"American Politics" at the 2018 Virginia Festival of the Book - #VaBook2018

Despite its title, there was not much discussion of the left side of American politics by this panel of authors at the 2018 Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville.

The March 24 program, held in the Charlottesville City Council Chambers, was entitled "American Politics: Left, Right & Center" and featured three authors of books about contemporary American politics who spoke on a panel moderated by University of Virginia political scientist Carah Ong Whaley.

Former Pennsylvania Congressman Jason Altmire (author of Dead Center: How Political Polarization Divided America, and What We Can Do About It), assistant professor in presidential studies at the Miller Center for Public Affairs Nicole Hemmer (Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics), and Irish journalist Caitriona Perry (In America: Tales from Trump Country) talked about the deep polarization in American politics, news and opinion media, and the country at large in a wide-ranging discussion prompted by questions from Whaley and members of the audience, who filled nearly every seat in the city hall auditorium.

Here is a video recording of the American politics panel:



Come back to this web site soon for more reports from this year's Virginia Festival of the Book, and watch out for the March 31 episode of The Score podcast on Bearing Drift for an exclusive interview with Jason Altmire that followed the panel discussion.

Sole Booklength Biography of SecDef Nominee Chuck Hagel Leaves Much to Be Desired

Today's confirmation hearing by the Senate Armed Services Committee to review President Obama's nomination of former Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel as the new Secretary of Defense is drawing plenty of attention from the press and public alike.

Outside of Nebraska and rarefied policy-wonk circles, most Americans are not familiar with Hagel or his career. Consequently, they are looking for information about him so that they can make up their own minds about his qualifications to be the successor to Leon Panetta.

Some will turn to their local libraries or book shops to find a biography of Hagel. They will find there is just one available: Charlyne Berens' 2006 book, Chuck Hagel: Moving Forward (University of Nebraska Press), scheduled to be published by Bison Books in paperback this year on July 1 (a publication date that may, given the current circumstances, be moved up).

Berens, described on the book's jacket flap as a professor of journalism at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, wrote this fawning, uncritical biography of her state's then-senior senator during a period in which Hagel was being widely discussed as a potential Republican presidential candidate for 2008. Ultimately, Hagel decided against a run – the nomination went instead to his fellow Vietnam veteran, John McCain – but Berens' book is little more than a brief for supporters of a draft-Hagel movement.


Comic relief
Sadly, Chuck Hagel: Moving Forward, despite being brisk and breezy, reads like a book-length answer to a job interviewer's question: “What would you say are your shortcomings?”, with the reply being, “I work too hard and give too much money to charity.”

Relying on interviews with Hagel's family members, friends, and political colleagues, there is not an unkind word said about him – and even the few (slightly) negative comments are spun positively.

Berens is the kind of biographer who seeks out early mentors of her subject who are prone to say things like, what he lacked in raw talent he made up in scrappiness.

That is not a direct quotation, but this (p. 18) is:

Hagel played football and basketball and went out for track. He was on student council and in the honor society as well as in Sodality, a Catholic young people's organization. "He was a kid you never could keep busy because he was so busy," his football coach Dean Soulliere, now retired, said.

And this, from the next page:

Anything he lacked in athletic ability he made up in effort. For instance, [younger brother] Tom Hagel said Chuck really didn't have a lot of talent in basketball, but he wanted to play so badly that he just drove himself until he made the team. "He was kind of the comic relief in some games,' Tom recalls, 'moderately good, at best, but just entirely focused on it."

Slapdash hagiography
It is hard to begrudge Hagel's success in the armed services (a decorated infantryman, with two Purple Hearts to his credit), business (he built up a multimillion-dollar fortune by investing his life savings in the nascent cell phone industry), philanthropy (he rescued the USO from near bankruptcy in the 1980s), and politics (he defeated a popular sitting governor in the 1996 U.S. Senate race, having never run for office before). But Berens writes about Hagel as if he were an angel. This is a Hagel hagiography entirely lacking academic detachment.

The book is also a slapdash effort that should embarrass both the academic press that published it and the professor who wrote it.

For instance, in discussing Hagel's first first major assignment in the U.S. Army, Berens writes on page 28:

So he was sent to Fort Ord, California, and the White Sands Missile Range. He was nearly twenty-one years old, and it was the first time he had seen the ocean. It was only the second time he'd been out of Nebraska; the first time was for basic training at Fort Bliss.

Yet just a few pages earlier, Berens quotes Hagel as saying that, as a teenager, “I spent way too much time with my buddies, driving up to Yankton, South Dakota,” to meet coeds and drink in a state with a lower drinking age than Nebraska's (p. 23). And two paragraphs later on the same page, Berens reports that Hagel had spent a year in Minneapolis, Minnesota, attending the Brown Institute of Radio and Television, where he also worked several jobs – all this before he began his military service.

Then, much deeper into the book, in a discussion of environmental policy and legislation, Berens explains that the Kyoto Protocol (on climate change) “would have required industrial plants – but not automobile manufacturers – to cut pollution from burning fossil fuels to 2000 levels by 2010” (p. 104). Two pages later, Berens describes a bill that Hagel opposed as one that “would have required U.S. industrial plants – but not auto manufacturers – to cut pollution from burning fossil fuels to 2000 levels by 2010.” The only difference is “automobile” becomes “auto.”


Amateurish
This is amateurish stuff, but Berens worst sin, in terms of academic rigor, may be the way she sources her quotations and paraphrases. Her end notes are all in this form: “Omaha World-Herald, August 16, 1999” or “Washington Post, November 15, 2004” – no page numbers, no article titles, no author bylines. If a high-school student turned in a term paper with that kind of format, he would barely get a passing grade. For a college professor to do it in a book published by a university press is simply horrifying.

All those criticisms aside, there are some interesting tidbits found within the text.

Who knew, for instance, that in the early 1990s, before he returned to Nebraska after two decades as a Washington insider, Republican activists tried to recruit Hagel to run for governor of Virginia? He was, Berens reports, “mildly interested but never pursued the option” (p. 72).

It is also largely forgotten that Hagel was talked about as a potential vice-presidential candidate for George W. Bush as early as 1999, and also as a possible running mate (crossing party lines) for John Kerry in 2004.

With a certain prescient irony, Berens recounts that it would be “safe to say Hagel never seriously considered pursuing a spot on the ticket with Kerry. But the suggestions he might serve in a Kerry cabinet were a different matter. 'I'd see that in a different light,' Hagel said in May 2004.”

Continuing, she writes,

Of course, he added, if he, a Republican, were to serve s a member of a Democratic president's cabinet, that would eliminate any possibility he could ever run for president himself. "I'd have to think about that," Hagel said. "Would it be worth it to give up that option" to serve as secretary of state or defense in a Kerry cabinet? Only if he were convinced the position would allow him to make a real difference, he said. As things turned out, the question was moot.

As things turned out, it was only temporarily moot.

Hagel chose not to run for re-election in 2008, fulfilling a promise he had made to voters in 1996 that he would serve just two terms. He went on to become chairman of the Atlantic Council of the United States, in keeping with his lifelong interest in international affairs. And on January 7, 2013, Republican war veteran Chuck Hagel was nominated for Secretary of Defense by a Democratic president.

Will this foreclose future plans for the now-66-year-old Hagel to run for President himself? That remains to be seen but one can only hope that, if that day comes, a better, more analytical biography of him by a less sycophantic author will have been published.  For now, Chuck Hagel: Moving Forward is not that book.

(This book review appeared, in slightly different form, on Examiner.com.)

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'The War Powers Resolution: Its Implementation in Theory and Practice'

This book review appeared initially in the New York Tribune on Monday, September 3, 1983.

BOOK / RICHARD E. SINCERE JR.
The War Powers Resolution: a siege on presidential power
 
The War Powers Resolution: Its Implementation in Theory and Practice by Robert F. Turner, Philadelphia: Foreign Policy Research Institute, 1983, 147 pages, $4.95.

Clement J. Zablocki, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told The Milwaukee Journal on July 3: “The Wars Powers Resolution is uniquely crafted in that it accommodates to the reality of our modern, nuclear world. . . However, the distinctive virtue of the resolution is that it reserves to the Congress its constitutionally mandated responsibility of ultimately deciding the full legality of a presidential action. “In short,” said Zablocki, author of the 1973 law, “the War Powers Resolution is too fundamental in both its constitutional anchorage and its practical benefit to be dismantled” by the recent Supreme Court ruling that the so-called legislative veto is unconstitutional.


Inaccurate optimism
Zablocki’s assertions are wrong, according to attorney Robert F. Turner, formerly a legislative assistant to a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  Turner argues in “The War Powers Resolution: Its Implementation in Theory and Practice” that the law “is — in essence — unconstitutional, ineffective and unwise.”

Experience of the past decade demonstrates that the War Powers Resolution is not only ineffective, it is probably harmful. “Rather than fostering an atmosphere of cooperation partnership in decisions to commit U.S. forces to hostile situations, the War Powers Resolution has had the opposite effect: it pits the two branches against each other on essentially procedural grounds at the precise time that national unity is needed to deal with a potential crisis.”

The War Powers Resolution was doomed from its beginning. It was passed by a Congress that refused to acknowledge the congressional role in the conduct of the Vietnam War. Pretending that the near- unanimous vote in 1964 for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution (which granted sweeping discretionary powers to the president for prosecuting the war) never occurred, Congress gave the false impression that its constitutional responsibilities had been usurped by the president. So the law’s purpose was grounded in a historical fiction.

Nixon’s veto
Furthermore, the law’s effectiveness was immediately cast into doubt because it had to be passed over President Nixon’s veto. Sen. Jacob Javits, who co-sponsored the resolution, had hoped that Congress would work out a “methodology’’ for join presidential-congressional action in committing American troops abroad and that the president would then sign it — essentially making a compact between the president and Congress. That hope was not realized when the resolution was, for good reason, vetoed.

The War Powers Resolution requires, among other things, that 60 days after American forces are introduced into “situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances,” the president must terminate American involvement unless Congress explicity acts to continue it. Thus, vital American military aid to a nation under siege could legally be ended simply because the Congress cannot make up its mind! More important, an enemy aware of the president’s time limits could easily delay an offensive or refuse to negotiate peace terms until the 60 days of American military presence had ended.

Turner shows that the War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional for several independent reasons, including those cited by the Supreme Court in its recent Chadha decision. Among the others, Turner says, are the resolution’s provisions limiting the power of the Commander-in-Chief to “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces” [Section 2 (c)]. ‘Turner argues: “Any attempt to give legal effect to this provision would be patently unconstitutional.”

Critical omissions
The resolution fails to make the crucial distinction between the Congress’s constitutional power to declare war and the president’s powers to make war. Since after 60 days Congress must affirmatively act to authorize use of U.S. armed forces, the resolution deprives the president of "a fundamental expressed constitutional power,” something “incompatible with our system of separation of powers.”

Turner’s work is a valuable lesson in history and government. It will increase in value as President Reagan and Congress continue to dispute the presence of U.S. forces abroad, particularly in Central America, where fears of “another Vietnam” obscure the realities of the situation.

Congress and the public should take heed of Turner’s analysis, as Sen. John Tower already has, calling the War Powers Resolution “probably the most potentially damaging of the 1970s legislation” that altered the relationship between Congress and president. Tower most surely agrees with Robert Turner’s concluding recommendation:

“Now that its failure has been demonstrated and the acrimony resulting from Vietnam has receded, Congress should take a valuable first step in the direction of improved legislative-executive cooperation in this vital area — and in the process reaffirm its commitment to constitutional government — by repealing the War Powers Resolution.”

Richard E. Sincere, Jr., serves on the board of directors of the American Civil Defense Association and on the staff of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.