Sopranos Seniors Are Back---On the News

While HBO offers reruns of Tony and his crew, their real-life counterparts are on cable news, geriatric Mafioso flashing pinky rings for a generation that links them with cave men.

Police have stopped digging up a field in Oakland, Michigan for crooked labor boss Jimmy Hoffa, who disappeared in 1975 after incurring mob displeasure. The tip came from cash-strapped Tony Zerilli, a long-time made man recently released from prison and peddling a manuscript.

According to senior citizen Z, Hoffa ”wasn't shot, he wasn't stabbed, nothing like that. A cement slab of some sort was placed on top of the dirt to make certain he was not going to be discovered. And that was it. End of story."

The FBI, which recently fumbled a tip on the Boston Marathon bombers, found that tale “highly credible” and encouraged the digging.

Meanwhile, back in Boston today, 72-year-old Johnny “The Executioner” Martorano after copping a plea is spilling beans about his former boss in the Winter Hill gang, 83-year-old Whitey Bulger on trial for ordering oh-so-many murders.

Maureen Dowd is watching Martorano with fascination:

“If anybody insulted, implicated or roughed up his brother or a friend’s brother, if anybody looked at him funny while he was with a date, if anybody ratted on his fellow gang members, if anybody could eyewitness a crime committed by an ‘associate,’ he grabbed a .38 or a knife, a fake beard, a walkie-talkie or a towel to keep the blood off his car, and sprang into action. And somebody usually ended up in a trunk somewhere, sometimes still groaning.

“’Family and friends come first,’ said the bulldog-faced enforcer, looking natty with slicked back, suspiciously black hair, a dark suit, pink-tinted wire-rim glasses and a kerchief the color of fresh blood.  'The priests and the nuns I grew up with taught me that. They always talked about Judas. A Judas is the worst person in the world.’”

When his former boss’ lawyer suggested that he might be one for turning on Bulger, Martorano patiently explained his inner feelings: “I didn’t like doing any of it...I never had any joy, never had any joy at all.”

And that, as an older and wiser Tony Soprano might tell his understanding shrink, makes all the difference.

Update: Only hours after posting this reminiscence about “The Sopranos” comes news that James Gandolfini, the brilliant actor who embodied Tony, has died at 51 of an apparent heart attack on his way to a film festival in Italy.

Grief at his passing is compounded by awareness that the lowlifes who inspired his performance have outlived him by decades. Eventually they will be deservedly forgotten, but Gandolfini will live on in one of TV’s most creative achievements.

Privacy in an Age of Preening

When I was editing a mass magazine ages ago, an odd little man on the part-time payroll would stop by or call up to grill me about famous people I had met or bon mots I may have dropped. Known as a column planter, he made a good living converting such stuff into items for Walter Winchell, Leonard Lyons, Ed Sullivan and the dozens of syndicated newspaper columnists who flourished back then.

Now, with Twitter and Facebook, we are all item planters, offering up pieces of our privacy in exchange for what? A sense of community? Bonding with others? Reassuring ourselves that our lives have value and that we are not alone?

The outrage over government surveillance and invasion of our privacy is rather piquant in view of all this voluntary self-revelation.

Parsing such history in the New Yorker Jill Lepore notes “the paradox of an American culture obsessed, at once, with being seen and with being hidden, a world in which the only thing more cherished than privacy is publicity. In this world, we chronicle our lives on Facebook while demanding the latest and best form of privacy protection—-ciphers of numbers and letters-—so that no one can violate the selves we have so entirely contrived to expose.”

Yes, yes, self-exposure is not the same as others snooping, but can’t we find some balance between moral indignation (pace Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald) and Barack Obama’s reassurance that he is not Dick Cheney, bending over backwards to protect our privacy while keeping us safe from terrorist attacks?

Can’t we find some appreciation of the irony that, no matter how much we want to be let alone, we can't be and don’t want to be entirely isolated from our fellow human beings?

Time to Rethink Middle East Wars

What are we doing in Syria and why? And why are we still chained to a discredited foreign policy concocted by Dick Cheney and his armchair warriors before George W. Bush took office almost two decades ago?

After 9/11/01 their fringe call in 1997 for a new century of “American global leadership” with “military strength and moral clarity” drove US foreign policy into, among other misadventures, an Iraq war that cost the nation more than 4000 lives and $3 trillion dollars.

While Congress bickers over responsibility for deaths in Benghazi, the same old voices drive the nation toward intervention into the kind of morass in Syria that led to quagmires in Libya, Egypt and throughout the Middle East.

When and where have we found moral clarity through military strength anywhere? Isn’t it past time for new voices and new ideas about what the hell we are doing in that region of the world?

While white-haired Bill Clinton says the President risks looking like a “fool” and a “total wuss” if he doesn’t move into Syria, he is joined by Cheney, McCain and all the ancient GOP war lovers cheerleading for another bloody enterprise.

Unheard in the din are young senators like Connecticut’s Chris Murphy and New Mexico’s Tom Udall who went to Syria and came back deeply skeptical about what we can do there. Their face time on cable news is minimal.

Unheard too are the American people who have long been showing signs of Middle East fatigue but voting on the basis of Tea Party bombast about the economy rather than foreign policy.

Isn’t it long past time that figures more rational than Rand Paul start campaigning on the issue of why we keep spilling blood and money in endless Arab sands?

Isn’t it past time for the generations who have to fight old men’s wars to have their say?  

Missing Fathers

How many Americans grow up with their fathers physically and/or emotionally absent? Barack Obama is one of them and today he says, “I still wish I had a dad who was not only around but involved.”

Five years ago, as candidate Obama, he was blunter. In a Chicago church he told African-American worshippers, “Too many fathers are MIA, too many fathers are AWOL, missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.”

Citing his own father, who left when he was two, Obama stressed how lucky he was to have had loving grandparents who helped his mother give him support and stress education.

"A lot of children don't get those chances,” he said. “There is no margin for error in their lives. I resolved many years ago that it was my obligation to break the cycle--that if I could be anything in life, I would be a good father."

Looking back over a long lifetime, I would add another definition of manhood: When your kids are in trouble, you go and get them. In the 1970s, the gentlest man I knew went halfway around the world when his teenage age son was in a drug crisis and fought not only criminals but local authorities to bring him home.

In today’s world, how many men and women of any age, ethnicity or social position are sure their fathers would do the same when they are in physical or emotional danger?

“Deadbeat dads” is now a cliché, but even without divorce or separation, children are being cheated of a bedrock certainty that can help them grow into generous open-hearted human beings.

One of the novelist I admire most, Richard Russo, has made such men a staple of his work (think Paul Newman in the 2005 movie of “Empire Falls”). Now in a memoir titled “Elsewhere,” Russo writes about his lifelong emotional struggle with an abandoned mother and a long-gone dad who shows up occasionally to tell him, “You do know your mother’s nuts, right?”

On the day of greeting cards and small gifts, American fathers like Russo and Obama should be honored most of all for not turning out like their own, for showing up in the lives of their children and, no matter what else happens, being there for them.

Face to Face with JFK at His Peak

Fifty years ago this week, John F. Kennedy gave the “best speech of his life,” which led to a nuclear test ban treaty. The next night, as Alabama police were attacking protesters with water cannons and dogs, he was on TV from the Oval Office affirming the rights of African-Americans.

Two days later I was in the Cabinet Room of the White House across a table from him leading editors of seven women’s magazines with 34 million readers to ask questions about preserving peace, the only exclusive interview he had given in his presidency, JFK said, other than one with Khrushchev’s son-in-law, editor of Isvestia.

It had taken much effort to get there. Kennedy was changing the rules in pop culture, but politics were something else. His popularity soared, but the Bay of Pigs was a fiasco, Congress thwarted him on civil rights, the Soviets put atomic warheads into Cuba. Even after the 1962 Missile Crisis, both sides were poisoning the air with nuclear testing. Kennedy was negotiating a test-ban treaty, but the Senate seemed unlikely to approve it.

As editor of Redbook, a magazine for young women, I knew readers were concerned that nuclear tests were contaminating their children’s milk and might lead to apocalyptic war. I had been running articles on the subject. Other women’s magazines were publishing little or nothing.

I asked Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s press secretary, if the President would give a joint interview to editors of women’s magazines about nuclear war and peace. Salinger did not hesitate. “Yes,” he said. “We’re starved for ways to get people to listen.”

As popular as Kennedy was, lining him up was the easy part. My colleagues, always leery of depressing topics, had to be inveigled. The bait was Dr. Benjamin Spock, who was opposing nuclear tests, and a Republican, James Wadsworth, Eisenhower’s Ambassador to the United Nations, who had written for me on the subject. I invited the editors of six magazines to listen to them over cocktails.

Afterward, I proposed we ask Kennedy for an interview and publish our own versions of it simultaneously.

To my amazement, they agreed, but I could not foresee that that would put me in the position of, in effect, strong-arming the President.

At our first meeting, the editors--of McCalls, Good Housekeeping, Woman’s Day, Family Circle, Cosmopolitan and Parents--worried that material on survival of the human race might be too “dull” for their readers. We agreed to submit questions in advance, so we could use our time with the President to talk in human terms.

When the answers came back, I had a revolt on my hands. Kennedy’s staff had drafted 15 pages of position-paper jargon. What, my colleagues demanded, was I going to do about it?

As they sat glowering, I called the White House. Salinger was away, leaving his assistant, Andrew Hatcher, to cope with me. “We’re worried,” I told him, “by the tone of the written material. Does the President realize we want to ask questions on a more personal level? Otherwise it doesn’t make sense for us to come down.”

Hatcher, understandably taken aback, could only answer, “But any interview with the President is worthwhile.”

“Of course. But we wouldn’t want to waste his time. Can you make sure there’s no misunderstanding?“ 

Several days later, Salinger called. “We hear you. Come on down.” (When we were making the arrangements, one editor had asked if he could attend and then decide if the material was usable. “Tell him,” said Salinger, who had been a free—lance writer, “the President doesn’t work on speculation.”) 

On June 14, 1963, we were in the Cabinet Room. Kennedy came in and shook hands. We settled into leather chairs around the table. Sitting opposite, I thanked him for seeing us and added, “Between the material you gave us and your speeches, we understand your basic positions. We’d like to ask questions that reflect the concerns of our readers so you can talk to them personally.”

Kennedy smiled, patting the papers in front of him. “I looked over this material. It is somewhat canned. I’ll try to make my answers as personal as possible.”

For the next hour, he did just that, talking about radiation dangers, fallout shelters, the effects on children of air raid drills, easing the arms race, and the value of individuals joining the political debate.

“There is great pressure against peaceful efforts,” he said. “There are an awful lot of powerful groups and interests and people, all very strong patriots, who believe in policies that I think could end up in disaster.” Women working for peace, he added, “are very valuable because they help balance off that pressure. Otherwise we would be very isolated in our efforts toward arms control.”

Most of his answers were, as usual, analytical and rational. But some emotion showed through. “Too many people want to blow up the world,” he said at one point.

"In Cuba, a lot of people thought we should take more drastic action. I think we did the right thing, more drastic action would have increased the possibility of nuclear exchange. The real question now is to meet conflicts year after year without having to escalate."

At one point the talk turned to the brutal and violent instincts of human beings that, in his words, “have been implanted in us growing out of the dust.”

In controlling those destructive impulses, John Fitzgerald Kennedy said sadly, “we have done reasonably well--but only reasonably well.“

 
The meeting ended soon afterward. The President asked how we would like the transcript. “Raw,” I said and he smiled. We posed for pictures, Kennedy showed us around the Rose Garden, and we left.

The following week we received a 31-page transcript. Then in July, Kennedy and Khrushchev signed a treaty banning nuclear tests. Salinger suggested I come down alone for another interview, and in August, I did.

In the Oval Office, I was startled by Kennedy’s appearance. In June he was tanned, smooth-skinned, seemingly glowing with health. Now he still had the tan, but his face was pinched, his eyes sunken with deep lines radiating on the skin around them. The rumors of massive amounts of cortisone for Addison’s disease and dependency on amphetamines and painkillers swarmed through my mind.

In half an hour, we went through the new treaty and the campaign to have the Senate ratify it. Kennedy had given a TV speech, asking for support, because “there is no lobby for our children or our grandchildren” to avoid a nuclear exchange that could mean 300 million deaths. Was he satisfied with the response?

“There are 190 million Americans,” he said wryly, “and we got several thousand letters. Actually I think we got more mail about the new White House puppies.”

From the two sessions, each of the magazines published its own account in November. Letters of support poured into the White House. Salinger called to say the President was very pleased. Several weeks later Kennedy went to Dallas.

What would our world be like if he hadn’t?

       

A Public Smarter Than Its Politicians

In the velocity of 24/7 news, the Eric Snowden story has been aborted in the media’s womb, a viable fetus of scandal for only days. The underlying issue of privacy vs. security lives on, but politicians Left, Right and Center are backing away from bashing one another over it.

The electorate, in primal wisdom, has told them to cool it, as a new poll shows 57 percent believe “leaks about the surveillance programs would not affect the ability of the United States to prevent future terrorist attacks” after 56 percent had called phone tracking an acceptable tactic.

In the light of such attitudes, the likes of John Boehner have turned on a dime. After first challenging the President to “explain” the NSA revelations, the Speaker is now leading the pack calling Snowden “a traitor.”

As most Democrats like Al Franken line up to back the programs, their GOP counterparts are rushing to outdo them in patriotic fervor, with good old reliable Lindsey Graham proclaiming he wouldn’t mind having the government snoop on his snail mail.

As he often does, Thomas Friedman reflects the mixed feelings that most rational Americans can’t avoid:

“Yes, I worry about potential government abuse of privacy from a program designed to prevent another 9/11--abuse that, so far, does not appear to have happened. But I worry even more about another 9/11...

“I worry about that even more, not because I don’t care about civil liberties, but because what I cherish most about America is our open society, and I believe that if there is one more 9/11--or worse, an attack involving nuclear material--it could lead to the end of the open society as we know it...I fear that 99 percent of Americans would tell their members of Congress: ‘Do whatever you need to do to, privacy be damned, just make sure this does not happen again.’ That is what I fear most.”

Behind all the posturing that will go on for a few more days, that has to be at the core of our concern, even if most politicians, unlike the public, won’t face it.

Security vs. Privacy Debate Begins

After all that indignation over “government spying,” there are signs that a true public airing of the tradeoffs is coming.

For a start, Pew finds “56 percent of Americans regard “NSA Phone Tracking as Acceptable Anti-terror Tactic...Even If It Intrudes on Privacy,” a snap judgment that will no doubt be modified as details emerge but a promising openness to hearing argument on both sides.

That debate is not well-served by Rand Paul’s predictable outburst about Big Brother and his vow of a “class-action lawsuit to overturn the decisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court...I will take the fight all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary.”

Maybe Sen. Paul didn’t get the memos, but the Administration reveals 22 briefings over 14 months for Congress on the law to justify the National Security Agency's email monitoring program under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act, giving the attorney general and director of national intelligence authority to gather intelligence on non-U.S. citizens for up to a year.

Rand’s colleague,  Dianne Feinstein,  who chairs the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, has paid closer attention and now wants to prosecute whistle blower Eric Snowden for treason as she schedules open meetings about the NSA in the coming months.

The President, while deploring the Snowden leak, has responded by calling the ensuing debate “healthy for our democracy.” But it won’t be easy to counter demagoguing the subject with material that has to remain classified.

Grown men in Washington should be up to doing the work on the balancing act that public safety vs. individual privacy requires.

I am encouraged by a term paper written by my 17-year-old grandson, exquisitely analyzing the benefits of drone observation against their intrusions into individual privacy, with sound suggestions for reconciling those contradictory goals.

In a couple of decades, his generation will take over the job of governing, but can we afford to wait?

One-Eyed Whistle Blower

When no one trusts anyone, paranoia sells and produces “heroes” like 29-year-old Edward Snowden, who is being hailed by the self-selected morally superior for revealing, in the words of his sponsor Glenn Greenwald, that the “US government is building this massive spying apparatus aimed at its own population.”

That this is not even remotely true seems to matter not at all, as the White House and Congress struggle to explain how surveillance works with safeguards of a FISA court to limit intrusion on Americans who have not been in contact with suspicious foreign sources. (If they had been aggressively bugging the Tsamaev brothers, might we have been spared the Boston bombings?)

Now in Hong Kong, Snowden has taken his conscience out of criminal reach, counting on odds that the US will not try to extradite him to avoid prolonging debate on the issue, but that does not make him a First Amendment hero. In times of moral darkness, a one-eyed whistle blower is no king.

JeffreyToobin observes in the New Yorker: “The American government, and its democracy, are flawed institutions. But our system offers legal options to disgruntled government employees and contractors. They can take advantage of federal whistle-blower laws; they can bring their complaints to Congress; they can try to protest within the institutions where they work. But Snowden did none of this. Instead, in an act that speaks more to his ego than his conscience, he threw the secrets he knew up in the air—and trusted, somehow, that good would come of it. We all now have to hope that he’s right.”

Now we learn about ego-driven squabbles at the Guardian over publishing Snowden’s scoop that tend to confirm the motivation of all involved.

Right on cue, Daniel Ellsberg who made public the Pentagon Papers in 1971 shows up to proclaim that the US has fallen into an "abyss" of total tyranny but that Snowden's revelations offer "the unexpected possibility of a way up and out of the abyss."

Those of us who recall those days can testify to the legal process back then that the New York Times and other publications had to go through to publish details not about the government’s current activities but a long retrospective about the Vietnam War that a self-questioning government itself had conducted.

Ellsberg himself was eventually justified for his whistle-blowing, but nostalgia should not conflate his with Snowden’s.

After a lifetime in journalism, I cherish the First Amendment but it does not come with the right to what Oliver Wendell Holmes long ago called yelling fire in a crowded theater.

 
Especially when the theater is full of those trying to prevent a fire.

Swallowing McCain and Graham for Breakfast

Most Americans go to church or pancake houses or sleep in, but a few political junkies gobble Sunday morning talk shows, a diet that provides little intellectual or spiritual nourishment.

The main items on the menu, the New York Times reports, are GOP blowhards like Lindsey Graham, John McCain and Mitch McConnell—-162 appearances since 2010, outnumbering by far all Senate Democrats in the talking-points derby.

Since so few are listening, so what? So this: Just as national newspapers like the Times and Washington Post would set the political news agenda in the last century, the Sunday talk shows have a wide ripple effect by providing “news” leads for other journalists.

In addition, “guests with strong points of view can give viewers a false sense of proportion to certain sides of policy debates,” notes the Times, pointing out that McCain’s “advocacy for military intervention in Syria and criticism of the administration’s policies there might create a sense that there is a robust policy debate over the matter in Washington when there really is not.”

Distortion goes far beyond false equivalency on issues, echoing the kind of meanness generated by the endless 2011 Republican primary debates that still infects the political atmosphere.

The only argument for such weekly political preening can be made for the rare occasions when robotic guests slip off script, as Darrell Issa did last week in labeling the White House Press Secretary a “paid liar,” prompting GOP pressure on Issa to cool it.

Much more significant was Joe Biden’s remark on “Meet the Press” last May that he was “comfortable with” gay marriage that eventually led to the President’s shift on the issue. Did Biden slip or was he sending his boss a message?

Until memoirs are written, we won’t know, but the Sunday talk shows won’t go away, and we can only hope producers widen their choices of guests. Sen. Al Franken, for example, was a professional talker before his election but has never been booked. The republic won’t be endangered if he’s invited on to express his “liberal” opinions.

Jon Stewart Goes to Summer Camp

When my first son went away, I received two undated postcards. One said he was having a great time, the other begged to come back home. The pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock decoded them for me: “The happy one was written first. It takes a while to get homesick.”

Such memories are stirred up by Jon Stewart’s summer departure from the Daily Show to, of all places, the Middle East to direct a movie-—parental angst over an absence coupled with hope for an enriching experience.

With John Oliver replacing him, the house won’t be empty late evenings, but the tone will change from Yiddish to British as our inner child reacts to the insanity of the day’s news.

At 50, Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz may be having his midlife crisis, but it serves to underscore the role he plays in American life, something more than what the New York Times has described as “advocacy journalism,” coupling him with Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite.

That may have been damning him with faint praise. What Stewart more closely resembles is a 21st century version of figures going back to Will Rogers and, before he started writing novels, Mark Twain--the comedic commentator who keeps Americans sane by deflating political powers-that-be.

Calling Stewart a pop social critic could be closer to the mark but might lump him with gasbags he so deftly deflates--the cable TV commentators who purportedly analyze the news but pour the ketchup of ideology over it and obscure rather than reveal its essence.

Whatever he is or may eventually become, Stewart is now part of thinking people’s brain structures whose absence will leave a hole in their lives until he returns.

To ease the pain, they can revisit one of his earlier ventures into movies, as an actor in the sweetly dopey “Playing by Heart” of 1988, romancing Gillian Anderson and a shaggy dog bigger than both of them, with a cast that includes Angelina Jolie, Sean Connery, Gena Rowlands, Ellen Burstyn and other accomplished thespians.

It’s available for instant streaming from Netflix. It won’t fill the void left by Jon Stewart but, like a postcard from summer camp, may help tide over his absence from the house weekday nights.

Liberty or Death or Something in Between

When it comes to privacy vs. security, are the only choices Glenn Greenwald and Lindsey Graham, two egomaniacal lawyers with no sense of balance?

Thanks to his latest hue and cry, TV talking heads are belaboring Greenwald’s “discovery” that “The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.”

To disentangle that scare scenario from reality is requiring bend-over-backward responses not only from the White House but such responsible figures as Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss, bipartisan leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to point out, without breaching security, that such activities go back over a decade to the Patriot Act and are severely limited in scope.

Since 9/11/01 we are living in a world where freedom and terror have been colliding constantly, with no clear answers on every question. Demagoguery on either side does not help.

Even such civil liberties stalwarts as Bill Moyers are taken aback at Greenwald’s absolutism. In a recent interview, when he railed at “reverence for military and political institutions” during the days following the Boston bombings, Moyers asked, “Couldn't it have been just relief? Relief that they had found the other guy? That they didn't have to go to bed that night wondering if another bomb would go off?”

Even further left, AlanDershowitz denounces “lies from Greenwald” about not targeting terrorism and accuses him of fomenting paranoia.

The National Security Council is staying up late responding to Greenwald’s latest hype. Surely those man-hours could be spent more productively on keeping the nation safe.

If we have to walk a tightrope between safety and civil liberties, couldn’t we have someone other than Greenwald and Lindsey Graham holding on to the ends?