Does history repeat itself? A Cambridge University historian’s study of the causes of World War I

A review of The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Six little boys tussle in a sandbox, pushing and shoving, sometimes openly, sometimes when none of the others are looking. One of them, a runt, is getting the worst of it, but he’s a vicious little guy and manages to hold his own within his own tiny corner of the sandbox. The biggest boys exert the least effort but command the most space. They all look confident, but secretly they’re terrified of one another, leading them to combine forces in a constantly shifting pattern of partnerships to fend off the others.

This is the image that comes to mind of Europe in the summer of 1914 from reading Christopher Clark’s new inquiry into how the First World War came to be. Naturally, Professor Clark had something much more grown-up in mind when he wrote the book. After all, he is a Fellow at St. Catherine’s College at the University of Cambridge, where he received his Ph.D. in History, and we all know that a Cambridge Don would never indulge in such belittling imagery.

In all fairness, to put the event in proper perspective, “The conflict that began that summer mobilized 65 million troops, claimed three empires [Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian], 20 million military and civilian deaths, and 21 million wounded. The horrors of Europe’s twentieth century were born of this catastrophe.”

With The Sleepwalkers, Clark muscles into the seemingly endless debate about why and how all this came to pass. Not that anybody on the street is talking about this stuff, of course. But among modern European historians these questions pass for excitement, and no wonder: the Great War is generally taken as the climax of the well-ordered Victorian Era that launched the human race with a lurch into the 20th Century. The origins of the cataclysm that upended tens of millions of lives are variously found in Prussian militarism, the colliding interests of European empires, the arms race, the profit motive among arms merchants, and other cross-border phenomena, but Professor Clark apparently will have none of this. He’s a practitioner of that brand of history that finds truth in the quotidian details of human interaction — in short, in the day-to-day decisions of living, breathing human beings tossed together in a crisis that nobody foresaw.

In the first of its three parts, The Sleepwalkers thus explores the political environment, highlighting the major players in each of the contending nations — Serbia, Austro-Hungary, Russia, Germany, France, and England — in the years running up to 1914. Part II takes a broader look at the Continent, discussing the interplay of the leading states in the closing years of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th. In outline, the stable alliances of the late 1880s had given way to a bipolar system by 1907, with the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and (loosely) Italy facing off against the interlocking fortunes of Russia, France, and Great Britain. Clark asserts that “[t]he polarization of Europe’s geopolitical system was a crucial precondition for the war that broke out in 1914.” Then, in Part III, Clark delves deeply into the day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour, decisions of the leading players from June 28, when Gavrilo Princip shot to death the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and his wife, until the early days of August, when all the chips had fallen into place and war was declared on all fronts.

In Clark’s view, “1914 is less remote from us — less illegible — now than it was in the 1980s. Since the end of the Cold War, a system of bipolar stability has made way for a more complex and unpredictable array of forces, including declining empires and rising powers — a state of affairs that invites comparison with the Europe of 1914.” Although Clark makes it easy to see history repeating itself in small ways — for example, the genocidal course pursued by Serbia in the 1990s was little different from its behavior in the decades leading up to 1914 — it’s difficult to see the parallels to most of today’s international crises. Surely, Professor Clark wouldn’t pretend that the U.S. invasion of Iraq — one of the seminal events of our times and perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in American history — was anything but the result of hubris and colossal miscalculation on the part of an ideology-driven clique within the U.S. government.

Disagreements aside, however, The Sleepwalkers is an outstanding piece of work.  Professor Clark’s knowledge of the period he writes about is both broad and deep, and he writes with grace and verve that’s highly unusual in academic circles.

A new biography serves up Jerry Brown, once over lightly

A review of Trailblazer: A Biography of Jerry Brown, by Chuck McFadden

@@@ (3 out of 5)

If you wrote a novel about a guy like this, who was the son of a popular and successful governor; dated a rock star; married for the first time at age 67; twice served as governor of the country’s largest state, four decades apart; talked the voters of a notoriously anti-tax state into raising taxes substantially; ran for president three times; spent three years in a Catholic seminary, studied with Zen masters in Japan, and worked with Mother Teresa; and . . . well, you get the point. Would anyone believe this? No doubt they’d think you’d gone, as my British friends say, barking mad.

If, instead, you wrote a biography of this curious phenomenon, you’d need it to be a lot longer than a couple of hundred pages, right? And, of course, you’d need to spend days in face-to-face interviews with the guy, if only to get a solid sense of whether he’s for real. How could anyone possibly do justice to him otherwise? Well, Trailblazer is 248 pages long, one-third of them taken up with notes and other backmatter, and the author never managed to interview his subject. That, in a nutshell, is the problem with Trailblazer, Chuck McFadden’s new biography from Berkeley’s University of California Press of the impossibly self-contradictory  Governor Moonbeam.

Don’t get me wrong: Trailblazer is a well-informed portrait of our Governor, written by a man who reported on his ups and downs for many years as a Sacramento political reporter for the Associated Press. As an introduction to Jerry Brown for anyone who doesn’t remember his early days in politics or is too young to do so, Trailblazer works. McFadden, now retired, retains numerous contacts among the working press in California, whom he quotes extensively in the pages of this book, adding considerable insight. His writing is clear, his understanding of the extraordinarily complex politics of this nation-state is impressive, and he brings the story of Jerry Brown up to the present moment. It’s just that a reader would have wished for something more — something new and fresh that a truly in-depth study of the man’s life and work might have brought to light.

If you know little or nothing about our second Governor Brown, you’ll learn that he has long been accustomed to being “the smartest guy in the room”; that, as a politician, the fundamental contradiction in his life is the give-and-take between idealism and pragmatism; that the women in his adult life, Linda Ronstadt in the 70s and his wife Anne Gust for the past two decades, have smoothed over the rough edges in his personality and brought a considerable measure of balance and stick-to-it-iveness to his conduct; and that he may well be one of the most skillful politicians this state has ever seen. Is this enough? You be the judge.

Berkeley in 1969: Black Panthers, the FBI, and the Vietnam War

A review of Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin III

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When I moved to Berkeley in 1969, the Black Panther Party was in its heyday. Only three years earlier, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale had begun building the party around an image and a name they’d appropriated from other Black organizations then active in those turbulent years of the Vietnam War and exploding ghettoes. Yet before the decade of the 1970s was out, the Black Panther Party had all but disappeared. Black Against Empire, Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin’s excellent study of the Panthers and their politics, makes clear why and how they grew into such a force — and why the party collapsed so few years later.

The pivotal event in the history of the Black Panther Party was the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968. Before that day, the Party was just one of hundreds of activist African-American organizations, most of them vanishingly small, in Black ghettoes and on university campuses all across the country. The Panthers were set apart from others by their distinctive black outfits, by carrying guns in public to defend themselves against police brutality, by their outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War, and, perhaps most of all, by their willingness to encompass people of other ethnicities. As a result, they had grabbed headlines locally and were growing at a fast pace, attracting African-Americans in their late teens and twenties who were disillusioned by the timidity of their elders in the Civil Rights Movement — but the party’s activities were largely limited to Oakland, Berkeley, and nearby cities. However, when Rev. King was murdered, the Black Panther Party quickly emerged as the leading organization nationwide with the credibility and the activist ideology that could channel the fury and the hope of young African-Americans and attract alliances with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and other largely non-Black radical organizations. The Party quickly began opening offices around the country — a total of 68 cities by 1970 — and for three years remained a powerful and ever-present force in the activist politics of the day.

Soon, however, the party’s rapid decline began in earnest. Bloom and Martin emphasize two key factors — the Panthers’ establishment enemies and the shrinking U.S. engagement in Vietnam under Richard Nixon — to which I would add a third: the explosive personality dynamics of the Panthers’ leaders themselves.

The Black Panther Party’s sworn enemies included the FBI, the Oakland police, and, later, police in Chicago and many other cities. J. Edgar Hoover personally led the FBI’s campaign against the Panthers, introducing informers and agents provocateur to trigger violence and sow dissent within their ranks. The Bureau’s efforts went so far as to hand out explosives, spread destructive rumors to undermine the marriages of Panther leaders, and arrange the assassination of key Panther activists. The Oakland police used violent and often illegal tactics, invading Panther homes and offices without search warrants and arresting individual Panthers on transparently trumped-up charges. The most egregious incident took place in Richard J. Daley’s Chicago, when police, acting on information from an informer, illegally burst into an apartment in the middle of the night and murdered Fred Hampton, the local chapter leader, sleeping in his bed. All told, police murdered dozens of Panther activists around the country.

Richard Nixon played a pivotal role, too. “Nixon was the one who rolled back the draft, wound down the war, and advanced affirmative action.” The cumulative effect of these strategic moves was to erode the foundation of the Panthers’ support both in the Black community and among white radicals (whose popularity among young people, it became clear, was largely grounded in fear of the draft). Once regarded not just by themselves but by other self-appointed revolutionary organizations as the vanguard of the revolution, the Panthers increasingly found themselves alone as liberals attacked them and the revolution on the nation’s campuses went the way of the draft. The party was officially dissolved in 1982.

So far as it goes, this analysis of the principal forces that undermined the Black Panther Party is right on target. However, I would argue that the personality dynamics of the party’s leadership played a significant role as well. Judging from my own observations as well as the evidence advanced in Black Against Empire, the three leading figures in the party were all brilliant men. It’s idle to speculate what roles they might have played in society had they been born white in middle-class families — but it’s clear that their life experiences as African-Americans growing up in America in the 1950s and 60s, not to mention the cruel frauds worked on them by FBI agents and informers during the late 1960s and early 70s, wreaked havoc on their mental health. Of the three, only Bobby Seale survived the Panther years whole and sane. Both Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver were, by all accounts, unhinged in the final years of their lives. So far as I’m concerned, no further proof is needed than the bitter feud that erupted between the two of them, which led to dangerous and sometimes violent splits within the Panther organization.

For anyone who lived through those unsettling times on the margins of the day’s events, Black Against Empire is illuminating. Though I crossed paths with a number of the individuals named in the book, and we had a great many mutual friends, I was quite unaware of the Panthers’ early history and of the party’s years of decline. If you have any interest in East Bay history, Berkeley politics, or African-American history and politics, you’ll find Black Against Empire essential reading.

Joshua Bloom, the principal author, is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at UCLA. His collaborator, Waldo Martin, is a Professor of History at UC Berkeley specializing in African-American history.

Two wrenching views of the U.S. military at war, Part 1: Vietnam

A review of Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, by Nick Turse

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

This is the first of two reviews of recent books that deal with the U.S. military at war. In a subsequent post, I’ll review The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor by Jake Tapper, which presents a dramatically different perspective on the subject by focusing on one small American unit in the field in Afghanistan four decades later. 

If you were following the news in 1971, chances are you were aware at least dimly of the Winter Soldier investigation, when American soldiers, sailors, and marines testified to the atrocities they had witnessed, or even participated in, during their service in Vietnam. You may also have come across reports in newspapers and magazines from time to time about other war crimes committed by the U.S. military there. However, like most of us who followed news of the war only sporadically, you probably thought only about the 1968 My Lai Massacre whenever the subject of U.S. war crimes in Vietnam saw the light of day.

The frenzy of reporting and commentary on that single event was so voluminous that you may remember some of the names of those involved: Seymour Hersh, whose fame as an investigative reporter began with his disclosure of the massacre; Ron Ridenhour, the soldier whose persistent efforts finally succeeded in gaining a hearing; and Lt. William Calley, the only person convicted of criminal acts in connection with the massacre of more than 500 Vietnamese villagers.

My Lai was characterized by the Pentagon and the Nixon Administration as an aberration, the result of “a few bad apples” such as Calley. But it was nothing of the sort, as Nick Turse reminds us in his shattering new book, Kill Anything That Moves.

The sheer scope of the Vietnam War was far greater than that of the U.S. military efforts in Iraq or Afghanistan. More than 10 times as many Americans died in Vietnam than in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Even more significantly, some 3.8 million Vietnamese died in that conflict, according to the best available estimate, while Iraqi and Afghan casualties are measured in hundreds of thousands. In 1969, the peak of U.S. engagement in Vietnam, more than 540,000 troops were serving there. As Turse notes, “Over the entire course of the conflict, the United States would deploy more than 3 million soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, and sailors to Southeast Asia.”

As Turse illustrates, the reality of the war they experienced was far worse than even the most lurid mainstream reporting disclosed. Far from being an outlier, the My Lai Massacre was typical of the daily experience in much of the country for years on end, although no instance came to light in Turse’s research with nearly as many dead as the 500 who perished at My Lai. As Turse notes, “I’d thought I was looking for a needle in a haystack; what I found was a veritable haystack of needles . . . [A]trocities were committed by members of every infantry, cavalry, and airborne division, and every separate brigade that deployed without the rest of its division — that is, every major army unit in Vietnam.”

Turse displays his findings in heart-wrenching and ultimately numbing detail. However, his major contribution in Kill Anything That Moves is to explain why so very many U.S. troops participated in the virtually indiscriminate murder of Vietnamese civilians. It was all a matter of policy set at the highest levels. 

The war, and war planning, were grounded in the racist assumptions underlying the emphasis on the “body count.” Turse: “[E]verything came down to the ‘body count’ — the preeminent statistic that served in those years as both the military’s scorecard and its raison d’etre.” When senior officers rated junior officers on the numbers of “enemy” dead they reported, junior officers demanded that enlisted men “kill anything that moves” in the belief that it made no difference whether the dead Vietnamese were “Viet Cong”, supporters of the allied U.S. government in the South, or simply peasants who couldn’t care less —  didn’t “they all look the same”, anyway? “While officers sought to please superiors and chased promotions, the ‘grunts’ in the field also had a plethora of incentives to produce dead bodies. These ranged from ‘R&R’ (rest and recreation) passes . . . to medals, badges, extra food, extra beer, permission to wear nonregulation gear, and light duty at base camp.”

Kill Anything That Moves is an indispensable contribution to the enormous body of writing about one of the most significant — and most tragic — episodes in the history of the United States.

From the ashes of the Holocaust, a gift of lessons for living

A review of Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

“Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning.” This is the conclusion that a young Viennese psychiatrist, Viktor E. Frankl, reached in the course of more than three years in a succession of four Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz. The book he wrote in the space of nine days in 1946, originally under another title, morphed over the years into the thin volume known around the world today as Man’s Search for Meaning. It has sold more than 12 million copies and been translated into 24 languages, serving as a source of inspiration and solace for millions of people. Man’s Search for Meaning is frequently cited as one of the most important books of the 20th Century.

Frankl’s almost matter-of-fact description of his years in concentration camps is profoundly moving, the more so because it’s a fiercely personal document and makes no attempt to relate the familiar statistics now surrounding the topic or to place the Nazi phenomenon in historic perspective. Frankl writes simply about how he personally managed to remain hopeful in the face of staggering brutality, including the murder of his young wife at Bergen-Belsen and the death of numberless friends and colleagues. As Frankl relates, their deaths came not only at the hands of SS guards but also, at least equally, as the result of sadistic behavior by the “Capos,” prisoners themselves raised to positions of authority and privilege by the Nazis. The effect of reading this material is searing. Here, God is truly in the details.

However, Frankl’s story about life in the concentration camps is only one of several parts in Man’s Search for Meaning. The edition I read included five pieces written over more than half a century by three different authors: a foreword by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, an Afterword by William J. Winslade, and three articles by Frankl. The first of these three, “Experiences in a Concentration Camp,” has received the most attention from non-professionals. The second, “Logotherapy in a Nutshell,” is Frankl’s brief summary of the principles and procedures of logotherapy, the “third school” of Viennese psychiatry that Frankl created — an approach that’s often termed “existential psychiatry.” (Somehow, Carl Jung seems to have gotten lost in the numbering system — perhaps because he was Swiss, not Viennese.) Frankl also wrote a “Postscript 1984” bearing the title, “The Case for a Tragic Optimism.” And all this writing fits comfortably into a remarkably thin little volume. 

Intellectually, Frankl’s abbreviated introduction to logotherapy for the layperson, was the most intriguing part of the book. The term itself is derived from the much-used Greek word, logos, which has been applied to all manner of pursuits in philosophy, rhetoric, and religion. Frankl took it to mean something like “meaning.” He rejected the determinism of Freudian and Adlerian psychiatry, insisting that neither approach was useful in treating more than a minority of psychological problems. In his own practice and that of the students under his supervision in a series of top Viennese hospitals, Frankl found that many psychological problems could be easily cured by one or a few conversations between the patient and the logotherapist. Logotherapy involved no years-long sojourns on the analyst’s couch. (In fact, patients sat in chairs.) He cites many cases of ingrained phobic and compulsive behavior that he and his disciples cured by somehow convincing patients not to worry about their behavior. A lifelong stutterer, for example, was cured when he was persuaded to enter conversations unconcerned about stuttering — and the cure was lasting. A fellow physician transcended his depression over the loss of his wife in a single, short conversation with Frankl. The essential truth of logotherapy is as Frankl discovered in the camps: so long as we maintain a powerful commitment to some life goal outside our present circumstances, we can get through practically any privation.

Man’s Search for Meaning should be in everyone’s library. The lessons Viktor Frankl teaches can be applied to challenges in any culture and all walks of life.

Roman generals, barbarians, and a compulsive historian to tell the tale

A review of The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, by Peter Heather

@@@ (3 out of 5)

Remember having to memorize all those dates when you were back in school? 1066, 1776, and all that? Right? So, what epochal events do you associate with the years 376, 405, 410, and 476? Give up? No, I’m not going to give you the answers. If you really want them, you can immerse yourself in the pages of Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire. By the time you’re finished — assuming you have the stomach to get through the whole ordeal — you’ll know not only what significance those dates hold but also the names of godknowshowmany inconsequential Roman emperors, generals, and barbarian kings. Frankly, I can’t believe I read the whole thing.

Here, dates and battles and names aside, is the message that British historian Peter Heather was attempting to get across:

• Gibbon got it all wrong. The Roman Empire didn’t fall because of its internal weaknesses.
• What actually happened, according to the latest findings by archaeologists and historians, is that the barbarians ganged up on the Romans. 

OK, it was a little more complicated than that. Around the middle of the 4th Century, the Huns — those nomadic horsemen from the Central Asian steppes — began pushing westward. They didn’t get as far as the Roman frontier, but their relentless drive pushed hordes of Germanic tribes (the original barbarians, from the Roman perspective) further west, and the Germani began crowding the borders that Rome had so carefully kept sparsely populated. In fact, about 100,000 of them actually managed to cross into Roman territory in the Balkans — and that started the ball rolling. They had permission from the Eastern Roman Emperor in Constantinople — you remember, of course, that the Empire was then divided in two? — but the hapless fellow later had occasion to regret the decision, because the Germani started raising all manner of hell very shortly. (For good reason, too. The Roman generals and provincial officials assigned to their settlement took them to the cleaners.)

Later, when the Huns, eventually under the gifted leadership of Attila, moved all the way westward toward the Romans’ Rhine frontier in what is now Germany, the Germanic tribes living there decided the time was convenient to actually invade Roman territory, namely Gaul (now France), Spain, and later North Africa. Though Roman generals began hiring Huns as mercenaries to help them fight the other barbarians, and they actually had some success from time to time, it was a losing battle. Soon enough, Germanic armies managed to sack Rome, not once but twice within the space of a half-dozen years. For several more decades, the Romans tried to pretend nothing had happened while the territory under their control steadily shrank. After all, Rome had ruled the world (well, the Mediterranean, anyway) for nearly half a Millennium, so how could it possibly all end? Eventually, though, before the end of the 5th Century, all the last of the Western Emperors had left was Italy. Being able to read the writing on the wall, he turned out the lamps in Rome and retired to his summer villa.

Why did all this happen? Peter Heather says it was the Romans’ own fault. Their unnecessarily harsh imperial policies drove the Germani to attack them. I would add that Rome had simply bitten off more than it could chew. The Empire had overreached.

Now, why couldn’t he just have said that?

New proof how J. Edgar Hoover and Ronald Reagan stirred up violence in 1960s Berkeley

A review of Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power, by Seth Rosenfeld

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

We’ve known for some time that the FBI and Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial administration were involved in the sometimes-violent conflicts that roiled Berkeley in the 60s. What we didn’t know — or, at least, what I didn’t know — was that J. Edgar Hoover and Ronald Reagan were personally and directly engaged not just in monitoring but in managing the secret government campaigns that helped raise the temperature to the boiling point again and again. Seth Rosenfeld’s exhaustively researched recent book, Subversives, documents this story in often minute detail yet manages to keep it eminently readable.

Anyone who lived through those times as a sentient adult will surely remember some of the seminal events: the protest against the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1960, lodged in memory through the iconic footage of students being fire-hosed down the steps of San Francisco City Hall; the 1964 Free Speech Movement that pushed the University of California at Berkeley into the forefront of student protest, brought Mario Savio to prominence, and began to change public attitudes about the police; the 1965 Vietnam Day Teach-In that fastened students’ attention on the escalating U.S. war in Vietnam and initiated the public’s disillusionment with the U.S. government; and the violent clash over People’s Park in 1969, which led to the death of young James Rector and confirmed in so many minds the view that law enforcement officials were out of control.

Subversives breaks new ground in several ways because of Rosenfeld’s dogged, three-decade pursuit of classified government files that cast new light on the events themselves as well as the major players whose decisions drove them. The author keeps the story from getting out of hand by maintaining a tight focus on Hoover, Reagan, Savio, and UC Berkeley President Clark Kerr.

In Subversives, Rosenfeld relates the roles (hitherto largely undocumented) of J. Edgar Hoover and Ronald Reagan in these familiar events, demonstrating the ruthlessness with which both men pursued “Communists” and their lack of respect for the truth. We see Hoover aggressively pushing his agents to seek out embarrassing personal details — largely rumors — about Mario Savio, Clark Kerr, and their collaborators, illegally passing the information along to Right Wing publications, and later citing it as documented truth in reports to the President and to the public. We see Reagan eagerly seeking out the FBI to inform on his rivals in Hollywood and secretly naming names behind closed doors with HUAC, destroying the careers of talented actors, directors, and writers because he disagreed with their political beliefs. From a vantage-point of half a century, both men appear to be thoroughly unscrupulous and careless about the sometimes tragic consequences of the action they directed from their privileged positions.

Seth Rosenfeld, a winner of the coveted George Polk Award and now a staff member of the Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting, was previously an investigative reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Vladimir Putin, the KGB, and the restoration of Soviet Russia

A review of The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, by Masha Geffen

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Every once in a while I’m shocked to learn anew that the American news media has missed the mark in its reporting of events around the world. Masha Gessen’s recent portrait of third-term Russian President Vladimir Putin, The Man Without a Face, is an excellent case in point.

For example, one year ago, in December 2011, we learned about large demonstrations in Moscow protesting the obviously rigged outcome of the latest Russian elections, which had awarded nearly 50 percent of the vote to the President’s party, United Russia. What I didn’t learn from the reports I read here in America was that estimates of the crowd in Moscow ran as high as 150,000 and that “[p]rotests were held [the same day] in ninety-nine cities in Russia and in front of Russian consulates and embassies in more than forty cities around the world.” Reports in The New York Times and other U.S. news sources gave the impression that the events were the work of Russia’s tiny, long-beleaguered liberal minority and meant little. In fact, the demonstrations and marches were far more broad-based than the liberals had ever shown themselves to be capable of organizing. Masha Gessen tells the whole story in The Man Without a Face.

Or consider the experience of the brave souls who put themselves forward as candidates for President to replace Putin. It’s possible but unlikely that you came across something awhile back about Garry Kasparov, the world’s most famous Russian and the most celebrated chess player of all time, when he announced he was running for President. Kasparov could easily have attracted crowds of thousands anywhere in the vast expanses of Russia, but everywhere he went he found the doors locked at the venues he’d arranged and often found himself speaking to 50 or 100 people out-of-doors. He persisted for months nonetheless. until it was made clear to him that he was risking his life by doing so. Masha Gessen tells the whole story in The Man Without a Face.

Roughly the same thing happened to Mikhail Prokhorov, the 6’8″ Russian billionaire who bought the New Jersey Nets (now the Brooklyn Nets) professional basketball team. When the regime asked him to be the front man for a moribund political party to give the appearance of democratic choice in the 2012 Presidential elections, Prokhorov took the assignment seriously. He mounted a vigorous campaign, fashioning an agenda for reform, traveling throughout the country, and speaking out boldly — until he was informed that if he continued to pursue the Presidency he would lose all his businesses, his freedom, and possibly his life. I’d been aware of Prokhorov’s abortive campaign, but I learned none of the rest of this from news reports in the United States. Masha Gessen tells the whole story in The Man Without a Face.

You might wonder, as I had, how the democratic path that Russia was on through most of the 1990s had veered so sharply, and so suddenly, rightward toward a brand of authoritarianism reminiscent of the tsars and the commissars. Gessen’s answer lies in the circumstances surrounding the selection of Vladimir Putin as Boris Yeltsin’s successor in 2000 by the circle of intimates known as “The Family” who surrounded the ailing Russian President.

After a decade in office, Yeltsin was gravely ill and acting erratically as a result (not because of heavy drinking, Gessen asserts). His popularity had plunged into the low single digits, and the Russian people were seeking “solace in nostalgia — not so much in Communist ideology . . . but in a longing to regain Russia’s superpower status. By 1999, there was palpable aggression in the air, and this was a large part of the reason Yeltsin and the Family were rightly terrified.” They feared the rise of an ultra-right-wing nationalist who might destroy all that they had achieved in a decade and cast about for a like-minded standard-bearer as Yeltsin’s successor who marshal popular support.

“Imagine you have a country and no one to run it,” Gessen writes. “This was the predicament that Boris Yeltsin and his inner circle thought they faced in 1999.” In desperation, knowing virtually nothing of the man’s character, his work habits,  or his political beliefs, they turned to a low-level former KGB operative who had recently been elevated to head the KGB’s successor, the FSB — Vladimir Putin. They named him Premier, then Acting President when Yeltsin resigned, brought in a team of image-makers and campaign specialists, mobilized the pro-democratic community, pulled together a sanitized biography in three weeks, and ran him for President. As The Guardian wrote in its review of this book, “[g]rey, ordinary and seemingly incorruptible, Putin is the man without a face, on to whom others can project whatever they want.”

Tragically, Putin’s true nature only became apparent in the months following his election in 2000. Somehow, his self-description as a “thug” — a claim he made on many occasions — had been overlooked, and the thugocracy he built during his first two terms as Russia’s President came as a total surprise to nearly everyone except the very few who knew him well. Investigative journalists who turned up evidence of corruption or worse were simply murdered one after another, their killers never arrested. While the senseless war in Chechnya went on year after year after year, attacks by Chechen terrorists were brutally put down by the Russian military, with hundreds of civilian hostages losing their lives — even, in one case, while the terrorists were engaged in negotiations with the police. Business tycoons who refused to support the regime were imprisoned on trumped-up charges and ownership of their businesses transferred to Putin and his cronies. Putin himself built up a personal fortune rumored to be as high as $40 billion. That estimate might be exaggerated, but the total is certainly somewhere in the billions, as Putin built himself a palace on the Black Sea at a cost of more than $1 billion.

Masha Gessen knows whereof she writes. She lives in Moscow, where she has held a series of increasingly high-profile jobs in journalism. Her career had barely begun when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The Man Without a Face is a personal book, and opinionated, but it represents a lifetime of work side-by-side with many of the individuals whose actions are described.

The ugly U.S. war with Iran, past, present, and future

A review of The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran, by David Crist

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

If you were among those who sighed with relief when Barack Obama was reelected because you’d been concerned that a Republican administration would invade Iran, David Crist has news for you. In fact, The Twilight War is full of surprises, even for one who stays relatively well informed about world affairs. The underlying message — the meta-message, if you’ll permit that conceit — is that what we normally consume on a daily basis as “news” is an awkward mixture of critical opinion, wishful thinking, rumor, partisan posturing, self-serving news leaks, and a smattering of hard information.

When it comes to Iran, the purveyors of news have done an especially poor job of keeping us informed. As David Crist makes clear in this illuminating report on the three decades of conflict, tension, miscalculation, and profound misunderstanding that have characterized our two countries’ relationship, we have indeed engaged in what can only be described as war for several extended periods. And when I say war, I mean soldiers, sailors, and air force pilots shooting at one another, laying mines, launching missiles at ships and ground facilities, and generally forcing one or both of the two governments to decide between escalation and retreat. There was even one heart-stopping incident during the Reagan Administration when a rogue, high-ranking U.S. Admiral conspired with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to invade Iran with massive force — and, apparently, was ordered to pull back from the brink largely because the Administration was consumed with covering up the President’s active role in the Iran-Contra affair.

The 2004 Presidential election campaign brought into the spotlight the U.S. support for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s because Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had been photographed shaking hands with Saddam. Then we learned, some of us for the first time, that the U.S. had supplied weapons and munitions to Iraq. However, what went largely unreported was the extent to which the U.S. military built up its forces in the Persian Gulf to prevent Iran from flanking Iraq or widening the war to the Gulf Arab states, provided combat intelligence that helped Iraq turn back Iranian advances, and even intervened with force on Iraq’s side from time to time.

It was this history — combined with an understanding of the neoconservative design on the region — that led the Iranian leadership to conclude in 2003 that the U.S. invasion of Iraq presaged an imminent attack on Iran itself. The Ayatollah Khamenei and his minions were so frightened of this prospect that they used every backchannel available to them to attempt to get the U.S. to the negotiating table, where they were prepared to arrive at a grand solution to the differences between the two countries. Are you surprised to learn that the Bush Administration flatly rejected the overtures?

In other words, this has been a nail-biting relationship. Even worse, the outlook today doesn’t look any brighter than it ever has.

Author David Crist is a military historian for the U.S. Government, a reserve Marine Corps colonel, and the son of one of the early four-star commanders of CENTCOM, which was created in the 1980s to coordinate U.S. military affairs involving Iran and the Middle East. Given this pedigree, it’s not unfair to wonder whether Crist himself is guilty of some of the same sins I attributed earlier to the news media. Clearly, he’s extremely well informed and had access to military and government archives that  might well be closed to other writers. However, a little poking around on the Web reveals that Crist got at least a few of his facts wrong, and in some places his interpretation of events has clearly been colored by his official associations.

The Twilight War is an especially dense work. The hardcover edition runs to 656 pages, but it reads as though it’s a thousand, largely because Crist (military historian to the core) seems to include a capsule biography of every other officer and combatant engaged in every firefight he reports. Like the epic dramas of Cecil B. DeMille, The Twilight War has a cast of thousands. All in all though, this is a revealing and important book, well worth reading, even if that means slogging through the mud.

The CIA, the mistress, and JFK’s assassination: An astonishing but true story (Part 4)

Part 2 of a review of Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace, by Peter Janney

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

This is Part 4 of a 4-part series on Mary’s Mosaic. Click here for Part 1. 

It’s difficult for anyone who didn’t experience that time in our history to appreciate the high stakes in politics at the top in Washington, D.C. then:

• Early in Kennedy’s Presidency, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spearheaded by a notoriously bellicose Air Force general named Curtis LeMay, presented a plan to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the USSR in June 1963. Kennedy disgustedly rejected the plan out of hand — and thereafter was deemed “dangerous” by the Chiefs and their allies in the CIA. For its part, the CIA essentially ignored orders from the White House from that time on.
• Ever since 1953, when Allen Dulles was named Director of the CIA, the agency had been compiling an astonishing record of illegal behavior. The agency had overthrown the governments of at least six nations, not just Iran and Guatemala (which are so well known). CIA agents and contractors had attempted to assassinate a number of world leaders in addition to Fidel Castro, and the agency had undertaken extensive surveillance of U.S. citizens within the borders of the country. All this, too, has been well documented.
• Following the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, President Kennedy was incandescent with fury at the CIA, and they with him. Kennedy wanted to break the agency up into “a thousand little pieces” and scatter them about the government. He fired Director Allen Dulles and replaced him with an inexperienced outsider, effectively leaving the agency under the control of counterintelligence chief Jim Angleton and his inner circle, a handful of other wealthy sons of Yale, Princeton, and other Ivy League colleges who held high-ranking posts in the agency.

Given this set of facts, is it any wonder that the CIA would kill the President?

After reading Mary’s Mosaic, my mind is awash with a hundred other facts and factors, but I won’t reveal any more. Although the focus is on Mary Pinchot Meyer’s murder, the book contains extensive information, much of it revealed only within the last 12 or 13 years, about JFK’s assassination. It makes the case convincingly.

According to the book’s website, author “Peter Janney grew up in Washington, D.C. during the Cold War era of the 1950s and 1960s. His father Wistar Janney was a senior career CIA official. The Janney family was intimately involved with many of Washington’s social and political elite that included the family of Mary and Cord Meyer, as well as other high-ranking CIA officials such as Richard Helms, Jim Angleton, Tracy Barnes, Desmond FitzGerald, and William Colby.”