Authors

The Colorado in the 21st Century

2010-06-13T06:04:09Z

Michael Hitlzik's sweeping, romantic telling of the creation of the behemoth of the Boulder (Hoover) Dam, Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century, begins with the moment FDR dedicated the damn's opening in 1935 but then encloses all the dreams were first came to Black Canyon and dreamed the dream of diverting the silty Colorado River to the Colorado Desert. A genius rascal named Charles Rockwood (proto John Galt) schemed to divert the Colorado (right) at the turn of the 20th Century, and to bring out settlers from LA by advertising that he could make the desert bloom. Rockwood knew that advertising $.25 an acre for the Colorado Desert would not work, so he invented the location as "the Imperial Valley." The silt clogged the cuts and channels, and Rockwood failed, but the scheme lived on. TR boosted it, but it wasn't until POTUS Harding tasked Herbert Hoover that the Federal government managed the solution. The dispute between seven states -- Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming in the Upper Basin; Arizona, Nevada and California in the Lower Basin -- was resolved with a formula for who gets how much water, a squabble that continued until the Supreme Court settled it in the later 20th century. The conditions in the construction were Gulag Lite bad and cruel - camp followers assembled in a shantytown called "Ragtown;" and the desperate-for-work men lived in 130 degree heat with non-potable river water for drinking at a place called "River Camp" -- with men and children dying of heat and lack of medical attention the first Spring and Summer. The 1930s were the age of electrification and dams, and the Hoover Dam in the legendary Black Canyon (the third or fourth choice, because the other sites were earthquake fault crisscrossed) was the first of several hydroelectric reservoir systems to transform the Colorado into a power and water source for the Lower Basin. (Of note, the Hoover Dam was built and the water rights were allocated on the basis of the average of twenty years in the early 20th century. It turned out later that this was a swollen wet climate period, and the river is now and again in drought conditions - an example of how you may be unwise to make policy based upon any particular climate result, and two decade measure of rain and snowfall.) A bad flood in 1983 revealed that the Colorado was not tamed; and the system of dams and reservoirs requires constant attention. A choice comment from one of the engineers on the works in 1931 when asked, Who built the Hoover dam? It was built by a man in a "tin hat," came the answer, and he is about 31 years old, and you can find him at the dining hall. Wages were $3.50 a day for a mucker; $6.00 a day for a trucker. Of the Six Companies that knitted together to do the construction, only one lives independently today, the global Bechtel Corporation. Without the Hoover Dam and the subsequent dams and reservoirs, there would have been no California miracle of sixty million people in the region by century's end. And now? The Colorado has reached a natural limit. Perhaps Southern California has long since topped out. Unknown. Right now, there is not enough water for both California and Arizona to sustain the growth of the last decades.

James Bradley's "Imperial Cruise."

2010-02-20T17:19:16Z

Imperial Irony.

Spoke to James Bradley, author, "Flags of Our Fathers" (from which the Clint Eastwood movie is made) and the new "Imperial Cruise," on the 65th anniversary of Iwo Jima invasion, February 19, 1945. James Bradley's Navy Corpsman father was with the 5th Marines, and was one of the men raising the flag (the second time) on Mt. Suribachi that became the famous photograph. We spoke of the sad-eyed facts of the massacre on Iwo Jima -- from mid-February until late March, six weeks of slaughter and sacrifice. The final casualty rate was unbelievable even to the strong stomachs and numb minds of the time: 26,000 US casualties from the Marines and Navy, and upward of 70,000 Japanese casualties, most KIA or self-destroyed. Iwo Jima connects to the revelations in James Bradley's most recent book, "Imperial Cruise." In the summer of 1905, TR sent his then-WarSec William Howard Taft on a mission to Japan, Korea and China, during the peace talks in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, between the Japanese conquerors of Port Arthur and the Russian losers. Taft enraged and doomed the kingdom of Korea by handing it to the imperial appetite of Japan. TR enraged Japan by not demanding a cash settlement from Russia for the victory over the tsarist troops. China disdained TR and the US as invaders and exploiters who had suppressed the genuine longing of the Boxers at Beijing. The result was an East Asia that was ripe and defenseless to the imperial aggressors in Tokyo -- men who toyed with joining Germany in the First War after 1916, men who built a fleet and army to launch the Manchuria campaign in 1932. What attacked Pearl Harbor and the Philippines and Singapore in 1941 was the mature rot of the predators of 1905. It is imperial irony that scarred the 20th Century in the Pacific. James Bradley and I discussed how the Marines and sailors who suffered on Iwo Jima did not know that they were fighting men in the delusion of imperial might that was cooked by American arrogance and ignorance forty years before. I mentioned that the decision to use the atomic weapons six months later was a result of the shocking casualty numbers at Iwo Jima and the satanic Okinawa. The imperial Japanese war plan in 1945 was to kill and wound as many Americans as possible; not to win, but rather to bleed the US to the armistice table with Japan undefeated. The planned US invasions of the Homeland Islands would have been Iwo Jimas times fifty. Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs (all that existed at the time) were the grim answer to an imminent apocalypse.

Peter Clarke's "Keynes: The Rise, Fall, and Return of the Twentieth Century's Most Influential Economist."

2010-01-01T06:22:04Z

Peter Clarke's swift, concise, trenchant observations of John Maynard Keynes and the evolution of Keynes's thinking presents a contrarian case that Keynes is not an advocate of deficits. Instead, Clarke presents Keynes as working through his experiences in India, in the First War at Treasury, and in the post-war period as a Bloomsbury groupie while writing for the Manchester Guardian, and coming to see that the wise government will, in downturns or recessions or depressions, seek to stimulate investment and spur employment. Keynes did not advocate stimulating consumption. Keynes was self-consciously pragmatic and experimental. Also, argues Clarke, Keynes was writing his theories and conclusions for the British parliamentary system, not for the American congressional system. The recommendation for deficit spending was an American adaptation. Keynes became more celebrated in America, after 1936, then he was in war-darkened Europe. But then the admiration turned into a kind of fad. At luncheon with FDR advisers and other luminaries in Washington in 1944, Keynes jested that he was the only non-Keynesian at the table. Clarke reminds that Keynes was charismatic in public and private, and his powers were such that the listeners were often converted more than they were convinced. Milton Friedman remarked long after Keynes's death that everyone was a Keynesian and everyone was not a Keynesian. In sum, the Keynes theories of government spending, taxes, stimulus, employment, inflation and deflation, currency, the gold standard are so comprehensive today, so widely debated, that there is no escape. The Obama administration and its guru Larry Summers boast of their Keynesian plan. It means what you want it to mean. The original polymath and his age and arguments are long gone. Only the word connects what we see now, with the $1 trillion stimulus package, and the sudden mistakes of the FDR administration that led to the W recession of 1937.

Giles McDonough's "1938: Hitler's Gamble."

2009-12-13T05:05:25Z

In January 1938, Herman Goering, the very ambitious heir apparent to der Fuhrer, schemed to construct dirty tricks on two of his most potent and prestigious rivals in Berlin, Baron Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, the ancient (60!) Prussian Defense Minister, and Colonel-General Werner von Fritsh, the ancient (60!) Prussian chief of staff of the proud, brutal, still-building army. Dirty tricks that involved baiting a honey trap with a prostitute to ensnare the widower Blomberg, and obliging the prissy and censorious Hitler to attend the sudden nuptials; and also involved producing a so-called witness to the homosexual behavior of the bachelor Fristch in Berlin one night near the Wannsee Station. The tricks were arch, elaborate, trite, and unsupported by the facts presented; nevertheless, the tricks worked to undermine Blomberg's and Fritsch's confidence and lead directly to Hitler's forcing both of them out of office. Goering chortled and pranced. Hitler reddened and fumed. The Prussian officer corps darkened in alarm. From this moment we can date the certain Prussian military elite antipathy to Hitler and his gang of mass-murderers that would lead eventually to the July 20th failed plot to assassinate Hitler in his bunker. In January 1938, the result of Goering's dirty tricks was that Hitler assumed the two empty posts for himself and thereby became the absolute leader of the army that he would presently launch on its road to oblivion for the rest of the century and perhaps forever. Hitler's gamble in 1938 was to bluff and bluff with an army that hated and looked down upon him. The miserable fact is that the bluff worked because the other European powers, and America too (Chamberlain had FDR to back him), chose concession and appeasement and civilized diplomacy over the only vocabulary that would ever work on Hitler, Goering and the predator punks of the Nazi Party (Goebbels, Heydrich, Himmler, etc.: bourgeois sadists), which is best described as the business end of a firearm. Giles McDonough, whose mother's family - prominent Jews in pre-war Vienna who ran a department store empire (Bergdorf's and Wal-Marts) - was wrecked by the Nazis, has composed a thrilling, even-toned, relentless script for an opera that will never end. The lives of the completely petty Hitlerist predators who wrecked Central Europe and then the globe for at least fifty years, perhaps centuries more.

Douglas Macgregor's "Warrior's Rage: The Great Tank Battle of Eastling 73."

2009-12-06T04:30:54Z

The Republican Guard's Last Hour.

Momentous national strategic mistakes were made in the last days of February 1991 as the 2nd Cavalry Armored Division attacked the Iraqi Republican Guard frontally from Saudi Arabia into Kuwait, and Doug Macgregor was on the scene leading the team of M1A1 tanks and Bradley assault vehicles to witness the events. In December, LTG Fred Franks had been given the order by LTG Schwarzkopf to break the Republican Guard and capture Baghdad. Franks asked for VII Corps, a massive armor army then in Germany to fight the Soviets who had disappeared the previous year when the Kremlin fell to Yeltsin. Two months later, VII Corps was arranged opposite the Republican Guard, and on February 25 the ferocious artillery barrage and air strike wave struck against the front lines of the Iraqis at what was then about 70 Eastling (map coordinates). Macgregor describes the barrage as a mistake, because it gave the Republican Guard time to flee. What had been 80,000 troops with T-72s and BMPs. Macgregor's unit struck at 1600 hours on February 26 and the battle was over by nightfall, a complete unconditional defeat of the Iraqis, the last hour of the Republican Guard as a credible fighting force. The action described is vivid, stunning, and demonstrates that at that moment in time, America possessed the best and most efficiently violent fighting force ever assembled on the Earth, a machine-like Behemoth that could not ever be stopped once it chose an objective and received the order to go.

The Mistake

That evening, 26-27 February, the George H. W. Bush administration committed the mistake that created the conditions for the disaster in Iraq for the president's son, George W. Bush, when the original order to smash the Republican Guard and take Baghdad was called off. The men of VII Corp were stumped and frustrated at the time, and more so today, nineteen years later. Macgregor relates the tales of a captured Iraqi Brigade commander, who told him on the evening of 26 February, in his excellent trained-at-Fort Benning English, that the American army should keep going, go all the way to Baghdad and get rid of Saddam Hussein. The major indicated that Saddam would flee with his hand-picked weasel generals, and the Iraqi army could be put in charge of the fragmented state until the UN held elections. It was a battlefield speculation in 1991 that was credible. Nothing happened. The Iraqi major couldn't understand why we stopped. Neither could Macgregor. Neither can I. Can you? I know the excuses, but still, all mistakes have explanations. They are still mistakes that change history. The father's sin of commission, giving an order that he later rescinded, cursed the son, who gave an order to take Baghdad in 2003 and lost his presidency to the sinister nature of the region that had time, between February 1991 and April 2003 when we captured Baghdad, to arrange a quagmire in the sandy reaches of the Euphrates River valley.

Wil Haygood's "Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson."

2009-11-23T01:55:05Z

Born into the cauldron of post-World War I Detroit, born Walker Smith, Jr., to a sharecropper dad who tried his luck in Fordized Michigan; to a sturdy mom, Leila, who provided the energy for a life lived at high speed, Sugar Ray Robinson was an American legend who spanned both sides of the civil rights transformation and who reinvented the African-American sports hero. Wil Haygood's story is fluid and romantic. The accidental rise of Sugar Ray Robinson is contained in a wonderful anecdote of how he went from Walker Smith to Ray Robinson. It was amateur fight night in Watertown, New York, 1934, and a boxing club from the Salem Episcopal Methodist Church of Harlem was in for a series of matches. The team lightweight, Ray Robinson, was out sick. So Herbert Smith pushed himself to the coach and said, "Let me." He won in a tidy style that at ringside they called "sweet," and he was written up the next day in the local paper as "Sweet Sugar Ray Robinson." Legend born. After he won the Golden Gloves in 1938, he turned professional and also made the decision to present himself stylishly, befriending Langston Hughes, Lena Horne. Not a palooka, not a gambler, not a loser. He was in the Army in 1944 with Joe Louis, touring the base in the South for the Department of the Army. After an incident in which Robinson defended Joe Louis from discrimination, Robinson walked away from the Army and the decision was made to let him go. In 1946, back to fighting, he started his own night club on Seventh Avenue in Harlem, and it became a hot night spot for the TV, Hollywood and newspaper crowd, like Jackie Gleason, Walter Winchell, Frank Sinatra. The five fights with Jake LaMotta from 1941-1951 defined feud fighting for a big gate. In May 1947 at Cleveland, Robinson punched a kid fighter and Doyle in the eighth round, and Doyle never recovered, dying the next day. The incident haunted Robinson, but did not stop him fighting. Sugar Ray Robinson transformed the boxing game so that when Muhammed Ali came along, there was a role for the champion celebrity iconoclast. Robinson died young of complications from what was called Alzheimer's in 1984 in California, his last years a disappointment of missed opportunities. Did all the punching contribute to the early death from brain damage? And where is the Hollywood movie? This is a role that makes careers.

D.M. Giangreco's "Hell to Pay: Operation DOWNFALL and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947."

2009-11-14T07:17:06Z

Reading "Hell to Pay," re Operation DOWNFALL, the massive, more-than-massive planned two-stage invasion of Japan, that was scheduled for October 1945-March 1946. President Harry Truman with Herbert Hoover advising, Admirals King, Leahy and Hap Arnold advising, real tough guys. The Japanese warlords were ready for 20 million casualties. Japanese were well prepared. They knew where we were coming, at Kyushu starting November 1, 1945, and then right at Tokyo in the spring 1946. Stunning. The two atomic bombs were mercy in comparison to the projected casualties on both sides. Those were hard men and hard decisions. They were making swift decisions while post-VE Europe trembled with starvation, lawlessness, disgust, Soviet chicanery and cruelty. The choice for Truman and his advisers was either to murder 200 -- Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- or to take the risk to lose 500,000 American casualties and up to 8 million Japanese. Numbing.

George Marshall, July 1945, "...the daily casualty lists are mine. They arrive in a constant stream, a swelling stream, and I can't get away from them." After Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed, an the Japanese warlords still hesitated to surrender, Marshall wanted all eight of the next atomic weapons that would be ready for X Day, November 1, 1945, to be dropped on Kyushu, where 10 million people were trapped among 16 Japanese divisions dug in with orders to fight to the death like Okinawa. Marshall was clear. He had gone to New Mexico to see the effects of the first atomic bomb test. He knew. He wanted three bombs on each Corps landing zone. Push the US troops right through the radiation. Unbelievable. They were all going insane with the casualties. The Navy prepared half a million Purple Hearts. The US built hospitals to prepare to receive 700,000 wounded back in the States during the projected two-year campaign, '45-'47.

Herbert Hoover, working diligently with casualty figures projected provided by the DoD, based upon Iwo Jima and Okinawa casualties, communicated to Truman that half a million American casualties were a conservative minimum. The numbers scared and humbled Truman. Truman was a veteran of the battle of Meuse Argonne, 1918. Within three miles of his guns, half his 35th Division fell in four days. Truman moved through a "cemetery of unburied." Truman chose the atomic bombs to save American lives. In so doing, he also saved Japanese lives, up to 8 million. Also, the casualty rate in all Pacific Theater campaigns ongoing, wherein the Japanese refused to surrender, was 400,000 a month until the emperor surrendered on August 14, 1945. The surrender surprised Truman, Marshall, Leahy, Arnold, King, LeMay. The decision had already been sent along. X-Day was November 1, 1945, on Kyushu Island. The early American waves on the beaches would have sustained totally unprecedented losses. The Japanese warlords were waiting with murder holes and orders to fight to the death. I will never again be dubious about the decision to use the atomic bombs. In a world of ghastly choices, they chose the nightmare over the Apocalypse.

Anne C. Heller's "Ayn Rand and the World She Made."

2009-11-08T05:57:08Z

Speaking Sunday 8 with Anne C. Heller's re her comprehensive, fluent, convincing biography of the driven, sad, charismatic, overwhelming novelist Ayn Rand, who remade herself entirely in 1926 from a lonely, gifted movie fan of a Russian immigrant, named Alissa Rosenbaum, into a strident anti-Soviet spellbinder named Ayn Rand. The delightful revelation of Alissa/Ayn is that she began and remained a sober, secretive little girl who discovered a cartoon hero named Cyrus in a magazine story, "The Mysterious Valley," when she was ten years old and remained devoted to the long-legged, fair-haired, jolly and heroic Cyrus for seventy years. Cyrus later became her husband, her characters Howard Roark and John Galt, her beau ideal lover. Surviving through wartime Petersburg, then revolutionary Petrograd, she finally fled Russia on a fantastic pipe dream that she would get to California and become a famous Hollywood screenwriter for Cecil B. DeMille. In 1926, she sailed for New York, then entrained for relatives in Chicago, then borrowed $100 to go to Hollywood to stalk Cecil B. DeMille, grab at extra roles on the King of Kings set, pick out a handsome Cyrus-like amateur actor, Frank O'Connor, and then learn to speak English by writing screenplays for DeMille. Cannot make this stuff up, and it all came true. One of her early efforts, the Skyscraper, contains the narrative structure of both Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged -- a heroic Cyrus outsider who is despised for his virtues and who finds love with a racy, forceful, overstated female figure. Ayn Rand invented everything, resented everyone, regretted her family and past, forced all to obey her or to get out, and created in her novels a make-believe world she called individualism. It was Alissa/Ayn, the heroine in a world of one. Her made-up name itself represents aspects of her her romanticism, imagination, whimsy, isolation, longing. Heller argues that Ayn was a version of Alissa's father's pet name for her, "Ayein,: short fo Ayinoshka," which means "bright eyes." The surname "Rand" remains a mystery, thought Anne Helle presents the credible deduction that Ayn Rand chose it from the railroad schedules that for many years were printed by "Rand-McNally."

Morris Dickstein's "Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression."

2009-11-01T18:33:28Z

The catastrophe of the bank runs in 1933 prior to FDR's inauguration was the true start of the sinkhole of gloom that we recall as the Great Depression, and Morris Dickstein's sweeping, fluent, thoughtful survey of the novels, plays, poetry, photos, songs and movies of the period, from approximately 1931 to 1941 is a thrilling and also sentimental journey into the imagination when it is down and out. The novelists he favors, Henry Roth, John Steinbeck, Nathaniel West, were successful just because they avoided the cant and communist claptrap of hope. The movies make the book jump and laugh, because the celebration of the gangster in the early Depression era was not a veneration of crime but a romance of a hero breaking free of a corrupt, broken, false witnessing, aimless system, with governments gone tyrannical and arbitrary, with worldwide despair transforming into the mass murder of the 1940s. Especially rich for metaphor of the dread of the times are Edward G. Robinson's "Little Caesar," Jimmy Cagney's "Public Enemy," and Paul Muni's "Scarfarce." Also critical to understand the era, the fear that lived in the kitchens with the kids, is the never equaled, over the top, sensationally scary "I Am A Fugitive from a Chain Gang," with Paul Muni. The last line echoes over the decades. When our broken, frightened, miserable on the run hero is asked how he will live as a fugitive from a rotten system, he answers in the dark, "I steal." If you understand the passion and accuracy of that remark, you understand how bad it was in 1933, how bad it can be again. The banks stole and ran. It was a lie to be honest. How is it for us now when we know the the Treasury made a side deal with the banks to keep them alive while our jobs and savings and loans and mortgages failed? Unknown. Who got 100 cents on its IOUs from AIG while we the people bailed out gamblers and their bonuses? Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Societe General. Do POTUS and Biden and Geithner and Bernanke know this? Yes. Who is honest 2009?

James G. Workman's "Heart of Dryness: How the Last Bushmen Can Help Us Endure the Coming Age of Permanent Drought"

2009-10-24T04:37:56Z

Kalahari Majesty.

After 2002, the government of the IMF dupe Festus Mogae, president of the ambitious state of Botswana, directed his apparatus to drive and flush and bribe the approximately 50 thousand Bushmen from their traditional, majestic Kalahari desert home and habitat. The aim was to concentrate the available water into the hands of development, including a DeBeers facility to service fresh diamond mines and the usual tourist attractions for the elephant population. Cynical, modern, determined, devoted, glib characters in a Dickens novel unwritten of 21st Century Africa. A severe drought struck Botawana and reduced the central Gaborone Dam reservoir to 27% of capacity. The nation panicked and abused the handful of remaining Bushmen. James G. Workman traveled into the Kalahari to meet with the traditional people and came under the spell of an aged grandmother, Qoroxloo Duxee, born 1924, and her family and clan members. Qoroxloo confronted the threats and abuses of the central government. The apparatchik in charge, Sidney Pilane, declared the Bushmen holdouts and those who returned to the desert to be "terrorists." Workman makes a parallel case that drought is a likely scenario for North America and other parts of the globe in the event of severe climate change. Life with minimal water supplies is a profound challenge. Following the Bushmen into the desert to seek and preserve food and water is thrilling and a journey into science fiction. In one hundred degree dry heat, a human being needs one gallon of water every 20 miles. The confrontation between Bushmen and the IMF boys is predictable and satisfying. The story is tragic and foreboding. It will make you thirsty. Mention that the IMF and World Bank convinced Botswana, as with other African states, to centralize its water reservoirs, and this is a catastrophe in waiting, as only diversified water management can adapt to climate change.

Ilaria Dagnini Brey's "The Venus Hunters: The Remarkable Story of the Allied Soldiers Who Saved Italy's Art During World War II"

2009-10-17T01:21:58Z

Speaking to Ilaria Dagnini, born in Padua, constructs a vivid, romantic, patriotic tale of how the Italian museum keepers and volunteer patriots combined to protect Firenze's potable art work from the schemes of the doomed Fascist Party of Italy and the long-range larceny of Reichsmarshall and art-goon Herman Goring of the demonic Nazi Party. All of Italian art and architecture and archeology was at risk as the combined Allied force fought its way from the beachheads north on the

peninsula, but the situation for Firenze became unacceptable and tragic in July 1944. A goon named Alessandro Pavolini, secretary of Mussolini's Fascist Party, arrived in Firenze in early July as the Allies were approaching Tuscany and the Germans were preparing a strategic retreat. Pavolini wanted all of the art, such as the Medici classical collection in the Uffizi, and a library of Renaissance painters starting with Botticelli and Michaelangelo and Titian, removed to Fascist hands in the north of Italy, closer to the German border. Confronting the sinister Pavolini (who was also in Tuscany to organize murder teams of snipers who would continue to kill Italians long after the Allies had freed the valleys) was the hero of the city's art, Superintendant Giovanni Poggi. Poggi invoked an 18th Century scheme by the remnant of the degenerate Medici clan called the "Family Pact." Cooked up by the aged Anna Maria Luisa, she closed the deal with her successor, the Grand Dukes of Lorraine. The pact declared that the Medici collections (just about everything) "could not be taken away from the city of Florence, nor out of the borders of the old Medici Duchy, so that the Florentines would never be deprived." Poggi played his card, and Pavolini, overwhelmed by pending disasters, went along. And so began the evacuation and securing of the treasures of the city to various castles, palazzos and other holding areas around the city. The Allied Dream Team of art historians, architects, archivists, amateur treasure hunters and just plain good souls arrived around August 1 and had to wait until the retreating Germans blew the bridges and bugged out to begin the task of restoring the city. Gripping detail, thrilling teamwork, uplifiting conclusion. To fight an artillery and infantry battle in the midst of an open air museum of the Renaissance and the Roman empire. What madness lived in Western Europe, once upon a time. Below Titian's Danae, one that got away to Germany and had to be rescued by another team of the heroes, called the Monuments Men.

Mike Vaccaro's "The First Fall Classic: The Red Sox, The Giants, and the Cast of Players, Pugs, and Politicos Who Reinvented the World Series 1912"

2009-10-09T06:12:27Z

Coogan's Bluff vs. Fenway Park.

Boston's ace "Smoky Joe" Wood and New York's "The Christian Gentleman" Mathewson were far, far more popular and revered than the mugs Wilson and Roosevelt who were campaigning for president against the great baseball fan, President Taft. The Giants had all the advantages with scale and fame and those black uniforms -- and the Giants had John "Mugsy" McGraw, (left) too: "You win championships on the field, not in the newspapers." What Boston had was Smoky Joe (right), who had the career year with a fastball that smoked, and Boston also had a just built gem of a park called Fenway and that odd feature later called "the Wall." The post-pennant World Series the first dozen times had been a mess of promotion, cash and disappointment, given that the Nationals usually won. The Giants had not won since 1905, but they carried themselves as if the crowd belonged to New York and was leased to others on occasion. The commission decided that New York and Boston would play seven games over eight days (Sunday off), and also switch parks every day, so there was a lot of time playing cards on the railroad on a Special Train, No. 26. Every game, every inning, every out was followed religiously by telegraph to newspaper offices on Herald Square and Newspaper Row in New York and to the cheers of the First Red Sox Rooter John "Honey" Fitzgerald, Mayor of Boston, as well as to newspapers across the country. It was heartbreakingly joyous when Boston took the first game in the Polo Fields (Coogan's Bluff, where New York-Presbyterian Hospital stands today). Game two in Boston was Mathewson's to win, but it was called as a tie for darkness, and then the series got really serious. Vaccaro portrays the zeal, romance, comedy, gamesmanship and American firepower of the event that turned baseball into a cult -- and this was before the Giants shared the Polo Grounds with the upstart nine, the New York Highlanders, who were sometimes referred to, as the rookies in town, as the Yankees.) Afterward, the lifetime of regret for Giants centerfielder Fred Snodgrass means that 1912 will always be with us in that commonplace soliloquy of youth, "What Coulda Been."

Matt Latimer's Speech-less

2009-10-01T05:13:09Z

Swift, snarky, long on style and autobiography, glib on policy and war and the crack-up of the Bush White House, Matt Latimer's breezy and comic memoir of his time writing speeches for Rummy and Bush is high-grade gossip. I am speaking to Matt Latimer on Saturday 3 October. Latimer saw what he saw in and out of George W. Bush's presence. Like a foster child living at the palace, Latimer is best at illustrating those who believed they were entitled to be royal. What emerges are affectionately icky portraits of the pretentious, rootless, self-dealing court figures and hangers-on in the Executive who schemed to get and stay close to the vacuum around POTUS. George Bush remains an uninteresting enigma -- not stupid, not sharp, not warm, not ungrounded, not comfortable, not purposeful, a kind of dull, unexplained, out of place mystery to the end. The villain is Hank Paulson, who does not much appear. Karl Rove is played for guffaws and jeers. There is a prim absence of romance or even tawdriness at the Bush White House. It was a ceaseless Methodist showroom. Latimer writes smoothly, like a sitcom writer trapped inside a magazine journalist. He will do well writing West Wing Wacko scripts. Or producing motivational tapes. And he is perfect for TV cameos. Has he done Colbert more than once yet?

James Ellroy's "Blood's A Rover: A Novel."

2009-09-27T18:49:09Z

Speaking to James Ellroy Sunday 27 re his grotesquely hilarious new novel about crime in high places in the 20th century of Los Angeles and, in this instance, in Washington D.C. also. The narrative follows a bevy of detectives, snoops, FBI ops, black radicals, white radicals and not a few innocent bystanders from a violent armored car heist in 1964 to the eve of the Watergate fiascos in 1972. At the center of this narrative, part of Ellroy's many novels about crimes in high places, is the deranged lunacy of the dying J. Edgar Hoover combined with the epochal cynicism of the just elected President Richard Nixon. The telephone consultations between Hoover and the book's peculiar, compelling hero, FBI agent Dwight C. Holly, are topped only in dark comedy and a kind of grim opera by the telephone conversations between President Nixon and agent Dwight C. Holly. The historical fact that makes all this zany plot credible in the FBI's deeply paranoid program COINTELPRO that was aimed to discredit and destroy all dissenters who annoyed the troubled Hoover. Including and starting with Martin Luther King and the Kennedys. What makes it a pleasure to follow the vulgarity, crudeness, violence and nasty pay-off is the author's infectious style, part crime genre and part laughter. At least I think this is laughter. It makes me laugh and like LA and DC all over again for the fact that anything is possible, anything at all:

"It was raining. He'd hit sixteen print-shops. He displayed his hate s--- and ruined moods en masse. His badge and nerves induced freakouts. Numbnuts clerks flashed the peace sign.

"Mr. Hoover dug the peace sign. It was the "footprint of the American chicken."

David E. Hoffman's "The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy"

2009-09-23T05:53:56Z

Compelling, dramatic, richly painted, driving, smoothly rendered, something close to a thriller starring Ronald Reagan and the good villain Gorbachev, David Hoffman's "Dead Hand"...]]> provides a sweeping backdrop to the current world dilemma with proliferation in North Korea and Iran. The Cold War is done, American won, and now Russia rises to bite back as it will not cooperate with sanctions of Tehran. At the same time, those Nato and Russian nukes still wait in the silos and lockers and submarines. All they need is a few minutes of targeting and then the launch codes.

PERIMETER.

Spoke to David Hoffman Saturday 26 and learned that the fate of Perimeter, the Doomsday Machine built by Andropov era paranoids to combat the expected American first strike in 1981-85. The fact is that Perimeter is presumed still operational. Russia officers in a sealed bunker underground near Moscow have the authority to start the end of the world as we know. There are conditions. But the conditions are not profound. And once Perimeter begins, there is no call back. First condition is that the officers must be told that nuke war is imminent and likely, which is why they are sealed in the tomb. Second condition is that the tomb loses contact with Moscow Center and the Kremlin leadership, which is presumed what will happen in a decapitation strike (by Pershing II missiles deployed in Europe). Third condition is that the junior officers hear or perceive seismic thumping above them consistent with nuke strikes on Moscow Center. At this point, Perimeter is active. The orders fire command rockets from hardened silos across the country. The command rockets fly for 30 minutes over the country sending radio beacons that automatically salve all the nuke ICBMs. Game over. Again, Hoffman's best information is that Perimeter remains operational. Peter Sellers and Ambassador Kissoff are still in business. Did George Bush and Dick Cheney worry about Perimeter when they looked into Putin's KGB (non-transparent) eyes? Do POTUS and his Politburo know about Perimeter? Would they ask if they knew? Our Minutemen and their ICBMs are not now targetted. Hoffman says they can be retargetted in minutes. Norman Polmar, author, "The U.S. Nuclear Arsenal," told me Saturday 19 that the targetting is as simple as hitting the Enter key. Same for Perimeter. If a rascal wanted to take out Russia and North America, perhaps because a Global Caliphate is more desirable, what use Perimeter? It's a far-fetched question, but should it even be slightly credible?