History News Network

...The office of the vice presidency seems to addle many occupants, and that goes back centuries before Cheney. In Aaron Burr’s final year as the country’s third vice president, he killed Alexander Hamilton, his political rival, in a duel.

Thomas Marshall, who served under Woodrow Wilson, was utterly sidelined during the many months after a stroke left the president bedridden. The first lady ran the show. He felt so understandably marginalized in his job that he said: “Once there were two brothers. One ran away to sea. The other was elected vice president. And nothing was ever heard of either of them again.”

F.D.R.’s first vice president, John Nance Garner, famously characterized the job as not being worth “a warm bucket” of urine, which was euphemized in the retelling as “spit.” Hubert Humphrey saw his favor among liberals shredded by his loyalty to L.B.J., who got us deeper and deeper into Vietnam....

Posted On: Tuesday, September 4, 2012 - 09:33

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Noemie Emery: Farewell to All That ... There Will Never Be Another FDR

SOURCE: National Review (9-4-12)

Noemie Emery is a contributing editor of The Weekly Standard and writes a weekly column for the Washington Examiner.

Barack Obama, who was hailed by the Left in 2008 as the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a four-term-winning liberal icon, is struggling to avoid becoming the second coming of one-term-and-done Jimmy Carter, and thereby hangs a tale. The tale is the Democrats’ endless quest for the next FDR — which began the day after the first one expired — and the moral is that this quest will always be hopeless. The fact is that Roosevelt — not the war leader and father of the Manhattan Project (who would be impeached by today’s Left as a war criminal), but the great and groundbreaking expander of government — cannot and will not come again.

The hope of the Left in 2008 was that he had come again, but this hope was gone by July 2010, just months after the health-care bill was passed by them with such celebration, and met by the public with so much disgust. “A big disappointment,” said Eric Alterman. Progressives were “gripped by gloom,” as Paul Waldman put it, and Michael Tomasky found “profound despair among liberals” about more than the angry reception that was given the president’s bills: “The storyline is much larger than merely that the stimulus has failed. It is that government is a failure. . . . The great bottom-line hope back in November 2008 was that Obama was going to restore trust in government and prove it could solve problems. That hasn’t happened. . . . That’s not an argument about the midterm elections. It’s about the party of government’s very raison d’etre.” “Remember when Barack Obama’s presidency was going to wash over the capital like a cleansing tide, renewing both the government’s ability to accomplish great things and restoring the people’s faith in that ability?” lamented Waldman. “It seems so much longer than a year and a half ago.”

Answers were sought as to how this had happened, but none seemed convincing, at least not to rational people. “The system is rigged, and it’s rigged against us,” said Eric Alterman. Hendrik Hertzberg said FDR was one lucky dog in that he inherited the Great Depression when it was three years old and such a calamity that no one could blame him for anything. Peter Beinart said that Obama was unlucky in that he lacked someone like the firebrand Huey Long, who “scared the crap out of the American establishment and sent some of its denizens scurrying into the arms of reformers like FDR.” (One wonders whether FDR, who confronted a social implosion, dangerous demagogues, and a world conflict, appreciated his good luck.) Put aside the fact that FDR was a great politician, who would no more have dreamed of passing a game-changing bill without strong and bipartisan backing than he would have thrown himself off a tall building in the belief he could levitate; he still had an advantage that no modern progressive will ever replicate: He became president at the one time in our history when the federal government was too small for its burdens and truly cried out to be expanded...

Posted On: Tuesday, September 4, 2012 - 07:17

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Charles Krauthammer: The ‘Deterrence Works’ Fantasy

SOURCE: National Review (8-30-12)

Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist.

There are few foreign-policy positions more silly than the assertion without context that “deterrence works.” It is like saying air power works. Well, it worked for Kosovo; it didn’t work over North Vietnam.

It’s like saying city-bombing works. It worked in Japan 1945 (Tokyo through Nagasaki). It didn’t in the London blitz.

The idea that some military technique “works” is meaningless. It depends on the time, the circumstances, the nature of the adversaries. The longbow worked for Henry V. At El Alamein, however, Montgomery chose tanks.

Yet a significant school of American “realists” remains absolutist on deterrence and is increasingly annoyed with those troublesome Israelis who are sowing fear, rattling world markets, and risking regional war by threatening a preemptive strike to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Don’t they understand that their fears are grossly exaggerated? After all, didn’t deterrence work during 40 years of the Cold War?..

Posted On: Tuesday, September 4, 2012 - 07:13

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Alan Colmes: How Democrats Made America Exceptional

SOURCE: WSJ (9-3-12)

Mr. Colmes is a liberal political commentator, author and host of "The Alan Colmes Show" on Fox News Radio. His book Thank the Liberals . . . For Saving America has just been published by Hay House.

Voters have a real choice this election season between a president who has redirected a country suffering the worst economic times since the Great Depression, including a global financial meltdown, and a Republican ticket that favors draconian cuts in our most popular programs. It's a good time to point out that it is liberals who, time and time again, have been on the right side of history.

Conservatives blast the left for not appreciating "American exceptionalism"—even though Barack Obama is the only president to have ever used that phrase, at least in the past eight decades or so. But let's take a moment to explore just what it is that makes us exceptional. It is, very simply, a battle between progress and regress.

The last time we hit the economic bottom, Franklin Roosevelt focused on relief, recovery and reform: relief for the poor, recovery from a bad economy, and reform so it wouldn't happen again. The Civilian Conservation Corps put young men to work in rural areas, with the income going to help their families. The men planted trees, built parks and laid down roads...

Posted On: Tuesday, September 4, 2012 - 06:57

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Matt Apuzzo: First Since '52 ... No Talk of War in GOP Speeches

SOURCE: Salt Lake Tribune (8-31-12)

Matt Apuzzo is on AP's investigative team in Washington, where he focuses primarily on national security and intelligence matters.

With America embroiled in its longest armed conflict, Mitt Romney became the first Republican since 1952 to accept his party’s nomination without mentioning war.

Three election cycles after the 2001 terrorist attacks, neither Romney nor his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, had anything to say about terrorism or war while on their party’s biggest stage. The only one who did Thursday was actor Clint Eastwood, who won cheers for suggesting invading Afghanistan was a mistake and calling for an immediate withdrawal of troops — a line that might have earned boos and catcalls four years ago.

The Romney strategy reflects the weak public support for the Afghanistan war, fatigue over a decade of terrorism fears and the central role of the economy in the campaign. But it was still a remarkable shift in tone for a party that, even in times of peace, has used the specter of war to call for greater military spending and tough foreign policy...

Posted On: Tuesday, September 4, 2012 - 06:25

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Hedrick Smith: When Capitalists Cared

SOURCE: NYT (9-2-12)

Hedrick Smith, a former correspondent and Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, is the author of “Who Stole the American Dream?”

IN the rancorous debate over how to get the sluggish economy moving, we have forgotten the wisdom of Henry Ford. In 1914, not long after the Ford Motor Company came out with the Model T, Ford made the startling announcement that he would pay his workers the unheard-of wage of $5 a day.

Not only was it a matter of social justice, Ford wrote, but paying high wages was also smart business. When wages are low, uncertainty dogs the marketplace and growth is weak. But when pay is high and steady, Ford asserted, business is more secure because workers earn enough to become good customers. They can afford to buy Model Ts.

This is not to suggest that Ford single-handedly created the American middle class. But he was one of the first business leaders to articulate what economists call “the virtuous circle of growth”: well-paid workers generating consumer demand that in turn promotes business expansion and hiring. Other executives bought his logic, and just as important, strong unions fought for rising pay and good benefits in contracts like the 1950 “Treaty of Detroit” between General Motors and the United Auto Workers....

Posted On: Sunday, September 2, 2012 - 00:00

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Nicole Gelinas: New Orleans Owes George W. Bush

SOURCE: New York Post (8-29-12)

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.

With Hurricane Isaac menacing New Orleans as Republicans meet in Tampa, the national media are reminding everyone how badly President George W. Bush screwed up the response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. But Bush’s real New Orleans legacy isn’t those images of storm survivors desperate for food and water. It’s New Orleans’ spanking-new flood-protection system — which helps protects the city from a catastrophic repeat.

Seven years on, the images from Katrina remain indelible: survivors begging outside the city’s Convention Center and Superdome; rescuers terrified to enter the lawless metropolis without armed guard.

Yet New Orleans has moved on. Visit now, and you won’t find a city wallowing in self-pity, but one whose people have rebuilt.

That’s a small miracle...

Posted On: Thursday, August 30, 2012 - 16:42

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Daniel P. Aldrich: How to Weather a Hurricane

SOURCE: NYT (8-28-12)

Daniel P. Aldrich, an associate professor of public policy at Purdue University, is the author of “Building Resilience: Social Capital in Post-Disaster Recovery.”

HURRICANE Isaac, which made landfall in Louisiana last night, has not only disrupted the Republican National Convention but also brought back painful memories of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the Gulf Coast seven years ago this week.

In August 2005, my wife and our small children and I evacuated to Houston just before the storm destroyed the New Orleans home we had moved into six weeks earlier. We took with us just a bag of toys and a suitcase. We applied for federal aid, but especially in the immediate aftermath, it was family, friends and friends-of-friends who came through for us.

As a political scientist (I taught at Tulane at the time), I decided to study how communities respond to natural disasters. I’ve concluded that the density and strength of social networks are the most important variables — not wealth, education or culture — in determining their resilience in the face of catastrophe....

Posted On: Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - 13:50

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Imraan Coovadia: Mining for Stories

SOURCE: NYT (8-28-12)

Imraan Coovadia teaches creative writing at the University of Cape Town and is the author, most recently, of the novel “The Institute for Taxi Poetry.”

THE 34 miners killed by the police earlier this month in a wildcat strike at a Marikana platinum mine, in northern South Africa, were immediately engaged as bit players in various morality tales. Marikana reminded some of the 1960 police massacre at Sharpeville; suggested to others that poverty and division had survived apartheid; or foretold a sharp confrontation between capital and labor. To many, it either predicted or confirmed the political and moral disintegration of the ruling party, the African National Congress.

I hesitated in choosing among these fables because a writer’s single item of professional knowledge is that a story is a speculation about the world, composed under the sign of luck rather than of law or reason. Good stories, like bad stories, have a way of escaping the facts.

If the international press framed Marikana as a tale about deprivation and inequality, it missed the specific dynamics of a strike in a country ruled by former unionists, Socialists and Communists....

Posted On: Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - 13:43

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Rob Rakove: Taking Nonalignment Seriously

SOURCE: Foreign Policy (8-27-12)

Rob Rakove is a lecturer in International Relations at Stanford University. His first book, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World, will be published by Cambridge University Press in October.

Last week, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced that he will attend the summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which began Sunday in Tehran. The announcement came in spite of protestations from Washington and openly flouts American efforts to keep the Iranian regime diplomatically isolated. But efforts to dissuade Ban from attending the summit -- as well as more general attempts to marginalize the NAM -- are actually significant tactical errors by the United States. They are based, moreover, on longstanding American misconceptions about nonalignment itself.

Ever since nonalignment emerged in the 1950s, Americans have struggled to comprehend the phenomenon. At that time, in the early years of the Cold War, nonalignment seemed an ominous new development because of its apparent susceptibility to communist influence. Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, in particular, thought that the nonaligned states, which included pivotal nations such as India, Egypt, and Indonesia, could play a decisive role in the Cold War.

Then, as now, Americans tended to understand nonalignment as something akin to neutrality. Neutrality, however, was not a particularly helpful lens through which to view the movement. Although the NAM has eschewed direct alliances with the major powers, this was never the movement's sole defining attribute. A broad gap exists between the classical neutrality of a state like Sweden, on the one hand, and the outlook of a nonaligned state on the other. Nonaligned states have historically been defined by several common traits: They were recently decolonized, generally remain mired in poverty, and their economies are overwhelmingly based on the export of raw materials. These common experiences and problems have driven nonaligned states toward an assertive stance on the world stage, rather than the reticent neutrality expected of them. As such, Americans have often found the actions of the NAM baffling or hypocritical. Asked about the direction of the movement in the wake of its September 2006 meeting in Havana, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice mused, "I've never quite understood what it is they would be nonaligned against at this point. I mean, you know, the movement came out of the Cold War."

It was a classic misreading of nonalignment...

Posted On: Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - 10:34

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Charles C. W. Cooke: Southerners and Gs

SOURCE: National Review (8-25-12)

Charles C. W. Cooke is an editorial associate for National Review.

Americans are not infatuated with class in the manner that the British are, but accents remain consequential nonetheless. How else to explain the Amazing Disappearing G, a trick of pronunciation that, whereabouts permitting, politicians on the campaign trail and beyond are keen to perform? Vice President Joe Biden, during his ignoble allegation that the Republican party has a secret plan to put black Americans “back in chains,” avoided the participial G as if he were fatally allergic.

Were we in the Southern states, Biden’s trick would instead be called the Amazin’ Disappearin’ G, and this has not been lost on any of this year’s presidential contenders. While Mitt Romney has much less of a tendency toward dropping his Gs than does Barack Obama, the Republican candidate is not wholly innocent: Touring the South during the primaries, Romney wished supporters a “fine Alabama good mornin’” and took to asking, rhetorically, “Ain’t that somethin’?” This while pretending to like grits, no less.

Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, why politicians do this is self-evident. But more interesting is why Southerners do it in the first place. The answer is surprising: Actually, Southerners are truer to “original” English voicing than are their G-happy Northern counterparts. Chalk one up there for Biden....

Posted On: Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - 10:51

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Robert Reich: George W. Bush: GOP’s Persona Non Grata

SOURCE: Salon (8-27-12)

Robert Reich, one of the nation’s leading experts on work and the economy, is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.

There is nothing Republicans would rather the American people forget more than George W. Bush, who doesn’t even have a bit part at the GOP convention opening in Tampa.

But W’s ghost may be there, anyway.

The National Weather Service says tropical storm Isaac is now heading for New Orleans, and Isaac is projected to become a Category 1 hurricane by the time it makes landfall late Monday or early Tuesday.

Isaac is very likely to revive memories of the Bush administration’s monumental incompetence in dealing with the needs of Americans caught in Hurricane Katrina....

Posted On: Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - 10:07

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Warren Kozak: Nuclear-Weapon States Aren't Created Equal

SOURCE: WSJ (8-27-12)

Mr. Kozak is the author of Presidential Courage: Three Speeches That Changed America, an eBook to be published in October.

For the past 67 years, the United States has been criticized for being the only country to drop atomic bombs on another sovereign nation. But while the anniversaries of Hiroshima (Aug. 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (Aug. 9, 1945) rarely pass without comment or controversy, another crucial date is completely ignored: Aug. 29.

Between July 16, 1945, the day the U.S. tested the first atomic device in New Mexico and realized that it actually worked, and Aug. 29, 1949—when the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb—the U.S. held a nuclear monopoly.

No country has ever held a greater strategic advantage over the rest of the world—not Rome under Caesar, France under Napoleon, or Germany under Hitler. Yet between 1945 and 1949, America's friends and enemies lost very little sleep. Why not? Because the idea of the U.S. using its great advantage to take over the world with nuclear bombs was ludicrous to all but the most irrational minds...

Posted On: Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - 09:54

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Jamie M. Fly: Will Mitt Romney Discover His Inner Reagan?

SOURCE: Foreign Policy (8-27-12)

Jamie M. Fly is executive director of the Foreign Policy Initiative.

An economy in shambles. Unemployment high, even in double digits in some states. Overseas conflicts in Afghanistan and the Middle East. The U.S. military strained by budget cuts. A growing sense that America has abdicated its leadership role -- being, in the words of the Republican presidential candidate, "unwilling or unable to fulfill its obligations as the leader of the free world." And an incumbent president calling his Republican challenger a warmonger whose proposed defense buildup would yield more conflict and endanger America.

The year is 1980. Or 2012.

There are many foreign-policy similarities between this year's race and the one that ushered in the Reagan revolution and the end of the Cold War. And with a recent speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars and his trip to Britain, Israel and Poland, Mitt Romney has begun outlining a foreign policy that embraces Ronald Reagan's legacy. He has highlighted the Obama administration's neglect of allies and its obsession with engaging enemies, and the resultant sense of an America adrift in a dangerous world.

This Reaganesque vision has been overshadowed by the media's obsession with several Romney "gaffes," and Boston's view that any day spent talking about something other than jobs and the economy is a lost opportunity. The campaign is also likely hesitant due to public opinion pollingthat shows President Barack Obama with a sizable advantage over Governor Romney on national security, the first time in decades that a Democratic candidate for the presidency is polling better than his Republican challenger on the issue.

Despite these challenges, as he delivers his acceptance speech at the Republican convention in Tampa this week, the former Massachusetts governor has a foreign-policy message to be proud of -- a vision of an America that will once again lead rather than follow and that has the military resources to ensure the respect of its allies and the deterrence of its enemies...

Posted On: Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - 09:38

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Jacob Heilbrunn: Will Romney Discover His Inner Nixon?

SOURCE: Foreign Policy (8-27-12)

Jacob Heilbrunn is senior editor at the National Interest.

This past May, Colin Powell appeared on the Morning Joe show to plug his latest book, It Worked for Me. One thing that did not appear to be working for Powell that day, however, was Mitt Romney's candidacy for the U.S. presidency. Losing his customary cool, Powell, one of the last realist grandees in the Republican Party (along with Brent Scowcroft, George Shultz, and Henry Kissinger), expressed his vexation with Romney's proclivity for encircling himself with neocon advisors, not to mention declaring Russia America's No. 1 geopolitical enemy. "C'mon, Mitt, think!" Powell said.

Since then, however, Romney has expressed few thoughts that would suggest he is cogitating along Powell's lines. Rather, as he prepares to accept the Republican nomination in Tampa, Florida, Romney will likely denounce President Barack Obama in his acceptance speech as a supine and feckless leader abroad as well as at home, further bolstering the belief that he has been captured by the neocons. Bereft of any real ideas about foreign policy, Romney, like George W. Bush, has become a vessel for some of the most retrograde ideas about foreign affairs that a Republican candidate has ever advanced. Whether the issue is Israel or China, Romney, who has cloaked himself in the mantle of Ronald Reagan, repeatedly espouses truculent stances that would likely mire America in new conflicts. He has declared that he would brand China a currency manipulator, stated in June on Fox News Radio that Russia remains a "geopolitical foe," and pandered to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And though Romney advisor and prominent neocon Elliott Abrams is arguing that a congressional resolution authorizing force against Iran would be a neat idea, Romney himself says that the president doesn't need any such authorization, but can just go for it. As the Nation warned in May, "a comprehensive review of his statements during the primary and his choice of advisers suggests a return to the hawkish, unilateral interventionism of the George W. Bush administration should he win the White House in November."

Or does it? Is what has rapidly become the conventional wisdom correct? Is Romney a plaything of the neocons? Or might he actually revert to a more moderate and pragmatic tradition of Republicans that began with Dwight Eisenhower (something that I myself was skeptical about in 2010 in Foreign Policy)? Might Romney, to put it bluntly, discover his inner Nixon?..

Posted On: Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - 09:29

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Michael Tomasky: How Tricky Mitt Romney Is Aping Richard Nixon

SOURCE: Daily Beast (8-28-12)

Newsweek/Daily Beast special correspondent Michael Tomasky is also editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.

Apparently, there will be no sweeping effort undertaken to humanize Mitt Romney at this week’s convention. He told USA Today that during the daytime sessions, there will be “a series of vignettes, so people who attend the convention will get to know me a little better,” but during primetime, when millions are watching, “we won’t be talking about my life.” It’s the right decision in the sense that there’s almost nothing about his life that’s the least bit emotionally compelling. But it’s also a telling one, because it means the campaign is basically going to be: Vote for me, I’m white, and I’m not a socialist.

Gallup found last week that Barack Obama outscored Romney by 23 points on the likability scale, as 54 percent said they found Obama likable compared to only 31 percent for Romney. Normally a campaign would be quite worried about this, and rightly so. I’d rate it as Romney’s biggest problem, more than his positions and his incessant right-wing pandering (I guess those two are the same thing). People don’t normally vote for somebody they don’t like, especially for president. A state legislator, a congressman, a senator, even a governor—you can forget who that is, if you have a mind to; go days or even weeks without hearing his name. But the president? You can’t avoid the guy.

And so every presidential campaign of the television age has pushed the touchy-feely button. Al Gore and his sister, George W. Bush and the bottle (and Jesus), Bill Clinton and the abusive stepfather, Bob Dole and the war injury. And almost every winner has been likable enough. Bush was definitely not my cut of steak, but I could imagine that if he were a normal guy and I ended up next to him on an airplane, I could carry off a reasonably happy chat with him about golf or something, assuming a mercifully short flight.

Posted On: Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - 09:24

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Michael Tomasky: How Tricky Mitt Romney Is Aping Richard Nixon

SOURCE: The Daily Beast (8-28-12)

Newsweek/Daily Beast special correspondent Michael Tomasky is also editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.

Apparently, there will be no sweeping effort undertaken to humanize Mitt Romney at this week’s convention. He told USA Today that during the daytime sessions, there will be “a series of vignettes, so people who attend the convention will get to know me a little better,” but during primetime, when millions are watching, “we won’t be talking about my life.” It’s the right decision in the sense that there’s almost nothing about his life that’s the least bit emotionally compelling. But it’s also a telling one, because it means the campaign is basically going to be: Vote for me, I’m white, and I’m not a socialist....

We have had, in the modern era, just one truly unlikable president. Dick Nixon, of course. And it turns out that there are points of similarity between Romney’s and Nixon’s campaigns that aren’t instantly apparent but are worth fleshing out. The campaigns resemble each other in that both are built far more around negative than positive selling points. With Nixon, the argument went that you needed to elect him to preserve law and order, which he said was at risk of very survival if Humphrey won; to keep the blacks and the hippies and the pinkos at bay; and because he had a secret plan for quick victory with honor in Vietnam, which turned out to be so secret that he continued the war, even expanding it into Cambodia, for another seven years before we finally lost it....

Posted On: Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - 08:32

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Megan Garber: What Died With Neil Armstrong

SOURCE: The Atlantic (8-27-12)

Megan Garber is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She was formerly an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab, where she wrote about innovations in the media.

American mythology loves nothing more than the reluctant hero: the man -- it is usually a man -- whose natural talents have destined him for more than obliging obscurity. George Washington, we are told, was a leader who would have preferred to have been a farmer. Thomas Jefferson, a writer. Martin Luther King, Jr., a preacher. These men were roused from lives of perfunctory achievement, our legends have it, not because they chose their own exceptionalism, but because we, the people, chose it for them. We -- seeing greatness in them that they were too humble to observe themselves -- conferred on them uncommon paths. Historical circumstance became its own call of duty, and the logic of democracy proved itself through the answer.

Neil Armstrong was a hero of this stripe: constitutionally humble, circumstantially noble. Nearly every obituary written for him this weekend has made a point of emphasizing his sense of privacy, his sense of humility, his sense of the ironic ordinary. Armstrong's famous line, maybe or maybe not so humanly flubbed, neatly captures the narrative: One small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind. And yet every aspect of Armstrong's life -- a life remembered for one act of bravery but distinguished ultimately by the bravery of banality -- made clear: On that day in 1969, he acted on our behalf, out of a sense of mission that was communal rather than personal. The reluctant hero is also the self-sacrificing hero. The reluctant hero is the charitable hero.

And so Armstrong was an icon fit for America's particular predilections: one who made history, yet one who recognized the ultimate contingency of his own history-making. One who, Washington-like, preferred quiet retirement over continued fame. After he walked the heavens, James Fallows noted, Armstrong returned decidedly to Earth and to "a life lived deliberately away from the limelight and with scrupulous attention to avoiding any controversy or indignity that might reflect upon the space program of which he'd played such a crucial part." In particular, significantly, he declined to be an explicit leader. "Nothing is more typical of Armstrong, or more estimable," Anthony Lane put it, "than his decision not to go into politics; heaven knows what the blandishments, or the invitations, must have been. That is not to deprecate the service rendered by, say, John Glenn, but simply to remind ourselves that political ambition, like our other passions, is in the end a low sublunary affair; and that Armstrong, by dint of being the first man to tread not upon terra firma but upon the gray dust of terra incognita, rose above the fray and stayed there."

Thus Armstrong's ongoing place in the American imagination...

Posted On: Monday, August 27, 2012 - 16:25

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Peter Rutland: What Links Pussy Riot With Dostoevsky

SOURCE: Moscow Times (8-27-12)

Peter Rutland is a professor of government at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.

The dramatic trial and sentencing of the Pussy Riot band members captured the imagination of Western observers but has not resonated so much at home. Why has the band been so successful in gaining international attention, and what is the long-term historical significance of the Pussy Riot phenomenon?

Behind their punk Western image, it is important to recognize that Pussy Riot emanates from a long-standing tradition of dissent by the Russian intelligentsia. To borrow a Leninist term, Pussy Riot is Western in form but Russian in content. The Western-derived medium of a punk performance is delivering a very Russian message.

One obvious lesson to draw is the disruptive potential of the Internet. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then in the age of YouTube, a video is worth 10,000. The striking images of colorfully dressed women dancing in front of the ornate gilt altar of Christ the Savior Cathedral — the country's crowned Orthodox jewel — against a curious but ear-catching soundtrack, proved irresistible to global audiences. It spawned copy-cat action in a Cologne cathedral, demonstrations of support in dozens of cities from Marseilles to Sydney, and expressions of sympathy from the likes of Madonna and Paul McCartney...

Posted On: Monday, August 27, 2012 - 16:04

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Harold James: Why August Is the Worst Month for the Markets

SOURCE: Moscow Times (8-23-12)

Harold James is professor of history and international affairs at Princeton University and professor of history at the European University Institute, Florence.

Summer is a time for beaches and relaxation — and, historically, for all sorts of destructive crises. Time and again, it has proven dangerous for the world to be on holiday.

August is an especially bad month for financial markets. On Aug. 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon ended the commitment of the United States to a fixed gold price, and since then the world has lived with currency volatility and instability. On Aug. 13, 1982 (a Friday), Mexican Finance Minister Silva Herzog went to Washington to tell the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. government that Mexico would be unable to make its scheduled debt payment the following Monday. On Aug. 17, 1998, Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko announced that Russia would simultaneously default and devalue. And in the first week of August 2007, IKB Deutsche Industriebank disintegrated as the U.S. subprime crisis spread.

The roots of this seasonal periodicity of crises predate World War I, in the era of the classic gold standard. The explanation at that time was usually found in the predictable timing of the international payments mechanism. In the late summer, farmers in the Western Hemisphere brought their crops to traders for export and demanded cash payment, which the traders needed to raise from their banks. The consequence was a demand for gold in the United States and mounting exchange-rate pressure on Britain and other European importers.

The same pattern of selling pressure on the pound sterling was repeated in the interwar era. Finally, in September 1931, Britain departed from the restored gold standard, which led to the collapse of the system as a whole...

Posted On: Thursday, August 23, 2012 - 13:14

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