Outrageous Hero on the bus

Finished Maureen Collins Baker's "Outrageous Hero: The B.T. Collins Story." This book is more a sister's remembrance than a biography.

"As a biographer, I make no claim of impartiality, although I have traveled the country, watched miles of videotape, and conducted over 300 interviews before completing my brother's story. I have written to let you know B.T. Collins. I have written to honor heroes, and to preserve our memory of his kind of American. I have written out of love for my brother and for my country."

B.T. Collins served two tours in Vietnam, first as an artillery forward observer and finally as a Green Beret. It was while leading indigenous forces on June 20, 1967, in a firefight that a South Vietnamese mercenary tossed him a live grenade. The resulting explosion cost B.T. his right hand and right leg.

Baker's description of B.T. during his time at law school works for any period of his long career in public service:

"He was both deadly serious and frivolous; things mattered terribly or not at all. His behavior was unthinkable, yet totally without pretense. Somehow, people knew immediately they had to take him exactly as he was. Among the many lessons learned in Vietnam was the necessity of being pure. In combat, all men are laid bare. In the terror of the moment they are stripped to the soul and beyond. He would remain faithful to that essential truth and, in so doing, became, according to one of his professors, 'One giant breath of fresh air in a bullshit world.' "

I particularly enjoyed the chapter on B.T. time working for Gov. Jerry Brown -- the yin and yang of the governor and B.T. who were so different and yet fit so well together.

My favorite example of B.T.'s style of leadership came during his time in charge of the California Conservation Corps. His "troops" were going to fight in a war on the Mediterranean fruit fly, which threatened to devastate California's agriculture industry. The CCC crews were tasked with harvesting infested fruit after it had been sprayed with Malathion. CCC workers became concerned about the health hazard they faced.

"B.T. chose a highly unusual method of allaying their fears. He drank a glass of Malathion. He drank a glass of Malathion, diluted to same strength used for spraying. He drank a glass of Malathion in front of them, after assuring them that he would never put them in harm's way.

"Soldiers understand: Never ask your troops to do what you wouldn't do yourself."

B.T. Collins served in both Democratic and Republican administrations in Sacramento. It was one of the compelling things about him. He came to serve. It didn't matter which party was in power.

B.T. Collins died on March 19, 1993. He was 52. Are there any men like B.T. alive today?

I highly recommend this book. It's a fine read, especially if you are already familiar with B.T. Collins.

Spider's Web on the bus

Finished Alan Friedman's "Spider's Web: The secret history of how the White House illegally armed Iraq," a 1993 volume that documents, literally, the efforts of the Reagan and Bush I administrations, Britain and Italy to arm Iraq during and after the Iran-Iraq War.

I found this book on a shelf in my study when I went to put away Ahmed Rashid's "Descent into Chaos," which deals with the current Bush disaster. "Spider's Web" was one of those remainder books I picked up somewhere and never read. Reading it today gives a whole new perspective on U.S. involvement in Iraq.

For instance, take this from Friedman's "Endgame" chapter:

In the 1980s, at times in the name of anti-Soviet containment, and because of the obsessive drive to guarantee access to Persian Gulf oil, the Reagan and Bush administrations, with people like George Bush and James Baker in positions of primary responsibility, did virtually anything they wanted. The government's lack of accountability, either to Congress or to the public, was so egregious as to pose a silent threat to the principles of American democracy.

Who was the defense secretary in this period? Dick Cheney. And who was President Reagan's special Middle East envoy? Donald Rumsfeld. And then there's Robert Gates, today's defense secretary who worked for Bush I in the CIA and in the White House as deputy national security adviser. Is it any wonder that today's "war on terror" suffers from the same lawlessness?

The first Gulf War was full of irony. As Operation Desert Storm was broadcast live on CNN:

Millions of dollars' worth of the military equipment that the West had covertly supplied to Iraq, and billions more in high technology that Saddam Hussein had illicitly obtained, were now being bombed by his principal suppliers.

The cluster bomb factories that Carlos Cardoen had supplied and built were among the very first targets. Those had arrived in Iraq with CIA knowledge and blessings. The radar-guided antiaircraft systems that resembled fireworks over CNN as they assisted Baghdad's defenses had wound their way to the Iraqi capital from James Guerin's companies in Pennsylvania. The computers from Hewlett-Packard, the trucks from General Motors, the satellite down-links from California, and a thousand more U.S.-supplied components of Saddam's huge military machine were being methodically obliterated.

The depth of the U.S., British and Italian involvement in supporting Iraq's weapons programs, including its efforts to build nuclear-weapons-capable missiles, is outlined by Friedman in detail and supported by 73 pages of documents and another 69 pages of notes.

At the time, President George H.W. Bush lamely excused this commerce as an effort by the world community to bring Iraq into the family of nations. A more glaring example of immoral government actions is hard to imagine. At least it was hard to imagine before the current administration's preemptive return to the region.

Regime change, anyone?

Moment of Truth In Iraq on the bus

Reading free-lance journalist Michael Yon's slim volume "Moment of Truth in Iraq" after reading Ahmed Rashid's richly sourced "Descent into Chaos" underscores the difference between professional journalism and blogging as news.

Michael Yon is a former Green Beret who boasts of having spent more time embedded with troops in Iraq than any other journalist. He has certainly walked the walk in order to tell the story of Iraq from the perspective of the boots on the ground. But reporting by anecdote isn't necessarily the same as journalism.

I picked this book because I wanted to read something about the Iraq occupation after President Bush declared the end of major combat operations.

Yon is critical of the original mistake of not bringing enough troops to Iraq, and the resulting failure to stop the spiraling chaos that allowed the insurgency to take hold.

As a former special forces soldier, Yon was trained in counterinsurgency tactics. This clearly influences his outspoken cheerleading for the current efforts of Gen. David H. Petraeus.

Much of Yon's anecdotes tell the story of soldiers who must switch from war-fighting to nation-building and back, often in the same day. These are the efforts, Yon explains, that could have won the war in 2003, when Petraeus first demonstrated in Mosul how to wage counterinsurgency warfare.

Yon sees the U.S. soldiers today pulling Iraq back from the abyss as the next "Greatest Generation." Our soldiers have done a masterful job. They deserve all of the praise Yon lavishes on them. But this war cannot be compared with the war fought by the "Greatest Generation." Yes, we may yet pull a victory of sorts from the jaws of defeat we nearly suffered at the hands of a terrorist insurgency, but to what end? The only real winner here is Iran, and that doesn't help anyone.

* * *

I wanted to include some quotes from the book, but I'm afraid I left it on the No. 82 bus in my confusion after losing my job. I was within a few pages of the end, and I was looking forward to writing a fuller review. I've checked RT's lost and found, but apparently someone else is now reading the book. It's worth reading. I've ordered a signed copy to replace the one I lost.

Descent into Chaos on the bus

Finished Ahmed Rashid's new book, "Descent into Chaos." This is the book to read to understand why the Supreme Court's decision today to stand up to the Bush administration's lawlessness in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, is so important. This is the book to read to understand the consequences of our failure to finish the job in Afghanistan and the terrible cost that the Iraq distraction has extracted.

Rashid's 403 page book is backed up with 48 pages of footnotes documenting his sources and five pages of suggested reading. This is a scholarly work written by a Pakistani journalist who is considered an expert on the region.

This book offers an excellent overview of the geopolitics that influence the Central Asia region and a detailed examination of the consequences of our actions -- or lack thereof -- in Afghanistan and neighboring Central Asia.

Take as just one example, the consequences of the Bush administration's decision to abandon international norms of conduct in warfare and to pursue a course of lawlessness.

"For the greatest power on earth to wage its 'war on terrorism' by rejecting the very rules of war it is a signatory to, denying justice at home, undermining the U.S. Constitution, and then pressuring its allies to do the same set in motion a devastating denial of civilized instincts. America's example had the most impact in Afghanistan, where no legal system existed; in Pakistan, ruled by a military regime; and in Central Asia, where the world's most repressive dictatorships flourished. By following America's lead in promoting or condoning disappearances, torture and secret jails, these countries found their path to democracy and their struggle against Islamic extremism set back by decades. ... It could well be argued that over time Islamic extremists were emboldened rather than subdued by the travesty of justice the United States perpetrated. The people learned to hate America."

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the United States had an opportunity. The Bush administration failed that test, as it has failed so many tests.

"Bush promised a great transformation in 2001, and he has certainly transformed the world, but not in the way that any of us could ever have imagined. We now all have to live with the consequences, pick up the pieces, and help improve the world we are left with by tilting the earth's axis back to where it should be."

Read this book.

Benjamin O. Davis Jr. on the bus

Finished "Benjamin O. Davis Jr.: American," an autobiography. I was introduced to the book by a conservative blogger I read who took exception to Barack Obama's March 18 speech on race in Philadelphia and in particular Obama's unwillingness then to denounce the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Listening to Senator Obama’s speech (and reading the transcript), I wondered if the candidate—or his spiritual advisor—ever heard of General Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., the first African-American to reach flag rank in the U.S. Air Force.

General Davis, who passed away on Independence Day 2002, was a product of the hate-filled and racist times that spawned Reverend Wright’s anger. But the obstacles of that era had a far different impact on General Davis; he not only overcame the evils of racism and segregation, he shattered them, opening doors of opportunity and equality for thousands who followed.

Having now read the book, I agree that Davis and his career are truly inspiring. But to suggest that Davis himself "shattered" the evils of racism and segregation suggests a radicalism that did not exist. Davis was determined to prove that he was equal to any man, but he was determined to do it from within the system.

Davis was the son of the Army's first black general, Benjamin O. Davis Sr. When Davis Jr. graduated from West Point in 1936, the first black to graduate from West Point in the 20th century, he and his father were the only two black line officers serving in the U.S. Army. That is just amazing to me.

From Davis' entry into West Point until his retirement on Jan. 26, 1970, he lived 37 1/2 years under military control. And, as he points out, from 1936 until Aug. 1949, he had lived under complete segregation.

I was grateful to the Air Force for giving me an opportunity that did not exist for me anywhere else in the United States. It had given me a flying career, something I had always wanted. It had educated me at West Point, and it had handed me a Regular Army commission as a second lieutenant upon graduation. Initially the military had treated me badly, but eventually it had rewarded me with important assignments in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. I lived almost 14 years overseas in these assignments, developing an appreciation of and respect for people at all levels of life -- people who were different in appearance and culture from Americans, but who had the same aspirations. I learned to recognize arrogance and its killing effects on human relations. I also learned the meaning of the phrase "the equality of man."

My co-worker, Ginger Rutland, is personally familiar with Davis and the story of the Tuskegee Airmen he lead. Her father was a civilian contractor at Tuskegee during WWII, and she has cousins who were fliers. When I mentioned that I was reading Davis' biography, she said Davis wasn't a popular commander. He wasn't, as she put it, one of the guys. He was aloof. That comes through in the book.

The role I had played as commander of the 99th Fighter Squadron, the 332d Fighter Group, and the 477th Bombardment Group had not been easy, primarily because of the segregation that had then weighed so heavily on the lives of all black officers and airmen. The very nature of segregation was demeaning, and its effect upon its victims was deadening. I had found it absolutely necessary to compound the troubles of black officers and airmen by asking that they perform better than their contemporaries in comparable white Air Force units. The eventual result of these demands was recognition throughout the Air Force of superior achievement, and in the minds of at least some of those under my command my actions were justified.

Davis was not a supporter of black separatists or even the concept of black self-identification. In 1972, the superintendent of West Point, Lt. Gen. William A. Knowland, asked Davis if he would provide a portrait that could be displayed in a place where cadets could be inspired by his example. "I find that many of our Black cadets are well aware of their heritage, but I believe public recognition of it would provide a welcome reinforcement," Knowland told Davis.

Davis initially agreed but then had a change of heart. "Having the views that I have," Davis explained, "I think it would be inconsistent for me to have my portrait displayed as 'a source of both satisfaction and inspiration' for black cadets, the reason simply being that there is a strong implication of the existence of a separate group in the Corps of Cadets. To some this concept is unimportant; to me it is most important because it is something I have lived with for a very long time."

It is this feeling of inclusion rather than separatism that explains the subtitle of his book: "American."

"We are all simply Americans," Davis explains. "Differentiations created by extensive statistical studies for no obvious purpose except to prove the superiority of a particular group are not helpful, and surely the unnecessary labeling of people by race, religion or ethnicity does nothing to bring the many diverse groups of American society together."

In 1987, when Davis went to West Point to do research for this book, the Visitors Center had an exhibit entitled "The Great Train of Tradition" that contained the pictures of outstanding West Point cadets from 1819 to 1950. As Davis explains, two men are included from his class of '36: William C. Westmoreland, "Chief of Staff, Army, Commander, Forces Viet Nam, and Superintendent"; and Davis, "World War hero, helped integrate Air Force."

Davis was not displeased with this honor. But it raises a point for me that I found troubling after I finished Davis' autobiography.

While the Army was segregated, Davis commanded troops in combat and attained a distinguished record for himself and the men he led. But what about after 1949? During the Korean War, he was sent to the Pentagon. He didn't serve in Korea until after the ceasefire. During the Vietnam War, the closest role he played was commander of the 13th Air Force, which was headquartered at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines. The 13th Air Force acted as the logistical wing of the war effort.

Yes, Davis played important roles within the bureaucracy of the Army and the Air Force, but why was he never again put in an air combat role in wartime?

For students of black history, this is a worthwhile, if dry, volume.

Basic Brown on the bus

Finished Willie Brown's "Basic Brown: My Life and Our Times," part memoir, part graduate seminar for wannabe politicians, and all-around entertaining.

Willie Brown gets credit as the author, but the book owes much to P.J. Corkery, the San Francisco Examiner columnist who collaborated with Brown. As Corkery explains, the book is the product of a series of Saturday morning breakfasts during which Brown would hold forth.

In a leisurely fashion, he began to talk and spill out his observations of politics today, what makes things work, how money operates, who influenced him, how to handle scandals, and how flamboyance in a politician doesn't mean an avoidance of serious political issues. Over time, the material began to organize itself -- not as a standard biographical work, but as a set of related glimpses and flashes into the making of modern politics and a modern political life.

The book, especially the first part, reads as if you are seated at the breakfast table listening to Brown weigh in on such topics as "Consensus and Power," "Sex Scandals and the Socializing Politician" and, the most entertaining of all, "The Power of Clothes: Don't Pull a Dukakis."

Brown admits that before he became speaker he was at most a part-time legislator.

I agreed to take this watchdog's post and became chairman of the Revenue and Taxation Committee, or "Rev and Tax." It didn't seem like such a major deal. I didn't expect it would cut into my work at the time, which was building my private law practice.

Indeed, one condition I imposed on (Assembly Speaker Leo) McCarthy as part of the deal was that the committee would meet on Mondays. To give me the time to work on my law practice, I only came to Sacramento then on Mondays and Thursdays, when the whole house was in session and when you had to sign the roll to get paid. I needed the other days of the week for my private work, and I wasn't going to come to committees that met on other days.

Unfortunately for California, it was while Brown was chairman of the Rev and Tax committee that the the Legislature faced one of its biggest challenges -- how to respond to the growing anti-tax movement of the late 1970s -- and came up empty. The Legislature's failure to find a way to answer the anti-tax fervor and prevent passage of Proposition 13 cost California dearly. Brown's part-time focus no doubt contributed to the Legislature's inept response.

To critics who complain that he lacked a real agenda, a vision for where he wanted to lead the Legislature, Brown answers, "My guiding principle was to place myself in a position of power so that I could help people with good ideas see those ideas realized. I was the leader as facilitator, a facilitator you didn't want to cross because then I became a shark."

In a previous lifetime, I was married to a woman who worked for Patrick Johnston when he was in the Assembly and for Majority Services during part of Willie Brown's tenure as speaker. As a result I had something of an inside glimpse at the workings of the Legislature. I saw enough to know that the FBI's effort to ensnare Brown in a cash-for-votes sting was doomed to failure. Brown is nobody's fool. He is smart, very smart, and certainly smarter than his opponents.

"In the end," Brown says of the long FBI effort to entrap him, "it was only Patrick Nolan, the Republican member of the Assembly who went to the FBI in 1985 and suggested they try to get Willie Brown via an undercover sting involving phony legislation, who went to prison. Nolan served two years in federal prison for taking illegal contributions in the very FBI sting he himself suggested."

As Brown explains, the politician as leader is often viewed as a quarterback on a football team or a point guard in basketball -- the tactician, the strategist. "But a more appropriate comparison," Brown says, "is to, of all things, nursing."

Indeed, that's really how I've often thought of myself. You're doing vital work, necessary work. You get to use your brains, your people skills, and you get to help people. The physicians are specialists with highly specific knowledge, but the nurse is the facilitator, the real practitioner. And often you have to get people to take medicine they don't want. ... A real working politician these days isn't a prostitute, isn't a preacher, isn't a topic-specific expert, isn't a rabble-rouser. The good pol is a nurse for the body politic.

It would be nice to have a Legislature filled with such nurses.

Ambush Alley on the bus

Finished reading British journalist Tim Pritchard's "Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War."

This is the story of the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines, who were tasked with the job of securing two bridges at Nasiriyah, the Iraqi town made famous for Americans when an Army maintenance convoy made a wrong turn and ran into an ambush and a young private named Jessica Lynch was captured.

The story covers a single day, March 23, 2003, from the discovery of the smashed Army convoy to the completion of the mission to open the road to Baghdad for the main Marine force.

Pritchard writes:

"On March 23, 2003, eighteen marines from Charilie Company were killed in action between the southern Euphrates Bridge and the northern Saddam Canal Bridge. Over thirty-five were injured. It was the single heaviest loss suffered by the U.S. Military during the entire combat phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom."

I don't know where the "most extraordinary battle" aspect is supposed to play into this. Nothing went according to plan. Tanks became mired in a sewage bog. Commanders had no idea where the various units were on the battlefield. And, worst of all, as many as 10 of the 18 deaths suffered by Charlie Company were caused by two Air Force A-10 jets who were mistakenly told there were no friendlies around the northern bridge.

Pritchard interviewed the marines and tells the story from their perspective, from the boredom of the journey from Kuwait to the horror of battle. If anything, the "extra" of the "ordinary" in the "battle" on March 23 was the way that the individual marines put their training to work.

"From the TC's hatch (Alpha Company commander Capt. Mike) Brooks watched his marines dismount (from the AAV, lightly armored amphibious assault vehicles) and scatter into a 180-degree perimeter. He was heartened at the way they reacted. He'd seen many of them in action at the combined arms exercise over the summer when they'd practiced as a helo-borne company. Several had struggled through training, getting things badly wrong because they were either out of shape, lazy, or just slow. He knew some of them had checkered backgrounds, were troublemakers, and carried a whole lot of baggage with them. Now, amid the flying metal, the explosions, and the swirling dust, he saw all that stuff go away. Individually, they were nothing special, but when they came together they were amazing. They were moving together, reacting to what was going on around them, taking the initiative. There was coherence, which gave him an enormous sense of pride. He was surprised that the marines who had struggled with training were now the ones who seemed to be taking control."

But in the end it is the individual who fights the war, and it is the individual who lives with the consequences.

Lance Corporal Edward Castleberry was an AAV driver whose vehicle crashed in Ambush Alley during an effort to evacuate wounded. Castleberry and the marines in his vehicle were able to evict an Iraqi family from a house and take up defensive positions. Without a functioning radio, they held off Iraqi fighters, not knowing if they would all die in their Alamo. But eventually Castleberry and the others were rescued. In the evening, as he was digging in to a defensive position, battalion commander Lt. Col. Rick Grabowski came up to him and said, "You did a great job."

"The more Castleberry thought about that day, the more wound up he became. I'm going through some sort of religious meltdown. His mom had wanted him to go to church. But that night he was losing all sense of religion. He thought about the women and children he shot. He remembered one kid in particular. They'd shot an Iraqi dead from the house in the middle of Ambush Alley. This little kid, maybe the dead man's son, who couldn't have been more than ten years old, ran out and picked up the abandoned AK-47. He lay on the ground and started firing it. Castleberry and some of the others shot the young boy, punching bullet holes right through him. The kid did a sort of combat roll, stood up, and then fell down dead. Castleberry knew that he would shoot hundreds more kids like that to save the life of just one marine. That's how fucked up this job is. How could God let this happen? He tortured himself with the vision of (Lance Corporal David) Fribley's broken body. And then you look in the troop compartment of your track and there is a guy there with his entrails pouring out of him, his body blown to pieces and completely desecrated. And yet the day before he was laughing at you because someone had taken a photo of you while you were shitting. That's what had turned him against God. And now he didn't know how he was supposed to find any sort of faith. Trouble is, if I believe in God, I'm really screwed because I killed a lot of people out there."

Postscript: There's something of a local angle in this. Major David Sosa, the operations officer of the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines, became commander of Recruiting Station Sacramento after he returned from Iraq.

Bush's Law on the bus

Finished reading New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau's book, "Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice," which tells the story of the excesses of the Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks.

This book is part memoir. Eric Lichtblau covered the Justice Department for the Los Angeles Times from 1999 to 2002 and then moved over to the New York Times. It was Lichtblau and New York Times intelligence reporter James E. Risen who won the 2006 Pulitzer Price for National Reporting for their articles on domestic spying. Much of the story revolves around the exigencies of reporting the story of the Justice Department's effort to switch gears from capturing criminals to capturing people thinking about committing crimes. In telling the story, Lichtblau recalls the high ideals that drive the best journalism and reveals the base competition for a scoop that governs judgments of newsworthiness all too often.

It was interesting to compare Lichtblau's perspective to that of Amy B. Zegart's academic study of the transformation -- or failure to transform -- described in "Spying Blind." Lichtblau focuses the blame at the top of the Justice Department.

"In May of 2001, Ashcroft's budget people began putting together their proposals for the next fiscal year. The preliminary listing of the department's top fiscal priorities made no mention of counterterrorism. ... The FBI had asked for an extra $58 million for 149 new counterterrorism field agents, two hundred analysts, and fifty-four more translators -- all critical areas in the fight against terrorism. Ashcroft's people at Main Justice nixed the increases in their budget plan. ... Ashcroft's budget package went over to the White House, minus the requested increases sought by the FBI for tracking terrorism. The date was September 10, 2001."

And on Sept. 11, 2001, everything changed.

Lichtblau spends much of the early part of the book somewhat breathlessly describing excesses of the post-9/11 effort to make sure there were no other terrorist sleepers cells planning another attack. I found myself sympathetic with the FBI. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, I think a case can be made that the nation was at war and certain rules needed to bend.

That, however, doesn't excuse the way the Bush administration went about bending those rules. Vice President Dick Cheney and President Bush and the sycophants in the White House such as senior national security adviser David Addington clearly felt no law applied to them. The NSA effort to mine vast amounts of electronic communications could have been done within the law or, as was eventually done, the law changed. The use of SWIFT banking transaction information to trace the financing of terrorism could have been modified to answer legitimate privacy concerns.

The Bush administration didn't so much invoke emergency powers as it denied Congress its rightful, co-equal responsibility. And if left alone, it would have continued. Imagine the Bush administration without an unfettered free press. That's a scary, very scary, thought.

The Power of the Vote on the bus

Finished "The Power of the Vote, Electing Presidents, Overthrowing Dictators, and Promoting Democracy Around the World," the memoir of Douglas E. Schoen, the pollster and political consultant who founded Penn, Schoen and Berland, a market research and consulting firm.

Schoen was a pioneer in political polling. He and his partner, Mark Penn, created the first overnight poll, using a microcomputer they purchased for $1,000 and manually keying in the information overnight to present the results the next morning to their customer, New York mayoral candidate Ed Koch in 1977.

Over the years Schoen and his partners were responsible for a number of innovations. For instance, they struck upon the idea of using shoppers at malls as a source for polling, thus mitigating the problems traditional phone polling experiences.

Most amusing for me was the way politics and marketing circled around. After all, Dwight Eisenhower's use of "Madison Avenue" advertising executives was considered avant-garde at the time .

"In the years that followed, however, most of Madison Avenue lost touch with the practice of politics. ... As a result, the big advertising firms and the corporate research departments had failed to develop the kind of quick research and response capacities that we had honed over the course of the preceding decade," Schoen writes. "There was an irony here: Mark and I were now coming full circle, bringing skills once thought to reside exclusively on Madison Avenue back to corporate America."

If you find today's ubiquitous television advertisements for prescription drugs annoying, you can blame Schoen. One of his first corporate clients was Eli Lilly, which was looking for a way to market a new drug: Prozac.

"Although many experts (and television viewers) now decry the proliferation of prescription drug ads, the fact of the matter is that people suffering from depression were not getting the help they needed from the medical profession," Schoen writes. "We advised Eli Lilly to speak directly to this significant segment of the public."

And, of course, this good deed had its reward. As Schoen explains, "By the end of its first decade in the marketplace, sales of Prozac had earned Eli Lilly an estimated $28 billion." <-- note the "b" in that last word. Having recently read Amy B. Zegart's "Spying Blind" and earlier George Crile's "Charlie Wilson's War," I found particularly interesting Schoen's brief encounter with the CIA's analysts.

In September 1999, Schoen's company fielded a benchmark poll for opponents of Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic. The poll found Milosevic vulnerable. The conclusions were circulated in the White House and came to the attention of the CIA. Schoen was invited to brief the CIA on his polling in Serbia and his conclusion that Milosevic lacked popular support.

"My audience at the CIA wasn't just skeptical. It was hostile. The analysts questioned everything -- my assumptions, my methodology, my sample sizes, even my ability to conduct a proper poll. Needless to say, they also took issue with my conclusions. ... The good news was that the CIA was doing everything right -- spending millions to monitor public opinion, placing analysts in the region for long periods, and so on. The bad news was that it was coming up with findings that a reasonably intelligent political consultant -- one person -- could see were wrong after one week in the country. ..."

Having read Gust Avrakotos' opinion of the Ivy League boys club attitude inside the CIA, it was interesting to read Schoen's impression of his CIA interrogators. Schoen is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard, a graduate of Harvard Law School, and earned his doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University in England.

"The hostility of the CIA ... seemed to reflect some kind of professional resentment. Instead of welcoming an unusual source of information, I was treated like an undergrad whose presentation was claiming time that would have been better given over to senior professors. ... It was only a brief encounter, but it gave me a disturbing insight about the U.S. inteligence community's analytic capabilities."

Schoen, who worked for President Clinton as a pollster and campaign consultant during and after Clinton's re-election campaign, also supports the suggestion in Steven Gillon's "The Pact" that the president was considering a proposal to shore up Social Security by directing a portion of the revenue into the stock market.

"As the second term begain, Mark (Penn) and I began working on a proposal that would simultaneously address the country's most difficult long-term financial problem and make Democrats the party of bold initiatives -- Social Security reform. ... Putting Social Security's finances on a safe foundation would be an historic achievement. It would demonstrate the president's zeal for nonpartisan reform and also appeal to young voters, who recognized that investing in equities was a better way to build wealth than government bonds. It would clearly have been a hard sell -- the liberal wing of the party was adamantly opposed to this idea; however, the surging stock market of the 1990s at least gave us a chance."

But, as both Schoen and Gillon point out, the fallout from the Monica Lewinsky scandal effectively killed any opportunity for bipartisan cooperation.

The book is not a history of polling and market research. But as a memoir of a man who spent 30 years in the business, it is an engaging book and well worth reading.

Spying Blind on the bus

Finished Amy B. Zegart's "Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11," a textbook, literally, on the failure of America's intelligence bureaucracy and, more troubling, its continuing inability to adapt to the demands of fighting terrorism.

"For the first time in history, great power does not bring security," Zegart writes. "It is now the weak who threaten the strong. And it is intelligence, not military might, which provides the first and last line of defense."

In Zegart's sparse textbook style -- explain what will be said, say it and then summarize what was said -- the reader is led step by step to an appreciation of the structural deficiencies that cripple government efforts to protect the nation in a post-Cold War world. It is no wonder, then, that it was not a systematic counterterrorism effort but a conscientious border customs inspector in 1999 who foiled the Millennium plot to explode a bomb at Los Angeles International Airport.

"The single most important reason the United States remained so vulnerable on September 11 was not the McDonald's wages paid to airport security workers, the Clinton administration's inability to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, or the Bush administration's failure to place terrorism higher on its priority list," Zegart explains. "It was the stunning inability of U.S. intelligence agencies to adapt to the end of the Cold War."

Zegart's book underlines what Los Angeles Times reporter Bob Drogin explained in "Curveball," his tale of the intelligence failures that surrounded America's invasion of Iraq. It's an institutional culture in the intelligence community that hobbles the efforts of good people to do their jobs. These are the same institutional faults described in "Charlie Wilson's War" by George Crile, especially during CIA agent Gust Avrakotos' internal exile, when he used the anonymity of the need-to-know compartmentalization inside the agency to hide from superiors he had angered.

"Government agencies are not built to change with the times," Zegart writes. "Because reform does not generally arise from within, it must be imposed from the outside. But even this rarely happens because all organizational changes, even the best reforms, create winners and losers, and because the political system allows losers multiple opportunities to keep winners from winning completely. Indeed, the greater the proposed change, the stronger the resistance will be. As a result, organizational adaption almost always meets with defeat, becomes watered down, or gets shelved for another day, when the next crisis erupts."

What I found surprising -- but I should not have been surprised by -- was the role the Defense Department played in thwarting intelligence reform efforts both prior to and after 9/11. In 1991, under the first President Bush, Congress devised a radical restructuring of the intelligence community that would have placed it under a powerful new director of national intelligence. Then-Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney played the "reducing the effectiveness of intelligence support to our war-fighting commanders" trump card and scuttled the effort. This is the same card future-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would play after 9/11, seriously undermining efforts to fix what study after study found to be the problems with America's intelligence community.

For anyone with an interest in government, who wants to know why it works the way it does, this is a must-read book.

The Pact on the bus

Finished "The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the Rivalry that Defined a Generation" by Steven M. Gillon, the resident historian of the History Channel and professor of history at the University of Oklahoma. This is a must-read for anyone interested in government, and it is especially important when considering the race for the Democratic Party's nomination for president this year.

The book, which is being published by Oxford University Press, won't be released until June. I got my copy of the Uncorrected Advance Reading Copy off the discard pile at work. Everyone figured a book about Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich couldn't have much relevance. Just goes to show you really can't judge a book by its cover.

Gillon has written a well-researched account of the secret partnership between a Democrat who sought to move his party to the middle and a firebrand Republican who harbored visions of a transformed government -- and the tragedy that befell both men because Clinton couldn't keep his zipper closed.

Liberals who disagreed with President Clinton's welfare reform effort or the balanced budget agreement he reached with Republicans will find the book cloyingly approving of those efforts. Conservative Republicans who feel distaste for any deal that compromises principles to gain support will find the book and Gingrich a great disappointment. And supporters of Hillary Clinton will want this book to disappear.

On one level, the book is a tale of the battles of the cultural revolution that began in the 1960s -- the fans of Elvis vs. the fans of John Wayne. As Gillon explains in the preface, "When I started working on this book my plan was to use Clinton and Gingrich as metaphors for the intense partisan divisions that shaped the politics of the 1990s." But in researching the book Gillon discovered that Clinton and Gingrich had been on the brink of forging a coalition of conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans, a 60 percent majority that would have provided the support necessary to pass long-term Medicare and Social Security reform.

"Clinton was looking for a bold initiative in his final years that would define his presidency, answer critics who claimed he had failed to make a lasting imprint on the office, and encourage historians to rank him among the nation's 'great' presidents," Gillon writes. "For his part, Gingrich was also thinking about how history would remember him. His idol was Henry Clay, the nineteenth-century Whig Speaker of the House who used his influence to expand American power abroad and preserve the Union at home. Gingrich wanted to be remembered as a great statesman, not just as a conservative firebrand rebel and mastermind of the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress."

On the evening of Oct. 28, 1997, Gingrich and Arnie Christenson, Gingrich's chief of staff, met with the president, White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles and the administration's legislative director John Hilley.

"Both sides went to great lengths to maintain secrecy," Gillon writes. "The president did not tell his vice president, the Democratic leadership in the House, or even his wife, about the meeting." The official photograph of the meeting wasn't declassified until November 2007 after Gillon's freedom of information request.

What did Clinton and Gingrich have in mind?

"In private conversations with Gingrich and with Texas Republican Bill Archer, powerful head of the House Ways and Means Committee, the president promised to 'provide political cover' for Democrats and Republicans by announcing his support for raising the minimum age required for Social Security and for changing the COLA formula. The president was willing to oppose the leadership of his own party and support the Republican demand for private accounts. Although most Republicans planned to use the surplus for a massive tax cut, Gingrich privately accepted the administration's position that the surplus should be used first to save Social Security 'for all time,' with any remaining amount used for a tax break."

Four months later, the revelations of Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky abruptly ended any possibility of bipartisan work on any issue, let alone such sensitive topics as Social Security and Medicare.

Even casual readers of this blog know that I am a supporter of Barack Obama, and in particular an enthusiastic fan of his efforts to reach across the partisan divide in order to make government work. When Clinton was president, I reluctantly supported his welfare reform efforts. My sentiments were not unlike those of conservative Republicans who gave grudging support to President Nixon's efforts in China. If you are going to have welfare reform, I figured, it's better to have a Democrat in charge, balancing the limits on welfare with job training for welfare recipients and subsidized child care.

But it was as I read this book that I realized just how much the country lost with the stain on Monica's blue dress. In fighting his removal from office, the president had to seek refuge in the left extreme of his party while Gingrich was forced to adhere to the will of a cadre of unbending Republican conservatives he had brought to Congress. Gone was any chance of a middle way, and we have been paying for that to this day.

This is not a book that either Gingrich or Clinton wants published.

Gillon found a brief window of opportunity after the 2004 election when the two men were willing to allow the story of their past effort to work together to be uncovered, but as maneuvering for the 2008 elections began that window closed.

"By 2006, ... with his wife gearing up for her own run at the presidency, Clinton shifted gears," Gillon explains. "He had once seen himself as a post-partisan politician, as the man who would blur ideological differences between Democrats and Republicans. Now the master of triangulation pushed Democrats to assume the ideological offensive against Republicans. With his wife locked in a tough primary battle the president was determined to help broaden her appeal to traditional Democratic voters. Telling the party faithful that he had once tried to form a coalition with a man most of them despised was not part of the message."

Not only does the former president not want his efforts publicized, but he also doesn't want to reveal just how limited that "experience" was that his wife touts on the campaign trail.

One of the singular achievements of the Clinton administration was the balanced budget deal he and Gingrich hammered out after the Republicans had suffered major public relations disasters by shutting down the government twice. Hillary's role?

"For liberals, the only remaining ally in the White House was Hillary Clinton. While she was an influential voice in the first few years, she was largely excluded from policy discussions after the health care fiasco. She was much less generous toward Gingrich than her husband, viewing him as part of the right-wing conspiracy that was out to destroy his administration. But she was largely absent from the inner circle after 1994, directing her attention outward, traveling around the world, condemning policies that discriminated against women. Her most high-profile domestic initiative after the health care debacle was a book about the White House pets called 'Dear Socks, Dear Buddy.' [Erskine] Bowles gracefully made clear to the president that he would prefer she keep a low profile during the second term."

Barack Obama's name never appears in the book, but he comes off as the true heir to the New Democrat mantle, the best choice to restore the nation's hope that something more than partisan differences should be the focus of government.

It's time to turn the page.

Heroes of My Time on the bus

Finished reading Harrison Salisbury's "Heroes of My Time." This is a thin volume published in 1993. The book is one of several I picked out from the collection of a former neighbor who is getting rid of her inventory from her days as an online bookseller.

Salisbury profiles 20 people in the 201 pages. These are not the heroes of Salisbury's lifetime as much as they are heroic people he met during his years with the New York Times.

I have included only heroes whom I have known personally or whom I have learned to know well at second remove. This limits me somewhat geographically to areas where I have spent most of my years -- the United States, Russia and China.

There are plenty of famous people among these heroes -- Robert Kennedy, Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn, Malcom X, Nikita Khrushchev, Andrei Sakharov and Zhou Enlai. And since Salisbury was a journalist, he offers up several icons: David Halberstam, Homer Bigart, Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger and Edgar Snow. It is the choice of lesser heroes that is most striking: Brigid Temple Keoghan, an Emmet nun and university professor in China; Sister Huang Roushan, who cared for lepers in China; and Dan Xiaoping's son, Deng Pufang, who was crippled during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and went on to change China's attitude about the handicapped.

Perhaps one day I will write about my heroes on the bus. There was the lady the other day who helped the auto mechanic get to Florin Road. I would also include the driver who waited while a passenger ran across the street to get change. And, of course, no collection of my heroes would be complete without the gentleman on the bus who saw a young mother struggling with an infant in one arm and a bulky stroller and ran off the bus to help the woman board.

No, not as exciting as Salisbury, but heroes nonetheless.

Dreams from My Father on the bus

Finished "Dreams from My Father, A Story of Race and Inheritance." This is Barack Obama's first book, which was written 13 years ago in 1995. This book is every bit as inspiring as his later book, "The Audacity of Hope," but it is also more personal, at times raw, dealing as it does with his own struggle with the meaning of racial identity.

The son of a Kenyan scholar and a white teenage college student, growing up in Hawaii and Indonesia, raised for long periods by his loving maternal grandparents, going on to college and deciding to pursue the unglamorous job of community organizing and finally going to Harvard Law School and becoming the first black president of the Harvard Law Review -- it is obvious that Obama is anything but ordinary.

Since Obama lately has been accused of cribbing points he made in recent speeches, I'm not going to try to create my own narrative to wrap around what Obama wrote. Instead, I'm just going to give you the passages that I marked to save as I read the book. I think these provide a useful summary. They also illustrate the deep foundation on which the words Obama speaks today are built.

Page 11:

Miscegenation. The word is humpbacked, ugly, portending a monstrous outcome: like antebellum or octoroon, it evokes images of another era, a distant world of horsewhips and flames, dead magnolias and crumbling porticos. And yet it wasn't until 1967 -- the year I celebrated my sixth birthday and Jimi Hendrix performed in Monterey, three years after Dr. King received the Nobel Peace Prize, a time when America had already begun to weary of black demands for equality, the problem of discrimination presumably solved -- that the Supreme Court of the United States would get around to telling the state of Virginia that its ban on interracial marriages violated the Constitution. ...

Sure -- but would you let your daughter marry one?

The fact that my grandparents had answered yes to this question, no matter how grudgingly, remains an enduring puzzle to me. There was nothing in their background to predict such a response, no New England transcendentalists or wild-eyed socialists in their family tree.

Page 50:

My mother's confidence in needlepoint virtues depended on a faith I didn't possess, a faith that she would refuse to describe as religious; that, in fact, her experience told her was sacrilegious: a faith that rational, thoughtful people could shape their own destiny. In a land [Indonesia] where fatalism remained a necessary tool for enduring hardship, where ultimate truths were kept separate from day-to-day realities, she was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.

Page 79:

By the time I reached high school, I was playing [basketball] on Punahou's teams, and could take my game to the university courts, where a handful of black men, mostly gym rats and has-beens, would teach me an attitude that didn't just have to do with the sport. That respect came from what you did and not who your daddy was. That you could talk stuff to rattle an opponent, but that you should shut the hell up if you couldn't back it up. That you didn't let anyone sneak up behind you to see emotions -- like hurt or fear -- you didn't want to see. ...

My wife will roll her eyes right about now. She grew up with a basketball star for a brother, and when she wants to wind either of us up she will insist that she'd rather see her son play the cello. She's right, of course; I was living out a caricature of black male adolescence, itself a caricature of swaggering American manhood. Yet at a time when boys aren't supposed to want to follow their fathers' tired footsteps, when the imperatives of harvest or work in the factory aren't supposed to dictate identity, so that how to live is bought off the rack or found in magazines, the principal difference between me and most of the man-boys around me -- the surfers, the football players, the would-be rock-and-roll guitarists -- resided in the limited number of options at my disposal. Each of us chose a costume, armor against uncertainty. At least on the basketball court I could find a community of sorts, with an inner life all its own.

Page 133:

In 1983, I decided to become a community organizer.

There wasn't much detail to the idea; I didn't know anyone making a living that way. When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn't answer them directly. Instead, I'd pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country, manic and self-absorbed. Change won't come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.

Page 197:

"It's about blood, Barack, looking after your own. Period. Black people the only ones stupid enough to worry about their enemies."

That was the truth as Rafiq saw it, and he didn't waste energy picking that truth apart. His was a Hobbesian world where distrust was a given and loyalties extended from family to mosque to the black race -- whereupon notions of loyalty ceased to apply. This narrowing vision, of blood and tribe, had provided him with a clarity of sorts, a means of focusing his attention. Black self-respect had delivered the [Chicago] mayor's seat, he could argue, just as black self-respect turned around the lives of drug addicts under the tutelage of the Muslims. Progress was within our grasp so long as we didn't betray ourselves.

But what exactly constituted betrayal? Ever since the first time I'd picked up Malcom X's autobiography, I had tried to untangle the twin strands of black nationalism, arguing that nationalism's affirming message -- of solidarity and self-reliance, discipline and communal responsibility -- need not depend on hatred of whites any more than it depended on white munificence. We could tell this country where it was wrong, I would tell myself and any black friends who would listen, without ceasing to believe in its capacity for change.

Page 406:

(Barack Obama's half-sister Auma, who was educated in Germany and has returned to Kenya to teach, is tsk-tsking their grandmother's acceptance of the old rituals that gave women little say in their lives.)

"Much of what you say is true, Auma," she said in Luo. "Our women have carried a heavy load. If one is a fish, one does not try to fly -- one swims with other fish. One only knows what one knows. Perhaps if I were young today, I would not have accepted these things. Perhaps I would only care about my feelings, and falling in love. But that's not the world I was raised in. I only know what I have seen. What I have not seen doesn't make my heart heavy."

Page 437:

The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power -- and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition.

But that's not all the law is. The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.

We hold these truths to be self-evident. In those words, I hear the spirit of Douglass and Delany, as well as Jefferson and Lincoln; the struggles of Martin and Malcom and unheralded marchers to bring these words to life. I hear the voices of Japanese families interned behind barbed wire; young Russian Jews cutting patterns in Lower East Side sweatshops; dust-bowl farmers loading up their trucks with the remains of shattered lives. I hear the voices of the people in Altgeld Gardens, and the voices of those who stand outside this country's borders, the weary, hungry bands crossing the Rio Grande. I hear all of these voices clamoring for recognition, all of them asking the very same questions that have come to shape my life, the same questions that I sometimes, late at night, find myself asking the Old Man [his father]. What is our community, and how might that community be reconciled with our freedom? How far do our obligations reach? How do we transform mere power into justice, mere sentiment into love? The answers I find in law books don't always satisfy me -- for every Brown v. Board of Education I find a score of cases where conscience is sacrificed to expedience or greed. And yet, in the conversation itself, in the joining of voices, I find myself modestly encouraged, believing that so long as the questions are still being asked, what binds us together might somehow, ultimately prevail.

* * *

Below is Barack Obama reading from the introduction to his book.



Perhaps he will write that book about his mother. I will read it if he does.

Books and buses

It's 7:40 p.m. on a Friday night. I'm waiting for an outbound train that is supposed to arrive at 7:41 p.m. The question occurs to me: Am I the only person in the world who is happy to have an hour-long ride home in which to read and unwind?

This seems odd. Certainly it is at odds with the every-second-is-precious philosophy that consumes most commuters. I could drive to work and forgo the books. It's not like crowded highways are an issue in Sacramento when I go to work at 11 a.m. or travel home after 7 p.m..

No, it's the books. I crave the reading time, and I just don't have the discipline to set aside the time to read at home.

Tonight I didn't even mind -- well, OK, just a little -- when I arrived at 65th Street and realized I had been blocked into an extra 15-minute wait for the next No. 82 bus. I sat down at the base of a street light and read my book. The bus arrived 10 minutes early, and the driver allowed me and two other passengers to wait inside while he went off somewhere.

Dog-tired from the grind my job has become, seated in a warm, well-lit bus, the ride home reading my book was just fine with me.

Party of One on the bus

Finished Daniel Weintraub's "Party of One: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of the Independent Voter." Weintraub does a fine job of crafting an admiring portrait of Schwarzenegger as governor.

Weintraub is upfront about where he comes from in writing the book:

For the past four years, I've watch Schwarzenegger do his job as closely as anyone. And I've watched with a special interest. Like Schwarzenegger, I am not wedded to the views of any one political party. I have been a registered Republican and a registered Democrat, and I am currently registered with no party at all. I consider myself to be a fiscal conservative with a bit of libertarian streak. I believe in individual responsibility. When it comes to social policy, I think government should act only as a last resort, and mainly to ensure equal opportunity, not equal results. I am an old-school liberal, a live-and-let-live person who believes government should generally leave people alone to do their own thing. And I am an environmental progressive, because when you blow soot in my lungs or dump toxins into my water, you are no longer just doing your own thing. You're messing with my life. As it turns out, these beliefs are a pretty good match for Schwarzenegger's.

And while Weintraub does criticize some of the governor's actions, his personal disappointment is clear.

Of course, I'm not a disinterested observer any more than Weintraub. I'm a yellow-dog Democrat raised by a woman who was inspired to become politically active by the Adlai Stevenson presidential campaigns. And I'm also a Democrat who was so disappointed by Gov. Gray Davis' performance in office that I voted for the recall, and I even voted for Schwarzenegger on the off chance that maybe he was something different.

Weintraub explains the Schwarzenegger's difference, how his ideas are not limited by partisan ideology. Weintraub argues that Schwarzenegger's success, at least in terms of popularity among voters, derives from this nonpartisan focus. This, Weintraub says, meshes well with the desires of Californians to have government officials working to fix problems rather than scoring ideological points.

Unfortunately, Weintraub has written the book before the story is over. Substantial portions of the book deal with issues -- health care, school reform and legislative redistricting -- that have since fallen victim to the economic downturn that has struck California. While his criticism of the governor for failing to attack the structural budget issues is prescient, it doesn't compensate for the way the book leaves these issues hanging.

Weintraub explains in the introduction:

I hope this book serves as a guide to readers of all political persuasions who want to better understand the Schwarzenegger phenomenon, its effect on California, and its potential application to the rest of the nation.

This he has done. Writing the book a year later -- or, better yet, when the governor left office -- might have provided the opportunity to hammer home the tragedy of the governor's failure to get a handle on budget reform. Still, Weintraub has written a valuable book. I imagine it will be one of several contemporary works used by future historians as original source material.

Charlie Wilson's War on the bus

Finished George Crile's masterful "Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History." As regular readers of this blog will realize, spooks and wars are two topics that fascinate me. And Crile's book has both as it tells the story of the United States' covert war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

In the last 12 months I've read "Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House," Valerie Plame Wilson's attempt at a memoir along with "Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War" by Bob Drogin. I read "OSS: The secret history of America's first central intelligence agency" by R. Harris Smith; "No Other Choice," the autobiography of George Blake, who spied for the KGB against the West; and "Breaking the Ring: The bizarre case of the Walker family spy ring" by John Barron. Even in my rare fictional outing, I read John Le Carre's "The Mission Song."

I bring all of this up as a way to underline my opinion of Crile's book: It is simply superb. It is by far the best book I read in 11 months of riding the bus to work.

If it were not all true, it would be unbelievable.

Rep. Charlie Wilson, a liberal Texas Democrat with a self-destructive streak that mixes booze and beauty queens, becomes the patron of the Afghan warriors, on a mission to find a way to shoot down the Soviet Hind helicopter gunships. Gust Avrakotos, a street-tough CIA agent, refuses to kiss up to the dandies who control the CIA bureaucracy and manages to land a job supervising what would become the biggest covert war ever waged while his bosses were focusing on the ill-fated war in Nicaragua. Mike Vickers, a young former Army Green Beret just starting out in the agency, is given a chance to design and execute a military strategy and ends up turning ragtag Afghans into techno-guerrillas who take the war to the Soviets.

And then there are the women: the leggy Charlie's Angels who work in Wilson's Capitol office; Joanne Herring, the right-wing Texas socialite and honorary Pakistani consul; Carol Shannon, Charlie's belly dancer who entertains the Egyptian defense minister; Playboy centerfold Liz Wickersham, who has an important role in a Las Vegas hot tub; a Nordic blonde named Cynthia Gale Watson, whom Charlie introduced to everyone as "Snowflake"; and Annelise "Sweetums" Ilschenko, a former Miss World contestant and Charlie's fiancee until Snowflake answered the phone in Charlie's hotel room one day.

"What brought us together," Gust Avrakotos famously says, "was chasing pussy and killing Communists."

It's no wonder Hollywood wanted to make a movie out of this material. I haven't seen the Tom Hanks version of Charlie Wilson's War, but I can't imagine how it could possibly come close to capturing more than the surface of Crile's book.

Afghanistan was the Soviet Union's Vietnam, and the CIA's covert war was America's attempt at payback.

The Soviets were supposed to be providing support to the independent Afghan government. It was, in fact, their puppet government. The Red Army was supposedly just serving as advisers and suppliers of the Afghan army, which had been close to 100,000 strong at the beginning of the war. Now, after the tremendous infusion of Soviet arms and money, it was down to 30,000, and units were defecting en masse to the mujahideen. Once the Soviets had determined that the Afghans wouldn't fight, they'd found themselves with no choice but to take over the fighting. It had been the same for the United States. And just as in Vietnam, the Soviet infantry hadn't been organized to cope with a dedicated, cunning, and increasingly well-armed guerrilla force. To compensate, the Soviets, like the Americans before them, had grown increasingly dependent on air power.

Of course, today, in hindsight, the enthusiasm -- and the tons of ammunition and weapons -- we showered on the mujahideen seem more than ill-advised.

Afghanistan was the largest and most successful covert operation ever mounted by the CIA. But the scope and nature of this campaign has still not registered in the consciousness of most Americans. Nor is it understood that such secret undertakings inevitably have unforeseen and unintended consequences, which in this case remained largely ignored. None of the sponsors of the campaign, least of all Charlie Wilson, has ever felt responsible for the path the CIA-sponsored jihad has taken; perhaps that's because their intentions were so pure and because the specific objectives they sought were initially so overwhelmingly successful.

This book tells the story of Wilson's ability to get hundreds of millions of dollars for the covert war against the Soviet Union, the battle within the CIA to overcome the bureaucratic inertia that felt WWI rifles were all that the Afghans needed against the Soviet Army and a staggering world arms supply chain that linked China, Isreal, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, England and others to supply the jihad in Afghanistan, a war run mostly by the Pakistanis, who were busy at the same time creating the Islamic bomb.

This is an excellent book on so many levels. Just fantastic.

Anything for a Vote on the bus

Finished reading "Anything for a Vote: Dirty Tricks, Cheap Shots, and October Surprises In U.S. Presidential Campaigns" by Joseph Cummins. Those who read history for its value as trivia for cocktail chatter will find this book priceless.

Cummins explains that the 2004 presidential election postmortems moaning about how sleazy presidential campaigns had become prompted his research. Are presidential campaigns more vicious today?

After a year and a half spent researching and writing "Anything for a Vote: Dirty Tricks, Cheap Shots, and October Surprises In U.S. Presidential Campaigns," I can happily answer that question with a resounding No. Presidential elections haven't gotten worse -- they're just as dirty now as they've always been.

hearken back to 1800 and the rematch between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Jefferson hired a writer named James Callender to attack President Adams:

Adams, he wrote, was "a repulsive pedant," a "gross hypocrite," and, most interesting, "a hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensiblity of a woman."

The book offers an excellent survey of American presidential politics, with just enough historical background to explain the flavor mud being splashed about. I appreciated the new insights into historical figures. For instance:

When one reads about Davy Crockett's career in politics, one gets a very different picture than that of the honorable homespun hero of the 1950s TV coonskin cap fame. Crocket was a Whig attack dog, the Ann Coulter of his time.

I particularly enjoyed the discussion of the 1920 campaign between Warren G. Harding and James Cox. Cummins describes Harding as "the most libidinous candidate to run for president until Bill Clinton."

When Republican operatives decided to nominate the fifty-five-year-old Ohio senator, they asked if he had anything hidden in his personal life that would "disqualify" him from winning the presidency. Harding asked for some time to reflect on the question, and he may have pondered that he chewed tobacco, played poker, loved to drink (Prohibition had just been voted in), and was having affairs with not only the wife of one of his friends but also a young woman thirty years his junior, with whom he had an illegitimate daughter. Then he said, nope, nothing to hide, guys -- it's all good.

The book comes with a handy Sleaze-O-Meter for the worst campaigns. The campaigns rating a 10 on the Sleaze-O-Meter scale of 1 to 10:

• 1800 Thomas Jefferson vs. John Adams
• 1876 Rutherford Hayes vs. Samuel Tilden
• 1928 Herbert Hoover vs. Al Smith
• 1960 John F. Kennedy vs. Richard Nixon
• 1964 Lyndon Johnson vs. Barry Goldwater
• 1972 Richard Nixon vs. George McGovern
• 1988 George H.W. Bush vs. Michael Dukakis
• 1992 William Jefferson Clinton vs. George H.W. Bush
• 2000 George W. Bush vs. Al Gore

Here's the famous "Daisy" ad from Johnson-Goldwater campaign.



There's also a handy appendix with the Top Ten Classic Attacks in Presidential Elections

10. "You're not tough enough!"
9. "You'll drive us into war!"
8. "You're too old!"
7. "You're an egghead!"
6. "You're an idiot!"
5. "You're a slut!"
4. "You're clearly not having sex with anyone!"
3. "You're at least a little bit gay!"
2. "You're drunk all the time!"
1. "You're insane."

In this election year, with the primary season finally under way, there's something comforting in knowing that the mud throwing is just, well, normal, quadrennial fun.

Big Daddy on the bus

Finished Bill Boyarsky's slim volume on Jesse Unruh, the legendary former speaker of the California Assembly who transformed the Legislature from a part-time vassal agency, subservient to the governor, to a professional, co-equal branch of state government.

Boyarsky sets his goal in the prologue:

"By studying his life and the story of the institutions he built, we can learn something about why government worked so well in his era, when it served both the poor and the middle class through institutions carefully built by a California government that confronted issues remarkably similar to those Americans face today."

But that's just too big a bite of history to digest in 224 pages. As a result, the book's examination of those events seems at best cursory. Complicating matters is the fact that Boyarsky covered much of this era as a wire service and newspaper journalist. By combining his personal experience with the history he tries to tell, what results is a muddle of biography and memoir that doesn't satisfy either.

Much like my muddled personal blog book reports.

My mother was an active member of the California Democratic Council, an organization that Unruh felt was too elitist, too detached from the realities of blue collar Democrats. I find it an interesting omission that Boyarsky's discussion of the CDC fails to point out that the organization was the outgrowth of the "Stevenson Clubs" established during Adlai Stevenson's idealistic, but unsuccessful campaigns for president. We learn in the book that Unruh favored Truman over Wallace in the campaign to succeed FDR, but where was Unruh in the Stevenson campaigns?

Coming as I did from an environment of liberal CDC politics, I grew up with a well-developed dislike for Unruh's down-to-earth politics, a politics where the goal was to acquire personal power ‌in the pursuit of good works. It was this type of politics that created a "Big Daddy" who could promote civil rights and fair housing legislation.

Today, having outgrown that liberal cocoon, I better appreciate the art of Unruh's work. Both as Assembly speaker and later as state treasurer, Unruh gathered to himself great power. He then used that power to both personally enrich himself and at the same time to make changes for the betterment of those less fortunate. His campaign against the "greenmail" tactics that roiled Wall Street in the 1980s and his efforts to establish shareholder rights are examples of the good works Unruh accomplished while raking in more than a million dollars in campaign gifts from people who profited from California bond sales managed by Unruh's office.

Unruh was California's equivalent of the East Coast political bosses or Chicago Mayor Richard Daley: He knew the rules and how to play the game. In an interview with a Los Angeles Times reporter who sought to make something of Unruh's milking of campaign cash from Wall Street investment houses with business before the treasurer's office, Unruh said:

"[I] don't propose to talk about campaign financing. Your paper has written on it many times, and as far as I'm concerned we've been down though the list, and as a consequence, I've said all I have to say on that. Okay? Which is essentially that I don't like the way the game is played, and until we get some other alternative method, the only alternative to not using the present method is to lose."

And Unruh didn't like to lose.

Fair Game on the bus

Finished "Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House," Valerie Plame Wilson's attempt at a memoir, an attempt that the CIA vigorously worked to undermine. Simon & Schuster, the publisher, had to resort to hiring Laura Rozen to produce a 78-page "afterword" that seeks to fill in some of the blanks left by the CIA censors. (See this post by Rozen.)

When this whole affair first started I was aghast that the administration would stoop to revealing a covert CIA officer's identity as a part of an effort to undermine a critic of the administration's march to war. Having read even the redacted description of Valerie Plame's work in the CIA, I am even more angered by what was done. But I am not surprised. After all, this is the same administration that has worked so hard to turn the Justice Department into an arm of the White House political machine, that has bent the environmental protection laws to favor mining interests and has turned the nation's energy policy into corporate welfare for the oil industry.

What's one spy's life and the damage her outing has caused to national security when there are political scores to settle?

There's more than a little irony in the fact that Plame was outed by the White House trying to stifle dissent. She was a strong supporter of the work to gather the intelligence on Iraq's nuclear program and other weapons of mass destruction.

Writing these pages in 2007, four years after the invasion of Iraq, and the evidence of the manipulations of intelligence and failures of the intelligence community prior to the war, it is easy to surrender to a revisionist idea that all the WMD evidence against Iraq was fabricated. While it is true that powerful ideologues encouraged a war to prove their own geopolitical theories, and critical failures of judgment were made throughout the intelligence community in the spring and summer of 2002, Iraq, under its cruel dictator Saddam Hussein, was clearly a rogue nation that flouted international treaties and norms in its quest for regional superiority.

The book contains full pages of material censored by the CIA. Since all of the material the CIA cut out is already in the public domain -- news articles, other books, even the congressional record -- one is left to suspect the political appointees at the top of the CIA still have a score to settle with a woman whose husband had the audacity to speak out. She is not even allowed to say how she met her future husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson.

Click on the image of Page 64 from the book for my favorite example of what the CIA felt safe to reveal.



I have never understood the claims of supporters of the White House, who argued that Wilson's assessment of the Niger "yellowcake" evidence was somehow undermined by the fact that his wife worked as a CIA operative on WMD and played a role in getting him the pro-bono trip to Africa. Rozen expresses my own sentiments in the afterword:

It's not easy to understand how an unpaid week interviewing ex-officials in the second-poorest country on earth could be construed as a boondoggle by even the most avid political operative, and the nepotism talking point did little to neutralize Joe Wilson's fundamental and still-compelling claim: that the White House exaggerated the case for war to the American public. It's a claim that teams of CIA-led Iraq weapons hunters did nothing to dispel when they delivered their findings to Congress shortly thereafter that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Even with the redactions in her memoir, Valerie Plame Wilson comes across as a dedicated, patriotic public servant who served her country to the best of her ability, sometimes risking her life in the process. This is not James Bond stuff. This is the nitty-gritty work of intelligence gathering, the very necessary and very valuable effort required to ensure our national security.

That she was paid back in the way she was is just a crime.

In the book, she makes reference to a photo that appeared in TIME's 2005 retrospective focusing on "People Who Mattered." A photographer had come over to shoot her husband. When one of her twins wandered downstairs, she came after the child in her pajamas. She paused a moment, pushing her hair out of her face. The image captured speaks volumes about two people who stood up to an organized political attack.

Curveball on the bus

Finished "Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War," by Los Angeles Times reporter Bob Drogin. This book details the story of an Iraqi defector who was the sole source of America's claim that Iraq possessed mobile labs capable of creating deadly biological toxins for bombs. These mobile labs were the keystone of Secretary of State Colin Powell's evidence against Saddam that he presented to the United Nations.

As Drogin explains:

Curveball's case occupies a singular place in U.S. history. After 9/11, critics complained that U.S. intelligence and law enforcement failed to connect the dots of evidence that might have prevented the terrorist attacks. But in this case, the CIA and its allies made up the dots. Iraq never built or planned to build any mobile weapon labs. It had no other WMD. The U.S. intelligence apparatus, created to protect the nation, conjured up demons that did not exist. America never before has squandered so much blood, treasure, and credibility on a delusion.

It was interesting to read this account of how the nation's intelligence community had failed to fulfill its mission at the same time that the reversal of the assessment of Iran's nuclear weapons program was in the news.

As Drogin explains:

As the rhetoric rose in intensity (in 2002), the White House pushed Congress to authorize use of force if Saddam did not disarm. Anxious Democrats asked to see the current intelligence estimate on Iraq. There was none. The White House had begun gearing for war without any strategic-level intelligence assessments on Iraq.

The next day, officials from the six agencies that collect foreign intelligence gathered at the National Intelligence Council office, at the other end of the hall from Tenet's suite at Langely. A National Intelligence Estimate represents the best collective judgment of the entire intelligence community. Preparation of an NIE, as it's known, normally requires six to ten months of drafts, debates, and more drafts. The deliberative process is designed to weed out bias and produce unvarnished assessments, regardless of whether they conform to U.S. policy. No other intelligence document is considered more important.

The council cranked out the Iraq NIE in nineteen days flat.

Compare that with this week's news reports concerning the new NIE that says Iran's nuclear weapons program was abandoned in 2003. The Iran NIE was in the works for more than a year. And, more important, when new information arrived, a full reassessment was done. Just the opposite occured prior to the invasion of Iraq. As more an more questions arose about Curveball, the Iraqi defector in Germany, the CIA specialists in biological weapons refused to consider that maybe a mistake had been made. Curveball's story about mobile biological weapons had to be true -- the analysts' reputations were riding on it.

As a Los Angeles Times report in The Bee about the Iran NIE noted, "As U.S. intelligence officials Tuesday sought to explain the remarkable reversal, they pointed to two factors: the emergence of critical new information over the summer, and a determination to avoid repeating the mistakes that preceded the war in Iraq."

One can hope that the difference between the NIE on Iraq and the NIE on Iran means the nation's intelligence community has returned to its proper job as an adviser to the administration and abandoned it's co-conspirator role.

If the Iraq war were not so tragic, the bumbling intelligence effort that started the war would be funny. Prior to the war during the U.N. inspections:

Analysts studying satellite imagery kept reporting Scud missiles hidden on farms. Each time, a U.N. convoy would race to the site. ... But the missile always turned out to be a rotating steel drum for drying corn. Or a poultry shed. "Chickens in Iraq are kept in a long, low half-cylinder coop," Casagrande said later. "We inspected a lot of chicken coops." ... Fed up with wild-chicken chases, Casagrande had a shop print thirty souvenir T-shirts. They showed the U.N. symbol over the words Ballistic Chicken Farm Inspection Team.

During the hunt for WMD after the invasion, an Iraqi tribal sheik approached the Americans and swore that Saddam's aides had buried a cache of biological weapons in farmland he owned. A CIA analyst named Rita took the bait. The CIA team searching for WMD went to the guy's farm with front-end loaders, mobile chemical and biological testing gear and emergency demolition and disposal teams. The crews dug out one enormous hole and then another. After nothing was found in the third hole, the CIA gave up. Drogin reports, "Rita drove back to see the sheikh two weeks later and discovered he had pumped water into the holes and filled his three new ponds with carp for a commercial fish farm."

I'll be on a spy theme for the next several books. I'm now reading Valerie Plame Wilson's book, "Fair Game," which touches on the same pre-Iraq war intelligence fiasco.