fallen, and persisting in its killings and kidnappings from decade to decade into the mid-1990s—a long run in a well-ordered place such as Germany.
Even today, a political legacy from the old Baader-Meinhof tendency has managed to linger on, though without a clandestine wing, or so it is said. The Red Army Fraction remained strong during those many years because its leaders were clever and its militants fanatical, but also because it enjoyed the secret backing of the government of East Germany, meaning the Soviet bloc, for as long as there was a Soviet bloc, which gave the group a real institutional power. (The Red Army Fraction was tiny, but the Red Army was not.) Yet the organization clung to life mainly for another reason, which lay at the heart of the several scandals that flooded outward from the grainy photographs in Stern this year.
The radical student movement during the years around 1968—I will call it the New Left, using the American and English term—was never especially powerful in the Federal Republic of Germany as a whole, not compared to the big political parties and the industrial groups and the trade unions. But in the world of the university students and the young people's neighborhoods and the younger intellectuals, the New Left was a gigantic presence. And the Red Army Fraction grew naturally from that soil. Ulrike Meinhof herself was by all accounts an intelligent and articulate leader, a woman already thirty-seven years old when she helped to organize her guerrilla army, which meant that, in matters of age, she towered over the New Left's rank and file, the student naifs. She knew how to drape the grand ideals of German philosophy across her organization and its doings. To be sure, her guerrilla army was reviled by an overwhelming majority of West Germans, the put-upon bystanders and potential victims and frightened citizens.
But in the universities and the counter-cultural districts in Frankfurt and Berlin and a few other places, her tiny organization drew on the active and even enthusiastic support of a not-so-small number of people, plus the passive support of far larger numbers, the leftists who would never have endorsed a program of violence and who wanted nothing to do with murders, but who would have said that, even so, the Red Army Fraction did have reason to despise German bourgeois society, and Marxist revolution was an excellent idea, and state repression posed a greater threat to society than any guerrilla resistance from the left. And shouldn't we progressives and reasonable leftists worry chiefly about civil liberties? And so forth: the many arguments and apologetics that people offer in circumstances when, out of confusion and moral timidity, they are too frightened to applaud the murders and the kidnappings, and too frightened to condemn them.
The Red Army Fraction claimed a fraternity with the new breed of revolutionary groups around the world. "We must learn," Meinhof said in her original manifesto back in 1970, "from the revolutionary movements of the world—the Vietcong, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Tupamaros [of Uruguay], the Black Panthers." But mostly her organization resembled several other guerrilla currents that got their start in the New Left upsurges of Europe in those same years: the Red Brigades in Italy; the Irish Republican Army in its modern, Marxist version (which revived a defunct military organization from many years before); the Corsican nationalist guerrillas; and the Basque ETA—small groups each and every one, but tough, and with a degree of popular support that made each of those groups nearly indestructible during the next decades.
The Red Army Fraction was not exactly invulnerable. In 1972, the West German police did manage to arrest a number of key warriors. They arrested Meinhof herself. But arrests only rendered the group fashionable. Jean-Paul Sartre expressed an admiring appreciation—a cagey admiration, designed to leave him unstained by any crimes that the guerrillas might commit. Meinhof wrote the famous philosopher a letter, inviting him to visit Baader in jail, "to give us the protection of your name and your gifts as a Marxist, philosopher, journalist and moralist." Sartre came. But the martyrdom only deepened. One of the imprisoned warriors had already committed suicide by the time of Sartre's visit, and in 1976 Meinhof likewise committed suicide in her maximum-security cell—though some people suspected an official murder.
Her death was followed the next year by the suicides of Baader and two others in the same jail, which even more people suspected was official murder. And the deaths, as they piled up, radiated a morbid glamour. It was a highbrow glamour—the kind of glamour that, as Peter Wollen pointed out in The London Review of Books, would by 1995 lead New York's Museum of Modern Art to devote an exhibition to paintings of those suicides (assuming they were suicides), a sacralization in high art. But it was also a street glamour. The death of Meinhof alone, back in 1976, was enough to send crowds of young people swarming into the West German streets, enraged at the jails and at the revolutionary defeats and at the thousand injustices of modern life.
Joschka Fischer was among those angry crowds. He was a young firebrand in Frankfurt. At one of the Meinhof demonstrations, somebody tossed a Molotov cocktail at a policeman and burned him nearly to death. Fischer and a dozen other radicals were arrested and jailed for two days, though no charges were ever lodged against them. Fischer was not especially famous at the time, outside of the radical left, and in later years, as he rose in national politics, not many people remembered that he had spent those days in jail or had been under any suspicion at all. Still, some people, the left-wing insiders, not to mention the policeman and his friends, did retain the memory. And in those first days of 2001, when Stern published the photographs from 1973, Meinhof's daughter, Rohl, revived the accusation against him. She insisted that Fischer did, in fact, bear a responsibility for the Molotov cocktail and the policeman's injuries.
A couple of participants in the radical movement from those days backed her up, too, and said that, in planning the particular demonstration in which the policeman was attacked, Fischer had never ruled out the use of Molotovs and may even have favored it. A retired colleague of the injured policeman was adamant about Fischer's responsibility. No one came up with any sort of indisputable confirmation. But Fischer was obliged to rise from his seat once again and, in his dignity as foreign minister, deny all connection to a very ugly event from long ago ("Definitiv nein!" he told Stern)—which would have been unpleasant under any circumstances but must have been doubly so in the light of the photographs, the five atrocious photographs that made him seem all too capable in his younger years of having organized a Molotov cocktail attack.
There was another accusation. Fischer was said to have tossed stones and Molotov cocktails during yet a different raucous demonstration, this one in 1975 at the Spanish Embassy—an angry protest against Generalissimo Franco and Spanish fascism. Fischer denied that accusation, too, though he did acknowledge through his spokesman at the Foreign Ministry that he had participated in the event, which had never been a secret anyway. The spokesman reminded the German public that demonstrating against Franco and fascism was nothing to be ashamed of. A good point: something to be proud of, at last!
Then another accusation: Fischer was accused of having attended a meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Algiers back in 1969, at which the PLO adopted a resolution to achieve final victory, which is to say, the destruction of Israel. That was not so good, and seemed triply bad for a future foreign minister of Germany, even if no one threw rocks or bombs. The ministry spokesman conceded that Fischer did attend the conference; but, doing his best to cope with one more embarrassing revelation, the spokesman made the mistake of adding that Fischer had spent only an hour there, which was like admitting to using marijuana but not to inhaling it. And, of course, the part about spending only an hour turned out to be untrue, and the spokesman, backtracking, had to acknowledge that, yes, Fischer had participated throughout. (Which no one should have doubted. The man is a born politician. He loves meetings.) And still more accusations from New Left days of yore came raining down on Joschka Fischer's respectable middle-aged head.
It was not instantly obvious what drove Bettina Rohl to deliver the photographs to Stern and to dredge up her several hair-raising accusations. I looked at different European papers during the course of the affair, and I found a certain amount of political speculation, as could have been expected. Fischer's enemies in the Bundestag and at Stern tended to be, as I say, worthies of the conservative cause, who must have taken a fine partisan pleasure in making life miserable for a Green foreign minister. Yet the complications of contemporary politics are such that, on the left, too, Fischer had his enemies, who may have regarded him with an even deeper loathing.
Fischer had entered the government in 1998 as part of what is called the Red-Green coalition, meaning the alliance of the very big Social Democratic Party, the ancient Reds (whose organization was founded in 1875), and the much smaller Greens (whose organization was founded in 1979). To have forced the powerful and venerable Social Democrats into a coalition was, from the Green point of view, a great victory, and Fischer's arrival at the foreign ministry was bound to arouse jubilant expectations from the hardworking party activists. But here was the leftwing difficulty. The Greens had made their way in German politics by sticking to their twin principles of ecology and anti-militarism. They were the enemies of the military policies of the United States, beginning in the days of President Reagan and advancing through the Gulf war of 1991 and onward to the present. Yet their year of political triumph, 1998, was not a happy one for the anti-militarist cause. The wars of Serbian nationalism had been getting grimmer and grimmer, and in 1998 the massacres took still another bad turn in Kosovo. NATO's involvement grew deeper and, from an anti-militarist perspective, more ominous. Many a Green looked to Fischer, as foreign minister, to oppose the NATO campaign, or at least to keep Germany, with its peaceful traditions in modern times, from taking part. But on matters of anti-militarism and NATO, Fischer was out of step with his own party. In his reasoning, the Serbian atrocities gnawed away at the pacifist logic. He looked at the ethnic persecutions, and came away thinking that military action was not such a bad idea, after all.
Fischer was filled with conviction on this theme. And when he got into office he took the fundamental Green commitment to anti-war principles, deftly heaved it overboard, and gave his official endorsement to Germany's participation in the NATO effort. A large number of Greens could only look at those ministerial actions and feel horribly betrayed. To have spent nearly twenty years building a new party devoted to anti-militarism, only to see its first foreign minister endorse military action by NATO, the imperialist alliance! That was galling.
At the Green convention in 1999, someone threw a bag of red ink at Fischer and broke his eardrum. Four hundred police officers had to guard him when he got up to address the convention. His own party, the eco-pacifist assemblage, was a howling mob. The man did not lack for political skill, and he managed to hang onto the convention's support. But there was no placating a good percentage of his opponents. What was to be done about that? Nothing, nothing. And so, when the accusations against Fischer came rolling down upon him in the early months of 2001, it was easy to imagine that motives from the left, anti-militarist and anti-NATO, and not just the traditional hostility of his enemies on the right, might have been at work.
Then again, the fury against Fischer might have wended its way into the press from the remote margins of German political life, from the very far left well beyond the respectable democratic radicalism of the Greens—the fury of ultra-militants who had remained in some way faithful to the legacy of Meinhof and her martyred guerrillas. Or perhaps the fury had its origin on the extreme right, from well beyond the respectable zones of Christian Democratic conservatism.
II.
But what did it mean in 2001, extreme right and extreme left? The ordinary political labels have gotten bollixed up in modern times, and not just in Germany. In poking around the Internet, I found my way to the electronic discussion center of the fans of the Baader-Meinhof Gang—they have their own website, naturally—and was interested to read about the curious case of Horst Mahler, one of the founders of the group back in 1970. Over the years, Mahler had slid down the corridor of extremist politics from left-wing terrorism into the circles of German neo-Nazism, where he set about promoting mad theories on Jewish themes. Such things did happen. And Mahler, as I discovered, entertained his own opinions about the Fischer affair. He made the argument that Ulrike Meinhof, had she lived, would have likewise slid over to the extreme right.
But in his view, as reported on the website, right-wing and left-wing counted for nothing as far as the behavior of Meinhof's daughter. The real animus against Fischer bubbled up instead from a daughter's anger at her inadequate mother, the prison martyr. Or else, as was more widely said, Rohl's anger at Fischer derived from a still vaguer resentment against the entire era of 1968—from the resentment that, on an earlier occasion, she had already described in the pages of Der Spiegel. For what was 1968 to Bettina Rohl?
It was the era that had deprived her of a childhood. Her mother, in the grip of the revolutionary manias of the time, had once tried to ship little Bettina and her sister to a Palestinian camp, only to have the girls' father, a publisher of left-wing (and somewhat pornographic) magazines, arrange to have them kidnapped en route and brought back to Germany—a horrible childhood event. Then the mother had gotten herself jailed, and had ended up dead—she suffered every tragedy of the era. As had the children, in their fashion.
And who was Joschka Fischer? Someone who had participated in the radical cause and gotten away scot-free; someone who managed to profit from every horrible thing that had taken place. This was the cause of Rohl's holy rancor, or so it was said. A victim's fury at a survivor. In any case, everyone could agree that, whatever her deepest motives might have been, Rohl had put a lot of vim and energy into her campaign. And no one could doubt that she had displayed a canny skill at inflicting the maximum personal damage, too—as if to prove that, with or without her famous mother, she was in her own right a real journalist.
One of her accusations pointed not at Fischer himself but slightly to his side, at an old roommate of his from the 1970s—another radical survivor, someone who had participated in nearly every phase of the movement, and had only managed to rise higher and higher in European life, and had suffered not one whit. This person was Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a well-known figure in Germany and all over Europe and beyond, even if, as a politician, he never achieved as lofty a post as Fischer. Cohn-Bendit was a man with an interesting childhood of his own. He was the son of German Jews, and he had spent his youth shuttling between West Germany and France. He attended university at Nanterre, outside Paris. And there, in the spring of 1968, he helped spark a series of student demonstrations, which sparked other demonstrations in Paris, which resulted, in May of that year, in a gigantic student uprising in Paris and all over France, which led in turn to a general strike by labor, which pretty much shut the country down for a while.
His hair was flaming red in those days, and he was witty and impish, and he became known as Danny the Red. He was the single best-known leader of the 1968 uprising, famous not just in France but everywhere in some degree, if only because the May uprising in Paris was the largest of the student uprisings anywhere in the world in that year, and because Paris was the capital of world revolution. Cohn-Bendit consequently had the experience of seeing himself elevated in a matter of weeks into the only person in any country who could claim to represent the generation of 1968 internationally, the human symbol of a worldwide seismic youth event—an odd personal fate for anyone to endure, an instant deification.
His legal citizenship, as it happened, was not French, but West German. And as soon as he made the mistake of stepping across the German border in 1968, the French authorities banished him from France. The leader of the French Communist Party, always a big enemy of the New Left, denounced Cohn-Bendit as a "German Jew," which infuriated his admirers, who were many. Indignant crowds marched through the streets of Paris chanting, "We are all German Jews!"—a touching slogan, and a fine display of loyalty to Danny the Red. (At a right-wing rally afterward, one of the slogans was "Cohn-Bendit—to Dachau!") But there was no bringing him back to France, not for many years. He moved to Frankfurt.
He also roamed around a bit, stirring up trouble here and there. I ran into him in Britain in 1970. He sat on a hilltop and directed a small regiment of young French leftists, plus myself as translator, who invaded an Isle of Wight rock festival in the name of anti-capitalism, free rock music, and anti-clericalism. (The anti-clericalism struck me as odd, but those were our reasons.) Cohn-Bendit, our leader, was a mischievous guy. Mostly he stayed in Frankfurt, though. He set up house with Fischer. And, ever militant, Cohn-Bendit and Fischer organized a group called Revolutioner Kampf, or Revolutionary Struggle, which was left-wing and counter-cultural both, a fixture of 1970s life in the happening districts of Frankfurt.
Fischer was the main leader of Revolutionary Struggle's militant political activities, and Cohn-Bendit of its counter-cultural side. Fischer led the revolutionary mob in the streets, and Cohn-Bendit directed the revolution in daily life. His main activity was to run a kindergarten. He spent two years at it. Running a kindergarten might sound like an oddly modest thing for a famous revolutionary to do. But kindergartens were a big project for the German New Left. The goal was nothing less than to perform radical surgery on the German national character. The traditional educational system in West Germany had followed the standard old-fashioned authoritarian model. And, in the New Left analysis, the standard model had succeeded all too well in times past at producing standard personalities—people who responded well to authority and knew how to give orders and how to take them, the kind of people who might grow up to be Nazis or to accept a government of Nazis without protesting. Good Germans, in a phrase. Authoritarian personalities.
So the New Left set out to construct a new kind of education—an antiauthoritarian education, beginning at the beginning, with the goal of creating antiauthoritarian personalities, people who would think for themselves and instinctively shrug off any attempt to impose a totalitarian domination. Sex education figured in the idea. The anti-authoritarian educators wanted to break down the sexual repression of earlier times—the sexual armor that, in their psychological figurings (with the help of Wilhelm Reich), had always surrounded the authoritarian personality. That was the idea behind the kindergarten campaign: the "anti-authoritarian kindergartens." The teachers wanted to encourage the healthy sexuality of little children.
The idea was more than German, to be sure. The notion of breaking down old-fashioned personality types, the idea that early education offers a fulcrum for moving mankind, the campaign to build new kindergartens and schools on radical new principles—this was a big impulse in the English left, too, on its anarchist side. It was a venerable notion: Rousseau, Godwin, Dewey. It was big in the United States. One of the national leaders of America's Students for a Democratic Society, Bill Ayers, began his radical career by organizing a proper elementary school—after which he hurled himself into the guerrilla campaign of the Weather Underground, after which, correcting himself, he hurled himself back into early childhood education.
In Frankfurt, Cohn-Bendit not only ran his kindergarten, he also wrote about it in a book directed at the French public that had so amiably chanted about being German Jews. The book was called Le Grand Bazar and it appeared in 1975. It was a loosely structured memoir of his life in the revolutionary movement, with chapters on the French student uprising, his own Jewish identity, his kindergarten, the objectionable nature of communism, and several other topics. It was full of the inflammatory phrases of the day. Then Le Grand Bazar faded from memory.
In the early months of 2001, though, with the photographs of Fischer circulating in Stern and the many accusations of violent leftism surrounding him and a scent of scandal rising on every side, Bettina Rohl craftily plucked one of those inflammatory passages from Cohn-Bendit's book, declared the passage to be an undiscovered new outrage, and offered it for a fee (a tacky move) to the press. She approached Liberation in Paris with her scoop. Liberation declined to take her up on it, partly because the newspaper's policy was not to pay for news scoops, and partly because the book in question had been published long ago and could be freely quoted by anyone, but mostly because the paper's correspondent read the passage and, by interpreting it the way Cohn-Bendit had plainly intended, failed to see any scoop at all. The Observer in England did go for Rohl's item, and ran the excerpt. Then the item was picked up by L'Express in France, the Bild Zeitung in Germany, La Repubblica in Italy, and other papers.
The excerpt described Cohn-Bendit's kindergarten and was intended to illustrate the atmosphere of non-repression—the lengths to which the kindergarten teacher would go in order to prevent his little wards from looking on sex with fear. Cohn-Bendit had written: "It happened to me several times that certain kids opened my fly and began to tickle me. I reacted differently according to circumstances, but their desire posed a problem to me. I asked them: `Why don't you play together? Why have you chosen me, and not the other kids?' But if they insisted, I caressed them even so."
In the context of the sexual liberation ideas of the 1970s, his larger point in writing those words was clear enough, and not without sense. He did explain in the book that, even in the most anti-authoritarian of kindergartens, children need instruction and cannot be allowed to do just as they please. He considered that adults ought to ponder the sexual questions long and hard, with regard to children. But that one sentence did make it seem that he himself was not exactly pondering anything. If you lifted that one passage from its context, CohnBendit could easily be made to look like a pedophile—like an adult having sex with children. And this horrendous insinuation, the suggestion that Joschka Fischer's roommate, Danny the Red, the spirit of 1968 itself, had been, in fact, a pedophilic creep of the first order, a child molester—this dreadful insinuation ascended into the scandal of the hour in the French newspapers and on television.
There was never any reason, none at all, to credit the accusation. A group of parents of the kindergartners in Frankfurt plus some of the children themselves, now grown up, made public statements in praise and in defense of the teacher Cohn-Bendit. Not one person stood up to denounce him or to lodge any personal complaint. Cohn-Bendit himself, the Cohn-Bendit of 2001, was apoplectic about the accusation. He acknowledged in his riposte that the passage in his book had been written carelessly, in the provocational mode of the day. It was, he said, a "literary exaggeration," stupid, foolish, and shocking. Everything about the New Left, even its descriptions of kindergarten life, had been meant to provoke the wrath of the bourgeoisie. But he stressed that, during the friskier days of New Left wildness, whenever someone did try to make a case for pedophilia, as occurred from time to time (in the form of "man-boy love"), he was one of the people who spoke up right away in disapproval—he and the feminists and just about nobody else.
Pedophilia, Cohn-Bendit pointed out, has always been a shameful reality of traditional family life—the traditional life that conceals abysmal behavior under a blanket of silence, ignorance, and patriarchal authority. Pedophilia is the kind of scandalous reality that the sexual liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s tried to eliminate by making sexuality into something to be discussed honestly, without shame—by creating an anti-authoritarian atmosphere in which crimes and abuses would no longer be covered up in the name of filial obedience. Those were not foolish arguments on his part.
Surely he was right in pointing out that sexual liberation in the 1970s has turned out to be--notwithstanding the excesses and even the crimes that were sometimes committed in its name—one of the grand social advances of modern times, for women especially. Nowadays people can talk openly about pedophilia and other sexual abuses and depredations, as was rarely, if ever, possible during the two million years before the sexual revolution. Knowledge advances, ignorance recedes. There might even have been something heroic about Cohn-Bendit's devotion to the kindergarten. What other leader of a mass European uprising has ever turned from leading a revolutionary crowd in the streets to running a kindergarten? The new kind of masculinity needed a living example of how to behave, and CohnBendit offered himself—someone unafraid to take up a role that had always been assigned to women. Any proposed revolution of daily life was going to depend on the willingness of men like him.
As it turned out, this particular accusation in the course of the Fischer affair, the insinuated charge against CohnBendit, got nowhere at all back in Germany. The kindergarten in Frankfurt and the parents who had sent their children there and the children themselves were too well-known, and their refutations proved decisive. Besides, the experiment in anti-authoritarian education was conducted on a big scale in Germany in the 1970s and afterward, and large numbers of Germans had spent their infant years waddling through the hallways of that experiment and had come away understanding its goals and its methods as well as the sillier dogmas and the fads—the essays of Adorno ornamenting every anti-authoritarian classroom, that sort of thing. Familiarity bred respect (and perhaps a tolerant smile). To hang Cohn-Bendit on the basis of a single badsounding sentence in a book that no one remembered anymore did seem more than a trifle opportunistic. Even some of the conservative politicians in Germany spoke up for Cohn-Bendit's probity.
In France, a number of people likewise rebutted the insinuation, and right away, too. The host of a book-chat show on French television recalled that CohnBendit had appeared on a panel in 1977 to discuss his book, and none of the other guests, not even the Catholic conservative, had thought to raise such an issue. It was pointed out that L'Express, which made such a convenient fuss over the accusation in 2001, had reviewed Cohn-Bendit's book when it originally came out and had found nothing objectionable at the time. And yet in France—and in other countries, too—the accusation about pedophilia, once it crept into the press, turned out to be a big event. Nasty journalists in the newspapers and at the television studios felt they could attach any sort of horrendous story or fantasy to the famous face from 1968, and have a swell time doing it, and feel no shame at all. Among journalists, such are the joys. Besides, newspapers must be sold and viewers attracted.
III.
But the main reason the smear about Cohn-Bendit spread in France and in a few other countries had to do with something more than yellow journalism. Serge July, the editor of Liberation (and a Maoist from the good old days), put his finger on that reason right away. The insinuation lingered because, in France and in some other countries, it had lately become fashionable to hold up for inspection the radicalism of the period around 1968, and to search out the wildest episodes, some of which were wild enough, and to identify the radicalism as a whole with its most extreme moments. And it had become fashionable to take the social and cultural problems of our own time and to blame those problems on the radicalism of the earlier period, as exemplified in its extremes.
This particular fashion may sound familiar to American ears, but in Europe in the later 1990s it acquired a tonality all its own, without any American echo or equivalent. The new tonality consisted of—this was the strange part—youthfulness, instead of age. There was a stylish young people's pining for a long-ago era of order and hierarchy, when every person occupied his allotted place, and rules were rules, and culture and language and relations between the sexes were properly fixed, and not, as they are today, so damnably fluid. The young people who indulged in that particular nostalgia yearned, in short, for the 1950s. (They could hardly yearn for the 1940s.) And since nostalgic yearning always turns out to be, on its obverse, an indignant protest, the people who pined for the 1950s ended up raging against the 1960s, amusing themselves with indignant recitations of every scandalous outrage that was committed—and even a few that were not committed—by their own parents and older siblings.
You could describe their complaints as a right-wing reaction. That may overstate the case, though. Mostly the young reactionaries wanted to stamp their feet. As July pointed out, hardly anyone actually wanted to roll back the social and cultural achievements of the New Left era. To send women back to the kitchen, to resume the persecution of homosexuals, to return to the days of secrecy about child molesting, to resurrect the old superstitions about race, or to reconstruct the European imperialisms (to name a few of the ancient customs and social structures that had been overthrown in the course of the New Left era)—no one seriously wanted to do any of that. To undo the reforms of an earlier age is always possible, if enough people feel suitably motivated; but the nostalgics of the 1990s merely wanted to reel with horror, and in that way to fend off the anxieties of the present age.
The writer Michel Houellebecq had a big success in 1998 in France, then in Germany and elsewhere, with a novel about the horrors of the 1960s called The Elementary Particles (which came out in the United States two years later). And his blood-curdling portraits of the radical weirdness of yore, combined with a sentimental yearning for 1950s-style family life, combined with his ever-popular scenes of modern sex orgies, accounted for Houellebecq's success. Disgusting sexual cruelty in the name of liberation, cult manias, radical murders: his book hit every note of 1960s mayhem. The Fischer affair merely seemed to recapitulate in real life what Houellebecq had already imagined in his novel, down to the figure of Bettina Rohl, the distressed child of a New Left terrorist, who seemed to have stepped from his own pages. (If she had only read a bit further in Cohn-Bendit's Le Grand Bazar, she might have dug up a few sentences about group sex, too, and The Elementary Particles would have replayed itself in full.)
In the early months of 2001, then, it hardly mattered if any particular accusation against Fischer or Cohn-Bendit turned out to be unfounded. Either way, true or false, the accusations afforded a satisfying pleasure to anyone who felt a nostalgia for the excellent social order of long ago, and a resentment at the radicals who had so rudely overthrown the order in question. That was true in Germany just as in France. Feelings were expressed, even if truths were not told. The accusations constituted, as July put it, a "settling of accounts with the generation of 1968." And so the accusations and even the smears spread from Germany to France and outward to Britain and Italy and, in some degree, around the world, on the basis of a cultural anxiety that had nothing to do with the petty ideological and local concerns of Greens and Christian Democrats and other politicians in Germany who fretted over the career of the statesman Joschka Fischer.
And then, having floated upward into the airy zones of cultural anxiety, the Fischer affair suddenly sank into the concrete terrain of law. The legal issue came up at the trial of a New Left terrorist named Hans-Joachim Klein, who happened to be an old friend of Fischer's and Cohn-Bendit's in Frankfurt, from their days in Revolutionary Struggle in the early and middle 1970s.
The Fischer affair was a tale of people who had undergone life changes so vast as to be incomprehensible to outsiders. And among those many left-wing changelings, Klein was the king of kings. As a young man he had worked as an auto mechanic. He used to repair Cohn-Bendit's car. He followed Fischer to street demonstrations. He was one of the militants running to join Fischer in the grainy photographs from 1973—a tough character, not at all loath to mix it up with what we Americans used to call "the pigs." The terrorist wave rose in Germany, and Klein was carried aloft on the foam. When Sartre responded to Meinhof's letter by agreeing to visit Baader in the Stammheim prison, Klein served as his driver.
But he was no mere chauffeur. By then Klein was a secret soldier in a guerrilla organization called the Revolutionary Cells, which was allied loosely with the Red Army Fraction and more tightly with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. One of the master achievements of the Revolutionary Cells was to help coordinate the Palestinian attack on the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. A New Leftist from Frankfurt made the arrangements. And in 1975 Klein and the Revolutionary Cells joined with Carlos the Jackal, the Argentine terrorist, to attack, in the name of "the Arab revolution," a meeting of OPEC oil ministers in Vienna. Three people were killed. Klein was shot in the stomach and the shoulder, but he and Carlos and some of the others made their escape in a plane to Algeria.
As time went on, though, Klein reflected on what he had done. And having reflected, he made the grave decision of deserting his terrorist comrades. He renounced his own activities and denounced the terrorist doctrine. He fled underground from the underground, hiding equally from the police and the Revolutionary Cells and all the other terrorists, who would surely have killed him, given the chance. (There was a case in West Germany of left-wing terrorists murdering one of their deserters.) Klein sought out his old friends who, unlike himself, had never taken the plunge into armed activity, and he pleaded his case, and they helped him. Cohn-Bendit was one of those people, together with the French "New Philosopher" Andre Glucksmann, who had been a well-known visitor at Fischer's and CohnBendit's Revolutionary Struggle house in Frankfurt. Cohn-Bendit and Glucksmann and the handful of other people who aided Klein rather admired him for having reconsidered his violence and for speaking out against his own comrades, the terrorists.
His friends helped him to settle in France. Sometimes they paid his rent. They tried to keep up his spirits. He lived in a little Norman village. He even wrote a book, and he granted a clandestine interview to Cohn-Bendit for a television documentary. In 1998, though, just three days before he was going to turn himself in under an arrangement that Cohn-Bendit had helped to broker, Klein was tracked down by the French police, who delivered him to the German authorities. His trial in Germany took place, by unhappy coincidence, just as the Fischer affair got under way in January 2001. He was sentenced to nine years.
But before the trial reached its end, Fischer was called to testify, not in his capacity as foreign minister but as a private citizen. He was asked about his relationship to Klein back in New Left times. Fischer explained that in those days he tried to talk Klein out of joining the terrorists. And when Fischer had finished making his statement, he walked over to Klein in his defendant's chair and shook the man's hand. The handshake seemed innocent enough, given that, as Fischer had just testified, Klein was an old friend, and the old friend had long ago denounced his own crimes and was now about to expiate them. Even so, next day in the Bundestag, Fischer was asked to explain himself.
There was worse. In the course of his testimony, Fischer was accused of having harbored people from the Red Army Fraction in his house. The accusation infuriated him. He told the court: "Next we will hear that Daniel Cohn-Bendit and I organized World War III in that house!" He wanted to draw a thick line between his own leftism and the terrorists—to show that in those days you could have been a revolutionary militant and still not have had any truck with murderers and kidnappers. But Fischer's insistence on this point turned out to be untrue. A woman named Margrit Schiller, who had served jail time for her connections to the Red Army Fraction, wrote an autobiography in 1999, in which she plainly stated that she had spent a "few days" in the early 1970s living in the Revolutionary Struggle house. She visited the house out of curiosity. She wanted to see who these Revolutionary Struggle people were. She did see them, including Fischer himself. This awkward bit of information emerged in the aftermath of Fischer's testimony, and Fischer had to acknowledge that Margrit Schiller's assertion must have been correct.
The discrepancy did not seem especially damning. All kinds of visitors were always traipsing through the house in Frankfurt. Abbie Hoffman was there; Jerry Rubin came to visit. Who could remember every last person who had ever stopped by? But the news about a Red Army Fraction woman only managed to underline yet again how close Fischer, in his younger days, had been to the terrorists. And the revelation gave an opening to the prosecutor at the Klein trial. The prosecutor had already shown a nasty hostility to Fischer during his testimony; he had even been rebuked for it by the judge. Now the prosecutor charged Fischer with perjury. The Bundestag was put in the position of having to decide whether to lift Fischer's ministerial immunity and allow him to be tried on the perjury charge.
So Fischer faced a legal problem, and not just a public relations problem or a political problem, in the wake of those many accusations and scandals and insinuations. And with one scandal piling on another, the photographs, the resurrected accusations, the new accusations, the denials, the retractions, the outright smears, the undeniable acquaintance with more than one authentic bomb-thrower, and finally the perjury charge—with all of that, the general public was bound to gaze on Fischer with a nervous apprehension. What kind of man could this Joschka Fischer be? People did have to wonder.
Fischer's evolution was plainly a lot stranger and more extreme than might have seemed to be the case. He was not just a peacenik politician who in the fullness of time had metamorphosed into a NATO supporter—as had been widely believed, given his origins in the Greens. His political origins reached back to the era before there was any such thing as a Green. He was a street-fighting militant, someone on the fringe of terrorist New Leftism, a rough-and-ready revolutionary, who then became a Green, and then a NATO supporter, someone who had changed his colors not once but twice—or who knew how many times?—someone whose history was populated with tough and sinister characters from the left-wing underworld.
IV.
Didn't the several mysteries of his past political life suggest (as his political enemies insisted) that Fischer might, in fact, be a man without character? Didn't his political zigzags reveal a Machiavelli of the worst sort? A man desperate for power, someone who would adopt any position whatsoever, if only it would bring him what he wanted? That was how Fischer began to seem in other countries, including in our own far-away part of the world. Even before the scandal broke, Fischer was presented in The New York Times Magazine by the German pundit Josef Joffe as "a bit of a Forrest Gump," someone whose "business" is "self-reinvention"—which sounded friendly enough, until you stopped to think about it.
Then the waves of scandal rolled in, and Roger Cohen of the Times, one of the paper's most astute correspondents, duly reported in the news section that Fischer was, in fact, "a man of startling changes, not least in his views on the use of force," which was certainly true. But the startling changes were bound to arouse a few worries about the man, especially if he was Forrest Gump. Some of those worries cropped up on the Times editorial page, whose editors felt sufficiently upset by the incriminating photographs and by some of the accusations to devote a small commentary to the affair. The Times editors concluded that Fischer, in their words, "should be allowed to continue serving his country"—which was not too surprising, given that his foreign policy had been controversial in Germany precisely in the degree to which it coincided with that of the United States. Not quite satisfied, however, the editors added the cautionary phrase "barring more damaging revelations"—as if one more telling photograph, or one persuasive proof that he did tell people to throw Molotov cocktails back in 1976, might have tipped the balance against him.
And who could blame the editors for having registered their careful reservation? For if Fischer were, in truth, a man without principles, a man whose history consisted of shadows and hidden crimes and whose business was self-reinvention, there would have been reason enough to fret over the power that he could wield from his desk at the foreign ministry in Berlin. But it was also obvious that, beneath the day-to-day politics, a deeper worry was all along trailing through this affair.
It was a nagging worry about the radicalism of the years around 1968 and its crazier episodes. Even some of us who went through a few of those episodes can hardly believe, looking back, that such things could have taken place. Might not a few dark after-effects from those days have lingered into the present? You could find yourself worrying that question even without pining for the arcadia of the 1950s. Out of the dark violence of the student left of three decades ago, might not a faintly criminal stain, a shiftiness, maybe a touch of ruthlessness, have crept across certain personalities and left an indelible mark?
The worry went well beyond poor old Fischer at the foreign ministry. In Germany under the Red-Green coalition, a greater number of veterans of the New Left had risen to power than in any other country among the big Western powers—risen through the Greens or else through the Social Democrats, where some of the New Left Marxists, having abandoned their revolutionary leftism, eventually found a home. Gerhard Schroder, the chancellor, used to be something of a radical socialist himself, before making his way into the safely popular regions of Social Democracy's "Third Way." Such was the long march through the institutions.
So Fischer, in all his flashiness, proved to be a representative figure in these matters. That was why it was reasonable to think of the Fischer affair as the trial of the generation of 1968—to see in it a challenge to an enormous cohort of people who had fashioned their personal characters in the years of New Left rebellion. And it did seem, for a while, that the challenge was going to prevail, and that Fischer would sooner or later have to accept the price of his young man's wildness, hang his head in shame, and submit his resignation, just as his enemies were dearly hoping.
But not so fast. The letters pages of German newspapers began to fill with dispatches from middle-aged worthies from the business world and the learned professions who confessed that they, too, had waged the revolution back in the years around 1968, and then had grown up and had sanded down the sharp edge of their views, just as Fischer had done, and Germany's foreign minister ought not to be persecuted for what happened long ago. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a conservative paper, published an essay by the poet Charles Simic shaking his head over the hypocrisies of conservative indignation. If only Fischer had become a stockbroker or a college professor, Simic observed, nobody at all would have complained about his left-wing background. If only he had become, like so many ex-radicals from the 1960s, a right-wing newspaper columnist! The most amazing vote of support came from Fischer's own victim, the white-helmeted policeman in the photographs from 1973, whose name turned out to be Rainer Marx. Fischer telephoned Marx to apologize for the gruesome beating in the Frankfurt parking lot, and Marx found admiring words to say about Fischer's conduct of foreign policy. Nor did Fischer seem to be collapsing in the polls.
But there was something about Fischer's ability to survive the scandal that aroused still other worries, nameless and deep, touching on matters well beyond the mayhem of the New Left. For what might it say about Germany if, faced with some hair-raising accusations and the dreadful photographs, the German people ended up supporting their foreign minister with more enthusiasm instead of less? What would it mean if the worse Fischer seemed, the more he was applauded? Americans have had some experience with that kind of question. The Clinton sex scandal hit its stride in the same year that Fischer became foreign minister, and week by week Clinton's personal behavior was revealed in ever more pornographic detail. Most Americans seemed to recognize intuitively that their president's sex life had followed an ancient if undistinguished tradition of husbandly wandering, and had no bearing on state policy or the fate of the nation, and was finally not the public's business—which was why Clinton's popular ratings remained high, and rose even higher when his persecutors had their say.
Yet Clinton's conservative enemies, some of them, saw in his behavior something much more worrisome. They saw a shadow of the 1960s and its radical subversion of (as they imagined it) basic morality, a left-wing undermining of eternal principles of behavior, a menace to civilization. The right-wing accusation against the radicalism of the 1960s has always been a bit more shrill and intense in the United States than in Europe, and as the Clinton scandals unfolded, the conservatives in America grew ever more upset, not just at the sinning president but at the all-tolerant American public. What could it mean, the conservatives had to ask, that Clinton's legal situation was tottering and his public support was firming up? His popularity seemed to hint at something monstrous: that America had been corrupted in its ethics by the horrible radicals of the 1960s. The American public seemed to have sunk into a swamp of moral indifference, even depravity. Right and wrong had disappeared into a marshy haze. And the conservatives grew wide-eyed in astonishment and horror.
The deeper worry that ran through the Fischer affair had something in common with that conservative American fear, only in a German version that seemed infinitely more sinister. Some of the commentaries on the Fischer affair made the quiet suggestion that, if Germany's foreign minister were shown to be a man without character, and if the Germans ended up applauding him anyway, as did seem to be happening, it was because, in Germany, any number of people were living in the shadow of their own shameful political pasts, and the country was long ago shorn of its ability to make moral judgments, and nothing was to be done about it. Such was the implication, quietly hinted. Germany: a country incapable of looking things square in the face. Germany: a country unwilling to confront its own history. And, to be sure, in Germany's case, something in that suggestion did catch the eye.
Watching the Fischer affair unfold through the early months of 2001 was like studying a painting where your attention first focuses on the main subject at the center of the canvas, and then you begin to notice the background and how interesting it is, and then you notice, reflected in a piece of metal or seen through a window, a second background, which you can barely see. The main subject in the Fischer affair was a simple political scandal of the present day involving a well-regarded government minister. But the scandal was set against a background consisting of events from twenty-five or thirty years ago, from the time of the New Left. The Fischer affair invited us, even required us, to make a few judgments about that background.
But the New Left background turned out, on closer inspection, to have a background of its own, barely visible, which was the Germany of long before. Not the generation of 1968, but the generation of 1938. Not the New Left, but the Nazis. The whole difficulty in making sense of the affair was to figure out what possible tale or narrative could account for all three of those elements: today's foreign minister in the foreground, the New Left behind him, and, half-hidden, the background of the background, yesterday's yesterday, bathed in darkest shadow. V. Everyone knows what the Nazism of the 1930s and 1940s was. But what was the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, in its motives, instincts, and goals, in its spirit? The decades come and go, and on that question no consensus has been achieved, none at all, not in Europe and not in America. That was why the Fischer affair went leaping from country to country, arousing different controversies in each new place. It was mad cow disease in the form of an argument about the past. It turned out to be a rather useful argument, too. Questions were raised; perhaps a few lessons were learned. And what were those lessons? I will give my faraway, trans-Atlantic interpretation.
The New Left was a young people's movement motivated by fear. Naturally, not just by fear. New Leftists all over the world knew very well that, in the decades after World War II, European imperialism was steadily collapsing around the world and certain kinds of social progress were advancing nicely in the Western countries, and might go on advancing, too, given a proper left-wing push. Utopian cheerfulness was a sunbeam that fell here and there. Yet fear swallowed all. It was a fear that, at least in the Western countries, social progress rested on a lie, a fear that prosperity was theft, and Western wealth was Third World exploitation; a fear that Western civilization comprised a system of manipulation designed to mislead its own people and everyone else—an iron cage cleverly designed to resemble the open air of freedom.
The social optimism of the New Left drew on visible realities of world history, and so, too, did the fear. New Leftists all over the world looked at the United States. They saw that America's ancient prejudices against blacks had come under challenge. But the spectacle of America trying to reform itself succeeded only in revealing how persistent were the ancient prejudices, and therefore how limited and false must be America's claim on democratic virtue. New Leftists gazed also at Vietnam. The fighting there had the look of a colonial war in an extremely ugly version—a war no less racist under the Americans than under the French imperialists, except with a Madison Avenue smarminess ("defense of the free world") and a terrifying industrial face. American bomber planes overhead and cone-hatted rice farmers down below made an unbearable spectacle. And the smarmy slogans together with the old-fashioned race hatreds and the technological ghastliness—all of this aroused a dread, finally, that pointed to the terrors of the past.
It was a fear, in sum, that in World War II, fascism, and more specifically Nazism, had not been defeated after all—a fear that Nazism, by mutating, had continued to thrive into the 1950s and 1960s and onward, always in new disguises. It was a fear that Nazism had grown into a modern system of industrial rationality geared to irrational goals—a Nazism of racial superstitions committing the same massacres as in the past, a Nazism declaiming a language of democracy and freedom that had no more human content than the old-fashioned rhetoric of Lebensraum and Aryan superiority. And so the New Left in its youthful anxiety found its way to an old and mostly expired panic from its parents' generation, and bent over it, and fanned the dead embers, and breathed on them, and watched aghast as the ancient flames leaped up anew.
In each country where the New Left happened to flourish, the revived panic over a newly discovered, cleverly disguised, still-flourishing Nazism seemed to be confirmed by strictly local circumstances, each country in its own fashion. France in the early 1960s kept trembling on the brink of a right-wing coup d'etat, and right-wing bombs exploded in central Paris, and French soldiers and police committed massacres and atrocities in Algeria, and a black cloud of those events hung over France well into the 1970s. In Italy, the New Leftists looked at their own neighborhoods and schools and even at their own families and saw with perfect accuracy that the social structures and cultural habits and ways of thought from Mussolini times had merely been covered over, as with a drop cloth. But no one gazed at the everyday vistas before their eyes with more pain and anger than the New Leftists of West Germany.
The new leftists there could see all too clearly that West Germany's conservative parties were comfortably maintaining quite a few continuities with right-wing customs of the past, and that big-time industrial figures from Nazi times were big-time industrial figures still, and that society had not entirely changed hands. Even the gas chambers retained a patriotic luster in the eyes of many a knuckleheaded West German curmudgeon, such that when the New Leftists marched in the streets, here and there an ornery old burgher could be counted on to mutter, "You should go to the gas chambers!"—more or less the way that in the United States some Neanderthal throwback to the McCarthy era would always be heckling, "Go back to Russia!" (And we Americans thought we had it bad.) In most countries, when the New Leftists described their enemies as Nazis, they knew that Nazism was a figure of speech. But West Germany was beyond metaphor.
The New Leftists there noticed that even the socialists had made their peace with German society, and that no one in the Social Democratic Party seemed to be trying too hard to root out the holdovers from Nazi times. Such were their observations. Maybe they were unjust. Sometimes they were on the mark. Of the many crimes committed by the Red Army Fraction, the most famous of all was the cold-blooded execution of Hans-Martin Schleyer, the president of the West German employers' federation, who turned out to have been a top SS officer in Prague during the Nazi occupation. And with a disguised Nazism apparently in command at home and across the Western world circa 1968, the need for an extremely radical resistance seemed to cry out from every stone. What was New Leftism, then? It was—it pictured itself as—Nazism's opposite and nemesis: the enemy of the real Nazism, the Nazism that had survived Nazism, the Nazism that was built into the foundations of Western life. And how did the New Left intend to act on that idea, with what tools and what ideas?
The commentators on Fischer and his photographs and his terrorist acquaintances, in looking back on those years, tended to shrink the New Left and its practical and philosophical quandaries into a straightforward argument about violence and non-violence—about tactics, by and large. And, having divided the movement along tactical lines, the commentators wanted to know: was Fischer in his hotheaded youth a good New Leftist, meaning non-violent, or (as the photographs and the accusations made seem likely) a bad New Leftist? But those questions, asked head-on, were never going to shed much light on the man himself or on the movement. This was because New Leftism in its fear and its panic was always a super-emotional movement, and the charged sentiments undid any chance for lucid discussion, and the arguments for violence and non-violence kept slipping illicitly into one another's arms, though you wouldn't think it possible.
In our own country, to cite a humbling example, some of the most notoriously violent street protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s, during the mass mobilizations against the war in Vietnam, were led by the die-hard opponents of all violence whatsoever—by militants of absolute pacifism who, in their Christian zeal, chose to stand shoulder to shoulder with the helmeted warriors of sidewalk mayhem. And the helmeted warriors ran into the street and did what even the pacifists expected them to do. Were the pacifists good and the window-smashers bad? You may think so, but those people were arm-in-arm, and their differences shriveled at times to such tiny proportions as to seem mere variations in style, the pious and the polite over here, the blasphemous and the rude over there, each complicit with the other: good cop, bad cop.
The truly fundamental debates within the New Left, the arguments that really mattered about the crypto-Nazism of modern life and how to confront it, the arguments that finally did lead to violence or that led away—those arguments broke down along lines that, in their origins, had very little to do with tactics. They were arguments about worldviews, about what it meant to be a leftist and what sort of world the left wanted to create—philosophical arguments, you could say. Those particular arguments tended to remain somewhat muted in the early years of the New Left, when tempers were relatively cool and the student movement was content to remain a student movement.
But the heat rose season by season, and by 1969 or thereabouts the New Left had lost any sense of balance that it might once have had—lost its balance because the Vietnam War had intensified and the anti-colonial movement seemed about to erupt in social and racial cataclysms here and there around the world, and because a good many New Leftists had by then undergone their own unhappy run-ins with the police, which led to dizzy spells of rage and tantrum. And the movement lost its old tranquility because many a simple-souled activist wanted to make the transition from student to grown-up and stop fiddling around—wanted to put together an adult movement capable of wrestling the old society to the ground. VI. In each country around the world, some of the central figures from the student ranks, having grown older and more frustrated, set out to do just that, mostly by trying to organize a full-scale revolutionary movement, something that could no longer be described as a young person's merry carnival. Only what could that mean in the world of 1969 and the early 1970s? A revolutionary movement? In what fashion? In the Western countries the New Left, stroking its chin, contemplated three main alternatives.
The crudest of those alternatives, the least imaginative, was simply to revert to the old-fashioned sectarian Marxism of the 1930s and to go about fighting Nazism in exactly the way that people had done in the past, by organizing disciplined, Leninist structures based on obedience, dedication, and self-sacrifice, the dream words of the Great Depression, and in this manner to sink into a sepia-toned memory of long ago. Leftism, too, can be a nostalgia cult. (Leftism may be the greatest nostalgia cult of all.) Resurrecting the 1930s turned into quite an enormous campaign around the world. Even in the United States, where the Marxist and Leninist traditions were venerable but never especially strong, some fifteen thousand New Leftists are estimated to have enlisted in the minuscule retro-Marxist sects, Trotskyist or Stalinist (though the Stalinists called themselves Maoists), which is no small number, if you consider that enlisting meant accepting the rigors of party discipline and not just sending in a dues payment or showing up at a meeting now and then.
I do not know exactly how many people embarked on that sort of project in West Germany, but the figures would have been larger, much larger. The yearning for a heroic Marxist past—for the heroic past that had failed in Germany to be sufficiently heroic, that had failed to beat down the Nazi challenge—became irresistible in the German student movement. Rosa Luxemburg, the martyr, became a goddess. And the students were drawn to old-fashioned Marxism for another reason. The New Left in West Germany had originally taken shape in response to the Federal Republic's banning in 1956 of the West German Communist Party, a political event that allowed the students to feel that a heritage from the past had been denied them: the heritage that was flowering (they liked to imagine) in the part of Germany that was struggling against the Nazi legacy, in the morally superior part, the egalitarian and civilized part—in the other part, that is: in East Germany.
The principal west german student movement happened to be called SDS (which, coincidentally, were also the initials of the principal American organization of the New Left). In 1969, under the pressure of the revolutionary mood and the worldwide student uprising, the German SDS dissolved. The students from that organization, in their search for an adult politics, went about forming any number of brand-new Marxist-Leninist parties—a new party in every city, it sometimes seemed. That became a big tendency in West Germany, bigger there than in France and the other countries of the West.
And yet retro-Marxism was never New Leftism's main impulse. A much larger number of people took up the second alternative, a Marxism that was distinctly of the 1960s and 1970s: the Marxism of Castro, Che, Ho, and Mao, mixed with a few doctrines of the Frankfurt School. This was a modern Marxism, free of retro touches. The people who took it up sometimes went about organizing militant parties of their own, but mostly they cultivated their radical aspirations in a cheerfully provisional mood, awaiting the arrival of the true, well-organized revolutionary party of the future, and meanwhile biding their time in the agreeable fashion of the young. "Please, God, make me chaste, but not yet!" Modern Marxism was for this reason mostly a left-wing milieu without formal structures or central commands or any way of coordinating itself—a big milieu, though.
As for New Leftism's third alternative, it was fundamentally anarchist—a libertarian impulse that sometimes drew on the nineteenth-century pamphlets of Bakunin and Kropotkin, sometimes on the early-twentieth-century writings of Anton Pannokoek and the councilists, sometimes on the contemporary but equally obscure pamphlets of the "autonomists" in Italy and the Socialism or Barbarism group and the Situationists in France. But most often it drew on nothing at all, on a breeze blowing through the university neighborhoods and on rumors from the California counterculture.
The libertarianism was typically less than libertarian. It was anarchist-leaning—or, as the French say, anarchisant—cultural more than political, oblivious to economics, a libertarianism under constant siege by the doctrines of the retro-Marxists and especially of the modern Marxists—a libertarianism that turned out to be, as a result, blithely inconsistent. The anarchisants of the New Left kept falling for the Third Worldist fantasies of the modern Marxists, kept wanting to celebrate Ho or some other tropical Communist as a hero of the libertarian cause—an odd thing to do. The anarchisants spoke about freedom and personal autonomy and, at the same time, nodded respectfully at the self-sacrifice of Che Guevara, whose unmentionable achievement was to have established Soviet-style prison camps in Cuba. An anarchist salt and a Marxist pepper, sprinkled together.
Cohn-Bendit spoke for this third alternative. His own libertarianism was more sophisticated, and therefore more frankly anti-Communist, than that of almost everyone else in the New Left outside of the tiny, old-school anarchist sects. He could draw on a solid acquaintance with the old-time anarchist groups and the revolutionary tradition that in France went back to Proudhon, a venerable heritage. And the venerable heritage did have its wisdom, which was available to him even as a college student. Lenin's crimes were a revelation to everyone in the left-wing world, it sometimes seemed, but they were no revelation to the heirs of French anarchism. They already knew the awful truth.
Cohn-Bendit knew better than to sigh for the Popular Front. He was not a man for Mao buttons. He was a lot clearer than Fischer on these questions, back in the New Left days. (Cohn-Bendit has explained that, when he arrived in Frankfurt after his expulsion from France, he was surprised by how great the Stalinist influence on the German left was, by how little the German radicals knew about the true nature of communism.) The phrase "visceral anti-communism" would have sounded terrible, even fascistic, in the ears of many a person in the movement; but Cohn-Bendit was happy with the phrase and applied it to himself. He filled his writings with all kinds of angry denunciations of the Soviet Union and Lenin and the Marxist-Leninist political tradition. Le Grand Bazar, the book that got him in so much trouble in the early months of 2001, was largely an antiCommunist tract.
Then again, in the spirit of inconsistency, even Cohn-Bendit made himself at home with all kinds of people who could never have postulated anti-communism as a New Left principle. Those were his limitations. Or perhaps those were the limitations of the movement: CohnBendit would have cut himself off from an enormous number of people if he had insisted on anti-Communist principles at every moment. He was a great fan of the freak scene in the United States, which he instinctively knew to be anarchist at heart, allergic to bureaucracies, allergic to anything like a Marxist-Leninist centralized organization—a movement devoted to individual expression and to the expansion of personal freedom in every possible dimension, plus a few other dimensions. The freak scene in America was surely the biggest of all the libertarian currents around the world in those years, and its size and friskiness excited his enthusiasm. America's freaks and Hollywood's Westerns were a sort of ideal for him. He recommended their virtues in Le Grand Bazar. But then, America's freaks were just as inconsistent as anyone else among the New Left libertarians around the world. You could see the confusion in someone such as Abbie Hoffman, whose level of education in matters of left-wing lore was fairly low, and who therefore tended to be rather gullible about Third World communism. Hopelessly gullible, in fact. Hoffman was an anarchist who knew zero about anarchism.
No single phrase denoted the New Left's libertarian current around the world. The word that Fischer liked to use in West Germany (as I see from an interview that he gave to Cohn-Bendit back in the mid-1980s) was the humorously clunky "anarcho-Mao-spontex"--an expressive phrase covering all bases. "Anarcho" meant the old tradition of the anarchist movements of the past. "Mao" meant an imaginary Mao—a Mao who, unlike the real Mao, was not a totalitarian. "Spontex" meant "spontaneist"—against formal organizations and against the bureaucratic and military discipline of the Marxist sects. Or, abbreviating, the doublyhyphenated phrase could be rendered as "sponti," which was German for what we Americans meant by "freak," more or less.
The "sponti scene" in Frankfurt meant the housing squatters whom Fischer used to lead around the streets, together with the "alternative" journals such as Cohn-Bendit's Pflasterstrand, or "Under the Pavement, the Beach!" The sponti scene meant the teachers at the "anti-authoritarian" schools, the street-corner layabouts, the politicized dope-smokers, and the avant-garde in the arts, except for the people who could more comfortably fit under a label of conventional Marxist—a big scene, block after block in Frankfurt and Berlin, the sponti capitals.
I do not mean to suggest that those three grand tendencies of the New Left, post-1968—retro-Marxists, modern Marxists, inconsistent libertarians—kept themselves in neatly separated columns. Events and fads came in torrents, and atop the waves people bobbed about from one tendency to another. Still, the debates that went on within the New Left, the crucial argument over violence and non-violence, had to take place within categories of thought that were shaped by those fluid tendencies. The outside world sometimes had a little trouble in making sense of the New Left for that reason.
On the topic of violence—back to that now—it was a convention of the bourgeois press in the late 1960s and 1970s to take the notorious old label of "anarchist" and paste it across every sort of left-wing scuffle, especially the acts of terror. A volume of clips from The New York Times lies before me as I write, and I see the headlines and the phrases: "Anarchist Leaders Seized in Frankfurt" (announcing the 1972 arrest of Andreas Baader and three other comrades of the Red Army Fraction). Or this, from the same year: "Miss Meinhof, thirty-seven years old, has been considered the leading ideologist of an anarchist group calling itself the Red Army Fraction...."
But the Red Army Fraction was not an anarchist group, nor was anarchism a main inspiration for New Left violence. A minor inspiration, yes. The June 2nd Movement in West Germany (which kidnapped a Christian Democratic politician), the Angry Brigade in Britain, and the Direct Action group in France were armed action groups that could plausibly claim an anarchist background. Some of the people in the Black Liberation Army in the United States (which came out of the Black Panthers) likewise invoked an anarchist origin. Anarchism's share of the violence of the New Left was, even so, strictly minimal. The bourgeois press had it wrong. The true inspiration for the guerrilla or terrorist groups on the New Left was overwhelmingly Marxist—not in the retro-style of the traditional Marxist organizations (traditional Marxism, dating back to Marx, always regarded terrorism with absolute disdain), but in the modern style.
The modern Marxists looked on life in the Western countries as hopelessly tainted and on Western society as inherently dreadful. They subscribed to the economic analyses of dependency theory, according to which the Western exploitation of everybody else around the world appears to be unavoidable, owing simply to the laws of economic survival under capitalism, and not to some streak of cruelty or thoughtlessness that could be overcome. The modern Marxists, having studied their Frankfurt School texts, saw in Western culture an impermeable wall of total oppression. Hopelessly exploitative in economic matters, hopelessly mendacious and manipulative in cultural matters—that was Western society. What could anyone do but heave a bomb and hope for the best? A proper bomb might blow a hole in the Western web of total oppression.
Some people did manage not to draw those particular conclusions. Herbert Marcuse himself stood up against the Red Army Fraction, and did it in The New York Times to boot, just in case anyone might fail to notice what position he was taking. Still, the terrorist logic, such as it was, drew on a Marcusean social criticism: the criticism that saw no hope at all in Western society. There was another line of argument: guerrilla action seemed a useful way to support the Third World liberation fighters, who were guerrillas themselves. "Be like Che," the Fidelista slogan, meant that you too should die a warrior. Then, too, in the case of the Irish and Basque terrorists and a few other people fighting miniature wars of national liberation, violence offered an encouraging sign that Ireland or the Basque country or some other benighted province of the West might be able to slip away into the Third World, where the sunny rays of a beautiful social revolution were far more likely to dawn.
Such were modern Marxism's guerrilla arguments. They had the curious effect of leading the guerrillas and the people who supported them to look sympathetically on the Soviet Union, even if without much enthusiasm. The armed Marxist organizations in the Western countries, if they intended to be at all serious, did need a helping hand—logistical support, military training, a place to which hard-pressed guerrillas could flee. And where to find that kind of help if not from East Germany, or Czechoslovakia, or Cuba, or some other country of the Soviet bloc, or else from one of the Arab countries that enjoyed Soviet backing? And what is logistical support if not moral support?
That was definitely how the guerrilla argument ran in West Germany. Meinhof's defense of terrorism leaned on the Frankfurt School Marxists, who were not especially friendly to the Soviets and sometimes were quite hostile; but on the Soviet question Meinhof drew her own conclusions, which were positive. The Soviet Union: a progressive force in world history. Really, how could she think otherwise? The East German secret services paid good money to keep the Red Army Fraction afloat in West Germany, and there was every reason to feel grateful.
The gap between the New Left terrorists in their modern Marxist version and the New Left libertarians was, in a small word, big. The libertarians detested the Soviet Union, even if they deceived themselves about the un-Soviet nature of Communist regimes in tropical regions of the world, about which everyone felt free to fantasize. The libertarians never imagined that Western society was hopelessly oppressive. The libertarians went about building the freak neighborhoods and the sponti scene on the palpable assumption that Western society, in its accordion flexibility, could be stretched and squeezed to play a few melodic variations on "alternative" themes. The libertarians never expected to storm the Winter Palace. The hippie-dippies—they were much too culturally minded for that. The several modern Marxist reasonings that led to a New Left terrorism therefore tended to escape them.
Then again, like the Marxists, the libertarians did find themselves in a fury over local events and foreign wars and the state of modern life. They chucked rocks at the police, and the police clubbed them back, and then some. That was Fischer's experience: beaten by the police at a demonstration in 1968. And from behind their overturned cars and makeshift barricades, the libertarians, nursing their bruises, had to wonder: why stop at rocks? Or at Molotov cocktails? They scratched their long-haired heads. They were not entirely resistant to the terrorist argument. So they dithered. That was the characteristic response. Meanwhile they labored at building their communes, kindergartens, food co-ops, new gender relations, and other elements of the New Left utopia in its counter-cultural version. Or else they followed the retro-Marxist example and colonized the factories in search of proletarian followers. They mooned nostalgically over the anarcho-syndicalist vision of a revolutionary general strike. And they never did take the terrorist plunge. Or they dipped a toe in and out. This was the situation in the early and mid-1970s. And at that moment the great black clouds of New Left moodiness and rage that had been gathering for a good ten years began to break up, all over the Western world.
VII.
The mood changed because the United States began pulling out of Vietnam, beginning in 1972, which tamped down the New Left hysteria; and because President Nixon, who managed to incite panic everywhere he went, soon enough began his long, slow fall from power. Watergate did wonders for democracy's prestige, and the refurbished prestige tamped down the hysteria still more. Maybe America was not unredeemably horrible, after all; maybe Hollywood's Westerns and California's marvelous hippies were the true America, and Richard Nixon was part of a false America that was going down to defeat. And just as those encouraging American trends were getting under way, two very shocking developments took place, which quickly sobered up large numbers of people in the New Left all over the world, and perhaps the libertarians most of all.
The first of those developments involved the Palestinians and their struggle against Zionism, and it requires a little explanation. The war of Arab nationalism against Zionism had been going on since the turn of the twentieth century or even earlier, and, in ideological terms, had already flip-flopped several times in the eyes of the European left, such that left-wing had turned into right-wing, and vice versa, and back again. The early Zionist settlers, being solid European socialists or anarchists, basked in the sympathy of at least some portions of the European left. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, however, the world Communist movement came out in favor of the Arab resisters. Then, in the 1940s, both the Communists and the democratic left in Europe returned to, or re-affirmed, their original sympathy for Zionism—only to have things switch again in the 1950s, when Israel lined up as an ally of the British and French imperialists.
The 1967 war, in which the Israelis seized a lot of land, seemed to confirm Israel's imperialist nature. The Soviets became fierce enemies of Zionism. Palestinian Marxists stepped forward. Soviet resources poured in. And under those circumstances the New Left came up with one more interpretation of the Middle Eastern conflict, in which the New Left's vision of a lingering Nazism of modern life was suddenly re-configured, with Israel in a leading role. Israel became the crypto-Nazi site par excellence, the purest of all examples of how Nazism had never been defeated but had instead lingered into the present in ever more cagey forms. What better disguise could Nazism assume than a Jewish state?
Israel thus advanced in the New Left imagination into the vanguard of imperialist aggressors, and the Palestinian resistance into the front rank of modern antiNazism. "We are all German Jews" came to mean: our sympathies lie with the Palestinians. In West Germany, the shift of attitude in regard to Israel was probably more pronounced than in other countries. Israel's military triumph aroused a somewhat creepy excitement among German conservatives. The Bild Zeitung celebrated the Israeli general Moshe Dayan as a new Rommel, the "Desert Fox." Israel's tanks were greatly admired. An efficient army, at last! A Jewish Wehrmacht! And the student left recoiled. That was why, for a period in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a militant and angry opposition to Zionism swelled into a main principle of the student movement in Germany, as well as elsewhere—why a young adventurer such as Joschka Fischer would have traveled in 1969 to exotic Algiers to attend a convention of the PLO, and might not have batted an eye when the convention solemnly voted to crush its enemy.
The whole outlook of anti-Zionism suddenly seemed to fit the left-wing worldview. On the other hand, a theoretical sympathy for the Palestinian cause brought the European New Left into contact with actual Palestinian guerrillas, which, you might think, would have transformed the budding new sympathies into sentiments of love and brotherhood—an international fraternity of revolutionaries. But fraternity was hard to achieve. The Palestinians, once they had become known, ceased to be exotic. And as the European leftists got a closer look, the New Left's instinctive anti-Zionism—the interpretation that pitted heroic Palestinian resistance fighters against cleverly disguised Nazi Zionists—began to crumble.
That was the story behind the amazing evolution of Fischer's friend Hans-Joachim Klein, the penitent terrorist. Klein had joined the Revolutionary Cells in Germany and had united with Carlos believing that he was going to put his mechanic's skills to good use in a left-wing military organization, fighting Nazism in its modern disguises. The Revolutionary Cells sent him for military training in an Arab country. In his interview on this theme with Cohn-Bendit in the mid-1980s, Klein did not specify which country. But wherever it was, he was not happy. He found himself in a military training ground where, in one part of the camp, European leftists singing left-wing songs received their anti-Zionist military training, and, in another part, European fascists singing fascist songs received their own anti-Zionist military training.
The Palestinian movement turned out not to be an anti-fascist or anti-Nazi cause at all. It turned out to be an anti-Jewish cause. Klein was horrified. His mother had been imprisoned for a while in Ravensbruck, the Nazi camp, and died later on from her sufferings there, when he was still a little child. In his adulthood, he began to imagine, or perhaps to fantasize, that she was Jewish—a common fantasy among modern Germans. That was why he abandoned the Revolutionary Cells and then went even further and accused his old comrades among the German guerrillas not just of having betrayed the revolutionary ideal but of being out-and-out anti-Semites. That was a shocking accusation.
A good many French New Leftists went through an identical turnabout, except without having killed anyone first. The French student movement never did generate a hard-line Marxist tendency of the sort that in West Germany produced the Red Army Fraction and in Italy the Red Brigades. I suppose that in France the libertarian currents in New Leftism were much too vigorous to allow such any such thing to take shape. The main organized tendency to come out of the 1968 uprisings in France was, instead, a group called the Proletarian Left, which was usually described as Maoist (and its members as "Maos"), and which Cohn-Bendit liked to described as outright Stalinist; but it was, more accurately, a Mao-spontex hodgepodge—an old-fashioned Marxist organization streaked with libertarian impulses. (The Proletarian Left kept having to expel people who, because of those impulses, insisted on smoking their unproletarian hashish and muttering about Stalinists. I spent a couple of weeks living in a commune with those people in Paris, and felt their pain.)
So the Proletarian Left, in its spontex ambivalence, dithered on the road to terror. It was only in 1972, a late date by New Left standards, when the French Maos finally did their revolutionary duty and kidnapped an assistant personnel director at a Renault factory. They did it under the rubric of the New People's Resistance, whose very name raised the honorable old banner of anti-Nazism. The kidnapping was halfhearted, though, and after a while the New People's Resistance let their victim go, without having received a single sou in ransom.
Half a year went by, and then the PLO's Black September group, with the Revolutionary Cells' helping hand, launched its attack on the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games. And the leaders of the Proletarian Left in France, having flinched at their own violence, flinched at the Palestinian violence, too. The obvious truth that terrorist action means the murder of random persons for political aims suddenly became, to them, obvious. And the French Maos, exactly like Klein, turned away in horror—not just at the killings in Munich and at the general strategy of Palestinian terror, but also at their own intentions of launching similar campaigns at home.
Joschka fischer went through a version of that same shock. The recognition fell on him in July 1976, seven months after his friend Klein played his part in the assault at Vienna and shortly after the suicide (unless it was a murder) of Ulrike Meinhof. The Revolutionary Cells, acting on behalf of jailed Palestinian terrorists, hijacked an Air France plane, took it to Entebbe in Uganda, and went about arranging a "selection" of passengers, Jews on one side, non-Jews on the other, with the Jews slated for execution. In that instance, an Israeli army unit, under the command of the young Ehud Barak, staged a spectacular raid and managed to rescue all but one of the hostages, though one Israeli soldier was killed. The soldier happened to be Jonathan Netanyahu, whose brother Benjamin was, like Barak, thereby propelled into a political career. A good deal of Israeli politics owes something to the events in Entebbe.
And the same turns out to be true of German politics. The German terrorists were killed by the Israeli commandos, and only after their deaths did Germany's New Left discover who those people were. It was a revelation. The terrorist leader turned out to be a man named Wilfried Boese, who was well-known and much-admired on the Frankfurt left—a hammy thespian who used to play the evil capitalist in street theater events, a founder of various left-wing institutions, and a prominent member of Frankfurt's Black Panther solidarity committee. Fischer knew Boese. Now was his own moment to be astonished.
Suddenly the implications of antiZionism struck home to him. What did it mean that, back in Algiers in 1969, the PLO, with the young Fischer in attendance, had voted the Zionist entity into extinction? Now he knew what it meant. Fischer seems never to have gotten over the shock of Entebbe. Even in the early weeks of 2001, at the height of the scandal provoked by the photographs in Stern, the memory of the Air France hijacking came back to haunt him. He spoke to a reporter from that same magazine and cited the hijacking and especially the "selection" of Jews as part of his Desillusionierung with the violent left. A few months later, in his capacity as foreign minister of Germany, he happened to be in Israel at the very moment when a terrorist blew up a Tel Aviv disco; he was close enough to hear the blast. It was Fischer, more than any other foreign minister or religious leader or world figure of any sort, who took it upon himself to confront Arafat in person, who (so it has been reported) berated Arafat ferociously and even forced him into declaring some sort of a cease-fire. The erstwhile militant for the PLO, now militant against Palestinian terror.
Entebbe had such an effect on quite a few of West Germany's New Leftists. A new suspicion was dawning on those people—a little tardily, you might complain, but dawning nonetheless. It was a worried suspicion that New Left guerrilla activity, especially in its German version, was not the struggle against Nazism that everyone on the New Left had always intended. It was a suspicion that, out of some horrible dialectic of history, a substantial number of German leftists had ended up imitating instead of opposing the Nazis—had ended up intoxicating themselves with dreams of a better world to come, while doing nothing more than setting out to murder Jews on a random basis: an old story.
The terrorist actions at Munich in 1972 and at Entebbe in 1976 were not the only examples, either. Klein announced his turn against terrorism in 1977 by making the sensational gesture of sending to Der Spiegel a letter containing his own pistol from the Vienna attack and announcing that the terrorists were planning on murdering the leaders of the Jewish communities of Berlin and Frankfurt. That was no idle threat, either. Carlos in person, gun in hand, rang the doorbell of the scion of Marks & Spencer in London and murdered the man on the spot for no other crime than being a Jew. There was an insane idea of murdering famous Jewish musicians such as Artur Rubinstein and Yehudi Menuhin. The discovery that some people in the terrorist brigades had actually descended into such thinking came as a pretty severe blow to the muddle-headed non-terrorists of the German New Left.
There was a further shock, and it resonated at still deeper levels, if only because many more people were involved. It was the news from Indochina. New Left movements all over the world had yearned for a Communist Indochina, had worked hard for it, had sacrificed, had struggled, and had done a lot of dreaming, too. The new utopian society was supposed to emerge there at last, in a bamboo-and-thatch version. That was a popular idea—an irresistible idea, really. Those cone-hatted rice farmers were actually defeating the B-52s, and if a Third World peasant insurgency could fend off imperial France and then the mighty United States, what couldn't be done around the world, given sufficient dedication and the rightness of a cause? Millions of hearts beat to that rhythm.
But when the Communists did triumph in Cambodia, and the new society turned out to be what it was, a new and unpredicted truth became clear, and not just in regard to the sorry turn of events in faraway Asia. For it was suddenly obvious to anyone with eyes that huge portions of the New Left had ended up supporting a cause that, in the case of the Palestinian guerrillas and their allies in Germany and other countries, was on a tiny scale resurrecting the old manias of the Nazis of the 1930s and 1940s; and, in the case of the Cambodian Communists, was engaged in slaughter by the millions. Anti-Semitism and genocide, a familiar twosome. And it became obvious that the New Left in its more radical or revolutionary version was not, as everyone had imagined, an anti-Nazi movement. On the contrary.
This was a vast, almost unimaginable shock—a shock that most people in the movement found much too horrifying to take in. For who had the emotional strength to see anything as unexpected, as undesired, as that? To have set out to fight Nazism in its sundry modern democratic disguises, only to have ended up, in a modern left-wing disguise, Nazi-like! That was absurd. To anyone gazing at the world through strictly Marxist glasses, the entire sequence of events and their implications in the early and middle 1970s lay outside the zone of recognizable reality. Marxism pointed to the workings of the capitalist economy and the manipulations of the imperial powers and the crimes of the United States, and if you spoke about anti-Semitism and Communist mass murder, weren't you merely repeating the much-analyzed propaganda of the imperialist West?
Among the Marxists of the New Left—the retro-Marxists and the modern Marxists alike, the mass of non-terrorists together with the handful of terrorists—the response to those shocking discoveries could only be dismissive, or, at any rate, quietly baffled. A good many people on the Marxist side of the movement simply lumbered on as if nothing had happened. Some of those people lumber on still. The largest number of all drifted away, speechless and agog, until the years had passed and they could no longer remember having participated in the New Left and its several manias and fanaticisms—amnesiacs of a New Left radicalism that no one could recall anymore, the kind of people who, in their respectable middle age today, would indignantly deny having ever been anything but ardent liberals. Who, us?
On the New Left, serious responses to the new events tended to come instead from people with some sort of background on the libertarian side of the movement. Those people, the inconsistent anarchists and the anarcho-Mao-spontaneists, could at least rummage through their bookcases and discover a useful trove of critical pamphlets. They could gaze at the terrible new events and feel with some justification that anti-capitalism was a fine position to hold but had never been the main idea, not for the libertarian left. Those people could feel that authoritarianism, and not capitalism, had always been the real enemy. And having made that recognition, they had to imagine what might be a plausible libertarian response to the unexpected new events.
It was not that everyone with some sort of anarchist or libertarian background rushed to respond to the left-wing calamities with a sudden passion for thoughtful reflection. In the United States, the most influential of the anarchistinfluenced writers was Noam Chomsky, who responded to the news from Cambodia exactly as any Third World-oriented Marxist would do: by wondering if the stories about genocide were not imperialist propaganda. Somehow Chomsky tilted in Marxist directions just when his anarchist background might have come in handy. Still, no great psychological obstacle prevented anyone who had done a bit of reading in the old anarchist pamphlets or in back issues of Socialism or Barbarism from interpreting the new events in a libertarian light. You needed only to be able to wriggle free of the Marxist influence, and to give the world a fresh glance.
Here and there, a few people did respond in that way. The veterans of the old anarcho-Mao-spontex currents in France were the first to do so, and in the long run they had the biggest influence around the world. But there were people like that in every country. Joschka Fischer was one of them.
It was just that, to shake free of Marxism's influence, to scoop up everything that was valuable about the New Left and abandon the rest, to come up with genuinely new responses—this was, intellectually speaking, extremely difficult. Several years of hard thinking and political experimentation were required. Some of the steps proved to be controversial, too. And the history of this new development, the move away from New Leftism toward something newer, a post-leftism, came up for public inspection and even a lot of jeering in the course of the widening Fischer scandal.
VIII.
Fischer's response to the crackup of the New Left entered into our American debates on one occasion to my knowledge; and a glance at that occasion may shed a little light on how someone with an extremely radical New Left orientation could have ended up, in the fullness of time, a friend of NATO. The occasion was a discussion between Fischer and Glucksmann, which originally ran in the pages of Die Zeit in 1986, and was soon translated into English and published in Telos, the philosophical journal of the American New Left.
Among the intellectuals of the American New Left, the Telos item attracted a bit of attention partly because, to any of us in the United States who wanted to keep abreast of our comrades and peers in Europe, Glucksmann's name had already become fairly familiar. He had been a '68er in Paris, and afterward a Mao. Woolly essays under his byline ran in the New Left Review in England. And he was known for having made a sensational about-face in the mid-1970s to become one of the "New Philosophers," much noted around the world and much mocked. Glucksmann was never the splashiest or most telegenic of the New Philosophers. But that was good. He had a reputation for being the most solidly educated (he was a student of Raymond Aron). So we were curious. We liked to be astonished, too—a New Left trait.
Fischer's name, by contrast, was not at all well-known, except to the specialists in the German left and any Americans who had done a bit of hanging out in the Frankfurt sponti scene. Still, Fischer had become a leader of the West German Greens, and the Green connection counted for a lot in American eyes. The mass New Left in America had given way by the mid-1980s to a panorama of single-issue movements—against nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, for identity politics, for solidarity with the Marxists of Central America. To anyone who participated in those movements, West Germany's Greens seemed rather attractive. They had evidently discovered the secret of how to convert an impractical, marginal, too-radical left-wing movement into a practical, democratic movement that nonetheless knew how to cling to its left-wing soul: a difficult thing to do, achieved by virtually no one else anywhere in the world. That was their reputation. So Fischer, too, as a leader of the Greens, aroused a curiosity in the United States.
There was a charm in his debate with Glucksmann. The New Left had always drawn on a warm internationalist spirit, an easy young people's camaraderie of Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt, Rome, Mexico City, New York, and Berkeley (not to mention Lawrence, Austin, Madison, Ann Arbor, Cambridge, Portland, and so forth around the country and the world). Something of that remembered spirit warmed the discussion in 1986. Glucksmann had spent a few weeks in Frankfurt back in the early 1970s with Revolutionary Struggle, and he had gotten to know Fischer and regarded him fondly, maybe a little patronizingly.
Fischer had never attended a university, and at the time of Glucksmann's visit he was trying to give himself a proper education by reading the great philosophers in alphabetical order, starting with Aristotle. Glucksmann could only laugh. He and Fischer did seem to have enjoyed themselves, though. That was visible in the 1986 debate. But the debate seemed noteworthy mostly because by the mid-1980s it had become obvious that, among the many responses around the world to the crack-up of the New Left, French New Philosophy, on one hand, and the West German Greens, on the other hand, seemed the most thorough and original, the deepest, the liveliest—the two responses most likely to blossom in the future, and not just in their own countries. They were opposite responses, of course. So there was drama in that debate.
Glucksmann's New Philosophy is easily enough defined, looking back on it. He went through the entire process of disillusionment of the New Left during the early and middle 1970s, in a fairly radical French version—the shock at Palestinian terror doubled by the shock at Cambodia, the shock at the New Left's plans for its own terror campaign, the remorse, the self-reproach, the moral confusion. And then, having stopped at every station, he set about trying to construct a new set of political ideas. That was his project. He did it in three big steps between 1975 and the early 1980s.
His first step, in the mid-1970s, was to give up on his old-fashioned anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, the fundamentals of the left, in favor of what he began to call "anti-totalitarianism"—though by anti-totalitarianism he meant something broad, an opposition to extreme oppression of every kind, whatever its shape or cause. Glucksmann was the son of Jewish Resistance fighters during the Nazi period. Even his older sister had participated in the underground, passing out leaflets in Nazi Germany. He grew up thinking of pretty much everything he did as a struggle against Nazism. But now he took his old anti-Nazism and extended it in all sorts of novel directions. He read Solzhenitsyn. He became an enemy—and not just a critic—of the Soviet Union and of communism in Cambodia and everywhere else. He became an enemy of every extreme dictatorship around the world, right-wing or left-wing. He declared himself the enemy of famines, too, wherever they might occur, as in Africa—the enemy of every extreme horror and catastrophe that leads to mass death and total oppression. And to all of those extreme dictatorships and catastrophes he attached a single name: "Auschwitz."
He still thought of himself as a New Leftist when he adopted his new anti-totalitarian position, and with good reason. He drew whole aspects of his new anti-totalitarianism from the views of his old colleague at Nanterre Michel Foucault, his fellow-rioter who was the philosopher of institutional super-oppression. It may be that, like so many other intellectuals in the French New Left, Glucksmann picked up a few inspirations from the old Socialism or Barbarism group in France, too. Those were his influences. They were impeccably leftwing. But he discovered that nothing was inherently or exclusively left-wing about counting himself an enemy of extreme suffering. The left-wing vocabulary was expressive, and he used it in the first of the books that explained his new position, La Cuisiniere et le mangeur d'hommes, or The Cook and the Cannibal.
But the left-wing vocabulary was not necessary; it could even be misleading. After a while he set it aside. Most of Glucksmann's comrades on the left despised his new analysis anyway, no matter what rhetoric he used. (They could not forgive his sympathy for Solzhenitsyn. They thought that he had gone overboard in his opposition to the Soviet Union.) Besides, he discovered that by dropping the left-wing vocabulary, he could free himself from an inhibiting political tradition. So he became an anti-totalitarian with a vocabulary that was neither left-wing nor right-wing—his own vocabulary, hyper-emotional (that was his heritage from the New Left), baroque, flowery, philosophical, but no longer ideological in any of the conventional versions.
His second big step was to answer Lenin's "What is to be done?" with a few thoughts that would have curled the lip of any self-respecting Bolshevik. Glucksmann's original notion of revolutionary action, back in New Left days, had been pretty much the same as everyone's—among the more political people. He wanted to take the wartime French Resistance of his parents and his sister and update it with the inspirations that he drew from Mao and the Communist guerrilla fighters of the Third World. He wanted to rally the workers and to spark the revolution; and when the atmosphere hardened and violence was in the air, he wanted to fight the revolutionary war. Now he gave up on that kind of talk. He began to speak, instead, about humanitarian action.
His new heroes were people such as Bernard Kouchner, a man of his own generation. Kouchner had come up in the Communist youth movement of the early 1960s and had gone off to Cuba with Regis Debray to offer his services to Fidel Castro. Castro was nothing but discouraging, though Debray actually did make his way into the Latin American jungle to stand at the side of Che Guevara—the action theorist of guerrilla war. But Kouchner took his rejection by Castro seriously and went off to medical school instead. He ended up organizing Third World emergency medical rescue missions to places such as Biafra during the Nigerian civil war and Beirut during the Lebanese civil war—expeditions just as risky as any guerrilla fighter's, but medical instead of military. Kouchner founded Doctors Without Borders, and then a second organization called Doctors of the World. This was not like founding a guerrilla army—though from the point of view of existential risk and daring, or from the point of view of throwing off bourgeois comforts, perhaps it was a bit like founding a guerrilla army.
Glucksmann, in any case, was thrilled. He saw in Kouchner's medical activism a new ideal: the daring doctor, instead of the Resistance partisan. The saver of lives, instead of the maker of a revolutionary new society. As early as 1979, Glucksmann was promoting missions to rescue the boat people fleeing Vietnamese communism. By the mid-1980s he was already holding up Kouchner's organizations for comparison with the organizations of the left, and remarking that Kouchner was doing a world of good and that the leftwing organizations were doing nothing at all.
Glucksmann's third big step followed more or less logically from his first two: his anti-totalitarianism and his ardor for humanitarian action. He wanted to oppose extreme oppression with something more than medical rescue missions—he wanted to put up a military resistance, too. He came out for the military deterrence of the Soviet Union, which meant coming out for NATO. The Soviets installed new missiles aimed at Western Europe, and President Reagan announced a plan for new American missiles aimed at the Soviet Union. And Glucksmann came out for Reagan's missiles. He even defended the logic of nuclear deterrence. This was a genuine shocker to his old comrades on the left, needless to say. Solzhenitsyn was bad enough, but NATO?
In their debate in 1986, Fischer could not get over how far Glucksmann had strayed from their common origins. Fischer was irate. But to understand his indignation (and why his anger would slowly fade, until he himself had ended up following something like each of Glucksmann's three steps)—to understand all of this, it is necessary to glance at his own reaction to the crack-up of the New Left. His first important move, in the wake of the events at Entebbe, was fairly tentative. He gave a speech begging the German terrorists to put down their weapons. That was a useful thing to do, though it was not exactly a turn away from radical leftism.
In 1976, Fischer was against bomb-throwing, but not against stone-throwing. Against guerrilla war, but not against street fighting. Against murderous violence, but not against unmurderous violence. Someone who looks back on those distinctions today might laugh. Punching a policeman in the back or kicking him when he is down can be pretty brutal, after all, even if not murderous; and besides, it can end up murderous. Still, those were distinctions with a difference. The whole problem of civic life in West Germany was to find ways to shake people out of the old authoritarian habits of the German past, to get rid of the spirit of obedience, to encourage people to go out and protest, maybe with a bit of noise, too. That was the idea behind the left-wing street battles. The street fighters wanted to go too far, but not too, too far: to make protests that broke the code of obedience, but would not impose by violence a different code of obedience. The guerrillas, by contrast, wanted to establish their own system by force of arms: that was the whole point of founding even the tiniest of armies. Between rock-throwing and bomb-throwing, then, there was an enormous gap, and in 1976 everyone could see it plainly—everyone on the left, that is.
Thinking back on Fischer's speech, Glucksmann has pointed out to me that Fischer showed a lot of bravery to say anything at all about the guerrillas. In Italy in those years, the Red Brigades adopted a grisly habit of "kneecapping" people who criticized them in public. There was every reason to worry that, in West Germany, the Red Army Fraction or the Revolutionary Cells or someone else might do the same, overcome by a feeling of betrayal and rage or even something as pale as contempt at what Fischer had said. And the terrorists did feel a contempt. Klein made that clear in an interview that ran in the American journal Semiotext(e) back in 1982. (Klein's mention of Fischer and his opposition to West German terrorism must be one of the earliest mentions of Fischer in the American press.)
So Fischer's speech in 1976 was a first step. There were others. Glucksmann came to Frankfurt, promoting his book about Solzhenitsyn and the Soviet prison camps and the necessity of being anti-totalitarian. The militants of the left came out to jeer. Fischer stood by Glucksmann, though. Fischer and Cohn-Bendit presented Glucksmann at a public forum, quite as if Glucksmann's ideas were suitable for a left-wing discussion, which was something rare in those years of extreme dogmatism. Fischer was trying to get people to accept a principle of open debate—no small thing.
Mostly, though, in the effort to think his own new thoughts, Fischer dropped out of politics. There was nothing else to do, anyway. The New Left was disintegrating. He drove a taxi. And when he returned to the political world, he signed up with the Greens, whose movement was strictly post-New Left. He joined in 1981.
IX.
The West German Greens resembled the French New Philosophers in a couple of respects. The Greens, too, wanted to escape the manias and the delusions of the traditional left, wanted to make a sharp break with the left-wing past. The nineteenth-century proletariat, the war-to-the-death of economic classes, the cult of the factory, of Marx, and of the pioneers of socialism, the barricades: the Greens wanted to be rid of every one of those ancient things.
It was just that, where Glucksmann and the New Philosophers in France wanted to give up the habit of thinking in large philosophical systems and especially wanted to give up the exhilarating old habit of imagining future revolutions and perfect societies, the Greens in West Germany wanted to take the left-wing concepts from the past and, item by item, recycle them into notions suitable for the present. Instead of the old proletarian metaphysic with its catastrophic vision of capitalism and its dream of a future proletarian society, the Greens proposed a new ecological metaphysic with its own catastrophic vision of capitalism and a dream of a new ecological utopia. Instead of the cult of the factory, the cult of the forest. Instead of the class war, the ecological struggle. Instead of the socialist millennium, the ecological millennium. Instead of the color red, the color green.
The German Marxists of a hundred years ago split between the revolutionary "orthodox" and the moderate "revisionists," and in precisely this manner the Greens split between the revolutionary "fundis" (or fundamentalists) who wanted to resist political compromises, and the reformist "realos" (or realists), who were happy to push their program forward one modest inch at a time. Fischer, the new Fischer of the 1980s, was a realo. By the mid-1980s he was already needling his Green comrades for their hostility to NATO. The Greens voted a resolution calling on Germany to withdraw from NATO. Fischer, by then a canny politician, declined to sign it. He remained a man of the left, even so. He had no intention of lining up with the United States in its struggle against the Soviet Union. He wanted to stay independent of both superpowers. The imperialist nature of the United States seemed to him a danger of the first order.
He said to Glucksmann, in their discussion in 1986: "I do not want to identify myself with either Communist or American imperialism." He wanted to move beyond power blocs and imperial confrontations, to arrive at a different sort of politics, still imbued with the radical values of the past and the insights of left-wing theory. Glucksmann's arguments could only seem, to Fischer's way of thinking, dismal in the extreme, like nothing more than a fancy French repetition of every bellicose cold war platitude of the American superpower, lacking a vision of the future, lacking ideals, lacking the red blood of a left-wing heart.
"What separates us," Fischer told Glucksmann, "is your return to a rigid anti-communism as an ideological foundation." That was an icy phrase. Most people on the left in the 1980s, I think, would have seen that statement as the clincher in the argument—a devastating hit. Glucksmann had become a dogmatist of the right, a rigid instead of flexible thinker, an ideologue, every terrible thing. An apologist for the American superpower. A sad case!
But Glucksmann had more to say. From his own point of view, it was Fischer who had surrendered to the will of an imperialist superpower. The West German Greens pictured themselves as putting up a lively resistance to tyrannical impositions from the United States. Yet Glucksmann considered that, on the contrary, the Greens were merely lowering their submissive German heads in the face of totalitarian pressure—as Germans had done in times past. It was just that, in the 1980s, the totalitarian pressure was coming from the Soviet Union.
The Greens prided themselves on being a new type of German: rebels against authority. But Glucksmann saw in them Germans of the old type, the respecters of power and the enthusiasts of obedience. He knew very well that, in their own imaginings, the Greens were strictly independent of the Soviet Union, even contemptuous of it. But he pointed out something to Fischer. The anti-missile demonstrators in West Germany had directed nearly all their indignation at the United States, and almost none at the Soviet Union. Which superpower was occupying half of Europe, though? "We are left with the scandal," Glucksmann said, "that 500,000 people demonstrated against Reagan, but only 10,000 against Brezhnev. This fact has a scandalous effect not only in Paris, but also in Prague and Warsaw, and on all those who struggle for freedom in Eastern Europe."
Fischer replied that Glucksmann seemed to expect some enormous turn-about in political life, some immense change. And no such thing was going to happen. "You are taking a perspective twenty years from now," Fischer said. "Gorbachev will not change. America will also not fundamentally change. Without a doubt, there is a huge monopoly of opinion in the Soviet Union. This is probably the case in two-thirds of the world, or even more. But Hollywood is essentially more effective as far as the monopoly of opinion is concerned."
From Glucksmann's perspective, Fischer had lost the argument right there. It was preposterous to suppose that Soviet censorship and America's Hollywood were in some way comparable, and crazier still to imagine that Hollywood was "essentially" worse. And Glucksmann responded with a terrible swift word: "No."
Back in 1986, it would have been easy to suppose that Fischer had merely blundered at that moment, and in the heat of argument had let loose a foolish volley of hyperbole, as anyone might do. But today we may look on that debate with a bit of accumulated knowledge and recognize that blunders such as Fischer's bubbled up naturally from the fundamentals of his anti-imperialist outlook. The blunders came out of the instinct that led him and everyone else with old-fangled or even new-fangled leftist points of view to look at the world from the standpoint of the crimes of capitalism—from a standpoint that, by definition, attributed the world's woes principally to capitalist economics (and therefore to the United States, the capital of capital), and by afterthought to anything else.
Then again, maybe the foolishness in Fischer's remark was obvious even at the time, and not just to Glucksmann. For what does seem plain, looking back today, is that Fischer's side of the argument—the popular side, many people would have said, judging from the mass demonstrations in West Germany and Britain and the United States and elsewhere—was not as strong as it may have seemed. And Glucksmann's side—the unpopular one, judging from the malicious scorn that so many commentators heaped and still heap on the new intellectual generation in France, the non-geniuses, the less-than-Sartres—was gathering strength year by year.
This was certainly true in France. The shift in opinion from New Leftism or even Old Leftism to something like New Philosophy was already visible in Paris by the mid-1970s. Foucault in his later years, as is sometimes forgotten, was rather a supporter of Glucksmann. Sartre himself, in 1979, the year of his death, stood with Foucault and even with Aron to endorse Glucksmann's argument not just about humanitarian action but, implicitly, about burying the hatchet with the right. The new attitude was symbolized by a famous photograph of Sartre side by side with the conservative Aron, and a Beatle-haired Glucksmann alongside them, representing the younger generation: the three men together, left-wing, right-wing, and youth, at a meeting to call for emergency humanitarian aid for the refugees of Vietnamese communism. By the early 1980s it had already become obvious that, at least in France, a large group of the more interesting younger intellectuals was thinking along lines close to Glucksmann's—the '68ers, grown up now, "the former left," as they came to be called: Alain Finkielkraut, Pascal Bruckner, Bernard-Henri Levy, and several other writers, the veterans of the student insurrection.
A similar evolution was going on among the dissidents of the Eastern bloc. Even as late as the early 1980s a good number of the dissidents there, the radical intellectuals, '68ers by and large, might still have identified with Fischer more than with Glucksmann. VAclav Havel has described how, in the intervals when he was out of jail, he would turn on his television and watch the mass demonstrations of the West German anti-nuclear protesters and would root for the people with long hair and pacifist principles. By the mid1980s, however, he and the other dissident intellectuals of the Eastern bloc were beginning to lose patience with the Western peace movements, at least on political grounds. (The cultural affinity remained—a complicating point.) Glucksmann was aware of this evolution in the East, too. That was why in his debate with Fischer he invoked the dissidents, while Fischer did not.
By the mid-1980s you could even detect a few shifts in opinion in Fischer's own circle of friends and comrades. Cohn-Bendit was the bellwether. In 1986 Cohn-Bendit was still living in a New Left-style commune, putting out Pflasterstrand. He, too, was a Green by then: Danny the Green. But he was keen on preserving a sense of continuity with the New Left past, and he went around the world that year with a television crew filming interviews with some of the heroes of the 1968-era uprisings in different countries, which he later turned into a book called Nous l'avons tant aimee, la revolution, or We Loved the Revolution So Much. His idea was to produce a series of interviews showing the international dimension of the New Left and the seriousness of the people who had been involved and the evolution in their thinking—to assemble a sort of '68ers' International by means of television and the book. He went to the United States and interviewed Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, Jane Alpert, and Susan Brownmiller—the American delegation to his '68ers' International.
He conducted an interview with Hans-Joachim Klein for this same purpose, though Klein was still on the lam. Klein and Fischer, together with the feminist Barbara Koster, were Cohn-Bendit's West German delegation. (The accompanying photo of Fischer showed him as a young politician in blue jeans and sport jacket, a great advance in visual imagery over the black-motorcycle-helmet look.) Glucksmann, by contrast, was definitely not on Cohn-Bendit's list, nor anyone else who had made the transition to something like New Philosophy. Those people, the New Philosophers, had wandered too far from the old left-wing idea to be acceptable. In his introduction to the book, Cohn-Bendit went so far as to complain about "defrocked Stalinists" who had made themselves virgins by turning into Reaganites. He meant the ex-Maos.
Cohn-Bendit's '68ers' International was notable for one other large omission, at least in the television documentary and in the first edition of the book, which appeared in 1986. He had tried to arrange an interview with someone from the 1968 generation in the Soviet bloc, namely Adam Michnik, a leader of the Polish student movement from those days. Only the Communist government in Poland had crushed the Solidarity labor movement and Michnik was languishing in jail, where there was no interviewing him. Then he got out, and Cohn-Bendit was able to speak with him at last, if only for the mass-market paperback edition of the book. Michnik seemed eager to be interviewed. He very much thought of himself in generational terms—a '68er through and through. He kept insisting on this to Cohn-Bendit.
But Michnik's interview turned out to be unlike anyone else's in the book. He and Cohn-Bendit argued about the Vietnam War. Michnik was not about to condemn the United States for having put up a fight against communism. In this one passage of the book, the principles of anti-totalitarianism, non-ideological solidarity, and respect for NATO—Glucksmann's principles, in a word—suddenly emerged as fairly reasonable, and deserving of their proper place in a survey of the heroes of '68: principles that could not be rejected out of hand just because the conservatives or the State Department might approve of them. Cohn-Bendit gave the impression of being a little astonished by Michnik's remarks, but he published the interview anyway and even advertised it on the jacket of the new edition. All of this was quite significant, seen in retrospect. Cohn-Bendit was the only person anywhere in the world who could claim to speak for the 1968 generation as an international phenomenon, and this small alteration in his book, the addition of Adam Michnik, spoke volumes.
X.
Those were the shifts in argument and mood through the 1970s and 1980s. But the moment when large numbers of veterans of the New Left finally had to put aside matters of mere philosophy or attitude and adopt actual positions and accept the political consequences, and sometimes the more-thanpolitical consequences—that moment, the moment of truth, arrived only after the Soviet collapse had gotten under way. A first sign of it could be seen in the months after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and declared it annexed. George Bush the Elder was president of the United States, and he defined the war to drive Saddam out of Kuwait mostly as a war over material interests, which came down to oil; and Bush's definition, given the power of the American president, guaranteed a pretty strong backlash against the war on the part of a lot of people on the left, all over the world. Still, the inadequacy in Bush's way of thinking did not inhibit a number of other people from noticing a few additional aspects of the war: the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Kurds in northern Iraq, the threats of further atrocities to come, Saddam's threat to incinerate the Israelis. There were, in short, questions of genocide to consider: a twentieth-century predicament.
Among the old militants with New Left backgrounds, some people did notice that sort of thing. This was certainly the case in France, due to the circle of the "former left." You could see something similar in Germany, too, where a handful of old-time heroes of the New Left—Wolff Biermann, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and a few others—surprised their public by declaring themselves in favor of the war. Peter Schneider, who had come out of the anarchist half of the New Left, gave his endorsement. Cohn-Bendit did the same—an especially brave thing to do, given that Cohn-Bendit was, in his fashion, a political leader and not just an intellectual, and had to worry about his popularity. In the Soviet bloc, the '68ers had no trouble at all supporting the war. Havel was already the president of what was still Czechoslovakia, and he went so far as to send a small detachment of Czechoslovak soldiers, experts in gas warfare, into the Saudi desert to take their place in the grand alliance. Even in the United States you could have seen a few small indications of a split on the left on this issue.
Yet the big moment of change came the next year, when the ethnic massacres got under way in the Balkans. Then at last the old, profound question of Nazism and what to do about it—the old founding question of the New Left—rumbled up in a European setting and not just in connection to a barbarous dictator in the Middle East. And once again the veterans of the New Left had to ask themselves the old questions about Europe and its past. They had to ask: why was it, how could it have been, that Germany, the center of civilization, had once upon a time gone Nazi? And how, why, did the rest of Europe, most of it, end up being conquered by the Nazis back in the 1930s and 1940s? Everyone knew the answer to those questions in a general way. Germany had gone Nazi and Europe had succumbed because the Nazis were strong and well-organized and powerfully motivated; but mostly because everyone else, the non-Nazis, had failed to resist.
And why the lack of resistance, in those days? A thousand reasons, of course. And here were mass graves once again. And again a thousand reasons not to resist, and even a new reason—a thousandth and first. The new reason was something never before imagined, a new mutation of an old argument, a novelty, almost a contribution to modern political thought. The Atlantic Alliance, having come out of World War II, did have to look on genocide as a fundamental enemy, at least in regard to Europe. When the massacres got going in the former Yugoslavia, the big Western democracies had to respond, if only to affirm what it meant in the 1990s to be a powerful democracy. So the big powers responded. They unfurled the bloodless blue flag of the United Nations. They came up with a principle of non-action through action: a resistance that was no resistance at all. A non-action that cannot be faulted because it calls itself action: that was the new mutation. And so, when the Serb nationalists made their insane "selection" of Bosnian Muslims to be killed en masse at Srebrenica, the Dutch troops and a French general and the other Western military forces in Bosnia—the foreign interveners—did what they had been sent to do, which was to not intervene.
How could the Western democracies have managed to come up with such an absurdity? It was because, by the 1990s, the vast public in the democratic world was definitively opposed to genocide in a general way; but somebody had to step forward to oppose genocide in a concrete and specific way. And who was that going to be? In Europe, who was going to argue for a genuine forcefulness and not just a morally pleasing display of high dudgeon? The champions of foreign policy "realism," by any chance? That was out of the question. Realism is never genocide's enemy. Genocide in modern times always takes place in the margins of what appear to be great events, never at the center; but "realism" is a calculation of power at the center—a calculation of "Great History," in Finkielkraut's phrase, not of Little History. Genocide attacks the weak, but realism appraises the strong.
If genocide in World War II has come to seem central to the war against Nazism, that is only because, in later years, the kinsmen and the friends of the slaughtered insisted on viewing it that way, and the historians reconsidered the entire evolution of events and succeeded in changing public attitudes. The realists of the 1930s and 1940s had never looked on the war in that light at the time, and their heirs in the 1990s were not going to respond to genocide in their own time any differently. The realists were going to observe with perfect accuracy that massacres in the Balkans or anywhere else threatened the fundamental interests of not one of the great powers. Massacres were not going to knock over the giant chessboard of world power. What did worry the realist thinkers was that a NATO military intervention in the Balkans might upset Western relations with Russia. Intervention, not massacre, posed the danger, from the point of view of great power relations. Realism was non-interventionism in the 1990s.
The argument for intervention, therefore, was going to have to come from zones of opinion that chose to put matters of conscience at the heart of their foreign policy thinking—from the foreign policy "idealists." Meaning "who?" or "whom?" The Catholic Church? The Church turned out to have its interests in the Balkans, and they were those of the Croatian Catholics. (Between the Yugoslav civil war and the massacres in Central Africa, the 1990s proved to be another less than splendid decade for Catholicism in the matter of genocide.) And the Protestant political instinct leaned toward pacifism.
Would the call come from the political left—from the parties and the movements that pictured themselves as the voice of the oppressed? But there were multiple lefts. There was an old-fashioned and even reactionary left (to call it that), which still felt an ancient tug of loyalty to the Soviet Union and therefore to Soviet communism's child and heir, the Russian republic. Sympathy for Russia counted for quite a lot in the Western European left, and leftism, from that perspective, meant a tender concern for Russia's national interests. This kind of thinking counted for something even in the United States, where The Nation published an amazing series of anguished editorials about the need not to upset the Russians and especially the nationalists among them.
Then again, there was also a realpolitik left, which was not in the slightest inclined to idealism in foreign policy. Francois Mitterrand, the president of France, realpolitik's master of masters, made an art of signaling his solidarity while craftily defending a weirdly nineteenth-century vision of French national interests in the Balkans and in Central Africa alike. (It did mean something that Mitterrand, the Socialist, turned out to have been an old Vichy official in an earlier life.) The realpolitik left in Europe, just like the realpolitik liberals in the first years of the Clinton administration, were hardly going to press for forceful interventions in the name of something as vaporous as human rights.
In europe, if any large group of people was going to press for a forceful intervention, it was going to have to include a good many veterans of the student uprisings circa 1968—the people who, in their young days, had imagined that they were building a new civilization in Europe. Those people, in looking at the Balkans, were at least guaranteed to give a few thoughts to matters of genocide, to questions of resistance and non-resistance—the issues that, many years before, had brought them to the left-wing barricades. Anti-genocide was those people's oldest and deepest idea, together with the worried conviction that Nazism was capable of reappearing under new disguises.
But even if the old '68ers and their heirs did give some thought to massacres in the Balkans, how were they possibly going to make a case for an intervention that would actually intervene? The '68ers and their heirs were, after all, of two minds on military questions, divided into the warring attitudes that you could have seen in the Die Zeit and Telos debate back in 1986. In France the question of intervention was decided fairly quickly and easily among the intellectuals, as could have been expected. The "former left" had long ago ascended into powerful positions in the French press and on radio, and throughout the later Mitterrand years those people pushed for the three principles that had first been laid out by the New Philosophers years before: anti-totalitarianism, humanitarian action, forceful means.
The "former left" had a success, too, in a painfully delayed version. The traditions of the French Communists and of Mitterand's Socialists; the traditions of "realism" at the Quai d'Orsay and its ancient bugbears about the balance of power and the Serbo-French alliance of ages past and the Francophone struggle against its historic foe the Anglophones; the many phantoms that haunted France's political imagination—all of this conspired against any sort of powerful French intervention. Yet once Mitterrand was gone and Jacques Chirac, the conservative, was president, the French government, for all its stammerings and duplicities, did manage to become the first of the Western powers to play any kind of forceful role in the Balkans. Quite a few French soldiers were killed, too (a fact that is always forgotten by Americans who love to sneer at the French). In this way the French opened the door to a more forceful involvement by the timorous Clinton administration. This was in some degree an achievement of the old '68ers in France.
But what could be expected of the old '68ers and their heritage in Germany? The Greens, to begin with, whose movement represented probably the purest expression of the post-'68 political imagination anywhere in the world—how could they possibly respond? The Greens still insisted on interpreting anti-Nazism to mean anti-imperialism in the left-wing style. Didn't American hegemony pose a terrible danger to Europe and to the world, perhaps the greatest danger of all? A laughable question, you might observe, given the Balkan massacres. But the Greens had been asking that question all their lives, and repetition made it anything but laughable. The United States had committed crimes in the past. How could it not be doing the same in the present?
In their pacifist hearts, the Greens had to ask: what about the moral dangers of using any force at all? They had to wonder about the legacies of Hitler. In the 1940s Hitler had sent German armies into the Balkans and had fought the Serbs. Now the advocates of war wanted to send German armies into the Balkans and fight the Serbs. Why would fighting the Serbs be, this time, anti-Hitlerian? Thus did ten thousand Lilliputian arguments swarm across the terrain, explaining why NATO was a monstrosity and nothing could be done about the Balkans, and that it was too bad but life is tragic, and what about the dangers of nuclear energy?
The Greens needed to tear off their veil of ideology. And this was precisely what Joschka Fischer managed to do. Even as late as 1994 he could not imagine sending German soldiers to places where Hitler had sent German soldiers. But then, with the news from Srebrenica, he finally understood that anti-Nazism in its traditional Green version was going to end as no anti-Nazism at all: "I learned not only `No more war' but also `No more Auschwitz.'" For there, at Srebrenica (and at Omarska and other places), was Auschwitz, not just in the figurative sense that Glucksmann liked to bandy about but with greater and grisly exactitude, down to the "selection" by the master ethnic group of its victims. So Fischer made his choice, and Glucksmann's three principles—anti-totalitarianism, humanitarian action, NATO—finally became his principles, too.
But how was Fischer going to bring along his fellow Greens? The governments of the United States, Britain, and France were not going to clarify the issue on behalf of Europe's pacifists. The Western powers seemed to have sunk comfortably enough into their swamp of make-believe action and their meaningless threats—their clever compromise between "idealist" anti-totalitarianism and "realist" non-intervention. The Serb nationalists alone could force the issue. And on that one point, the government of Slobodan Milosevic proved to be splendidly reliable.
In late 1998 and early 1999, Milosevic's military and paramilitary forces began to clear the Albanians from the whole of Kosovo. The new government in Germany was just then settling into power—the Red-Green coalition with its regiments of ex-New Leftists, now converted into Social Democratic and Green politicians. The emblem of those new people was, of course, Fischer himself, the new foreign minister, far more than Schroder—Fischer the notorious Frankfurt street-fighter, the rioter outraged by Ulrike Meinhof's death, the Green anti-militarist in his antibourgeois blue jeans. And so on top of the ten thousand Lilliputian arguments against taking any kind of forceful action in the Balkans came ten thousand more, directed against anyone who had participated in the New Left of long ago—low, personal arguments, the arguments that invariably descend on anyone who has displayed the mental alertness to change his mind now and then.
Fischer and his advisers and co-thinkers among the Greens must have gritted their teeth when they contemplated those arguments. They had to have told themselves: if we do what seems to be necessary in order to prevent a giant catastrophe; if we endorse a NATO air campaign against the Serb nationalists; if we, the Greens and the '68ers and the old-time New Leftists, come out for real intervention instead of fake intervention; if we approve a German participation in the NATO action—won't we be accused of inconsistency? Fischer surely had to know: if I come out forcibly against Nazism in its current guise, which happens to be Serb racism, won't I be accused of lack of character? If I stick to what have always been my principles, which have been to oppose Nazism in all its forms, won't I be accused of betraying my principles?
And so it was. The foreign minister gave the endorsement. Germany, which had failed to resist Nazism, resisted Nazism. Feebly, you may say. Even so, German soldiers departed German soil for the purpose of saving someone else's life. Something new under the sun! And Germany's foreign minister, of course, was accused of having been a brute and a man without principles, and the accusations spread around the world, until even The New York Times was fretting over the man's moral character. Fischer's friend and old-time roommate was accused of pedophilia, and those accusations, too, made their way around the yellow press of France and England and Italy. The world of Joschka Fischer was presented as a running scandal, and his enemies in the Bundestag congratulated themselves on their maturity and statesmanship in standing up to say of Germany's foreign minister, "This man can no longer represent us to the world." Fischer: a maneuverer without scruples. A thug, a cynic, a man with a dark past.
XI.
The Kosovo war has sometimes been called "The Liberals' War," because it was the liberal idealists, more than the conservative realists, who were keen on fighting it. But I am not the first to point out that it could just as easily be described as "The '68ers' War." That was true of the European participants, anyway. The French participation was owed to the circle of "former leftists." The NATO official in charge of the pacification of Kosovo after the Serb military withdrawal was Glucksmann's hero from long ago, Dr. Kouchner. The man who in 1998 signed the treaty that brought the Czech Republic into NATO and therefore into the NATO intervention was Jan Kavan, a Czech '68er. The NATO diplomat in Kosovo for a while was Jiri Dienstbier, another Czech '68er. The secretary-general of NATO during the war was Javier Solana, a '68er from Spain's Socialist Workers Party. And the German participation could not have occurred without Fischer and his allies. The '68ers' International that CohnBendit had tried to assemble in an imaginary version back in the 1980s had finally assembled in real life, under the auspices of NATO. An irony, you might think. But it was not an irony.
At the height of the Fischer affair, Serge July, the editor of the Paris Liberation, wrote an editorial called "On Your Knees!" accusing Fischer's and Cohn-Bendit's enemies of engaging in a reactionary campaign not just against two individuals but also against the social changes and the social conscience that had come out of the uprisings of the years around 1968—a prosecution by smear of entire portions of the population. That was why Liberation settled on the inspired phrase "the trial of the Generation of 1968." But if the affair was, in some sense, a generational trial, you would have to conclude that, from a point of view such as July's, everything turned out well enough after a few weeks, certainly in France. The charges against Cohn-Bendit were made, and were rebutted, and evaporated. The animus against Fischer in France never congealed into anything worrisome or even politically awkward.
And in Germany? I followed an English-language Web edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung during the controversy, and I noticed that in Frankfurt, too, the affair was looked at precisely as July defined it in Paris—as an accusation against a generation. Naturally the scandal counted for more in Germany than in France, given Fischer's place in the government and the role of the Bundestag, and given those terrible photographs. Yet the polls never did tip against him. At one point Fischer was declared to have the support of seventy-two percent of the polling respondents, a nice statistic for a man under daily assault in the press and in the Bundestag.
Even Fischer's keenest enemies eventually had to bow before that kind of public reaction. Late in April, the prosecutor in the Klein trial, having left the foreign minister to twist slowly, slowly in the wind, at last dropped the perjury charge, which brought the Fischer affair to an end in a legal sense. But by then the affair had already dribbled to a close in the popular imagination. The true finale, in the judgment of the Frankfurter Allgemeine, came in late March, some ten weeks after the affair had begun, when the results of one other poll came in, quite a fascinating poll precisely because its subject went beyond Fischer himself. The subject in this instance was the generation of 1968. The radicals of that period—were they mainly "interested in power," or were they "idealists"? Such was the question to the German public. The respondents stroked their chins. And a majority (whose exact size was left unreported) answered: "Idealists."
It is true that "interested in power" versus "idealism," taken as an either/or proposition, makes for a pretty crude way of judging the motivating sentiment of vast crowds of people. You could shrug off such a poll easily enough. What does it mean, anyway, this word "idealism," outside of some specific setting such as foreign policy, where the word has a kind of technical meaning, connoting a particular set of values? Surely everyone understands by now that idealism has always been Satan's slogan, the father of fanaticism, the mother of self-righteousness, a license for crime. And is it always so bad to be interested in power? No one could believe that Fischer himself had ever been indifferent to power. There had to be more to his politician's career than a love of meetings. The man was obviously a major conniver. And yet that naive little poll in the Frankfurter Allgemeine surely offered an expressive commentary on modern life and its foreground from a few decades ago, perhaps not just in Germany.
We can be pretty confident that, thanks to the Fischer affair, no one among the respondents to that poll needed to be reminded of the realities of New Leftism and its history from a quarter of a century before. The movement's ugliest traits had been on public display for months. Nor did anyone need to be reminded of the politician's machinations that had brought Fischer to his present station, nor of the policies that he had adopted once in power. Shady associates and violent acts years ago, NATO bombings in 1999: everyone knew everything. Those were the givens in that poll. And given the givens, the real meaning lurking beneath that naive-looking question was, I think, a little less naive than might have seemed to be the case.
The real meaning, I propose, was this: knowing what everyone knows about the New Left of long ago, knowing the consequences of the New Left's many rebellions, knowing the characteristics and consequences of those alternative kindergartens and everything else, knowing the career that Fischer had followed, knowing the role that Fischer had played in 1998 and 1999 in the European crisis over the Balkans—knowing all that, did it make sense (Question One) to speak of a basically admirable quality in the New Left, a quality that could be branded with the approving honorific "idealism"? Did modern society seem (Question Two) better off in the wake of those many New Left rebellions? Did Nazism and its constituent traits and habits seem (Question Three) to have suffered a blow? Did a personal background in the New Left seem (Question Four) to indicate an attractive feature in someone's character today, lo these many years later?
Those were the real issues, the four questions, hiding beneath the dopey-looking query about idealism and power. The answers, among a majority of the respondents, were plainly yes, yes, yes, and yes. In spite of everything, four yeses, and in a conservative newspaper, too: a sign of political wisdom in the heart of Europe, I think—though I grant that some people, the not-majority among those respondents, perhaps quite a hefty not-majority, answered those questions differently. And so la lotta continua, as we used to say.
The Mystery of the Free Lunch
* Michael Kinsley
* May 23, 1981 | 12:00 am
President Reagan's inauguration was a landmark in the history of conspicuous consumption. It signaled the total rehabilitation of lavish extravagance after half a century when practices like sipping champagne in a limousine were in mild or severe disrepute. They had to pick the east coast clean to find enough limousines to satisfy the demand from people who had flown in from around the country, often in private planes, to attend more than 100 fancy parties, crowd into restaurants that charge $40 or more for a meal, and lay down their heads in triple-digit hotel rooms. The man from Ridgewell's, Washington's leading caterer, summarized the prevailing philosophy for a Washington Post party reporter: "Rather than shrimp salad, they want the whole shrimp."
When I read about people living this way, I often think it would be nice to do the same, and then I think it's unfair that some people can and others can't. Everything's relative, of course, and many might have the same thoughts if, for some reason, my lifestyle were chronicled in the newspapers. To me, these two reactions seem perfectly human and perfectly connected. But to conservatives they are very different. The first thought—I would like to live like that—is called "incentive," and is considered crucial to the proper functioning of a capitalist economy. The second thought—It's unfair that some can and others can't—is called "envy," and is considered a dangerous symptom of that political infection known as "egalitarianism" or, in Irving Kristol's phrase, "infantile liberalism."
The social role of rich people and lavish living is a topic that is much on the minds of conservatives these days, and plays an important part in Reagan's economic policies. George Will wrote recently:
A society that wants to be extraordinarily productive and prosperous should resolve to ensure that those who produce extraordinarily also prosper extraordinarily. [That's "incentive."! Alas, an irrational and costly (especially to the non-rich) resentment of the rich [that's "envy"] has prevented implementation of sound policies, including substantial cuts in corporate taxes.
No longer. Reagan's tax plan involves massive cuts in corporate taxes and other changes frankly intended to make it easier to get rich and stay that way. These cuts are supposed to be so helpful to the non-rich that the least rich are being asked to accept "austerity" (the Reaganites' own word) to help pay for them.
Such thinking and such policies rest on many assumptions. Some are deep philosophical assumptions about things like the nature of human inequality. Some are technical economic assumptions about things like the incentive effects of tax rates. But one is a simple factual assumption: that in America today the greatest consumers of wealth are also the greatest producers of wealth. Both the moral case and the economic case for financial inequality—and the case against "envy" as a legitimate response to conspicuous luxury—rest on this, assumption. High living is a reward for socially useful activity, and an encouragement for more of the same.
But you can admire the productive power of capitalism, and still wonder how much of the lavish consumption you see and read about is really financed by productive activities that benefit the general populace in the textbook manner. If it's not, then the case against "envy," or "infantile liberalism," or other unattractive labels for skepticism about the social value of financial inequality, becomes somewhat weaker.
Let's look again at the extravagance surrounding the Reagan inauguration, for example. One striking conclusion is that much of it—1 would say most, but I can't prove that—was somebody's tax-deductible business expense. It is tempting to say that this means the average taxpayer was paying part of the freight (46 percent in the case of a corporation; up to 70 percent for a rich individual). But this sort of suggestion enrages conservatives. Irving Kristol complains in Two Cheers for Capitalism, in excited italics, that with such talk, "You are implicitly asserting that all income . . . belongs right to the government. . . ." So let's just stay calm and agree that there are two kinds of money—Before Tax (BT) and After Tax (AT)—and that BT money buys a lot more goodies than AT money. Anyone who denies the reality of this distinction either hasn't experienced the joys of tax-free consumption (and I have spied Professor Kristo! at more than one BT social occasion around Washington) or is lying.
A few weeks ago I had lunch with the editor of a rival publication I sometimes write for. It was a nice restaurant, a treat for both of us. He suggested we split the check. Instead, I paid the whole thing and will deduct it as a business expense ("lunch with customer, $25"). This will reduce my taxes by about the cost of his lunch. If (unlikely, but let's suppose) he picks up the check next time ("lunch with supplier, $25"), we will have lunched twice for the same cost as if we'd lunched once and split the check. Who is paying for that second lunch? I wouldn't presume to say. It must have something to do with supply-side economics.
Reagan's inauguration can be seen as an elaborate round-robin version of the free lunch mystery, which has puzzled philosophers of accounting for centuries. For days the same people took turns entertaining one another while deducting the cost of the entertainment, the cost of getting there to provide it, the cost of staying to enjoy it, and so on. Many were corporate executives who passed on the pleasure of deducting the cost to their stockholders, and some were freeloaders with nothing to deduct. But what all shared was luxury paid for with BT money—money that had never passed through the tax system.
In the three days of January 19, 20, and 21 the Washington Post Style section had no fewer than 36 separate articles about different parties connected with the inauguration. By my conservative count, 14 of these were paid for entirely with BT money, two probably were BT, and another 11 were BT in large part. Only nine seem more likely to have been paid for with the kind of money you use for your night at the bowling alley. The "definitely BT" category includes affairs sponsored by corporations and trade associations such as a lavish brunch at the Four Seasons Hotel sponsored by NBc, a movie screening and champagne reception at the Motion Picture Association, and a modest cocktail party for 300 or 400 thrown by The New Republic. Fortune magazine ran a color photo essay featuring some of these functions under the title, "Business Goes to Washington," Ford chairman Phillip Caldwell (1980 losses: $1.5 billion) was quoted commenting with pleasure on the new mood Reagan had brought to Washington: "Hope feeds on itself, just as defeat feeds on itself," Caldwell, however, was feeding on poached steelhead salmon, or, in the other sense, was feeding on the Pepsi Cola Company. He did not feed on himself all week.
Another "definitely BT" affair was a "sumptuous" (said the Post) dinner given by Roy Cohn and his law partner at the Madison Hotel. Cohn, who is innocent of a variety of federal crimes, takes an "I dare you" attitude toward deductions. He told the New York Times recently that his firm pays him a salary of $75,000 to $100,000, but picks up (and deducts, I presume) $500,000 a year of his expenses, including houses in New York, Connecticut, and Acapulco,
In the "probably BT" category, there was a "Californians are Coming" party for 300 given by a California PR man named Peter Hannaford, A California PR man certainly would be entitled to deduct the opportunity to cultivate other prominent Californians, even though many of them were already his good friends.
The "partially BT" category includes events paid for by the inaugural committee itself, which was largely financed by tax-deductible contributions. For example, there was a "lavish buffet" at the State Department for VIPs to view the pre-inaugural fireworks. Tickets were sold for other inaugural events, such as the inaugural gala ($150 top) and dinner at the Kennedy C enter ($500). It is common for companies to buy and dispense such tickets. Good for business, you know. As the inaugural chairman. Bob Gray, said between bites, "Guilt? . . . No, Lord, . . . I had a sign made for my desk today: 'No government money, all private enterprise.'"
In such a world, what is not deductible? Well, Clement Stone, the insurance tycoon, gave a party for 250 at the Georgetown Club, and I wouldn't want to assume that he deducted it, although he probably could. Not one inaugural week self-indulgence reported in the Post was totally without possibilities for creative accounting.
The 36 parties do not include the coffee and donuts served Wednesday morning at National Airport to those waiting for their private planes to take off. These were BT donuts, of course, supplied by the airport management to pacify angry private plane passengers delayed by the crush. Commercial passengers, equally delayed though not equally responsible, were free to purchase coffee and donuts, AT.
Almost all of the 305 private planes departing from National on January 21 were registered to corporations, according to forms on file at the airport. Two patterns predominate in these records. Planes owned by large corporations like General Motors and General Electric swooped in with just a pilot and co-pilot, loaded up with passengers, and took off almost immediately. Some corporations ran shuttle services. US Steel, for example, took off four times during the day. Smaller companies generally had brought in a small plane on January 17, the day the partying began, and parked it at the airport until returning home January 21. Thanks to a multi-billion dollar annual federal subsidy to private aviation, it costs four dollars to land a small plane at National Airport, and $6.50 a day to park it. Parking a car at National costs about the same.
Now, perhaps six people from the Dome Petroleum Company of Denver and six from the Mossbacher Products Company of Houston and eight from Harrah's Hotel of Reno, Nevada, had important business reasons to be in Washington that week, and perhaps all are allergic to commercial boarding passes. Or perhaps all the passengers (such as Bob Hope, who rode back to Palm Springs with the Spanos Construction Company) either reimbursed the company for their flights or plan to declare the value as income next April. If not, these flights amount to tax-free consumption. Other planes departing that day were registered to familiar and unfamiliar names such as the Reader's Digest (two planeloads). Mustang Gas Products of Oklahoma City, Dow Chemical (three). Hooker Chemical, the King Ranch, Gulf States Toyota of Houston, Caesar's World Inc., William Moss Properties of Dallas, Hoffman-LaRoche, Pillsbury, West Texas Marketing Gorp. of Abilene, and so on.
The inauguration festivities were not unique. Read the papers for a few days with the BT/AT distinction in mind, and you will realize that most of the visible high living that goes on in this country is paid for with money that has never been taxed. Almost ail the gatherings of show-business celebrities that fill the "People" or "Personalities" section are somebody's tax-deductible business expense—a movie company or a PR person or a theatrical producer. The same is true of many executive pastimes reported in business publications. A recent Wall Street Journal article on the demand for tickets to the Masters golf tournament reported, "On the weekend before the tournament, corporate executives start arriving in their private jets and, clients in tow, head for rented condominiums and a week of golf and business palaver." Another group with a rewarding BT lifestyle is journalists. They lunch with sources, travel on assignments, assemble regularly for mawkish BT celebrations of their trade, and are wined and dined at social occasions where their very presence is what makes the affair a tax-deductible business expense for their host.
A growing opportunity for tax-free high living is, of all things, charity and, in particular, corporate contributions to the arts. Two consulting firms in Washington alone specialize in lining up corporate sponsors for artistic groups or events, then staging elaborate parties to celebrate the connection. Corporate executives and their entourages fly in for the occasion and invite friends, politicians, journalists, and so on to wine and dine and hear speeches about private enterprise and culture. It's all BT. The cost of such a do is about $100 to $125 a person for "medium-level" food, wine, booze, waiters, flowers, guards, fees for the use of one of Washington's ceremonial buildings, and so on. A "nice" cocktail reception can be done for only $25 to $50 a person. Masterpiece Theater is made possible by a grant from Mobil Oil Corporation, but the frequent trips to England by Mobil's culture vultures to chat up BBC executives, view videotapes in screening rooms, and see what s new on the London stage are made possible by BT bucks.
Most industries in what might be called the luxury sector of the economy are deeply dependent on untaxed money. Of the consumer items associated with high living, only wearable clothes, furs, and jewels—are really rarely paid for with BT money. (Though even here, the Wall Street Journal has reported an arrangement whereby corporations lease business suits for their executives.) Relatively little luxury housing gets written off as a business expense. However, "business" apartments are quite common in resort communities and major cities here and abroad; and how to get deductions for second homes is a perennial topic in tax advice publications. Similarly, most luxury cars probably are paid for AT, but many self-employed professionals and small-business men manage to write off hefty chunks of their Cadillacs and Mercedeses, and top corporate executives often get company cars or limousines.
At the opposite extreme are luxury restaurants, almost all of which would fold if they had to rely on AT customers. In a city like Washington, 80 to 90 percent of the lunch crowd and perhaps half the dinner crowd at top restaurants is eating on "business." This is an unscientific estimate, but experienced Washington trencher persons don't challenge it.
The travel industry—airlines, hotels, resorts—is only somewhat less dependent than restaurants on tax-deductible customers. As with restaurants, the fancier the circumstances, the more likely the money is BT. According to the Air Transport Association, 55 percent of commercial air travel was for business purposes in 1979, up from 46 percent in 1973. Some of this represents traveling salesmen or computer engineers off to training sessions in Topeka, but much of it is doctors and lawyers heading for conventions in Hawaii and corporate executives attending conferences at the Greenbriar. The airlines won't say whether business is more heavily represented in first class or coach, but the question answers itself. The hotel industry has been developing its own equivalent of "first class" in recent years—a special section of rooms with extra services like little chocolate bars on the pillow at night. The newly opened Marriott in downtown Washington charges $30 extra a night (about $125 for a double room) for its "Concierge Level." According to the Wall Street Journal, "Hotels say the bulk of luxury customers are on expense accounts." Surprise, surprise.
The Hyatt Hotel Corporation advertises as follows in the February issue of an airline magazine:
FOR YOUR NEXT BUSINESS MEETING
Lake Tahoe the way it was . . . and still is, 460 newly appointed rooms and suites on the North Shore, plus a Regency Club Level with Concierge and a special touch of Hyatt.
2 nearby Robert Trent Jones golf courses and 26 tennis courts close to the hotel. Our own beach for swimming, water skiing and water sports. A heated pool. 6 nearby ski areas, cross country skiing and snowmobiling. Indoor and Outdoor Theme Parties. . . .
Hyatt's notion of a "business meeting" is useful in interpreting another ad Hyatt placed in February, this one in the New York Times, celebrating President Reagan's economic program:
There's a new spirit in America. The nation is charged with a strong new determination; ready to go to work and spur the growth of a new prosperity.
It's back to business. . . .
Business? What do Indoor and Outdoor Theme Parties have to do with business? Where does the enormous amount of lavish living that goes on free of taxation, much of it existing only for that reason, fit into the prevailing mythology that we need to worry less about the have-nots and more about the haves in order to rebuild the economy? There is a conceptual trap awaiting inequality buffs here. If such luxury is considered compensation for services rendered, to specific businesses and to general prosperity, then the money that pays for it should be subject to tax like all other compensation. We can argue about the proper tax rate, as of course we are doing these days, but even the Laffer Curve recognizes that a tax rate of zero is not fiscally sound.
Fearful of this logic, connoisseurs of the BT high life tend to portray themselves as characters in a Bunuel movie, dragging from one lavish event to the next and deriving no pleasure at all from the constant travel, socializing, fancy dining, and so on they are forced to endure as part of their contribution to the economy. The Wall Street Journal tax column recently told of a Santa Monica surgeon who deducted $2,533 in expenses connected with playing golf twice a week at his country club. He claimed that golf was "a chore" that he endured in order to cultivate patients and other doctors. The tax court denied the deduction, but only because he had insufficient records.
"Business" high living, therefore, cannot be regarded as an appropriate reward and necessary incentive for productive activity. So what is its social value? Let us not be so unfashionable as to reintroduce here the fundamental question of fairness—why the people who can most easily afford luxury anyway get so much of it tax-free, while more modest lifestyles are paid for with post-tax money. Instead, let us consider the problem from a strictly supply-side point of view. From this perspective, favored tax treatment for"business"luxury has three defects.
First, it encourages consumption over productive investment, at a time when the nation requires the opposite priority. Should Pickaname Corporation spend $100,000 on modernizing its rusty plant, or on a lavish weekend at the Superbowl for Mr. Pickaname and some "clients"? Ordinarily the government doesn't try to second-guess businesses about how they spend their money, figuring that they know best how to maximize their profits, and therefore the government's tax take. But Mr. Pickaname is not likely to make a cool and rational business decision here if one option will let him stage a grand exercise in hospitality at about half of what it would otherwise cost him. If Mr. Pickaname has passed from the scene, and his firm is now run by professional executives, their preference for the Superbowl weekend is likely to be even more pronounced, since it won't cost them anything at all. Furthermore, even when "investing" in lavish entertainment is a sound decision for an individual business, it rarely brings any return for the economy as a whole. At best, competitive orgies of consumption merely redirect demand; they do not create new supply.
Second, tax-free "business" consumption is inflationary. A customer who is paying only about half the cost (if he deducts it), or none of it at all (if she's on expense-account) is not going to be as sensitive to prices as people who have to pay with their own after tax money. By any standard, the value-for-money ratio at establishments that cater primarily to business customers is lower than at places where most people pay their own way. The cost of a fancy meal or top hotel room has outpaced most consumer prices in recent years, whereas restaurant meals in general, for example, have lagged behind.
Third, business consumption deductions reduce tax revenues—about three billion dollars a year for meals alone. This money could be used to cut marginal tax rates or to reduce the federal deficit, the two key conservative economic nostrums. Of course the money could also be used in other ways. The Congressional Black Caucus has proposed making restaurant meals only half-deductible, and using the money to restore Reagan's cuts in spending for child nutrition. But 1 suppose that suggestion smacks of envy.
Periodic crackdown attempts over two decades have added verses of sonorously forbidding language to the statute and regulation books. In practice, though, almost any sort of self-indulgence remains deductible. For example, the regulations state quite sternly that for a social occasion to be deductible, the "active conduct of business" must be the "principal aspect" of the occasion. The atmosphere must be "conducive to a business discussion." But read on. "Principal aspect," it develops, does not mean more than half of the time. And social occasions of any sort are deductible if they are "preceding or following a substantial business discussion." So are meals while traveling on business, and almost anything to do with a convention, and on and on.
And how about this passage from the IRS regulations for taking away with one hand and giving back with the other?
41. Question: Are there limitations on deductions for entertainment expenditures which are lavish or extravagant?
Answer: Yes. To the extent that the expenditure is lavish or extravagant it is not allowable as a deduction.
42. Question: Will entertainment expenses be subject to disallowance on grounds of being lavish or extravagant merely because they exceed a fixed dollar amount or are incurred at deluxe restaurants, hotels, night clubs and resort establishments?
Answer: No. An expense for entertainment will not be considered lavish or extravagant merely because it includes first class accommodations or services. An expense which, considering the facts and circumstances, is reasonable will not be considered lavish or extravagant.
The most complex rules surround the recondite question of deducting club dues. Business use of the club must be computed two different ways, one to determine whether the dues are deductible at all, and the other to determine how much. This can be a nuisance, but it Isn't much of a limitation. Unofficial tax guides contain pages of hints like this:
Make a point of having a quiet business lunch on the same day as you play golf. That makes it a directly related day. ANOTHER POINT: a few drinks . . . at the bar can also transform a casual golf date into a full-fledged business day.
The rules for writing off yachts and hunting lodges used to be the same as for club dues. But the only crackdown that survived from President Carter's "three martini lunch" campaign (besides a restriction on foreign conventions that was mainly for the benefit of the US tourist industry) was a new rule disallowing all deductions for fun-and-games "facilities." Even here, however, there is an exception for "out-of-pocket costs" of entertaining at such facilities. In the case of hunting lodges, this includes the guides, the dogs, the guns, the bullets, the food, the booze, the loose women, the private planes to get there—in short, almost everything except the roof.
Even under present rules, with their loopholes and self-immolating limitations, the IRS estimates that 20 percent of all entertainment and travel deductions people take are illegitimate. The problem is not that the rules are too lax or that they're not enforced, but that such rules are conceptually unenforceable. How long must angels talk business before they can deduct the cost of going out dancing on the head of a pin? Faced with meaningless concepts like "principal aspect," impossible demands for precision in apportioning life's moments between business and pleasure, and restrictions on what counts as "business" that only a clairvoyant could supervise, taxpayers naturally treat themselves generously. The IRS, boxed in by the statute and by limited enforcement resources, is powerless to prevent billions of dollars a year of the most superfluous consumption from being subsidized by the taxpayers. (Sorry Mr. Kristol, that just popped out.)
Money spent on meals, parties, sports tickets, vacations, and lavish living in general should not escape taxation. Permitting so much of it to do so is both bad for the economy and, just by the way, terribly unfair, A few very simple and easily enforceable rules would solve the problem. Expenditures for food and entertainment should not be deductible unless they are also reported as taxable income to the recipients. Deductions for business travel should be limited to some modest but not spartan standard, such as coach air fare plus the daily allowance the government sets for its own employees. One or two conventions a year should be all that is considered necessary for fraternal comity within the professions.
There are three standard objections to proposals like these. One is that jobs in the luxury industries would be sacrificed. The answer is that subsidizing extravagant consumption by the already prosperous is a silly and costly way to create jobs for the deprived. A second objection is that some truly legitimate and necessary business spending would be caught unfairly in the tax maw. The answer is, not much, not nearly so much as the properly taxable consumption that now escapes, and not the kind that really contributes to national prosperity. A third objection is that defining consumption is an impossible task, and cracking down on only certain kinds is unfair. Should executives be taxed on offices beyond a certain size, or carpet above a certain thickness? Should doctors have to declare the value of their satisfaction at saving lives or their status in the community? The simplest answer to this is that the people who enjoy these inchoate forms of business income are the same ones who have been deducting the more material gratifications of their caste. Starting to tax just one category of income of this sort makes the tax code more fair, not less fair.
If people still wished to live high on the hog, they would be free to do so. Relieved of the need to pretend that they're not enjoying it, they could instead reflect that this was their just reward for their contribution to society, as accurately measured by a free market economic system. Whether this reflection would have any basis in fact is a question for another day.
