A Review of To Move the World: JFK's: Quest for Peace by Jeffrey D. Sachs

In this book well-known economist and public intellectual Jeffrey Sachs moves from the world of economic development and environmental concerns to an examination of how John F. Kennedy’s thought and rhetoric changed the dynamic of the Cold War. Sachs apparently came to this project through his friendship with Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy's primary speechwriter. Also, I suspect that Sachs came to the project because of his own quest to alter the dynamics in the world about global poverty, sustainable economic development, and ecological stewardship. In this book Sachs doesn't break any new historical ground. His main concern is to examine how the interplay of experience and rhetoric shaped the course of events both before and after the Kennedy administration.

Sachs notes that Kennedy had some important role models for his rhetoric and perceptions. First and foremost among these role models was Winston Churchill. However, his model was not simply the pugnacious Churchill of 1940 who defied the Nazis, but also the postwar Churchill, who, while warning of the spread of communism, also spoke in favor of peaceful talks. Perhaps in Churchill’s less eloquent but most apt words, more “jaw-jaw” and less “war-war”. This attitude of conciliation was carried forward by Dwight Eisenhower. Sachs notes a couple of Ike's speeches that struck a conciliatory note and that appreciated the dangerous dynamics that were developing between the US and the USSR. The most famous of Ike's speeches was his farewell speech, which Sachs describes is only one of two presidential farewell speeches that bears remembrance (the other was George Washington’s). In Ike's farewell speech, he warned of – indeed I think coin the phrase of – "the military industrial complex". Ike understood that there were strong pressures in the US (and certainly within the USSR as well) that pushed for military confrontation as a part of a profit and power seeking engine driven by defense contractors and the military. Roughly contemporary with Kennedy’s time in office was the papacy of Pope John XXIII, whose encyclical Pacem In Terris (Peace on Earth) provided another eloquent voice speaking out in favor of peace and justice. Kennedy was thus not alone on his perceptions and hopes, and he carried forward a line of predecessors and contemporaries from whom he could gain wisdom and assistance.

Sachs doesn't dodge the fact that Kennedy made the Cold War worse by the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs invasion that occurred shortly after he took office. In another one of history's "what if's", historians of wondered if Ike would've had the good sense to have pulled the plug on the Bay of Pigs invasion, or whether he would have gone whole hog with the invasion. Kennedy chose halfway measures that embarrassed the US, made Castro more belligerent, and that suggested to the USSR that some further intervention on behalf of their Cuban comrades was necessary. Sachs details how Khrushchev developed his harebrained scheme to put offensive missiles in Cuba with the thought of revealing the fateful come play at a party Congress scheduled in late 1962 (shades of Dr. Strangelove here). This scheme led to the Cuban missile crisis, where humankind came within an eyelash of worldwide catastrophe. Credit goes to both Kennedy and Khrushchev for avoiding a nuclear Armageddon by backing away from the demands of hardliners. Kennedy had to deal with Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay (the model for Stanley Kubrick's general Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove). Khrushchev obviously had his own people to deal with as well.

After this harrowing experience, Kennedy chartered a new course to try to ease the tensions of the Cold War. His renewed concerns with this subject  eventually led to his June 1963 speech at American University that has since been dubbed "The Peace Speech". Kennedy laid out the need for renewed efforts to avoid war, efforts that were neither naïve nor impossible to achieve. This included a voluntary suspension of nuclear testing so long as no other nation engaged in tests of their own. Kennedy followed up the next day with a major speech on civil rights where, I believe for the first time, he described the civil rights movement in terms of a moral imperative. These two speeches, perhaps more than his better-known inaugural address, highlight of Kennedys’ rhetorical gifts and moral vision.

Sachs does a good job of carefully examining Kennedy's rhetoric. For instance, Sachs shows how effectively Kennedy used the rhetorical device of antimetabole, the Greek term referring to the repetition of words in transposed order (e.g., “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”) A great deal of credit for Kennedy’s rhetorical success goes to his aid Ted Sorensen, who wrote the first drafts and worked revisions in tandem with Kennedy. As a team, it will come up with signature ways of speaking and arguing that proved eloquent and effective. Kennedy was able to get the Soviet Union to the bargaining table, the parties agreed to a partial nuclear test ban treaty (underground testing was still allowed), and, most notably by the standards of today, he was able to get overwhelming Senate approval for the treaty. This was one of the highlights of Kennedy's congressional efforts. As we know, no civil rights legislation and no economic stimulus bill were enacted until after Lyndon Johnson became president and oversaw those efforts. While Kennedy's rhetorical gifts are undoubted, I still have the sense that without Johnson, the major civil rights legislation and perhaps even the economic stimulus Kennedy sought would have been sidetracked by Congress. As we know from our experience with President Obama, formal rhetoric that artfully and clearly sets forth a vision for possibilities is important, but not sufficient to effect real change. The trench warfare of congressional approval is also necessary to translate positive visions into law. Nevertheless, one can't leave this book without appreciating the skilled vision that Kennedy and Sorensen set forth.

Sachs spends a little bit more time on the post-Kennedy Cold War, and especially noteworthy is the period in the early and mid-1980s when Ronald Reagan and the hard core Republican right wing adapted an extremely confrontational attitude toward the Soviet Union. This attitude was perceived by the Soviet leadership and reciprocated. In hindsight, the Nixon-Ford-Kissinger efforts for détente are much more rational and reasonable. Reagan supporters argue that Reagan's rhetorical and military build-up in confrontation with the Soviet Union led to the downfall of the Eastern block and eventually the Soviet Union. But this argument should be subject to a lot of skepticism and should be rejected without a more persuasive argument made through a careful historical analysis than I’ve yet seen. The fact is, the doomsday clock that measured the threat to human well-being crated by nuclear war (now I think subject to other factors, such as ecological catastrophe) moved up very close to midnight again during a period in the 1980’s. However, once Reagan perceived a change in Soviet attitudes in the person of Gorbachev, Reagan's very effective rhetoric changed into one of conciliation and the need for rational consideration of the parties’ mutual need to avoid nuclear war and threatening confrontations. Neither Kennedy nor later Reagan dropped his strong stance of anti-Communism, but both came around to a much more sensible position. (Kennedy was more constrained by the extreme political right wing than was Reagan, who, like Nixon going to China, had a degree of credibility for a changed attitude toward the USSR that no Democrat could gain in order to achieve the changes the Reagan fostered.)

In my continued reading reflecting back on the presidency of John F. Kennedy, this book was a worthwhile addition. I thought it might be an exercise in hagiography, but instead, I found it a measured consideration of Kennedy and the importance of his and his predecessor’s rhetoric in defining the conflicts of the Cold War and thereby limiting the potential for a nuclear war. Perhaps because of my primal Republican background, I've never been an unabashed Kennedy admirer. His record was mixed, but I have gained a sense that the man grew during the course of his presidency and that the tragedy of his assassination did rob the world of his potential. Would he have avoided the deep entanglement of the Vietnam War? Would he have been able to forward the program of civil rights as effectively as did Lyndon Johnson? Would changes brought about by the initial efforts in diffusing the largest tensions of the Cold War have continued? All these “what if?” questions remain as tantalizing possibilities that will never receive a definitive answer. The only sure thing is the actual past; the future—or alternative futures—are marked by uncertainty. So with Kennedy. We should examine carefully his accomplishments, his failures, and the gifts he left behind, which though all too few, are nonetheless significant. I think Sachs performs an important service in this book in acknowledging that heritage and challenging us today to find similar instances where we can understand and improve our world through our rhetoric and politics.

A Review of 11.22.83 by Stephen King

The fantasy of time travel has always intrigued us. In modern times, perhaps beginning with Edward Bellamy's Looking Backwards, to HG Wells’ The Time Machine, on to Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, we have read fictions that explore the weird but familiar world of time travel. Similarly, the popular medium of television, through such shows as Star Trek, have explored the imaginative possibilities of this fantasy. Stephen King praises writer Jack Finney for his book Time After Time as an outstanding example of a time travel novel. In 11.22.63, Stephen King tries his hand at the genre with excellent results.

Probably anyone old enough to be in school on November 22, 1963 has indelible images from that day seared into their brain. This is the date that John F Kennedy was assassinated. It was a national trauma in my lifetime matched only by the trauma of 9/11 for traumatizing our collective and individual psyches. I remember vividly my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Handley, coming in and saying to us “I have some bad news. The president has been shot." That was all the information we received at first, and when the bell rang, we were sent to different rooms for our reading groups. Mine was on the main floor of the old fifth and sixth grade building, where a large old-fashioned radio sat in a small room. The volume on the old radio was turned up probably as loud as it could go. I recall the announcer saying “Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States is dead." The station then immediately played the national anthem. My own reaction was one of shocked disbelief. Some of my classmates cried. I don't remember if I did, or if I prayed, but probably both. I think all were stunned. The following days were filled with a national grief and a ritual funeral that attempted to grasp the gravity of what happened.

What had happened, was that a lone, misfit of an individual by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald, had shot the president with a high-powered rifle. Oswald was later arrested only to be shot and killed himself a couple of days later by another misfit. This account of a lone gunmen acting out a deranged fantasy didn't seem to fit with what ought to have happened, that some deep conspiracy of great power must have been necessary to create so momentous an event. Thus, up sprung conspiracy theories that have spun almost endlessly since that date. Oliver Stone's JFK gave cinematic voice to those theories, but in the end, the conspiracy theories don't jibe with reality.

In an interview about writing this book, Stephen King says he initially started the draft in 1973, ten years after the assassination, but he reports that he put it away because of the demands on his time and the freshness of the wound that he was attempting to address. Now, a couple of years short of the 50th anniversary of JFK's assassination, he came out with a book that deals with this momentous date, the issues of time travel and what might have been, and the differences between the world of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In it attempting to address all of these different concerns, King has done a masterful job creating a sense of time and place in the recent—and to some of us, remembered—past. King does this in large measure through characters that we come to know and care about. I have to admit this is the first work of fiction by Stephen King that I've read (earlier listened to his book On Writing), and I must say ability as a story teller is well displayed here. (I have seen some movies based on his work, such as The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption, and Stand by Me, all of which I found compelling.) I'd avoided King because I had always thought of them as a horror writer, but I see now that this does not do justice to the scope of his abilities.

The conceit of the book surrounds the discovery of a time warp in a small Maine town in 2011. An owner of a diner discovered the time warp some time ago and visited the past (always the same date and time in 1958), going back and forth in time. He eventually decides that his mission should be to avoid the assassination of JFK, and thereby avoid the national trauma that the Vietnam War visited upon the nation. (I think him terribly optimistic about this prospect.) However, he cannot get himself to the time and place necessary to confidently intervene to stop Oswald, so he recruits the main character, Jake Epping, to go back in his place. Jake Epping, a high school English teacher, reluctantly agrees to go back in time to try to derail this horrific event and other tragedies. In doing so, he travels to what in to us is now the strange world of the late 1950s and early 1960s in America. Epping’s self-imposed mission is made much more difficult by the fact that he falls in love with a woman who has her own past to deal with.

King doesn't dwell on weird theories of physics in support of his time travel conceit, but he does provide some common sense observations on what it might be like, such as the conclusion that the past doesn't want to be changed. No doubt true, but that doesn’t stop us from pondering the possibilities. Besides being a topic of interest for fiction writers, the “what if's” of history have tantalized serious historians and social scientists as well as fiction writers. What if Winston Churchill had not become prime minister in Great Britain in 1940? What if Hitler had successfully invaded? The number of possibilities are nearly endless once you crack open the past with an eye to changing it or imagining it happening differently. When we think philosophically and analytically about the past, we come up against the cold fact that the past is closed and fixed, while the future is open and uncertain (at least to some degree). When we try on mentally changing the past, we find, as the protagonist Jake Epping does, that things don't fit easily. The waves of consequence that emanate from any single fact disburse through the past creating a butterfly effect that can have nearly infinite repercussions.

I’m very glad I read this book because I found a thoroughly enjoyable and engrossing. As we approach the anniversary of the assassination of JFK, there some other books I want to read as we try (continually, as with all good history) to assess JFK, the man and his presidency. Because his life and presidency were cut short at a time of such great change and trauma that we know came to pass in the United States during the period of about 15 years after his death, we wonder what would have happened had the assassin's bullet not struck. The fact is, we can never know, but we can wonder and ponder and argue these possibilities. It's not something worth doing because we can change anything in the past, but by casting the strongest possible light on the past, we can use the reflection to see a bit further where we might be going—and want to go—in the future.

By the way, if you are interested, the initial character who discovers the time warp and decides to look into the Kennedy assassination in the hope of avoiding it, thought there was a "95% chance" that Oswald acted alone. King, in an interview, opines, after having researched the matter very thoroughly, that that probability is close to 98 or 99%. History sometimes lurches in unforeseeable ways based on the acts of the least formidable of individuals or the random events of nature. This event seems to be such an instance.

A Review of Swag by Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard died about a month ago. I’d never read any of his books. But I’d learned a lot about them after he died. Appreciations of his writing appeared in the New York Times and in the New Yorker. I read these reviews. Based on these comments, I came to the conclusion that Leonard was a writer’s writer. Many people praised his style. His economy of style.

In addition to reading all of these appreciations, I knew Leonard wrote about crime, and there is perhaps no better genre to enjoy than crime, police procedurals, detective novels, and mysteries. You learn a lot about the world, especially the underside. You’re also entertained most of the time. Based on the reviews I read and my appreciation of the genre, I decided to try a Leonard book. I read Swag.

My choice did not disappoint me. Swag is about two guys who decide to go into the business of armed robbery. Leonard’s portrayal of the two main characters is pretty much flawless. Each has about half a set of brains, and together they don’t quite make a whole. But for a while, they’re on a run. Leonards’s spare and direct style works perfectly to portray the mentality of the main protagonists. Complications occur when a bright detective, a bright prosecutor, and a dame get involved in the proceedings. And greed. And love.

Having represented a lot of criminal defendants in my time, I can only think of a couple who were genuinely bright. And at least once I represented a wiseguy and his saner, quieter partner. You can see the trouble that someone is headed toward when bluster and bravado are supposed to replace thought and judgment. Based on my experience, Leonard seems to have encountered these types of guys as well. He captures their character and ethos so well. Leonard doesn’t criticize his characters or paint them to be anything than other than what they are. A pair of guys who generate some sympathy along the way even as you see them blunder deeper down the rabbit hole.

If you enjoy crime writing at all, then I’d have a hard time thinking that you wouldn’t enjoy this Elmore Leonard novel written in the 1970s. Leonard wrote and published up to the time of his death, and there’s a large body of it I’ve yet to read. This work is different from a mystery or detective novel because the main protagonists are the criminals and not the “good guys”. He gets into the heads of these guys as well as I can imagine anyone doing, and that’s no small accomplishment. Good style or not.

Garments of Court & Palace: Machiavelli & the World That He Made by Phillip Bobbitt

We recently toured Rome and Italy, where we viewed many of the splendors of the Italian Renaissance. Works by Michelangelo, Titian, and Rafael were prominent. The spirit of Leonardo da Vinci loomed in the background. These figures and others like them are considered among the glories of the Italian Renaissance. But perhaps the most important person to emerge from the Italian Renaissance was not a painter, sculptor, or poet. He was a Florentine diplomat sent involuntarily into exile from Florence to a country estate, where he took up his pen and began writing. He drew upon his deep knowledge of ancient history and Florentine history. He drew upon his extensive practical experience from many years as a Florentine diplomat. After his death, one of his works, On Principalities, was published. Immediately, it was subject to mistranslation, misunderstanding, and abridgment. It became known as the Courtier's Koran (and this is not a compliment). Who was this person? Niccolò Machiavelli. His name has become familiar through the centuries since the publication of The Prince (as the title was misleadingly translated into English) as a purveyor of sinister political advice. Almost every major commentator addressing all him him him him him him him him the history of political thought has grappled with Machiavelli’s works and wrestled with his legacy. In this book, Philip Bobbitt enters the fray.

Philip Bobbitt is a professor of law at Columbia University with continuing ties to his original teaching position at the University of Texas. In addition, he has served in foreign-policy positions under both Republican and Democrat administrations. Finally, and most recently, he has published two major works on law, strategy, and international relations: The Shield of Achilles and War and Consent. Compared to those two books, his foray into the world of Machiavellian studies is brief and succinct. However, Bobbitt has a compelling hypothesis and makes a strong case in favor of his interpretation.

Bobbitt argues that The Prince is a short detour from Machiavelli's longer work, the Discourses on Livy, which helped create the intellectual climate that allowed the resurgence of Republicanism in the Western world. Bobbitt argues that The Prince and the Discourses should be read as one book on the state (il stato). Instead of Machiavelli writing a “mirror of princes” work like his predecessors, Machiavelli is attempting something else. In The Prince Machiavelli aims to establish a practical ethics for establishing a state (principality). After the establishment of the state, Machiavelli recommends a transition to a republican form of government. Machiavelli undertakes this intellectual project in the hope that Italy will one day unify into a single state under a republican government, a hope that was not realized until several centuries after his death. In forwarding this argument, Bobbitt does not see Machiavelli as a teacher of evil, but as an astute student of political realities that is willing to weigh the consequences of action and not pay mere lip service to ethical guidelines that don't deal with the reality of those grasping for political power.

I found Bobbitt's argument convincing. Most who read Machiavelli have to admit that he has insights into the behavior of those grasping or seeking power (i.e., all of us). His classic query is to whether it is better to be loved or to be hated, a question that has a practical ring to it for personal relations as much as for political rule. Many readers over the centuries have felt that in taking any advice from Machiavelli one was somehow lowering oneself in a dastardly way, but this is not (necessarily) so. Machiavelli tries to establish the guidelines for founding a state (or regime or scheme of power) that can be later transferred into a more stable republic.

Bobbitt's argument about Machiavelli makes a lot of sense, but it also leaves many unanswered questions. The review of the book by Garry Wills in the New York Times suggest that Bobbitt’s book tacitly approves of a powerful state that will limit civil liberties and unduly aggrandize the regime. Wills seems to believe that Bobbitt’s argument grants license to the Dick Cheneys of the world to do as they will in protection of the state. I didn't read Bobbitt as making that argument, although I am curious to go back and look more closely at The Shield of Achilles and especially Terror and Consent to learn how Bobbitt draws these lines. Bobbitt does ignore the question of when Machiavelli’s ethics of The Prince should no longer apply. In other words, a newly formed principality, according to Machiavelli and Bobbitt, must work under different set of guidelines than an established republic. However, to what extent can a republic or should a republic revert to the ethics of a principality when under threat? Indeed, history seems littered with examples of political leaders who grasp for power when external forces threaten. The identification of an external threat is the oldest trick in the playbook for extending political power. According to Machiavelli and Bobbitt, how do we sort out the legitimate expediencies that Machiavelli might consider legitimate from those that would prove harmful to a republic? Our own republic has undergone a serious decline in civil liberties under the terrorist threats of the last 20 years, and before that, under the threat of communism. Despite the warnings of people like George Kennan, throughout the Cold War the US too often mimicked our adversaries in paranoia, state security, and limitations on freethinking. The same thing can be happening in the current age, although Al Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalism don’t pose the ideological threat that Marxism once held as an attractive messianic religion.

For anyone who is remotely interested in Machiavelli and the world in which he lived and acted, I highly recommend Bobbitt's book. Bobbitt is not a Machiavelli scholar, but he has done his homework and marshaled his arguments in a way that is convincing and appealing. I hope his next book will address the application of Machiavelli and Machiavellian principles in today's world and how we can distinguish between the legitimate uses of power and their easy corruption.