Don’t worry, it was even worse in the 1970s. Or was it?
Jonathan V. Last
September 30, 2013, Vol. 19, No. 04
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: Everyday life wasn’t much better than economic life. Terrorism first came into vogue in the 1970s. Sometimes it was a thuggish hijacking, with criminals commandeering an airplane and demanding passage to Cuba. Sometimes it was deadly, like the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Nobody much remembers it today, but in March 1977 Muslim radicals with machine guns and machetes marched into the B’nai B’rith headquarters in Washington, just five blocks north of the White House, and took 100 workers hostage. They herded the hostages onto the roof, where one was killed and two others were shot over the course of a standoff that lasted two days. Simultaneously, affiliated terrorists took over D.C. city hall, where future mayor Marion Barry was shot and a radio reporter was shot and killed.
The B’nai B’rith incident was soon lost in the wash of small-scale attacks and bombings from Islamic extremists, Black Power radicals, and student leftists that punctuated life in the ’70s—none of which seems to have left much of an impact. One prelude to the ’70s did have lasting consequences. During the “long, hot summers” of 1964-68, 329 “important” riots took place in 257 U.S. cities, according to Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom’s authoritative America in Black and White, with a toll of some 300 dead, 8,000 injured, and 60,000 arrested. The riots in Harlem, Watts, Detroit, Newark, and, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Washington, D.C., were only the most famous. These eruptions helped drive the middle class out of urban cores in the ’70s, sending cities into decline and making the new underclass permanent.
Violent crime was almost nonexistent in the 1950s, but by 1973 it was rampant,
Happy times are all alike, nestled in the comfortable batting of peace, growth, and stability. Every unhappy time is unhappy in its own way.
America has been blessed because, since the end of the Great Depression, our nation has experienced only two periods of deep discontent that lasted a decade or more. The first was the 1970s. We are living through the second today. Which was worse?
The popular mind often misremembers the past. For instance, these days the 1950s are held out as a time deserving special scorn. Stories set in the Eisenhower era are often shot through with contempt for the racism, sexism, hypocrisy, and dissatisfaction of American life. But this is revisionism; by many measures—wages, unemployment, home sales, marital stability, births, savings rates, upward mobility—the ’50s were an idyll.
What’s more, the happy times of the 1950s stretched into the 1960s. So long that “The ’60s” as we remember them—Woodstock, long hair, free love—didn’t really get underway until 1967 and continued well into the 1970s. That’s one of the central insights of David Frum’s wonderful book about the ’70s, How We Got Here. His other insight is that whatever people want to believe about the ’50s and ’60s, the stretch from 1967 to 1979 was a rarely mitigated disaster.
Many people remember the headlines from the 1970s: the shooting war in Vietnam and the quiet but existential threat of the larger Cold War; a president nearly impeached; oil shocks that forced people to stand in line for gasoline. But the problems in America were both broader and deeper.
The economics of the 1970s, for example, were brutal. In 1969, the unemployment rate was 3.5 percent, the lowest it had been since the mid-1950s. (The postwar average has been about 5 percent.) By 1975 unemployment had more than doubled, to 8.5 percent. While people were working less, so was their money, as inflation ate into the value of the dollar. In the 1960s, the inflation rate rose above 2 percent only twice—until 1968. At which point it began steadily increasing, reaching 11 percent in 1974, 9.1 percent in 1975, and 11.3 percent in 1979. To understand the effect this financial terror had on the national psyche, consider how often inflation fears have recurred during the last 30 years—even though inflation hasn’t topped 6 percent since 1982. (more…)
Former Vice President Dick Cheney, center, shakes hands with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the dedication of the George W. Bush presidential library on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Thursday, April 25, 2013. Former President George W. Bush‘s daughter Jenna Bush Hager is at right. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
President Barack Obama stands with, from second from left, former Presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, and Jimmy Carter at the dedication of the George W. Bush presidential library on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Thursday, April 25, 2013. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times and is now editor of the Drudge Report. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and @josephcurl.
Thursday, April 25, 2013
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DALLAS — Shortly after Barack Obama was elected in 2008, a fellow reporter who’d covered President George W. Bush all eight years told me she’d had enough of the travel and stress and strain of the White House beat, that she was moving on.
We reminisced about all the places we’d been, all the crazy days and wild nights, all the history we’d seen — first hand. Just before we said our goodbyes, I asked her if she’d miss covering President Obama.
“Not at all. He’s an inch deep. Bush is a bottomless chasm, a deep, mysterious, emotional, profound man. Obama is all surface — shallow, obvious, robotic, and, frankly, not nearly as smart as he thinks. Bush was the one.”
Her words, so succinct, have stuck with me ever since. By the way, she’s a hardcore Democrat.
But she was right. And that contrast was apparent to all who watched Thursday’s ceremonial event to open W’s new presidential library in Dallas. The class and grace and depth of America’s last president completely outshined that of his successor (who, coincidentally, or perhaps not, was the only one seated in the shade on a sunny Texas day). (more…)
In March 1975, with the United States in post-Watergate disarray at home, stunned by repeated diplomatic defeats at the United Nations, and about to suffer the humiliation of seeing an ally at whose side we had fought for many years be overrun by the North Vietnamese Communist Army, Daniel Patrick Moynihan asked: “What then does the United States do?”
His answer, in an article in Commentary magazine:
The United States goes into opposition. This is our circumstance. We are a minority. We are outvoted. This is neither an unprecedented nor an intolerable situation. The question is what do we make of it. So far we have made little—nothing—of what is in fact an opportunity. We go about dazed that the world has changed. We toy with the idea of stopping it and getting off. We rebound with the thought that if only we are more reasonable perhaps “they” will be. . . . But “they” do not grow reasonable. Instead, we grow unreasonable. A sterile enterprise which awaits total redefinition.
How to achieve a “total redefinition” through opposition? First, “recognize that there is a distinctive ideology” at work on the other side. Such a recognition allows one to “be in a position to reach for a certain coherence of opposition.” And that coherence of opposition would revolve, Moynihan suggested, around making the case for America as a nation worth defending: “It is past time we ceased to apologize for an imperfect democracy. Find its equal.”
In particular, unapologetic opposition means openly and aggressively making the case for free markets as unequaled engines of economic opportunity and growth; it means advocating government policies that are “limited in their undertakings, concrete in their means, representative in their mode of adoption, and definable in terms of results”; and it means showing a commitment to “speaking for political and civil liberty, and doing so in detail and in concrete particulars.” Making these arguments would be “liberating” for American diplomats and for American foreign policy, Moynihan claimed. “It is time, that is, that the American spokesman came to be feared in international forums for the truths he might tell.”
Today it is the Republican party that is in opposition. Not entirely, of course. There are 30 Republican governors, many of them governing successfully. And Republicans maintain control of the House of Representatives. On the other hand, a Democratic president has just been reelected with a majority of the popular vote for the first time in almost 70 years. Republicans lost 25 of 33 Senate races. And Democrats received more popular votes in House contests nationwide than did Republicans. So opposition it is. (more…)
A good movie might have been great without the polemics.
John Podhoretz
October 29, 2012, Vol. 18, No. 07
The new Ben Affleck film—an efficiently toldpiece about a crazily brilliant CIA operation to get six Americans out of Iran during the hostage crisis more than three decades ago—could almost have been a docudrama made for network television in the early 1980s, except that the rescue mission it depicts was classified and remained a secret until 1997. Which is to say, Argo is kind of a little movie that could easily fit on an old 19-inch color television. And in a different age, it might have worked better on television. But there’s something wonderful about the fact that it’s right up there on the big screen at a time when an adult looking for something to hold his attention at the movie theater is almost certain to come away disappointed.
Not this time.
The movie Argo most closely resembles is Raid on Entebbe, the understated behind-the-scenes story of the daring Israeli rescue of the airline passengers who were hijacked and taken to Idi Amin’s Uganda in 1976. Raid on Entebbe aired on NBC in 1977, and it remains the best fact-based television film ever made. Its verisimilitude and painstaking eye for detail contribute to the overwhelming force of Raid on Entebbe’s final half-hour: You know as you’re watching it that the mission was a success, but your heart is lodged in your throat and the passengers’ final escape results in a shocking flood of grateful tears.
Much the same thing happens when you watch Argo, which tells a true story even more unlikely than the one in Raid on Entebbe.When, in November 1979, six of the employees from the American embassy in Tehran manage to escape as it is being overrun by the radicals who would take 52 remaining Americans hostage for 444 days, they find refuge at the residence of Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor. They have to be extracted before the Iranians figure it out, and the task falls to Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck), a clandestine CIA officer who specializes in “exfils” (short for “exfiltration”). (more…)
Hollywood loves to think of itself as socially significant. But given how long it can take to finance a film—let alone make one—it’s exceedingly rare for its products to be attuned to the zeitgeist. So it’s fortuitous for the makers of the new movie Argo that its depiction of rioters storming a U.S. embassy might be mistaken for footage from the evening news. At the same time, current events make the movie’s implication that the Americans were kind of asking for it all the more unsettling.
Argo is set during the 1979 Iranian Revolution that deposed the shah and installed the theocracy that rules Iran to this day. The film’s early scenes would be frightening even if they weren’t so disturbingly familiar. A mob shouting anti-American slurs grows in size, sound, and rage. The Americans trapped inside their embassy watch in horror as the crowd finally breaches the entrance and rushes the compound.
The movie (reviewed by John Podhoretz on page 38 of this issue) opened October 12, a month after four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were murdered in a violent attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya—and just days after President Obama admitted the assault was a premeditated terrorist strike. I spoke with director and star Ben Affleck about the film twice, first at a press conference in Beverly Hills, then with a few other journalists in Washington, D.C. At both events, the 40-year-old filmmaker emphasized that he didn’t set out to make a political statement. “It was always important to us that the movie not be politicized. We went to great pains to try to make it very factual and fact-based, . . . knowing that it was coming up before an election in the United States, when a lot of things get politicized,” he said. “We couldn’t obviously forecast how terrible things would become now.” (more…)
Is Barack Obama a warrior president? Not in the British tradition, of course, which gave us Winston Churchill, with his crazy cavalry charge against Sudanese spears, or the more cerebral Harold Macmillan, shot to pieces in World War I, lying in the blood and the mud reading Aeschylus. Obama is a post-Vietnam president: He walks in the footsteps of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who took different paths away from the jungles of Southeast Asia but later sent Americans into harm’s way in foreign wars. He is—if we are to believe his campaign ads, his vice presi-dent, and a recent breathless encomium in the New York Times—a commander in chief more in line with “Teddy Roosevelt than Jimmy Carter.” He is a “gutsy” guy, who has “embraced SEAL Team 6 rather than Code Pink.”
Politically, it’s common and fair for an American presi-dent seeking reelection to accentuate his manly qualities. Most Democrats to the right of the editors at Mother Jones—and that is still most Democrats—don’t want to elect a wimp. Modern democracies understandably don’t demand that their leaders come from military backgrounds, let alone have shown valor in battle. So we use a different standard to assess their martial toughness. President Obama, his minions, and his admirers have loudly told us he stakes his claim on two accomplishments: the raid to kill Osama bin Laden and the aggressive use of drones against jihadists. So let’s look.
The last two presidents, in fact, have used Predators to kill our enemies. For going after Muslim holy warriors in geographically challenging regions of the Greater Middle East, remote-controlled aircraft are militarily and politically safer and more economical than sending in special-operations teams. Early on, the Bush administration accelerated the development of drones because they were an immediately useful part of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s technology-driven transformation of the armed forces. Still, for the Bush administration to trumpet Predators as a sign of the president’s warrior ethos would have seemed surreal, given his invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. It also would have appeared unseemly, when Rumsfeld’s high-tech doctrine fared poorly against insurgencies that demanded more troops than the secretary had deemed necessary.
In theory, killer drones are almost a liberal’s fighting dream-machine: no dead Americans (unless they are the targets), no captured U.S. soldiers, no wounded to transport home, no crashing helicopters, a minimum of soul-tormenting reflection, no blood or gore on TV or in print, and limited collateral damage. Perhaps best of all, because of drones’ stealth, cooperating Muslim governments can deny their complicity with the infidel superpower. True, some leftists have risen to question the ethics of drone use (if terrorism should be treated as a crime, which is sometimes the view of the Obama administration, then killing folks without trial or judicial review, remotely and clandestinely, is wrong). But most American liberals have approved or kept their reservations quiet. Killing jihadists overseas is apparently more moral than putting them alive into Guantánamo Bay. (more…)
Beginning Nov. 4, 1979 , dozens of U.S. diplomats were held hostage by Iranian Islamic revolutionaries for 444 days while America’s feckless president, Jimmy Carter, fretted in the White House. Running for the presidency against Carter the next year, Ronald Reagan made it crystal clear that the Iranians would pay a very stiff price for continuing their criminal behavior. On Jan. 20, 1981, in the hour that Reagan was sworn into office, Iran released the hostages. The Iranians well understood that Reagan was serious about turning words into action in a way that Jimmy Carter never was.
America and the world face a strikingly similar situation today; only even more is at stake. The same Islamic fanatics who took our diplomats hostage are racing to build a nuclear bomb. Barack Obama, America’s most feckless president since Carter, has declared such an outcome unacceptable, but his rhetoric has not been matched by an effective policy. While Obama frets in the White House, the Iranians are making rapid progress toward obtaining the most destructive weapons in the history of the world.
The gravity of this development cannot be overstated. For three decades now, the ayatollahs running Iran have sponsored terrorism around the world. If we’ve learned anything from Sept. 11, 2001, it is that terrorism in the nuclear age holds nightmarish possibilities for horror on a mass scale. (more…)
Updated March 5, 2012, Reagan Was A Sure Loser Too
Conventional wisdom about Republican presidential prospects sounds mighty familiar.
By WILLIAM MCGURN
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: Nor was candidate Reagan without baggage. As governor, Reagan had pushed through the largest tax hike in California’s history, had signed one of the nation’s most liberal abortion laws, and—as George H.W. Bush pointed out—presided over the doubling of the state budget over his eight-year tenure, to $10.2 billion when he left office from $4.6 billion when he entered.
Not since Herbert Hoover has a party out of power had such an opportunity to run against everything that troubles the American family—prices, interest rates, unemployment, taxes, or the fear for the future of their old age or the future of their children—than is now presented to the Republican Party.
The Republicans, however, haven’t figured this out. This is their basic problem. They have no strategy for defeating an Obama administration that is highly vulnerable on both domestic and foreign policy.
That’s the conventional wisdom in a nutshell, isn’t it?
It will come as no surprise that these words appeared in a Feb. 29 column in the New York Times. They are reproduced here exactly as written, save for one small adjustment.
The president whose failings they describe is Jimmy Carter, not Barack Obama. The lines were written in 1980, not 2012. The author was the then-dean of conventional wisdom, James “Scotty” Reston. The headline was “Jimmy Carter’s Luck,” a reference to Reagan’s victory in the New Hampshire primary three days earlier.
It appears the conventional wisdom hasn’t changed much. Today’s narrative holds that however weak President Obama’s hand, Republicans find themselves in no position to capitalize on it. A glance back to where we were at this exact point in the 1980 primaries suggests otherwise.
Bettmann/CorbisThe Republican candidates in early 1980 (from left): Philip Crane, John Connally, John Anderson, Howard Baker, Bob Dole, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush (more…)
In Human Events this morning I discuss the latest disastrous turn of Obama’s disastrous presidency:
Last week the Egyptian Government announced that it intends to put 19 Americans on trial for fomenting anti-government protests – a charge they deny. Protests from the Obama administration have so far been futile, met with sneers of contempt. If you’re of a certain age, this should sound familiar. On Nov. 4, 1979, Iranian thugs stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took 52 Americans hostage. Jimmy Carter’s government wrung its hands in futility for the next 14 months, until finally the Islamic Republic released the hostages Jan. 20, 1981, the day Ronald Reagan took office as President of the United States.
The bitter irony in all that was that Carter had betrayed the Shah of Iran, a longtime U.S. ally, and thereby paved the way for the ascent to power of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian mullahcracy that has ruled Iran ever since. Rather than feel gratitude toward Carter, however, Khomeini viewed his abandonment of the Shah as a sign of weakness, and pressed forward with his jihad against the Great Satan. (more…)
On January 23, 1980, Jimmy Carter gave what turned out to be his final State of the Union address. Ronald Reagan’s victory over Carter that November spared us any more of them. Will Barack Obama’s appearance before Congress on January 24, 2012, be his swan song?
’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
But there are differences between 2012 and 1980. One is that the Republicans have no Reagan. Another is that it may not be as clear that Obama has failed as was the case with Carter. That’s not to say Obama is a superior president to Carter. In fact, Obama may end up having done more damage to the country, even if he only gets one term. But how evident will Obama’s failure be when voters go to the polls on November 6? (more…)
