'A Century of Christmas Memories' - A Book Review

A Century of Christmas Memories, 1900-1999, by the Editors of Peter Pauper Press. White Plains, N.Y.:  Peter Pauper Press, 2009. Hardcover $12.95, 120 pages.

One hundred years ago today, President Woodrow Wilson lit the first national Christmas tree on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol.  Ten years later, Calvin Coolidge presided over a tree-lighting ceremony on the Ellipse south of the White House, beginning a tradition that endures today.

These are two of the historical tidbits included in A Century of Christmas Memories, 1900-1999, a stocking stuffer book attributed to "nameless" editors working for the Peter Pauper Press.

While it contains more than 100 pages spanning ten decades, the book itself can be read cover to cover in less than an hour.  Each item consists of just one or two sentences, and the pages are dominated by photographs and other illustrations.

Designed more to entertain and to evoke nostalgia than to be a serious reference tool, A Century of Christmas Memories has the capacity to send readers scrambling to the encyclopedia or to the Internet to learn more about the events, trends, and commercial products it mentions.

To get a flavor of the book, check out some of the items reported every ten years ending in "3".

One might be surprised to learn, for instance, in one of the entries for 1903 that that was the year that Advent calendars were first introduced:

they are attributed to printer Gerhard Lang.  Legend has it that Lang's mother gave her son a piece of cake or biscuit on each day in December, giving him something to look forward to as he counted down to Christmas.  This inspired his creation of the calendars that offer children treats or favors for each day leading up to December 25.

Besides the debut of the first national Christmas tree, 1913 also saw the birth of the Kewpie doll and the Erector Set, as well as the Goo Goo Cluster candy, the crossword puzzle, and

On December 1, the first "drive-in" gas station opens in Pittsburgh, current home of the Gulf Oil Company.  The price for a gallon of gas?  Eight cents!

Ten years later, when Coolidge lit the Christmas tree outside the White House ("illuminated by 2,500 lights"), Paul Whiteman's orchestra had a hit with the holiday-themed "Parade of the Wooden Soldiers" and the Hasbro company, eventually known for producing popular toys left under the Christmas tree, was founded.

In the midst of the Depression, 1933 saw the erection of the first Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and the first Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular (featuring the Rockettes).

During the Second World War, the U.S. government suggested giving war bonds as Christmas presents.  In 1943, Bing Crosby had a hit record with "I'll Be Home for Christmas" and -- despite otherwise suspending the expansion of the TV industry -- there was an experimental broadcast of Dickens' A Christmas Carol.  (How many -- or how few -- viewers saw it is not noted.)  Overseas that year, American GIs decorated Christmas trees in Italy with the leftover foil from their C-rations and sailors on the U.S.S. North Carolina sent a large check to Macy's with instructions to provide gifts to their families across the country.

In the peace and prosperity of 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower produced the first White House Christmas cards, featuring his own artwork.   Classic holiday recordings introduced that year included Eartha Kitt's sultry "Santa Baby" and Louis Armstrong's novelty number, "Zat You, Santa Claus?"  That was also the year that Matchbox cars were first found under the tree on Christmas morning.

In the wake of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, Christmas 1963 was somewhat subdued, as suggested by Roy Orbison's recording of Willie Nelson's song, "Pretty Paper," but that year in England, the Beatles sent their fans the first of several special recordings of holiday greetings and Andy Williams first recorded the now-seemingly ubiquitous "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year."  Toy manufacturer Hasbro introduced the Easy-Bake Oven in 1963, selling half a million units that first year.

The OPEC oil embargo dimmed some lights for Christmas 1973, but that year saw the debut of Dungeons & Dragons and the first Hallmark collectible ornaments.  Songwriters Johnny Marks ("Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer") and Irving Berlin ("White Christmas") received the 1973 Spirit of Christmas Award from the International Society of Santa Claus.

Today we think a 24-hour cable-TV marathon of A Christmas Story is a tradition whose origins are lost in the mists of history.  It turns out that movie premiered in 1983, as did the Eddie Murphy-Dan Aykroyd vehicle Trading Places and ABC-TV's annual Mickey Mouse Christmas parade broadcast from Disney World.

The fourth year of the last decade of the twentieth century, 1993, featured the release of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, a hybrid holiday film.  Big toys that year were action figures based on the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers TV series and the biggest bubble commodity since tulips and before Bitcoin, the Beanie Babies:

this is the year the first Beanie Babies are unleashed on an unsuspecting public, creating a craze that would last for years.  The Original Nine?  Spot the Dog, Squealer the Pig, Patti the Platypus, Cubbie the Bear, Chocolate the Moose, Pinchers the Lobster, Splash the Orca, Legs the Frog, and Flash the Dolphin.

The twenty-first century is beyond the scope of A Century of Christmas Memories, but let's take a look back at what happened on December 25, 2003, just ten years ago, to continue the nostalgia,  The top three films that day (per box office receipts) were The Lord of the Rings:  Return of the King, Cheaper by the Dozen, and Paycheck.  Billboard's top single for that week was "Change Clothes" by Jay-Z.  The AP headlined a story: "‘Secret Santa’ spreads $40K worth of cheer" about a man in a Santa suit passing out $100 bills to strangers.

What will a future edition of A Century of Christmas Memories have to say about the holiday season of 2013? Perhaps we'll be remembering Pajama Boy, but only the editors of the Peter Pauper Press know for sure.

A Look Back at Jimmy Carter's Human Rights Speech: 'Morality and Foreign Policy'

Today is Blog Action Day, an annual participatory event for bloggers across the globe.  This year's theme is "human rights," which brought to mind another day in which that topic sparked a global conversation.

Thirty-six years ago, in a speech to college graduates, a new American president launched a worldwide discussion on the question of human rights and how best to promote them.

On May 22, 1977, President Jimmy Carter delivered an address on foreign policy at Notre Dame. Carter’s speech was widely seen and read and was the subject of much commentary.

Jeane Kirkpatrick

Shortly after Carter’s speech was delivered, the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) published a book entitled Morality and Foreign Policy: A Symposium on President Carter’s Stance.

That slim volume -- the first book under the imprint of the EPPC, which was then affiliated with Georgetown University -- included nine original essays that reacted directly to Carter’s address and three previously published articles on the general topic of ethics and international relations and, more specifically, the role that the promotion of human rights should play in foreign policy. Contributors included future U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol, and New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

It has become something of a commonplace, and a jocular one at that, to make facile comparisons between the Carter and Obama administrations, especially with regard to foreign policy. (The comparisons were raised even before the 2008 election as a warning to voters about Candidate Obama and were accelerated by Obama's premature receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.)

Thus it was somewhat jarring to read this paragraph in the essay by Charles Burton Marshall. Substitute the word “Obama” for “Carter” and this reference to political messianism could have been written yesterday – or next week – rather than in 1977:

“Sooner or later events will demonstrate even to the tight inner circle that the Carter administration no more knows the secret for walking on water around the world than it has a formula for cleansing the public service or any other manifestation of the Old Adam. The self-enthrallment then will cease.”

That oddity aside, the substance of Carter’s speech was meant to lay down a line of demarcation between his administration’s foreign policy and that of previous administrations. As the book’s editor, Ernest W. Lefever, explained in his preface, Carter, “perhaps more than any other president since Woodrow Wilson, has sought to make morality the touchstone of his foreign policy. In so doing he draws upon a persistent and fundamental strand in the American experience. He has emphasized respect for human rights throughout the world, not only as a valued goal, but also as a specific objective of U.S. statecraft.”

Blog Action Day: October 16, 2013

In Carter’s own words at Notre Dame, he stated his belief that “we can have a foreign policy that is democratic, that is based on fundamental values, and that uses power and influence which we have for humane purposes. We can also have a foreign policy that the American people both support and for a change know about and understand.”

In the single phrase that may have, more than any other, thrust Carter’s address into heightened scrutiny, he referred to the “inordinate fear of Communism.”

Given that May 1977 was in the midst of the Cold War, for those who believed the Soviet Union was an authentic threat to the West, the phrase “inordinate fear of Communism” rang untrue. As Eugene Rostow put it in his essay, “American foreign policy during the years between the Second World War and the end of the Vietnam War was not dominated by an ‘inordinate fear of Communism,’ but by a legitimate concern for policies of Soviet expansion and aggression.”

The comments of the contributors to Morality and Foreign Policy were cutting, even as they were respectful and, in some cases, shared the basic hope and optimism that Carter manifested. Re-reading them more than three decades later, it is surprising, given the different historical, diplomatic, and political contexts of the times, how relevant the remarks seem today. Listen to the words and ask yourself if you have not heard similar expressions in the months since January 20, 2009.

For instance, Robert Bartley wrote: “Almost certainly it is a mistake to look to President Carter’s professed morality to explain our concerns about his foreign policy. His version of morality is not that sharp a departure, and on experience so far not that powerful a force in shaping his policies. We would do better to worry about sheer inexperience.”

John P. Roche, then dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, tried to set Carter’s speech in a wider context:

“As a thirty-year veteran who long since reached the conviction that commencement addresses were drafted by computers, I am certain I have heard this one four times. Indeed, had I absorbed it without advance information on the source, I might have attributed it to Eleanor Roosevelt, Arthur Goldberg, Harold Stassen, or George McGovern. (At half an hour it was a bit brief for Hubert Humphrey, God bless him.) In short, it was standard commencement pap by an American ‘statesman’: ‘Speech 5c—American Policy, Morality, and the World (for use at a liberal religious school).’”

Roche went on to say: “Part of Mr. Carter’s problem in world politics is the lack of any ideological roots, a weakness which has been buttressed by a McGovernite ‘issues staff’ which sincerely believes that the world began in January 1977, when they took office. In this state of historical amnesia it is hard to deal with the degrees on the scale between ‘good’ and ‘bad.’”

The two contributors most sharply critical of Carter’s speech were Michael Novak and Eugene V. Rostow.

Novak, then a religion professor at Syracuse University, said in his response that it “is a profoundly embarrassing and disturbing speech…. [The] President’s vision is deficient. It is deficient both in realism and fact. It is deficient in its moral vision. The President uses the word moral and its cognates – values, principles, social justice, and the like – very heavily indeed. But he does not use them well.”

He later added: “One of the best ways to create an immoral foreign policy is to try too hard for a moral one.”

'Morality and Foreign Policy'

Rostow, who served in the Johnson Administration’s State Department, wrote that “President Carter’s Notre Dame speech is his most ambitious attempt thus far to define the American national interest in its course. The speech is deeply flawed: inconsistent; incomplete; and excessive in its claims of novelty…. The speech lacks any conception of the relationship between power and morality in international affairs.”

While generally content with the themes underlying President Carter’s remarks, Jeane Kirkpatrick raised six questions demanding clarification or explication. One was: “Why does the President think that ‘a peaceful world cannot exist one third rich and two thirds hungry’? The implication is that the frustration of poor nations causes war. In fact that the notion that poverty causes war doesn’t wash. Poverty causes hardship, suffering, and death … but there is little evidence to support the notion that it causes war… Poverty is abominable, not because it leads to war, but because it perpetuates human misery. We can approach problems of war and poverty more effectively if we are clear about the relationships between them.”

Ronald Berman, once chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, parsed the language of Carter’s speech. “Where the language of this speech is moralistic,” he said, “it tends to have an effect just about the opposite to that intended: By devaluing our past motives it makes our present ones suspicious. How reliable can policy be which is based upon the acceptance of our moral fallibility?”

In a paragraph that timelessly retains its relevance, Charles Burton Marshall, pondering whether disappointment might follow the non-fulfillment of the president’s high-flying rhetoric, noted that the “distinction [between cynicism and skepticism] is important. A cynic shrugs off differences between right and wrong as merely conventional – a sham, as it were. A skeptic acknowledges such differences as real, but regards them to be often complex and subtle, and refuses to arrive at judgments on the basis of declaratory evidence only. Cynicism goes hand in hand with ennui. Skepticism kindles the critical spirit. Every one of us should be skeptical about foreign policy, because that attitude is what helps exact proper performance from those conducting it.”

Understanding the distinction between skepticism and cynicism is important in any context, but in the field of foreign policy, it can mean the difference between success and failure, between freedom and tyranny, and between life and death.

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From the Archives: Review of 'The Benefits of Moderate Drinking: Alcohol, Health, and Society' by Gene Ford

This article originally appeared in The Arlington (Va.) Journal on May 9, 1991, under the title, "The sober truth: The Prohibitionists want to control our lives" and the Roanoke (Va.) Times & World News on May 19, 1991, with the all-caps headline "BOOZE BANS: NEO-PROHIBITIONISM THREATENS OUR FREEDOMS." I have made some minor formatting adjustments so it can appear on the Web for the first time.

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In a recent ("Blitzed," April 22, 1991) New Republic article, Princeton University student Joshua Zimmerman reports that a California school district banned "Little Red Riding Hood" from first-grade classrooms because Grandma has a glass of wine after she is rescued.

He also notes that after a single incident of overdrinking that gave him a bad hangover, a campus counselor told him that he was "teetering on the brink of alcoholism" and should seek treatment.

Fox TV's "Beverly Hills 90210" recently portrayed a similar incident; the teen-age protagonist got drunk once, and by the end of the show he was at an AA meeting.

These are but surface symptoms of a deeper malady affecting American life today: neo-Prohibitionism. Another symptom is the attempt to link alcoholic beverages to illicit drugs -- an inapt analogy heard often in the wake of the drug arrests at the University of Virginia and Radford University.

The net effect is to shame social drinkers, driving the vast majority of drinkers who do not abuse alcohol into social closets. The neo-Prohibitionists are social engineers who want to legislate their moral agenda and increase state control of people's private lives. This is unhealthy, politically unwise and morally reprehensible.

In response to the new Carrie Nations, author and lecturer Gene Ford has written a comprehensive book, The Benefits of Moderate Drinking: Alcohol, Health, and Society. Ford reviews all the relevant literature on alcohol and human health, and charges that fearmongers have exaggerated the negative health effects of alcohol and buried the research demonstrating alcohol's benefits.

These pseudoscientists have cowed responsible physicians and scientists to the point that few are willing to speak in favor of moderate alcohol use.

One exception is Thomas B. Turner, M.D., former dean of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. In his foreword to Ford's book, Dr. Turner notes that "the moderate use of alcoholic beverages has been with us for millennia; so has alcohol abuse. It is important to understand the difference." The new Prohibitionists, it seems, are unable to make that distinction.

Today's alcohol debate is over whether individuals should be allowed to control their own lives, to make personal decisions about their own behavior.

Ford sees the new Prohibitionists as the foot soldiers in a shadow army of totalitarians who seek to increase state control over individual behavior and decision-making.

He asserts that the anti-alcohol studies are skewed and emotionally biased. "New temperance" activists, as he calls them, use "highly selective and bastardized science to single out alcohol . . . to garner public support for their Draconian measures."

"New temperance devotees are classical political progressives wearing the mantle of public health," Ford writes. "Like stern mothers and fathers, they seek Orwellian control over the conduct of your most intimate personal lives. Progressives like to set standards for others. They suggest what you can eat, what you can drink, how you can exercise, the nature of your sexual practices, even what you and your children should read. Since the middle of the past century, when Christian progressivism evolved into a form of political fundamentalism, there has been a strong undercurrent of repression in American society."

Alcohol use and abuse have been with us since prehistoric times - in fact, some anthropologists believe that civilization itself began because prehistoric man abandoned his hunting-and-gathering lifestyle and began planting crops to ferment grains and fruits into alcoholic beverages.

Those early farmers who consumed beer and mead were better nourished than those who simply consumed gruel.

As man advanced technologically, he began to write; the earliest written record we have found is a Sumerian tablet containing a recipe for brewing beer! The Bible, Greek philosophers, and Roman poets all lauded alcoholic beverages. The moderate use of alcohol is something deeply imbedded in our culture.

Banning Red Riding Hood is just the tip of the iceberg. Millions of Americans who enjoy a glass of wine with dinner, a cocktail after work or a beer at the ballpark suffer increasing ostracism from a vociferous and vocal minority of social "progressives" whose paternalism tells them that they know better than we about ordering our lives.

They want to expand the government's already broad powers to interfere in our personal decisions, something we must firmly resist.

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Note:  Gene Ford is also the author of The Science of Healthy Drinking (2003); The French Paradox & Drinking for Health (1993); and Ford's ABC's of Wines Brews and Spirits (1996), among other books and articles.

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TV Review of 'Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film' by Richard Dyer

For a few years in the 1990s, I was roving correspondent, sometime co-anchor, and book reviewer for Gay Fairfax, a weekly television magazine series telecast over Channel 10 in Fairfax County, Virginia, and bicycled to other cable-access TV channels in the Washington, D.C., area and elsewhere around the United States.

On episode 35 of Gay Fairfax, I reviewed Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film by Richard Dyer for the regular "gay book beat" segment. What follows is a transcript of that review, delivered orally on a program that first aired on Fairfax Channel 10 on October 7, 1991.

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I'm Rick Sincere with gay book beat.

We'll be looking at exciting and unusual books by, for, and about gay men and lesbians.

Today's book: Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film by British film scholar Richard Dyer.

About ten years ago, Vito Russo wrote a book called The Celluloid Closet, which examined the portrayals of gay men and lesbians in mainstream films from America and elsewhere.

Russo really did not look behind the scenes, however. This is what Dyer does.

Dyer looks at films made by and for gay men and lesbians, that is, gay filmmakers making films for specifically gay audiences.

This is something that wasn't really easy for Russo to look at when he wrote his book ten years ago but with archival material becoming available, Dyer has been able to unearth a number of films that are very significant in historical perspective.

Dyer starts by looking at the films of Weimar Germany right after the First World War.

One very famous film of that period was called Different from the Others ("Anders als die Andern"), which starred Conrad Veidt, a matinee idol who became famous in our country as the wicked Nazi major in Casablanca.


Veidt portrayed a gay man who is being blackmailed and that film was not only very popular in Weimar Germany, it eventually became banned.

At the end of the Weimar period was a film made for lesbians which also has become quite famous, Mȁdchen in Uniform.

Between these two films of 1920 and 1933, Weimar Germany produced the bulk of films for gay audiences. They set the trend for the rest of the world – England, France, Sweden, America – and set standards for film making from then on.

The lesbian and gay films that Dyer examines include Genet's classics Un chant d'amour and Possession, which revolutionized gay cinema with their exciting, vibrant imagery and dramatic style.

Dyer's book is an important contribution to film studies and gay literature. I recommended very highly.

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TV Review of 'Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America' by Paul Nathanson

For a few years in the 1990s, I was roving correspondent, sometime co-anchor, and book reviewer for Gay Fairfax, a weekly television magazine series telecast over Channel 10 in Fairfax County, Virginia, and bicycled to other cable-access TV channels in the Washington, D.C., area and elsewhere around the United States.

On episode 47 of Gay Fairfax, I reviewed Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America by Paul Nathanson for the regular "gay book beat" segment. What follows is a transcript of that review, delivered orally on a program that first aired on Fairfax Channel 10 on December 30, 1991.

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I'm Rick Sincere with the gay book beat.

Today will be looking at a book about culture, Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America by Professor Paul Nathanson.

There are many famous movies. There are many movies that are considered great by critics and by film scholars. There are many movies that are popular but there are few movies that have inserted themselves into the collective consciousness of America.

One movie like that is The Wizard of Oz, Victor Fleming's 1939 classic version of L. Frank Baum's turn-of-the-century novel.

Who's not familiar with the characters like Dorothy Gale of Kansas, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, Glinda the Good Witch of the North, the Wicked Witch of the West, and, of course, the Wizard himself.

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”

There: Didn't you recognize that line automatically?

Nathanson is a Canadian scholar who's written a multi-disciplinary analysis of The Wizard of Oz -- the movie, the book, the music, the lyrics, the actors, and the way the movie has inserted itself into American culture.

Americans have been fascinated by The Wizard of Oz for more than fifty years and this is a fascinating book in its own way but it has one serious shortcoming.

For the gay community, especially for gay men, The Wizard of Oz is a defining myth that helps us come to terms with our identity. It's a coming-of-age myth in its own way.

For many years the question, “Are you a friend of Dorothy?” was a coded way of asking if someone was gay

“Over the Rainbow” has become a gay anthem of love and desire and Judy Garland is a gay icon.

So the Wizard is important for for much of gay America, yet Professor Nathanson in this book only mentions the gay community – gay subculture – once, in a single footnote on page 354.

Can he be serious?

Even with this unfortunate missing link, Over the Rainbow it is a fascinating book and anyone who has loved Dorothy Gale or liked the music of The Wizard of Oz should take a look at it

Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth in America from State University of New York Press -- it's just been published. It's by Professor Paul Nathanson.

On the gay book beat, I'm Rick Sincere.

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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What Was Christmas Like in 1941? A Book Review

Pearl Harbor Christmas: A World at War, December 1941, by Stanley Weintraub. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, November 1, 2011. 224 pp., $24.00.

“Pearl Harbor Christmas” may sound like the title of a 1960s-era TV holiday spectacular set in Hawaii, in which Bing Crosby had sung a duet of “Mele Kalikimaka” with Rosemary Clooney.

It’s not.

It is actually a tightly-packed but readable account of the “12 days of Christmas” beginning two weeks after the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on the U.S. Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor (Sunday, December 21 to Thursday, January 1). It begins with the arrival of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Washington for talks with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and ends with the ceremonial signing of the “Joint Declaration of War Aims” by representatives of the nations allied against the Axis Powers.

In between, author Stanley Weintraub takes his readers on a day-by-day (sometimes hour-by-hour) account of the political, diplomatic, and military events of that crucial week and a half. He circles the globe, drawing on public documents, letters, and diaries from not just the United States and Britain but also from the Philippines, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaya, Singapore, Australia, France, North Africa, the Soviet Union, Germany, and Japan.

I picked up Pearl Harbor Christmas by chance at a local bookstore and bought it on a whim, thinking that it primarily would focus on the home front in the weeks following the Pearl Harbor attack and how Americans adjusted their holiday celebrations to the new realities of having been thrust into war.

The book has some of that, and Weintraub is able to draw an adequate picture of what the Christmas season of 1941 was like.

Wartime black-out rules had not yet dimmed Christmas lights, and Christmas trees themselves, Wientraub says, “were plentiful, seldom priced at more than a dollar or two.” Rockefeller Center presented its annual Christmas show, featuring the Rockettes, and people were still reading comic strips and going to the movies.

“The hit book for Christmas giving,” he writes in a prelude, “at a hefty $2.50, was Edna Ferber’s Reconstruction-era romance Saratoga Trunk. For the same price, war turned up distantly yet bombastically in a two-disc set of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, performed by Artur Rodzinski and the Cleveland Orchestra.”

Weintraub goes on to list the prices of crates of citrus fruits (“$2.79 at Bloomingdales”) and new cars (“soon to be unobtainable”) for $900. Silk stockings were $1.25 a pair, and nylon stockings – which would also quickly disappear as the fabric was needed for parachutes – were $1.65.

In a clever, parenthetical turn of phrase, he writes about upscale clothing shops:

“Hattie Carnegie’s designer dresses began at $15. The upscale Rogers Peet menswear store offered suits and topcoats from a steep $38. (At recruiting stations nationwide, the army was offering smart khaki garb at no cost whatever to enlistees.)”

The book, however, is mostly about politics, not domestic life.  And the politics and diplomacy that are the focus of Weintraub's research are fascinating in themselves.

Churchill’s extended visit to Washington included bibulous dinners at the White House, a joint press conference with FDR, two visits to local churches (on Christmas and New Year’s Day), a speech to a joint session of Congress, a side-trip to Ottawa to address the Canadian parliament, and the British Prime Minister’s only shared public appearance with the American President, at the annual lighting of the White House Christmas tree.

The account of the Christmas Eve speeches is one of several sections of the book that could have used a better editor’s eye, because Weintraub’s writing is redundant on two facing pages.

On page 80, Weintraub writes that Churchill began his speech with the phrase “This is a strange Christmas Eve,” and then quotes extensively from his remarks, including a passage about “war, raging and soaring over all the lands and seas, creeping nearer to our hearts and our homes.”

Three paragraphs later, on page 81, Weintraub repeats the passage:

“It was, [Churchill] conceded, ‘a strange Christmas eve,’ with war ‘raging and roaring over all the lands and seas, creeping nearer to our hearts and homes.’”

This is not an isolated incident of sloppy editing.

In a description of how actor Robert Montgomery – by December 1941 an officer in Naval Intelligence assigned to the White House – set up a map room for the President’s use, Weintraub writes on pages 75-76:

“Space was limited; toilets and sinks were removed from a ladies’ cloakroom in the basement, as Montgomery superintended the conversion of a ladies cloakroom in the basement into a secure information center...”

Similar repetitiveness is found on page 92 (“Rarely seen at religious services at home, Churchill accompanied the President to Foundry Methodist Church…”) and 94 (“Churchill – not a churchgoer at home…”).

Still, these errors, while distracting, do not significantly mar the flow of the story that Weintraub tells, and Pearl Harbor Christmas is a real page-turner as the narration flies from place to place, sometimes describing high politics and sometimes describing the hardscrabble efforts at survival of seamen and grunts.

The book reveals how, simultaneously, the United States was caught unawares by the Japanese attacks in the Pacific, leading to the quick fall of the Philippines under what Weintraub seems to characterize as arrogant and incompetent military leadership of General Douglas MacArthur – but that it was also able to turn on a dime and, within weeks, ramp up its military and industrial operations to meet the needs of facing down hostile enemies in both Europe and the Pacific.

The 12 days of Christmas in 1941 included delicate negotiations about how the war would be pursued. As a direct result of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the American people were angry and eager to take the war into the Pacific and strike back at the Japanese immediately. Churchill and Roosevelt, however, recognized that the greater threat came from Hitler’s Germany and that the initial focus of the war should be in Europe. Japan would have to wait.

In the course of events, the war was fought on both fronts, but the defeat of Hitler came first, with Japan to fall several months later.

What’s remarkable to see, in that regard, is the predictions made by military and political leaders of that time about how long it would take to bring the war to an end. Not precisely correct, Churchill thought that a frontal invasion of the European continent would occur sometime in 1943, with the war to end by 1944. He was off by a year but, on the general shape the war would take, he was eerily prescient.

The intersection of wartime and Christmastime is a particular focus of Stanley Weintraub's prolific work. He is also the author of Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce (2002); 11 Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944 (2007); and General Sherman's Christmas: Savannah, 1864 (2009); as well as General Washington's Christmas Farewell: A Mount Vernon Homecoming, 1783 (2007).  Could Christmas in Kandahar be next?  (There is already a song by that name but, so far, no book.)

If one is primarily interested in social history (as I was, when I purchased this book), Pearl Harbor Christmas could turn out to disappoint, because it is primarily about political and military history. In my case, the initial disappointment ended quickly, because the story that Weintraub tells is compelling, with many revealing details about the first weeks of the Second World War that otherwise would be buried in archives and dusty memoirs.

The Power of Words: A Review of Mark Oppenheimer's 'Wisenheimer'

My only disappointment with Mark Oppenheimer’s recently published memoir, Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject to Debate, came about a third of the way through the book.

That is when Oppenheimer, who now writes about religious topics for the New York Times, reveals that the debate world he inhabited in junior high and high school was not that of policy debate – the sort familiar to the vast majority of high school debaters who compete under the auspices of the National Forensic League and the National Catholic Forensic League – but rather a more rarefied style of parliamentary debate, more familiar in Britain and Commonwealth countries and, apparently, in New England prep schools like the one Oppenheimer attended.

If one needs further proof that Oppenheimer's debate experience was different from that of debaters on the NFL circuits, one need only note the utter absence of any reference in his book to the R.E.M. song, "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)," widely rumored to be about the habit of policy debaters to "pile bodies on the podium" as they try to inundate their opponents with disadvantages.  That the song was popular during Oppenheimer's high school years, yet he fails to mention it, shows the distance he and his teammates kept between themselves and policy debaters.

This break in our parallel lives did not deter me from reading the rest of this memoir of life as a debater because, despite its idiosyncratic foundations, Wisenheimer is perhaps the most accurate literary portrayal of the debate world in a genre that is strewn with misleading examples, not the least of which are the earnest-though-off-the-mark screenplays for the 1989 Kirk Cameron vehicle Listen to Me and for the later (2005) and better film, Thumbsucker.

Perhaps I am alone among debaters (among those who competed seriously, there really is no such thing as an “ex-debater” or “former debater,” any more than there is an “ex-Marine” or “former Eagle Scout”) who scour the entertainment media for realistic representations of our lives, only to be met with disappointment at every turn. (This is what it was like to be a gay teenager watching TV in the 1970s, hoping that someone like you would show up on the screen. It didn’t happen or, if it did, it was wildly wrong.)

The closest thing in recent years to accomplish what Oppenheimer has done is, perhaps, Gary Alan Fine’s Gifted Tongues: High School Debate and Adolescent Culture, but that is a densely argued, deeply researched sociological study, with the appropriate detachment that such a book requires.

Wisenheimer, on the other hand, is a breezy, deeply personal reflection about one person’s life and the characters he encounters. It is also a story of how a preternaturally loquacious boy channels his love of language – and, more important, his compulsion to argue – into a suitable, productive direction.

That is another parallel between Oppenheimer’s life and mine. Although he was born the same year that my high school debate career was just taking off, the personalities we displayed in our early childhoods were much the same.

He explains:

From the time I learned my first words, my parents were worried. For one thing, I never stopped talking. Some children never stop moving, other children never go to sleep, but I never stopped talking. All young children go through their inquisitive stages – ‘Why is the water blue, Mommy?’ … ‘But why does it reflect the sky?’ – but mine was extreme. What my parents remember about me as a two-year-old accords perfectly with my own faint memories of that age: the unquenchable desire to say more, to be understood better, and, above all, to have conversations with adults. I found children my age maddeningly slow. I’d ask them a question, and they didn’t know what I meant, or they would take forever to answer. Grownups, by contrast, talked smoothly, without hesitation, and their conversations went on and on.

Yes, yes, yes.

Oppenheimer and I shared an early love of books and, although his parliamentary-style debate in the Connecticut Valley League differed in kind from the Oregon-style policy debate that engaged my classmates and me in the 1970s, we both shared a pre-Internet-age approach to research that required long hours in the library, pawing through card catalogs until eyes bleared and wandering the stacks looking for that perfect quotation. (I don’t recall the last time I saw a reference to the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature in any book -- or anywhere, for that matter. Oppenheimer fondly remembers using it.)

As an example of what a typically competitive high-school debater in the days before the World Wide Web would do to obtain research materials, Oppenheimer recalls preparing for a series of debates on a still-current topic, drug law reform. In this passage, he’s remembering an event in 1988 or so:

After three extemporaneous tournaments in the fall, I was excited to be able to prepare again, as I had for the Star Wars debates in junior high. I began to research drug legalization with a particularly freshman zeal. To gather information on the more relaxed drug laws of Western European countries, I embarked on a project of writing letters to various foreign embassies in Washington. I mailed my requests for information in early December… and by Christmas break I had received generously sized pamphlets describing the Dutch, Swedish, and German legal regimes regarding narcotics. When I presented my haul at the last debate team meeting before break, [the] team co-president, an earthy, hippieish senior girl named B.J. Chisholm, looked at me and said, ‘You wrote letters?’ I detected both admiration and an equal measure of annoyance, as if I were trying too hard.

He wasn’t trying too hard, however.  He was doing what had to be done to succeed.

I have written previously how it was estimated in the 1970s that, each year, a high-school debater competing on the national circuit did the equivalent amount of research to that of a master’s degree student writing a thesis. I suspect that at Marquette High in Milwaukee, where I was a fourth-string player, the top debaters were writing the equivalent of a doctoral dissertation. How else could they routinely win national championships year after year after year?

I remember that, as low on the totem pole as I was, I wrote a new affirmative case each week throughout the season my junior year, in an attempt to throw rival teams off the scent of what our best teams were doing. The topic was environmental policy, so one week my partner, sophomore John Pilarski, and I would present a case about mercury pollution. The next week we’d argue endangered species. The following week it would be nuclear energy, ad-nearly-infinitum.

The middle two-thirds of Oppenheimer’s book is a blow-by-blow account of his career as a high school debater, which included several tournaments overseas. (There’s something NFL debaters can seldom add to their lists of accomplishments; score one for the parliamentary competitors.) This is framed by a long prologue about his alienation as a child and a short epilogue about college.

Oppenheimer applied to two universities, Harvard and Yale, and – for him – chose correctly to attend Yale.  Yale’s debate team, like those of most other Ivy League schools, is firmly in the parliamentary model. The Yale Political Union is a manifestation of that.

At Harvard, had he chosen to continue to debate, he would have found himself among the fast-talking, hypothesis-testing, Kritik-embracing geeks whom he rues in comparison to his own milieu of persuasive, oratorical perorators within the parliamentary tradition.

As he puts it,

… beginning in the 1970s debaters – as they call themselves in the large national leagues – changed [the style] to something hardly recognizable as debate: in order to cram in as many different arguments as possible, policy debaters now talk superfast, pausing every few sentences for a deep breath and then starting again at top speed. What’s more, they use jargon, like DA or disad for disadvantage, that makes their debates indecipherable to the nondebater, and even to someone like me, a debater not used to their style.

If you don’t believe this characterization, check out the 2007 documentary film, Resolved.  You’ll find yourself gasping for breath just by listening to its real-life high school debaters.

And if you think Oppenheimer’s complaint is new, check out Michael McGough’s October 10, 1988, article from The New Republic, “Pull It Across Your Flow,” in which he notes that a then “current debate textbook notes that ‘accomplished intercollegiate debaters’—the role models for high school contestants—‘speak at an average rate of nearly 270 words a minute.’”

It may be a matter of taste, this divide between policy debate and the more oratorical parliamentary style, but I’m sorry, in all my years as a competitive debater, coach, and judge, I never heard any First Affirmative begin a speech with “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, honorable judge.” Honorable judge? That just strikes me as pretentious.

I don’t want to leave the reader with a misperception of how much I enjoyed Oppenheimer’s memoir.  Despite the divergences in our debate experiences, I found Wisenheimer to be a tremendously entertaining book, tender in its recollection of adolescent misery, salutary in its tribute to intellectual pursuits, encouraging in its demonstration of triumph over adversity.

Like James Magruder’s novel, Sugarless, which similarly portrays the individual speaking events side of high school forensics with uncanny accuracy, Mark Oppenheimer’s Wisenheimer is a worthy, if rare, addition to a growing literature about competitive speech.  I’m glad I chanced upon it.

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'Waging Nuclear Peace: The Technology and Politics of Nuclear Weapons'

This review originally appeared in the Washington Times on Thursday, May 2, 1985. This is probably the first time it has been readily available in digital form.  (Versions of this book review also appeared in the New York City Tribune on September 3, 1986, and in the spring 1985 issue of Strategic Review.)

BOOK REVIEW/Richard E. Sincere Jr.

A textbook look at our nuclear strategies

Waging Nuclear Peace: The Technology and Politics of Nuclear Weapons
By Robert Ehrlich
University of New York
$12.95 paper, 397 pages

When George Mason University physics professor Robert Ehrlich began to teach a course in arms control and nuclear weapons policy a few years ago, he could find no adequate, single-volume text that was conducive to class discussion and that provided sufficient technical and political background for his students. So, Mr. Ehrlich has produced a readable, detailed and useful primer on nuclear strategy that will also be an excellent reference book for those who are already in the field.

Page 1 introduces the purpose of the book with the question, “Are we discussing the real issue?... Nuclear war is a highly emotional issue,” Mr. Ehrlich points out. “It would be almost irrational not to become emotional when reflecting on the horror that a nuclear war could bring. However, the whole point of thinking analytically about nuclear war is to try to see facts objectively, not as we might wish them to be. It is only by clearing away these misconceptions that we can best assess the most likely course of action to avert catastrophe.”

The practical applications of this view become clear later in a discussion of the 1979 Office of Technology Assessment study, The Effects of Nuclear War, a report often cited as a primary source on the immediate and long-term effects of a nuclear attack upon the United States. Mr. Ehrlich compares the advantages and disadvantages of the United States and the U.S.S.R. that bear on their prospects for survival following a nuclear exchange. He notes that the OTA report concluded that there is no evidence “that the Soviets face a lower risk [than the United States] of finding themselves unable to rebuild an industrial society at all.”

Mr. Ehrlich argues, however, that an objective reader may come to different conclusions from those reached by the OTA report’s authors, and conclude that the Soviet Union is better prepared to survive a nuclear attack than the United States: “It is possible that the authors of this [OTA] study did not want to encourage the belief that nuclear war might be survivable -- especially the notion that it might be more survivable in the Soviet Union than in the United States.”

If Soviet military leaders do believe in the survivability — or winnability — of a nuclear war, the United States is faced with a major problem for strategic policy. And Mr. Ehrlich’s analysis of this problem deserves more prominence in, his book than he gives it.

Among many other issues that Mr. Ehrlich sheds light on, two are of particular current interest, antiballistic missile defense (ABM) and civil defense. One of his views on ballistic missile defense may surprise some pundits: “It would make little sense’ the author argues, “to build an expensive and exotic ABM system of uncertain feasibility without first investing in a much cheaper civil defense system. Such a course of action would be akin to installing an expensive photovoltaic solar-energy collection system n your roof and not bothering first to add insulation in your ceiling -- a much more cost-effective measure.”

This approach is unusually relevant, since the Reagan administration has cut the civil defense budget for fiscal 1986 from $181 million to $119.1 million. There appears to be a trend in administration thinking toward putting all of its eggs in the Strategic Defense Initiative basket -- a prospect that chills arms-control advocates as well as civil defense professionals.

While acknowledging the arguments of Physicians for Social Responsibility and other groups that there may be “insurmountable obstacles” to surviving nuclear war, including long-term climatic damage and the destruction of our national infrastructure, Mr. Ehrlich remains firm in his support for population-protection measures. At the conclusion of his discussion of the effectiveness of civil defense, he writes:

“While there are major obstacles to survival following a nuclear war, it is by no means clear that these obstacles are insurmountable. In the nuclear age the goal of preventing nuclear war must, of course, take priority over surviving one. Nevertheless, because a nuclear war could occur despite our best efforts at prevention, prudence requires that some attention be devoted to the problem of survival.”

The book is rich in its exposition of the myriad issues that students, citizens, and policymakers must face in the crowded debate over nuclear weapons policy. It is well- structured, with divisions into four topical sections: “Introduction to the issues,” “Nuclear Arms and Nuclear War,” “The Effects of Nuclear War” and “Policy Options and Objectives.”

These are further divided into chapters with headings such as “Public Opinion and the Media,” “Long-Term Worldwide Effects of a Nuclear War,” and “Arms Control and Disarmament.” Two appendixes address “The Physical Principles of Nuclear Energy and Radiation” and “Survival After Nuclear War.” Each chapter and appendix is followed by study questions to help instructors conduct class discussions or to devise midterm and final essay questions.

The fact that this book is designed for classroom use should not deter readers who are past the age of worrying about term papers, grades, and spring break in Florida. Waging Nuclear Peace is an important contribution to the catalog of nuclear-strategy books.

Richard E. Sincere Jr. is vice president of the American Civil Defense Association.