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?

Oops!

Seven months after Election Day, the Gallup folks have figured out how they missed Obama’s big win—-sort of. They have charts to explain about cell phones, land lines, time zones, what callers told them about their race and other high-tech stuff we civilians wouldn’t understand.

All this goes back to 1936 when a magazine Literary Digest, which had accurately forecast previous elections, predicted FDR would lose a reelection bid to Alf Landon, who ended up winning only Maine and Vermont in the most lopsided landslide ever. It turned out they had called up their own readers in days when poor people couldn’t afford magazine subscriptions and had no phones.

Gallup called it right with a smaller sampling and became a brand name.

The larger question here is about the picture of the world we are all getting, not only from pollsters but cable pundits, bloggers, tweeters and all the noisemaking apparatus that obscures a dwindling number of real journalists reporting hard facts in a real world.

Now polls picture the President as beleaguered by Benghazi, IRS scandals and other Issa noise, but is that what’s really going on?

Today’s sound bites show Michelle Obama being heckled by a Lesbian activist, which will generate tons of talk, but is anybody telling us what’s going on with the economy, the sequester and the President’s upcoming summit with the President of China?

In this hall of mirrors, where is reality? 

Irreverent Times for Sharpton

With the Trayvon Martin trial coming up, these should be heady days for Al Sharpton in his dual roles as anchor and agitator, but a confluence of events is raining on the Reverend’s parade.

His cable home MSNBC has fallen off a ratings cliff, and the New York Times has chosen to revisit, complete with video, the 1987 Tawana Brawley case which brought Sharpton notoriety he converted into fame, respectability and a 2004 Presidential run.

The new Times report calls the Brawley case “a hoax” about a 15-year-old African-American girl who, afraid of punishment for staying out late, smeared herself with feces and claimed she had been raped by white men. For months Sharpton, a street agitator, kept embellishing her story, naming law enforcement officers as the rapists and leading mob protests.

Now a meticulous report concludes: “After seven months, 6,000 pages of testimony and 180 witnesses, a grand jury found Ms. Brawley’s story to be a lie. Neither the police officer nor the district attorney accused by Ms. Brawley and Mr. Sharpton had been involved in any way.”

Sharpton was ordered to pay $80,000 for defamation, provided by what he described as “love offerings” from his admirers. For years afterward, the Reverend subsisted on odd donations, including

*$25,000 from folks seeking Harlem fast-fried franchises as the Reverend stood up for the “underchicken” and denounced Kentucky Fried Chicken’s fowl cruelty.

*A $100,000 misunderstanding that resulted in having to return Federal funding for his 2004 presidential campaign.

*$240,000 a year to do commercials for Loan Max, which he renounced after an uproar over the firm’s 360 percent-a-year interest charges that often resulted in taking away cars from the poor.

*The $1.9 million the National Action Network reported in 2002 mostly from unidentified contributors.

But all that was pin money until Sharpton used his radio show to drive Don Imus off NBC in 2007 and two years ago signed with the network’s cable outlet to host the 6 o’clock news.

When the Tawana Brawley scandal was playing out, I lived nearby in upstate New York when the Reverend was roiling the rural area only a few miles from FDR’s residence at Hyde Park and Eleanor Roosevelt’s cottage in Val-Kill.

History makes strange bedfellows.

Where is Issa's Edward R. Murrow?

If he persists in channeling Joe McCarthy, Darrell Issa deserves a new Edward R. Murrow to bring him down. When 60 Minutes gets tired of polishing up summer reruns, his CBS successors should give us a full portrait.

There is ample material. Issa keeps pushing himself into the national face with outrageous accusations, as McCarthy did, now branding Obama spokesman Jay Carney “a paid liar” over the IRS scandals, as Candy Crowley presses for a “direct link” to the President over actions of an agency branch office.

Democratic frustration comes, not with a bang, but a tweet by former White House senior adviser David Plouffe: “Strong words from Mr Grand Theft Auto and suspected arsonist/insurance swindler. And loose ethically today.”

Plouffe is just grazing a tip of the Issa iceberg: how an impecunious high-school dropout morphed into Congress’ richest man ($450 million) and, as chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, spends full-time not legislating or even investigating for legislation but endlessly prosecuting the Obama Administration for “crimes,” prompting the White House to keep defending itself as Issa himself in his earlier days was forced to do.

Issa, who now burrows into everyone’s life for political paydirt, is sensitive about his own transformation into a car-alarm magnate with a history of car theft, suspicious factory fires, alleged hostile takeovers at gunpoint and shady deals. When Ryan Lizza was reporting on him for the New Yorker two years ago, Issa balked at questions about all that. “Everyone has a past,” he grumped.

Just so. As Issa keeps pursuing his role as Lord High Executioner of everything Obama, his own history and ethics should not be sacrosanct. Or will we have to wait for someone like the starchy old New England attorney Joseph R. Welch, who started Joe McCarthy’s downfall by asking publicly, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

With Issa, the more relevant question is did he ever have any.

A Priest Who Always Flew First-Class

Andrew M. Greeley has died at the age of 85, described by the New York Times as “Priest,  Author,  Scholar, Scold,” writer of 120 books including steamy novels, one of which was a best-seller.

Father Greeley was a combative polymath, often at odds with his Church’s hierarchy. A quarter of a century ago he denounced pedophile priests and later gave a million dollars from his book earnings to an organization for their victims.

Twenty years ago, we shared an airplane ride. He had been a guest speaker at the Magazine Publishers Association in Bermuda and somehow contrived to have my coach ticket upgraded so I could sit next to him in First Class. We spent the two hours parsing a new movie, Ingmar Bergman’s autobiographical masterwork “Fanny and Alexander,”  the shaping of an artist’s sensibility by his widowed mother’s remarriage to a tyrannical Lutheran bishop.

On our plane trip, we traded reactions to Bergman’s brilliant imagery including his boyhood refuge in the home of his grandmother’s Jewish lover and a wistful speech by his uncle about “the little world” of theater that their family inhabited:

“Therefore let us be happy while we are happy. Let us be kind, generous, affectionate and good. It is necessary and not at all shameful to take pleasure in the little world.”

In today’s scandal-plagued Catholic Church, Father Greeley in his prime would have been a rallying figure for dissidents. Even diminished by illness, he wrote his last book about the US in Iraq titled “A Stupid, Unjust and Criminal War.” 

Back in 1983 as we landed at Kennedy, I offered to share my taxi into Manhattan with the celebrity priest. “No, no.” he said. “You must ride with me. My publisher always sends a limousine.”

Even a non-believer can be sure that wherever Andrew Greeley now is, he is still going in style.

   

The Meaning of Bachmann's Departure

Her announced leave-taking from Congress brings a snarky rush over the Tea Party frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination only two years ago, but Michele Bachmann’s weird six years in the national spotlight deserve serious consideration as a symptom of the times.

How did a mouthy back bencher parlay ignorance that made Sarah Palin look like Winston Churchill into such prominence? And does her downfall amid murky misuse of campaign funds portend a continuing descent of the GOP into a diehard faction of the major party it once was?

From early 2007 when as a newly elected Congresswoman she groped GeorgeW. Bush after his State of the Union and would not let go, Bachmann was clearly more of a mental case than a rising political star, but the endless GOP 2011 debates allowed her to appear presidential alongside the likes of Herman Cain and Rick Perry.

The political system that produced FDR, JFK, Ike and Reagan was disgorging a freak show of anti-Obama venom that overrode all such mundane qualifications as wisdom, political knowhow and sanity. Even after Republicans settled for an Empty Suit Wall Streeter and failed to take the White House, the Tea Party held its grip on Boehner’s redoubt last November, but the signs of slippage keep coming.

Former GOP Sen. Lincoln Chafee is changing party affiliation to Democrat in his bid for reelection as Rhode Island Governor. Tea Party icon Jim DeMint has left the House of Representatives in favor of reformed Latin lover Mark Sanford, and now Bachmann steps aside to allow Minnesotans to vote for a candidate from planet Earth next year.

If the trend continues in 2014 voting, Barack Obama’s last two years in office as a lame duck could turn out his most productive—-and rational-—of all.

A Sharp Turn in the War on Terror

As the President eulogizes those who fought past and present wars, he also reminds us that a few days ago “I outlined the future of our fight against terrorism--the threats we face, and the way in which we will meet them.”

Amid Memorial Day parades, speeches and war movies on TV, Barack Obama declares that Americans’ post-9/11 mindset has to change: “Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue. But this war, like all wars, must end.”

But how?  “Neither I, nor any President, can promise the total defeat of terror. We will never erase the evil that lies in the hearts of some human beings, nor stamp out every danger to our open society.”

True, but how do we define evil acts? At what point does lethal madness become terror? If the Newtown killer had left behind any political babble, would he now be ranked with the brothers who perpetrated the Boston bombings? Where do we draw the lines?

The Obama speech, says one national security scholar, “delegitimizes the terrorists. They want to think of themselves as warriors. We want the world...not to think of them as terrorists defending Islam, but as people who are psychos. They are criminals."

In the New Yorker Jane Meyer underscores “the contrast between Bush’s swagger and Obama’s anguish over the difficult trade-offs that perpetual war poses to a free society...While Bush frequently seemed to take action without considering the underlying questions, Obama appears somewhat unsure of exactly what actions to take. That is not a bad thing: at least he is asking the right questions. In fact, by suggesting that, after a decade and seven thousand American and countless foreign lives lost, and a trillion dollars spent, it might be time to start downsizing the ‘war on terror,’ he is leading the national debate beyond where even most Democrats have dared to go.”

After the President consoles Oklahoma tornado survivors on a weekend of American remembrance of those who lose their lives to human violence, he will return to a Washington of man-made turmoil. Not the least of his challenges will be to make good on the effort to refocus homeland security away from total preoccupation with the Middle East.

There will and should be serious debate on relations with new governments there as well as use of drone strikes and the closing of Guantanamo. But it would be helpful to start focusing the war against terror on organized groups plotting violence and leave the tracking down and prevention where possible of acts by the criminally insane to those trained to deal with them.

  

Clobbered Comforter-in-Chief

When the eight years are over, Barack Obama may go down in history mostly for his grace as America’s designated mourner. This weekend it’s Oklahoma in the endless tour of body-count catastrophes natural and man-made.

As the President pursues ministerial duties, everyone else in Washington is consumed with efforts to defrock him for not preventing deaths at Benghazi or reining in bureaucratic scandals. Opponents have not yet found ways to tax him with hurricanes and tornadoes, but they must be trying to twist sequester results into White House blame.

In the larger sense, all this is a long wake for an America that almost was, where we used to bow our heads in prayer together after disasters with some awareness of common humanity in the face of a tenuous world and work to control our primitive impulses to destroy one another over ideological differences.

Among the many ironies swirling around the figure who started out to unite us all under the banner of “Yes We Can” is that he may end up delivering a eulogy for “No We Wouldn’t.”

Disneyland Diplomatic Disaster

The President will be meeting China’s President Xi Jinping for a summit in southern California next month, raising hopes it will go better than a bizarre Cold War flap over barring a Soviet leader from visiting Disneyland.

In 1959, Nikita Khrushchev came here in Eisenhower’s lame-duck days and, at his request, visited Hollywood where he happily mingled with Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine and other stars on movie sets. But when he wanted to go to Disneyland, permission was denied for “security reasons.”

The volatile Khrushchev exploded, “I would very much like to go and see Disneyland. But then, we cannot guarantee your security, they say. Then what must I do? Commit suicide? What is it? Is there an epidemic of cholera there or something? Or have gangsters taken hold of the place that can destroy me?"

Three years later, when I was in California during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Hollywood people were sure that ICBMs were aimed at them and also been re-targeted from San Francisco. In the ensuing panic, they emptied supermarkets of toilet paper.

Now President Obama will be hosting his Chinese counterpart at a lavish private estate and will no doubt take him to Disneyland, if asked.

In these days of cyber-spying, what a foreign leader can see at a theme park is the least of American security worries in the face of new reports that Chinese hackers have breached Google’s servers and gained access to a database with years’ worth of information about American surveillance targets.

So enjoy the Magic Kingdom if you choose, Mr. Presidents, and settle in for serious talk about trade, tariffs and North Korea, among all those other issues that have morphed over the past six decades.

Talking Heads from the Wax Museum

Sunday brings White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer to five morning shows claiming the GOP is trying to “drag Washington into a swamp of partisan fishing expeditions, trumped-up hearings and false allegations.”

Pfeiffer’s Energizer Bunny Presidential defense counterpoints the usual suspects wheeled out from the punditry wax museum and animated with higher-volume loops of their usual spiels.

After Pfeiffer’s pitch on “Meet the Press,” David Gregory features a parade of Madame Tussaud figures starting with Mitch McConnell, frozen in his usual startled owl expression, barely moving his lips to  refute a 1987 tape of himself asserting that tax laws are “being abused not just by people on the right but most of the so-called charitable organizations who are involved...in arguable violations of their tax-free status and violations of the campaign laws...on the left.”

Facing voters next year, McConnell deviates only enough not to jump on the Benghazi bandwagon but insist that “getting to the bottom of this is an important investigation.”

On the following panel Peggy Noonan turns up her Rupert Murdochian pitch about the “worst Washington scandal since Watergate,” while sitting next to a Bob Woodward effigy mouthing the Obama blame for not being a strong enough President that is now his signature theme in the post-Nixon era.

To cap it all, David Gregory trots out a true figure from the is-he-still-alive-? past, Don Rumsfeld, to plug his new book about leadership.

Mellowed by being a great-grandfather, he is now snideness-free and advises, “If you foul up, tell the boss and correct it fast...Bad news doesn’t get better with time.”

If only he had told George W soon enough about al Qaeda and nuclear weapons in Iraq...

But that was then. Wasn’t it? 

Angelina Jolie's Preemptive Cancer Strike

The newest name in the annals of breast cancer brings back one from four decades ago that helped change how women—-and doctors-—viewed and treated the affliction. Angelina Jolie, meet Babette Rosmund.

Before 1970, mastectomy was the unquestioned answer for women diagnosed with the disease. Then a 50-year-old writer who had read a magazine article challenged the conventional wisdom.

In McCalls Rosmund learned from a column by Dr. William Nolen about the pioneering work of a Cleveland surgeon who performed lumpectomies, removing only the affected tissue and treating surrounding areas with radiation and chemotherapy.

When she refused to have her breasts removed, Rosmund’s doctor told her she would be “dead within three weeks.” She went to Cleveland, wrote an article about her experience and then a book. Rosmund died in 1997 at the age of 75; her breast cancer never recurred and the treatment she publicized became the standard for women.

Now in the age of advanced genetics, Jolie at 37 tells the world about her decision to undergo a preemptive double mastectomy after being told that she had “an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer” to avert the fate of her mother who died at 56.

Jolie’s choice and her openness about it are in the brave tradition of Betty Ford, who underwent surgery as First Lady and related all the details to encourage other women to seek detection and treatment.

But now the actress’ OpEd about her experience in the New York Times elicits concerns in the newspaper the following day:

“But some doctors also expressed worry that her disclosure could be misinterpreted by other women, fueling the trend toward mastectomies that are not medically necessary for many early-stage breast cancers. In recent years, doctors have reported a virtual epidemic of preventive mastectomies among women who have cancer in one breast and decide to remove the healthy one as well, even though they do not have genetic mutations that increase their risk and their odds of a second breast cancer are very low.”

On a subject affecting so many lives and families, it’s crucial to go beyond the headlines and make fully informed choices. Browsing the news is not enough.

Obama's Bush League Week

Democrats who have been wishing for years that their party turn as nastily combative as the GOP are getting a taste of what St. Teresa of Avila meant centuries ago by saying, “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.”

Suddenly the Obama White House is besieged by accusations of IRS targeting Tea Party groups and the Justice Department bugging the Associated Press just as the Benghazi talking points todo starts to lose steam.

The White House is on the defensive in the dirty-pool competition, recalling the scandals of Bush II’s final years--but with difference.

Disheartening as these revelations may be and as complex in the AP matter involving an imminent terror attack on American soil, they serve as reminders that bureaucracies can blunder in the Internet Age and the President has to be accountable for what they do.

But as Boehner et al bluster and call for heads to roll, perspective requires distinguishing between today’s furors about failed White House oversight and the Bush scandals emanating directly from the top: the outing of Valerie Plame by Cheney lapdog Scooter Libby and Karl Rove’s attempt, in concert with Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, to fire Bush’s own US Attorneys for not being zealous enough in prosecuting Democrats.

Even so, the new Washington narrative encourages a mindless equivalence between the two eras and undercuts any momentum the President may have been gathering in getting Washington to function at least at a minimum in days dominated by sequester and scandal.

Yet, as the Obama people work to clean up their own messes, there should be some alternative to turning away in disgust and saying, “To hell with them all.”  The differences remain.

Gnawing on the Benghazi Bone

In his 1950s heyday, Sen. Joe McCarthy snagged headlines with committee hearings on questions ranging from trivial (“Who promoted Peress?” an Army dentist in New Jersey) to global (“Who lost China?”). The subject was never the point. Uncovering “plots” and “traitors” was.

Darrell Issa is taking us back to that era. No doubt mistakes were made during the chaos of four American deaths in Benghazi, as they almost always are when there are no clear battle lines or enemies, but like McCarthy, Issa is on a mission of prosecution, not investigation.

Now John Boehner, sniffing political paydirt, joins the hunt by calling for release of White House e-mails to breathe new life into an attack on Obama’s reelection and a pre-emptive strike against Hillary Clinton in 2016—-a demagogic twofer if there ever was one.

Prosecutorial slickness has been upgraded since McCarthy’s days of blurting conflicting estimates of Communists in the State Department. Instead of a low-rent hack, we have Issa, the richest man in Congress who is smooth enough to banter regularly with Bill Maher despite iffy Wiki bread crumbs about his own past while amassing a fortune from car alarms.

With help from new aspirants like Marco Rubio and the old team of John McCain and Lindsey Graham, the GOP will wring the Benghazi sponge dry in media that still sees equivalency in two sides of every political argument without weighing their merits.

 In coming days, hearings will continue to produce a string of what blogger Kevin Jones calls “Nothingburgers” while hinting at deep dark plots. Those with long memories will recall that Joe McCarthy eventually ran out of prosecutorial gas and was censured by the Senate.

But his spirit lives on.

Paranoid Politics: J. Edgar to LaPierre

Seldom in history has file-keeping been a path to power, but last week’s NRA convention celebrated its chief clerk’s kind of national clout unseen since J. Edgar Hoover bullied the White House and Congress half a century ago.

Hoover and Wayne La Pierre, two bombastic file-keepers who rose to control those elected by voters through fear and blackmail, seized and held on to power to push the nation into diametrically opposed directions.

Hoover exploited anxieties over Cold War spying and domestic crime in a time of economic abundance to fuel paranoia and glorify government, his kind of secret policing, at the expense of civil liberties and individual rights.

LaPierre, in contrast, has taken advantage of economic adversity and lunatic nightmares about a minority President to make government itself the straw-man suppressor of citizens’ freedom to arm themselves with weapons of war.

What they have in common is practice of what historian Richard Hofstadter described as “the paranoid style in American politics,” which prompts a proponent to see “conspiracy in apocalyptic terms--he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization...he does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician.”

Beyond their divergent choice of devils, Hoover and LaPierre share a bone-deep racism, with J. Edgar attempting to hound Martin Luther King into suicide and the NRA pit bull exploiting racial fears about Barack Obama, while stoking anti-Muslim fallout over the Boston bombers.

When the Newtown horror prompted a public outcry over gun violence, the President’s push for the minimal sanity of background checks seemed possible, but with passage of time, a new poll now finds both Republican and Democratic voters saying that the GOP reflects their views on the subject and public desire for gun control waning.

If Clint Eastwood decides to follow his J. Edgar movie with one on LaPierre, he will have a candidate for the lead role in the empty chair he featured at the GOP convention last year.