SEVEN DAYS IN MAY

In my early teens, growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, I was a regular reader of Fletcher Knebel’s political humor column, Potomac Fever, which ran in The Plain Dealer. So, when the film version of Seven Days in May was recommended to me recently, I knew the reference although I had neither read the book nor viewed the movie. My interlocutor had just watched the film, and on the eve of President Trump’s Flag Day 2025 birthday parade found it disturbing. “What if those 60,000 troops don’t go home?” I have since read the book and watched the movie.

You might think that it can’t happen here or maybe you think that it already has. Fascism’s militaristic vestments notwithstanding, like Communism, it is a civilian republican theory of government. While military rule survives in some nations today, the rise of republicanism after the Enlightenment made it exceptional for the head of state to be the active commander of the armed forces. (The powers and duties of the President are defined in Article II Section 2 of the Constitution.)  

The last significant example of a head of state commanding an army in the field was Louis Napoleon III of France who was captured by the Prussians at Sedan in 1870. Previously, Napoleon III had successfully commanded the French at the Battle of Solferino; the army of their ally, Piedmont-Sardinia, was commanded by Vittorio Emanuele II, later king of the newly unified Italy. Significantly, no emperors were in the field for World War I.

George Washington defined the paradigmatic corollary of a general (or admiral) becoming the head of state through civilian electoral process. Of the 45 US Presidents only 14 had no prior military service. The two short lists of exceptions  run: Taft, Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, and Roosevelt; and then: Clinton, Obama, Biden, and Trump. 

When I read the book, the characters seemed unreal to me until I removed myself and accepted that the authors were accomplished journalists and therefore, these portrayals were derived from their own experiences, being composites or sketches of actual people. My personal experience had been that in public you call a colonel “Colonel” rather than “Jiggs” no matter how well you know them. Clearly, the previous age was a different time. 

As to whether a military coup d’etat could happen here, this story may have been influenced by the events in France in 1961, with over thirty attempts on the life of Charles de Gaulle, a military putsch in Algeria, and the threat of civil war within metropolitan France. 

“How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?” 

— Charles de Gaulle.

As for the storyline of the conspiracy itself, it seemed to me that the refusal of the Chief of Naval Operations to go along would have required his removal and replacement by the conspirators. They could not have moved forward while lacking one of the other Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

The President’s summary speeches in front of the White House reporters for the major news media also encapsulated another problem with the tale, in effect asking rhetorically, “What was their plan for the day after tomorrow?” Once you have captured and isolated the President and Vice President, then what? The Constitution has no provision for that. The order of succession was fixed by law, but in this story, the generals did not intend to install the Speaker of the House. They intended to rule directly by martial law. How and when they intended to stop ruling was never clear in the story. 

That  raises the deeper question of whether and to what extent the People would accept military rule. The movie version did show Gen. James M. Scott being wildly popular among some factions, especially at a mass rally of  the American Veterans Organization. The cinema version opened with a scuffle between pro-Gen. Scott and pro-Pres. Lyman supporters picketing the White House. It is easy to transpose that to January 6, 2021. Following the dreamland fantasy in which the rioters succeeded in hanging Vice President Mike Pence, certifying their own election results, declaring Donald Trump the President, following which he rides down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol and assumes office—then what? How long could that situation have remained stable? 

If Seven Days in May echoed the crisis in France, that model depended specifically on the personality of Charles de Gaulle, who had been a public literary figure and a charismatic politician within the military even before World War I. Of Gen. James M. Scott, we had only a sketchy portrait of a decorated air ace. In the book, more context was developed to set the story a few years in its future, from 1963 to 1972, following a military failure in Iran and its partitioning. To me, that was not enough to sell Gen. Scott to the reader as the Man of the Hour, though in the book, the line is offered that every twenty years, we seek a man on a white horse.

It Can’t Happen Here

It Has Happened Here

In our world of 1968, Gov. George Wallace received 46 electoral votes. That was perhaps the only modern challenge to mainstream politics until the ascendency of Donald Trump. Wallace’s choice of Gen. Curtis LeMay as his running mate was problematic on several grounds and did little to help the campaign. (See Wikipedia on the 1968 Wallace campaign.) Furthermore, it is salient that Donald Trump’s vice president was, indeed, the very person who refused to certify his 2020 election and thereby became a target for the January 6 rioters, perhaps personifying the distinction between traditionalist and populist conservatism in America. 

Contrary to the plot of Sinclair Lewis’s warning, the actual attempt at a fascist coup in America came not from a populist groundswell but from a Wall Street cabal, the 1933 "Business Plot." Now, our hillbilly Vice President starred at Yale Law School and worked for a venture capital firm before entering Ohio politics. So, comparisons and contrasts are at once parallel and skew, depending on your perspective. And four dimensions might not be enough for an accurate projection onto our political Flatland. 

The State of Texas just enacted a law to require that the Ten Commandments be posted in every public school classroom. It was quickly challenged in court by self-identified Christian leaders. 

In other news, the State House and Senate passed a new bill to ban marijuana gummies and drinks and the Governor vetoed it, calling them back into session to write a law that can be enforced to the benefit of the State via taxes and regulation.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Book Review: Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny” 

I Stopped Listening to NPR 

The GOP as Pushy Beggars 

Morality and the Philosophy of Science 

Against Gulching 

Where are the Augurs?

Originally, the Romans were seven hilltop villages under Etruscan domination. The nominally Roman deities Minerva, Mercury, and Vulcan were Etruscan. The Romans eventually ascended, absorbing their Tuscan, Latin, Samnite, and Greek neighbors.

The words in red come from Latin. This is based on a poster
in a classroom at Lincoln High School in Cleveland where
Nida Glick taught Latin for many years before my time.
(During WWII, she was a cryptologist. See her biography at
 https://www.military.com/coast-guard/lt-cmdr-nida-glick-uscgr.html )

The Roman Senate was only the topmost assembly. While the Roman Senate was culturally conservative, it also could be fickle when making and repealing laws. As the republic matured over decades, lifetimes, and centuries, young men ascended through increasingly responsible (and therefore powerful) appointments in public service. Being the moneyer for two years let you get your name out there for people to see, typically by honoring the public service of an ancestor.

 

Jean-Antoine Houdon's George Washington (left)
and Horatio Greensnborough's George Washington (right).
Washington was called "The Father of His Country" by
people who had been educated to read Latin.

When political conservatives insist that we are a republic and not a democracy, they are glossing over some contextual facts. It is true that in the Athenian assembly citizens voted directly—and they could change their collective minds. If a law remained in force, it was transcribed from painted words on wood to being carved in stone. It is also true, though, that the assembly voted to install officials in charge of the harbor, the mint, etc. On the other hand, Rome had a different tradition. 

 

Imperial Rome continued the fiction of being a republic and not a kingdom. The emperor (imperator: military commander-in-chief) was the “first citizen” and one of two consuls, and often granted the title “father of his country. ” Around the head on the obverses of many denarius coins of the empire the abbreviation PP stands for Pater Patriae: father of his country. But it refers to a deeper tradition of privilege (privis + legis = private law), when the senior elder of a family held life-and-death ownership over everyone on the farm. 

The coins of Roman emperors also give their years of consulship: COS III, for example, meaning that the Senate had re-elected them to their third term of office. Silver coins generally came from the private holdings of the imperator. The Senate issued the official copper coins of the government. The abbreviation SC meant Senatus Consulto. 

Copper sestertius of Marcus Aurelius.
Minerva with Owl and S C.

Some political conservatives claim to be Constitution originalists who insist that today we should return the intentions of 1789. At that time, political parties were private associations, not public institutions. Even when parties first erupted, conservative Anglophile Federalists versus liberal Francophile Republicans, the Vice President and President were elected separately and could be from different parties. 

This one-ounce silver commemorative issued by the
U.S. Mint would have spoken well to ancient Romans
with both the personification Libertas and the eagle of Jupiter  
carrying olive branches and its mottoes and legends: 
Liberty, United States,
E Pluribus Unum.
The numerals would be foreign to them
but they could sound out the letters.

Today, the VP is still the President of the Senate but seldom sits there, giving over the daily work to a president pro tempore, chosen by the Senate. You have to wonder what life would be like with President Donald Trump and President of the Senate Kamala Harris. President Harris (her proper title under the original Constitution) would vote as a senator in case of tie balloting. 

 

Previously on Necessary Facts

Etruscans and Americans 

The Cure for a Failing Empire 

Tycoon Dough is Democratic 

The Mercury Dime 

Lack of Religion is not the Presence of Science

Recent polls from the Pew Trust and Gallup assert that 30% of Americans self-identify as Not Religious along the spectrum from Atheist to Do Not Attend Services, even as 60% of Americans say that God created us directly or may guide our evolution. Moreover, a Marist poll commissioned by the Cleveland Museum of Natural History revealed that 17% of college graduates believe that the Earth goes around the Sun in one day.

"Measuring Religion in Pew Research Center's
American Trends Panel" 
Pew Research Center 14 January 2021 

"Science Knowledge Quiz" 
Pew Research Center
28 March 2019

Richard Hofstadter found the source of our anti-intellectual tradition in Jacksonian Democracy of the late 1820s, after the passing of the Revolutionary generation. (Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on 4 July 1826.) Entrenched ignorance is a tradition running 200 years. Granted that exceptions stand out. 

 

https://maristpoll.marist.edu/cleveland-museum-of-natural-history-survey/

James A. Garfield is credited with an original proof of the Pythagorean Theorem in 1876, but it had little to do with his election to the Presidency in 1880. Woodrow Wilson served as president of Princeton University. Herbert Hoover earned his degree in mining engineering from Stanford (1895). Although Jimmy Carter completed a degree in nuclear engineering at the US Naval Academy, John F. Kennedy was the last president who could be called an intellectual. 

 

Nearly 3 in 10 Doubt Leaders Value Scientific Expertise
https://news.gallup.com/topic/science.aspx

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

Why Evidence is not Enough

The Science of Liberty 

The Success of the Weird People 

Gregory M. Browne’s Necessary Factual Truths 

 

 

You Have No Right ...

Following the logic of the U.S. Supreme Court in its recent “abortion” decision (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization), although you do have an explicit right to bear and keep arms, you have no implied right to a bulletproof vest. You have a First Amendment guarantee to publish whatever you want, but no implied right to read whatever you want. Because nothing in the Sixth or Seventh Amendments defines how many people are empaneled on a jury one person can be a jury. The list goes on.

 

These are among the many specious arguments put forward by the Court: 

The Constitution makes no express reference to a right to obtain an abortion, but several constitutional provisions have been offered as potential homes for an implicit constitutional right. Roe held that the abortion right is part of a right to privacy that springs from the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments. See 410 U. S., at 152–153. The Casey Court grounded its decision solely on the theory that the right to obtain an abortion is part of the “liberty” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. Others have suggested that support can be found in the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, but that theory is squarely foreclosed by the Court’s precedents, which establish that a State’s regulation of abortion is not a sex-based classification and is thus not subject to the heightened scrutiny that applies to such classifications.

[...]

The Court finds that the right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition. The underlying theory on which Casey rested—that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause provides substantive, as well as procedural, protection for “liberty”—has long been controversial.

The Court’s decisions have held that the Due Process Clause protects two categories of substantive rights—those rights guaranteed by the first eight Amendments to the Constitution and those rights deemed fundamental that are not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution.

[...]

Finally, the Court considers whether a right to obtain an abortion is part of a broader entrenched right that is supported by other precedents. The Court concludes the right to obtain an abortion cannot be justified as a component of such a right. Attempts to justify abortion through appeals to a broader right to autonomy and to define one’s “concept of existence” prove too much. Casey, 505 U. S., at 851. Those criteria, at a high level of generality, could license fundamental rights to illicit drug use, prostitution, and the like.

Syllabus, DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION, No. 19–1392. Argued December 1, 2021—Decided June 24, 2022.

In the logic of the court, because extra-marital and non-marital relationships have no historic support in US law, they can be outlawed today (or tomorrow). By the last sentence above, the fact that a substance is ruled "illegal" by legislation closes your right to challenge that law. The justices of the Supreme Court may know prostitution when they see it. I am not sure how it is different from "dinner and a movie" -- or marriage. 

 

You have no right to leave the United States or to travel within them. 

 

Just as medical devices are regulated and their ownership, possession, and use are controlled by law, so, too can any instrument or tool be circumscribed: electrophoresis, polymerase chain reactions, spectroscopes, microscopes, telescopes, radios, televisions, … In fact, radios have almost 100 years of regulation around them and nothing in the Constitution or US history establishes your right to a radio (television, computer). 

Whether a computer is a “press” would be an argument before a Court that seems well disposed to limiting any claims not supported by explicit text in the original documents of 1789 or 1868. 

Can a state require the licensing of a musical instrument?  

Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

 

AMENDMENT XIV

Passed by Congress June 13, 1866. Ratified July 9, 1868.

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The 14th Amendment notwithstanding, states had laws against marriages across racial lines.  (Personally, I find no scientific evidence for the existence of "race" as a characteristic of human beings. Most of the rest of the world seems to disagree with me.)

“The first ever anti-miscegenation law was passed by the Maryland General Assembly in 1691, criminalizing interracial marriage. In a speech in Charleston, Illinois, in 1858, Abraham Lincoln stated, "I am not, nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people". By the late 1800s, 38 US states had anti-miscegenation statutes. By 1924, the ban on interracial marriage was still in force in 29 states. While interracial marriage had been legal in California since 1948, in 1957 actor Sammy Davis Jr. faced a backlash for his relationship with a white woman, actress Kim Novak. In 1958, Davis briefly married a black woman, actress and dancer Loray White, to protect himself from mob violence. 

“In 1958, officers in Virginia entered the home of Richard and Mildred Loving and dragged them out of bed for living together as an interracial couple, on the basis that "any white person intermarry with a colored person"— or vice versa—each party "shall be guilty of a felony" and face prison terms of five years. In 1967 the law was ruled unconstitutional (via the 14th Amendment adopted in 1868) by the U.S. Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-miscegenation_laws

In a statement of sheer ignorance, Vice President Kamala Harris told NPR: “This [Dobbs v. Jackson] is the first time in the history of our country that the United States Supreme Court has taken a constitutional right that was recognized …” (Interview with Asma Khalid 28 June 2022 here.) It absolutely was not. To be generous, let us allow that Vice President Harris misspoke.

 

It was the law of the land that no Asian could become a US citizen. That fact was cited by “the great dissenter” Justice John Marshall Harlan in his reply to the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling affirming racial segregation. Harlan noted that by law, an Asian, who could not become a citizen would be allowed to ride in a railway carriage with White people, though a Colored person, born here, an Army veteran, perhaps, could not. 

World War I US Army veteran Bhagat Thind Singh was denied his citizenship. The Court affirmed that racially, as an Aryan, Singh was “White” but that to the common man of America, he was an Asian and therefore ineligible for citizenship. 

 

In 1935, Jehovah’s Witness Christians in Minersville, Pennsylvania, refused to salute the flag in a pledge of allegiance ceremony. They were expelled from school. In 1940, the Supreme Court upheld the decision: Minersville School District v. Gobitis. Freedom of religion is not absolute, the Court said, but is subsidiary to the need for national unity and therefore national defense. That decision was overturned in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943). 

The fact remains - contrary to the opinion of the Vice President - that SCOTUS has taken away rights from people.

While the First Amendment promises freedom of religion, there is no explicit right to freedom from religion. While the Federal government is barred from establishing a national religion, states can and have (Massachusetts and Virginia) had their own government-supported churches. 

 

About 30 years ago, it occurred to me that if abortion takes a human life and is therefore murder, then a miscarriage must be manslaughter. I am pretty sure that I offered it as an argument to libertarians and progressives at social gatherings and was met with blank stares. It seems to have sunk in. (NPR here: Losing a pregnancy could land you in jail in post-Roe America.) You would have to prove that you were not negligent, that you obtained pre-natal care and followed the regimen prescribed for you. Absent that, you are negligent. 

I do not understand why "a State’s regulation of abortion is not a sex-based classification" except, perhaps, because men are also prohibited from terminating their pregnancies, just as the rich and poor alike are forbidden to sleep under bridges. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

The GOP as Pushy Beggars 

Tycoon Dough is Democratic 

Ayn Rand versus Conservatives 

The Science of Liberty

Crimes Against Logic: Exposing Bogus Arguments 

 

Austin’s Homeless: Laissez Faire in a Mixed Economy

Here in Austin, Texas, the reductio ad absurdum of the city government’s policies toward the homeless is that you (and all your friends) can take over any public space for your own use. The city council and mayor have declared de facto privatization. I want a school. They are not being used now and I can make good use of one. Once in, I will be hard to extricate because schools are defensible fortresses. (See, for example, The Girl Who Owned a City.) Perhaps you would like a park or a sports arena. Just find one that is not being used and make yourself a home. 

 

Menchaca and Ben White Jan 2020 and June 2020 

Austin Statesman

City Council rescinds measures that critics say criminalize homelessness

By Elizabeth Findell 

Posted Jun 21, 2019 at 3:36 AM

Updated Jun 21, 2019 at 6:14 PM

 

The Austin City Council early Friday rescinded city prohibitions on sitting or sleeping in public and panhandling — measures social advocates said wrongly criminalized homelessness — after hours of emotional testimony from passionate residents on both sides of the issue.

 

The decisions, made after 2 a.m. during a meeting that started at 10 a.m., capped a long day of intense discussion surrounding several homelessness-related votes at City Hall.

 

https://www.statesman.com/news/20190621/city-council-rescinds-measures-that-critics-say-criminalize-homelessness

 

Ben White opposite Target Then 

Summary of Changes to the Ordinances

On October 17, 2019, the City Council made several revisions to the city ordinance that prohibits camping in public areas.  Other ordinances, including those prohibiting obstruction on sidewalks in the downtown area and aggressive confrontation, remain unchanged.  The ordinance changes went into effect on October 28, 2019.

https://www.austintexas.gov/department/council-direction-and-policy

 

The Texas Tribune

Greg Abbott says TxDOT could remove homeless camps from Austin's highway underpasses

BY DAVIS RICH OCT. 18, 2019

 

The governor has vowed to use state resources to clear Austin's homeless residents from public spaces since city officials began changing local ordinances dictating where people can and can't camp.

 

Gov. Greg Abbott's office said Friday the Texas Department of Transportation could force homeless Austin residents out from under bridges and overpasses where some of them live or camp if recent changes to city ordinances don't result in less feces and fewer needles by Nov. 1.

 

https://www.texastribune.org/2019/10/18/greg-abbott-says-txdot-will-remove-austin-homeless-under-highways/

Ben White opposite Target Now 

 

KVUE-TV (ABC)

After more downtown stabbings, Abbott says Austin's 'reckless' policies on homelessness 'must end now'

Author: Drew Knight, Luis de Leon

Published: 5:16 PM CST January 24, 2020

Updated: 8:16 AM CST January 25, 2020

AUSTIN, Texas — After a series of Downtown Austin stabbings overnight left three people injured, Gov. Greg Abbott released a pointed statement for the Austin City Council on Friday.

"City of Austin leaders have allowed lawlessness throughout the capital city that is resulting in violence against Austin residents, including those who are homeless," Gov. Abbott said in a statement released to KVUE. "Last night’s tragedy, leaving three injured, is just the most recent instance of this violence. This rise in violence has corresponded with the revocation of the camping ban that the Austin City Council passed in June. Public endangerment and murder can no longer be tolerated because of the actions – and inactions – by City officials. Mayor Adler and the city council should re-instate the camping ban and restore the rule of law in Austin. The City’s gamble on these reckless policies has been a loser and must end now."

https://www.kvue.com/article/news/local/gov-abbott-calls-austin-homeless-policy-reckless-after-stabbings/269-fe1bd9ab-d65b-4cff-a013-3edb295c4c1f

 

Fox-7 TV

Gov. Abbott working to override Austin homeless camping ordinance

By Steven Sarabia 

Published February 7 [2020]

Homeless Crisis FOX 7 Austin

While talking about Austin's homeless issues Wednesday, Abbott said on Twitter, "Next step should be to reinstate the ban on camping and work with non-profit organizations to assist with shelters. That's exactly what I will ask the Texas Legislature to do."

https://www.fox7austin.com/news/gov-abbott-working-to-override-austin-homeless-camping-ordinance

Wikipedia provided this definition from the Communist Party of Texas

LUMPENPROLETARIAT - German for "rag proletariat." Generally unemployable people who make no positive contribution to an economy. Sometimes described as the bottom layer of a capitalist society. May include criminal and mentally unstable people. Some activists consider them "most radical" because they are "most exploited," but they are un-organizable and more likely to act as paid agents than to have any progressive role in class struggle.  See https://www.cp-texas.org/glossary

 

Previously on NecessaryFacts

 

Workers’ Paradise Promised an End to Money 

Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny 

Karl Marx and the Dustbin of History 

Furloughs for Freedom: Downsizing Government 

Toxic Leadership 

 

In Support of Paid Political Advertising

Twitter’s Jack Dorsey suffers from an anti-capitalist mentality. I know that sounds odd, considering, but smart as he is, he evidently lacks an understanding of economics as human action.

Instead of paying for political advertising, which is obvious, political campaigns will only pay people like me to write “personal opinions.” As a Meier-Briggs ENTJ, I can argue any side with aplomb and verve. Some issues have moral meaning for me and I would take or reject work on that basis, but one of the definitions of a “hack” is a writer who works for pay without regard for personal or professional standards; and we never have lacked them. Also never in short supply were writers using pen names. Twenty years ago, long before Mitt Romney was Pierre Delecto,  people on message boards used fake names to agree with their own opinions. 

Our federal republic owes its existence at least in part if not largely to three men who wrote under one name: Hamilton, Madison, and Jay appearing in the newspapers as “Publius.” 

I do not have a Twitter account. However, I am on Facebook, but only because of commitments requested by employers. Not so much a cyberphobe as a user of other online platforms, I have this blog, of course. My first BBS username goes back to 1984. A few years later, I served as the business news and issues manager of the Political Forum BBS sponsored by East Lansing state representative and state senator William A. Sederburg (Wikipedia here). (You can find an InfoWorld article from November 19, 1984, page 38, archived on Google Books. Start here and use the Search box.)

At that time, I was on several other networks and started posting GRID News. It was my gateway to the news room in the Michigan Capitol Building. Some of that is archived under the Computer Underground Digest. 

I forget which cyberpunk science fiction book it was in, probably one of William Gibson’s, but a European character sighs that Americans believe that history started after they were born. The other day at work, one of the scientists was complaining to an engineer that newspapers are biased; factual reporting is a thing of the past. I pointed out that newspapers were always opinionated. I explained that Joseph Pulitzer in St. Louis and William Randolph Hearst in San Francisco and New York made their fortunes from any kind of fake news story to sell papers. I said that after Pulitzer died, his estate bequeathed a large grant to the Columbia School of Journalism which began giving out awards for honest reporting. 

Growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1950s and 60s, we accepted the morning Plain Dealer as a Republican newspaper and the evening Cleveland Press as a Democrat newspaper. We always took the PD, but subscribed to the Press if we liked the paper boy. Cleveland was not unique. You can find many newspapers called Democrat and Republican but even those called Tribune, Globe, World, Telegraph, and Guardian were (and are) partisan. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Money as Press and Speech 

Money is Speech 

I Quit Meetup 

Start the Presses

For the Glory of Old Lincoln High 

The Wise Men

Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson, and George Kennan were names that I grew up with, reading daily newspapers and weekly news magazines from the late 1950s through the late 1960s. I learned of the other three men—Robert Lovett, John McCloy, and Chip Bohlen—from this careful and objective though laudatory history. Isaacson and Thomas had established impressive bibliographies of their own before this collaboration. I found it engaging and informative.

William Averell Harriman and Robert Abercrombie Lovett grew up together because Lovett’s father, Robert Scott Lovett, was the chief counsel for railroad magnate E. A. Harriman. John Jay McCloy, Jr. and George Frost Kennan grew up poor. Their hard work took them to the Ivy Leagues and thence to the halls of power. Dean Gooderham Acheson met Averell Harriman at Yale. Charles Eustis “Chip” Bohlen inherited the fine social graces of his almost wealthy family and those skills took him to the Foreign Service where he met George Kennan. It is easy to perceive the six as symbolic of, if not identical with the Establishment (page 26). The popular catch-phrase “The Establishment” was coined by John Kenneth Galbraith speaking to a convention of the Americans for Democratic Action in 1966. But the privileged collective had long before enjoyed opposition from both the left and the right, liberals and conservatives, going back to Jonathan Edwards and Andrew Jackson and forward to Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan (page 29). 

 

The Wise Men: Six Friends
and the World They Made 
by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas.
Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, 1986.

We may try to make the best of our opportunities. That is a two-part engagement. Many were born to inherit great  opportunities. Not many made the most of them. Starting as children and continuing through their teenage years, Harriman and Lovett accompanied their fathers on inspection tours of the railroad. (When he reached the Pacific coast E. A Harriman saw no reason to stop, and took his family to Siberia. That fact would be a trump card played more than once when Averell Harriman was the U. S. Ambassador to the USSR.) The son of an Episcopalian bishop, Dean Acheson took it upon himself in 1911 to join a Grand Truck Pacific Railway work crew in northern Canada. Before the United States entered World War I, Acheson volunteered as a Navy ensign. Meanwhile, Bob Lovett was only in his freshman year at Yale in 1914 when he enlisted. He was graduated in absentia while serving in the Army Flying Squadron. (Thirty years later, he served as a War Department expert on air forces.) After his senior year at Yale, Chip Bohlen signed on a US Steel cargo ship as crewman. Later head of the World Bank, John McCloy first met the upper classes when he worked as a chore boy at resorts. Even the four who were born to wealth knew from personal experience the relationship between money and work. 

Each had their own political preferences. Most were Republicans by birth, but adapted themselves to serve the government through the long decades of Democratic Party ascendance from 1932 to 1980. They were internationalists who saw no profit in war and only losses in surrender. They were among the first to push US foreign policy out of isolation and into alliance with the United Kingdom and France. It is no surprise that Ivy Leaguers are Anglophiles, but, in addition Chip Bohlen’s mother was from Louisiana and he visited France as a child. (On the other side of the ledger, his father’s in-laws included the Krupps of Germany.) Individually and in concert, they were early to warn the world of Stalin and the USSR, even as their Yale and Harvard classmates were still enthralled with the “ten days that shook the world.” 

But it would be just as wrong to characterize them has “hardliners” as to brand them as “appeasers” which the radical right did, from the McCarthy era through the years of the John Birch Society, the Nixon presidency, and the Reagan Revolution. As bankers and lawyers—only Bohlen and Kennan were professional diplomats--they knew how to evaluate facts, measure risks, create and analyze logical arguments. They were willing to admit their mistakes, to cut their losses, to change course to avoid a collision. They knew that the world is not run by gentlemen, and “certainly the Kremlin was not.” (Page 327.) 

On February 22, 1946, while chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, Kennan sent the 8000-word “Long Telegram” to Secretary of State George Marshall. It explained fully and succinctly the nature of the USSR and its relationship with the Western democracies.  Though it is discussed at some length (pages 352-356), it is never presented in full. You can find it online:

• The Truman Library (here) where it is an image of a typewritten transcription
• A modern typeface transcription at the Wilson Center (here)
• A text-accessible PDF (here) from Nevada Technical Associates among other famous speeches.

“Marxist dogma, rendered even more truculent and intolerant by Lenin’s interpretation, became a perfect vehicle for sense of insecurity with which Bolsheviks, even more than previous Russian rulers, were afflicted. In this dogma, with its basic altruism of purpose, they found justification for their instinctive fear of outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifices they felt bound to demand. In the name of Marxism they sacrificed every single ethical value in their methods and tactics. Today they cannot dispense with it. It is fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability. Without it they would stand before history, at best, as only the last of that long succession of cruel and wasteful Russian rulers who have relentlessly forced country on to ever new heights of military power in order to guarantee external security of their internally weak regimes.” – The Long Telegram by George Kennan.

Successful in arguing for an immediate and full response in 1950 to North Korean aggression and its support from China, they nonetheless were less enthralled with McArthur’s posturing. Their experience in 1951 informed their opinions in 1965 when they pushed Pres. Johnson to increase US military action in Indo-China. But quickly, by 1966, they foresaw the inevitable American defeat ten years later. For that, they were vilified as defeatists. 

Yet, they continued to serve. Dean Acheson hated Richard Nixon, but honored the office of the Presidency as so few in that administration did. Acheson responded to President Nixon’s requests for advice and counsel. But Acheson had had the same relationship with President Roosevelt 40 years earlier. 

The choice of these six men as paradigms for the Establishment may be arbitrary. In their work, they formed friendships, alliances, and animosities with others of equal influence such as James Forrestal, Robert Oppenheimer, Lucius Clay, Harry Hopkins, and Paul Nitze. Their proteges included Henry Kissinger, Dean Rusk, and Robert McNamara who themselves were connected to still others, even to John Kenneth Galbraith. Thus, they were the Establishment and “the Architects of the American Century.” 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

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A Chronology of Recent Historical Periods 

Karl Marx and the Dustbin of History 

Money as Living History