Memories of Bill

Life inside the 1 percent

The best think JFK ever did

The worst thing JFK ever did

Why he had to appear tough

Justice in coal country

Credit where credit is due

Moonshine morality

The Pentagon is a spoiled brat

A bad trade

Pension rackets

Spoiler Alert

The trouble with redistricting

The old college fail

Unreasonably Hatched

Nothing personal, Mr. Cordray

As goes California …

The post Casino Jack knows… Longing for Bill… JFK’s best and worst appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Year of the Pig
by Mark J. Hainds
University of Alabama Press, 248 pp.

Year of the Pig, recently published by the University of Alabama Press, is Hainds’s account of his monomaniacal quest. In it, Hainds takes the reader through his year of hunts—across eleven different states, from Hawaii to Florida; alone and with company; using KA-BAR knives, black-powder rifles, compound bows, and various other weapons. It is the best book on killing feral pigs you’ll read all year.

Feral pigs have been devastating the American landscape since they were first introduced to this continent by European explorers in the 1500s. Some people call them razorbacks, or wild hogs—and, like the John Travolta movie of the same name, you will have trouble finding anyone with a good word to say about them. They ravage every ecosystem into which they’re introduced. They can grow to 500 pounds. They reproduce rapidly, and can begin breeding when they’re only eight months old. They’re violent and dirty and ugly and omnivorous—and they are everywhere. Writes Hainds,

Excepting city dwellers in the North who never visit the Midwest or South, virtually everyone in America lives or vacations in or near wild hog habitat. You may not have seen them. You may not have recognized the signs, sounds, or smells that identify them, but they were there, lurking in the shadows.

If they stayed in the shadows, there would be no problem. But they inevitably come out—tramping indelicately through woodlands and rooting through soil in search of food; destroying crops, polluting wetlands, imperiling forests, and spreading disease; endangering other species by ravaging their traditional food supplies. They are the animal kingdom’s scorched-earth policy.

It is the hunter’s role to fight back, and Hainds embraces this role with an assassin’s eye and an apostle’s zeal. Throughout the book, he hunts and kills pigs with extreme prejudice, stripping their skulls and boiling them clean so they can later be displayed as trophies. After he beheads them, he eats them. (“There are no known diseases that can be contracted from eating well-cooked pork, and wild pigs are delicious!”)

To be clear, for Hainds killing pigs is primarily a matter of sport and relaxation. “My professional life is oriented around science,” Hainds writes. “My personal life, at least in recent years, has been oriented around pig hunting.” Whether firing on fleeing hogs with a black-powder rifle in Mississippi, stalking pigs in the dark of night in Arkansas, or gutting a decapitated boar in Louisiana’s Bayou Cocodrie, Hainds makes very clear his belief that a weekend hunting pigs is a weekend well spent.

But it’s also a matter of conservation. Feral pigs give resource managers fits because they’re so hard to control—they have few natural predators, and they easily break through fences and other enclosures. Game hunters are often the last line of defense. (The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, for instance, deems feral pigs “unprotected wild animals with no closed season or harvest limit” and “promotes aggressive removal anywhere feral pigs are reported.”) Hainds is a forestry researcher at Auburn University, and, from the looks of it, a very sincere one. (The book is dedicated to the longleaf pine and wiliwili forests.) His clear, precise descriptions of the different forests in which he hunts illuminate the variety of ecosystems under attack by wild pigs—and he makes a strong case that responsible pig hunting is a relevant and vital form of pest control in these endangered ecosystems.

“Responsible” is the operative word here. Though Hainds is unrelenting in his deadly pursuit of America’s wild pigs, he is not a maniac, nor is he sloppy, and he has little good to say about those who are. He grows frustrated with a hunting guide who brags of indiscriminately killing snakes without first stopping to see if they’re poisonous. He chides those careless hunters who, after shooting pigs, leave their carcasses to rot on the trail. And he is embarrassed when, in order to meet his pig-a-month quota, he has to resort to bow hunting in a stocked pig stand that advertises a 95 percent success rate. (Much of the recent rise in the wild pig population can be traced back to the popularity of cannedhunt purveyors of that sort.) Many urbanites tend to stereotype all outdoorsmen as trigger-happy rednecks. With his moderate, reasonable approach to pig hunting, Hainds provides some welcome nuance to that depiction.

There isn’t much nuance to his writing, though. Hainds can be a droll narrator at times, well aware of the ludicrous aspects of his pursuit, and he occasionally turns a memorable phrase, as in his description of hunting with Hard-Luck Jimmy, “the single unluckiest hog hunter in the history of modern-day hunter-gatherers carrying high-powered rifles.” That said, the book is generally more tedious than any book about pig killing has a right to be. While Hainds ably communicates the joy he takes from game hunting, he does a so-so job of getting the reader interested in the journey. To a certain extent, if you’ve read about one hog hunt, you’ve read about them all, and it would take a keen, focused narrator to provide the color and description necessary to tell one from another. Hainds is not that narrator.

Hainds mentions that he has spent the better part of a decade collecting material for a book called A Field Guide to the Birds, Fish, and Crabs of Pensacola Bay and Surrounding Waters. A similarly comprehensive approach works to his detriment here. There is too much bland dialogue from hunting buddies (“Near the middle of the brake, John froze and motioned to stop. He whispered, ‘Pigs!’ ”), few of whom display any real personality. And too much attention is paid to the mechanics of each hunt—how it was planned, where he stayed when he got there, what time he had to wake up on the day of the hunt. An editor should have cut all this superfluous information. The interesting theme here is man vs. pig.

When he hits that theme, the book is excellent. In those segments, Hainds comes across as something of a rural American Ahab, ready to endure endless privations in the pursuit of his quest:

Scratched from head to toe, buried in a yaupon thicket, covered with blood, sitting in the dark in a cold rain with a fever, a bad cough, and a two-hundred- pound hog carcass, the revelation hit me: “Maybe this is why more people go golfing than hog hunting.”

But nobody’s going to buy this book expecting Faulkner. They’re going to buy it expecting to learn the best way to kill a hog, and Hainds delivers. He explains the most efficient way to finish off a trapped pig. (“A head-on shot, square between the eyes, is the preferred bullet placement for killing pigs in traps.”) He discusses whether you should follow a bleeding and wounded pig into the underbrush. (You should not.) He even offers advice for those hunters interested in gutting their boars. (Wear gloves, lest you risk contracting undulant fever.) Anyone who hates feral pigs and wishes them dead will find much to like about this book.

Near the end, after spending more than 200 pages bad-mouthing pigs, Hainds attempts to put them and the damage they cause in some wider perspective:

Real ecological damage is inflicted by human beings: forest conversion to dense loblolly, slash, and sand pine plantations; fire exclusion; urbanization; and the introduction of invasive plants, animals, and fungi. These are the real factors destroying our native forests.

While perhaps true, the disclaimer feels a bit tacked on, coming as it does from a man who spent a year of his life and incurred significant debt in a fanatical nationwide pig-hunting adventure. The takeaway from Year of the Pig isn’t that the American ecosystem is endangered by various destructive forces. The takeaway is that feral pigs should die, and that we’re lucky to have responsible, intelligent people like Mark Hainds to kill them for us. “Perhaps I’ll do my small part in leaving the Southeast with a little more longleaf forest and one or two fewer pigs than when I first set foot in Lower Alabama,” he writes. Godspeed.

If you are interested in purchasing this book, we have included a link for your convenience.

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The Time of Our Lives:
A Conversation About America,
Who We Are, Where We’ve Been,
and Where We Need to Go Now,
to Recapture the American
Dream
by Tom Brokaw
Random House, 320 pp.

Brokaw begins the subtitle of his book “A Conversation with America,” and starts with the proposition that America has lost its way. He offers a sharp critique of the current state of affairs—a devastated economy, rising competition from abroad, a broken political culture. And as befits the author of The Greatest Generation, he looks to the experiences of those who lived through the Great Depression and World War II for inspiration and ideas on how we can confront our own problems today.

Much of The Time of Our Lives is built around stories about four generations of his own and his wife Meredith’s families, and the distance he and Meredith have traveled from their small-town South Dakota roots. Seventy years old and very involved in the lives of his children and grandchildren, Brokaw is deeply concerned about the world being bequeathed to the next generation. He gives voice to the desire that many of us grandparents today have “to make the most of the time remaining.” He laments that his own Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers who followed lost the ethos of thrift and shared sacrifice that was second nature to his parents and grandparents. And though he movingly depicts the suffering of families in the current economic downturn, he also sees some hopeful signs of that ethos returning.

Like a TV documentary, the narrative follows Brokaw around on far-flung reporting assignments, introducing readers to individuals making a difference in their own lives and in the life of the country. An out-of-work electrical contractor in Covington, Kentucky, upgrading his skills at a cutting-edge community college. An Atlanta developer who used the proceeds from a rehabbed inner-city golf course to build a successful charter school. A severely wounded National Guardsman from Brokaw’s hometown of Yankton, South Dakota, being slowly reintegrated into the life of the community with the help of his family, friends, and neighbors.

Despite these hopeful signs, one question continually arises from the Americans he meets as he travels the country: “Why is it all shouting and confrontation? Why can’t we return to the days of Walter Cronkite and The Huntley-Brinkley Report? What has happened to us?” The well-documented explanations for our country’s growing partisanship is not Brokaw’s concern here. Nor is he interested in apportioning blame to one side or the other. Instead, he is challenging us all to address our problems as citizens. He asks, “A hundred years from now, what will be our indelible and measureable legacy? What will our grandchildren say of us? Of our country? Historians will not judge our time by Barack Obama, George W. Bush, or the Tea Party alone. We’re all in the dock.”

In Cairo in 2009, when he first interviewed the “casually confident, as yet untested and oh, so young” President Obama, they talked of the moral character of the American people. “The biggest lesson we learned from World War II,” Obama said,

is that America can do anything when it puts its mind to it, but we gotta exercise those muscles. I think they’ve atrophied a bit. We’re soft in ways that are profoundly dangerous to our long-term prosperity and security. And you know we’ve gotta start working those moral muscles and service muscles and sacrifice muscles a little more.

About the “muscles of national character,” Brokaw asks his readers, “Can they be developed so that they provide the strength to carry us through this treacherous passage? Do we have the will to restore a sense of national purpose that unites us rather than divides us?” As a first step, can we “establish a climate for listening as well as for shouting”?

High on his list of challenges to be met is reforming public education, which he believes “is to the twenty-first century what the civil rights movement was to the mid-twentieth century.” He cites Teach for America and the Harlem Children’s Zones as examples of unconventional and impressive public-private partnerships at the local, state, and national levels that point the way to addressing the systematic dysfunction eroding American society.

From his experience covering the American armed forces, in both war and peace, Brokaw places great value on their role in the training of citizens, from all walks of life. He hails the post- 9/11 GI Bill under which young men and women are eligible for financial support for tuition, fees, books, and housing for higher education after ninety days of aggregate service. Their presence on campuses, including community colleges and job-training institutions, he writes, is “a major step toward addressing the disconnect between the 1 percent of Americans in uniform and in harm’s way and the 99 percent of us who can go about our pleasurable civilian lives without even acknowledging wars are under way.”

Remembering how President Kennedy’s inaugural “ignited a fresh fervor for public service as the Peace Corps became the hot new destination for the young,” Brokaw laments the fact that nothing is now being asked of that 99 percent of us. With the discontinuation of the draft in 1972, the all-volunteer military is today drawn largely from the working and middle class: “We became two societies with too little connective tissue.” He calls the situation “manifestly unjust,” adding that ”if the political and military establishment has no interest in a renewal of military conscription, preferring the current all-volunteer concept, should we have as a national priority another form of universal service?”

And that takes us back to what Bill Clinton proposed in his presidential campaign in 1992: voluntary national service available to all, with living expenses for full-time volunteers and an educational award to help pay for college or pay off college loans. For all. That “all” was the key to the enthusiastic response of middle-class voters and young people to the Clinton campaign. It was estimated that such a new opportunity would open doors for at least a million young people.

When Clinton’s national service bill passed in 1993, but with only 20,000 initial slots for his newly created Ameri- Corps program, the press treated it almost like a defeat. But it was a start. When the Republicans swept both houses of Congress in 1994, the House of Representatives voted to terminate the new program. President Clinton held firm and AmeriCorps was saved, and with increasing bipartisan support grew to 50,000 members by the year 2000. With President George W. Bush’s support, after 9/11 the national service positions grew to 75,000, working in hundreds of nonprofit service programs, including Teach for America and the Harlem Children’s Zone, City Year and the National Civilian Community Corps, and in large numbers serving in long-standing organizations such as Habitat for Humanity, Boys and Girls Clubs, and the Red Cross.

In 2008, Senators Barack Obama, John McCain, and Hillary Clinton joined Senators Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch as prime cosponsors of what became the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, authorizing the five-year growth to 250,000 National Service participants. The bill passed with large bipartisan majorities in the first hundred days of the Obama presidency, and the president signed it into law. After the election of 2010, however, House Republicans, many of whom had supported tripling AmeriCorps’ size in 2009, voted to terminate the entire program. Fortunately, the Senate reversed those cuts in the latest federal budget passed in December. Still, national service will not reach the goal of 250,000 members— much less Tom Brokaw’s even bolder aims—anytime soon.

In his book Brokaw does not report the fitful growth of AmeriCorps. But he is right in seeing that the success of the program to date is too little told and too little understood. His book’s presence high on the November best-seller list is a sign that the public is open to his call for expanding national service, and his advocacy could make a difference in public opinion and the legislative struggles to come. This reviewer hopes that when his book touring is over, Brokaw will play an important role in shaping the next steps and helping to lead the way.

If you are interested in purchasing this book, we have included a link for your convenience.

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An Honourable Englishman:
The Life of Hugh Trevor-Roper
by Adam Sisman
Random House, 672 pp.

It is worth reading for two reasons. First, it is a model of the biography form. Sisman is a superb writer who masterfully presents his subject—to the point where the reader somehow becomes invested in minutiae like Trevor-Roper’s decision to move from England to Scotland or to replace a Bentley with a Mercedes. The second reason is the rare pleasure of a book properly shelved in the shrinking Intellectual History section of the library. Reading about Trevor-Roper— Hitler chaser, Oxbridge don, occasional foreign correspondent, bomb thrower— means doing one’s learning collaterally, like taking in the fine view on a train ride that gets you from here to there. Strictly speaking, the book’s subject is a fusty old professor, but its pleasures and insights range far wider.

Trevor-Roper’s great work was The Last Days of Hitler (1947), which established the fact of Hitler’s suicide and recounted the hallucinogenic final days inside the bunker of the Reich Chancellery in April 1945. The slender but authoritative book grew out of an investigative report that Trevor-Roper prepared for British intelligence. The report was commissioned in September 1945, when no one knew for sure whether Hitler was alive or dead. His successor, Admiral Karl Donitz, insisted that he had fought to the last breath against the Soviet army; the Soviets claimed that he was alive and being harbored by the Allies. Rumors flared up like brushfires and were just as hard to stamp out. Hitler was said to be staying “on a mist-enshrouded island in the Baltic; in a Rhineland rock-fortress; in a Spanish monastery; on a South American ranch,” or “ living rough among the bandits of Albania.” The uncertainty compromised Allied security in occupied Germany and created tension between the Soviets and the British. The thousand-year Reich could not be pronounced dead if the Fuhrer was still alive.

As the former head of research for Allied intelligence, Trevor-Roper was just the man to find answers. He had extensive experience interrogating Nazi prisoners, spoke German, and knew his way around the country. Since—as it later emerged—Hitler’s body had been incinerated, Trevor-Roper could not establish physical evidence of his death. The next best thing was to find eyewitnesses to either his suicide or his corpse. Trevor-Roper traveled the countryside deducing who the occupants of the bunker were during the final days and interviewing those who were still alive. His most famous witness was the architect Albert Speer, who had defied Hitler by refusing to destroy German infrastructure as the Red Army approached Berlin. But Speer was not in the bunker when the end came, so Trevor-Roper also spoke with Hitler’s secretaries, butler, and physician, as well as guards of the Fuhrerbunker.

In this way Trevor-Roper not only proved Hitler’s death by suicide, he also gained an understanding of the last sputter and cough of Nazism. His book combined exciting reporting with Gibbonesque flourishes:

More and more the once sociable Fuhrer became an isolated hermit, with all the psychological repressions inherent in that dismal condition. He was isolated from persons, isolated from events. Convinced that only he could lead the German people out of defeat to victory, and that his life was therefore of cardinal importance; and yet convinced that every man’s hand was against him, and assassination awaited him around every corner; by a logical consequence, he seldom left the protection of his underground headquarters, or the banal society of his quack doctor, his secretaries, and the few spiritless generals who still pandered to his inspiration.

Trevor-Roper presented the Third Reich as a court—“as incalculable in its capacity for intrigue as any oriental sultanate.” He sketched vivid portraits of the infamous members of Hitler’s inner circle. Heinrich Himmler was a banal simpleton and Joseph Goebbels a brilliantly nefarious propagandist. Hermann Goring was a costume-wearing kook who, “in scenes of Roman luxury, feasted and hunted and entertained,” while wearing “the emblematic stag of St. Hubertus on his head, and a swastika of gleaming pearls set between his antlers.” Speer was the most interesting figure, for he alone had the intelligence and scruples to see Nazism for what it was and nevertheless abetted it. Trevor-Roper closed the book with ruminations on Speer’s fateful passivity. On the theory that the final days revealed the logical endpoints of both National Socialism and Hitler’s monomania, Trevor-Roper concluded that the Fuhrer’s “error lay in supposing that faith can move mountains by itself, instead of merely giving the decisive impetus to the spade.”

The Last Days of Hitler caused a sensation and made Trevor-Roper rich and famous at the age of thirty-three. It also portended a brilliant career at the intersection of popular journalism and academic writing. (Trevor-Roper was both a history professor and a lifelong contributor of reporting and review essays to the Times and the New Statesman.) Yet for all the promise, the book was his swan song. He had attained all the formal trappings of professional success by his death in 2003: he had been Regius Professor at Oxford, master of Peterhouse College at Cambridge, and Lord Dacre of Glanton, made a life peer in 1979. Yet his field of study was not Nazi Germany but the Enlightenment, and he never managed to write a major work of academic history on it. Beginning and abandoning many projects, Trevor-Roper struggled to get the bat off his shoulder. Margaret Thatcher herself once made fun of him for this. After she asked in front of others when she could expect his next book, he said he actually had one “on the stocks.” She replied, “On the stocks? On the stocks? A fat lot of good that is! In the shops, that is where we need it!”

Born into the periphery of British nobility, Trevor-Roper cultivated himself as an aristocrat, not least by burnishing the hyphen that joined his two prestigious surnames. He collected undergraduates from the best families, supervising their studies, and socialized with ambassadors and duchesses. Dmitri Shostakovich and Francis Poulenc gave recitals in his home. Happiest when in horse, Trevor-Roper contrived to join fox hunts whenever he could, even when this meant hurrying in to read the lesson at Evensong with a surplice over his hunting costume. Sisman expertly describes the professor’s grandeur during lectures:

[He] often spoke in long sentences, consisting of multiple subordinate clauses—so many of these that on at least one occasion the audience began to applaud. He wore a rose in his buttonhole. Occasionally he would interrupt his flow to read a quotation, take a sip from a glass of orange juice, or correct his text with his fountain pen.

If Trevor-Roper remains known in the United States for anything beyond The Last Days of Hitler, it is for his merciless hatchet jobs on other historians. “I have decided to liquidate [Lawrence] Stone,” he wrote of a former pupil who scooped him on the Elizabethan aristocracy, before writing an article that nearly destroyed that man’s career. Unsportingly, Trevor-Roper himself had thin skin and was quick to call upon the libel courts. Colleagues snickered at his paltry output while wondering aloud what made him so nasty. (In a rare misstep, Sisman ridiculously suggests it was sinusitis.) His faculty at Cambridge loathed him so much that they would not break bread with him.

Sisman portrays Trevor-Roper as more Whig than Tory; an anticommunist but no cold warrior, he deplored McCarthyite witch hunts and maintained friendly relations with Marxist historians. He dragged his feet on admitting women to Peterhouse College and harbored several petty bigotries, including against Scots and Catholics. Needlessly spiking his writing with anti-Catholic jabs, he antagonized the Church and its defenders like the novelist Evelyn Waugh, who sniped with Trevor-Roper in the Letters pages of newspapers for decades.

Yet in the end it all came back to Hitler. In 1983 the Fuhrer’s alleged diaries were discovered, and the Times, hoping to buy, hired Trevor-Roper to authenticate them. Sisman’s pages on the episode that nearly ruined his subject are riveting. Trevor-Roper was given several hours to examine the documents in a five-star Zurich hotel. He relied on the sellers, who falsely claimed that expert analysts dated the ink and paper to the 1930s and ’40s. In the frenzied bidding war between rival newspaper companies, he let himself be rushed into giving an opinion of authenticity. Rupert Murdoch owned the Times and wanted to bid quickly; his editor scrubbed out Trevor-Roper’s hedges and qualifications. By the time his doubts got the better of him and he made a frantic phone call to the Times, it was too late: a banner headline and his own essay were about to go to press for the next day’s edition. “Fuck Dacre— publish,” Murdoch said, using Trevor- Roper’s title. But the diaries were forgeries. Trevor-Roper’s enemies pounced, and well they should have, for a man who revels in destroying the careers of others can hardly complain when he destroys his own.

Still, Sisman’s lenient judgment seems right: Trevor-Roper was foolish not to demand more time, but he was also the victim of impossible circumstances. Another venerable expert, Gerhard Weinberg, was also taken in. The cruel irony is that Trevor-Roper would much rather have been completing his elusive three-volume magnum opus on the Puritan Revolution. It would no doubt have been outstanding work—but it never would have outweighed The Last Days of Hitler.

If you are interested in purchasing this book, we have included a link for your convenience.

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The Ideal Man:
The Tragedy of Jim
Thompson and the American
Way of War
by Joshua Kurlantzick
Wiley, 272 pp.

It is now hard to imagine this, but in 1941 it was with American support that Ho led his guerrilla coalition, the Viet Minh, against the Japanese military, who had acquired control of Indochina in a power-sharing deal with Vichy France. Ho saw the United States as an ally that would help him rid his people of the French colonial rule that had degraded them for eighty years. Viet Minh soldiers also worked alongside spies from the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA, to rescue downed American pilots.

That same year, an OSS spy named Jim Thompson was sent to Bangkok, where he immediately saw the value of cultivating popular rebels like Ho Chi Minh. He began wooing the Viet Minh, Cambodian, and Laotian nationalist fighters—sometimes operating with the tacit approval of his superiors at OSS, but sometimes working completely off the grid. Thompson was convinced that these partisans, who saw themselves primarily as nationalists, would someday become well-placed allies in what was shaping up to be a protracted struggle for influence in Indochina between the U.S., China, and the Soviet Union. Thompson also believed that the United States could become a great force for good in the impoverished countries of Southeast Asia.

But Thompson, like Ho, had not factored in the fervid anticommunism that would grip the United States for nearly three decades after the end of World War II. The result, writes Joshua Kurlantzick, Southeast Asia fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in The Ideal Man: The Tragedy of Jim Thompson and the American Way of War, was that the U.S. turned against those anti-colonial insurgents.

By the late 1940s, the U.S. was no longer seen as a harbinger of democracy. In 1950, Washington gave diplomatic recognition to the corrupt anticommunist fief known as the Republic of Vietnam, which had been set up a year earlier by the French government. In Thailand from the 1940s to ’60s, the U.S. backed a lineup of military dictators who, over time, turned the country into a decrepit forward base for American soldiers fighting in Indochina. And in Indonesia in 1965, the State Department threw its weight behind Suharto, a general whose underlings exterminated Southeast Asia’s largest communist party when they massacred at least 500,000 alleged leftists.

What’s more, Thompson’s outspokenness had alienated his superiors in the Truman administration, many of whom considered him something of a loose cannon. To no one’s surprise, Thompson’s OSS career didn’t last long. Four years after his resignation in 1946, the U.S. government investigated him for trafficking arms to the Vietnamese and Laotian nationalist fighters during his OSS tenure. In 1953, at the behest of J. Edgar Hoover himself, the FBI investigated him for “un-American” activities, although they never specified what those activities were. He was later cleared of the charges, but his sympathies cost him the support of fellow diplomats when he most needed political allies.

Fed up with Cold War politics, the left-leaning Thompson chose to settle down to a life of relative languor in Thailand, abandoning his failed marriage and his privileged family in Delaware. In Bangkok, he sought out high-society contacts, forging a friendship with reformist Prime Minister Pridi Banomyong. In 1948, Thompson cofounded the Thai Silk Company, an enterprise that later earned him far more celebrity than espionage ever did. Within the next decade, Thompson had revitalized the country’s dying tradition of hand-woven silk, and was bringing jobs to the country’s poor northeast.

Quickly labeled the “Silk King” by the Western press, Thompson was making fabrics that were featured in Vogue and Time, and were used to make royal Thai costumes in the classic 1951 musical The King and I. Over the next two decades, Thompson hosted regular dinners at his Bangkok home—today a museum about his life—for guests such as Truman S. Capote and Eleanor Roosevelt, showing off his well-known collection of Asian art.

Under this veneer of glamour in the 1960s, writes Kurlantzick, the retired spook felt more like a lonely prophet, without any real friendships and also weary from watching the American entanglement that he had once foreseen wrecking Southeast Asia. CIA officers in Bangkok were furious that Thompson wouldn’t help them, even though the agency considered him a subversive. As thousands of American servicemen flew in and out of Bangkok, Thompson witnessed his prelapsarian city deteriorate into a burg of prostitution and drug trafficking. Military regimes backed by the U.S. had purged many of his old Thai friends, including the democratic reformer Pridi.

Thompson was also angry that Washington had secretly turned his beloved Laos into the world’s most heavily bombed country—per capita. The U.S. dropped more than two million tons of ordnance there well into 1973. And in Vietnam, he lamented that a small-scale operation against the U.S.’s former allies had escalated into a ruinous imbroglio that would later leave 50,000 American servicemen dead. “They attacked so hard,” Colonel Tu Cang, a former commander of an elite Viet Cong spy ring, told me in Ho Chi Minh City. “But they didn’t understand that we have a big tradition of struggling against aggressors for centuries.”

In addition to the U.S. government, Thompson attracted the hostility of a second powerful clique: Thai businesspeople who were furious that a foreigner was making money using their centuries-old silk arts. By the early 1960s, his competitors (including a prime minister’s wife) began marketing cheap knockoffs, and the Thai Silk Company began losing customers. One Thai prince recalled that some in the royal family began calling Thompson a traitor, and the Silk King became paranoid that he was being followed. In a brazen political attack in 1962, the government seized some of Thompson’s cherished trove of Thai art—a collection he had spent a decade carefully gathering to help preserve the country’s heritage.

The increasingly weary and frustrated Thompson, who by then was regularly checking into hospitals with bouts of depression and the flu, felt a country he had helped and loved had once again betrayed him—a fitting prelude to his somber end. It’s a sad story for a visionary who, perhaps naively, thought he could protect his adopted country from the shameful realities of business and politics in a war-torn region. In 1967, while spending Easter Sunday in Malaysia, the depressed mogul went for a walk in the highlands and disappeared without a trace. Kurlantzick suggests that a business competitor arranged to kidnap him, while other investigators have concluded that he was mauled by a wild animal or ran away to start a new life. Thompson’s remains have never been found and the mystery never solved.

Six years after Thompson vanished, the American military bowed out of its failed campaigns in Indochina, unable to put down its fierce insurrections. Many Americans saw this debacle as a bad dream to be forgotten, pushing Southeast Asia to the fringes of U.S. foreign policy. But after almost forty years of neglect, an ascendant China, flanked by a crescent of pro- American client states, is winning over allies and natural resources across this sphere. Busy managing forays into Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington has responded sluggishly, although its diplomats are finally making inroads. Last year, they carefully orchestrated a series of cooperative military and trade deals among China’s neighbors, including a plan to station 2,500 Marines in northern Australia within five years, giving Washington the leverage to counteract Chinese expansionism throughout Southeast Asia. Soon after that, Hillary Clinton became the first secretary of state since 1955 to visit Burma, going on a factfinding mission to see whether its military regime is serious about reform.

Despite good trade ties with Vietnam, Washington still hasn’t won over the goodwill of the largely conservative and China-appeasing Communist Party, even though many regular Vietnamese hold favorable views toward American influences. One reason the government distrusts Washington is because, even today, U.S. leaders have neglected to sew up old war wounds, such as by reimbursing those suffering from the spraying of Agent Orange in central Vietnam and the Mekong Delta.

Unlike in the Cold War, our Southeast Asian alliances today are bound more by commerce than ideology, and thus the timing is good to build alliances with those countries trying to bolster their economies. If America wants to be a Pacific power to be reckoned with, it would be wise to listen to the whispers of its former foes, whether their political beliefs are popular in Washington circles or not. Thompson would doubtless have approved.

If you are interested in purchasing this book, we have included a link for your convenience.

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Rule and Ruin:
The Downfall of Moderation
and the Destruction of the
Republican Party, from
Eisenhower to the Tea Party
by Geoffrey Kabaservice
Oxford University Press, 504 pp.

Kabaservice’s new book, Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party, reads like an elegy to that bygone era—to the once-proud Republican moderate political establishment that was defined by men such as Lindsay and Moore. Kabaservice surveys the rise and fall of the patrician class that once dominated the GOP but has been all but banished from the Republican Party hierarchy by the movement conservatives who are now in charge. The conservative revolution that overtook the old moderate establishment is by now a familiar story, but has been mostly written (as most history is) about the victors. Rule and Ruin is the same story, but told mostly about the losers. Kabaservice has combed the archives and conducted hundreds of interviews with politicians and activists, unearthing a wealth of information about postwar moderates—men like George Romney, Elliot Richardson, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Charles Percy, Edward Brooke, John Chafee, and Nelson Rockefeller—and reminding us that these men were both numerous and influential.

The GOP, as Kabaservice notes, has not always been a bastion of reflexive hostility to elites or to government. Quite the contrary. It was none other than George Romney—governor of Michigan, father of Mitt—who in 1968 campaigned for the Republican presidential nomination by embarking on a 10,000-mile tour of poverty across America, insisting that it was essential to “listen to the voices from the ghetto.” Can anyone imagine his son, who insists that “corporations are people,” uttering a remotely similar statement?

The pedigree of moderate conservatism goes back to the Mugwumps, the anticorruption Republican East Coast gentry who, during the 1884 presidential election, fled the Republican Party en masse, throwing their support to Democrat Grover Cleveland rather than support a Republican nominee with suspect financial connections. Kabaservice begins his story half a century later, with Robert Taft, the man known as Mr. Republican. Taft’s rise ignited a battle between the moderates and the conservatives, and his anti-internationalism cost him the Republican nomination in 1940, 1948, and 1952, but he was no foe of elites. Kabaservice points out that Taft shunned cheap populism and respected intellect. (When Taft’s wife was asked at a rally about whether her husband was a common man, she responded, “Oh, no, he is not that at all. He was first in his class at Yale and first in his class at Harvard Law School. I think it would be wrong to present a common man as a representative of the people of Ohio.”)

The trajectory of the modern Republicans from George Romney to Mitt began with the election of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952. Moderates such as Paul Hoffmann, a leading business figure who had saved the Studebaker Corporation from bankruptcy, were elated. Eisenhower admired Hoffmann but was dismayed by his moderate Republican supporters in Congress, who, he said, lacked “guts.” He told his aides, “We really need a few good hatchet men on our side up there.” The conservative faction, by contrast, was dismayed by Eisenhower’s caution. Already, Kabaservice writes, they saw the “[m]oderates and progressives not as misguided brethren but as traitors to be destroyed.”

Eisenhower incurred their wrath because rather than seeking to undo the New Deal, he tried to govern around it. A former military man, Eisenhower had few qualms about standing up to forces inside the Pentagon—particularly their demands for increased spending. Couple that with his unwillingness to do more than allow his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, to fulminate about rolling back communism, and you had a recipe for rumblings on the far right about a fresh round of appeasement. Indeed, Eisenhower managed to largely emasculate both the isolationists and the hard right, and they in turn saw him as the real threat, fearing that he was subverting the Republican Party from within by preaching adaptation to the New Deal rather than trying to overthrow it.

Disaffected conservatives instead clustered around William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review; they were becoming radicalized. Buckley himself stated in a 1957 interview that he was a “revolutionary against the present liberal order. An intellectual revolutionary.” Kabaservice believes that Buckley and company were “the only Republican tribe that had a sense of themselves as an ideologically coherent group joined in a movement, and their sense of heroic embattlement was enhanced by their opponents’ tendency to view them as not merely wrong but insane.” (It isn’t clear just what Buckley would have thought of the current crop of Republican candidates or of the Tea Party. But one can safely assume he would have cringed at the movement’s flaunting of its total lack of pragmatism and sophistication.)

In 1960, when Richard Nixon became the nominee of the Republican Party, he felt compelled to meet with Nelson Rockefeller, the GOP’s standardbearer, in order to discuss the terms of the party’s platform. They met at Rockefeller’s New York apartment, after which they issued a joint fourteen-point statement that reflected progressive views on jobs, civil rights, and housing. The press dubbed their meeting “The Compact of Fifth Avenue”; Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, darling of the right, called it a “Republican Munich.” The right had lionized Nixon for his role in the Alger Hiss case, and Nixon fit into the conservative pantheon as a fearless martyr who had braved the obloquy of the liberal establishment to expose a domestic traitor. But Nixon did not really campaign as a conservative in the election against John F. Kennedy, even pointing in one debate to the areas of common ground that the two shared because he feared losing moderate voters. Only in the last weeks of the campaign did he begin to distinguish himself from his rival for the White House.

With Nixon’s loss, the right went on the offensive. In Maryland, L. Brent Bozell Jr., the brother-in-law of William F. Buckley Jr., challenged the incumbent Republican Senator Charles C. Mathias for the U.S. Senate. The GOP could not, said Mathias, “continue to be a truly national party unless we have the benefit of the views of those who are conservative, those who are moderates, and those who are liberals.” His opponent would have none of this. Bozell—who admired the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and in 1960 had inveighed against Buckley’s move to exclude the John Birch Society from the conservative movement— attacked Mathias’s support for civil rights legislation and accused him of being soft on communism. Still, Mathias won, and he went on to serve in the U.S. Senate for twenty-five years.

Moderates were again set up for a victory in the 1964 GOP primaries with Nelson Rockefeller leading in the polls, until the candidate’s marital troubles torpedoed his appeal, leaving an opening for Barry Goldwater, the conservative movement’s hero. Kabaservice acutely diagnoses that the “thrill of defying moderate elites was central to the appeal of the Goldwater campaign,” and that the “single piece of campaign literature that best captured the anti-establishment, antimoderate mentality of Goldwater con-servatism” was a book by the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, A Choice Not an Echo, which purported to tell the inside story of how American presidents are elected. It was a creepy little pamphlet in which the author claimed that “secret kingmakers” based on Wall Street dominated the media. Their cabal included the participants in the Bilderberg meetings (informal soirees that were supposed to facilitate cooperation between Europe and the U.S. over brandy and cigars), whose “most trusted agents” were Rockefeller and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. This group consistently selected Republican moderates who lost elections rather than conservatives who might prove too difficult to control. Goldwater volunteers, Kabaservice says, disseminated no less than half a million copies of Shlafly’s tract in California.

Even after Goldwater’s crushing loss to Lyndon B. Johnson, conservatives were unrepentant. They blamed moderates for their defeat, and concluded that the solution was to carry out a purge of the GOP. Conservatives, warned Ronald Reagan in a speech to the Los Angeles County Young Republicans in November 1964, must not “turn the Republican Party over to the traitors in the battle just ended.”

They didn’t. The correlation of forces, to use an old Soviet term, was increasingly on their side. Those “tidal pressures”—white flight to the suburbs, anger at Vietnam protesters, and the debacle of the Democratic Convention in Chicago—are familiar enough. But Kabaservice pins the demise of the moderates on the failure of George Romney to win the Republican nomination in 1968. Romney, he observes, was the GOP moderates’ last and best chance to elect one of their own to the presidency, which in turn, he argues, would have preserved the long-term viability of their movement. Romney united northeastern liberals with moderate midwesterners and westerners and had the “potential to attract non-traditional Republican constituencies” with his support for civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War. “The moderates would never again have the opportunity to build a national movement in the way that a successful Romney presidential campaign, let alone a Romney presidency, could have afforded,” writes Kabaservice.

Though initially the front-runner for the nomination, Romney was never very good on the stump, and his campaign tanked after he visited Vietnam and reported that he had been “brainwashed” by the generals. What he meant was that they had tried to brainwash him, but the gaffe was used by his political enemies to suggest that he was susceptible to brainwashing.

Romney ultimately lost the nomination to Richard Nixon, who fatefully took the party, and the nation, in a different direction. Nixon kept the loyalty of many moderate votes with progressive domestic policies, such as the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency. But he also shrewdly reached out, via his famous Southern Strategy, to white workingclass voters in the South who were alienated by Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act and shared Nixon’s own grievances against the educated East Coast elite.

Then Watergate happened. A number of moderate Republicans in the House of Representatives who voted for the articles of impeachment against Nixon earned the enmity of rank-and-file Republicans, who punished their disloyalty by throwing them out of office. Gerald Ford’s close call in the 1976 Republican primary, when Ronald Reagan almost stripped him of the nomination, was a potent sign of the right’s growing strength. But by 1980, enough angry conservative southern whites had joined the GOP, and enough working- class northern Democrats had been turned off by the drift of the country, that the moderates were outnumbered; this time Reagan, a more radical-right figure, won the GOP nomination.

Of course, the GOP has moved so far to the right that Reagan himself, as many have observed, might have had trouble running on his record if he were a candidate in the current GOP primaries. Indeed, one need only witness Mitt Romney’s contorted efforts to distance himself from his own past positions and accomplishments as Massachusetts governor to see how hostile the party has become to any hint of deviation from conservative gospel.

Kabaservice gloomily speculates that the “growth of ideologically polarized politics may prove toxic to government effectiveness and perhaps even to America’s social stability.” Maybe, but it’s possible that the 2012 election will go some distance toward settling political disputes that have hampered President Obama’s first term. Indeed, if Newt Gingrich, a more authentic (if heterodox) conservative than Romney, captures the Republican nomination, a Manichean clash between two diametrically opposed ideologies will take place. If Gingrich were to lose the race, the GOP might begin to question the wisdom of its long march toward the right-wing fringe, and moderates might once again find their views welcome within the party.

But that day, if it comes, is a long way off. Until then, where will moderate Republican voters go? They might support Obama, as some did in 2008. Certainly Obama can make a credible case that the centrist policies he’s pursued as president are in line with their preferences. But party identity is a remarkably tribal force, and many would rather stay home than pull the lever for a Democrat. The wild card this year is an effort by the well-funded centrist group Americans Elect to build a grassroots, Web-based constituency for a third-party presidential challenge. If that effort grows and its organizers can recruit someone like New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, himself an enlightened plutocrat, to head the ticket, it’s possible to imagine moderate Republicans jumping on board. Their candidate might not win, but it could give moderate Republicans more respect and power than they’ve enjoyed in many years.

If you are interested in purchasing this book, we have included a link for your convenience.

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Warriors of God:
The Inside Story of Hezbollah’s
Relentless War Against Israel
by Nicholas Blanford
Random House, 544 pp.

Two months later, the Al Aqsa intifada broke out in the occupied territories, unleashing four years of tit-for-tat carnage that killed an estimated 5,500 Israelis and Palestinians and hardened attitudes on both sides of the Middle East conflict. It was just one measure of the powerful—and, in the eyes of many, malign—influence and reach of Hezbollah, a point meticulously and persuasively documented in Warriors of God: The Inside Story of Hezbollah’s Relentless War Against Israel, by Nicholas Blanford, the Beirutbased correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and the London Times as well as the author of Killing Mr. Lebanon: The Assassination of Rafik Hariri and Its Impact on the Middle East. A resident of Lebanon since 1994, Blanford has observed Nasrallah’s Islamic warriors up close for nearly two decades. He’s broken bread with operatives in southern Lebanese villages and in Beirut’s Shiite suburbs, interviewed the elusive Nasrallah, talked to Israeli commanders who waged war against Hezbollah, and come close to being blown apart by rocket fire during Israel’s bloody offensives in 1996 and 2006. Blanford has gone farther than just about any other Western journalist in penetrating the armed wing of this opaque organization—mixing grudging admiration for Hezbollah’s endurance with deep misgivings about its ultimate mission.

Hezbollah was born in the 1970s, amid the regional disarray that followed the Six-Day War. Taking advantage of the weak Lebanese state, Palestinian militants set up guerilla bases in southern Lebanon, unleashing cross-border attacks on Israel that brought a terrible retaliation. Angry about the Lebanese government’s failure to protect the Shi’as, who dominate the south, the Iranianborn cleric Sayed Musa Sadr issued a call to arms. Sadr became the spiritual father of Shi’a armed resistance that coalesced first around the Amal movement and later, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, around a more militant offshoot led by Nasrallah. Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the Bekaa Valley armed and trained the initial recruits, developing their expertise in everything from bomb building to hand-tohand combat.

Nasrallah, both a military tactician and a religious scholar who had studied in the Shi’as’ holy city of Najaf, instilled in them a steely discipline, a capacity to endure physical punishment, and a willingness to suffer death for the cause. Their mantra was summed up by one commander whom Blanford met in southern Lebanon at the height of a stealth campaign that was claiming the lives of dozens of Israeli soldiers every year in roadside bombings and ambushes. “When I kill an Israeli, I think of what they have done, the shelling, destroying villages,” the commander told the author. “I kill them to stop them [from] doing more of the same. Killing is a duty, not a joy.”

By the late 1990s, Hezbollah’s war of attrition had created a backlash within Israeli society. With dozens of soldiers dying every year in surprise attacks, the Lebanese engagement had breathed new life into Israel’s peace movement, causing even many soldiers to question the occupation’s morality; Lebanon was becoming Israel’s Vietnam. “The time has come to stop mincing words,” wrote a senior army officer in an opinion piece titled “Let’s Go” that appeared in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz in 1997, shortly after one of Israel’s top generals in Lebanon was killed by a massive roadside bomb.

Have you been to south Lebanon recently? Have you seen what kind of outposts we’ve built there in the last year? We are sitting in these huge armored fortresses, which of course invite enemy shelling, and we make convoys leading to them into easy targets. Little by little we’re becoming crusaders, who primarily guard only ourselves.

In March 2000, Prime Minister Ehud Barak announced a unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon. Thousands of Christian militiamen from the Southern Lebanese Army, who had collaborated with Israel and feared revenge attacks by Hezbollah, fled as well. The hasty retreat gave Hezbollah a gigantic propaganda victory and inspired the militant Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad to wage a similar campaign in the West Bank and Gaza—one that would ultimately fail.

Yet Blanford makes a compelling case that Nasrallah and his fighters outstepped their bounds in the wake of their victory. Desperate not to lose their raison d’être—resistance to Israeli occupation— Hezbollah glommed on to the Shebaa Farms, a disputed, near-worthless tract of land along the border, occupied by a handful of Israeli troops, that even most Lebanese assumed was Syrian territory. (Hafez al-Assad, the Syrian leader, and his son and successor, Bashar, regarded Hezbollah as a useful tool to exert pressure and pain on Israel, and didn’t challenge the flimsy claim to sovereignty.) Demands for an Israeli “withdrawal” culminated in the kidnapping and killing of several Israeli soldiers in 2006. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his generals, eager to deal Hezbollah a mortal blow, responded with tank and infantry assaults on Hezbollah’s strongholds and devastating bombings of the southern suburbs of Beirut. Hezbollah again proved a worthy adversary— Israel suffered the loss of 119 soldiers, and a commission rebuked Olmert and the IDF command for poor decision making— but the war created a backlash against Hezbollah in Lebanon. “The war inflicted devastating punishment on Hezbollah’s core Shi’a support base,” writes Blanford. “Iran had channeled millions of dollars into upgrading Hezbollah’s military capabilities in 2000, which were squandered in a war that should never have been started in the first place.” Small wonder, he adds, that “Nasrallah admitted that Hezbollah would not have ordered the kidnappings if the leadership had known what the consequences would be.” Never again would Hezbollah command the same degree of support that it enjoyed in 2000.

Blanford makes no secret of his admiration for Hezbollah’s courage, nor of his indignation over what he views as Israel’s callousness. He writes with horrifying detail of the carnage inside a United Nations shelter packed with Lebanese refugees that was struck, perhaps deliberately, by Israeli missiles in 1996, and a similar attack in the village of Qana ten years later. One would have liked to see such descriptions balanced by, say, a thorough account of the 1994 bombings of the Israeli embassy and a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires, carried out by Hezbollah operatives, that together killed nearly 200 people.

Blanford’s courage as a reporter is undeniable; he took tremendous risks during his reporting trips to the front lines. Yet sections of the book tend to read like he was emptying out his notebooks—a shapeless mass of detail. And there are too many accounts of individual skirmishes between Israeli soldiers and Hezbollah guerrillas, as if Blanford felt the need to document every casualty in twenty years of fighting.

Even so, the mass of detail doesn’t overwhelm Blanford’s astute analysis. He examines the potential for another war between Israel and Hezbollah—he seems to think it is inevitable—and considers the movement’s latest incarnation as a player in Lebanon’s volatile politics. In May 2008 Hezbollah waged fierce battles against rival Sunni and Druze militias, and briefly took over the streets of West Beirut. The victory came at a price: Nasrallah’s claims that his rivals were serving the proxies of Israel and the United States, Blanford writes, “rang hollow in the ears of those Lebanese who had previously given Hezbollah the benefit of the doubt over its relentless determination to keep its weapons.” The movement now finds itself in a quandary, especially since one of its main protectors, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, is facing a sustained uprising that could drive him from power. Does Hezbollah accommodate itself to Lebanon’s fractious political system and take a pragmatic role? Or does it continue to serve as the “Lebanese detachment of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp,” dedicated to Shi’a Islamic revolution? It’s a decision that not only will have consequences for Lebanon but also, as Blanford demonstrates in this compelling book, could shape the balance of power in the rapidly changing Middle East.

If you are interested in purchasing this book, we have included a link for your convenience.

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Republic, Lost:
How Money Corrupts
Congress–and a Plan to
Stop it
by Lawrence Lessig
Twelve, 400 pp.

Almost all this advertising onslaught will be unleashed during the run-up to the November election. In that final 100-day frenzy, the presidential candidates will become the largest TV advertisers in America, eclipsing General Motors and Procter & Gamble. Nothing in political history will have matched the relentless firepower of next fall’s living-room wars, no matter how close or lopsided the presidential horse-race polls are. And these presidential spots—whose clichéd look and stentorian tone are throwbacks to the 1980s—will only constitute part of the campaign ad clutter that helps explain why Americans hate politics. Watching the five p.m. news in a Louisville hotel room in late October 2010, I counted within a single hour thirty separate cookie-cutter political ads (covering the Kentucky Senate race, House contests in Kentucky and Indiana, the Louisville mayoral battle, assorted state legislators on both sides of the Ohio River, and probably a stray county coroner or drain commissioner), totaling fifteen minutes of the half-hour broadcast.

The 2010 off-year elections may soon be remembered as the good old days of spending restraint. It was not until midway through 2010 that independent groups began to fully exploit the loopholes opened up by the Citizens United Supreme Court decision and the lower-court rulings that followed in its wake.

Still, more than $3 billion was spent on political ads in 2010, with $2.3 billion going for broadcast television alone, according to the research firm PQ Media. Since a reasonable projection suggests that another $2 billion in TV ads will accompany the presidential race, it is easy to imagine that campaigns and independent groups will end up lavishing more than $5 billion on the TV component of Campaign 2012. Throw in another $2 billion or so for the other essential aspects of modern campaigning, from pollsters to direct-mail fund-raising, to an assistant press secretary for tweeting. The result: Politics Incorporated may well raise and spend over $7 billion this year, which would put the industry roughly on par with Visa. This is a far cry from the innocent days when Adlai Stevenson recoiled at advertising agencies selling presidential candidates like soap. But in a nation that lavishes $20 billion on pet food annually, moralistic shock about how much money is squandered on campaign advertising can be overwrought. Yes, political commercials generally have all the intellectual heft of the Kardashian family, but the enduring problem is not the lack of an ennobling political discourse between sitcoms. Rather, the real crisis facing American politics is what elected officials have to do to raise the money to pay for those ads.

That, roughly, is the theme of Lawrence Lessig’s stirring new book, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It. Lessig’s focus is on the legislative branch of government (12 percent job approval), but his argument is actually rooted in presidential politics. A passionate Obama partisan since their days together on the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School, Lessig is suffering the agonies of a true believer confronted with a godlike figure who failed. As Lessig puts it, “The idealist in me certainly could not believe that Obama would run a campaign grounded in ‘change’ yet execute an administration that changed nothing of the ‘way that Washington works.’ But the pragmatist in me also could not believe it.… Nothing close to the reform that Obama promised is possible under the current system.” In Lessig’s telling (and he is exceedingly charitable to the least populist Democratic president since Woodrow Wilson), Obama was upended by the desperate need to placate the special interests, which have a choke hold over congressional legislation. A prime illustration: Obama had to buy off the drug industry with new subsidies as a price for winning their grudging support during the titanic struggles over health care legislation. Lessig’s apologia for Obama contains a whiff of “ If the tsar only knew …” The author, now a Harvard Law School professor, also does not fully appreciate the degree to which Obama’s second term, if it occurs, is already hemmed in by the president’s determination to raise about $1 billion for his reelection campaign and the coordinated activities of the Democratic National Committee. Karl Rove has reveled in correctly pointing out that Obama has already attended twice as many reelection fund-raisers as George W. Bush did at a similar point in the calendar eight years ago. On a typical evening in early November, Obama made a pilgrimage to a high-roller fund-raiser (minimum donation: $17,900 per person) at the Washington home of Dwight Bush, a health care executive with a lengthy background on Wall Street, and his wife, Antoinette Bush, a partner at the blue-chip mergers-and-acquisitions law firm Skadden Arps. In short, these are precisely the wrong people for a beleaguered president to be visiting at a time of nearly 9 percent unemployment and Occupy Wall Street rage against the financial elite. At the beginning of his brief remarks to the forty-five Democratic donors gathered in the Bush backyard, Obama declared, “I want to spend some time just in a conversation with you and answering some questions and getting your feedback.” (Washington backyard fundraisers, by the way, are a comparative bargain: New York donors had to pay a minimum of $35,800 each to attend a small dinner with Obama at the Gotham Bar and Grill in late November.

Presumably, there was no cash bar.) Every president lives in a cocoon, almost never talking to anyone without an appointment. People who give upward of $18,000 to the Obama reelection effort get as their reward a few minutes of seemingly casual, intimate conversation with the president. The danger of such access, in the popular imagination, is that donors will demand and extract explicit quid pro quos—like fixing a corporate tax problem with the IRS. But that is not the way that American politics has worked since the days of Richard Nixon. The real problem is that the inordinate time spent in the company of rich donors leads a president (Democrat or Republican) to absorb the concerns and worldview of those benefactors. Unlike most Americans, everyone at smallroom Obama fund-raisers has been treated extremely well by the twentyfirst- century economy. As a result, when these donors get a few moments with the president, they are far more likely to urge him to get tough with the deficit and rein in entitlement spending than they are to beseech him to reduce unemployment. This fiscal conservatism comes with the territory, even if big-ticket Democratic donors also worry about global warming, support gay rights, and want to go to the barricades to preserve Roe v. Wade. Since the days of Bill Clinton, I have always been amazed by how many wealthy Democratic donors sincerely believe that presidents treasure their policy advice. Presidents are adept at listening with laser-like eye contact as wealthy donors offer their theories about how America should be governed. Oddly enough, this altruistic policy advice tends toward recommendations like cutting the capital gains tax and lessening the burdens of Wall Street regulation.

This is the moment where I must offer the obligatory and truthful “Yes, Republicans are worse” sentence. But the problem is bipartisan. Indeed, gradually falling under the sway of big-time campaign donors is inevitable when political leaders—whatever their party affiliation or ideology—feel compelled to raise vast fortunes to pay for their campaigns.

Lessig sees the dilemma of democracy in much the same terms that Candidate Obama did in 2008—as a matter of the oversize power of lobbyists over Congress. But in Lessig’s shrewd argument, the problem with lobbyists today is not that they flout the law but rather that they slavishly obey it. The occasional Duke Cunningham (bribes for earmarks) and William Jefferson (cash bribes in the freezer) are the outliers, since Spiro Agnew-style cash corruption is mostly a thing of the past. “Yet when lobbying was this corrupt,” Lessig writes, “perhaps counter-intuitively, its effect was also self-limiting.… Lobbyists and members had to be discreet.” Now that lobbying is tightly regulated, and members of Congress rightly fear an unscheduled visit from the FBI, the entire process is far more insidious. These days, lobbyists prosper not from explicit quid pro quos but from the vague sense of obligation that accompanies campaign contributions and organized fund-raisers. They provide legislative and technical expertise (many lobbyists are former top Capitol Hill staffers or specialists in obscure but lucrative regulatory areas); they fund the leadership PACs that help keep legislators like John Boehner on the golf course; and they provide legislators with the ultimate safety net— the promise of a high-paying job if the voters ever turn rambunctious. In fact, Lessig quotes veteran Tennessee House Democrat Jim Cooper as worrying that too many of his colleagues “now view Capitol Hill as a stepping stone to life as a lobbyist.” Small wonder that when a reelection campaign to the House often costs upward of $2 million (not counting independent spending by outside groups), incumbents are understandably wary of doing anything to antagonize the particular lobbyists who are among their most dedicated fundraisers and, yes, friends. In the twenty-first-century Congress, fund-raising never stops, not even for senators at the beginning of a six-year term or House incumbents who just cruised to reelection by a lopsided margin. Lessig seizes on estimates that legislators spend more than 30 percent of their time dialing for dollars. As he writes, “For two or three or more hours every day, as a member fund-raises, she feels the effect of the ‘votes’ of funders.” This creates a type of tunnel vision, where the only voices a legislator hears belong to the wealthy or lobbyists—or party insiders screaming about the need to raise even more money. It is human nature—if you spend more than twenty hours each week making small talk with the affluent, it is hard not to identify with them and their concerns. Lessig’s dead-on understanding of how Congress fails to work has been shaped by his firsthand experience meeting with legislators as a legal expert arguing against electronic copyright statutes that benefit large corporations to the detriment of innovators. “The most striking feature of these exchanges was not that the members disagreed with me,” Lessig recalls. “It was that the members didn’t understand that there was another side to the issue. They had never heard it.” Three hours a day making small talk with would-be campaign donors cuts into the preparation time for even the most dedicated members of Congress.

Like most books fueled by outrage over our current system of funding campaigns, Republic, Lost loses its momentum when Lessig attempts to find a way to change the money-talks system. His notion is to convert the first $50 that everyone pays in federal taxes into “democracy vouchers” that would be given at the taxpayer’s discretion to candidates for federal office. If everyone participated (and they presumably would, because this would be, in effect, free money), these “democracy vouchers” could yield as much as $6 billion to pay for publicly funded campaigns. This would be enough of a subsidy, Lessig theorizes, that candidates in both parties would agree to accept no more than $100 contributions to augment these vouchers.

Without a doubt, the Lessig plan (which has been carefully designed to pass constitutional muster) would be a vast improvement over the current system—just as high-minded proposals for regulating handguns and curtailing the political power of the NRA would save lives. Alas, we live in the real world, in which new major campaign-reform legislation seems as much a liberal fantasy as effective handgun regulation. When it comes to reforming political finance, the core of the problem is that the same Congress that has prospered from the current system would be called upon to change it. To get around this obstacle, Lessig offers a series of impractical scenarios that range from protest candidates who bedevil incumbents in both parties with quixotic primary challenges to, yikes, a full-fledged constitutional convention. But ultimately Lessig admits that his democracy vouchers—even if they miraculously sprang into existence—would not eliminate the loopholes opened up by the Citizens United decision and its ripple effects. As he puts it with admirable in- tellectual honesty, “Even if we win the battle for funding reform, we could still lose the larger war.” The reason is that independent spending by super PACs and issue advocacy groups—funded by unlimited and, in some cases, undisclosed donations—could dwarf the $6 billion or so raised by democracy vouchers. The higher the percentage of overall campaign costs that comes from independent groups, the more candidates after the election are likely to feel beholden to them, even if there was no formal coordination during election season. The sad fate of the McCain-Feingold Act should remind us how quickly even the best reform legislation can be eviscerated by court decisions, regulatory permissiveness, and the creative ploys of political consultants. As a result, the Lessig plan would probably have the unintended consequence of moving the locus of power in politics from candidates and parties to independent groups on both the right and left.

Before we head for the window ledge in complete despair over the chances of even modest changes in the crass calculus that governs Washington, let us return to where we started—the roughly $1.5 billion that both 2012 presidential nominees will spend on TV ads. From the outset, the Obama political team has planned on bludgeoning his 2012 Republican rival into submission by massively outspending him. There may indeed be no connection between that resolve and the restraint that Obama and company displayed toward reining in Wall Street in 2009 and 2010, but a skeptic would be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

At minimum, the widespread suspicion that Obama is beholden to his campaign contributors both adds to the voters’ corrosive cynicism about government and accentuates Democratic disillusion with the president. Whatever the policy implications, it is undoubtedly true that as president (and as a 2008 candidate), Obama is exceedingly familiar with the color schemes and dimensions of certain Park Avenue living rooms. This assiduous presidential courting of the Democratic Party’s financial elite may ultimately bring in, say, an extra $100 million for the Obama campaign. But it is highly questionable whether the TV ads that money will buy will be enough to compensate for the politically damaging perceptions that flow from the president’s fund-raising ties to the mega-rich.

This is where most analyses of the problems flowing from our Gilded Age system of political finance end. It is as if the Wordsworth verse were simply “Getting, we lay waste our powers” rather than “Getting and spending.” And it is the spending side of the equation—what Politics Incorporated does with the money that candidates can mortgage their integrity to raise—that deserves equal scrutiny.

The dirty secret of major-league politics is that a significant portion of the money spent on TV spots is wasted. (Presidential primaries—especially during the early phase when candidates are introducing themselves to voters—are a rare exception to this general rule). The reason why voters are unmoved by most campaign spots in presidential campaigns is obvious: the effectiveness of television ads is inversely proportional to the amount of other information that voters have about the candidates. The presidential debates, the national conventions, and the incessant news coverage mean that few voters will lack a sharp sense of Obama and his Republican challenger. The 2012 election will be, more than anything, a referendum on Obama’s first four years in office. All the gauzy commercials in the world cannot erase the harsh economic memories of Obama’s first term. (When Ronald Reagan ran for reelection in 1984, the economy was roaring back at such a rapid pace that it justified the “Morning in America” spots that Ad Age later judged the best political commercials of the twentieth century.)

Okay, in an election as close as the one in 2000, it may be easy to imagine that the outcome could have hinged on a single TV ad (“Please be careful when you fill out your butterfly ballot. You don’t want to vote for Pat Buchanan by mistake”). But in most cases, commercials during the fall presidential election campaign are instantly forgettable. To illustrate: can you remember a single commercial aired by Obama or John McCain after the conventions in 2008? I have been covering presidential politics for four decades, and I couldn’t conjure up a single ad without prompting. Part of the explanation for the vapidity of these commercials is that, with the White House at stake and most decisions dictated by a committee, presidential campaigns tend to avoid anything risky or edgy, which is why political advertising is rarely as original as corporate spots.

Political reporters—relieved to be writing about an objective measurement like money raised—are often credulous when it comes to looking at campaign fundraising in isolation rather than linking it to how the money is likely to be actually spent. For example, many Democrats must have felt a bitter chill when the New York Times reported in mid-October,

Mitt Romney has raised far more money than Mr. Obama this year from the firms that have been among Wall Street’s top sources of donations for the two candidates. That gap underscores the growing alienation from Mr. Obama among many rank-andfile financial professionals and Mr. Romney’s aggressive and successful efforts to woo them.

You could just imagine loyal Democrats reading this and instantly lamenting the passage of Dodd-Frank. A few days later, the Washington Post responded with its own article, suggesting that Obama was doing fine in fund-raising among the financial elite when you also count the money donated to the Democratic National Committee for the 2012 campaign. But the Post story also overhyped the gravity of this financial competition: “The battle for Wall Street cash has become a crucial subtext in the 2012 campaign.”

This is ludicrous—voters in Colorado and Florida are “a crucial subtext” in the 2012 campaign. Financiers, no matter how intense their yen for politics, are comparatively bit players. Obama is going to corral so much money for his 2012 campaign that $75 million (a guess at the upper limit of the potentially lost swag from Wall Street) is little more than a rounding error. Sure, there are moments in politics when $10 million or $3 million represent the difference between a raucous election-night victory party and a wake. If Tim Pawlenty, for example, had had $3 million more in the bank at the time of the Iowa straw poll, he would never have dropped out of the GOP race. In a photo-finish Senate race, an extra $5 million can make all the difference. These orders of magnitude rapidly change when you get into the fall presidential campaign. What is misguided about both the Times and the Post stories is that the reporters assume that every single dollar in a presidential campaign shapes the outcome. As a result, the implicit message of this kind of journalism is insidious—that by not completely kowtowing to Wall Street, Obama risks losing the White House.

It is a mistake for political reporters to look at campaign fund-raising totals as if they tell the whole story. Not all campaigns are equally parsimonious in how they deploy their fiscal resources; there is, for example, wide variation in how much consultants take home for producing the ads, conducting the polls, plotting overall strategy, and shepherding the big-donor fund-raising. The finances of campaign consultants remain the biggest continuing mystery in politics. The press pack is often a tiger in its ferocious coverage of politicians, but it becomes a pussycat when it comes to the consultants, who are often invaluable sources. The result is that the personal finances and business arrangements of consultants in both parties are considered a private matter beyond public scrutiny.

This is admittedly difficult information to obtain even for the most hardnosed political reporter. The Federal Election Commission is meticulous about detailing the source of all money brought in by candidates and party committees. But the FEC’s reporting requirements have always been lax when it comes to disclosing where the money goes. The October 2008 spending disclosures by the Obama campaign—which I have picked at random—include slightly more than $1 million paid to Tiger Eye Productions, an Ohio fund-raising firm. There is no way to tell from that line item precisely what the money went toward and what profit Tiger Eye made on the deal. The same is true for the $262,000 that went to the Philadelphia mediaconsulting firm Shorr Johnson Magnus. Most of the Obama funds this late in the campaign were being transferred to state parties ($419,000 to Pennsylvania Democrats, $1 million to the Ohio party). What happened to the money after that—and who the media consultants were who benefited from what was presumably TV spending—is untraceable.

Please understand, I am not accusing the Obama campaign of anything unethical or outside the norms of politics. (Though I am a tad curious about the $1,280 that was spent at Thomas Keller’s signature Napa Valley restaurant, the French Laundry.) The larger point is that the fee structure of any campaign dictates how much of the money from donors ends up paying for prep schools for the media consultant’s children and an addition to the strategist’s beach house. In traditional political campaigns, the media consultant corrals as much as 15 percent of the overall television ad buy as his fee. And that is in addition to production costs and a possible victory bonus. The frequent result: out of every $1,000 donated to a candidate, less than $850 is spent on campaigning. Often general strategists and pollsters are brought in to share the media fee so that no one on the campaign team has economic incentive to complain at meetings with the candidate that so much money is going for TV advertising. Given how much compensation is wrapped up in the campaign’s media budget, it probably is not surprising that political candidates remain the ultimate true believers in the power of television ads in an era of social media and YouTube. These days— especially in presidential campaigns— this t radit ional fee st ructure has been downsized and some consultants (ssshhhh) even work on negotiated flatrate terms. But there is no way for a donor or a reporter to know whether the Obama reelection campaign will be more frugal in its payments to consultants than, say, the Romney campaign. The problem of rapacious consultants remains far more acute in House and Senate campaigns. I have had a series of recent off-the-record conversations with political operatives in both parties who identify specific ad makers as notorious for charging high fees and padding production costs while simultaneously producing ineffective commercials. But like doctors who are prone to misdiagnose, these media consultants mask their incompetence with an engaging bedside manner that wins the trust of candidates. Congressional incumbents often demonstrate their loyalty by sticking with the same consultants who ran their initial winning campaigns, regardless of fee structure. Moreover, when a senator spends three hours on a Wednesday afternoon in a cubicle at party headquarters coldcalling would-be donors, a fund-raising consultant is probably raking off a hefty percentage of the amount raised.

Over the years, I have written several indignant articles about the ways that campaign consultants prosper from the naïveté of candidates and major donors. Much to my surprise in our politics-obsessed culture, these pieces garnered all the reaction of a threepart series on the proper use of the adverb in contemporary Urdu. In hindsight, the problem of overcompensated campaign consultants came across as a victimless crime. After all, who’s going to weep for Hollywood executives, Washington lobbyists, and corporate chieftains whose campaign donations have been squandered?

In truth, the real victims are not the well-heeled donors but every candidate with a shred of idealism who falls under the sway of his or her campaign consultants. Let me explain the connection—and how it relates back to a problem that was identified so shrewdly and so depressingly by Lessig. The most tainted money in politics is not the first million that a candidate raises but the last. The more desperate a candidate, the more willing he is to put ethical beliefs in a blind trust and accept money that comes with winkand- nod strings attached. As Lessig writes, “Influence happens on the margin, and the most powerful are the contributors who stand there.” The more money that the press and the consultants claim is required to run a competitive race, the more likely a candidate is going to brush up against the yellow line to get it. That is what has been happening in recent years as the cost of running for president or for the Senate and the House has doubled or even tripled since 2004.

The depressing result is twentyfirst- century electoral politics—where money talks and everyone else listens. Is this political fundraising system completely impervious to nonlegislative change? Maybe, just maybe, demanding that c ampaigns publicly release the i r cont rac tua l a r – rangements with consultants could put the brakes on the current hyperinflation in the cost of running for major public office. The press certainly lacks the power to obtain these records, and campaigns themselves are unlikely to practice voluntary disclosure beyond what is required by the FEC. But there is one group that may have the market power to change the way that campaigns conduct their internal financial business. Wealthy ideological givers in both parties who live outside the Washington lobbying community should have no incentive to see their money blown on overpaid and underperforming political consultants. Such donors would not tolerate this sort of hidden insider dealing when supporting an art museum or a university. Why should they be any less responsible in their political philanthropy?

This is not a panacea, just a way to begin to bend the cost curve of politics. Believe it or not, there probably is a ceiling on the amount of money that can be effectively spent on political campaigns. Both Meg Whitman and Linda McMahon squandered nearrecord amounts on their 2010 campaigns and still lost despite the GOP tidal wave. Despite spending more than $100 million (or about $200 per vote), Michael Bloomberg won reelection to a third term with just 51 percent support. Putting aside these self-funders (plus the star-crossed Jon Corzine), the evidence suggests that many senators and congressmen in both parties are frustrated with the insatiable demands of the permanent fund-raising campaign. Maybe someday enough of them will rebel against constantly calling strangers whose names appear on fund-raising call sheets and demand that their high-priced consultants construct a winning campaign for less money.

Like Lessig, I despair over our current dollar-driven deadlock of democracy. And like Lessig, I may be guilty of clutching at straws in my hopes for even incremental change. But the ultimate responsibility for the current system lies with elected officials from Barack Obama to the Tea Party zealots who dominate the freshman class in Congress.

They are the ones who “approve this message” on shrill, deceitful, and often ineffective campaign spots. They are the ones who have allowed themselves to be convinced that making the moral compromises demanded by the current fund-raising system is their only way to return to office. And too often, they are the ones who have been played for suckers by their campaign consultants. In fact, maybe we can start of a rebellion by major donors and candidates united under the banner “I am not a schnook.”

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“I would say, or my staff would say, to him or her, at some point, ‘You know, when you’re done working on the Hill, we’d very much like for you to consider coming to work for us.’ Now, when I said that to them, or any one of our staff said that to them, that was it. We owned them.”

Abramoff was far from the only Washington lobbyist to dangle the prospect of future employment as an incentive for public officials to “cooperate.” It is a common practice, though often done with more subtlety, with a hint or two being enough. Indeed, a future job in return for favorable action by a public official has become such a common practice in some agencies that not even a hint is needed. The job is simply expected as a matter of course. Consider the case of the SEC employee whose wife testified, during their divorce hearing, that he had boasted to her about how she shouldn’t worry about the future because whenever he left the agency, he was certain to be able to cash in with one of the companies he now regulated.

Abramoff has a solution for this problem— at least for congressmen and their staffs: prohibit them from ever becoming lobbyists. I agree and would do the same for all federal employees. This solution is usually dismissed as too draconian, but believe it or not, congressmen once went home when they were defeated. And remember that they, and federal employees, have among the nation’s most generous retirement plans.

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I say all this not because I don’t like, even delight in, Bill Clinton, but because I fear the contrast to Obama in their minds contributes to the “since Obama has flaws, we can’t get excited about supporting him” attitude that seems to consume too many liberals.

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