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by Ted Morgan
By 1954, French colonial rule in Indochina was dying. An eight-year insurrection by the communist Viet Minh had forced the weary French military to make a stand at Dien Bien Phu, a village intercepting a key supply line to Laos.
Rather than stop the enemy’s supplies, the French found themselves besieged by Viet Minh troops in the highlands. When the French garrison was overwhelmed and overrun in May, it led to the end of the Lanier government in Paris and the creation of the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the northern part of the country.
Many Americans think our country’s involvement in Vietnam began 10 years later with the Gulf of Tonkin. But in a groundbreaking new book, Pulitzer Prize winner Ted Morgan argues that America’s interest and concern began with Dien Bien Phu.
Morgan begins Valley of Death with a concise, compelling account of the French defeat in May 1954. Yet he plunges beneath this familiar stream to explore deep currents of fresh insight. Drawing on new sources and on his own time in the French army, he creates vivid images of French generals Henri Navarre and Christian de Castries as well as Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, who led the guerrilla campaign that drove the French out of Dien Bien Phu and eventually out of Indochina.
But the book’s strength is found in the author’s careful re-creation of how Washington policymakers closely monitored Dien Bien Phu. A cast of famous historical figures, including Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Sen. Lyndon Johnson, emerges on the pages of this book, debating what America should do about the likely French defeat.
The main figure in these Washington discussions – and the man who perhaps had the clearest view and the shrewdest sense – was President Dwight Eisenhower. In April 1954, he mocked the inept French military effort and prophetically told an aide: “You can’t go in and win unless the people want you. The French would win in six months if the people were with them.”
As a staunch anti-communist, Ike did consider helping the French. In some ways, he served as metaphor for the division in Washington: opposed to the communists’ winning, but not willing to help save French imperialism with U.S. troops.
If the United States intervened, the president feared it would “lay us open to the charge of imperialism and colonialism … ” Yet he feared that the French would not be able to save themselves: “No military victory was possible in that type of theater.”
The president considered a proposal from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to use airstrikes to support the French on the condition that there be united action and involvement from allies. But he deferred to Congress and didn’t press the plan. When Dulles met with congressional leaders, Johnson asked whether he had secured any commitment of troops from other countries. After Dulles admitted he had not, Johnson and the others were unwilling to move forward.
Not that this displeased the president. Already realizing that all the options confronting him were bad ones, “he seemed to want Congress to block any unilateral American action,” Morgan notes. America’s main entry into Vietnam would not come until 10 years later. Given the outcome of that endeavor, the decision to keep America out of Vietnam in the 1950s looks even wiser.
In the end, Morgan’s well-researched and well-written new book shows that presidential leadership matters. After all, presidents don’t just lead by fighting and winning wars; sometimes they lead by staying out of them.
Kasey S. Pipes, the author of Ike’s Final Battle, is the Norris research fellow at the Eisenhower Institute and a senior fellow at the Center for Building Community.
books@dallasnews.com
Valley of Death
The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America Into the Vietnam War
Ted Morgan
(Random House, $35)
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TEA PARTIERS’ FAMILY FEUD POLITICS
If Colin Powell were ever to become president, Grover Norquist famously joked in the 1990s, it would be as if Ronald Reagan never lived and Nelson Rockefeller never died.
What a difference a decade makes. Today, with the tea party voters fermenting a spicy brew of family feud politics, the Republican Party’s troubles come not from the moderate middle but from the libertarian right.
A great myth of American political history holds that a direct path can be traced from the Barry Goldwater revolution to the Ronald Reagan majority. In this conventional wisdom, Barry and Ronnie were kindred political spirits, if not close personal friends. According to this account, Goldwater served as a kind of Moses, leading conservatives out of the wilderness, while Reagan played Joshua and led them into the Promised Land.
The real story is less simple and more interesting. As Reagan’s star in conservatism’s constellation began to
And for much of the Reagan presidency in the 1980s, Goldwater continued to serve as an in-house critic. He complained about Reagan’s conservative social values and feared his party had been taken over by the religious right, whom he called “a bunch of kooks.”
What happened to the straight path from Goldwater to Reagan? It turns out to have been more of a winding, jagged off-road. Goldwater preached a libertarian brand of opposition politics, while Reagan practiced a conservative creed designed to build a majority. To achieve a realignment, Reagan understood he needed to reach new voters with new issues. He did this first on economic policy, where he moved the GOP away from its traditional austerity economics and toward a prosperity economics.
Instead of just emphasizing budget cuts, he would emphasize tax cuts and reach working-class voters who were struggling with their tax bills. He went on to cultural issues, where he welcomed voters of faith who had previously supported Jimmy Carter. And Reagan matched Goldwater’s anger at the American government with his own optimism in the American people.
In short, where Goldwater wanted to complain, Reagan wanted to govern; where Goldwater offered a protest, Reagan offered a program. As a result, Reagan transformed Goldwater’s 40 percent vote in 1964 into a 60 percent majority in 1984.
In this way, Reagan closely reflected the writings of Russell Kirk, who in the 1950s exhumed 18th-century British statesman Edmund Burke and gave conservatism an intellectual founding father. Burke, according to Kirk, believed in the “negation of ideology.” Instead of an ideological litmus test, Burke offered conservatives a way to respond to new challenges by pursuing evolutionary change, which explains Reagan’s penchant for incrementally changing his party to meet the times.
To be fair, today’s tea party activists offer some much-needed idealism about the size and scope of the government, the security of the borders and the best means of taxation. But when tea partiers confuse rage with reason and fail to distinguish between Republicans and Democrats, they edge closer to permanent minority status.
The recent Texas primary shows that many tea party voters understand this and want to win. When Debra Medina botched an answer to an easy question from Glenn Beck about the Sept. 11 attacks, many of her voters moved to Rick Perry, allowing the governor to win the primary without a runoff in a three-person race. Medina’s modest showing proves that many tea partiers want to do more than just make a statement; they want to make a difference.
And the only way to do that is when their protest movement is attached to a larger conservative majority that can reach people beyond the tea party rallies.
Otherwise, if the tea party takes over the GOP, it will be as if Ronald Reagan never lived and Barry Goldwater never died.
Kasey S. Pipes, the Norris research fellow at the Eisenhower Institute and a senior fellow at the Center for Building Community, is the author of “Ike’s Final Battle.” He began his career as an intern for President Ronald Reagan.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0310/33871_Page2.html#ixzz0hVTx3rsi
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12:00 AM CST on Sunday, November 29, 2009
By KASEY S. PIPES / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
Kasey S. Pipes is the author of Ike’s Final Battle and is the Norris Research Fellow at the Eisenhower Institute and a senior fellow at the Center for Building Community.
Bernard Montgomery, George S. Patton and Erwin Rommel fought epic battles in North Africa and Europe in World War II. Entire libraries of books have been written about each commander. But now, these leaders are presented in a book the way they fought in the war: against each other.
Author Terry Brighton, curator of the Queen’s Royal Lancers Museum, follows the familiar terrain of scholarship on each man. He also digs deeper to show how the men thought and fought.
He invokes Clausewitz’s principle that battles are won by the ration of “means” and “will to fight.” Thus, though the Allies had an advantage in number of troops and weapons, the Germans won battles early in the war due to willpower. Hitler factored this in as part of his strategy: “It would not be the first time in history that willpower has triumphed over the stronger battalions.”
This Nietzschen on view was personified by Rommel. The Desert Fox used willpower and strategy to overcome the Allies’ numerical advantages. Brighton quotes English scholar and soldier Liddell Hart as saying of Rommel: “His successes were achieved with inferiority of resources and without any command of the air. No other generals on either side won battles under these handicaps.”
Indeed, Hitler’s strategy may have succeeded had it not been for the arrival of Monty and Patton.
The turning point of the North African campaign – and perhaps the entire war – was the Battle of El Alamein. There, on the Egyptian coast, Montgomery’s superior numbers faced Rommel’s willpower. But unlike his predecessors, Monty was ready to go the distance with the Desert Fox. “Montgomery’s superior will to fight – and it was his alone, all of his commanders being willing to pull back – brought the British a victory that otherwise (despite their numerical and supply superiority) might not have been won.”
And then there is Patton, relentless and ruthless. After Monty helped plan the D-Day invasion, the Englishman watched in horror as Patton’s Third Army swept across Europe ahead of him.
Only with these two leaders, Brighton argues, were the Allies able to defeat Hitler. Montgomery proved more capable of managing resources and more possessing of the perseverance needed in a battle of willpowers. Patton proved more capable of conducting a blitzkrieg campaign and more possessing of the audaciousness needed in a warrior’s will to fight. This combination of perseverance and audaciousness finally destroyed the Nazis.
The book also details the demise of each man. Brighton poignantly re-creates the moment when Hitler’s henchmen came to offer Rommel the choice of a trial or a suicide. Patton, marginalized at war’s end by his remarks about confronting the Soviets, was paralyzed in a freak car accident and died not long after.
Only Monty survived. The postwar years were not kind. The field marshal was enraged by Eisenhower’s memoirs (and perhaps by Eisenhower’s fame) and struck back with his own book, which Ike called “a waste of time to read.” In promoting his book, Monty appeared on American television and suggested President Eisenhower was not well: “Your president has had a heart attack and a stroke.” These episodes only served to diminish Monty.
Still, for a few years in the early 1940s, Patton, Montgomery and Rommel made history together. Terry Brighton’s book provides a brisk, compelling account of that history.
Kasey S. Pipes is the author of Ike’s Final Battle and is the Norris Research Fellow at the Eisenhower Institute and a senior fellow at the Center for Building Community.
books@dallasnews.com
Monty, Patton and Rommel at War
Masters of War
Terry Brighton
(Crown, $24)
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12:00 AM CST on Sunday, November 22, 2009
By KASEY S. PIPES / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
Kasey S. Pipes is the author of Ike’s Final Battle and is the Norris Research Fellow at the Eisenhower Institute and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Building Community.
In 1946, a 17-year-old British student met Winston Churchill and asked the once and future prime minister how he had achieved so much.
“Conservation of energy,” the great man replied. “Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.”
That teenager was Paul Johnson, and he later emerged as one of the world’s greatest historians. Now, in his twilight years, Johnson has turned his formidable powers on the 20th-century figure he calls “the most valuable to humanity, and also the most likable.”
In Churchill, Johnson chronicles his subject’s life and career, with special attention to how he paced himself through a 90-year journey of soaring vistas and dark valleys.
Johnson begins the book by arguing that Churchill was his mother’s son. His American mother instilled in him American characteristics: emotion, passion, perseverance and, above all, ambition. “She believed the sky was the limit,” the author writes, “that everything was possible … .” This philosophy would guide Churchill throughout his career.
And what a career. From soldier to statesman, Churchill served the British Empire for six decades. Though he often sought to preserve tradition, his unconventional leadership typically led him to promote change. In one striking example that Johnson highlights, Churchill used his first tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty to preserve the Royal Navy as the greatest sea-fighting force in the world while transforming the way it fought.
“He began the historic shift from coal to oil,” Johnson notes, “and in the process laid down a new class, the Queen Elizabeth, of huge, oil-burning battleship. He created the naval air service, and begged his ship architects to design him aircraft carriers.” Churchill loved history, but he could see the future and spent his career trying to build it.
Johnson’s story arc is written in fluid prose that beautifully reveals the tension and achievement in Churchill’s life. In one paragraph, the historian summarizes the length, width and depth of his subject’s career as a politician, warrior and artist:
“In his ninety years, Churchill had spent fifty-five years as a member of Parliament, thirty-one years as a minister, and nearly nine years as prime minister. He had been present at or fought in fifteen battles, and had been awarded fourteen campaign medals, some with multiple clasps. He had been a prominent figure in the First World War, and a dominant one in the Second. He had published nearly 10 million words, more than most professional writers in their lifetime, and painted over five hundred canvases, more than most professional painters.”
Still, Johnson’s book seems incomplete. Its 168 pages equal not quite two pages for each year of Churchill’s life.
At times, Johnson teases the reader with revealing and penetrating insight into the great man’s career. The author describes his subject’s engaged leadership style as the result of having been a prisoner during the Boer War. “All his life he refused to be confined to a desk,” Johnson writes, and then explains why. “His imprisonment by the Boers had given him a horror of confinement … .”
This type of insight raises the question of what might have been if Johnson had written a full-volume biography. Perhaps the author, like his subject, decided to conserve his energy.
Kasey S. Pipes is the author of Ike’s Final Battle and is the Norris Research Fellow at the Eisenhower Institute and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Building Community.
books@dallasnews.com
Churchill
Paul Johnson
(Viking, $24.95)
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‘The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall’ by Michael Meyer
This fall marks the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s collapse and the beginning of the Cold War’s end. Symbolically, Berlin always represented ground zero in the fight against communism. So when the wall finally came down in 1989, many wondered how it happened and who deserved credit.
In The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Michael Meyer offers an important insider’s account of the wall’s crumbling. Some people write about history; Meyer lived it. He served as Newsweek’s bureau chief for Germany and Eastern Europe in 1989. His first-person narrative takes readers back to his experiences in that historic year.
If storytelling comprises both content and context, Meyer deserves high praise for the former. His on-the-ground reporting of those momentous events is filled with new information and is told with a brisk, smooth style.
What ended with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Meyer argues, began when Hungarian soldiers cut down part of the electric fence between Hungary and Austria earlier in 1989. This first tear in the Iron Curtain led many East Germans to head south and escape. The hero who put things in motion, Meyer says, was Hungarian Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth, who knew that communism could not work.
But according to Meyer, Nemeth was made possible only by Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviet leader is portrayed as something of a patron saint of the revolution. Meyer details a tense Warsaw Pact meeting in July 1989, where other communist leaders pressured Nemeth to repent. But each time Nemeth looked over at the Soviet leader, he noticed that Gorbachev winked at him. Meyer quotes Nemeth’s recollection of that meeting: “It was as if Gorbachev were saying, ‘Don’t worry. These people are idiots. Pay no attention.’ ”
Later that year at a news conference, an East German government spokesman mistakenly implied that East Germans would be allowed to cross over into West Berlin. This announcement led countless people to flock to the wall, where the guards were so overwhelmed and so unsure what to do that they let the people cross. The Berlin Wall, it seems, came down by almost by accident.
When zooming in with a narrow-lens camera, Meyer creates a fascinating picture filled with vivid images and bold colors. But when he tries his hand at the wider shot, his view is sometimes clouded with ideological revisionism. Meyer goes out of his way to mock American conservatives who revere Reagan’s Berlin Wall speech: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” And he points to Reagan’s “political evolution” and argues that the president became a diplomat in his second term and worked with Gorbachev. Thus, Meyer essentially argues, conservatives should be careful to claim America won the Cold War.
At times, this makes Meyer’s book look more like a work of polemics than a work of history. Most conservatives don’t argue that Reagan’s speech won the Cold War, but that his policies played a key role: He deployed Pershing missiles to Western Europe, supported Solidarity in Poland and forced concessions from Gorbachev.
And did Reagan’s negotiating posture change in the second term? Sure it did, after Gorbachev accepted Reagan’s terms at the negotiating table. Most notably, when Reagan and Gorbachev signed the treaty eliminating intermediate- range missiles in Europe, they did not ban missile defense, something Gorbachev desired desperately. Reagan changed because he got what he wanted. And this pressure from the American president almost certainly was an important part of the context that led Gorbachev to wink and allow reform to move forward in Eastern Europe.
Still, Meyer’s book represents a major contribution to Cold War history. And his central thesis rings true: The people in Eastern Europe did the most to win the Cold War. Yet it takes nothing away from their victory to acknowledge that they had help from their friends in America.
Kasey S. Pipes is the author of Ike’s Final Battle and is the Norris Research Fellow at the Eisenhower Institute and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Building Community.
books@dallasnews.com
The Year That Changed the World
The Untold Story Behind the Fall
of the Berlin Wall
Michael Meyer
(Scribner, $26)
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As the president fought for his economic recovery agenda, the Republicans launched a fierce counterattack. The president’s plan, according to Newt Gingrich, would “kill jobs” and “actually increase the deficit.”
This was not Gingrich criticizing the Obama stimulus program in 2009. It was Gingrich attacking then-President Bill Clinton’s economic plan in 1993.
This week, as President Barack Obama promises to spend more of the stimulus money to improve the economy, Republicans — including some of the same spokesmen — are on the attack again. “Bureaucrats managing companies does not work,” Gingrich said recently. “Politicians dominating the economy does not work.”
To be fair, Republicans should fight for free markets and free trade. History shows that the invisible hand of the marketplace works more effectively than the heavy hand of government. And much of Obama’s economic agenda appears to be all motion and little action.
But when Republicans paint a dark picture of economic doom, they also paint themselves into a political corner.
The lessons of the 1990s should give Republicans pause. After Clinton increased both spending and taxes in 1993, the economy began a steady ascent. Sure, when Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, they reduced taxes and balanced the budget, undoubtedly helping this growth and prosperity. But in 1996, voters instead remembered the overheated GOP rhetoric of the early ’90s, considered the country’s economic strength and voted Clinton into a second term.
Republicans should reflect on this past. As they oppose the Obama agenda, they need to do it the right way, and they need to do it in a way that doesn’t contradict their core economic message.
The American economy is stronger than the policies of any one administration. The creativity of America’s entrepreneurs can overcome any of the federal government’s policies. In fact, throughout American history, economic downturns have often led entrepreneurs to create new products and services that have led to new economic growth. Any Republican message needs to begin by acknowledging that the economy will bounce back. It always has; it always will.
Perhaps no one possessed a better grasp of America’s economic power than Ronald Reagan. Yet when Reagan addressed excessive government, he often spoke in measured, philosophical terms. “They also knew, those Founding Fathers, that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy,” Reagan said in his famous 1964 speech supporting Barry Goldwater. In other words, big government won’t destroy the economy — it just won’t help it very much. That’s a much firmer terrain from which to fight the Obama administration.
In his 1981 inaugural address, Reagan posed a simple question: “But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?” These were not the words of an ideologue but, rather, the wisdom of a populist who put his faith in the people — not the government — to restore the economy.
For today’s Republicans, rather than oversimplified characterizations of economic decline, why not bet on the American entrepreneur? Instead of saying Obama will kill jobs or ruin the economy, why not argue the larger principle that businesses can resurrect the economy better and faster than the government can?
We know the economy will recover. We also know that, when it does, it will be in spite of Obama’s spending, not because of it.
But Republicans are setting the stage for an Obama encore by insisting that his policies will fail. When the economy inevitably returns to growth, Obama will be well-positioned for reelection. And if he is, perhaps he’ll quote the governor of Alaska and say, “I told you so.”
Kasey S. Pipes authored “Ike’s Final Battle: The Road to Little Rock and the Challenge of Equality” and wrote speeches for then-President George W. Bush and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/23586.html#ixzz0IVmQ54V2&C
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look at the life of America’s first corporate titan
On Jan. 27, 1870, the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad convened its first stockholders’ meeting. The merger of the previously separate rail companies marked a watershed moment in American history: the beginning of the giant corporation in American economic life. And it was made possible by one man: Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Long before Gates, Walton or Perot, there was Vanderbilt. The first great corporate titan in American history, the Commodore’s reputation has largely evolved into a caricature. It started with Mark Twain, a contemporary whose satire suggested the Commodore had no soul. But it was sealed by Matthew Josephson, whose 1934 book, The Robber Barons, cast Vanderbilt as a leading villain in a cast of rogues who stormed the economic stage in the late 1800s.
In recent years, Ron Chernow has reassessed J.D. Rockefeller and Jean Strouse has re-examined J.P. Morgan. Now, T.J. Stiles recasts Vanderbilt not as a villain, but as a visionary whose surreal life was matched only by his stunning legacy.
In The First Tycoon Stiles does more than trace the journey of a man; he tracks the evolution of a country. The Commodore’s career began in steamboats when America still operated as a largely agrarian society. Later, as the railroad titan, he literally helped transport America into the industrial age. Above all, the king of the railroads was an agent of change.
First, he changed the way America conducts business by creating the giant corporation. As Stiles writes:
“By consolidating two companies of great size and financial health, it created a single behemoth on an unprecedented scale. This new entity, the giant corporation, would spread into manufacturing, as seen first in Standard Oil and later in other industries, beginning with a great wave of mergers from 1895 to 1904; eventually it would dominate every other sector of the economy as well.”
From that point forward, the American economy would feature economies of scale that helped reduce prices and increase productivity. It also helped create a managerial middle class as more Americans began to work for the new giant corporations.
Vanderbilt also changed American finance. When he first ascended to the presidency of the New York Central, he decided to do more than build railroads, according to Stiles. Instead, “he would be a creator of the invisible world, a conjurer in the financial ether.” In March 1867, his plan to essentially create stock splits (increasing the amount of stock by issuing new shares) was approved to much outrage in the financial world. In the 20th century, it became a common Wall Street practice.
And Vanderbilt changed American law. Earlier in his career, his steamboat operation was so successful that the owners of a rival company sued. In the Supreme Court case, Gibbons vs. Ogden, the court upheld the federal government’s right to regulate commerce and overturned a state law that gave Vanderbilt’s competitors a virtual monopoly.
Stiles writes vividly of the Commodore’s life and times, showing his personal failings but focusing on his professional successes. His book is blessed with timing, as the recent market collapse might create interest in a man who laid the foundation for so much of corporate America. And this thorough and thoughtful book serves as an important corrective that unmasks the Vanderbilt caricature and reveals a more nuanced, complex and interesting portrait.
Kasey S. Pipes, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, is the author of Ike’s Final Battle: The Road to Little Rock and the Challenge of Equality.
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by Richard Beeman: a dramatic account of the debates that forged the U.S. Constitution
Historians have long argued over the intentions of the men who gathered in the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia. As the world’s oldest living constitution, the document has triggered several waves of revision.
In the early 20th century, Charles Beard wrote that the Constitution was created as a business arrangement by men of commerce and privilege. In the Cold War, Carl Van Doren argued that the Philadelphia agreement provided an example for how nations could unite just as the colonies had united years before.
But in the 1960s, Catherine Drinker Bowen produced perhaps the greatest book on the Constitutional Convention, The Miracle at Philadelphia. To her, the document produced by the 55 men from 12 states (Rhode Island did not participate) after five months represented a miracle. And though she labeled its authors as great men, not gods, to many Americans the event seems almost biblical, with the founding fathers descending like Moses from Mount Sinai with the great document for their people.
Richard Beeman tells a very different story in Plain, Honest Men. His account shows very human leaders struggling with the difficult political challenges and offers more drama and less divinity.
The challenge facing the men at Philadelphia was at once simple and profound: how to improve upon the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation without overly empowering the government.
On more than one occasion after the revolution, the Colonies had almost destroyed their new nation. George Washington had to face down a mutiny from his own soldiers when Congress would not pay them. Massachusetts received little help when farmers’ anger over debt and taxes erupted into Shay’s Rebellion. The new nation could not tax its citizens nor defend itself. Clearly, the Articles of Confederation were not working.
As Beeman writes, “something drastic needed to be done to save their experiment in liberty and union.”
And so what began in Philadelphia as an effort to improve the Articles of Confederation evolved into a conference to draft a new Constitution. Beeman painstakingly re-creates the debates in the Assembly Room of the Pennsylvania State House. The debates produced monumental achievements such as the creation of a three-branch government, including a bicameral legislature. There were failures, as well, the continuation of slavery among them.
Skillfully, Beeman uses character development to drive his narrative. Specifically, he focuses on James Madison, Ben Franklin and George Washington as the three men who helped “make the revolution of 1787 possible.” Madison offered ideas, plans and creativity; Franklin facilitated key compromises; and Washington’s presence and prestige gave the proceedings immediate legitimacy.
The result was a Constitution that still works and inspires today. Far from a miracle, Beeman argues that founding father Robert Morris correctly judged it as something else:
“While some have boasted it as a work from Heaven, others have given it a less righteous origin. I have many reasons to believe that it is the work of plain, honest men.”
Kasey S. Pipes, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, is the author of Ike’s Final Battle: The Road to Little Rock and the Challenge of Equality.
books@dallasnews.com
Plain, Honest Men
The Making of the
American Constitution
Richard Beeman
(Random House, $30)
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Two months into Barack Obama’s presidency, the country has seen a man with immense political talent. Calm and calculating, the new president possesses a natural ability to lead and a remarkable degree of emotional intelligence. He’s in control of himself; but is he in control of his party?
Like a swan on water, Obama glides gracefully along the surface while below his kicking never stops. So far, the kicking has hit only Republicans. Not long after assuming office, the president waved and smiled as he entered a Capitol Hill meeting with congressional Republicans. Once the doors were closed, he taunted them that “I won” and then mocked them for listening to Rush Limbaugh. This was power politics; but it was also easy posturing. Who isn’t beating up on congressional Republicans these days?
More impressive would be a show of force against his own base. History teaches that leaders have to fight battles with their own people. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan ignited a conservative explosion when he nominated Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court. Yet his unwavering support for her helped convince many Americans who hadn’t voted for him that Reagan was his own man. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton elevated this craft to an art form. Faced with a Democratic Party in Congress that leaned left, Clinton regularly looked for ways to show his independence. His work with Republicans produced welfare reform, NAFTA, a balanced budget and even a capital gains tax cut.
Obama could learn from these two presidents. But the learning curve appears steep. Little in his background suggests a willingness to confront his own party. His voting record in the Senate consisted of mainly party line votes. And his presidential campaign mostly hid fairly stale Democratic ideas behind fresh new packaging.
Since taking office, scant evidence has emerged that Obama wants to defy congressional Democrats. This strategy has hurt him. Take the stimulus, for example. When Speaker Nancy Pelosi inserted pet projects like funding for condoms (and then embarrassed herself trying to defend the idea), Obama’s brand suffered. This episode should have warned the president: Congressional Democrats possess their own agenda. At some point, he needs to acknowledge that and confront them.
Fortunately, one example does exist of Obama finally, grudgingly confronting an ally: his speech on Jeremiah Wright. No, not the vaunted Philadelphia speech. But the speech a month later in North Carolina. In Philadelphia, Obama skillfully wove an elaborate rhetorical argument to clothe and conceal an embarrassing relationship. But then the Wright shenanigans continued. A month later in North Carolina, Obama was forced to finally denounce his mentor. “I have spent my entire adult life trying to bridge the gap between different kinds of people,” Obama said, contrasting himself with Wright, “That’s in my DNA.” This perfect metaphor gave him the moral authority to separate himself from Wright’s divisive words and ways. Delivering this rebuke of his longtime pastor must have pained Obama. But it was necessary; and he did it effectively.
Where can the president confront his party today? The Congressional Democrats’ desire to pass card check legislation presents a potential opportunity. Card check would effectively eliminate the secret ballot when employees vote on whether to unionize. In opposing this, the president could say: “I support labor. But right now, my job is to help create jobs. Let’s get the economy moving again. We can discuss labor reforms later.” This would show the president is committed to improving the economy and willing to confront his own base to do it.
In politics, it’s not just what the president says about the issues, it’s what the issues say about the president. After all, anyone can confront an enemy, but it takes a leader to confront a friend.
Kasey S. Pipes (www.kaseyspipes.com) wrote speeches for President George W. Bush and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and authored “Ike’s Final Battle: The Road to Little Rock and the Challenge of Equality.”
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