The history of interns and fellatio in the White House

Book out today.

I have never been among those who are given to  adoration of John F. Kennedy.  Or any other president, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln.  I may approve of their political actions and admire their intelligence, but have reservations about certain aspects of their lives.   It was so with John Kennedy.  Like a friend on Pine Ridge, I found the entire myth of Camelot in America an embrace of medieval pageantry that contradicted what America was founded to be and wanted to become.  My Pine Ridge friend asks if one can point out what relevance King Arthur, knights in shining armor, and damsels in castle towers could have for Indians other than to identify the source of their oppression.  The same question can be asked by any American whose family history emerges from the "huddled masses." 

My occupation put me in a situation in which I knew about things going on during the Kennedy years.  I was a section editor for a newspaper, and within days after the assassination of President Kennedy, I was in Chicago with a large gathering of other editors and reporters for major newspapers.  In those years, the day after Thanksgiving was the start of two huge  events of importance to rural America that took place in Chicago each year:  the National 4-H Club Congress and the International Livestock Show.  Farm editors and writers came to cover those  events and spent a hectic and exhausting week running back and forth between the Conrad Hilton Hotel and the International Amphitheater, filing stories and photos to their home publications.

The refuge from the frantic was the press  room at the International Livestock Show.  There was a free bar there and a lavish buffet sponsored by the Meat Board.   The lunches were not to be missed, but it was also a place where one could take a break over a cup of coffee and chat with ones colleagues from news organizations throughout the nation.  In 1963, much of the talk was about the assassination of the President and the kind of life he lived.  Many of the reporters had Washington assignments at times and knew the White House press corps.  Some of them had contact with the Kennedys in various contexts and had personal experiences to relate.  But something that the conversation kept coming back to was John Kennedy's extra-curricular affairs with women and the fact that so many people knew about them.  The White House made little effort to keep them discreet, and the press knew about them and could name times, places, and names.  


A news service photographer I came to know quite well had White House credentials which were revoked.  They were revoked because he took and published a picture of Jackie Kennedy at a banquet with a cigarette in her hand.  Photographers had been warned never to do that, but my friend managed to get an unusually good shot and forgot about the prohibition as he put the photo on the wires.  The next time he showed up for a White House assignment, he was informed that he no longer had credentials and was refused entry.  


He said he  was not surprised.  He called Jackie Kennedy a super-bourgeois bitch who spent much time venting her ire and revenge on people who did not show her a groveling deference.  Few of his encounters with her were pleasant, as she instructed the press on how she wanted her image presented.


Another reporter, who had worked in Boston, claimed that when a Boston newspaper did not support Kennedy in his run for the Senate, his father bought the newspaper.  And another told a story of a photo opportunity in the White House with a physically and mentally challenged person and the President seemed to register some distaste in posing for it. 


I hasten to stress that these conversations did not reflect disapproval or approval of the Kennedys.  They simply reflected the facts of life that reporters lived with.  The real significance is that the press did not mention President Kennedy's dalliances.  At the time, publishing such stories would have offended the readers to the point of cancelling subscriptions.  Thirty-five years later when Bill Clinton dallied with Monica Lewinsky, reporters could not wait to get the stories in print and readers could not wait to read them. 


The press in my time was cynical and skeptical about people who held power.  We kept our reporting focused their official jobs, not on their extra-curricular activities.  As I said, the big reason was that tabloid-like stories were not permissible in family newspapers at the time.  There was also quite a different attitude about how far one should probe into a person's private life, whether a public figure or not.  A different standard was applied to the right to privacy than is today.  


The news media did not set the rules but reflected the standards held by the general public.  Today while anything goes on the national stage, quite different standards apply at the regional level.  I have been told of dalliances involving state officials, including names, dates, and places, but never a hint of them has been broached by the South Dakota news media.  As I say, people of power are allowed to operate by different standards than the rest of us.  As a business reporter, I knew some CEOs and corporate officials who were incorrigible reprobates.  The most perfidious person I have ever known was a university president.  However, the press never felt compelled, and for the most part still doesn't, to inform the public of the kind of people they are, even though they control much of what goes on in public.

Mimi Alford and her paramour.

Today is the release date for a book by a young White House intern who, at the age of 19, had an affair with John Kennedy.  It is Once Upon a Secret:  My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and It's Aftermath, by Mimi Alford.  It will revive many of those questions that the reporters in the press room at the International Livestock Show were discussing in 1963.  It will raise the question about why some very powerful and attractive people are given license, and others are condemned for the happenstance of their birth.  


Today's press is still very selective about whose personal lives it chooses to intrude upon.   I, for one, do not enjoy reading about personal betrayals inside families.  On the other hand, some basic issues of character about leaders that we should know are revealed.  But the character that is revealed the most is that of the people who dwell on other people's lapses and flaws of character.  And that seems to be a majority today.  




A New York Times book review link. 

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go yell slurs at women outside Planned Parenthood.**

 **From The Onion. 


The Washington Post constructed this chart to show the actual work done by Planned Parenthood in response to the Susan G. Komen Foundation fiasco.  

The right wing furor to discredit Planned Parenthood, as you can note, is based upon only three percent of what the organization actually does.  Contraception advice comprises 35 percent and is a big offense to the right wing because it actually allows women to plan and manage their own lives. 


Sixty-one percent of the organization's work is other women's health services. 

S.E.C. Is Avoiding Tough Sanctions for Large Banks

That's the headline in The New York Times.

By granting exemptions to laws and regulations that act as a deterrent to securities fraud, the S.E.C. has let financial giants like JPMorganChase, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America continue to have advantages reserved for the most dependable companies, making it easier for them to raise money from investors, for example, and to avoid liability from lawsuits if their financial forecasts turn out to be wrong.  

In the current state of inequality, some criminals are too big to hold accountable for their crimes.

Who cares about the very poor? They have a net.

It's called death.

On one section of the reservation, people must boil drinking water because chemicals, possibly the result of the oil and natural gas drilling method known as hydraulic fracturing, have contaminated the water supply. And fearing the chemicals might explode in a home, the Environmental Protection Agency ordered residents to run fans and otherwise ensure ventilation while bathing or washing clothes.

From a New York Times story on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming.  The crime fighting efforts that worked at Standing Rock in North and South Dakota did not work there.

 A photo gallery here.

Deconstruction of the nation

Robert V. Remini:  a chronicler of compromise as a political necessity.

During a recent election campaign, I stopped in at the printers to pick up some work they did for the party.  As I approached the service desk, I simply told the clerk "Brown County Democrats."  A woman behind me suddenly exploded with a sneering "Democrats!"  And she proceeded to rage with a litany of all the foul things she thought Democrats were,  none of which had any basis in fact, but were the features of some odious stereotype with which she lived.  The printer heard her and motioned me over to a side room, as he prepared the bill for the materials.  "No one who comes in here needs to be abused," he said.  We left the clerk behind the front desk to be the recipient of the woman's tirade.  

That encounter was indicative of what the media call the divisiveness that is rending the nation apart.  And it is not a unique instance, as people recount confrontations they experience over partisan politics constantly.  A pastor has told of the effects partisan politics has had within his church, and all the attempts to advise the congregation to put aside its partisan ideologies when they come to church fall on deaf ears.  He said people much prefer to  rage at each other than to quietly listen to the words of peace and conciliation from Christ.

However, that encounter also illustrates a gross misperception that the media advances.  The customary view advanced by news organizations is that national leaders shape the public attitudes and perceptions.   In fact, leaders feed on and serve the attitudes and notions they find in the public.  Occasionally, a leader occurs who inspires change in public attitudes, but most politicians try to shape themselves to fit the dominant public attitudes.  While Congress and the bureaucracy has its faults, the people ultimately determine who represents them and the character of the country.  At the present time, the USA suffers from some grave defects of character.  That woman at the printers portrays what America has become. 

The issue was raised in a recent Washington Post article headlined: 

Obama: The most polarizing president. Ever. 

The piece does qualify that headline with the assertion:  "While it’s easy to look at the numbers cited above [a Gallup Poll citing the growing polarization of the USA] and conclude that Obama has failed at his mission of bringing the country together, a deeper dig into the numbers in the Gallup poll suggests that the idea of erasing the partisan gap is simply impossible, as political polarization is rising rapidly."

Nevertheless, the article raised the ire of a staff member for the Senate Majority Leader whose rebuttal was published.  While he took exception to the thrust of the article, he conceded that events thwarted Obama in his quest for political comity:  "I guess the larger point that I am trying to make is that President Obama should not be blamed for the sharply polarized tone of the current political process because Republicans have made such an aggressive shift to the right. Or, put slightly differently, the President CAN be blamed for his unwillingness to go further to right than the American people are comfortable with — and for that he has been demonized and vilified by the right." 

In the midst of the debate steps an old professor from the University of Illinois in Chicago who is a historian of the pre-Civil War era in American history.  I am acquainted with Prof. Remini who was featured this weekend on C-Span's BookTV in discussing his book At the Edge of Precipice: Henry Clay and the Compromise that Saved the Union.  Dr. Remini, who has been historian for the U.S. House of Representatives, at the age of 91 is still an engaging speaker whose lectures are almost choreographed as he strolls back and forth on the stage engaging his audience.  His prefacing remarks stressed the point that Henry Clay shaped and concluded a compromise in the U.S. Senate that made it possible to preserve the union of the states and, therefore, the nation through and after the Civil War.  His point was that compromise is an essential tool of governing, but is not understood today.  Compromise is regarded as a surrender of values and principles, not the working out of solutions that conciliate differences, not require one group to subject itself to the demands of another.  As Prof. Remini points out, the U.S. Constitution is, in fact, the compilation of compromises on a number of sensitive points.   As the pastor observes about his congregation, the American people would rather rage at each other than find ways to accommodate each others interests and viewpoints and find ways to get along. 

The Washington Post article makes reference to a lengthy analysis of Obama's decision to shift from advocating comity to aggressive personal confrontation in his primary contest with Hillary Clinton.  The article, which has received much attention from serious students of politics, is by Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker.  The Post article quotes this point by Lizza:

The Republican Party has drifted much farther to the right than the Democratic Party has drifted to the left. Jacob Hacker, a professor at Yale, whose 2006 book, ‘Off Center,’ documented this trend, told me, citing Poole and Rosenthal’s data on congressional voting records, that, since 1975, ‘Senate Republicans moved roughly twice as far to the right as Senate Democrats moved to the left’ and ‘House Republicans moved roughly six times as far to the right as House Democrats moved to the left.’” In other words, the story of the past few decades is asymmetric polarization.

Lizza goes on to cite a new book by Thomas Mann, of the bipartisan Brookings Institution, and Norman Ornstein, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks:

 One of our two major parties, the Republicans, has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

Lizza concludes:

It would be hard for any President to reverse this decades-long political trend, which began when segregationist Democrats in the South—Dixiecrats like Strom Thurmond—left the Party and became Republicans. Congress is polarized largely because Americans live in communities of like-minded people who elect more ideological representatives. Obama’s rhetoric about a nation of common purpose and values no longer fits this country: there really is a red America and a blue America.

As a new President, Obama did not anticipate how effectively his political opponents would cast him as a polarizing figure.

David Brooks in The New York Times takes up the issue of the nation's polarization, which he calls the "great divorce," as he recounts another book on the subject,   Coming Apart by Charles Murray.  Brooks says:

The word “class” doesn’t even capture the divide Murray describes. You might say the country has bifurcated into different social tribes, with a tenuous common culture linking them.

Murray’s story contradicts the ideologies of both parties. Republicans claim that America is threatened by a decadent cultural elite that corrupts regular Americans, who love God, country and traditional values. That story is false. The cultural elites live more conservative, traditionalist lives than the cultural masses.

Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite, who hog society’s resources. But that’s a distraction. The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent. The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.

Among those who study and think about politics, there is, then, a growing consensus that does, in fact, cross party lines that the country is dividing itself again along lines not seen since the Civil War.  The trend as noted puts the 2012 election in a much different light than choosing who will preside over the country.  All the authors cited above see the preservation of the nation as what is at stake.  So, the question inevitably arises as to who, if anyone, can lead the nation back into a functional unity.

I will further heap the majority of the blame, as the writers cited above do, on the Republican Party and those it serves.  The people who have put on the primary campaigns and debates this month have clearly disqualified themselves as having any interest in mediating the concerns of the country.  The primary process did eliminate an alarming dingbat caucus from its ranks as Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain dropped out of contention, after demonstrating uncanny inabilities to handle facts.   But those who remain have put on "debate" performances, campaign appearances, and advertising onslaughts that make the sleaziest of the television reality shows look like high culture.   Does anyone who really cares for the country want anyone who operates on this intellectual and moral level to run the nation?

That would seem to leave Obama as the only option.   Ryan Lizza takes an optimistic view:

Obama promised to transcend forty years of demographic and ideological trends and reshape Washington politics. In the past three years, though, he has learned that the Presidency is an office uniquely ill-suited for enacting sweeping change. Presidents are buffeted and constrained by the currents of political change. They don’t control them.

 

Obama didn’t remake Washington. But his first two years stand as one of the most successful legislative periods in modern history. Among other achievements, he has saved the economy from depression, passed universal health care, and reformed Wall Street. Along the way, Obama may have changed his mind about his 2008 critique of Hillary Clinton. “Working the system, not changing it” and being “consumed with beating” Republicans “rather than unifying the country and building consensus to get things done” do not seem like such bad strategies for success after all.

But Lizza's article contains a huge cautionary note.  That note is in the account of Obama revived his campaign against Hillary Clinton by going on the personal attack:  the "campaign was entirely a character attack on Hillary as a liar and untrustworthy. It wasn’t an ‘issue contrast,’ it was entirely personal.   And, of course, it worked."

Of course, it worked.  And that is the caveat about bringing any unity to a country so bitterly divided.  When political strategists are questioned about negative personal campaigns, they always reply, they work. The fact that ad hominem campaigns work says much more about the declination of the electorate than about the shrewdness of the strategists.  A possible majority of the people either do not possess the level of literacy that allows them to understand the fallacies in negative, personal attacks or their political choice is simply not to care.

If Obama allows himself to get drawn into the kind of campaign being put on by Romney and Gingrich,  the intellectual and moral loss will devastate the nation.  If he does not participate in the kind of pandering dissembling of Willard Romney, he may well lose the election.  But at least he would preserve some element of human integrity that a segment of the population might use to rebuild their lives in other circumstances.  And we can study the examples of conciliation put forth by people like Professor Remini. 

The Occupy movement remains as the most positive political force, despite the fact it has been infiltrated by some violent and criminal elements.  The nature of the divide in the nation is one that is headed for the viciousness and violence of the French Revolution.  The Occupy people who have shown a peaceful but persistent civil disobedience offer a way to deconstruct the nation, if that becomes necessary, gently and without the violent fury of those who seek power and domination over other people.

The current campaign within the Republican Party has revived Obama as a symbol of hope.  The arguments over health care, deficits, regulation, and wars are insignificant from the perspective of whether the union is to be maintained.

For people like the woman at the printers who tried to confront me, the union probably does not matter.  She is a reminder that whoever gets elected this November is irrelevant.  It's the people who will make the decision whether this nation is to continue or finally give up the great experiment in democracy and concede its failure. 

Freddie Mac bets against homeowners

NPR and ProPublica have found that Freddie Mac, which is chartered to facilitate home ownership, has used its investments to bet on the failure of homeowners.  Here is the opening of the story at NPR, which you can read in its entirety through this link:

Freddie Mac, a taxpayer-owned mortgage company, is supposed to make homeownership easier. One thing that makes owning a home more affordable is getting a cheaper mortgage.

But Freddie Mac has invested billions of dollars betting that U.S. homeowners won't be able to refinance their mortgages at today's lower rates, according to an investigation by NPR and ProPublica, an independent, nonprofit newsroom.

These investments, while legal, raise concerns about a conflict of interest within Freddie Mac.

Stalking the poor teachers

A couple of sentences from an editorial in the Rapid City Journal typifies what has become a cliche: "We can support an initiative that rewards good teachers and roots out poor ones. School districts need a way to get rid of poor teachers, and if ending tenure helps accomplish this, it will be a welcome change."

 The current wisdom is that our public schools are impeded by a horde of bad teachers and all we have to do to improve education is fire them.  Which means getting rid of union contracts which require that firings be done for cause with procedures of due process to  make the case.  

 The issue is, just who are these bad teachers?  What are they doing or not doing that make them bad teachers?  


Colleges of education were the main controls on the quality of teaching in the past.  Students had to meet academic and behavioral standards to be admitted into teacher education.  Once admitted, their performance was carefully monitored and their student teaching experiences were carefully evaluated to insure that they would be effective teachers.  One of the most difficult jobs professors had was to redirect a few students into different careers when it became apparent that they were not effective as teachers.  Students who could not maintain the required grade average were simply dropped from the teacher education program.  But for some, problems showed up during their student internships as teachers.  Those problems often were matters of classroom management and discipline, not intellectual competence.


In the 1990s, we professors were confronted with some changes in South Dakota.  We noticed that our best students in education were hired out-of-state.  I recall writing letters of recommendation to schools on the West Coast, Nevada, Arizona, Florida, other upper Midwest states, and New England.  What was attracting our students to other places was better pay, better administrators, and cultural opportunities. 

 A U.S. Dept. of Education list shows teacher shortages for the 1990=91 school year in South Dakota only in  two areas:  gifted and special  education.

However, the shortages in the state for recent years have grown considerably:

2007-08

Foreign Language (K-12)
Math (7-12)
Music (K-12)
Science (7-12)
Special Education (K-12)
Speech Pathologists

2008-09 thru 2011-12

Art (K-12)
Career & Technical Education (7-12)
English as a New Language (K-12)
Health (K-12)
Language Arts (7-12)
Mathematics (7-12)
Music (K-12)
Physical Education (K-12)
Science (7-12)
Social Science (7-12)
Special Education (K-12)
Speech Pathologists
World Languages (K-12)

The shortages affected teacher education in two major ways.  The first was that school boards were asking for "provisional certifications"  so that teachers could teach in subject areas for which they had insufficient or no training.  The second was that in order to get a sufficient number of students into teacher education, colleges of education and professors in the subject area disciplines were asked to relax or change the standards.  During my last years of teaching, I and my colleagues, noted a very significant change in the levels of talent in those in the teacher education program.  

There were instances of shock in some cases.  After student teaching experiences, some students whom we assumed would find top teaching jobs informed us that they decided not to go into teaching.  They found that they and their supervising teachers spent an inordinate amount of time dealing with discipline problems so that little was devoted to teaching the subject matter.  And they found school bureaucracies to be absurd.  And as teachers retired, a significant number indicated that they would not choose teaching as a career if they had it to do over again.  This attitude, as reflected in polls taken by professional education organizations, stemmed from the classroom management problems and the attitude of the public toward teachers.
 
In the schemes to improve education, these trends are never discussed, even though a number of organizations and agencies have noted them and their effects.  The notion that education can be improved by identifying good teachers and giving them more money and identifying bad teachers and firing them only intensifies the diminishing of education as a profession anyone wants to pursue.  


The editorial in the Rapid City Journal indicates how badly the press performs in observing and reporting what is really going on in our schools.  The Governor's proposed legislation to award merit pay and abolish continuing contracts provides another big reason why a talented and conscientious person would not go into education.


When asking the people who promote merit pay and firings as the way to improve education just who the bad teachers are, their response is that the evaluation process will reveal them.  And when one examines the proposed evaluation procedures, one finds fatuous silliness on the part of the educational bureaucracies that design them.  They try to apply business world evaluation processes, not noting that those processes have not worked in the business world.  The lavish and ridiculously extravagant bonuses given CEOs and executives is a form of merit pay, and one need only observe what those bonuses have done for the country.  


The legislature and other groups are raging about making it easier to fire teachers, but they are ignoring how hard it is getting to find people to fire.  Smart people are not going into education that is being ruled over by so many truly stupid people.  


It is not the teachers who are causing the failures in public education.  But the governments and the public want to expend their efforts on blaming them.