The Lubitsch Touch

The Wall Street Journal headlined an article on this year’s crop of Oscar nominees “Fade to Bleak,” the point being that four of the five movies were grim stories, filled with blood and gore, amplified by modern technology that lets you actually see grizzly scenes of throat-slashing and other explicitly portrayed mayhem. One of the contenders is aptly named There Will Be Blood, so you can’t say you weren’t warned. So much for the movie theater as a place to escape the hard realities of life.

Once upon a time, it was different. In the early thirties, the public’s appetite for escape via movie musicals was insatiable. Some of them were awful, but some were excellent, thanks to performers like Maurice Chevalier, Jeanette McDonald, and, from England, Jack Buchanan. On the stage, The Desert Song, The Student Prince, The New Moon, etc. were still hugely popular, so it is not surprising that the plots for many of these musicals were essentially Hollywood’s versions of European operettas. By today’s standards, they are silly stories, but then, they are no sillier than most of what’s now playing at the local Cineplex. The other night I watched, for as long as I could stand it, a recent flick called Mr. Brooks, starring Kevin Costner and William Hurt. The plot was at least as noncredible as the worst of the operettas, and there was no music to offset the stupidity.

The master of the romantic-comedy genre in the early 30s was Ernst Lubitsch, and the term “the Lubitsch touch” is still applied to the most stylish romantic comedies.

Some of the Lubitsch treasures have recently been released on DVD and are available through Netflix. I recently waded in, and I’m glad I did. Here is what I found.

The Love Parade

The first 10 minutes of this film telegraph the whimsy that is to follow. Maurice Chevalier (whose name appears above the title) is a diplomat attached to the Sylvanian embassy in Paris. (He has been there long enough to have acquired his French accent, along with a string of female companions.) As we enter the scene, we hear an argument behind closed doors. His girlfriend has found a garter, and it isn’t hers. As she and Chevalier argue about the garter, her husband enters and sizes up the situation. Disgraced, she finds a revolver, shoots herself, and falls to the floor. The grief-stricken husband takes the gun from her hand and shoots Chevalier. But Chevalier, reprising a much-practiced scene, has loaded the gun with blanks. The husband, overjoyed to find his wife unharmed, exits with her (but not before she asks Chevalier to zip up her dress).

The Sylvanian ambassador, fed up with Chevalier’s string of scandals, sends him back to Sylvania, ruled by a beautiful but lonely Queen Louise, played by Jeanette McDonald in her first movie role. The rest of the story is thoroughly predictable. Comic relief, such as it is, is provided by British vaudevillian Lupino Lane (Ida Lupino’s uncle) and, in her cutesy period, Lillian Roth. The score, by Victor Schertzinger, features one standard, “Dream Lover.” The production is amazing for 1929, and the audio and video on the DVD are not bad, considering.

My mother was a big fan of Maurice Chevalier, and it is easy to see why. His warm personality and pleasant singing voice must have been dynamite to the audiences of 1929. As a matter of fact, they were all still evident three decades later, in Gigi.

Monte Carlo

The girl is still Jeanette McDonald, but the male lead is now British song and dance man Jack Buchanan. Jeanette is a countess who runs out on her wedding to an old, dim-witted nobleman and flees to Monte Carlo, where she falls under the spell of a hairdresser named Rudolph. But we know that Rudolph is really a count who pretends to be a hairdresser in order to meet the beautiful Jeanette. She is nearly broke (though she is attended by a maid and a retinue of other servants), and a big win at the casino is her only hope. The plot unfolds as in The Love Parade. She spurns him, he spurns her, she comes to her senses, etc. The similarity with the other movie is easily explained: Lubitsch, once he found a winning formula, milked it. In The Love Parade, the climactic scene is a ballet at the royal theater, with Queen Louise and her Prince Consort in the seats of honor. In Monte Carlo, the climactic scene is an opera (a contrived “Monseur Beaucaire”) with the Countess and Rudolph attending. The score for the film (including the opera scene) was written by Richard Whiting, and it contains one standard: “Beyond the Blue Horizon.” My wife reminds me that when this song was played during WW2, the final words, “a rising sun” were replaced by “a setting sun” in a burst of Nipponophobia.

One other song is worth mention: “Always in All Ways.” It is a delightfully catchy tune, well performed by Buchanan and McDonald. And Buchanan, like Chevalier, kept rolling along, delivering a knockout performance 23 years later in one of the best musicals ever screened, The Band Wagon.

One Hour With You

If you want to find out why Maurice Chevalier was the hottest property at Paramount in the early thirties, catch this one. It is a delicious Lubitsch confection, with clever dialogue, a few good songs, and Chevalier at his comedic best, which is saying a lot. The opening is memorable: The chief of the Paris police orders his gendarmes to sweep the City’s parks of its lovers, not because he is against necking, but because the economy suffers when people are on park benches instead of spending money in nightclubs. Chevalier and McDonald are among the park bench smoochers, and they are expelled by a dutiful officer. But they are married, and they are madly in love with each other, as Chevalier tells us in one of his arch to-the-camera asides. What a setup for the bedroom farce that is to follow, when Jeanette’s best friend, the sexy Mitzi, comes to visit! The supporting cast includes Roland Young as Mitzi’s cuckolded husband and Charlie Ruggles as an old friend who has a yen for Jeanette. The writers have given them some very funny lines, and they both deliver the goods.

The music includes two songs you will recognize, if you’re old enough: the title tune and "Day After Day" (we will always be sweethearts). The music is fine, and the cast (including the lovely Genevieve Tobin as Mitzi, the blonde hypotenuse of the triangle) is first-rate. But to me the revelation was Chevalier. I knew he could put over a song, but I never knew he had such a natural talent for comedy. If you have to choose one of the Lubitsch films to watch, this should be it.

The Smiling Lieutenant

Another operetta-based musical starring Maurice Chevalier. This one, made in 1931, before the censors were at work, has a plot that is silly even by operetta standards, but it’s a lot of fun all the same. Niki (Chevalier), a lieutenant in the Austrian army, is in love with Franzi (Claudette Colbert), a violinist and the leader of a girls’ band. While on duty as an honor guard to greet the visiting king and princess of neighboring Flausenthurm, he smiles at Franzi but is thought to be making eyes at Princess Anna (Miriam Hopkins) and is soon forced to marry her. Thus the triangle: the smiling Niki, Franzi the violinist, and Anna of Flausenthurm. Complications follow, and Lubitsch keeps you guessing till the end whether Niki will wind up with the blonde Anna or the brunette Franzi. The only musical number worth mentioning is “Jazz Up Your Lingerie,” notable mostly for the pianos backing up Hopkins and Colbert.

The dialogue is good. The king begins his grilling of the lieutenant by demanding that he spell Flausenthurm (he has been irritated by a missing “h” in an Austrian sign), and when Chevalier spells it correctly, the ladies in waiting swoon. (“That boy knows his alphabet.”) As I said, it’s all too silly for words, but once you accept that, it’s not bad. To audiences in the depth of the Great Depression, it must have been a wonderful tonic.

Trouble in Paradise

Trouble in Paradise is a Lubitsch romantic comedy, sans music, and it is revered by movie buffs for its sophistication and pre-Code sexiness. Debonair Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins are jewel thieves, and Kay Francis is the wealthy mark. It’s all played for laughs – not belly laughs, but laughs from naughty situations, double entendres, etc. It is like an extended Cole Porter lyric turned into a movie. Today’s directors should study it, in order to learn that a movie can be very racy without showing naked couples rolling about in the hay. In fact, without the dialogue this could be a G-rated movie. It could also have been a musical, and in fact I wish it were. I don’t know whether Marshall and company could sing, but I think the Lubitsch touch is deftest when set to music.



These movies probably will not appeal to younger audiences. They are by definition “dated,” they are of course in black and white, and the appeal lies in the dialogue, the situations, and, sometimes, the music. Almost all scenes are interiors, typically within palaces. There are no car chases, airplane crashes, or murders. But for anyone, young or old, who is interested in movies as an art form, Lubitsch 101 is a must course.

The Disney Touch

I watch movies, not to be educated or manipulated or shocked, but to be entertained. Measured by that standard, Disney’s Enchanted was a success. The story line, if you don’t know it already, goes like this: Giselle, a fair maiden living in a cartoonland called Andalasia, is in love with a handsome prince named Edward. Edward’s stepmother, the Queen, fears that Giselle will be a rival for her throne, so she throws her down a wishing well to a place “where there are no happy ever-afters” – New York City.

Giselle, now played by the flesh-and-blood Amy Adams, clambers out of a manhole in Times Square and is immediately surrounded by the horrors of Gotham. She is rescued from danger by a passerby named Robert. He is a lawyer and a single dad, living with his little daughter Morgan, and the trio repair to Robert’s apartment until he figures out what to do with this confused young woman dressed like a princess in a fairy tale. Eventually, Prince Edward also makes the trip from cartoonland to New York in search of his true love, who is learning the way people in the real world go about courting. The queen, keeping an evil eye on things from Andalasia, isn’t crazy about these developments and dispatches a minion to dispatch Giselle.

You get the idea: Animated characters are thrust into the real world, learn some lessons and teach some, too. In this case, Giselle from Andalasia and Robert from New York City fall in love and are obviously fated to live happily ever after.

Woody Allen also arranged for a handsome movie actor to step out of a movie to fall in love with a downtrodden housewife in the audience. The movie was The Purple Rose of Cairo, and it was clever and enjoyable. It was set in the Great Depression, and it exploited the contrast between the on-screen characters in a drawing-room comedy and the dreary moviegoers seeking escape from hard times. In Enchanted, no one is conspicuously miserable. Robert is a successful lawyer living in a luxurious Manhattan apartment. But his life is empty. Morgan, his little girl, wants a fairy-tale pop-up book, but her father gives her a coffee-table book on famous women like Rosa Parks and Madam Curie. He doesn’t do fairy tales.

Enchanted, given that plot, could have been sappy. Instead it is, well, enchanting. It has something Woody Allen, with all his talent, could never have.

That something is the Disney touch.

Talk about a brand for the ages! The screen fills with the glorious colors of the magic kingdom, against the strains of “When You Wish Upon a Star.” Then the narrator, Julie Andrews, sets up the story with the aid of a pop-up book of fairy tales, a device that will be revisited at the end of the movie. It had to be Julie Andrews. The adorable Amy Adams looks very much like Julie playing Cinderella in the Rodgers and Hammerstein TV special so many years ago, and of course Julie has That Voice.

The Disney touch also fills the screen with the usual menagerie of happy-go-lucky computer-generated animals, including a chipmunk who does his best to protect Giselle from harm. The movie is also chock-full of references to earlier Disney classics. The queen is a dead take-off of the queen in Snow White, as is her alter ego, the old hag who offers Snow White (and now Giselle) a poison apple. On one level, this latest Disney hit is making fun of all the Disney golden oldies. Only a film studio with monumental self-confidence would dare to do that.

Most of the movie takes place in New York, with real people, and the Disney touch is just as magical here. A long musical scene in Central Park involves dozens if not hundreds of dancers (there are certainly more than 100 dancers named in the end credits), and the obligatory ball scene at the climax is Disney at its best.

A word must be said in praise of the two actors who play Giselle’s suitors. As world-weary lawyer Robert, Patrick Dempsey has a tough assignment. When he is on screen, Giselle is usually with him, which means no one (no man, certainly) is looking at him. His dialogue is mostly straight lines, though every now and then the writers give him a gem. He is absolutely perfect in the role. James Marsden, who plays Prince Edward, is given a showy costume and a sword to brandish, and he must have had great fun hamming it up. The make-up crew and the costumers should also be credited for making the cartoon characters and their worldly counterparts look reasonably alike. (They obviously had no trouble sounding alike.)

I don’t want to give the impression that Enchanted is flawless. First, while I accept that birds and chipmunks and even caterpillars can sing and dance in the magic kingdom, I can’t buy lovable rats and cockroaches. (No, I didn’t like Pixar’s Ratatouille.) Second, the over-the-top finale, with the queen transforming herself into a huge dragon and then climbing a skyscraper, King Kong style, struck me as pointless. In Snow White, the queen/hag with her poison apple were quite enough. Maybe the Disney folks thought a modern audience needed a heavier dose of shock and awe, but I thought the last 10 minutes of the movie (after the exquisite ball scene) was a misfire.

Still, the pluses outweighed the minuses, and the movie was a winner.

Once upon a time, long long ago, I saw the original Snow White, and in the years since I have seen most of the animated Disney classics and have visited Disneyland with my children. There is nothing like the Disney experience, because it taps into a very deep, very primitive feeling that there must be someplace where dreams really do come true. I’ll let the psychologists and the theologians sort that out, but what I know is that for me, the Disney magic never pales. It is as bright and colorful as ever.

Renaissance Men

Bill Buckley died last week, and among the many tributes to him was a worry, voiced by Peggy Noonan, that we will all be poorer if our supply of well rounded, articulate men like Buckley starts petering out. (Her column was headed “May We Not Lose His Kind.”) It is a legitimate concern. It is now conventional wisdom that the future of our economy and our way of life depends on our ability to focus the education of our young on science and technology.

I yield to no one when it comes to recognizing the importance of math and science, and I agree that we are now at a competitive disadvantage because our youngsters score much lower in such subjects than the Chinese, the Japanese, and many others, including the Finnish children, who apparently are at the top of the list. On the other hand, what we need most of all are students who are good at math and science AND writing and history and at least one foreign language and geography and civics and all the other subjects that one had to learn, once upon a time, to graduate from high school. A bachelor’s degree from college was a certificate attesting to the fact that you were an educated person, in the fullest sense of the term.

Bill Buckley – writer, yachtsman, bon vivant, occasional politician, TV personality, philosopher, magazine founder and editor – was, flagrantly, an educated man. A renaissance man. There have been others, and one doesn’t have to travel back to Leonardo DaVinci to find them. Alfred Lee Loomis was one. After graduating from Yale Law School, he joined a New York law firm and was a rising star when he left law to pursue investment banking, rescuing a failing bond firm, making a large fortune, and selling out before the Crash. He was one of the 10 wealthiest men in the United States, yacht-racing with the Vanderbilts and their ilk. But, while Wall Street was his “day job,” on weekends he presided over one of the country’s foremost technology laboratories, at his estate in Tuxedo Park, 40 miles north. For Loomis was also a first-class scientist, and he was able to draw the best and the brightest from MIT, Stanford, and elsewhere. Among those drawn to Tuxedo Park were the giants of the era – Einstein, Bohr, Fermi. In the late 30’s, with war threatening, FDR called on Loomis to organize work on radar, and some of the Tuxedo Park crew were recruited for work on the Manhattan Project. Loomis’s amazing story is well told in the book “Tuxedo Park,” written by Jennet Conant, granddaughter of a noted Harvard president.

Another renaissance man was a fellow I once knew while working at General Radio in the 50’s. This was Robert Rines, a patent attorney with Rines & Rines, of Boston. Since General Radio’s engineers were notoriously prolific and creative, there were hundreds of patents to be awarded, and Bob was a master of his craft. But Rines the patent attorney was also Rines the scientist, with bachelor’s degree (MIT) and doctorate in physics, plus his law degree from Georgetown. His pioneering work on high-definition sonar systems was vital to the search for the Titanic and the Bismark. On vacation in Scotland, he became absorbed by the tales of the Loch Ness monster and became one of the world’s foremost experts on the subject. Is there more? There is more. He was also a composer, writing scores for 10 Broadway and off-Broadway musicals.

Then there was my old boss and mentor, Charlie Worthen, another MIT engineer who was a voracious reader of British literature, in particular the essays of Orwell and the arcana of J.R.R. Tolkein. Charlie knew so much more about art and literature and music than I did that it was embarrassing, because he was the engineer and I the liberal arts graduate. (In retribution, I tried mightily but vainly to become a self-taught electronics engineer.)

Engineers are often good musicians, I find, probably because the mathematics of music fascinates them. Lawyers also seem to be drawn to music, and long before Bob Rines, a lawyer named Arthur Schwartz became a hugely successful Broadway composer. (“Dancing in the Dark” was one of his many hit songs.) So the multitalented person is not all that rare. If you have the creative gene, it seems, it will find a variety of outlets.

Not everyone can be a Buckley or a Loomis or a Rines. But everyone can at least be interested in more than one thing at a time, and our schools can return to the old standard, the idea that education means more than knowing one thing well. The Jesuits called their master plan the “ratio studiorum,” and their plan of studies covered the widest possible arc, within the time constraints of the school day. I know, having gone through the drill and having taught at a Jesuit high school for a year.

So, much as I applaud the renewed emphasis on math and science, it would be a tragedy if the rest of the ratio studiorum were crowded out. I wonder, when I hear parents gushing that their eight-year-old Willy “is a whiz at the computer,” whether the child will eventually be taught anything about gerunds or magnetic theory or basic economics. Will he ever know who fought in the Boer War? Will he know where Acadia was? Will he ever read Shakespeare or Pushkin or Ibsen?

Maybe he will. Maybe he’ll Google them and eventually get interested enough to search them out at the library. I hope so, because if he is nothing more than a whiz at the computer, he is being cheated out of most of what life is all about.

Giuditta

A beautiful but bored housewife in a Mediterranean port city (let’s say Barcelona) charms an Army captain who is en route to a campaign in a North African city (let’s say Tangiers) and impulsively takes off with him, and the two live together in his villa in North Africa. But duty calls, and he must leave her to join his regiment. She begs him to stay, but he marches off, more than a little worried that the men of North Africa may be drawn to her like ants to a picnic.

His worries are well founded, for soon she is a successful exotic dancer in a nightclub, where her charms are irresistible to the club’s well heeled patrons. The captain finally deserts his regiment and tracks her down, but it is too late: She has found a life that agrees with her.

Years later, the broken-hearted captain is reduced to working as a cocktail pianist in a luxury hotel. His old flame is ushered to a table to await her escort for the evening, a wealthy duke. The captain plays a few bars of “their” old song (no, it’s not “As Time Goes By’), and she recognizes him and tries to restart the old romance. Alas, this time it’s too late for him, for he’s a broken man. The girl leaves with the duke.

That, more or less, is the plot of Franz Lehar’s last major operetta, Giuditta. premiered at the Vienna State Opera in 1934, about 30 years after Lehar wrote what is probably the most successful operetta of all time, The Merry Widow. The Vienna premiere of Giuditta (Lehar’s favorite of all his works) was broadcast worldwide by no fewer than 120 radio stations, but for all that, it was not well received by the locals, and to this day it has never been seen in New York, London, or Paris.

Has your curiosity been piqued? Good, because I am here to tell you that a fine CD recording exists, in English, courtesy of Telarc. It stars Jerry Hadley, familiar to all PBS fans, as Octavio, the captain, and Deborah Riedel in the title role. A full-bodied English Chamber Orchestra backs them up, and the excellent program booklet includes the entire libretto. You may recognize a couple of the songs: “Love, Gentle and Tender” and “Kiss My Lips and Your Heart’s Aflame” (both woeful translations of the original German). The CD was recorded in London in 1996, and it is technically very good. Hadley, a superb tenor, is in good voice. Riedel is a capable soprano, if a bit shrill at times. The secondary couple (there’s always a secondary couple in these things) are Naomi Itami and Lynton Atkinson, both solid performers.

So now there’s one more way to escape the Hillary-Obama-McCain drumbeat that is the curse of television these nights.


If you like operetta, check out this summer’s program at the Ohio Light Opera, in Wooster. In addition to standards like The Mikado and The Desert Song, the OLO will stage rarely hear operettas like The Czarevitch, L’etoile, and Marinka. The season is laid out for you at ohiolightopera@wooster.edu.

Fed Up

For well over a year now, you’ve been listening to speeches by Hillary, speeches by Barak, speeches by John and Mitt and Rudy and the other presidential hopefuls. You have also heard political analyses and commentaries by Katie, Wolf, Sean, Anderson, Glen, David, James, and the other talking heads. After each primary, you have been told how every describable demographic group voted: white males 45 and over, black females 18-40, Latino factory workers, young immigrants, black white collar workers, etc. You are told what Hillary said about Barak last night, how Barak reacted to that, and how Hillary reacted to Baraks’ reaction. Whatever news channel you choose, you can’t escape; it is as if there is no other news.

Had enough? Then here’s what you do: Go to the window of your house or apartment, throw it open, and shout to the world, “I’m fed up, and I’m not going to take it any more!”

This is not a tirade against political discourse, which, after all, lies at the core of our democratic system. But it is an indictment of chatter so inane, so repetitive, and so insulting to our intelligence as to drive us all to tune out.

Unless you have been living in a lead mine for the past year, you now know the leading candidates’ positions on taxes, health care, Iraq, the deficit, global trade, and global warming. What is left to know? Ah, there is always more, as long as TV channels compete for ratings. There is the issue of Barak’s wife, a putative loose cannon. There is the issue of Bill “ First Man” Clinton, prowling around the White House in search of interns. There is the issue of whether John McCain is already planning his invasion of Iran. They are all reasonable subjects for discussion, but don’t expect any answers from CNN or CBS or Fox, only questions.

You may or may not want to go the window and pull a Peter Finch, but you could decide to switch the channel whenever the subject of the 2008 presidential election comes up. Go to the Food Channel, or Turner Classic Movies, or the History Channel. The Weather Channel is running a great series called “When Weather Changed History.” There are other channels where you’ll be safe from talk about Barak and Hillary and John.

The ultimate rebellion, of course, is to withhold one’s vote for either presidential candidate. This sounds like an extreme, even unpatriotic position, but it is the correct position for anyone who cannot in conscience support either major presidential candidate. “None of the above” will probably appeal to more than a few voters this November.

Priorities

Defense Secretary Gates thinks the Iraq surge is working but is not sure about a troop draw-down. The NATO alliance is falling apart in Afghanistan. Iran has test-flown a ballistic rocket with an estimated range of 2000 miles. Hugo Chavez threatens to cut off oil shipments to the U.S. A rebel group has seized control of much of Chad. Riots have broken out in Kenya. The Darfur human rights disaster continues. North Korea’s agreement to suspend its nuclear program is on hold. Thousands of Burmese are fleeing into Thailand. In the U.S., a bitterly divisive presidential election seems unavoidable.

And what do you suppose our Congressional representatives are preoccupied with today?
What Capitol Hill hearings fill our television screens this morning? What important topic has brought the entire news-gathering community and their cameras to the hearings chamber?

War? Taxes? The recession? None of the above. Our elected representatives are holding forth on issue of whether a baseball pitcher named Roger Clemens ever used performance-enhancing drugs.

One after another, these stalwarts do their best to project a sense of gravity during hearings that serve no discernible purpose other than to allow them to project a sense of gravity. Do these people really think the state of the nation hinges on whether Roger Clemens used HGH? Representative John Tierney is today’s poster boy for this kind of nonsense, possibly because Tierney (D-MA) senses that there are some votes to be had in grilling a member of the Yankees. Tierney is now outraged, now righteous; see his face redden as he pursues his quarry. What a hambone!

It would be refreshing to hear Senator Clinton or Obama or McCain promise to restore a sense of priorities in Washington and stop these circuses, but it won’t happen. They know that most people would rather watch a Congressional version of American Idol than a serious discussion of world affairs. It is our priorities that are screwed up, not Congress’s.

The Songs of War

In World War 1, the doughboys marched off to war singing “Over There,” and when they went into battle, they sang “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” “It’s a Grand Old Flag,” and “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” The British and the French, not to be outdone, had their own lists of songs designed to keep spirits high.

In World War 2, the composers pulled out all the stops. Irving Berlin dug “God Bless America” out of his trunk and, with Kate Smith’s help, made it a second national anthem. Frank Loesser contributed “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” and Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn wrote “I’ll Walk Alone.” From Old Blighty we heard Vera Lynn and others promise that “We’ll Meet Again” and “There’ll be Bluebirds Over the White Cliffs of Dover.” The Andrews Sisters sang about the “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B,” and a uniformed Irving Berlin was on stage singing how he hated to get up in the morning. There were dozens if not hundreds of songs about soldiers, sailors, marines, and the girls back home, some of them, like Rosie, working away as riveters. The musical legacy of World War 2 lives on, as many of the tunes became standards that are now ingrained in the national psyche.

Then things changed. Nobody sang sentimental ballads about the Korean War or about Vietnam. (The musical “Miss Saigon” has many fine tunes, but they are mostly bitter or satirical.) We are now engaged in war once again, but nobody’s writing songs about it. (“It’s a Long Way to Sadr City”? I don’t think so.) As a society, we have progressed to the point where no one writes pop tunes romanticizing war. We are endlessly exhorted to “support our troops” by backing the latest tactical surge, but even that line is getting tired, and no one is setting it to music.

Of course, hardly anyone is writing romantic ballads of any kind these days, and we are all the poorer for that. A song like “I’ll Walk Alone” was really a love song, not a war song, and that is why it is still sung. Most of the true war songs didn’t last. They sold War Bonds and made people feel patriotic, but now they are rightly forgotten.

Oh, by the way, the U.S. and its allies didn’t hold a monopoly on war songs in WW2. I have a book of Soviet popular songs of that era, and, in case you’re curious, here are the lyrics for one of them, “Tachanka,” translated into English:

Fly, oh bird, above the highway,
Beast aside, to the clear road.
Look and see the dust roll skyward,
Raised by horses swiftly rode.
Taking aim with his machine gun,
The young gunner opens fire.
And staccato shots unseen zip,
Making all the foes retire.
Eh, Tachanka rostovchanka,
You’re a beauty and our pride.
With the mounted troops Tachanka,
On four wheels you swiftly ride.


Well, it probably loses something in translation.

Frank Loesser

Today’s Wall Street Journal brought a long review of a new book about Frank Loesser, and, since my antennae always home in on articles about the great songwriters, I dove into the story expecting enrichment. Instead, I was left wondering how a reviewer, presumably knowledgeable about the subject, could spend 1000 words or so on the musical achievements of Frank Loesser – a giant among American composers – without once mentioning the Loesser masterpiece, The Most Happy Fella. Instead, what we got was a lot of gushing about Loesser’s pop tunes, “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” “A Slow Boat to China” and “What Are You Doing New Year’s?” Good songs all, but they are mere footnotes in the illustrious biography of Frank Loesser.

To those in the know, Loesser gave Broadway two masterpieces: Guys and Dolls and The Most Happy Fella, and if he never wrote another musical or another song, that would qualify him for the Pantheon. Yes, How to Succeed…”won a Pulitzer, but its score is second rate. He also wrote Where’s Charley? and Greenwillow, but most of his 700 or so songs were written as singles, many of them becoming standards.

But let’s return to the two masterpieces. Guys and Dolls and The Most Happy Fella are so different that it is hard believe they are the works of the same composer. The opening of Guys and Dolls marks the show as an instant classic. Three “guys” sing about their favorite horses in today’s race. Nicely-Nicely likes Paul Revere, Benny is betting on Valentine, and Epitaph is Rusty Charlie’s choice. The “Fugue for Tinhorns” develops into a contrapuntal trio that sets the tone for the show. In the title song, we learn that “when you see a gent paying all kinds of rent for a flat that would flatten the Taj Mahal, call it sad, call it funny, but it's better then even money that the guy's only doing it for some doll.” Can lyrics get any better than that?

The Most Happy Fella is operatic, with Loesser pouring out one beautiful melody after another – enough for three musicals, really. The story, based on Sidney Howard’s 1924 play They Knew What They Wanted, centers on Tony, a middle-aged, Italian wine grower from the Napa Valley who falls in love with a San Francisco waitress, courts her by mail, and, when it comes time to swap pictures, sends her a photograph of his handsome foreman, Joe. When she travels to Napa and discovers the deception, she is enraged at Tony, seeks solace in Joe’s arms, and becomes pregnant. But when kind-hearted Tony is injured in an accident, she decides to stay on and take care of him. She falls in love with Tony, Joe packs up and leaves, singing that he’s had “all I want of the ladies in the neighborhood.” Tony is more than happy at the prospect of serving as the father of Rosabella’s baby.

It is a rich, warm love story, whose Napa Valley setting seems to cry out for a Puccini score. And we get it, with no compromise, from Frank Loesser, complete with festival songs (“Abbondanza”, “Sposalizio”) and dramatic arias (“My Heart is So Full of You,” “A Long Time Ago”). But for all its operatic soul, at heart this is a Broadway musical as well, so Loesser gives us “Big D” and “Standing on the Corner.”

I saw the Broadway original production in 1956, buying standing room at the sold-out Imperial. And I would do it again, even with my creaky knee. Tony was played by Robert Weede, Rosabella by Jo Sullivan (later Mrs. Frank Loesser). That amazing production was captured – not just the songs, but the whole play – in a three-LP recording, which is one of my most prized possessions. You don’t have a turntable? Not to worry: Sony has issued the entire original-cast album on a two-CD set. This is musical theater the likes of which you just don’t find anymore, because they aren’t making Frank Loessers anymore.

Cruising

Since we were last together, your beachcomber has traveled about 10,000 miles. No dummy he, the destination was the lower, warmer latitudes – to be specific, the islands of Hawaii, via a cruise ship. The climate was, well, Hawaiian, and it was the cruelest of all shocks to find the temperature at 8 degrees when we returned home. Maine has no mercy for those who desert her when the going gets rough.

If you’ve experienced ocean cruising, you know that it’s not exactly hazardous duty. But someone’s got to do it, so we dutifully boarded the good ship Zaandam at San Diego for 15 days of crossing to Hawaii, puttering around a few islands, and crossing back to San Diego. We’ve taken enough cruises to be a bit jaded about the food, entertainment, etc., but I refuse to join the chorus of complainers you find on most ships these days. They are enjoying a life style that would have been incomprehensible for most of them in their youth, a degree of pampering that 98 percent of the world’s population cannot hope to enjoy, ever, and yet they complain. Not this fellow, who knows how lucky he is.

The Zaandam is a good-sized ship: 63,000 tons, 1375 passengers, but it is hardly a megaship. In fact, when we docked at San Diego, the Zaandam was dwarfed by the Oosterdam, preparing for a trip down the Mexican Riviera. The Zaandam was built in 2000, and the ambience is quiet, the clientele sedate. It is definitely not a party ship. After dinner and the show, we tended to cap the evening in the mellow Explorers’ Lounge, listening to the classical music of a very good string trio.

The itinerary included Hilo, Kona, two days in Honolulu, and a day in Maui. The first day out, huge rollers from the northwest caused the ship to roll, forcing a cancellation of the big production show and keeping many (including yours truly) from dinner. After that, it was relatively smooth sailing.

The Pacific is one big drink of water – bigger, we were told, than the earth’s entire land mass. And it is deep – over 18,000 feet deep on our route. The ocean is so vast that in the four-day sail westward, we saw only one (container) ship. Coming back, it was again a single ship.

The food was standard cruise fare, which is to say very good indeed, and the entertainment was as good as any we’ve ever seen on a cruise. The dancers were Broadway quality, and the sets and costumes were just this side of unbelievable. Among solo performers, the best by far was an Australian cabaret singer named Annie Frances. If there is any justice in Showbizland, she should become a big international star.

The only drawback to winter cruising, for us, is that we have to fly some distance to catch the ship. The exceptional legroom, on-time performance, and Company whimsy of JetBlue all help, but flying is still a penance, and those passengers who live near the major cruise ports are very lucky.

Oh yes, the ship offered daily trivia games, which attracted throngs of people anxious to prove how smart they are. I can’t resist that bait, so Jill and I were regulars, joining the same teammates every day, and winning not a single game. That’s because Holland-America cheats. When the quizmaster asked which movie actor tough guy was also a talented dancer, we answered George Raft, but Holland-America would accept only James Cagney. Well, of course Jimmy Cagney danced; everyone knew that. But Raft was a real dancer before he was a Hollywood gangster.

But I said I will not complain, so I will overlook the Zaandam’s woefully misinformed trivia personnel and say that it was, over-all, another wonderful cruise experience.

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photo: The Zaandam, at anchor off Kona.

Merry Christmas

Snow fell yesterday, enough to warrant the use of the snowblower, and more is forecast for this weekend. For some reason, a large flock of geese flew over this morning - heading almost due north. They may have sensed the bad weather to the southwest and are looking for sanctuary.

Speaking of sanctuary, we will soon head for warmer climes for a bit, and so this blog will be quiet until we return in late January. To all our readers - and they are apparently in every corner of the globe - go our best wishes for a very Happy Christmas and New Year.

Oh yes - there's now a new collection of these blog posts in book form. It is called Lines from the Beachcomber, and it is available on www.lulu.com, as is an earlier collection, Searching for Joan Leslie. Either book may be purchased as a printed paperback or downloaded free.

The Candidates (continued)

It is time to take another look at the presidential candidates. In our last episode we declared John McCain out of the running. Nothing has happened since to change this opinion. We thought Fred Thompson was a dark horse. He has become an even darker horse, fading into the blackness. We thought Rudy Giuliani was the one to watch. But by staunchly endorsing the President’s invasion of Iraq – an act that, more than any other, has driven George Bush’s poll numbers to the cellar – Rudy has shot himself in the foot.

The comer is Mike Huckabee, who commands attention with his unscripted, laid-back demeanor and his agreeable looks. Ron Paul is also interesting, but Huckabee is more plausible as a candidate.

Mitt Romney is a good man, I believe, and he clearly has administrative ability and, most important, character. The foofaraw about his religion is ridiculous. But Governor Romney does not have the kind of personality that connects with large masses of voters. He just does not light up the TV screen. It’s unfair, perhaps, but there it is.

Among Democrats, Hillary is like a marathoner who raced out of a starting gate and now is looking tired, or rather, tiring. People are tiring of watching her campaign month after month. She would have been better off saving her energy for a big finish, as Obama seems to be doing. Still, she is the front-runner, and the only real opposition she faces comes from her own negatives. Hillary is the only person who can defeat Hillary.

In my last piece on this subject, I said that Obama could overcome either of his two handicaps (inexperience and race), but not both. I still believe that, but I am more convinced than ever that he will be a strong, maybe unbeatable, candidate next time around. He oozes common sense, decency, and intelligence with every syllable, and he takes the glare of attention with a cool demeanor that is very impressive for one so young.

Edwards, on the other hand, is a different breed. What he oozes is insincerity, and it is a mystery to me that he has attracted any support at all. The more earnestly he gives his “two Americas” pitch, the more he sounds like a charlatan. If Huckabee is the campaign’s Kevin Spacey, Edwards is its Tom Cruise, glib, shallow, and well coifed.


How will it all turn out? It depends on events in the Iraq. If things appear to be going reasonably well, the Republicans may hold the White House and could recapture Congress. If the situation deteriorates, the Democrats are in. It’s not automatic; candidates matter. But one side or the other will have a strong tailwind blowing from the Middle East.

I look at the debaters, all lined up on the stages mouthing their carefully rehearsed talking points, and I wonder, as so many must, whether this is the best we can do. And yet, as William Allen White said of a lightweight presidential candidate named Roosevelt in 1932, “responsibility is a winepress that brings forth strange juices out of men.”

The "We're at War" Syndrome

The candidates are all being asked for their opinions on torture, and they all say they’re against it. (What else can they say?) But then they add, as Fred Thompson did on the Charlie Rose Show last night, that if a terrorist was in custody and in possession of information that could save American lives they would favor “doing whatever is necessary.” Thompson went on to say that he believed that the other candidates, even John McCain, would say the same thing, though when pressed he admitted he hadn’t spoken to McCain on the subject.

Thus the straw man lives on. There is this terrorist, see? And he knows when a bomb is set to go off in a crowded New York theater, see? It could even be Yankee Stadium, see? So what are going to do, read him his Miranda rights?

But, said Charlie Rose, some people, including McCain, say that torture in such instances doesn’t deliver the goods; the prisoner will say anything under torture, even a pack of lies. And what about the high moral ground? Are we no better than our enemies, as we always claim to be?

Well, said Thompson, who looked as he was having trouble remembering his lines, those are all valid arguments, but there are valid arguments on the other side, too. Torture is wrong, but it may also be right. Next question.

The story about the hypothetical detainee who has life-threatening information is bogus. For openers, who says he actually has that information? An Army field officer? A CIA operative? A neighbor in Baghdad? Dick Cheney? He can't face his accuser. He can’t call a lawyer. He is completely at the mercy of someone who claims, without proof, that he is a terrorist, or supports terrorists, or knows a terrorist, or has read a terrorist pamphlet.

Consider the following scenario: A black car pulls up in your driveway. Three men get out, and one of them rings your doorbell. When you open the door you are whisked off to a black hole somewhere. You are held incommunicado, month after month, and you are grilled harshly about things you don’t know about. But that can’t happen; this is America, land of court trials, habeas corpus, a jury of your peers, the right to face your accuser, etc.

Under normal circumstances, says the Administration, all that is true. But we’re at war, and the President’s power at such times is absolute. All your rights go out the window with the magic words: “We’re at war.”

That’s the real issue, not waterboarding. The burning question, which no one seems to bother to ask, is: How do we know – really know – that the person we have in custody is the “very bad guy” the administration insists he is? We can’t tell you that, they say, because if we did it would compromise our intelligence methods. Translation: We know, wink, wink; nudge, nudge. Trust us.

Even if I were inclined to trust them, we are as a nation on thin ice. The case for total, unchecked Presidential power, so artfully constructed by White House Lawyer-in-Chief David Addington, sets a precedent for all future presidents, including whoever becomes President in January 2009. Looking over the field, and considering that “we’re at war” will still be an available defense, that’s a sobering thought.

On the Beach

The beach was crowded today. Crowded for Goose Rocks, that is. It is never so crowded that one can’t find a place to spread a blanket, as it sometimes is at Cannes or Nantasket or Coney Island. But it was crowded enough to force me to pick my way through the humanity on my daily beach stroll. We are closing in on Labor Day, and the renters are determined to get their money’s worth before packing up and heading back to Framingham or Chelmsford.

A new trend is visible on the beach this summer: the widespread use of children’s wagons and baby carriages to cart beach paraphernalia from the renters’ houses to their chosen spots on the sand. In past years, the crowds, such as they were, were clustered in the middle of the strand, near the center of population (and parking spaces). Now, pulling their wagons behind them, they travel hundreds of yards, to more remote destinations. The carrying capacity of those of those little red wagons is amazing: folding chairs, umbrella, a cooler for drinks, balls, frisbees, a bag of sandwiches, a boom box, books and magazines, camera, towels, and other necessities of beach life.

The sand is hard at low tide, and then you see the beachgoers making their long treks, looking like the Okies in “The Grapes of Wrath,” transporting all their earthly possessions to a Better Place. People are funny. On one hand, they rail against private beaches, arguing for total public access. On the other hand, given the chance, they will instinctively seek a private spot, far away from the throng. When I was a youngster, my parents took great pride in the fact that through a friend we had access to a private beach on the North Shore. There were equally attractive public beaches nearby, but private was better because – well, just because.

So the caravans roll on, to the farthest reaches of the beach. Then, after a day in the sun, they wheel their wagons back to their bases. Most of them are good about carting their beer cans and potato chip bags back with them, but some leave their detritus behind. It is sad to see litter on the beach, but the good news is that those red wagons and prams do make it easier for people to police the area.

In another week, summer will officially have ended, and the real caravans – the SUVs crammed to the roof and with full bicycle racks behind – will start their journeys down the Maine Turnpike. The beach will still be busy on weekends in September – the best month, in the opinion of many – but the big crowds will be gone. That’s the good news. The bad news is that winter is just around the corner. In January, to paraphrase Yogi Berra, when there’s plenty of room on the beach, no one comes.

____________________
Book note: A new edition of The General Radio Story is now available at lulu.com. This one has an index and a table showing annual sales and earnings from 1915 through 2001. Also available at lulu.com: Searching for Joan Leslie, a collection of these blog postings.

Uneasy lies the head...

President Bush has just used the analogy of Vietnam to buttress his case for hanging tough in Iraq. As many have pointed out, this was a curious decision on his part. Among those reading Vietnamese history with special interest these days must be Iraq’s Prime Minister al-Maliki, and the trip down memory lane cannot be very comforting.

In 1963, South Vietnam was ruled by President Ngo Dinh Diem, and at the time American military and intelligence advisers were strongly critical of him for not waging the fight against the enemy aggressively enough. (Sound familiar?) So, when the CIA folks in Saigon heard that some Vietnamese generals were hatching a coup, the American ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, gave these generals the green light, assuring them that if they succeeded, the U.S. would promptly recognize their new regime. Thus encouraged, the generals decided to “carpe Diem” on November 1. The next day, President Diem and his brother were both killed by the generals, and the new government was indeed swiftly recognized by the United States. The initial cover story was that Diem and his brother both committed suicide, but then photographs surfaced showing their stabbed and bullet-riddled bodies, hands tied, in the back of a truck. Oops. (Today, the murders would probably be shown on YouTube.)

Exactly three weeks later, the President who okayed the Saigon coup would himself be assassinated, in Dallas.

Fast forward to last week. President Bush, asked by a reporter whether it was time to replace Prime Minister Maliki, answered that this was a question for the Iraqis, not the U.S. Of course, Diem was killed by the Vietnamese, not the Americans. If something unfortunate happens to Maliki, the Americans in Baghdad are sure to have clean hands.

But Maliki knows the score, just as Pakistan’s President Musharraf knows the score. He says that the Americans threatened to bomb his country “back to the stone age” if he did not sign on as a U.S. ally. Now he, no less than Maliki, is feeling the heat, as U.S. politicians accuse him of not pursuing Al Qaeda on his border with Afghanistan. He, too, must be well aware of what happened to Diem in 1963.

Maliki, Musharraf, and others may think they have acquired a certain immunity. They fly to Washington, appear at press conferences with the American President, address Congress. But that’s all fool’s gold. Diem, too, flew to Washington and was a press celebrity. His American ties were solid: three years living in New York and New Jersey, a consultancy at Michigan State, a favorite of New York’s Cardinal Spellman. He must have thought he was safe. But when the Americans decided that he had to go, he had to go.

So why on earth did President Bush decide to stir up memories of Vietnam? In the past, he had always rejected any comparison between Iraq and Vietnam; now he was pushing just this comparison. A cynic might think that he was delivering a not-so-subtle message to Mr. Maliki and President Musharaff.

The Fed Caves

Yesterday the Federal Reserve Bank dropped the discount rate by a half point. Those whose lives revolve around the daily mood swings of the stock market cheered. The market indexes soared. But those who care about the integrity of our financial system know better, or at least they should. Mr. Bernanke and his colleagues, after months spent assuring us all of their diligence in standing guard against inflation, caved.

A week or so ago, Jim Cramer, host of a CNBC show called Mad Money, screamed – screamed - that the Fed didn’t have a clue about the panic lurking in the wings. If the Fed didn’t slash interest rates immediately, the market would crash, producing an economic catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. What happened to send Cramer ballistic? Countrywide Financial and Bear Stearns and KKR happened. Some investors were shocked to find that money market funds were not instantly convertible into cash after all. The Dow was making 9-G dives every other day. Investors were fleeing the market. If this kept up, they might turn off a stock-market-oriented cable TV channel. We can’t have that, can we? So the anchor of the hour, like the Wizard of Oz, kept urging us to stay focused on the strength of the economy and not to pay any attention to those 200-point drops, which were in any event just creating more buying opportunities.

Then the Dow broke 14,000, and they started singing a new tune: Yes, the economy would be fine - IF the Fed did the right thing and lowered interest rates.

As the Wall Street Journal editorialized today, “The same people who’ve been saying for weeks that all was well are now the loudest in urging the Fed to reflate the bubble.”

It is pathetic to see the Fed buckling under in this way. Yes, there was pain at the lending institutions, and there were scare stories about millions of sub-prime mortgage holders facing eviction. And investors were rattled by big portfolio losses. But when you borrow money, you enter into a contract, and the sanctity of contracts lies at the core of our financial system. When you buy a stock, you can lose money. When you buy a bond, your investment is only as secure as the issuer’s balance sheet. Those are the ground rules we operate by. Bernanke may not admit that he is weakening this foundation, but he is. Once the Fed is regarded as the white knight who will ride in to save you from your bad decisions, watch out.

Some will say that it is, after all, the Fed’s duty to keep its hand on the throttle. But a scheduled meeting of the Open Market Committee was only a few weeks away, and the sudden lurch to ease, following an “emergency meeting,” suggests two possibilities: (1) the Committee did in fact fold under pressure from the Wall Street walking wounded, or (2) the Fed knows something we don’t about the state of the economy.

Neither explanation is very comforting.

Red to the Rescue

In the 1970s, a hot subject in the semiconductor industry was memory testing. A semiconductor memory is an array of cells on a silicon chip, with each cell representing a 1 or a 0, depending on its electrical state. In those days, a memory typically had 1000 or so cells (today’s memories have millions of cells), and the memory makers tested each chip by applying a pattern to the matrix (e.g., a checkerboard, with alternating 1’s and 0’s) and verifying that the cells behaved properly – ensuring, for instance, that a cell didn’t change states when an adjacent cell was switched.

My company made memory test systems at a plant in the San Fernando Valley, and I thought it might be useful to hold a seminar on memory testing at a nearby hotel. The seminar, which was conducted by the manager of the memory-test division, was a success, and, thus encouraged, I immediately began planning a similar event for our east-coast customers. (This was at a time when a sizeable portion of the U.S. semiconductor industry was still located in the northeast.) The site would be New York’s Plaza Hotel, no less. The seminar would be a full-day affair, including lunch, in the Palm Court. It seemed like a guaranteed winner, and we were so bold as to charge the attendees, even though this was patently a promotional event.

The reservations rolled in, and the seminar opened with a Palm Court full of engineers eager to hear the latest tricks of the memory test trade. The speaker for the full day would be the same man we had used in California. This was a risky proposition. He knew his subject cold, but he was, frankly, a less than sparkling speaker. In fact, he was downright dull, and as the morning wore on, I could see from my back-of-the-room perch that he was losing the audience. No one was walking out, certainly - people were too polite to do that – but as the monotone droned on, some people became restless, while others allowed their eyelids to fall to half mast. What had been interesting in Woodland Hills was a snorer in Manhattan. With a full-course hot luncheon on the agenda, I wondered whether anyone would be awake by mid-afternoon.

It was as bad as I had feared. The luncheon was too heavy, and the subject matter was even heavier. The whole project, I felt, was going down in flames. I leaned against the glass doors at the back of the room, praying for the speaker to say something funny. Or sing a song, or tap dance. Anything.

Then I noticed that someone was behind me, on the other side of the door, with his nose against the glass, looking in. It was Red Skelton. A woman was with him.

I opened the door a crack and said hello.

“What’s going on?” he asked in a whisper.

“It’s a seminar on memory testing,” I whispered back.

“You mean, like, test your memory?” he said, obviously curious.

“No, like in semiconductor memories,” I said. Then I took the plunge.

“Come on in,” I said.

That was all the encouragement he needed. Red Skelton strode into the room and up the center aisle, with the audience suddenly wide awake. Then, when he reached the front of the room, he raised his arms to motion for silence and said:

“I just want to let you all know that Mamie Schmidlapp just pledged two hundred dollars.” Then he walked out, waving to the audience.

Pandemonium. The audience ate it up, laughing, applauding, and generally going nuts.
At the back of the room, the lady (Red’s wife) said to me, smiling, “He’s always doing things like this.”

As if energized, our speaker picked up his delivery for the rest of the afternoon, and the seminar was saved. Everyone present apparently thought yours truly was unbelievably clever to have arranged a guest appearance by one of the great entertainers of our time. Of course, I (eventually) admitted that it was all dumb luck.

On the other hand, I was the one who chose the Plaza. It could never have happened at a Holiday Inn in New Jersey.

The Summer Circuit

Summer in New England brings with it summer theater and the chance to see the classic old musicals and to understand why they are called classics. It is also a time to catch some little gems that never made it out of Broadway and to the provinces. In recent weeks both opportunities were available, and we seized them.

First, the classic: A full-bore, thoroughly professional The King and I was staged by the Reagle Players, in Waltham, MA. If you live within driving distance of Waltham (we do, barely) and have never attended a Reagle production, shame on you. In New York or Boston, you will pay three or four times the Reagle ticket price, but you will not see higher quality. For big musicals like The King and I, this company usually trucks in the Broadway sets and costumes, and the leads are often played by Broadway veterans. In an era when Broadway pit orchestras have been pared down to 14 or 15 musicians, there were 21 on hand for The King and I, and they handled the original orchestrations smoothly. Anna was played by the incandescent Sarah Pfisterer, no stranger to Reagle and always a joy to watch. “The House of Uncle Thomas” ballet was a highlight and alone worth the price of admission. The huge cast included a large number of young, smiling, non-Caucasian children, all of them irresistible. The only sour note was the fact that there were many empty seats in the large theater the night we attended. This was unusual. In our previous Reagle excursions (She Loves Me, Most Happy Fella, 42d Street, etc.), the house was always full, deservedly. What’s the good in living in a cultural mecca like Greater Boston if you don’t take advantage of treasures like The Reagle Players?

The King and I is a very ambitious, very expensive undertaking, beyond the capabilities of most summer theaters. But one doesn’t need Rodgers and Hammerstein to provide first-rate musical entertainment. Take the group at Bar Mills, Maine, for instance. We have reported previously on this small troupe, which calls itself The Originals. Although it occasionally ventures into the mainstream repertoire, the fare is usually off-beat. This time it was off-beat and off-Broadway, as it staged the 2001 musical The IT Girl, based loosely on an old Paramount movie. The campy plot involves a department-store (“Waltham’s”) sales girl (Betty Lou Spence) who aspires to win the store’s IT Girl title – and, by the way, the store’s owner, Jonathan Waltham. A cast of seven doubles and triples to play 15 roles, covering both ends of the social spectrum – Waltham’s upper-crust friends and Betty Lou’s buddies from the tenements. The staging was creative - a clothes line for the tenements, a ship’s railing for a boat picnic, and, most important, rear projections of old New York, borrowed, one guesses, from the New York production. Susan Brownfield, the lead, was outstanding, which was no surprise to anyone who saw her in The World Goes Round a year ago. A Chita Rivera type, she can act, sing, and dance, and she looks terrific, too. Molly Roberts, an Originals regular, shone as the haughty fiancée who stands in the way of our heroine. The big surprise was the music, by Paul McGibbins. Especially memorable was a lullaby, “Mama’s Arms,” sung by Jennifer Porter, who also directed and choreographed the production – very well, I should add. The score, which had touches of ragtime as well as Gilbert & Sullivan, was well handled by a backstage trio of musicians, with pianist Joe Arsenault a standout.

The Reagle Players do their work in the spacious auditorium of Waltham High School. The stage is enormous, and the lighting and acoustics are first-class. The upholstered seats are reserved. The ambiance is comfortable and the curtain times sensible. If you decide to see a Reagle musical, you will not regret it.

The Originals stage their productions in the cozy, quaint, century-old Saco River Grange Hall, in Bar Mills, Maine. The folding wooden chairs are not reserved, and the rest rooms are portable units outside the hall. The stage is adequate, no more. There are home-brew footlights and a spot, and some cast members were miked, though in the small theater this may not have been necessary. On the whole, the old Grange Hall represents a challenge to this highly talented theatrical group, and their determined professionalism is all the more praiseworthy. Bar Mills is an easy drive for most people who live in Maine’s York County. It is well worth the trip, because the product is always so entertaining.

The Hospital in the Valley

It happened a long time ago. Thirty years, I’d guess. I was attending a Board meeting in Silicon Valley, back in the days when Silicon Valley was the center of the universe. The meeting room was on the second floor of a bank building in Sunnyvale. The directors were all officers of leading semiconductor equipment suppliers, and we all knew each other well and looked forward to the chance to swap stories about life in what was then the fast lane.

One of the directors had to leave the meeting early for another appointment. His name was Sam, and he was the oldest member of the group. He said his goodbyes and walked down the stairs to exit the building.

He should have walked out the door, but instead Sam walked into a floor-to-ceiling glass panel adjacent to the door. It shattered, and Sam was badly cut. Somehow he made it back to the meeting room, his leg bleeding profusely. While the one lady present looked the other way, we dropped Sam’s pants to assess the damage, and we quickly concluded that a trip to a hospital was called for. I volunteered to drive, and a director named Mike, who lived in the Valley, offered to navigate.

As we drove to the hospital with our wounded colleague, Mike and I chatted about the quality of medical care in the Valley.

“The hospital we are headed for is one of the best in the world,” said Mike. “Every bit as good as Mass. General or anything else you have in Boston.” I nodded. It was good to know that Sam would be in the best of hands.

Sam was quickly admitted, and Mike and I sat in a very large room just inside the main entrance, waiting for our friend to be repaired. While we waited, Mike kept praising the hospital’s medical staff and its worldwide reputation. As a native Bostonian, I recognized the pattern. In Dallas, for instance, a Texan might say something like, “So you’re from Boston? Well, they say that our symphony orchestra here in Dallas is on a par with Boston’s.” Or someone from Phoenix might compare that city’s art museum favorably with Boston’s. It was an old story: new cities striving to equal the old. Today the subject was hospitals.

Then, from a pair of swinging doors to our left, a patient was wheeled into this large room. He was apparently being discharged from the hospital. The orderly who wheeled him in then walked over to the front desk to deal with the paperwork.

But he did not set the brake on his patient’s wheelchair, and the hard floor in the room was apparently not level. So, while Mike and I and the others in the room gasped in astonishment, the wheelchair rolled across the room, heading for the hospital’s main entrance about 30 feet away. It crashed into the wall, and the patient was thrown from the wheelchair onto the floor. Blood was oozing from his mouth. He was gathered up and whisked back into the hospital.

After a while, Sam emerged with his leg stitched up, and the three us drove back to Sunnyvale in relative silence.

I am sure that the hospital in question was every bit as good as Mike said it was. Mistakes happen, even in the best places.
But the floors are more level in Boston, I think.

The "What, Me Worry?" Economy

One day in the 1970s, when the stock market plummeted and investors were in trauma, a wise man (and the CEO of my Company) said, “Look, it’s not as if this is the end of the U.S. economy. The market will come back.”

Then he added, “Of course, some day it will be the end.”

The market recovered with a bang, and those who sold in fear were proved foolish. Alex was right, as usual. But I never forgot his postscript.

Today, we are trapped in Iraq. Not involved, not implicated, but trapped. There is no exit. Meanwhile, the hawks are beating their war drums on Iran. Garry Kasparov, former chess champ and political wannabe, rants against Russia in today’s Journal. Congressional hawks want us to “get tough” with China. American special ops forces are doing their thing in Somalia and the Philippines and elsewhere. There is serious talk of a military incursion into Pakistan. The neo-cons have Syria in their sights. When all else fails, escalate.

Here at home, the real estate market is in free fall. The country avoids economic collapse only because China and others fund us to the tune of two billion dollars a day. The U.S. savings rate is negative. House foreclosures are soaring. People, according to the polls, have utterly no confidence in the President or in Congress.

Despite all this, the stock market, despite a few speed bumps, charges ahead. If you are a hedge fund manager or a private equity guru, it’s a wonderful life. How wonderful? The managers of the 25 largest hedge funds earned more last year than the CEOs of all the Fortune 500 companies, combined. It's all fodder for John Edwards's populist presidential campaign.

It has always been foolish to count out the U.S. economy. Every time the market tanks, there are those who cry, “Don’t panic.” Sound advice, as a rule. Someday, though, the better advice will be “Panic.” Maybe this is the time. The odds that the game is over are still low, but they have risen from, say 2 percent during the crises of the 70s and 80s to maybe 4 or 5 percent today. Not to worry? Worry. By the time they rise to 10 percent, if they do, the markets will be in shambles.

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with an old friend who now runs a hedge fund in New Jersey. He admitted to holding 40 percent of his fund’s assets in cash these days, because he feels, as I do, that the current disconnect between the market and reality will end badly.

Another old friend, economist Gary Shilling, correctly predicted the sub-prime mortgage fallout when conventional wisdom said that it was a non-issue. Gary thinks a recession is coming later this year, and the chances are building that he will be proved right. But a routine, palliative recession may in fact be too optimistic a projection.

Meanwhile, the CNBC talking heads keep assuring viewers that any market pullback is a terrific buying opportunity. To believer Larry Kudlow, the market is bulletproof. The brokerage gurus and the analysts talk the talk. Stocks are a great buy, they insist, and you should avoid bonds. Above all, don’t hold cash. After all, how can all these people make money if you insist on keeping your assets in your mattress?


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A collection of these blogs, under the title "Searching for Joan Leslie," is available on www.lulu.com, as is "The General Radio Story."

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont

You just can’t beat the British when it comes to insightful, literate, well-acted movies. The latest evidence is a quiet little gem called Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont. The great Joan Plowright plays the title role, a widow who decides to settle into a London hotel she has seen advertised in a Scottish magazine. The hotel, whose name is announced by a flickering red neon sign, has obviously seen better days, and Mrs P.’s room is small and drab, with a bathroom “down the hall.” But Mrs P. decides to give it a go, and she quickly finds herself the center of attention in the Claremont’s dining room, where the long-term guests immediately fasten upon her as a new and interesting ingredient in their mélange. These characters include some of the best old-timers of the British stage and screen, with Anna Massey playing the imperious Mrs Arbuthnot, who reassures Mrs P. that she needn’t worry about being old because “you’re not allowed to die here.”

Mrs Palfrey tries to maintain her dignity without being rude to her inquisitors, but their curiosity is irrepressible. Then, walking along the sidewalk one day, Mrs P. trips and falls, and a young man living in the adjacent basement flat rushes to her rescue and ushers her into his digs to recover over a cup of tea. Overcome by his kindness, Mrs P. invites him to dine with her at the Claremont later in the week, and he accepts. His name is Ludwig, and he is an aspiring writer.

Mrs P. has a grandson, Desmond, in London, and the other Claremont guests have pried this fact out of her. But Desmond has not answered her phone calls; he is apparently too busy with his work. So, when Ludwig enters the Claremont’s dining room, the other guests take him to be Mrs P.’s grandson, and she does not bother to correct them. Later, when the real Desmond and his mother (Mrs P.’s daughter) enter the action, the plot thickens.

But the treasure here is not the plot (based on an Elizabeth Taylor novel), but the characterizations and especially the dialogue. Ludwig’s literary ambition sets up references to Wordsworth and Blake and conversations about Mrs P.’s favorite movie (“Brief Encounter”) and song (“For All We Know”). Joan Plowright is absolutely perfect in her role, and the supporting cast is nearly as good. We should all spend at least one evening with the flavorful characters in the Claremont’s dining room.

Great Britain has given us dozens of movies of this quality, and most of them, like this one, come and go unnoticed on this side of the Atlantic, while the local cineplexes play the likes of “Evan Almighty” and “Oceans Thirty-Seven” (or whatever) and “Live Free or Die Hard.” De gustibus.

As the movie’s final credits roll, Rosemary Clooney is heard singing “For All We Know” as only she can. Within minutes the record was downloaded from iTunes and berthed in my iPod.

The Language of War

You can’t tell the players without a program. Even with a program, the Iraq War can be confusing. The various players are called the Coalition Forces, the insurgents, the militias, the terrorists, and the militants. (I may have missed a few.) The terms change from war to war, it seems. For instance:

President Bush, in his Independence Day talk, likened the current Iraq War to the American Revolution. A poor analogy, for, as some churlish fellow pointed out, in the American Revolution, the insurgents won. Of course we don’t call them insurgents today; we refer to them as Patriots. John Adams was a Patriot, as were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the others. In homage, Tom Brady and his teammates are also Patriots.

Today we refer to the enemy forces as insurgents, but this raises an interesting question: If our addition of 30,000 troops we just dispatched to Iraq are collectively called a surge, then, by definition, are they not the insurgents?

In old World War 2 movies, the French and the Greeks and the Dutch who waged guerilla war against their German occupiers were called Freedom Fighters. I suppose that the Iraqis who shoot at their country’s occupiers are also in a sense freedom fighters. The difference, I guess, is the Germans were bad occupiers, and we are good occupiers. But when you see soldiers patrolling your streets and helicopter gunships shooting at you, the difference between bad and good gets blurry.

Condi Rice, Tony Snow, and others are careful to refer to our side as Coalition Forces, in order to promote the impression that the free world is aligned with us in our mission. The Gulf War waged by Bush 41 did indeed involve a coalition. This time around, we initially referred to our side as a "coalition of the willing,” but you don’t hear that anymore, because it’s obvious that hardly anyone is willing.

Much has been written about the definition of the word “terrorist,” and here it gets tricky. Our preferred definition is that a terrorist is one who commits or advocates violence against innocent civilians. But innocent civilians are being killed by the dozens in Iraq and Afghanistan, day after day, and some of them are killed by Coalition Forces. The language has thus been enlarged by the addition of the term “Collateral Damage,” which means terrorist acts inadvertently perpetrated by the good guys.

One recalls novels like Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984, in which government reshaped the language to serve its purposes. (The agency responsible for disinformation was called The Ministry of Truth.) There is nothing new here; Rome was ruthlessly imposing “Pax Romana” 2000 years ago, but, in the name of peace, the Romans killed over 150,000 British “insurgents” when they dared to rebel.

The Russians are Coming.....

The sky is cloudless and hazeless, and a light breeze from the north is keeping the temperature in the sixties. The sea is sparkling (the photo was just taken), and the place has the look of October, not July. It is, in short, as close to perfection as you can get, weather-wise, and the gods are obviously smiling down on Presidents Bush and Putin, who are meeting just a few miles from here.

We, like most of the Town’s residents, are steering clear of Walker’s Point, but you can’t escape the sense that Something Big is going on in the neighborhood. For one thing, there is the constant drone of jets overhead, as the Air Force provides round-the-clock cover. The neighbors’ tolerance of this incessant hum varies with their political leanings. The Bush haters take it as an annoyance; the pro-Bush people think it’s a stirring reminder of this country’s vigilance.

Then there are the fishing parties. The Presidents (41 and 43) have been fishing right outside our window, off Timber Island. They, in their white cruiser, are surrounded by a flotilla of security boats and a Coast Guard cutter – enough to drive away any stripers that may been in the area. The cruiser is “Bona Vita II.” The good life indeed.

Friday we drove by Walker’s Point, stopping at the security check point, where we were cautioned to proceed but not to stop again until reaching the next check point. All very serene, with courtesy abounding. The protesters hadn’t shown up yet.

Then, Saturday, on route to a family gathering in New Hampshire, we stopped by Pease AFB in Portsmouth, where we saw Air Force One sitting alone on the tarmac like a beached whale. Far away, in a secluded corner of Pease, we saw the Ilyushin IL-62 that had brought the Russian advance party over a few days before. The irony was tangible to those of us old enough to recall Pease’s role as a SAC base during the cold war. This now-decommissioned and nearly deserted air base, where B-47s and B-52s were poised to strike the Soviet Union for many years, is now hosting a total of four Ilyushin jets through yesterday (three IL-62s and Putin’s IL-96), with a fifth due to land on the 11,300-foot runway this morning.

No matter what your politics, you have to hope that the Kennebunkport summit goes well. This country needs friends these days, especially big, powerful friends, and the Russia-bashers and China-bashers should temper their rhetoric. It is time to revisit Henry Kissinger’s principle of Realpolitik, where in a world of three major powers you don’t want to be the odd man out. For the sake of our children and grandchildren, let’s hope the men at Walker’s Point get it right

Circling the Wagons

The Iraq War, it will be proven someday, was lost in the first week of May 2004. Up to that point, many if not most Iraqis were convinced that the United States had come as a friend, to liberate them and to establish a western-style democracy with respect for human rights and the rule of law.

Then came Abu Ghraib.

As the photos of sadistic prisoner abuse showed the Iraqis that maybe the United States wasn’t exactly an ideal role model, any hope of winning the hearts and minds of the people vanished. From that moment on, recruitment of what we call “insurgents” became much easier.

It didn’t have to be that way. When the photos surfaced, the official reaction should have been one of total outrage. The response from the White House and the Pentagon should have been along these lines: “This conduct is inexcusable and shameful, and we are going to find out who was responsible, and when we do, heads will role. Meanwhile, we extend our profound regrets to all those Iraqis who were abused, and to their families.”

Instead, the world was told that (1) the United States does not authorize torture, (2) the offenses were acts of a handful of misguided soldiers, (3) the accused would be properly tried and, if convicted, punished. Congressional oversight was a joke, with one committee member rationalizing that “Abu Ghraib was the price of defending democracy.”

The trail of responsibility ended in the lower levels of the chain of command, as it always does. Secretary Rumsfeld pleaded ignorance, as did Generals Abizaid and Sanchez. Needless to say, neither Rumsfeld nor his President had ever signed any order that could conceivably condone the actions of Abu Ghraib. Rule number one is to do what you have to. Rule number two is to ensure deniability.

The whole sorry tale of Abu Ghraib is told in Seymour Hersh’s “The General’s Report” in the June 25 issue of The New Yorker. The General here is Major General Antonio Taguba, who wrote the definitive Army report on the prisoner abuses. General Taguba, a man of unshakable integrity, knew what this assignment meant: “If I lie, I lose. And, if I tell the truth, I lose.”

General Taguba issued a pull-no-punches account of Abu Ghraib, and shortly thereafter General Abizaid, then the head of Central Command, sternly told him, “You and your report will be investigated.” Says Taguba, recalling the warning, “ I’d been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time I thought I was in the Mafia.” Last year, the Army’s Vice Chief of Staff, General Cody, telephoned: The message:” I need you to retire by January of 2007.” Thus the messenger was shot.

War is, as Donald Rumsfeld likes to say, a messy business, and it is also clear that our soldiers are fighting an enemy with little regard for the Geneva Conventions. Still, we are supposed to inhabit the moral high ground. At least that’s the way General Taguba saw it, and others agreed with him. But the men of morals were outgunned by the men of expediency. The heavies in the Hersh article include a number of Generals (Abezaid, Miller, Craddock, Formica, Cody, Sanchez) and Secretary Rumsfeld and his Under-Secretary Stephen Cambone.

General Taguba’s was not the only report issued on Abu Ghraib. An independent panel headed by James Schlesinger also investigated, concluding that there was “institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels.” But Schlesinger (a former defense secretary) absolved Rumsfeld of any direct responsibility.

Seven M.P.s were convicted of various charges, and one was sentenced to ten years in prison. The only officer facing trial is a lieutenant colonel due to stand court-marshal in August. The top brass and the Pentagon power structure circled the wagons, as they always do, and they are all off the hook.

(Flashback: Lt. William Calley was convicted of the premeditated murder of 22 civilians in the Vietnamese village of My Lai and sentenced to life imprisonment. As it turned out, he served 3-1/2 years of house arrest at Fort Benning and was then set free. His superior, Capt. Medina, who, according to Calley, gave the order to kill all 109 victims, was found blameless.)

Says General Taguba: “we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.”

The Hersh article is dispiriting, but it is worth reading.

The Summit

A few weeks from now, George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin will spend two days here in Kennebunkport, just down the coast a few miles. It is stirring to consider that decisions made almost within sight of here (a few pesky islands are between us) may shape the world order for decades to come.

One can’t be sure of the temperature of the conversation - there has been a chill in the air lately – but it might go something like this:


GWB: Hiya Vlad. Good flight?

VP: Ochen korosho. Kak vui pashzevayetsa?

GWB: Tell you what, Vlad. Let’s try it in English. Your English is a whole lot better than my Russki.

VP: Very good, Mr. President. And yes, it was good flight.

GWB: Now Vlad, we’re good friends, right?

VP: I hope so, Mr. President.

GWB: And friends can speak about their differences openly. So I have to say again what I said at the G-8: We’re disappointed in your actions in the area of human rights.

VP: Well, if I may use an old Russian proverb, Mr. President, people living in glass houses should not throw stones. May I remind you of Guantanamo, Abu Graib, Haditha…

GWB: That’s different, Vladimir. We’re at war.

VP: When the Soviet Union was fighting in Afghanistan, we were at war. But you were not so forgiving then. In fact, you supplied weapons to our enemies, to people you now call terrorists.

GWB: Look Vladimir, that was then, this is now. The Cold War is over. Let’s be friends.

VP: Friends do not point nuclear missiles at each other.

GWB: Now, Vladimir, I am going to have to help you a bit with your English. The word is nucular, not nuclear. I hope you don’t mind the correction.

VP: But I thought it was spelled…..

GWB: The spelling doesn’t matter, Vladimir. It’s an irregular verb.

VP: It’s a strange language, English.

GWB: Like reelator. Would you like something to drink?

VP: Excellent. I brought some of our best vodka, George. Will you join me?

GWB: Thanks, Vladimir, but I've been on the wagon for years. How about a good old-fashioned, capitalistic Coke?

VP: Yes, we will toast each other with Cokes. Here's to peace!

GWB: As they say in Russia, nazdorovya!

VP: As they say in Casablanca, here’s looking at you, kid.

GWB: Tell you what: Let’s save the serious stuff for tomorrow. Today, why don’t you enjoy the place? A swim in the ocean would be just the thing after your long flight. Would you like that?

VP: But isn’t the ocean water very cold here in Maine?

GWB: Only in the winter, Vladimir. In July, it’s a warm as a cow in the clover, heh heh.

After Evita

Eva Peron was a legend during her time as Argentina’s first lady and a source of continuing fascination for years thereafter, but her fame exploded with the success of the Andrew Lloyd-Webber/Tim Rice musical “Evita.” The show was a big, big hit, deservedly so. Lloyd-Webber’s music is often scorned by sophisticates, but the man is a skilled melodist in the Richard Rodgers tradition, and in every show he gives you at least one ballad that worms its way into your memory for keeps. I can understand some condescension toward “Cats” and “Phantom,” but not toward “Evita.” It is a masterpiece.

The Eva Peron story was, of course, a goldmine waiting to be tapped. Uneducated girl from backwater town becomes girlfriend of General who becomes President with her help. She becomes the star of the Casa Rosada, the darling of the masses, a veritable saint. Then she dies at age 33.

The musical (opera, really) begins with the announcement, in a crowded movie theater, of Evita’s death. The body of the play is then a flashback, tracing the life of Eva Duarte, right to her death and funeral, with weeping crowds mourning “Santa Evita.” The staging was dynamite. The portrayal of Evita (by the likes of Elaine Paige and Patti LuPone) showed the glamorous lady the public adored, while a cynical narrator, Che, balanced the account by pointing out her flaws. The movie, with Madonna in the title role, was excellent. (Who knew?)

But neither play nor movie provided a hint of what happened after Eva Peron died. This was, after all, a play about Evita, not about Juan, who lived 22 eventful years after Eva died. But those 22 years could keep Lloyd-Webber and Rice busy for the rest of their lives, if they were interested in sequels. In fact, there was more dramatic content in the post-Eva years than in the years when she was the toast of B.A., the “Big Apple.”

Here is what Paul Harvey might call “the rest of the story.”

In 1952, three years after Eva’s death, Juan is the victim of a coup and flees to Paraguay, then to Panama. At a party in Panama, he meets a nightclub dancer stage-named Isabel. A month after meeting her, he is living with her, and he takes her to his next stop, Venezuela. (Exiles have to keep moving.) Then, when Venezuela gets too hot, he and Isabel fly to the Dominican Republic, which under Trujillo welcomes dictators on the run. Two years of heaven in the D.R., then, with Trujillo under pressure, it’s off to Spain. Which is where the story gets really interesting.

In Madrid, Juan and Isabel live in an apartment house. (Ava Gardner is a fellow tenant.) Actually, it’s a threesome, because Isabel has fallen under the spell of a man named Jose Lopez Rega. He is a spiritist, a cultist, an astrologer, and an all-round nutcake. But Isabel thinks he’s wonderful. Juan tolerates him, barely.

Now Eva reenters the story: When Juan was deposed in Argentina, the new regime, determined to stamp out all traces of Peronism, caused Eva’s super-embalmed body to “disappear.” Now, after a series of governments have come and gone, powerful people in Buenos Aires send feelers to Juan. Would he consider coming back? First, he says, find Eva’s body and have it shipped to me. They do. The cadaver is dug up from a cemetery in Milan, and it is shipped by truck to Madrid and to Juan’s apartment, where, according to one story, Lopez Rega has Isabel lie atop the coffin while he murmurs incantations designed to transfer Eva’s essence into Isabel’s body.

You think I’m making this all up. I’m not. But wait; there’s more.

Juan eventually returns to Argentina in 1973, after a 17-year exile, where he is appointed President by acclamation. And Isabel is appointed Vice President, also by acclamation! Lopez Rega is also on hand, manipulating Isabel, who manipulates Juan. Juan dies, Isabel succeeds him as President, and Lopez Rega, a certified kook, is suddenly the most powerful man in Argentina.

Now, what do you think Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Tim Rice could do with that story? Isabelita, anyone?


By now you may be curious to know what happened to Eva’s body. It found its way back to Buenos Aires, eventually, and is today buried deep under the Duarte family monument in Recoletta Cemetery. It is protected by several feet of concrete. I visited the tomb and took the photo you see above, though of course I can’t swear that Eva is really there.

Here Come the Memoirs

George Tenet, the ex-CIA Director famous for calling the Iraq War a “slam dunk,” has just published his memoir, to mostly negative reviews. Thus the parade of memoirists begins. Douglas Feith, one of the principal architects of the war, is readying his War and Decision for publication this fall. Condy Rice has already dropped “when I write my book” into a conversation with a reporter. Paul Wolfowitz, another in the neocon big three (Wolfowitz, Feith, and Perle), just ousted from the World Bank, can be expected to publish his own self-glorifying story. Others will no doubt join the rush to print as soon as the Bush administration is gone and the coast is clear.

Winston Churchill is often quoted as follows: “History will be kind to me. I know, because I will write it.” And indeed he did, turning out what has become the definitive history of World War 2, a dazzling, six-volume work in which generals, admirals, and others are blamed for costly strategic and tactical blunders, while Winston paints himself as the heroic, wise leader who had to deal with their stupidity. In 1942, Japanese soldiers on bicycles rode down the Malay Peninsula to capture Singapore, while the fortress’s big guns were pointed seaward. Does Churchill accept blame for the fall of Singapore? You decide. Here is a letter written by him to General Ismay on 19 January 1942, as quoted in Churchill’s history:

“I must confess to being staggered by Wavell’s telegram of the 16th ….It never occurred to me for a moment……that the gorge of the fortress of Singapore, with its splendid moat half a mile to a mile wide, was not entirely fortified against an attack from the northward.”

Then, after railing about what should have been done and wasn’t done:

“How is it that not one of you pointed this out to me at any time when these matters have been under discussion?” (The Hinge of Fate, p.50)

It was all the fault of incompetent subordinates. That’s the way it is when you write the history.

(One wonders whether George W. Bush, after Iraq became a snake pit, ever wrote to Donald Rumsfeld, “How is it that not one of you pointed this out to me….”)


Similarly, Henry Kissinger, in his monumental memoirs, absolves himself for any responsibility in the overthrow and assassination of Chile’s President Allende, thus:

“I told Davis to keep the American Embassy out of the developing crisis. ….That conversation leaves no doubt of the state of our knowledge and of our intentions immediately before the coup. We were aware…..that the military….were seriously considering the takeover….But we were unaware of any specific plan or date. And we were party to none.” (Years of Upheaval, p. 404)

But a few years earlier there had been another coup attempt, this one engineered by Kissinger but (according to him) aborted at the last minute. Here is what Dr. Kissinger says of that episode:

“To assist such efforts seemed right to me then and seems right to me today. I cannot accept the proposition that the United States is debarred from acting in the gray area between diplomacy and military intervention, a shadow world in which our adversaries have as instruments a political party, their own infinitely greater foreign resources, and innumerable front organizations to mask their role.” (White House Years, p. 677)

Kissinger wants it both ways: His hands were clean in the matter of the successful coup, but justifiably dirty in the matter of the unsuccessful coup. Ah, the advantages of authorship!


That brings us back to George Tenet, who argues that his infamous “slam dunk” quote has been taken out of context. But Tenet is no Churchill, nor even a Kissinger, and others, notably Bob Woodward, have a different version of the scene, and they are more credible.

What will Wolfowitz write? Will he spice up his memoir by including a chapter or two on his relationship with Ms Riza? Probably not, though his publisher will surely lobby for it. Others being courted by publishers include the aforementioned Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz as well as Scooter Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, and the biggest enchilada of them all, Colin Powell. It is not enough that these people and others will dump their self-serving accounts on us; they will be all over the TV channels, with Larry King, Charlie Rose, Chris Matthews, Bill O’Reilly, and their ilk. There will be book signings at Barnes & Noble and reviews in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Some of the reviewers will have their own axes to grind: To review the Tenet book, for instance, the Journal assigned one of its favorite neocons, Douglas Feith.

I’ll bet you just can’t wait.

Tricks of the Trade

As an old hand at speech writing, I have come to know all the tricks. In this silly season leading up to the 2008 elections, they are all on display. You’d think that the masses would have caught on, would be anesthetized by now, so that all the rhetorical sleight of hand wouldn’t fool anyone any more. Maybe that’s true. Maybe the voters have caught on, and the speechwriters don’t get it. More likely, though, there are still enough gullible listeners to make a difference.

To these people, if any of them are reading this, I offer the following field guide to the tricks of the speechifying trade.

The fact of the matter is……

Whenever you hear a speaker begin a sentence this way, it is safe to assume that what comes next will not be fact. It will be an opinion dressed up as a fact, as in “the fact of the matter is that broccoli is delicious.” The same applies to “the truth of the matter is…” Real facts do not need to be introduced in this way; they can stand on their own two feet. Never trust a speaker who starts a sentence with this construction – especially in the context of a discussion on global warming.

I just want a level playing field.

This bromide was worn out in 1932, but it just won’t die. I remember once, when I was debating trade policy with some industry people in Tokyo, I floated the notion of a level playing field. “Are you kidding?” a colleague asked. “If the playing field is level, we’ll get killed. We want the playing field tilted our way.” We were a small group, in a restaurant, where it was safe to be honest. At a conference the next day, he would plead for a level playing field. So today, when you hear the China-bashers talk about forcing the Chinese to strengthen their currency and thus “level the playing field,” don’t believe a word of it.

I just want everybody to pay their fair share.

Leaving aside the bad grammar for the moment, the concept of fairness is completely in the eyes of the beholder. So organizations with names like “Americans for Tax Fairness” should be recognized as lobbyists with a mission to stack the tax code in favor of their members. When you slice the layers of the onion, you will always find that fairness means that people whose income is higher than yours should pay more, and that you should pay less.

All the polls say…

There are so many polls today that a speechwriter can pick the one that best serves his purpose. Some polls try to achieve a measure of credibility by flying under the banner of a major newspaper or network (as in the New York Times/CBS poll or the Wall Street Journal poll). If by some chance the speechwriter can’t find an agreeable poll, there is always “the only poll that counts is the one in November.”

I believe in capitalism, but….

Or “I believe in free markets but…” Or “I believe in the sanctity of the family but…” The hope is that the speaker will disarm the opposition up front by declaring that he or she is on your side, but… It’s a shabby ploy, and when you hear it you must understand that what will follow is a renunciation of what the speaker allegedly believes in.

We are well positioned for the future.

I hauled this one in from my annual report writing years, but a politician might use it to rebut some short-term problem. What it means is that things are absolutely dreadful, so bad in fact that they could hardly get worse. Being positioned for the future is a safe quasi-promise, because the future could be next year, 10 years from now, or the next millennium.

The power of “but”

As we have already seen, the word “but” is the most powerful weapon the speechwriter has. It is especially useful in the windup of a speech, where one can alter the meaning of a sentence by the simple expedient of switching clauses from one side to the other of the word “but.” Consider the following example:

She’s a beautiful girl, but she’s dumb.

She’s dumb, but she’s a beautiful girl.

In both cases, we present two elements of information. The elements are identical in both sentences. But what a world of difference in the take-away thought!!

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I’ll share more tricks of the trade in future posts.

Climate Change

There are times, and this is one of them, when it seems that the ship of state is foundering. It was like that in 1968, amid the trauma of the Vietnamese War, when anarchy threatened, and it was like that during the Depression, when riots sometimes required the Army to restore order. This time around, there is no draft, so the Iraq War has not sent the young into the streets as it did in the 60s. That aside, our political discourse is becoming unnervingly overheated. There are calls to impeach the President, as there were in the 70s, and Congressional attempts to choke off war funding, as there were then. The letters to the editor in the New York Times are weighted with vitriolic attacks on the President, and those in the Wall Street Journal contain equally vitriolic attacks from the other direction. On television, Sean Hannity can barely control his right-wing rants, and the left has its share of nutcakes, too, including the editor of Rolling Stone, who, on the Charlie Rose Show the other night, pronounced George Bush “the worst President in the history of this country, by far." Paul Krugman of the Times would no doubt agree, since he manages to slip that thought into just about every column.

In the run-up to the 2008 Presidential election, the attacks will undoubtedly grow more savage. There will be ad hominem (for Hillary, ad feminam) attacks, because they apparently work, and there will be counterattacks (the don’t-make-the-mistake-Kerry-made rule). Most of us will be sick of the TV debates and the robocalls and ads and mailers long before the elections, but there is no way to turn it off. You shouldn’t even think of turning it off, some say, because the functioning of democracy depends on the existence of a well-informed electorate. (Well-informed, yes; OD’d, no.)

There is no place to hide. The other night, I passed up the Republican candidates’ debate in favor of a “Live at Lincoln Center” concert broadcast by PBS. Surely a Lincoln Center concert would offer sanctuary from political diatribes. But no. A performer named Laurie Anderson chanted (rapped would be a better word) a long, heavy-handed polemic that managed to hit all the bases: weapons of mass destruction, detainees, and global warming (Al Gore’s Oscar included). Whatever the validity of Ms. Anderson’s points, the woman clearly had no business sharing a concert stage with the Juilliard Orchestra, Philip Glass, Wynton Marsalis, and Kelly O’Hara.

Recently – and depressingly – Barak Obama has been given Secret Service protection, probably because of threats in the air. A woman reviewing the film “The Assassination of a President” says her chief disappointment was that it was only a movie. Most Americans would regard that sentiment as repulsive, but the climate of hatred is spreading and intensifying, and that’s a dangerous thing. How dangerous? Within my memory, would-be assassins have shot at three presidents and killed one. That’s four out of the last eleven, so the crazies are batting .364.

The message, then, to the President and his staff and Cabinet, members of Congress, presidential candidates, journalists, op-ed writers, television commentators and anchors, talk-show hosts, comedians, rappers, film personalities, bloggers, and everyone else with access to a microphone, camera, or computer can be summed up in a simple, two-word plea:

Cool it!