Review: When Robert Kennedy gave his all

By Todd Leopold | CNN

A few days before the 1968 California Democratic primary, Washington Post reporter Richard Harwood told his editor he wanted to stop covering Robert F. Kennedy's campaign for president.

Robert Kennedy's campaign for president lasted 82 days before he died on June 6, 1968.

"I'm falling in love with the guy," he said, according to Thurston Clarke's "The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America" (Henry Holt).

It was easy to see why. During his ill-fated run for the presidency, Kennedy appeared to be that rarest of candidates, the truth teller. By many accounts, he meant every word he said, particularly those about fighting prejudice and poverty. He refused to kowtow to his audiences, and he wore his emotions on his sleeves (adoring crowds sometimes shredded his cuffs). And he pondered questions before offering thoughtful, sometimes stammering, answers.

Indeed, if Clarke's careful and moving book has a problem, it's that the author also seems to have fallen a little in love with his subject. The hard-nosed -- the preferred adjective was "ruthless" -- RFK who shrewdly managed his brother's presidential campaign gets short shrift. The book sometimes seems to exist in its own bubble, lacking the uncertainty that afflicted Kennedy in fighting his uphill nomination battle.


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The Jewish key to Henry Kissinger

Is the ferocity of criticism for Kissinger related to the fact that he is Jewish?, asks Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson | The Times Literary Supplement | May 28, 2008

To say that Henry Kissinger is the most controversial of twentieth-century American Secretaries of State would be an understatement. No other holder of that office has inspired opprobrium of the sort heaped on Kissinger by journalists such as Seymour Hersh and Christopher Hitchens. The latter’s polemic, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2002), for example, accuses Kissinger of having “ordered and sanctioned the destruction of civilian populations, the assassination of inconvenient politicians, the kidnapping and disappearance of soldiers and journalists and clerics who got in his way”. Hitchens offers no explanation of his subject’s alleged record of “promiscuous violence abroad and flagrant illegality at home”. The reader is merely left to infer that Kissinger must be a terribly wicked man.


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Angry Man

Nixon's America was a land of rebellion and reaction.

Reviewed by Elizabeth Drew | WaPo | Sunday, June 1, 2008; BW05

NIXONLAND

The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
By Rick Perlstein
Scribner. 881 pp. $37.50

There is so much literature about various aspects of Richard Nixon -- his foreign policy, his domestic policy, his rise to power, his time in power, his fall from power, his comeback, his relationship with Vice President Spiro Agnew, his trip to China -- that it would seem difficult to find an original approach to the man. But, in Nixonland, Rick Perlstein has come up with the novel and important idea of exploring the relationship between Nixon and the 1960s counterculture, a rebellion of mostly young people against society's conventions and authority in general. Perlstein is quite right in identifying this rebellion -- and the reaction against it -- as critical to Nixon's rise and his strange hold on the American people. One might even consider Perlstein's book to be primarily about the counterculture and only secondarily about Nixon, since he devotes nearly half of it to a brilliant evocation of the '60s.

The decade had begun quiescently, with a general acceptance of the conventional mores of the '50s and the Cold War. But midway through came upheaval: hippies, yippies, be-ins, the drug culture, the Weather Underground, the "summer of love." Then the traumas of 1968: the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, campus unrest, urban riots. And, of course, Vietnam. A nation unhinged.

Perlstein astutely follows the reaction against all of this by a large part of the American people, whose deep resentments and fear Nixon shrewdly observed and exploited. In the 1968 election campaign, he offered America peace and quiet, law and order. But once in office, he delivered mass arrests of peaceful protesters against the war; his allies in the construction unions beat up demonstrators on Wall Street. Perlstein's Nixonland is a land of rebellion and reaction, each faction stirring up the other.

McClellan’s Biggest Revelation? Bush Personally Authorized Leak Of CIA Agent’s Identity

By: emptywheel Thursday May 29, 2008 7:08 am

Scottie McC doesn't know it yet. But that's basically what he revealed this morning on the Today Show (h/t Rayne).

During the interview, Scottie revealed the two things that really pissed him off with the Bush Administration. First, being set up to lie by Karl Rove and Scooter Libby. And second, learning that Bush had--himself--authorized the selective leaking of the NIE.

Scottie McC: But the other defining moment was in early April 2006, when I learned that the President had secretly declassified the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq for the Vice President and Scooter Libby to anonymously disclose to reporters. And we had been out there talking about how seriously the President took the selective leaking of classified information. And here we were, learning that the President had authorized the very same thing we had criticized.

Viera: Did you talk to the President and say why are you doing this?

Scottie McC: Actually, I did. I talked about the conversation we had. I walked onto Air Force One, it was right after an event we had, it was down in the south, I believe it was North Carolina. And I walk onto Air Force One and a reporter had yelled a question to the President trying to ask him a question about this revelation that had come out during the legal proceedings. The revelation was that it was the President who had authorized, or, enable Scooter Libby to go out there and talk about this information. And I told the President that that's what the reporter was asking. He was saying that you, yourself, was the one that authorized the leaking of this information. And he said "yeah, I did." And I was kinda taken aback.

Now, for the most part, this is not new. We have known (since I first reported it here) that Scooter Libby testified that, after Libby told Dick Cheney he couldn't leak the information Cheney had ordered him to leak to Judy Miller because it was classified, Cheney told Libby he had gotten the President to authorize the declassification of that information.

Thus far, though, we only had Dick Cheney's word that he had actually asked Bush to declassify this information. We didn't have Bush's confirmation that he had actually declassified the information. In fact, we've had Dick Cheney's claims that he--Dick--had insta-declassified via his super secret pixie dust declassification powers.

But now we've got George Bush, confirming that he, the President of the United States, authorized the leaks of "this information."

Now, though Scottie refers, obliquely, to "this information," he explicitly refers only to the NIE. But as I've described over and over again, it's not just the NIE Bush authorized Dick to order Libby to leak.

As a review, here's what Libby's NIE lies are all about. This is all documented in this post, and here is the court transcript in which most of this is revealed.

• Scooter Libby has instructions in his notes to leak something to Judy Miller on July 8, 2003


• When questioned about the notation, Libby claimed the instructions related to the NIE


• Libby went further to make certain claims about the NIE leak--that the leak was authorized by Dick Cheney and George Bush, that such an authorization was totally unique in his career, and that Libby was so worried about leaking the NIE to Judy that he double checked to make sure he was authorized to do so


• Libby later made claims that directly contradicted these assertions--most importantly, even though Libby claims the Judy leak was totally unique in his career, he also leaked the NIE to three other people: Bob Woodward, a journalist [David Sanger] on July 2, and the WSJ


• Also, in spite of the fact that Libby says he was really worried about getting authorization to leak the NIE to Judy, he's not really sure whether he was authorized to leak the NIE to Woodward; his concern about the leak to Judy only extended to whatever he leaked to Judy

In short, Libby is almost certainly lying about what he was authorized to leak to Judy on July 8, 2003, in a meeting where Judy Miller admits he talked about Valerie Plame, and where Libby tried to get her to falsely attribute the story.

At this point, Scottie McC is still accepting Scooter Libby's lies, though I suspect he sees the dangerous frailty of them. With Bush's clear admission to Scottie that he was in the loop, and the evidence that, subsequent to receiving an order from Cheney (authorized by Bush) to leak classified information to Judy Miller, Libby leaked Valerie Wilson's identity, the circumstantial evidence shows the President was directly involved in the deliberate outing of a CIA spy. The only question now is whether Bush realized he authorized the leak of Valerie's identity, in addition to a bunch of other classified documents.

Think of how much sense this makes. We have evidence that George Bush ordered Libby to respond to Joe Wilson on June 9, 2003. We now have Bush's own confirmation that he authorized the leak Libby made to Judy Miller on July 8, 2003--which included the leak of Valerie Wilson's identity. We know on July 10, Condi told Stephen Hadley that Bush "was comfortable" with the response the White House was making towards Wilson. And we know that--when Cheney forced Scottie McC to exonerate Libby publicly that fall, he did so by reminding people that "The Pres[ident] [asked Libby] to stick his head in the meat-grinder." We know that Libby's lawyers tried desperately to prevent a full discussion of the NIE lies to be presented at trial. And we know that--after those NIE lies did not come out, for the most part (though one juror told me that NIE story was obviously false, even with the limited information they received)--the President commuted Libby's sentence on July 2, 2007.

The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America

In the course of his forty-year-career as one of America's most admired journalists, Robert Scheer's work has been praised by Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, and Joan Didion, who deems him "one of the best reporters of our time." Now, Scheer brings a lifetime of wisdom and experience to one of the most overlooked and dangerous issues of our time - the destructive influence of America's military-industrial complex.

Scheer examines the expansion of our military presence throughout the world, our insane nuclear strategy, the immorality of corporations profiting in Iraq, and the arrogance of our foreign policy. Although Scheer is a liberal, his view echoes that of former Republican president General Dwight Eisenhower, who, in his farewell speech to the American people, spoke prophetically about need to guard against the growing influence of the military-industrial complex. In George W. Bush's America, politicians like Ike and Richard Nixon seem like prudent centrists.

The views of libertarians, liberals, and pacifists are often overlooked or ignored by America's mainstream media. The Pornography of Power is the culmination of a respected journalist's efforts to change the terms of debate. At a time when many are exploiting fears of terrorist attacks and only a few national leaders are willing to advocate cuts in defense spending, nuclear disarmament, and restrained use of American force, Robert Scheer has written a manifesto for enlightened reform.

About the Author
Robert Scheer is currently Editor-in-Chief of Truthdig.com, 2007 Webby Award winner for best political blog.

Between 1964 and 1969 he was Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. From 1976 to 1993 he served as a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, writing on diverse topics such as the Soviet Union, arms control, national politics and the military. In 1993 he launched a nationally syndicated column based at the Los Angeles Times, where he was named a contributing editor. That column ran weekly for the next 12 years and is now based at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Scheer can be heard on the political radio program "Left, Right and Center" on KCRW, the National Public Radio affiliate in Santa Monica, Calif. He has written seven books, including "With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War."
He is a contributing editor for The Nation as well as a Nation Fellow. He has also been a Poynter fellow at Yale, and was a fellow in arms control at Stanford.

Daily Show: Moving Private Ryan

President Bush announces the troops will finally be coming home, but not the troops you're thinking of and not for another ten years.

“I’m sorry, did you say plural? Was that ‘wars’? How many more of these do you have in mind?” Jon Stewart

David Iglesias Vows: "It's Not Over!"

...so if you hear anybody says it's yesterday's news (Oh, that' so 2007!), please straighten them out, 'cos it's not.

Former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias has some harsh words for fellow Republicans during a visit to an Albuquerque, N.M. bookstore on May 19, 2008.

The Bush administration's drive to politicize the Justice Department reached a new low with the wrongful firing of seven U.S. Attorneys in late 2006. Their action has ignited public outrage on a scale that far surpassed the reaction to any of the Bush administration's other political debacles. David Iglesias was one of those federal prosecutors, and now he tells his story.

The first chapter, titled, "For Such a Time as This" (a quotation from the Book of Esther), describes how, shortly before he departed Baltimore-Washington International Airport to spend the Christmas of 2006 with his family in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Iglesias received a message on his BlackBerry from his assistant telling him to phone director of the Executive Office for United States Attorneys (EOUSA), Mike Battle, which he did and his reactions on being told to resign, "effective the end of January".

Iglesias writes:

I consider it one of the ironies of history that my personal "day that will live in infamy" occurred on December 7, 2006, exactly sixty-five years after the Japanese launched the sneak attack that took us into World War II. Of course, I'm not comparing what happened to me that afternoon to any such epic date with destiny. At the same time, however, I realize that my personal Pearl Harbor Day is not without its own historical resonance. From that moment on, things were not the same, for me or for the country I'd so proudly served. I'd arrived at a point when my history intersected with America's history in a way that would change—and is still changing—both America's justice system and me.

"It's ironic to think," Iglesias now reflects, "that I had once been offered the position of director of EOUSA. If I'd taken it, I'd have been the one who would have had to make that fateful phone call."

The penultimate chapter is titled, "All Roads Lead to Rove", the final one, "Fredo", a reference to the little man who occupied the office of Attorney General when Iglesias was fired (alas, he is no longer with us), and whose famous powers of recollection have so often formed the subject of posts on this blog.

Chapter 1 can be read online (click here) and is well worth reading, as no doubt, is the rest of the book.

In Justice: Inside the Scandal That Rocked the Bush Administration

From the Inside Flap:

David Iglesias's first encounter with Alberto Gonzales was when he was White House counsel in 2001. Something Gonzales said really stuck in his mind. "This is a tough town," Gonzales told him. "They are out to destroy the president, and it is my job to protect him." Who knew he would even break the law to do it?

The Bush administration's drive to politicize the Justice Department reached a new low with the wrongful firing of seven U.S. Attorneys in late 2006. Their action has ignited public outrage on a scale that far surpassed the reaction to any of the Bush administration's other political debacles. David Iglesias was one of those federal prosecutors, and now he tells his story.

Iglesias has long served in the navy as part of the JAG Corps. One of his earliest cases, concerning an assaulted marine in Guantanamo Bay, became the basis for the movie A Few Good Men. When Bush chose Iglesias to become the U.S. Attorney for New Mexico, it was a dream come true. He was a core member of Karl Rove's idealized Republican Party of the future—handsome, Hispanic, evangelical, and a military veteran. The dream came to an abrupt end when Senator Pete Domenici improperly called Iglesias, asking him to indict high-level Democrats before the 2006 elections. When Iglesias refused, the line went dead. Iglesias was fired just weeks later. First he was devastated. Then he was angry. Now he is speaking out.

Packed with previously unrevealed facts, In Justice follows Iglesias and his colleagues, who would soon be known as the Justice League, as they pieced together the sources and purpose of the conspiracy against them. In fascinating detail, it reveals how various members of the group viewed their own dismissals, reacted to threats from Justice Department officials designed to ensure their silence, and struggled to find a way to respond to the growing furor over the case.

Complete with insights into the power and responsibilities of U.S. Attorneys and an impassioned plea for their historic independence, the rule of law, and insulation from politics, In Justice is a compelling, real-life political thriller that takes you deep inside the Bush administration's darkest moment.

Wiley publishers substitute the last two paragraphs above with the following paragraph:

Iglesias recounts his interactions with Bush, Rove, Alberto Gonzales, and other key players as he takes readers into his time at the Justice Department to reveal what top Republican officials said and did, and how they subverted justice.

The Last Good Campaign

Increasingly opposed to the Vietnam War, Robert F. Kennedy struggled over whether he should challenge his party’s incumbent president, Lyndon Johnson, in 1968. His younger brother, Teddy, was against it. His wife, Ethel, urged him on. Many feared he would be assassinated, like the older brother he mourned.

by Thurston Clarke | Vanity Fair | June 2008

Bobby Kennedy campaigns in Indianapolis during May of 1968, with various aides and friends, including (behind and left of Kennedy) former prizefighter Tony Zale and (right of Kennedy) N.F.L. stars Lamar Lundy, Rosey Grier, and Deacon Jones. Photographs by Bill Eppridge.

Text excerpted from The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America by Thurston Clarke, to be published this month by Henry Holt and Company, L.L.C.; © 2008 by the author.

Photographs excerpted from A Time It Was: Bobby Kennedy in the Sixties; photographs and text by Bill Eppridge; introduction by Pete Hamill; to be published this month by Abrams; © 2008 by Bill Eppridge.


Two months after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Robert Kennedy traveled to Asia on an itinerary that had originally been planned for J.F.K. During the trip, he visited a girls’ school in the Philippines where the students sang a song they had composed to honor his brother. As he drove away with CBS cameraman Walter Dombrow, he clenched his hands so tightly that they turned white, and tears rolled down his cheeks. He shook his head, signaling that Dombrow should remain silent. Finally he said in a choked voice, “They would have loved my brother.” Dombrow put his arm around him and said, “Bob, you’re going to have to carry on for him.” Kennedy stared straight ahead for half a minute before turning to Dombrow and nodding. It was then, Dombrow said, that he knew Bobby would run for president and realized how much he loved him.

A deep, black grief gripped Robert Kennedy in the months following his brother’s assassination. He lost weight, fell into melancholy silences, wore his brother’s clothes, smoked the cigars his brother had liked, and imitated his mannerisms. Eventually his grief went underground, but it sometimes erupted in geysers of tears, as had happened in the Philippines. He wept after seeing a photograph of his late brother in the office of a former aide, wept when asked to comment on the Warren Commission Report, and wept after eulogizing J.F.K. at the 1964 Democratic convention with a quotation from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: “When he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he shall make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun.”

Kennedy was still mourning his brother and endeavoring to live for him when he ran for the U.S. Senate from New York in the autumn of 1964, telling a friend that he wanted to ensure that the hopes J.F.K. had kindled around the world would not die, and saying in his victory statement that he had won “an overwhelming mandate to continue the policies” of President Kennedy. And at first it appeared that his 1968 presidential campaign—challenging his brother’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, for the Democratic Party’s nomination—would be another homage to J.F.K. Bobby announced his candidacy on March 16 in the caucus room of the Old Senate Office Building, the room that his brother had used for the same purpose. He stood in the same spot and began with the same sentence: “I am announcing today my candidacy for the presidency of the United States.” After saying that he was running to “close the gaps that now exist between black and white, between rich and poor, between young and old,” he concluded with a passage that made him sound like his brother, perhaps because it had been contributed in part by Ted Sorensen, who had been his brother’s speechwriter: “I do not lightly dismiss the dangers and the difficulties of challenging an incumbent President. But these are not ordinary times and this is not an ordinary election. At stake is not simply the leadership of our party and even our country. It is our right to the moral leadership of this planet.”

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The still-vital Vidal

Friend of the Kennedys, enemy of Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal is an extraordinary compendium of American politics and literature

Playing to the gallery ... Self-confessed 'American patriot' Gore Vidal. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

Ben Marshall |guardian.co.uk | May 23, 2008 3:45 PM

It was a strange sensation to see Gore Vidal wheeled on stage in Brighton last night. As his recent appearance on the South Bank Show revealed, Vidal is, for the first time ever, looking, if not sounding, his age. He was born in 1925, the year F Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, but he still has something of the enfant terrible about him, even sitting trembling and shrunken in a wheelchair. Furthermore he seems, in his archness and studied pomposity, to belong to a time I fancifully imagine, and he credibly claims, to have been altogether more thoughtful and civilised than our own.

Vidal has written more than 25 novels, another 20 or so works of non-fiction, more than a half dozen plays and, I think, eight screenplays. And of course he has met pretty everyone who matters from the worlds of politics and the arts. Amongst his friends he could count Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, John Kennedy, the Clintons and pornographer Bob Guccione. And his enemies make for an equally exalted list - Truman Capote, Bobby Kennedy, Norman Mailer, the Reagans and of course the Bush family (and I do mean the entire family, he hates the whole dynasty, probably because they are almost as ancient and American-aristo as his own).

It was politics that Vidal stuck to in Brighton, despite interviewer Andrew Marr's valiant efforts to talk about his novels, plays and poetry. Vidal's long-practised technique is to mix extraordinary anecdotes with mostly incisive, occasionally glib observations about the parlous state of the United States. Thus an early question about literature evoked a story about JFK, which in turn evolved into a critique of Republican Presidential candidate John McCain and, swiftly but inevitably turned into a vitriolic attack on George W Bush.

And this was a problem for me. Gore, despite his impeccable credentials as a snob, cannot help but play to the gallery. So the second he detected that Brighton loathed the present American administration (and perhaps America and Americans too) he wasted no time in attacking it, them and everything it and they stand for. Often in the crudest terms. For instance calling Bush a "cretin" seems to me to be both inaccurate and lazy, but it elicited huge laughs. So Gore persisted. Bush began as a "cretin", was soon a "real cretin", occasionally an "imbecile", and ultimately a "congenital cretin". The audience just lapped this stuff up.

His best moments, as ever, came when he defended the American constitution, something, he stressed, he and his family have always done. He made one marvellous point - alluding to the Virginia Statute and the First Amendment - concerning the US in particular and the world in general. Gore, rightly in my view, thinks that anyone who believes in an afterlife should never be afforded any power whatsoever over the lives of others.

Once again the crowd, audibly prepared to storm Grosvenor Square, appeared to assume he was simply talking about Dubya and his God-fearing, tub-thumping, Bible-bashing mates. It was left to a member of the audience to ask the question that elicited the simplest, most unequivocal reply. Given his remorseless defence of the constitution, would Gore Vidal consider himself an American patriot? "Yes!" he shouted, from his wheelchair. There was only the faintest ripple of polite applause. No surprise, given the ghastly nature of the Brighton crowd.

Me? With patriots like Gore Vidal around, I walked home whistling The Star Spangled Banner.

Gore Vidal: ready to kill

Jon Snow interviews the writer Gore Vidal on the American presidential campaign - he dismisses John McCain as Mr Magoo and says he should have been court-martialled.

His career has spanned more than six decades, and he has written more than 20 novels and five plays. Gore Vidal is one of Americas most respected writers and thinkers, and is considered a patriarch of American letters and Democratic politics.



He is highly critical of George W Bush's administration. But what does he have to say about the bitter contest for the Democratic nomination?

This afternoon Jon Snow spoke to Gore Vidal here in London. They discussed the race to lead America and the candidates presenting themselves for president, starting with John McCain.

To watch Jon Snow's complete interview with Gore Vidal, click here.