If you want to be really afraid, read Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, a prize-winning history of the CIA based heavily on recently declassified internal documents and hundreds of interviews with former and current agents, including most living directors and some dead ones (the author has been covering the intelligence beat for quite a while). Legacy is a tragic and depressing read, but a good read for any citizen. It’s what I would call a “managerial” or “administrative” history of the CIA in the sense that it floats mostly on the level of policy and general direction and doesn’t get deeply into the details of CIA operations. In some way that’s disappointing, but it’s an eye-opening overview of the CIA.

I always knew that the CIA’s “successes” had deeply damaged American security (I mean Iran, Iraq, Guatemala, Chile, Honduras, and so forth), but I never realized how many catastrophic and damaging failures there were that they managed to keep under wraps during the Cold War. Nor did I fully understand the structural reasons for the idiocy of overthrowing governments and installing dictatorships (i.e. it goes beyond Cold War ideology and to the fact that the CIA was incapable of producing any useful intelligence on the Soviets or the Chinese, who had much more disciplined spy agencies).

The Bay of Pigs is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s also Indonesia, abysmal intelligence on the Soviets and the Chinese (worse than worthless). Not to mention fact that the CIA inadvertently supplied much of the operating budget for the Italian communist party for over a decade!
The book gives little hope that the CIA has gotten better or even can as currently structured. Virtually every president has asked the CIA to operate illegally and spy on US citizens within the US in direct violation of its mandate.

That said, Nicholas Dujmovic has a very long review of Legacy of Ashes that calls into question many of Weiner’s basic assertions and has some compelling demonstrations of Weiner’s fast and loose style that mistrepresents facts and quite often simple gets them wrong. In other words, these errors concern not complex matters of interpretation where careful scholars might reasonably disagree, but simple, verifiable facts like what year the president made a given speech. Carelessness is one of the cardinals sins of a historian and Dujmovic’s corrections are constitute an important critique of Weiner’s work.

Dujmovic is a CIA historian and his review appears on the CIA site. Despite the obvious bias inherent in that position, I do think there is a difference between a historian and a journalist, no matter how serious the journalist is. The standard for proof and how far one is willing to go from the facts, and the level of immersion in the specialty are different. In general, this is what makes historians more accurate and more boring than journalists. Of course, there are good historians and bad, good journalists and bad, but historians write primarily for other historians, so the impulse is to get it right even at the cost of being complex, boring and perhaps difficult to follow. Journalist write for non-specialists readers, so the impulse is to make the story compelling and readable and have an interesting narrative arc. Often scrupulous adherence to the facts suffers.

Being only a casual reader here, I can only guess at who to believe, but when it comes to basic facts, I would bet on Dujmovic. When it comes to broader interpretation, though, it’s an open question that I don’t feel qualified to answer. And thought Dujmovic quibbles with Weiner’s facts and his blanket judgements, in between is what I think are the essential conclusions of the book:

• the CIA was generally poor at intelligence, especially human intelligence and that was not just a recent failing. It has always been true. The US was never able to get decent intelligence on what was happening within the Soviet Union or China. Dujmovic would add that the CIA was good at surveillance intelligence (satellites and spy planes).
• Presidents need good, ideologically neutral intelligence and need to act on it, but that has never happened either because of the CIA’s inability to provide it or because of the president’s unwillingness to accept it. I think both authors agree on that.
• The CIA has been a weak institution, adept at creating mayhem, but not at keeping operations secret, except from the American public. I think they more or less agree on that, but would put it in starkly different terms and lay the blame in very different places.
• covert ops have, overwhelmingly been damaging to the United States and have achieved little of value. Perhaps the one exception, the ultimate outcome of which remains debatable of course, is arming the Afghanis, which played a significant role in bankrupting the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War. Since neither the future of Russia nor Afghanistan has been worked out, we can’t really know the legacy of those operations. Clearly, the covert ops in Iran, Chile, Indonesia, Cuba, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador were deeply damaging both to the people of those nations and to the long-term interests of the US. Dujmovic would disagree, no doubt, but then that conclusion is as much a matter of philosophy and the long view versus short view as it is a matter of fact in any way.

When it gets down to more specifics, Dujmovic certainly gives me pause to question many of Weiner’s assertions and, me being in journalist mode, or even worse, “journaling mode” here, this is from memory… so caveat lector. But here are some of Weiner’s other assertions as I recall them:

• Until Nixon, every president says he’s opposed to the covert service and just wants intelligence, and then quickly becomes drunk on the power of overthrowing governments and throwing elections and they all behave pretty much the same. With Johnson, and then with Nixon, intelligence, however, becomes entirely subservient to politics, a trend that of course had tragic consequences during the Bush admin. Dujmovic has some quibbles about Weiner’s assertions that the CIA more or less conned presidents into covert ops, but that critique, I think, supports the idea that the presidents could not resist the thrill of covert ops.
• The US overthrew governments and controlled or attempted to control elections in more countries than you can count: Guatemala, Honduras, Iran, Iraq, Chile, all the ones you know about. But the US also controlled the elections in Italy for twenty years through cash infusions and propaganda. Johnson actually spent more per voter on the elections in Chile than he did on his own presidential campaign. I’m not sure how one can prove that the US controlled democratic elections, but certainly money has its influence.
• Through the 1960s, the CIA had few intelligence successes. They predicted that the Soviets were at least three years from an atomic weapon and probably more like seven. Within the week the Soviets exploded a nuclear warhead. They said that the Indonesian government would not respond militarily to the CIA coup attempt for at least six months. As they were giving that briefing to the president, the president received a cable saying that the Indonesian army, [b]with intelligence help from the US military who still regarded Indonesia as a valued ally[/b], had bombed the CIA proxy forces to smithereens. Dujmovic particularly takes issue with the idea that the CIA intelligence was worthless and notes that Weiner gets some of his basic facts wrong, like saying that a CIA report from 1960 grossly understimated the number fo Soviet ICBMs, when in fact the report was from 1957, projecting ICBM levels for 1961.
• The CIA was full of loose canons and for many years the head of covert ops did not even report to the head of the CIA, but straight to our beloved Attourney General Bobby Kennedy. Dujmovic takes issue with many of the claims here as well though not specifically with regard to Kennedy.
• After failing utterly to gather intelligence on the Soviets (fact partly disputed by Dujmovic), the CIA got its act together in SE Asia and started getting good, actionable intelligence. Unfortunately, what their intelligence said, as early as 1964, was that the war was not winnable and we should get out. This was completely unacceptable to the hawks in the Kennedy and Johnson admins (Bobby, MacNamara, Bundy, all those). At one point, the CIA estimated there were at least 500,000 VC in South Viet Nam and probably more. The response from the White House and the Pentagon was that number was unacceptable and needed to be below 400,000 or the entire hiearchy of the CIA would be on the chopping block. The report was rewritten to say that there were only 399,000 VC in SVN.
  With Nixon it just gets worse and intelligence is put to political purposes to a degree previously unseen, at least in Weiner’s account.
• And Dujmovic essentially agrees with the tragic account of US intelligence in the Clinton and Bush years, that we all know too well.
• And then there’s the legendary incompetence and bumbling of the CIA (and Dujmovic would say that Weiner exaggerates). For decades, the covert ops service sent agents into Eastern Europe, North Korea and China with money and guns to organize local cells. Every one was rounded up and executed. During the 1950s, Kim Philby was passing coordinates of the drops to the Soviets. They rounded up these hapless “commandos”, had them radio back reporting a successful rendez-vous with the partisans, then executed them and took the gold bars and sent them to the Italian Communist Party. For over a decade, most of the funding for the ICP came from CIA gold.

One thing Weiner’s book brought home and Dujmovic’s review did little to dissuade was the feeling that Bobby Kennedy was an evil man. Of course, we know that he got his political start as a lawyer for HUAC hunting communists with another young, ambitious attourney, Richard M. Nixon. Bobby was also, of course, a foot dragger and obstructionist on civil rights issues who got religion on that issue late as well. Now, from Weiner’s book, one can see Bobby really coming into his own as Attourney General when he gets into his elbows with running covert ops, knocking off foreign leaders, throwing elections and generally usurping the power of the Director of Central Intelligence. I don’t know what was in JFK’s mind regarding Viet Nam, but I think this thing about how great the world would have been if John had lived or Bobby had gotten elected is a canard and the one thing the CIA got right is that we didn’t belong in Viet Nam and we weren’t going to win.

Meanwhile, every president ordered the CIA to conduct missions that were illegal by the terms of the CIA charter – spying domestically on peace activists, black civil rights leaders and so on. All the files on the CIA secret drug programs tested on Americans were destroyed because Helms felt that if released they would destroy the agency. Secret prisons and torture have always been a part of the CIA.

Anyway, as I said at the outset, and I am little dissuaded by Dujmovic’s critique, I always knew the “successes” of the CIA had had tragic consequences for the world, but I had never realized that their failures had done so much damage. And finally, I never realized that when they finally did have some intelligence successes, as in Viet Nam, it made no difference because the politicians didn’t want to get out.

We all know by now that plastic bottles are filling landfills and supposedly drinking bottled water is evil. Of course, drinking Odwalla juices is merely outrageously expensive instead of evil, for reasons that have more to do with perceptions of evil than with the differences between a juice bottle and a water bottle. And of course, we know that a bottle of water, when production and transport and disposal are counted, uses roughly enough petroleum to fill that bottle a quarter of the way to the top (and a bottle of juice?). And finally, we know that the real looming crisis in America (and Australia and many other developed yet arid parts of the world) is not so much energy, but running out of water. So if all that’s old news, what’s the new news? The new news is that Elizabeth Royte has written an entire book about bottled water. If Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It is as good as the New York Times review of it, it’s probably a surprisingly interesting read.

I had high expectations of Michael Beschloss’ Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America 1789-1989, but must say that I was disappointed. I had expected stirring narratives of cases where presidents stuck to their guns in the face of criticism and opposition. That’s more or less what’s here, but still, I found the book more like a snack than a meal. Beschloss is a commentator for the Lehrer News Hour on PBS and for NBC News. Now, those aren’t necessarily great credentials for a historian — the most famous news broadcast historians, like Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose are best known in academic circles not for their ground-breaking research, but for their plagiarism. Outside of academia, though, they’re known for books that are fun to read. I expected more or less the same from Beschloss, but somehow he didn’t deliver.

My first complaint with the book might be seen as overly picky. Basically, I just thought the narrative was distracted and ill-constructed. You would think I had written it or something. Beschloss retells the stories of how a handful of presidents flew in the face of popular opinion and powerful adversaries to do what they saw as the right thing. Sounds good, but typically fails to build toward a dramatic moment. In a large number of cases I reached the end of the chapter and thought, “Oh, I guess that was the act of courage.” Meanwhile, there are what seem to me to be a lot of asides because they are interesting factoids, not because they drive a compelling story. In other words, I had to work to finish this book, but a long, boring plane flight saw me through it. That said, who really cares? I’m an academic and the one sin that is easily forgiven in academia is being boring. So though I think Beschloss could really tighten his stories, it’s not a mortal sin by any means.

What I found most troubling about the book is the unstated premise. It is not merely about presidents who stand up to their adversaries, risking their reputation in order to do what’s right. It is specifically about presidents who acted so and then were judged correct by history. So what’s wrong with that? Simply this: it creates the impression that it is a good thing for a president to do what he sees as right even when there is overwhelming opinion to the contrary. So though we hear about Kennedy pushing for civil rights (albeit after a long period of foot-dragging), we do not hear about Herbert Hoover failing to act in the face of bank failures and growing Depression. Hoover did not fail to act because he was was utterly incompetent, but because he was a Coolidge Republican who believed that the market was self-regulating and should be left alone. History has judged that harshly, but wasn’t his inaction an act of presidential courage? I remember reading a book by the founder of Delta Force who praised Jimmy Carter for the courage he showed in planning the hostage rescue in Iran and dealing with the aftermath of its failure. Carter is, of course, pilloried as the very picture of the bumbling president and so his act of courage is inconsequential.

So what’s wrong with the selection Beschloss makes? Well, we happen to be living under a president now who has made some very unpopular decisions in the face of great opposition and criticism. Of course, it is shameful how little criticism there was of those decisions early on, but that’s beside the point. Bush shows great courage in staying the course. Reading Beschloss, we would assume that every courageous but unpopular president is eventually vindicated. By implication, we should perhaps stand by George Bush because history will vindicate him? I don’t think so. Beschloss never mentions Bush, his terrible environmental, diplomatic and military policy, or the war in Iraq, so the unwritten message of the book might slide by unnoticed, but it’s dangerous. Yes, strong medecine is often as unpopular as it is necessary. But the fact is that poison is also pretty unpopular. The argument that it is laudable for presidents to fly in the face of popular opinion is, I must say, a troubling one for a democracy.

Finally, Beschloss looks only at one case where a president makes an unpopular decision to avoid war (Washington’s unpopular treaty with the British). Up against that are the decisions of three presidents to choose the path of war and conflict (Lincoln, Roosevelt and, I would say, Reagan who is profiled for his bellicose stance against the Soviets). Were these bad decisions? Not necessarily, but again, I think the unsaid message is that presidents who lead us into war end up being vindicated by history. So that would include, presumably, Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush? I don’t think so.

Overall, I find it troubling that Beschloss writes in a climate that mirrors those he writes about, and yet he reflects on it not one bit. Is it in hopes that we won’t notice? Maybe. So I leave this comment here in hopes that if anyone reads the book (maybe you’ll like it more than I did), at least you can be aware of the subtle undercurrent that drives the narrative.

On the plus side, we have regained our future. When I was a kid, everyone looked 30 years ahead, hypothesizing about what the world would be like in 2000, usually choosing between a techno-utopia (think TV and film), an irradiated planet (think the novels of Philip K. Dick and the Civil Defense training in fifth grade), or perhaps a totalitarian society that seduced us with amusements and bribes (think Brave New World or Neil Postan’s Amusing Ourselves to Death).

I noticed in the 1990s, that everyone still talked about the world in 2000. It was at that point that I first realized that I had been cheated and that I was never going to get my own spaceship. In fact, as warnings about climate change grew, I realized they might even take away my gravity-bound car and perhaps my electron-consuming computer too. For the most part, though, climate change was barely on the radar and everyone talked about the Y2K global collapse that threatened (remember that?). It was then that I discovered the remarkable book by Stewart Brand (founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and early organizer of Earth Day), Clock of the Long Now. The book is about a project to build a clock that would go round once every 10,000 years. The project came out of an observation by Danny Hillis, one of the architects of the Cray Supercomputer. Hillis noticed, as I did, that over hsi entire life, the future always meant the year 2,000. He came up with the brilliant observation that for every year he had been alive, we had lost one year of future.

The Long Now project is an attempt to prompt people to think over the longer term. The clock is just the means to get people thinking, not important in and of itself. The book is a fascinating read on the problems and benefits of planning for the long term. For example,

• When they were doing a restoration of one of the colleges at Cambridge some years ago, they realized that they didn’t have oak beams big enough to replace the historic beams in the building. In searching the records, they realized that the builders had thought of that. The oak grove near the college had been planted specifically to replace the beams centuries later.
• In Sweden, the navy realized that they would eventually run out of trees big enough to make masts for giant ships. In the late eigtheenth century, they asked the royal forester to plant some trees for delivery in 200 years. In the 1980s, the forester contacted the navy to say that their trees were ready. Stewart Brand points out that the trees were useless to the navy, but the effort to preserve a disappearing resource had an unexpected payoff in that, though we now place a low value on giant trees for masts, we place a high value on old-growth forests.

It occurred to me recently that the growing awareness regarding climate change, however, may once again turn us into long-term thinkers. As the number of sceptics decreases, there will be an increasing tendency for people to project their actions further and further into the future. As a historian, I see this as a good thing. Now that climate change gets so much publicity, I think that the last few years are the first time in my life that I have seen the future extend out in front of me rather than retract. The inability to look over long distances into the past and the future prevents us from solving any major problem. So though for the time being the bad news continues to pile up with regard to climate change, the turn toward looking into the future and thinking about consequences is a first step to finding solutions.

Every so often I come across a book that makes it onto my “must read” list. It’s been a while, but William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the way we make things is one of those books. For people unfamiliar with McDonough’s work, he is an environmentalist, architect and designer who has designed a factory for Herman Miller, is designing housing in China, and has consulted with Ford, Nike, Dell and others. He has also designed products like eco-friendly textiles and McDonough wants us to fundamentally rethink the way we make things and what we think it means to be environmentally responsible.

Upcycling

McDonough and Braungart argue that one of the main problems is how we use materials, producing toxic waste during production, sequestering toxic chemicals in the products themselves, and then jettisoning those products as non-reusable toxic waste. Recycled materials are almost universally “downcycled” in their nomenclature. In other words, the typical lifecycle of a material is like this: pull raw oil out of the earth. In a toxic and polluting process, turn those polymers into PET bottles that have antimony (a poison with effects similar to arsenic) and phthalates (endocrine disrupter), both of which are harmful and though they leach into plastic bottles in levels below legal standards for drinking water, recent research has shown that even small amounts of endocrine disrupters (see also whyfiles) can have more far-reaching effects than previously considered. But it’s all okay, right, because we diligently recycle that stuff into bin next to our wastebasket and it comes back as another bottle right? No! I’ve been harping on that for a while, but we do not recycle plastics or most other materials if you take recycling to mean that we turn the material back into useful raw material. In fact, we turn plastic bottles into things like park benches and decking. And we turn those benches into landfill that takes thousands of years to break down. Similarly, the aluminum in cans is made out of two different alloys – the one on the top and the one on the sides. These get mixed together and downcycled into lower grade aluminum. You can never make another can top out of a recycled can.

So what do you do? Instead of using inherently unsafe materials and processes and then trying to clean up the toxic soup later, we need to create safe processes and materials that can be “upcycled”, that is reused infinitely without loss of quality. Sounds utopian, except that Braungart and McDonough are doing it over and over again in their design practices. For example, McDonough was commissioned to come up with an eco-friendly textile for a Swiss company. The company initially proposed a textile that would use recycled cotton and PET. But there are some problems with this from McDonough’s perspective:

• First, there are the materials. Cotton is the most damaging crop in the world to grow, using high levels of pesticides and causing great environmental damage. PET, as we’ve seen contains harmful chemicals
• Then there’s the product. It’s made of toxic materials and one has to wonder why were wear so many toxics.
• Finally, this is a one-hit wonder. Sure, it recycles PET, but that’s the end of the cycle. The product can never be recycled because it mixes incompatible materials that can’t be separated. It must be thrown “away” but, as McDonough says, there is no away anymore.

McDonough’s answer? He decided that they would create a product safe enough to eat. They analyzed thousands of materials and came up with a list of safe and sustainable ingredients. Furthermore, they did not mix biological and industrial products, since such mixed products can never be recycled. The textile company hesitated because the materials were relatively expensive. Eventually they decided to push ahead and a surprising thing happened – the final product was cheaper than the alternative because it had few ingredients to manage, did not require documenting, storing and managing toxic materials, and worker productivity was higher because they didn’t need to wear protective gear.

Waste is Food. Less Bad is Not Good Enough. Growth is Good.

So was the final product recyclable? No, not really. It was entirely biodegradable into absolutely safe components that could literally be used as “food” (that is, compost). McDonough says that environmental movements that look to make things less bad will ultimately fail, because less bad is not good enough. The goal must be to make things good. In an industrial society, industry believes in growth and deregulation, while environmentalists believe in slowing growth and mitigating the bad effects of industrial production. Efficiency is the watchword. McDonough points out, however, that just as there is no virtue in an efficient Nazi, there is no virtue in the efficient use and production of toxic products. In nature growth is good and even waste is good, because waste from one source is food for another. So the cherry tree grows and then wastes all those blossoms… which turn into compost and feed the grass and flowers that grow at the base of the cherry tree. That, McDonough says, should be our model for industrial production.

Again, it sounds utopian except for the fact that the book is replete with examples where McDonough, Braungart and others are putting just that into practice as in the case of the textile mentioned. McDonough does not want to give up industrial products. In some cases they are ecologically superior to natural products. For example, his first chapter is called “This book is not a tree”, which is to say that the entire object is made out of plastic. Paper of course calls for cutting down forests. Let’s say it’s made out of recycled paper or other fiber? Then it requires harsh bleaching processes or it ends up as a less satisfying read – flimsy grey pages with flecks of left-over material and ink from the original. Furthermore, few “paper” covers can be recycled because they typically have industrial products in the inks and wrapping. So McDonough has a vision for his book. Make it from non-toxic polymer that is nice and white, comfortable in the hand, and can be read in the tub and there’s no problem if you drop it in the water. Get the water real hot, though, and the ink can be washed off and reclaimed. And then the pages and cover, made from the same material, are mulched up and turned into the exact same product. Perpetually. Not cradle to grave, but cradle to cradle. Waste is food.

Not built to last.

McDonough argues that we are wrong to build products to last. All that usually means is that we have something that stays waste for a long long time. He finds it baffling that we take the most valuable substances (as well as the most toxic) and use them once then put them in the ground in a manner that does not allow for reclaiming them by any existing technology. Better is to build products that are safe, both in their production and during their lives, and efficient to produce. Above all, products that can be upcycled, that is reclaimed perpetually, and stay above the ground and useful. There is absolutely no reason that a grocery bag or iPod packaging should be built to last 50,000 years. There is no reason to use upholstery that will last 10,000 years and then put it in a car that will be retired in 10 or 20 years. A computer keyboard could be made of a material that will break down in 20 years. Why not? The eco-efficiency view wants us to create fewer and more durable products, but McDonough argues for an eco-effective approach where we build more and less durable items, but we make them safe, energy-efficient and upcyclable from cradle to cradle.

Achilles Heel

As a historian, I often think about how the carrying capacity of the planet has changed. Six hundred years ago, it would be unimaginable to think that we could live in a society of plenty where nobody had to die of famine and where we would see life expectancies of 70 years and more. Medieval Europeans believed that only in Eden had such a state existed and, furthermore, there was no reason for man to live hundreds of years like Noah and Methuselah. A short life sufficed to find salvation and a long life only served to encourage vice. As it turns out, they may have been right about that one – a long lifespan has given us the chance to use up a lot more resources per person, but hasn’t necessarily made us into better human being. In any case, though, we forget that at one time the wheeled plow was high tech and it created the possibility of feeding far more people. Similarly, changes in land tenure, the increased use of horses and so forth, made it possible for fewer farmers to feed more people.

So I believe that McDonough is right. Faced with the alternatives, we can come up with products that are non-toxic. They will be infinitely upcycled if industrial products and just simply thrown “away” if they are biological products that can be simply composted. Under such conditions, what is to stop infinite growth? In a word: energy. Thus far, almost every shortage we have faced on the planet has been solved by throwing more energy at the problem. As we see the looming problem of climate change, though, we see that using more energy in the forms we currently use it is, in itself a problem. I have no doubt that if we can solve the energy question, we can shift to a planet of plenty where every necessary product is produced safely and sustainably. Some products, it’s true, might get prohibitively expensive, but for the most part we will see those as unnecessary. There is a limit to planetary population, certainly, but history has shown that we have no idea what that number is (and to some extent that’s a value judgement – can we plow up all wilderness in order to grow food?). But the energy question is one that is looming imminently. That’s the one part of the puzzle that McDonough doesn’t really address and that may be the fundamental problem. As he says, efficiency is not enough. A more efficient system just runs out of resources more slowly. Granted, energy is not on McDonough’s agenda – he designs products and buildings and does his best to make them energy efficient (that bad word again), but leaves it up to others to find sources of energy that are as eco-effective as McDonough’s designs.

In the summer of 1959 there occurred a series of events which demonstrated our national ignorance in a shameful and nearly fatal manner. Briefly, the United States threatened intervention in a foreign country for reasons which, it turned out, had no basis in fact… Our Secretary of State called the situation grave; our ambassador to the U.N. called for world action; our press carried scare headlines; our senior naval officer implied armed intervention and was seconded by ranking Congressmen, including the Chairman of the National Committee of the Republican Party, which was then in power (p. 12-13)…. In the eyes of the world, the United States looked very foolish at best, and very dangerous at worst (p. 28)…. We have thrown away our good will and political strength by an ignorance which led to false confidence and corruption. We have clumsily alienated potential supporters by neglecting them for a few “pets” and have repelled others by maladroitness (p. 30).

Those are excerpts from William Lederer’s 1961 account of how the United States almost went to war in Laos in 1959, which he took to be “an omen with the most frightening implications.” His book, A Nation of Sheep (only $0.47 from Amazon at last check and well worth it), was intended to be a call to action, a warning to the American people so that such foolishness would not result in war. Of course, it has on at least two occasions now: 1) Vietnam, which went to full-scale US involvement because of faked “intelligence” about the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident and 2) the WMD fiasco in Iraq. It’s frightening to read Sheep and realize that in most cases, if the dates and countries were changed, it could have been written today.

Lederer details how the US ignorance of foreign affairs and foreign languages was playing into the hands of the communists in Vietnam and playing against us in Taiwan. For example, he notes that the US educational exchange programs usually only targeted those students with a decent command of English and typically only the privileged sons of the powerful who used their crony connections to get scholarships for their children. Furthermore, we doled out scholarships as a means to reward loyalty. Meanwhile, the communists offered a full scholarship to the top student from every village in Vietnam, regardless of language skills (Russian or Chinese) and party affiliation. These students, not surprisingly, often returned to their villages as ardent communists and thus it was that we lost the battle for the hearts and minds. That, of course, was unknown to Lederer in 1961 and rather than predict that it would happen, he suggested how it could be stopped. Nobody listened and, in case you weren’t paying attention, we lost that war.

The book is about Southeast Asia rather than the Middle East, about communists rather than Islamic fundamentalists, political schools rather than madrasas, about the 1950s rather than the 2000s, but there would not be much real difference in the message if it were written today. He details how Americans threw away our good money and good will for little return in nations we didn’t bother to understand. Sure, in retrospect our industrial resources allowed us to spend the Soviets into the ground and win the Cold War, but Lederer shows how poorly that money was spent and how much more effective we could have been had we bothered to send diplomats and journalists who actually knew the local language rahter than ones that had to depend utterly on translators who often fed them a line of bull, as just one example.

Lederer then outlines how our government uses misinformation and secrecy to keep information from citizens. At that time, he warned that the cult of secrecy was growing and that one out of every 180 Americans had the ability to classify information as secret. Frequently this was done, as it is today, for the most specious of reasons, often simply to protect politicians and bureaucrats. For example, Lederer discovered that “pictures of plush furnishings inside military transport planes, requested by Rep. Daniel J. Flood, were stamped ‘secret’ and then even the Congressman’s letter of request was stamped ‘secret’”. In other words, the secret was that taxpayer money was being misspent.

Not even guessing at where we would be today with an army of press secretaries and lobbyists and fewer and fewer resources for investigative journalism, Lederer noted that there were twice as many government public relations men as there were journalists in Washington. “Officials try by selective information releases to have us accept what they believe is proper; as if fearing the decisions we might make on our own if we had all of the truth.”

On the leading edge in his time, Lederer feared then, as most thinking people fear now, that the cult of secrecy and the spin in Washington is killing democracy. The American government seems to fear its own people, which is a hallmark of a failing democracy. It has gotten worse. Recall that the Clinton administration gave the order to declassify as much material as possible and not to classify materials unnecessarily. One of Bush’s first actions was to rescind that order. Of course, it is a matter of degree and there was still far too much spin and secrecy under Clinton, but at least things were headed in the right direction. Lederer envisions a future which could save democracy in America (and I’m not exaggerating, Lederer believed that the cult of secrecy and government by press release was edging us toward totalitarianism).

The President should assume that his fellow countrymen are tough-minded and patriotic. We will not become timorous or demoralized if told the truth about our blunders, failures and defeats. Quite the contrary, we will respond with strength and intelligence. But first we must have the truth.

Lederer is not, of course, suggesting that truly sensitive strategic of purely personal information be released to the public, but merely that the people should be kept informed rather than having to wait for the scandalous photos to appear on the internet, smuggled out by some insider, before the government fesses up to what happened.

All of this is rather old hat at this point. What Lederer showed to a Nation of Sheep in 1961 has become commonplace knowledge among thinking people (but what percentage is that?). The troubling aspect is that 45 years on, we still appear to be a Nation of Sheep, led into conflicts we don’t understand for reasons that turn out to have been false. Maybe it’s time to look at Lederer’s advice seriously:

• Badger your Senators and Representatives and make sure that they understand that you don’t think secrecy for secrecy’s sake is okay.
• Badger the same and perhaps local university officials to build scholarhips programs that include English-language instruction and target promising kids from lost villages throughout the Middle East. True, some will fail and some will stay here, but some will return and the overall cost will be cheaper than sending standing armies over there, not to mention that fewer people get killed.
• Demand that our diplomats speak the local language. No more ambassadorships handed out as political favors. When ambassadors come up for confirmation, if they don’t speak the local language, (or at least one local language) write your politicians and tell them to block the nomination, simple as that!

I normally don’t write reviews of books or movies that I’m going to pan. I like to find things I can recommend to friends, not things to avoid and I know that even famous authors getting reviewed by some obscure person with only a couple of readers still don’t necessarily enjoy negative reviews. I make an exception in this case because Bronson says in the closing remarks (p. 430-31): “And so my pool of nine hundred interviews was only ankle-deep in some areas and I now wish I had more diversity… Please don’t condemn me. Be assured that while you’re reading this, I’m out hearing more stories, doing my work, hammering out the rest.” So my point isn’t to condemn Po Bronson, but to say that I think the companion volume could be a lot better. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that the companion volume could be a lot different, perhaps in such a way that it wouldn’t really speak to those who penned the laudatory reviews cited on the cover and first pages. A different volume, however, might speak to the people in my tribe who, I think, would mostly feel utterly disconnected and alienated by the stories Po has in this volume. I should point out that in some sense I should belong to Bronson’s tribe (educated, middle-class, white), but even for me the book left me feeling dry. So on the off chance that someday Po Bronson finds himself among the six readers of Taken For Ranted, here’s a very long review.

The book has promise, but it is annoying for a number of reasons. First and foremost, is that the title and an undercurrent early in the book suggest that we are more than our jobs and this book will deal with the “ultimate question” (whatever that is). The title would certainly suggest that it goes well beyond work, unless you believe that your job is what you do with your life and finding meaning through your work is how one answers the ultimate question. The opening paragraphs (p. xix) start out like this: “We are all trying to write the story of our life. We want to know what it’s ‘about’… we want to know where we’re headed… This book is about that urge… [It's about] Those who fought with the seduction of money, intensity, and novelty, but overcame their allure.” For those of us who travel in circles where people float from job to job, often taking much of the year off and living in a van to climb, ski, or surf somewhere, the idea that their job is what they are doing with their lives seems ludicrous to them. Despite some hints that Bronson might actually consider covering some of these people and finding out whether they find their lives gratifying and whether there are possible alternatives to conceiving of ourselves in terms that are utterly bound to jobs, not one such story appears in the entire book. Of course, in one sense he could have gotten around this simply by promising less in his title and in the early bits and just delivering on that more modest promise. Perhaps I shouldn’t get so hung up on the title and I should just accept that it is merely a book about work and career, and not an open investigation of finding meaning in one’s life, but if the title and opening had promised to deliver what the book actually delivers, I probably wouldn’t have purchased it.

There is also a structural problem. These people, even with their MBAs and law degrees, went through some transformative times. You can think of their messy experience unfolding in real time as the novel. Their experience was varied, rich, came on its own time, was often confusing and unclear while happening. Then they got in touch with Po Bronson and told him their story, sifting a bit for relevant details and boiling it down, but also talking to him for hours and exchanging many letters. Think of his experience of their stories as the movie. Not as rich and satisfying, but still having some meat. Then Bronson boils them down to a few pages and passes them on to us. No matter how many times he laments that the stories come out sounding too sensible and linear, it’s impossible for them to be otherwise and, try as he might, they are now reduced to their essence and the richness of the experience even of the movie, let alone the novel, is gone. Think of this as the review of the movie. That’s what we get as readers of this book. Unfortunately, the review of the movie based on the novel is a far cry from the novel itself. I don’t think there’s anything at all a writer can do about that and I don’t blame Bronson. The truth is, if he devoted an entire book to any one of these stories, it would not get published and even if it did, could the reader extract any lessons from just one story? So it’s not that it’s badly written, it just goes to the heart of why career books pretty much always annoy me and this one is no different.

The bigger problem with the book, as I alluded to with respect to climbing/ski/surf bums, is the set of people he profiles. I kept thinking I had finally gotten to a chapter concerning stories that would relate to me, but alas was again and again disappointed. One woman, when her story opens, is unemployed, has no phone and is living in her car. This looks like it’s shaping up to be a story like some of the climbers I see around Yosemite or like struggling workers in Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed. That is, until we find out that the person in question is an unemployed laywer (I think, I can’t find that story) who is unemployed because she lost her job in the Clinton administration when Bush came to power. Similarly, there is a chapter called “Ski Bums”. Here, I thought, I would at last find a couple of members of my tribe: people who are tending bar in the winter in order to have days free to ski, and then doing something utterly unrelated in the summers. No, this is a couple of successful telecom execs who went out and bought a tree nursery for the price of a very expensive house (a million dollars?) and now run a successful business. Earth to Po, here are a few requirements for begin considered a ski bum:

1. You do not have a day job. You may be able to break this rule if your day job is ski instructor or ski patrol, but most people would still reject that as valid ski bumming since you’re not skiing for yourself during your days, which makes you a ski industry worker, not a ski bum.
2. You do not work the same job year round. You might break this rule if you live in a great ski town and have a job that allows for skiing almost every day in the winter and you have that job precisely because it allows you to ski most days in the winter, but again, this is really pushing things.
3. What you do is ski. Your job is not generally what you do in your mind.
4. You do not own a company unless, again, it is located in a prime ski location and you can take most of your days off. Even if it meets those conditions, to meet the ski bum litmus test, the reason you are in that business is because it gives you time to ski. It is not an accidental by-product.

The book is littered with MBAs, lawyers and refugees from the Clinton administration – how can so many of them find their way into one small book about finding meaning in your career, let alone about finding meaning generally? I just couldn’t care less about the story of another MBA who “stepped down” to something less stressful. The book is practically devoid of stories of people who are from a working class background, people who are from whatever background but chose to live a blue-collar life (there is one lawyer turned truck driver and that is one of the better stories), and people who transcend the “work thing” and simply don’t define themselves in terms of their means of paying rent, but in terms of what they do (that word again).

I don’t know where my people are. I’m thinking, for example, of my neighbor up the street who celebrated graduation from college with one last hurrah – a long hike. After weeks on the trail, he came to Yosemite, low on funds right about the time a lot students were quitting their summer jobs. Nic Fiore (who’s own work story would be a great profile) asked him if he wanted to work a couple of weeks up in Tuolumne to get a bit more money for the rest of his hike. That was eighteen years ago and he’s still here, never having used his college degree and working as a waiter. Another neighbor came for five days with friends. It was raining and they ditched him, but he wanted to stay the full five days. He also ended up casting aside his college degree: at the end of five days he was driving a bus and had has been here 28 years. I remember being up in Denali National Park, hanging out with a bellhop and a woman with some job I don’t recall. I said something very neutral about lawyers and the woman said “Ohhhh. Lawyers!” I looked in bewilderment and she said “Tell him.” Then the bellhop started in on his tale. Born and raised in New York City, he went to NYU and then Columbia Law School (or was it the other way around?) and immediately upon graduation took a job with a large New York firm. After a few years, I forget how many, but more than two, he finally got his first vacation. He decided on two weeks in Alaska. Once he arrived at Denali, he knew two weeks wasn’t enough. He called and asked for two more. They said okay. At the end of the month, he called and asked for a one month leave of absence. They said okay. And then he told me “By that time I was already a bellhop at the hotel. That was the last contact I had with my firm. That was eight years ago. A couple of years ago I went back to New York for a month to visit my family. I was there ten days and just couldn’t stay there anymore.” What all of these people have in common is that they found a place that felt like home, and though they couldn’t work in the field they had trained in and didn’t have any family near by, that feeling of a place they belonged trumped everything else.

Meanwhile, some of my friends have stories that are more like the ones in the book, but still what distinguishes them is that they have not found meaning through their job. They have found jobs that give them space to have meaning and joy elsewhere in their lives and I can’t recall a single story in Bronson’s book that falls into that category. My friend Jim uses his PhD in English to teach occasional classes, but otherwise teaches skiing and organizes biking programs. Theresa hated being in a lab and, like Jim, her first job out of grad school was teaching skiing. She stumbled through a perverse job the following summer: a slightly-above-minimum-wage job that consists of counting all the cash taken in during the day in Yosemite. Tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of actual bills, not computer numbers, going through her hands while getting paid about $60 a day. But then she was rescued. As a ski instructor, her boss’s boss’s boss was a guy named Stewart. He knew that the mountaineering and cross-country ski school was looking for an assistant manager and told the manager, “Theresa is a certified ski instructor, she’s really into the outdoors, climbs hard and I think she’s not very happy over at cash ops. Go talk to her.” So there she is, happily working at the mountaineering school despite a PhD in molecular biology, a degree that actually is worth something on the open market, unlike Jim’s English PhD or my history PhD. But she isn’t happy because her job gives meaning to her life. She’s happy because it’s a good job by most measures (nice co-workers, nice working conditions, work that’s pretty fun), but it doesn’t get in the way of her life. She doesn’t have to go in at 10:00pm and check on her fruit flies.

Before going off on a long personal digression, I have to say that I would like to see a book filled with people who really looked beyond work to find their place in the world. There are thousands of stories out there of would-be Warren Miller’s who camp in ski area parking lots, but never become famous film-makers. There are certainly hundreds of climbers who cycle through Yosemite every year and then migrate to Joshua Tree and El Potrero Chico for the winter, taking any old job in the interim to give them enough to live on. Not many live up to Dale Bard’s standard, one of the great climbers of the 1970s, who purportedly lived off $500 for one whole year, but there are lots of them who are living their dreams on a few thousand dollars a year and doing it by choice. That’s just a slice of the world that I know. I’m sure there are other tribes I don’t know that could easily fill a book with people who have found fulfillment in ways that are much further from the norm than almost all of Po’s stories. Michel Foucault once said that his goal as a writer was to show people how free they are, by which he meant, show them that fundamental institutions and perceptions of the world that appear immutable actually came into being over time and through circumstance and as such, they can be changed over time and through circumstance. The realm of possibility is so much grander than we can imagine if we don’t have a thoughtful perspective on the world. This is ultimately what left me feeling unsatisfied with the stories in the book. They seem so traditional, so inside the norm, such classic American success stories. Maybe in Po Bronson’s dot com bond trader circles, becoming a high-school teacher constitutes stepping off the success train, but for most people it’s a respected job that pays above the median American salary for a given age cohort. These aren’t stories that open my mind to the broad possibilities about how one can live one’s life. There isn’t a single person in the book living “off the grid” which seems like the one story that a book like this absolutely needs. So if you’re an MBA thinking of stepping off the fast track to become a teacher or horticulturist and, having done so, will feel like you’ve answered the “ultimate question”, by all means read the book. Otherwise, wait for the sequel.

Having said that, I won’t say there was nothing at all in the book that spoke to me, and if have a tolerance for personal biography, this is mostly about why I persevered to the end of this book and what it had to say that did speak to me. My own transition is in its early stages, but so far it mirrors Theresa. After fifteen years in academia, full-time telecommuting on a research project for the last six years, I just felt I couldn’t take another day alone in a room in front of a computer and became a full-time ski instructor. So far it’s the most fun I’ve ever had at work and I’m not sure what summer will bring, but it’s not about the dream job for me. It’s about a job, any job really, that has contact with flesh and blood human beings and lets me stay in Yosemite.

There are little snippets here and there, I must say, where I recognize parts of my own story. Carl Kurlander (p. 161) goes from Hollywood scriptwriter to academia, “one of the only cultures with a higher bullshit quotient than Hollywood.” When it’s time for Carl to give his first colloquium, “He tried to conform to their conventions, following an outline and draining his analysis of any personal stories, but eventually he couldn’t help it…. Carl would tell a funny story and the graduate students would nod knowingly with recognition that Carl had clearly never been to graduate school.” It is a sad fact that academia is perhaps the only broad area in the world where being boring is entirely excusable. I was prepared for this since I had had the good fortune to get to know the philosopher Michel Foucault who told me one evening as he hurried out of a reception after one of his lectures “I don’t know what it is about my colleagues, but after forty minutes, I’m so bored.” So when I gave my first academic paper, peppered with anecdotes and jokes, I was steeled for an audience that wouldn’t laugh. In fact, they laughed heartily throughout the whole thing and the editor of a journal asked to publish the piece. However, another person at the journal opposed publishing it and demanded that I give her a written copy. I gave her the exact text that I had read, word for word. Her response: “This is so much better than the paper that you read. It was just impossible to take that work seriously with everyone smiling and laughing.” Alone in her studio, she was able to drain the delivery of any humor and think of it as research. She went on to recommend publication and to tell my graduate advisor that she wished she could attract people of my caliber to her program (it was published as “Cette loi ne durera guère”, Bulletin de la Soc. d’Hist. et d’Arch. de Genève, 1995). But that was a first indication that academia would be a hard path for me. Writing in this journal, however, has shown me that I have a long way to go in getting away from academia. I still think in academic terms (citing sources) and I had expected to be a lot funnier, more like I am in conversation, but when I put words into print, somewhere the humor center shuts off and I blame years in academia for that.

Another academic in the book, this one specializing in poetry (p. 386), “was a leading presence in the department, but at night he watched hockey games for pleasure rather than read… On the cusp of success, there was no love of poetry left.” I don’t know as I was a leading presence, but I did manage to win Fullbright and publish a book in a foreign language while in grad school and my dissertation has been solicited for publication, but having beaten that dead horse too long, I just have no desire to see it in print. So I guess by most standards, I was reasonably successful in grad school, though I also came a hair’s breadth from failing my doctoral comps, so by another measure I suppose I wasn’t a leading presence. In any case, if I still had the passion, I think I could have landed a university teaching job somewhere, but by the end of it, the thought of teaching at a university literally gave me nausea. The basic observation that grad school could kill your desire to read held true for me. If not for the gym, I would have simply died in grad school. After squeaking by in my comps and drained of interest in history, I ran 5+ miles a day and spent another three hours in the gym. I got real fit and thought that my desire to read broadly in my field would return “soon,” but the sad fact is that it never did. Though I still retained an interest in archival research in my specialty for several more years, I’ve never really read a book outside my micro-specialty but within my broad field since my comps. Worse still, pretty much from the day I started grad school, I quit reading fiction. I remember quipping to someone that I had written two books since the last time I had read one, and it was true. Jim, my ski instructor friend told me that the best part of leaving academia for him was reading literature again. I remember when I finally decided for certain not to pursue a professorial career, I renounced my snobbery for the classics and I threw off the persistent feeling like I should be keeping up on literature in my field (which is done by skimming and perusing, not reading) and went on a year-long science fiction binge and it felt wonderful (by the way, Vernor Vinge, Deepness in the Sky, is a wonderful book).

More recently, I’ve realized that falling back on some old skills from before my days as a historian and mixing part-time contract computer programming in with being a full-time telecommuting historical researcher was not a solution as it’s just one more activity alone in an office. There were a few other quotes that resonated there:

• “‘That’s it. I cannot sell one more modem,” she vowed. But do what? She knew what she wanted: She missed human contact” (p. 244).
• “A bad day working at home is a sad and lonely thing, and if a few bad days land in a row, then an editing job starts to sound pretty appealing” (p. 281).
• “Fuck biology, I like people” (p. 284).

The problem with these sections that I do relate to, perhaps, is they come too late. They are all old thoughts to me at this point. Perhaps if I had picked up the book ten years ago, when I had the thoughts but not the actions to back them up, they would have validated my thoughts and feelings. I don’t think so, though, because that’s not really the way I work. I benefit more from new ways of seeing things than from having company in my beliefs. I keep coming back to the feeling that the book would mean a lot more to me if the range were greater. I imagine Bronson is receiving fan mail which will include stories that even after the nine hundred he received for the book, will blow his mind. Let’s hope he writes them up some day and blows our minds.

No, that’s not a quote from The Ranter’s close friends Dubya or Rummy. That’s from David Maraniss’ book They Marched Into Sunlight (Simon & Schuster, 2003). Maraniss follows two parallel stories, that of a battle in Vietnam and that of a student protest in Madison, Wisconsin. The two stories converge on October 19, 1967, when they appear side by side on the front page of the paper. For Maraniss, that was the beginning of the real slide in public opinion in favor of the war. Why bring this up now? Because the administration’s assessment of the situation in Vietnam in 1967 appears chillingly like the current administration’s assessment of Iraq today.

A few quick quotes from the book speak volumes.

We are losing support in this country. The people just do not understand the war.

   — Lyndon Johnson (p. 187).

[The embassy has developed a plan to] demonstrate to the press and the public that we are making solid progress and are not in a stalemate… [T]he enemy is losing control of the people for his side. His recruitment has dropped off sharply…

   — Eugene Locke, deputy ambassador to South Vietnam (p. 187).

If we don’t stop them in Vietnam, we are going to be fighting them in the streets of Lodi [a town near Madison].

   — Bob Hope (p. 315).

We should shoot them if necessary. I would. I would. Because it’s insurrection.

   — WI Senator Leland McParland regarding student protesters (p. 397).

In October 1967, General Westmoreland, President Johnson and the hawks in the administration still believed not only that the war was winnable, but that we were actually winning. Westmoreland felt that if he just had more troops, he could turn the tide. His strategy was one of attrition: if he could kill enemy soldiers faster than the enemy could replace them, he woudl eventually win. Westmoreland demonstrated that victory was at hand with the most specious of statistics. In the book’s main battle, the Americans get ambushed and kill 22 to 25 enemy soldiers. Westmoreland and Hay, general of the First Division, insist despite all evidence that there was no ambush and that the enemy lost 103 men. Not only was this not born out by the men in the field or the military investigator sent in to do the followup to the battle, Maraniss also managed to track down two of the commanders from the other side, who confirm that Westmoreland’s analysis and body count were tragically wrong.

In fact, the drop off in enemy activity was due to reasons that Westmoreland could not even suspect: they were gathering strength for the major Tet offensive. The only reason that the North Vietnamese did not stay put to wipe out the entire US battalion, was that they were being counted on for another battle and were in a hurry to get to their appointed rendez-vous. The vicious battle that caught up Delta Company and the Black Lions was just a shape of things to come.

Meanwhile, back on the home front, students in Madison had decided that 1967 was the year to get serious about stopping the war. Dick and Lynne Cheney, though they were on campus, were not among the protesters, but Dick was happy to stay in grad school on military deferment while he supported sending other young men off to fight, which seems to be a deeply ingrained MO for Cheney. In 1967, the protests in Madison transitioned from peaceful to violent, setting the campus on the trajectory that would end in the bombing of the Army Math Research Center which killed a grad student working there.

I don’t believe that history repeats itself, so there are only so many lessons one can take from Vietnam, but the clear one from Maraniss is that the generals on the ground and the president in the White House can be foolishly optimistic about their war effort.

This is, by the way, a fun read. Maraniss does a great job of introducing you to the cast of characters and getting you attached to men you know will die (or go on to be mayor of Madison, as the case may be). At times the book drags and feels like it was written by a historian, rather than a journalist, but the “action scenes” (the battle in Vietnam and the battle in the Commerce building) are gripping and well worth the read.