Politics Observations & Arguments, 1966-2004

by Hertzberg, Hendrik; Remnick, David

• ISBN13: 9781594200182
• ISBN10: 1594200181
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-07-15
• Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The

Summary

Cause for jubilation: At last, one of America's wisest and most necessary voices has distilled what he knows about politics, broadly speaking, into one magnificent volume. Imagine if the Rolling Stones were just now releasing its first greatest hits album, and you'll have some idea of how long overdue, and highly anticipated, Politicsis. Here are Hendrik Hertzberg's most significant and hilarious and devastating and infuriating dispatches from the American scene-a scene he has chronicled for four decades with an uncanny blend of moral seriousness, high spirits, and perfect rhetorical pitch. Politicsis at once the story of American life from LBJ to GWB and a testament to the power of the written word in the right hands. In those hands, everything seems like politics, and politics has never seemed more interesting. Hertzberg breaks down American politics into component parts-campaigns, debates, rhetoric, the media, wars (cultural, countercultural, and real), high crimes and misdemeanors, the right, and more-and draws the choicest, most telling pieces from his body of work to illuminate each, beginning each section with a new piece of writing framing the subject at hand. Politics 101 from the master, Politicsis also an immensely rich and entertaining mosaic of American life from the mid-1960s to the mid-2000s-a ride through recent American history with one of the most insightful and engaging guides imaginable.

Author Biography

Hendrik Hertzberg has been a staff writer and editor at The New Yorker since 1992; he was a staff writer there in the early 1970s as well. He has also been a naval officer, a Newsweek reporter, President Jimmy Carter's chief speechwriter, and (twice) editor of The New Republic, where he (twice) won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence. He is a 1965 graduate of Harvard.

Table of Contents

Introduction	xvii
David Remnick
Author's Note	xxv
Enough About the Sixties
The San Francisco Sound	3	(16)
New music, new subculture
Weather Report: White Tornado	19	(8)
Lunacy on the Left
Everywhere's Somewhere	27	(5)
John and Yoko come to New York
Why the War Was Immoral	32	(7)
Looking back at Vietnam and anti-Vietnam
You Had to Be There	39	(6)
What Woodstock was ``like''
Big Men
A Moral Ideologue	45	(25)
The character of Jimmy Carter
The Child Monarch	70	(23)
Ronald Reagan's surprising presidency
Scaling Mt. Kennedy	93	(20)
R.F.K.'s journey from fixer to martyrdom
Speechifyin'
In Praise of Judson Welliver	113	(4)
Judson who?
Wascally Woss	117	(4)
Perot's favorite fuzzy animal
Speeding Ticket	121	(3)
Cicero goes Geraldo
Two Speeches	124	(3)
J.F.K.'s Inaugural and Clinton's
Big Talk	127	(4)
It's about addressing the mainstream
Star-Spangled Banter	131	(3)
Can we please have a better national anthem?
Talking Points	134	(6)
Behind the lines with Peggy Noonan
The Word from W.	140	(3)
A shockingly good Inaugural Address
Grinding Axis	143	(8)
The rhetorical uses of evil
Judeo-Christians
Antidisestablishmentarianism	151	(3)
A Jaycee protests
Vatican't	154	(3)
Instructions from Rome and Alabama
Secular Sermon	157	(3)
The stakes in the Rushdie affair
Two Little Words	160	(3)
One nation under God (stet)
Dividends	163	(6)
Bush's preferential option for the rich
A Campaign
Sluicegate `88	169	(5)
The journalistic stoning of Gary Hart
Sporting News	174	(3)
Tarred by the Miami Herald's brush
G.O.P. Follies	177	(5)
The Republicans debate
Tuesday Night Patball	182	(3)
Republicans and Democrats, starring Tom Brokaw
Monster from the Id	185	(6)
Politics as psychotherapy, from Gary Hart
First Returns	191	(3)
Good morning, Iowa
Dole's Charm	194	(6)
His masks of comedy and tragedy
The Father, the Son, and the Holy Politician	200	(8)
Pat Robertson's Oedipus complex
The Tortoise	208	(7)
Dukakis's slow, sure bid for the nomination
Ivy Scoreboard	215	(4)
Which is more elitist, Harvard or Yale?
Dynasties Old and New	219	(3)
Scenes from the Democratic Convention
Front Man	222	(5)
The moral decline of the American ruling class
Roboflop	227	(11)
Make that 999 points of light and one dim bulb
And What if . . .?	238	(4)
Debate three: the remix
Aroma of Bull	242	(6)
Following the Bush campaign caravan
Recriminations '88: Hell, I Dunno	248	(9)
Parceling out blame
Foreigners
Poland's Revolution	257	(3)
The Proletariat---remember them?
Le Changement	260	(3)
L'anticommunisme des Socialistes
Death of a Patriot	263	(4)
Olof Palme, American
Casualties of War	267	(4)
Oops, Russia got out of Afghanistan
Democracia	271	(3)
The fall of the Berlin Wall as seen from Central America
Civics, Nicaragua-Style	274	(7)
The Sandinistas blow it
Non-Party Lines	281	(4)
Scenes from the Soviet twilight
Team Player	285	(4)
``Observing'' an election
Gremlins and Goblins	289	(3)
The end of the Soviet Union
The Kosovo Precinct	292	(3)
Police work in the Balkans
A Tale of Two Cubas	295	(8)
Havana and Miami fight over Elian
Wingers
McGovernist Conspiracies	303	(2)
The threat of ideological fluoridation
Neoconfab	305	(3)
Debating whether Soviet power will still triumph
Sweet and Sour	308	(3)
Wild and crazy Republicans in convention assembled
Marxism: The Sequel	311	(4)
The dialectics of Newt Gingrich
Cookie Monster	315	(4)
The Speaker as author
Bad News for Bigots	319	(3)
The good news from Bob Jones University
Sheer Helms	322	(3)
He preferred his racism straight up
Can You Forgive Him?	325	(9)
A right-wing conspirator comes clean
Rush in Rehab	334	(7)
Megadoses for megadittos
The Wayward Media
Headline	341	(4)
The guy who wrote Ford to City: Drop Dead
The Big Tune-Out	345	(6)
Whaddya mean, ``no story''?
Entertainment for Men	351	(3)
Which'll it be, Playboy or Penthouse?
Cross Talk	354	(3)
An irritating anchorhabit
Press Pass	357	(3)
Clinton awes the hacks
Topless Tabloids of Gotham	360	(18)
Latest on Post-News slayfest!
George Without Tears	378	(5)
What was John Kennedy's magazine all about?
What's Up, Doc?	383	(3)
Dr. or Mr.?
L'Affaire Blair	386	(5)
Fabulousness at the New York Times
Radio Daze	391	(6)
Same thing on every station
Wedge Issues
Big Boobs	397	(10)
The good parts of the Meese porn report
Executions I: Burning Question	407	(3)
Whom does capital punishment punish?
Executions II: Federal Death	410	(3)
Gallows to gurney
Wounds of Race	413	(5)
The bitter truths behind affirmative action
Flagellation	418	(4)
Flag burning? Can't be done
Gore's Greatest Bong Hits	422	(4)
The dopey drug war
Labor's China Syndrome	426	(3)
The problem is, unions are illegal
Cops and Wallets	429	(3)
Have faith in Bruce, please, Officers
Unnatural Law	432	(3)
Taking sodomy private
Northern Light	435	(8)
O Canada
High Crimes
Dean's First Day	443	(4)
The Senate Watergate hearings get under way
Tower Play	447	(4)
Capitol Hill prissiness claims a Republican sinner
What a Whopper	451	(3)
Clarence Thomas's lies about lying
Tales of the Tapes	454	(4)
Nixon had the right idea
What It's About	458	(7)
Evidently not the opposite of sex
Ghosts in the Machine
Let's Get Representative	465	(9)
How to make Congress democratic
Twelve Is Enough	474	(7)
A simple cure for chronic incumbency
Boom Vox	481	(3)
The screeching, deafening voice of ``the people''
Idea Woman	484	(4)
The actual, and excellent, thoughts of Lani Guinier
Filibuster I: Catch-XXII	488	(3)
The Senate rule that killed health care . . .
Filibuster II: Filibusted	491	(4)
. . . and how and why it should be killed, too
The Case for Proportional Representation	495	(13)
Why voting is almost never a political act in the U.S.
Letter from New Hampshire: This Must Be the Place	508	(8)
Somebody has to decide who'll be president, right?
The Lesson of Red Ken	516	(3)
The real novelty of London's mayoral election
Best Picture	519	(3)
Why good movies get nominated and bad ones get Oscars
Framed Up	522	(13)
What the Constitution gets wrong
Yuppies and Other Leftovers
The Education of Mr. Smith	535	(8)
The morality of pragmatism
All the Fine Young Kennedys	543	(3)
Caroline and John, among others
Moby-Rick	546	(3)
In quest of Leviathan
The Short Happy Life of the American Yuppie	549	(14)
The rise and fall of a cultural archetype
Book Him	563	(12)
Bill Clinton and other presidential memoirists
2000 + 9/11
Five Percenter	575	(3)
Why it was right to keep Nader out of the debates
Both Sides Now	578	(3)
Clinton versus Clinton
They've Got Personality	581	(5)
What are the candidates ``about''?
College High Jinks	586	(3)
What if the loser wins?
All Perfectly Legal	589	(3)
Bush becomes president-appoint
Eppur Si Muove	592	(3)
Gore and Galileo
Advice and Consent	595	(3)
The case for obstructionism
Generous George	598	(3)
Bush disguises an agenda of greed
Defense Mechanisms	601	(3)
The obsession with missile defense
Tuesday, and After	604	(3)
The reality of horror and the metaphor of war
Stimulation	607	(3)
Squandering 9/11's only gift
Differences	610	(3)
A success that's too conventional for comfort
Recounted Out	613	(3)
An election result no longer in doubt
Mine Shaft	616	(3)
Lessons of the Quecreek Nine
Manifesto	619	(5)
A dismal, ignoble vision of ``national security''
2000 and Two	624	(3)
The unmet challenge of that undemocratic election
Too Much Information	627	(4)
Information awareness that's, like, total
Blixkrieg	631	(3)
The unilateral rush to war in Iraq
Attack Anxiety	634	(5)
How did it come to this?
Collateral Damage	639	(3)
Things hidden in the fog of war
Building Nations	642	(3)
What's sauce for Iraq . . .
Unsteady State	645	(4)
Earth to Bush: Bush to Mars
Acknowledgments	649	(4)
Index	653

Excerpts

Introduction The Hertzberg Effect By David RemnickHendrik Hertzberg, in his present incarnation, is the political voice of The New Yorker. That pleases me, because, in my opinion, Hertzberg is the most humane and urbane commentator on American public life since Murray Kempton. I first began reading Hendrik Hertzberg-Rick, to his colleagues and his improbably large circle of friends-when he and Michael Kinsley took tag-team turns editing The New Republicin the nineteen-eighties. National Reviewand Human Eventsmay have held sway in the Oval Office, but elsewhere in town (on Capitol Hill, in the office suites of cause lobbyists and consultants, in newsrooms and think tanks, even in odd corners of Reagan's White House) no political publication was more eagerly read or more excitedly discussed than The New Republic. The relatively small liberal weekly (its circulation was around eighty thousand) had become an exhilarating cacophony of fractious, even warring, voices of different tones and tempers. In TNR's order of battle, Hertzberg and Kinsley, despite contrasting sensibilities, generally found themselves on the same side. Kinsley was, and remains, a master at lancing an inflated reputation or a fatuous argument. His prose is spare, logical, acerbic. Hertzberg's is a warmer, rounder, more confiding voice, though no less funny and often no less cutting. I had been reading the magazine ever since I arrived in Washington in 1982, but I remember well the first time one of Rick's pieces had on me what I'd later identify as the Hertzberg effect-a twinned zing of provocation and pleasure. The year was 1985, and William Bennett was the Reagan administration's secretary of education and grand inquisitor. (This was long before his Elmer Gantry-Fyodor Dostoevsky moment, when the ever-accusing moralist was forced to reveal he had gambled away millions in family milk money in the gambling dens of Las Vegas and Atlantic City.) In a tone of highest dudgeon, Bennett had complained that the people who really ruled the country-the liberals, the judges, the whatever-had consistently displayed what he called "an aversion to religion" and a disdain for the "Judeo-Christian" values that made America great. Hertzberg, a determined secularist born to an unbelieving Jewish father and a Quaker mother, took unforgettable umbrage: As a Judeo-Christian who has an aversion to religion, and who is an American as good as or better than any mousse-haired, Bible-touting, apartheid-promoting evangelist on any UHF television station you can name, I must protest.Where is it written that if you don't like religion you are somehow disqualified from being a legitimate American? What was Mark Twain, a Russian? When did it become un-American to have opinions about the origin and meaning of the universe that come from sources other than the body of dogma of organizations approved by the federal government as certifiably Judeo-Christian? If it is American to believe that God ordered Tribe X to abjure pork, or that he caused Leader Y to be born to a virgin, why is it suddenly un-American to doubt that the prime mover of this unimaginably vast universe of quintillions of solar systems would be likely to be obsessed with questions involving the dietary and biosexual behavior of a few thousand bipeds inhabiting a small part of a speck of dust orbiting a third-rate star in an obscure spiral arm of one of millions of more or less identical galaxies?Two decades later, I still don't know what to admire most about that passage-its swingy fearlessness, its sly patriotism, or the sheer syntactical gymnastics of its final flourish. The writing is so happy-making it almost reconciles one to the comic, cosmic smallness of our species and the bleakness of its fate. Some people are changelings, creating themselves as if