Thanks Ralph!
Rumor has it that Ralph Nader is once again considering yet another presidential run, especially if Hillary Clinton secures the Democratic nomination. Does the man have no shame at all?
Nader USED to be a good guy. His expose of GM and the Corvair Unsafe at Any Speed made automobile manufacturers more responsive to the safety issues they had essentially ignored. We have seat belts and safer cars because of Nader. He warned us of the dangers of nuclear energy. His work contributed to the creation of the Environmental Protection Act, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. His Nader's Raiders looked out for the welfare of the American consumer, monitoring corporate abuse working alongside organizations like Public Citizen, Congress Watch, the Health Research Group, the Center for Auto Safety, and the Center for Responsive Law. He also started a network of campus-based organizations called "PIRGS" -- Public Interest Research Groups -- that over the years has trained thousands of college students in the skills of citizen activism. I myself was a member of NYPIRG while a college student in upstate New York.
Ever since his initial battles with GM when he first became a public figure, Nader had the reputation for honesty and trustworthiness second to none.
But something went horribly wrong when Nader began his quixotic quest for the Presidency in 1996 and 2000, initially as the Green Party nominee and then later running in 2004 as an independent. Knowing that he would not and could not win, Nader pushed forward any way, essentially acting in the role of spoiler for the 2000 Bush/Gore Presidential race. Nader secured over 79000 votes in Florida. Despite hardball and ethically challenged moves by Florida Republicans with the encouragement of the Republican National Committee and a schizophrenic ruling by the US Sepreme Court (which essentially said, we believe in states rights but just not in this case because we want Bush to win and, btw, don't bother trying to cite this as a precedent in future cases), Gore "lost" Florida by under 600 votes. Those 25 electoral votes gave Bush the Presidency and condemned the US to four--later eight--years of grotesque incompetence.
One would think that Nader would feel some sort of guilt or remorse for enabling the disastrous president of the Frat-Boy-in-Chief and the incalculable damage the Bush administration has wrought.
No chance!
Nader rationalizes his behavior because he sees both the Democratic and Republican parties as essentially the same -- as tools of corporate America, which in Nader's myopic view is bad. So during the 2000 campaign, Nader argued that there was virtually no difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Many of us knew then and virtually ALL of us know now that there was a huge difference between these two. With Gore, the war in Iraq would most likely never have happened. We would not have the loss of civil liberties, Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib, the worldwide political ostracism, the attacks on stem cell research or global warming and the sanctioned assaults on our environment by unscrupulous corporate interests under the preposterously named Clean Water Bill. We would not have had the politicalization of the justice system, the packing of the Supreme Court with right wing idealogues, the ballooning of the national debt and tax cuts for the rich at the expense of federal programs for those who need it most.
On a theoretical level I can understand but can't agree with his thinking (for me all of corporate America is not evil) but we live in the real world where we have to make rational choices. Politics, like virtually everything else in life, is a compromise. We can fantasize about the ideal but the fact is we live in the real world so we are only left with the choice of the "lesser of two evils". Sure for progressives like myself, the Democrats fall far short but they pale in comparison to the Republicans who represent virtually everything that is wrong with this country.
Democrats at least pay lip service to caring about all Americans, not just the richest five per cent. Democrats do not lecture on family values while cheating on their wives or sodomizing Congressional pages. Democrats do not argue for war but then claim to be too busy to fight or desert their National Guard units which suggests a certain level of cowardice on their part. Democrats do not cry media bias or judicial activism even though they are the welcome recipients of such largess. Democrats do not start the scandalous negative campaigns from the likes of Richard Nixon or Lee Atwater and then cry foul when they get a taste of their own medicine. Modern day Democrats don't go to Mississippi (as Ronald Reagan did) and lament the loss of states rights (thus intentionally fomenting racism) while pretending to be the party of all Americans (the ubiquitous "big tent"). Democrats don't foam at the mouth about crime and punishment but when they transgress, expect to be held to a different (read: lighter) standard. Democrats don't lament about the dangers of big government while encouraging it to pry into the privates lives of its citizens. In short the Democrats are not as much the party of greedy perverts and hypocrites as the Republicans are. But even more significantly, Nader fails to distinguish between those who see government as good and a safety net for its citizens and those who see government as unchecked and evil.
Like Ross Perot, Barry Commoner and John Anderson, Nader talked of building a permanent progressive third party movement but it never happened, in part because of the realities of the American political landscape (money talks, winner-takes-all and the decided lack of media exposure for anything beyond the two principal parties) but also because Nader never devoted himself to the difficult and decidedly unsexy task of party-building. Instead of running as a Democrat in the primaries and shaping the debate while drawing attention to his causes like the current MoveOn.org, Nader chose to go it alone.
Curiously Candidate Nader also took up another odd, provocative and in my mind indefensible position. He would not release his financial records as virtually every candidate in the past 20 years has. He continues to refuse to do so. What is Nader hiding? Why won't he be accountable to the American public whose support he covets?
George Bush did not win the 2000 or 2004 presidential elections. They were stolen for him by the malevolent forces that really run this country, the shadow government. Ralph Nader helped them do it.
Yeah, I know the arguments. Nader supporters tell us that Gore ran a bad campaign--in fact he did--and that he could not win his own home state of Tennessee. We can look at the Bush/Harris activities in Florida and bitch about the Supreme Court decision but the truth is none of that would have mattered if Nader had done the right thing. Sure some Nader supporters would have stayed home, but most would have voted for Gore. Nader only had to release his votes in the swing states to assure a Gore victory and Gore would have prevailed in the electoral college, not just in the popular vote.
It is also no secret that the Republicans found a willing ally in Nader. They cynically contributed money to his campaigns in order to help Nader divert votes away from Gore and Kerry and tip the elections to Bush. Their strategy worked. What is troubling to me is that Nader actually took the money. In fact he welcomed it. Nader, who so zealously fought to protect the American consumer in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, completely sold his soul by taking this Republican money to advance his own egotistical cause.
I honestly can't imagine why Nader is considering yet another run. Most Americans learned from the 2000 debacle. His vote total dropped from almost 2.9 million votes to just under 464,000 in 2004. Yes, I do hope Hillary is not the Democratic candidate because I think she is too beholden to corporate interests, too conservative, too unwilling to admit errors and too incapable of actually leading. I'm hoping for some combination of Obama and Edwards. Still if confronted with Hillary versus any Republican I will hold my nose and pull the lever next to her name.
I feel sorry for Nader, once a hero to and a mentor to many activists, who now has now become the latter day Harold Stassen, the constantly inept and hopeless Republican candidate from Pennsylvania.
Because he has allowed his ego to overrule his common sense and better judgment, Ralph Nader has joined the Axis of Assholes. He may not have as much blood on his hands as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell but make no mistake. Ralph Nader is in part responsible and as much as he denies it, he has the blood of thousands of Americans and countless Iraqis on his hands.
Hardly a fitting epitaph for a guy who did so much for so many. But shame on him!
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Deus Ex Machina
Why anyone believes a word out of the mouths of anyone in the Bush Administration is beyond me.
We know of the lies that led us to invade Iraq. Yes we know Saddam was a bad guy but let's not forget he was our bitch, using the weapons Reagan and Rumsfeld sold him. We also know, moronic lying Bush apologists aside (think Fox News, the rightwing radio blowhards and the Anne Coulters of this world), that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction and had nothing to do with 9/11. Still we invaded because the Frat Boy, who had done nothing of consequence or value in his life but instead chose to sponge off his father's name and reputation, had to one up his daddy.
We know, to add insult to injury, that these chicken hawks like Cheney and Shrub are now looking at some sort of military action in Iran.
And we all know (at least those capable of actually agitating our craniums) that we are not safer now than before 9/11. For those who think Bush as done a good job and that we are indeed safer (echoing that pathetic refrain, "we haven't been attacked since"), then by your own logic, Bush should be held accountable for it was on his watch that we were attacked. It was also on his watch that the bipartisan Hart Rudman report was delivered to the White House on January 27, 2001. That report noted the threat of hijackers using planes to attack us. My guess is that someone in the White House read that report on September 12, 2001.
So what are we to think when the Bush Administration paraded General David Petraeus in front of Congress, put words in his mouth (political words no less) and then pretended that all is getting better in Iraq and the world?
Of course Petraeus, dressed in his military best, spun tales of success with the surge. Those in the military always argue for more troops and more time. The battle is always won until it is lost, and then they blame defeat on the politicians and the public. As Bob Scheer noted in the Huffington Post, there's no shortage of retired generals who will tell you we could have won in Vietnam if only we had sent more troops, or bombed the dikes in the North, or been willing to kill more than the 3.4 million Vietnamese who died along with 59,000 American soldiers.
We now know Petraeus was both unconvincing and disingenuous. The American public seems unswayed by the cherry-picked statistics, bar graphs and other gimmicks used to make Iraq seem less dangerous. We know that Petraeus was already on record as being political. In Oct of 2004 he allowed himself to be used by the Bushies when he authored (though I suspect it was written for him) an overly optimistic op-ed piece just days before the Presidential election, arguing that substantial progress was being achieved in Iraq.
Here's what the general said in 2004. "They will have the benefit of a substantially larger Iraqi security presence coming on line. This is an occasion where we'll see how the new Iraqi security forces are going to do. I think they'll be fine." And later, "We're only six months away from June and handing control of the country back over to Iraqis."
Well we all know that was either a lie or an utterly inept reading of the situation, neither of which is acceptable to me. We also know that Petraeus sees himself as a latter day Dwight D. Eisenhower, complete with Presidential aspirations of his own. So it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Petraeus was and is carrying water for the Bush Administration as it stumbles with Iraq, thus calling into question anything the general has to say on the topic.
Thankfully and understandably, his 9/11 testimony (now how is that for gilding the lily?), along with that of Ambassador Ryan Crocker, was duly challenged by many on Capitol Hill, by many in the media and by many political activist groups including that clever piece of wordsmithing by those at MoveOn. That ad of course raised hackles in the neo con community but then again that's just part of their overall strategy to deflect attention from that 24/7 disaster known as Iraq.
Bush and his toadies continue to argue that things are improving and that we need more time to allow General Petraeus' plan to work. This is Petraeus' plan? Suddenly we are supposed to believe Bush is listening to the military.
We know NOT to believe any of this.
This is either the fantasy of an intellectually bankrupt administration or a plan to leave this war to whomever succeeds him in the White House. Of course the men and women of our military, along with many innocent Iraqi civilians, will be the ones who suffer. The Bush plan is not a plan at all. It is a cynical delaying tactic with the despicable idea that whomever inherits Bush's war will somehow be responsible for it. Only a Bush-like brain would believe that.
By the way, I for one am tired of those apologists who defend the intellectual qualifications of this President. He is moron, a buffoon. I don't mind conservatives; I just hate vapid ones. Personally I am wary of people trying to defend him when we see and hear evidence of his intellectual short comings every time he opens his mouth. In my view, if you can't articulate a simple thought, you are quite incapable of entertaining much less comprehending a complex one.
And it doesn't help that he has surrounded himself with a bunch of macho cowards. Bush went AWOL when he had the opportunity to serve so obviously learned no lessons from the VietNam war. Cheney had something like seven draft deferments and "no time" to fight (yet somehow Clinton was the draft dodger!). Bush's recent revisionist bit of history that we lost because we gave up too soon shows an appalling disregard for the truth and really disqualifies him from being seriously heard and considered.
He is at best an incompetent commander-in-chief, having defied and discarded solid military men like General Eric Shinseki. Before the war began, Bush chose not to listen to the generals because it was inconvenient for his agenda. And now with the complete mismanagement of and the utter failure of this invasion, along with the knowledge of Abu Ghraib and other atrocities, my view is Bush is a war criminal. Personally I wouldn't mind seeing him, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice charged with war crimes. They all have blood on their hands and I'm very hopeful that they get their Lee Atwater like karmic payback. The good news is that history will not treat these clowns very kindly. Bush is already regarded as one of the, if not the, worst President in our history.
This is Bush's and the neo cons' war. They need to take responsibility for what he started. And Shrub needs to finish it.
There will be no cavalry to the rescue. There will be no miracle victory. This war is over and unfortunately for us, we are on the wrong side of it. These chicken hawk neo cons who started this fiasco should have considered the consequences before starting it in the first place. They didn't and now they need to own up to it.
Bush's plan to continue is a disaster. Iraq is already a complete and utter catastrophe with lawlessness, brain drain as intellectual and professionals migrate out of the country, a complete dearth of goods and services and rife with sectarian violence. Yes it will be even more chaotic when we withdraw but at least our military personnel will be out of harms way. And let the Iraqis, Syrians, Iranians, Saudis and anyone else struggle to deal with the chaos. Yeah we broke it but we can't fix it. Like the French in Indochina and the British at the end of the Ottoman empire, we have not learned the lessons of history and must be prepared to pay the price.
The damage has already been done and can not be undone, regardless of how hard Bush tries. These are consequences of this immoral and illegal war. Time for Bush and his 29 per cent to take responsibility for their collective stupidity.
There will be no happy Hollywood ending. We can delay the inevitable but at what cost?
Time to bring the troops home.
We know of the lies that led us to invade Iraq. Yes we know Saddam was a bad guy but let's not forget he was our bitch, using the weapons Reagan and Rumsfeld sold him. We also know, moronic lying Bush apologists aside (think Fox News, the rightwing radio blowhards and the Anne Coulters of this world), that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction and had nothing to do with 9/11. Still we invaded because the Frat Boy, who had done nothing of consequence or value in his life but instead chose to sponge off his father's name and reputation, had to one up his daddy.
We know, to add insult to injury, that these chicken hawks like Cheney and Shrub are now looking at some sort of military action in Iran.
And we all know (at least those capable of actually agitating our craniums) that we are not safer now than before 9/11. For those who think Bush as done a good job and that we are indeed safer (echoing that pathetic refrain, "we haven't been attacked since"), then by your own logic, Bush should be held accountable for it was on his watch that we were attacked. It was also on his watch that the bipartisan Hart Rudman report was delivered to the White House on January 27, 2001. That report noted the threat of hijackers using planes to attack us. My guess is that someone in the White House read that report on September 12, 2001.
So what are we to think when the Bush Administration paraded General David Petraeus in front of Congress, put words in his mouth (political words no less) and then pretended that all is getting better in Iraq and the world?
Of course Petraeus, dressed in his military best, spun tales of success with the surge. Those in the military always argue for more troops and more time. The battle is always won until it is lost, and then they blame defeat on the politicians and the public. As Bob Scheer noted in the Huffington Post, there's no shortage of retired generals who will tell you we could have won in Vietnam if only we had sent more troops, or bombed the dikes in the North, or been willing to kill more than the 3.4 million Vietnamese who died along with 59,000 American soldiers.
We now know Petraeus was both unconvincing and disingenuous. The American public seems unswayed by the cherry-picked statistics, bar graphs and other gimmicks used to make Iraq seem less dangerous. We know that Petraeus was already on record as being political. In Oct of 2004 he allowed himself to be used by the Bushies when he authored (though I suspect it was written for him) an overly optimistic op-ed piece just days before the Presidential election, arguing that substantial progress was being achieved in Iraq.
Here's what the general said in 2004. "They will have the benefit of a substantially larger Iraqi security presence coming on line. This is an occasion where we'll see how the new Iraqi security forces are going to do. I think they'll be fine." And later, "We're only six months away from June and handing control of the country back over to Iraqis."
Well we all know that was either a lie or an utterly inept reading of the situation, neither of which is acceptable to me. We also know that Petraeus sees himself as a latter day Dwight D. Eisenhower, complete with Presidential aspirations of his own. So it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Petraeus was and is carrying water for the Bush Administration as it stumbles with Iraq, thus calling into question anything the general has to say on the topic.
Thankfully and understandably, his 9/11 testimony (now how is that for gilding the lily?), along with that of Ambassador Ryan Crocker, was duly challenged by many on Capitol Hill, by many in the media and by many political activist groups including that clever piece of wordsmithing by those at MoveOn. That ad of course raised hackles in the neo con community but then again that's just part of their overall strategy to deflect attention from that 24/7 disaster known as Iraq.
Bush and his toadies continue to argue that things are improving and that we need more time to allow General Petraeus' plan to work. This is Petraeus' plan? Suddenly we are supposed to believe Bush is listening to the military.
We know NOT to believe any of this.
This is either the fantasy of an intellectually bankrupt administration or a plan to leave this war to whomever succeeds him in the White House. Of course the men and women of our military, along with many innocent Iraqi civilians, will be the ones who suffer. The Bush plan is not a plan at all. It is a cynical delaying tactic with the despicable idea that whomever inherits Bush's war will somehow be responsible for it. Only a Bush-like brain would believe that.
By the way, I for one am tired of those apologists who defend the intellectual qualifications of this President. He is moron, a buffoon. I don't mind conservatives; I just hate vapid ones. Personally I am wary of people trying to defend him when we see and hear evidence of his intellectual short comings every time he opens his mouth. In my view, if you can't articulate a simple thought, you are quite incapable of entertaining much less comprehending a complex one.
And it doesn't help that he has surrounded himself with a bunch of macho cowards. Bush went AWOL when he had the opportunity to serve so obviously learned no lessons from the VietNam war. Cheney had something like seven draft deferments and "no time" to fight (yet somehow Clinton was the draft dodger!). Bush's recent revisionist bit of history that we lost because we gave up too soon shows an appalling disregard for the truth and really disqualifies him from being seriously heard and considered.
He is at best an incompetent commander-in-chief, having defied and discarded solid military men like General Eric Shinseki. Before the war began, Bush chose not to listen to the generals because it was inconvenient for his agenda. And now with the complete mismanagement of and the utter failure of this invasion, along with the knowledge of Abu Ghraib and other atrocities, my view is Bush is a war criminal. Personally I wouldn't mind seeing him, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice charged with war crimes. They all have blood on their hands and I'm very hopeful that they get their Lee Atwater like karmic payback. The good news is that history will not treat these clowns very kindly. Bush is already regarded as one of the, if not the, worst President in our history.
This is Bush's and the neo cons' war. They need to take responsibility for what he started. And Shrub needs to finish it.
There will be no cavalry to the rescue. There will be no miracle victory. This war is over and unfortunately for us, we are on the wrong side of it. These chicken hawk neo cons who started this fiasco should have considered the consequences before starting it in the first place. They didn't and now they need to own up to it.
Bush's plan to continue is a disaster. Iraq is already a complete and utter catastrophe with lawlessness, brain drain as intellectual and professionals migrate out of the country, a complete dearth of goods and services and rife with sectarian violence. Yes it will be even more chaotic when we withdraw but at least our military personnel will be out of harms way. And let the Iraqis, Syrians, Iranians, Saudis and anyone else struggle to deal with the chaos. Yeah we broke it but we can't fix it. Like the French in Indochina and the British at the end of the Ottoman empire, we have not learned the lessons of history and must be prepared to pay the price.
The damage has already been done and can not be undone, regardless of how hard Bush tries. These are consequences of this immoral and illegal war. Time for Bush and his 29 per cent to take responsibility for their collective stupidity.
There will be no happy Hollywood ending. We can delay the inevitable but at what cost?
Time to bring the troops home.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Going Home
Eight weeks after the call, I was on my final road trip with my father. I was taking him home to Massachusetts to die.
In early March 2001, while shooting a commercial campaign in Vancouver, my cell phone rang. I looked down at the handset and saw my father's number on the screen. That was the first surprise. My father almost never called and when he did it was exclusively to my home phone where he left long-winded messages, barking at the machine uncertain if it worked or not.
My dad, a cum laude graduate of Harvard University, seemed to have a mental block when it came to "new" technologies. He could barely figure out the TV remote. The stereo I gave him one Christmas sat unused in the living for nearly six months until I returned to visit and found the pause button inadvertently pressed on the cassette machine. For years he wrote countless articles and more than one book on his fifty-year-old Royal typewriter though he did learn to use the Macintosh I gave him to write his final book.
He had a thing about cell phones, a distrust of sorts or perhaps he found it to be an invasion of one's privacy. So he never called mine until that day in March.
I knew immediately something was wrong. In his typical concise and matter-of-fact manner, he proceeded to tell me of his diagnosis: lung cancer. This wasn't a complete shock. He was 84 years old and had some pneumonia issues the Thanksgiving before which landed him in the hospital for a week. He had smoked two packs of Marlboros for 25 years though he had stopped back in 1967. And his home was in New York City where the air is supposedly so bad that just living there is the equivalent of smoking two packs a day.
Still the definitiveness of this news was unsettling. I had just finished eating breakfast and was well into my second cup of coffee. The food backed up almost immediately and I barely made it back to my room before I vomited.
Two days later I found myself in his one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He had lived there since 1972. Dad and mom couldn’t wait to leave suburbia behind—so much so that they moved to New York while I was still enrolled in high school. New York City energized them both and they had many happy memories of West 74 Street.
Over the next few days my father and I went to a barrage of medical tests and oncologist appointments. One afternoon I managed to sneak off and spoke with his personal physician who was uncharacteristically blunt about my father's prognosis. "Michael, he's 84 and his body is betraying him, " his doctor told me. "From what I can see, the cancer has spread into his lymph nodes and other organs and there is nothing that can be done." He went on to discuss chemo, radiation and other possible treatments but his intentions were clear. My father's condition was terminal and the doctor regarded any extraordinary efforts to save his life as futile, even misguided.
That night I spoke of this with my father and he agreed with his doctor. Dad didn't want to proceed with any measure that would keep him alive artificially while seriously contradicting the quality of his life. He was a New Englander and his stoicism was well known to friends and family. Think DH Lawrence and his view of the quintessential American (“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer”) but without the killer part.
My sister died in 1991, followed two years later by my mother. Both were difficult, painful deaths and each left huge holes in all of our lives, particularly my father's. Slowly but certainly his friends were dying as well and my father's social circle grew smaller and smaller. So one morning sitting in the lobby of a medical facility while waiting for yet another test, I vowed that my father would never be alone again.
My brother lives in Minnesota and I now live in California. My brother instantly agreed: one of us would with dad every day until the cancer finally took him.
So I arranged a weekly schedule for my brother and me. My brother is a talented painter, particularly of black and white portraits that look like photographs but he is chronically short of money so I arranged for his tickets and mine. Thank god for frequent flyer miles. Little did I know that I would cross the country 12 times in the next 12 weeks. For the first few weeks we scheduled our arrivals and departures to overlap by a couple of hours so we could update one another on his condition.
As my luck would have it, dad's medical emergencies seemed to coincide with my visits. More than once I had to drag him to the emergency room after midnight when he had trouble breathing. One night I took him to St. Clare's Hospital in what used to be called the Hell's Kitchen section of Manhattan. This time they checked him in.
He would not leave until I took the trip home to Massachusetts. Dad was New Englander, born Springfield in 1916 and though he had traveled all over the globe, Massachusetts was very much a part of his world. The family roots were there. My dad was a descendent of Francis Cooke, a member of the Mayflower Company that settled in Plymouth in 1620 and of Benjamin Waite, the hero of the Deerfield Massacre in 1703 who family lore has it was probably the role model for Natty Bumpo in James Fennimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer. He was also a descendent of the explorers William and George Rogers Clark, the former of whom was better known for his exploits with one Meriweather Lewis. He also spent his entire life as a Red Sox fan which put the two of us squarely at odds. I grew up idolizing Mickey Mantle and was (and remain) a New York Yankees fan ever since I was a little shaver.
By early May, the cancer had spread beyond his lungs to his lymph nodes and bones and he was deteriorating rapidly. The doctors were having trouble adjusting his medicine so he was either in pain or completely and utterly delirious.
One afternoon I found him stark naked standing in the hospital hallway. He was shrieking that the doctors and nurses were trying to kill him. I caught his eye. "Do you know who I am?" I asked. "Yes," he said and he began to calm down. "They're trying to kill me,” he whispered. "Dad, you have cancer,” I replied. “You are going to die anyway. Why would they bother to kill you?" He appeared startled but then relaxed as he considered the point, calming down enough for a nurse to slip a hospital gown around him. "Do you understand?" I asked. He nodded as I took his hand and escorted him back to his room.
That night I spoke to most of his doctors. One oncologist was a cowboy with a hero complex who thought he could save everyone. He recommended chemo and radiation, giving little thought to the repercussions these powerful drugs would have on an 84-year-old man. The other oncologist, a wonderful young Korean woman whose name escapes me, disagreed stating that the quality of my father’s life would be horrible. I agreed and also consulted my father’s general practitioner who sided with the second oncologist.
The next morning I received a call from the Korean oncologist informing me that my father was scheduled for surgery. Apparently the rogue oncologist thought my father should have a chemo stint inserted, "just in case". In my dad’s living will, I was the responsible party assigned to make decisions so I stopped the surgery just as they wheeled Dad out of his room towards the operating theater.
Clearly I needed to move quickly. So I renewed my search for hospices with available beds. My brother and I had compiled a list in the first few weeks of my father's illness. My dad longed to return to New England where he was raised and where we still had family. On the many occasions when he was delirious he muttered words that evoked Springfield, his parents, my mother, his brother and his childhood.
On one of my earlier visits, I had gone through his address books. My father had friends all over the world and though many of his own contemporaries were dying, his political work and his writings made him close friends and colleagues of all ages all around the globe. The sheer number was overwhelming so I sat down and drafted a form letter explaining his diagnosis and prognosis, created address labels for over 400 names and sent them off. I included my cell phone number.
It was at this moment that the phone calls began.
In between calls from his concerned friends, I contacted several facilities and called them constantly to a point where they must have considered me a royal pain. Undoubtedly I angered more than a few administrators but I needed to find an available bed as soon as possible. My perseverance paid off in a late afternoon phone call from one hospice facility in Northampton Mass. A bed had become available but I need to get my father up there immediately.
This was incredible luck. My cousin and his wife live in that small college town. My uncle, my father's brother, lived in Suffield Ct, just 40 miles or so south of Northampton. And some of my other cousins live in Leeds, just a few miles from the hospice. All of these people would play a great role in embracing what was left of our family and providing much comfort for my father, my brother and myself over the next weeks.
We had to arrive on the following day by 3PM or they would give the bed away. So I frantically started calling doctors, ambulances and so on to schedule his transportation but got little help. None of the ambulance services would guarantee a pick up or delivery time. Others thought it would take six hours or more to drive the 200 or so miles from New York to Northampton.
Other obstacles appeared. My dad could no longer breathe on his own; he needed oxygen. The process of obtaining oxygen tanks was surprisingly onerous. I would have to rent the oxygen myself but no one would rent to me without a doctors approval or unless I would commit to an extended rental. Pure oxygen is volatile and some companies were uncertain about putting their product in the hands of an unprofessional, as if I would fire up a cigar while handling the flammable gas.
But by far the most thorny issue was his medicine. He was receiving a very restricted narcotic every two hours. Since there would be no medical professional available, the hospital would not give me the drugs to give to him. I tried everything, talking to virtually every administrator at St. Clares. My pleas fell on deaf ears.
Then the Korean oncologist stepped up big time. She escorted me into see one administrator and sat with me as I explained the situation. She spoke convincingly on my behalf, on my father's behalf. I would rent a car, put two oxygen tanks in the back seat and my dad in the front seat with blankets and vomit bags and I would drive him myself to Massachusetts. I would borrow some oxygen tanks and I would need for them to trust me that I would not steal my father's pain medication.
I proposed that they give me two pills: one to be consumed just as we left New York and the other to be consumed along the way. That would essentially give me four hours to get my father to the hospice. Surprisingly everyone agreed to the plan. Thank goodness for the kind hearts of the Korean doctor and the St. Clare’s administrator.
The next morning I picked up the largest rental car I could find and headed to the hospital. Two oxygen tanks waited for me in my father's room. The oncologist personally escorted me to the hospital pharmacy where they carefully doled out two pain pills to her. She promptly handed them to me and we both then marched back upstairs to get my dad.
Twenty minutes later we were on the road. Well, almost. My dad wanted to stop by his apartment one last time. Luckily we found a space right in front of the building and I helped him out. It took him a considerable time to make it to the front door. I held the door open so he could take one last look. Perhaps because there were so many memories and so many personal treasures there, he could not bear to step inside. So we made our way back to the car and we were off this time for good.
At first my concerns were simple: to get him to Northampton on time and to make his as comfortable as I possibly could. I could care less about speeding tickets. I am what some might consider a fast driver, however I prefer the racing parlance: I am quick.
We headed north on the West Side Highway to the Saw Mill Parkway. As we approached our old hometown of Mt. Kisco, I asked my dad if he wanted to see our old house, the house where I grew up. He did.
Minutes later, we continued on our way and made very good progress until he had the first episode of sickness. He was nauseous and struggling not to vomit. Lung cancer is a particularly hideous disease in that it essentially stifles your breathing by destroying your lungs. And the coughing that accompanies this disease is particularly disturbing, especially for those who are unnerved at the sight of blood because… well there is a lot of it.
I stopped the car at a rest area and opened his door. He welcomed the fresh air. I held the bag as he vomited. The white translucent bag turned blood red, then purplish as the blood began to congeal. Mixed with the blood were bits of things that I had never seen before and have never seen since. A kind gentleman in the next car came by to offer assistance. I asked him to bring me some paper towels with cool water, which he did. He inquired once again and my dad waved him off with a wave of thanks. My dad, like me, prefers to be sick alone, in private.
Ten minutes later we resumed the journey. The producer in me finally gave way to the son in me. I now fully realized the import of this trip: that this would be the last time we would ever be driving anywhere together, that the awful certainty of my father’s imminent death would preclude more trips, more conversations, more moments of a youngest son trying to measure himself against the old man.
At once I remembered making this trip hundreds of times as a kid when we went to visit my grandmother or other relatives in Massachusetts. Dad would drive, mom would settle in the front seat and the three of us piled in the back, bickering over who had to sit in the middle. That was so long ago. Now there were just three of us left and for this ride, it was just the two of us.
I had so much to say and I knew that this would be my last opportunity to say it...
So we talked. Well I talked and he listened as best he could. My father was not a man who shared his feelings easily, if at all. And I learned this from him. But in this regard I have tried not to be my father’s son.
So I spoke openly about my mother and the tragedy of her final illness and his betrayal of her; about the heartbreak of my sister’s premature death and about my talented brother who often seems lost and struggling to find his way in the world. I spoke of myself: my hopes, my dreams, my frustrations and my fears. For a brief moment he was a captive audience and through his pain I could tell he was struggling to stay engaged.
Sometimes he would nod off for a few minutes and I would welcome the respite since it gave me a few valuable moments to gather my thoughts. But eventually I would continue talking because I knew time was short.
As he drifted in and out of consciousness, he uttered some incomprehensible, yet perplexing words. While most were unintelligible, he kept jabbering on about his mother. I could not make sense of it.
I stopped again to give him some water. Of course he had no appetite but my stomach was aching--I realized that I had not eaten since the night before. Still I could afford to miss a meal and I felt uncomfortable taking the time to eat while he was so sick. So I grabbed my cold caffeine of choice—Diet Pepsi—and handed him the last pain pill. He took it gratefully. We continued.
We stopped two more times so he could purge the poisons in his system.
Surprisingly enough, we made it to Suffield by 1PM. I swerved off the interstate and headed to his brother’s house. From the road while heading north on I-91, I had called my uncle, who is three years younger than my dad, to make certain he was there. I told him what I was doing. He was standing at the foot of the driveway waiting as we pulled up.
My uncle, like my father, does not share his emotions readily. But as we drove up I noticed the redness in his eyes. This was the first time they had seen one another since my father’s diagnosis. He and my father exchanged the familiar warmhearted convivial greetings, the welcoming by a younger brother still very much in awe of his older sibling.
Tethered to his oxygen tank and weakened by the journey, my dad could not move from the car. My uncle leaned in to the passenger window to talk. I decided to vacate the driver’s seat and offered it to my uncle.
They sat in the car alone together for 30 minutes or more and talked. Discreetly, I watched from afar, hearing little except for some boisterous laughs from my uncle and the occasional grunt from my father.
Soon it was time to leave as our deadline loomed. My uncle didn’t want us to go. And he didn’t know what to say. He clasped my hand tightly, commanded me to look him straight in the eye and thanked me profusely. He went to the passenger side and grabbed my dad’s hand, holding on. He only let go as the car started to pull away.
On the final leg of our drive to Northampton, my dad rallied and had a moment of clarity. Perhaps he was energized by the visit with his brother. Or perhaps he was steeling himself for what lay ahead. He talked of cremation, ashes and burial. We had discussed this and I knew full well he preferred to be cremated. What I would soon learn was that he had never picked up his own mother’s ashes from the funeral home—an act of omission for which he never forgave himself. Suddenly I understood everything.
I knew nothing of this since I was only eight when my grandmother died in 1962. I barely knew her and what I knew scared me, quite frankly. She was a domineering old woman who chained smoked cigarettes, smelled of old age and drove the wrong way down one-way streets. She was a bit of a curmudgeon too but she also died of lung cancer and I suspect I only remember the part of her life when she was ill, when she was in pain and when she was suffering, very much like my father on this day.
Later, as friends and family would visit my father I would come understand much more about her. I would learn that she was quite the Victorian, believing in observing certain rituals and social graces. I would find out that she helped the family weather the great depression where what left of the Deane family fortune—and there was one—was finally lost. And I would discover that she was something of a spitfire—a Republican woman who drove to Florida in the 1930s accompanied by a black lady friend with my grandmother all the way insisting that the hotels and restaurants serve her friend just as readily as they served her.
We pulled into the parking lot of the hospice at 2:45PM. The second pain pill was beginning to wear off and dad was noticeably uncomfortable. Fortunately the staff was expecting us. At the front door, we were greeted by a friendly attendant armed with a wheel chair who transported my father to the last available bed in the facility. We had made it.
This final chapter in my dad’s life got off to a better start than I could have imagined. To be honest, I had terribly dark thoughts before and during the trip but they were all for naught. I wasn’t all that positive dad would survive the trip and I wasn’t happy about the thought of my father breathing his last as we cruised along 1-84. But things were coming together. My brother was on his way in to Hartford and would arrive the following day. He would take the first shift and stay with my father. I would leave that night and return in seven days time. Still there was one more thing I needed to do before I returned to Los Angeles.
The next morning I visited dad in his room. He was more sanguine, attentive and even euphoric. The hospice doctor came by and introduced himself. Immediately he managed to put my father at ease and adjust his medications to find the level of right pain relief which made my father comfortable yet still able to communicate.
My cell phone rang. On the other end was a woman about whom I knew nothing. “Is this Michael?” she asked. “You don’t know me but I’m Toni, your father’s first wife.” Stunned, I almost dropped the phone. “How is he?” Nervously, I filled her in best as I could. I knew he was married before my mother, to a woman at Radcliffe who was his college sweetheart. They were together for seven years and they traveled all over Asia together, including a long stint in China while he worked for the Springfield Republican and strung for the Christian Science Monitor. Apparently she had a sense--and wanted no part--of my father’s upcoming political troubles. So when they returned from China in 1945, she left him.
Dad must have had an inkling who the caller was and he sat up and straightened himself, quite alert and eager to talk. I handed him the phone and left the room so they could say their final farewells.
Outside at a pay phone, I called all the local funeral homes with the twin purposes of making arrangements for my father but also trying to glean information regarding the whereabouts of my grandmother’s ashes.
One owner suggested I call every funeral home in Springfield where my grandmother lived. I called my uncle who could not remember anything, “Your father was supposed to take care of that,” he jokingly told me, even then unable to resist the urge to tweak his older brother. “I guess he screwed that up too.”
So I started dialing. I called every funeral home inquiring about the ashes for Geneva Schaffer Deane, a descendent of German immigrants, valedictorian of the 1904 class at Vassar College and my grandmother. None of them had any information about her ashes whereabouts.
Still I did get one piece of good news. In Massachusetts and other states, it is illegal to throw away human remains of any sort. So funeral homes are obligated to keep them for a certain time, then are allowed to bury them but only with the provision that the burial is clearly documented so any family member can recover the ashes at any time. So I had hope.
But I was running out of ideas. Fortuitously, I had the idea to check my grandfather’s obituary and see who handled his remains. That turned out to be the Dickinson Funeral Home but I had already called them and they offered no help.
Rather than call again, I decided to go to the funeral home directly. When I pulled into the parking lot I realized I had been there before.
The building was understandably silent, given the nature of their work. A young woman quietly greeted me and I explained the purpose of my visit. She was indeed the person to whom I had spoken to previously but given the circumstances of my trip she listened dutifully. Without protest, she went into another room and pulled out a long ledger of sorts. Inside were the names of those whose ashes were either downstairs in the basement or buried at a nearby cemetery.
They were entered chronologically of course and she reviewed the entries from 1960 on. She skimmed page after page, sliding her hand down upon each name to emphasize her determination and attention to detail. Finally she stopped at one name. “I have a Deane here but it is Hugh G. Deane, not Geneva Deane,” she said matter-of-factly. “That’s my grandfather,” I told her.
Hugh Gordon Deane died a month before I was born and not meeting him was and is one of my life’s greatest disappointments. He was by all accounts an incredibly kind man, soft spoken with a slight southern lilt to his accent. As a teenager he moved from Washington DC to Springfield where he met my grandmother. He was a self-made man, president of the Hamden Steel Grinding Co. and quite successful until the depression. He had a knack for working with his hands, particularly carving things or making the odd batch of bootleg wine during prohibition. Everyone loved him and, as my second cousin Jim remembers, he had a kind word for everyone. He and my grandmother were renowned for their generosity. During the depression, their home at 183 Dartmouth Terrace was well known among the transient community as a place where you could get a free meal. The railroad tracks ran nearby at the far end of the dingle, just south of the house. Many times, I’m told, my grandfather would answer a morning knock at the back door with the greeting, “C’mon in. I’ve just made breakfast for you.” And he would give the man his own breakfast.
I knew my father and uncle had claimed my grandfather’s ashes and buried some of them at the old homestead in Springfield, some in Mount Kisco where I grew up and some in New Jersey where my uncle raised his family.
“If you have any family ashes downstairs, they are probably my grandmother,” I told her. She shook her head, still skeptical. “That’s unlikely but I’ll look.”
She hurried off. Five minutes later she returned with a small brown cardboard box. Inside was an urn with the engraved initials HGD. I opened the urn carefully. Inside was a small plastic bag full of gray ash with a tag attached. It read: Geneva Schaffer Deane.
She gasped, then smiled, pleased to have helped. I couldn’t believe my good fortune.
An hour later I strode into my father’s room, my grandmother’s ashes in tow. Dad was awake, visiting with my brother who had arrived minutes before. I handed him the box. He and my brother both looked puzzled. “Grandma’s ashes,” I explained. My brother looked shocked. My father, who I never remember seeing shed a tear, started to cry.
Dad treasured family and friendships. He did indeed enjoy his role as the family patriarch, holding court in his final few weeks of his life as generations came to pay respects. It brought him great joy.
My father Hugh Gordon Deane Jr. died weeks later on June 25, 2001. Regrettably, I was not there for his death.
He was far from perfect, not a terribly good father or husband but he a very good man. My father was an intellectual with an unbounded interest in learning. He was quite modest, carrying himself with a quiet dignity. He possessed an almost unerring analytical mind and was always a head of the curve whether it was on China, on civil rights or on the conflict in Vietnam. He had courage, often willing to take an unpopular position and not back down in the face of real hardship.
His moral compass included a genuine and deep respect for each and every human being, not withstanding their thoughts, their values, their beliefs or their origins. His judgment and moral principles shaped his work and therefore his life, his moral compass existing in a world where, as one of his friends pointed out to me, far too many people are engaged in self-serving activity and comfort as a foremost concern.
He was a writer who wrote two books and countless articles. He was also a victim of McCarthyism, blacklisted for a series of articles on China that prophetically predicted the communists would prevail—a casualty of the notion that conspiring Americans had somehow lost China.
My father was compelled to write these stories that reflected the imperfection of the human condition: the paucity of justice, the inadequacy of compassion and the lack of sensibility toward the sufferings of our fellow man. In doing so he was willing to brave the disapproval of his peers, the censure of his colleagues, the wrath of society. Moral courage is a rare but a vital commodity for those who seek to transform a world that yields most painfully and most reluctantly to change.
Like all of us, he was prey for the usual human failures. But on the essentials, for the long run, in good times and bad, he followed his beacon about as well as anyone else kept busy in the heavy engagements of an active and productive life. That simple moral compass held him true on course until the end.
In life, he gave of himself to us. His keen mind stirred us. He offered his moral compass to guide us and a good kind heart from which the laughter came. He gave us a sense of purpose and a profound wit. He gave us kindness and strength.
In writing his eulogy I realized that in death he gave many of us one last gift, that of his love of family and for his roots. In doing so, he introduced and reintroduced family members to one another, allowing once dormant relationships to thrive and flourish. He gave that so we might give of ourselves which, when you think about it, is one amazing farewell.
In early March 2001, while shooting a commercial campaign in Vancouver, my cell phone rang. I looked down at the handset and saw my father's number on the screen. That was the first surprise. My father almost never called and when he did it was exclusively to my home phone where he left long-winded messages, barking at the machine uncertain if it worked or not.
My dad, a cum laude graduate of Harvard University, seemed to have a mental block when it came to "new" technologies. He could barely figure out the TV remote. The stereo I gave him one Christmas sat unused in the living for nearly six months until I returned to visit and found the pause button inadvertently pressed on the cassette machine. For years he wrote countless articles and more than one book on his fifty-year-old Royal typewriter though he did learn to use the Macintosh I gave him to write his final book.
He had a thing about cell phones, a distrust of sorts or perhaps he found it to be an invasion of one's privacy. So he never called mine until that day in March.
I knew immediately something was wrong. In his typical concise and matter-of-fact manner, he proceeded to tell me of his diagnosis: lung cancer. This wasn't a complete shock. He was 84 years old and had some pneumonia issues the Thanksgiving before which landed him in the hospital for a week. He had smoked two packs of Marlboros for 25 years though he had stopped back in 1967. And his home was in New York City where the air is supposedly so bad that just living there is the equivalent of smoking two packs a day.
Still the definitiveness of this news was unsettling. I had just finished eating breakfast and was well into my second cup of coffee. The food backed up almost immediately and I barely made it back to my room before I vomited.
Two days later I found myself in his one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He had lived there since 1972. Dad and mom couldn’t wait to leave suburbia behind—so much so that they moved to New York while I was still enrolled in high school. New York City energized them both and they had many happy memories of West 74 Street.
Over the next few days my father and I went to a barrage of medical tests and oncologist appointments. One afternoon I managed to sneak off and spoke with his personal physician who was uncharacteristically blunt about my father's prognosis. "Michael, he's 84 and his body is betraying him, " his doctor told me. "From what I can see, the cancer has spread into his lymph nodes and other organs and there is nothing that can be done." He went on to discuss chemo, radiation and other possible treatments but his intentions were clear. My father's condition was terminal and the doctor regarded any extraordinary efforts to save his life as futile, even misguided.
That night I spoke of this with my father and he agreed with his doctor. Dad didn't want to proceed with any measure that would keep him alive artificially while seriously contradicting the quality of his life. He was a New Englander and his stoicism was well known to friends and family. Think DH Lawrence and his view of the quintessential American (“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer”) but without the killer part.
My sister died in 1991, followed two years later by my mother. Both were difficult, painful deaths and each left huge holes in all of our lives, particularly my father's. Slowly but certainly his friends were dying as well and my father's social circle grew smaller and smaller. So one morning sitting in the lobby of a medical facility while waiting for yet another test, I vowed that my father would never be alone again.
My brother lives in Minnesota and I now live in California. My brother instantly agreed: one of us would with dad every day until the cancer finally took him.
So I arranged a weekly schedule for my brother and me. My brother is a talented painter, particularly of black and white portraits that look like photographs but he is chronically short of money so I arranged for his tickets and mine. Thank god for frequent flyer miles. Little did I know that I would cross the country 12 times in the next 12 weeks. For the first few weeks we scheduled our arrivals and departures to overlap by a couple of hours so we could update one another on his condition.
As my luck would have it, dad's medical emergencies seemed to coincide with my visits. More than once I had to drag him to the emergency room after midnight when he had trouble breathing. One night I took him to St. Clare's Hospital in what used to be called the Hell's Kitchen section of Manhattan. This time they checked him in.
He would not leave until I took the trip home to Massachusetts. Dad was New Englander, born Springfield in 1916 and though he had traveled all over the globe, Massachusetts was very much a part of his world. The family roots were there. My dad was a descendent of Francis Cooke, a member of the Mayflower Company that settled in Plymouth in 1620 and of Benjamin Waite, the hero of the Deerfield Massacre in 1703 who family lore has it was probably the role model for Natty Bumpo in James Fennimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer. He was also a descendent of the explorers William and George Rogers Clark, the former of whom was better known for his exploits with one Meriweather Lewis. He also spent his entire life as a Red Sox fan which put the two of us squarely at odds. I grew up idolizing Mickey Mantle and was (and remain) a New York Yankees fan ever since I was a little shaver.
By early May, the cancer had spread beyond his lungs to his lymph nodes and bones and he was deteriorating rapidly. The doctors were having trouble adjusting his medicine so he was either in pain or completely and utterly delirious.
One afternoon I found him stark naked standing in the hospital hallway. He was shrieking that the doctors and nurses were trying to kill him. I caught his eye. "Do you know who I am?" I asked. "Yes," he said and he began to calm down. "They're trying to kill me,” he whispered. "Dad, you have cancer,” I replied. “You are going to die anyway. Why would they bother to kill you?" He appeared startled but then relaxed as he considered the point, calming down enough for a nurse to slip a hospital gown around him. "Do you understand?" I asked. He nodded as I took his hand and escorted him back to his room.
That night I spoke to most of his doctors. One oncologist was a cowboy with a hero complex who thought he could save everyone. He recommended chemo and radiation, giving little thought to the repercussions these powerful drugs would have on an 84-year-old man. The other oncologist, a wonderful young Korean woman whose name escapes me, disagreed stating that the quality of my father’s life would be horrible. I agreed and also consulted my father’s general practitioner who sided with the second oncologist.
The next morning I received a call from the Korean oncologist informing me that my father was scheduled for surgery. Apparently the rogue oncologist thought my father should have a chemo stint inserted, "just in case". In my dad’s living will, I was the responsible party assigned to make decisions so I stopped the surgery just as they wheeled Dad out of his room towards the operating theater.
Clearly I needed to move quickly. So I renewed my search for hospices with available beds. My brother and I had compiled a list in the first few weeks of my father's illness. My dad longed to return to New England where he was raised and where we still had family. On the many occasions when he was delirious he muttered words that evoked Springfield, his parents, my mother, his brother and his childhood.
On one of my earlier visits, I had gone through his address books. My father had friends all over the world and though many of his own contemporaries were dying, his political work and his writings made him close friends and colleagues of all ages all around the globe. The sheer number was overwhelming so I sat down and drafted a form letter explaining his diagnosis and prognosis, created address labels for over 400 names and sent them off. I included my cell phone number.
It was at this moment that the phone calls began.
In between calls from his concerned friends, I contacted several facilities and called them constantly to a point where they must have considered me a royal pain. Undoubtedly I angered more than a few administrators but I needed to find an available bed as soon as possible. My perseverance paid off in a late afternoon phone call from one hospice facility in Northampton Mass. A bed had become available but I need to get my father up there immediately.
This was incredible luck. My cousin and his wife live in that small college town. My uncle, my father's brother, lived in Suffield Ct, just 40 miles or so south of Northampton. And some of my other cousins live in Leeds, just a few miles from the hospice. All of these people would play a great role in embracing what was left of our family and providing much comfort for my father, my brother and myself over the next weeks.
We had to arrive on the following day by 3PM or they would give the bed away. So I frantically started calling doctors, ambulances and so on to schedule his transportation but got little help. None of the ambulance services would guarantee a pick up or delivery time. Others thought it would take six hours or more to drive the 200 or so miles from New York to Northampton.
Other obstacles appeared. My dad could no longer breathe on his own; he needed oxygen. The process of obtaining oxygen tanks was surprisingly onerous. I would have to rent the oxygen myself but no one would rent to me without a doctors approval or unless I would commit to an extended rental. Pure oxygen is volatile and some companies were uncertain about putting their product in the hands of an unprofessional, as if I would fire up a cigar while handling the flammable gas.
But by far the most thorny issue was his medicine. He was receiving a very restricted narcotic every two hours. Since there would be no medical professional available, the hospital would not give me the drugs to give to him. I tried everything, talking to virtually every administrator at St. Clares. My pleas fell on deaf ears.
Then the Korean oncologist stepped up big time. She escorted me into see one administrator and sat with me as I explained the situation. She spoke convincingly on my behalf, on my father's behalf. I would rent a car, put two oxygen tanks in the back seat and my dad in the front seat with blankets and vomit bags and I would drive him myself to Massachusetts. I would borrow some oxygen tanks and I would need for them to trust me that I would not steal my father's pain medication.
I proposed that they give me two pills: one to be consumed just as we left New York and the other to be consumed along the way. That would essentially give me four hours to get my father to the hospice. Surprisingly everyone agreed to the plan. Thank goodness for the kind hearts of the Korean doctor and the St. Clare’s administrator.
The next morning I picked up the largest rental car I could find and headed to the hospital. Two oxygen tanks waited for me in my father's room. The oncologist personally escorted me to the hospital pharmacy where they carefully doled out two pain pills to her. She promptly handed them to me and we both then marched back upstairs to get my dad.
Twenty minutes later we were on the road. Well, almost. My dad wanted to stop by his apartment one last time. Luckily we found a space right in front of the building and I helped him out. It took him a considerable time to make it to the front door. I held the door open so he could take one last look. Perhaps because there were so many memories and so many personal treasures there, he could not bear to step inside. So we made our way back to the car and we were off this time for good.
At first my concerns were simple: to get him to Northampton on time and to make his as comfortable as I possibly could. I could care less about speeding tickets. I am what some might consider a fast driver, however I prefer the racing parlance: I am quick.
We headed north on the West Side Highway to the Saw Mill Parkway. As we approached our old hometown of Mt. Kisco, I asked my dad if he wanted to see our old house, the house where I grew up. He did.
Minutes later, we continued on our way and made very good progress until he had the first episode of sickness. He was nauseous and struggling not to vomit. Lung cancer is a particularly hideous disease in that it essentially stifles your breathing by destroying your lungs. And the coughing that accompanies this disease is particularly disturbing, especially for those who are unnerved at the sight of blood because… well there is a lot of it.
I stopped the car at a rest area and opened his door. He welcomed the fresh air. I held the bag as he vomited. The white translucent bag turned blood red, then purplish as the blood began to congeal. Mixed with the blood were bits of things that I had never seen before and have never seen since. A kind gentleman in the next car came by to offer assistance. I asked him to bring me some paper towels with cool water, which he did. He inquired once again and my dad waved him off with a wave of thanks. My dad, like me, prefers to be sick alone, in private.
Ten minutes later we resumed the journey. The producer in me finally gave way to the son in me. I now fully realized the import of this trip: that this would be the last time we would ever be driving anywhere together, that the awful certainty of my father’s imminent death would preclude more trips, more conversations, more moments of a youngest son trying to measure himself against the old man.
At once I remembered making this trip hundreds of times as a kid when we went to visit my grandmother or other relatives in Massachusetts. Dad would drive, mom would settle in the front seat and the three of us piled in the back, bickering over who had to sit in the middle. That was so long ago. Now there were just three of us left and for this ride, it was just the two of us.
I had so much to say and I knew that this would be my last opportunity to say it...
So we talked. Well I talked and he listened as best he could. My father was not a man who shared his feelings easily, if at all. And I learned this from him. But in this regard I have tried not to be my father’s son.
So I spoke openly about my mother and the tragedy of her final illness and his betrayal of her; about the heartbreak of my sister’s premature death and about my talented brother who often seems lost and struggling to find his way in the world. I spoke of myself: my hopes, my dreams, my frustrations and my fears. For a brief moment he was a captive audience and through his pain I could tell he was struggling to stay engaged.
Sometimes he would nod off for a few minutes and I would welcome the respite since it gave me a few valuable moments to gather my thoughts. But eventually I would continue talking because I knew time was short.
As he drifted in and out of consciousness, he uttered some incomprehensible, yet perplexing words. While most were unintelligible, he kept jabbering on about his mother. I could not make sense of it.
I stopped again to give him some water. Of course he had no appetite but my stomach was aching--I realized that I had not eaten since the night before. Still I could afford to miss a meal and I felt uncomfortable taking the time to eat while he was so sick. So I grabbed my cold caffeine of choice—Diet Pepsi—and handed him the last pain pill. He took it gratefully. We continued.
We stopped two more times so he could purge the poisons in his system.
Surprisingly enough, we made it to Suffield by 1PM. I swerved off the interstate and headed to his brother’s house. From the road while heading north on I-91, I had called my uncle, who is three years younger than my dad, to make certain he was there. I told him what I was doing. He was standing at the foot of the driveway waiting as we pulled up.
My uncle, like my father, does not share his emotions readily. But as we drove up I noticed the redness in his eyes. This was the first time they had seen one another since my father’s diagnosis. He and my father exchanged the familiar warmhearted convivial greetings, the welcoming by a younger brother still very much in awe of his older sibling.
Tethered to his oxygen tank and weakened by the journey, my dad could not move from the car. My uncle leaned in to the passenger window to talk. I decided to vacate the driver’s seat and offered it to my uncle.
They sat in the car alone together for 30 minutes or more and talked. Discreetly, I watched from afar, hearing little except for some boisterous laughs from my uncle and the occasional grunt from my father.
Soon it was time to leave as our deadline loomed. My uncle didn’t want us to go. And he didn’t know what to say. He clasped my hand tightly, commanded me to look him straight in the eye and thanked me profusely. He went to the passenger side and grabbed my dad’s hand, holding on. He only let go as the car started to pull away.
On the final leg of our drive to Northampton, my dad rallied and had a moment of clarity. Perhaps he was energized by the visit with his brother. Or perhaps he was steeling himself for what lay ahead. He talked of cremation, ashes and burial. We had discussed this and I knew full well he preferred to be cremated. What I would soon learn was that he had never picked up his own mother’s ashes from the funeral home—an act of omission for which he never forgave himself. Suddenly I understood everything.
I knew nothing of this since I was only eight when my grandmother died in 1962. I barely knew her and what I knew scared me, quite frankly. She was a domineering old woman who chained smoked cigarettes, smelled of old age and drove the wrong way down one-way streets. She was a bit of a curmudgeon too but she also died of lung cancer and I suspect I only remember the part of her life when she was ill, when she was in pain and when she was suffering, very much like my father on this day.
Later, as friends and family would visit my father I would come understand much more about her. I would learn that she was quite the Victorian, believing in observing certain rituals and social graces. I would find out that she helped the family weather the great depression where what left of the Deane family fortune—and there was one—was finally lost. And I would discover that she was something of a spitfire—a Republican woman who drove to Florida in the 1930s accompanied by a black lady friend with my grandmother all the way insisting that the hotels and restaurants serve her friend just as readily as they served her.
We pulled into the parking lot of the hospice at 2:45PM. The second pain pill was beginning to wear off and dad was noticeably uncomfortable. Fortunately the staff was expecting us. At the front door, we were greeted by a friendly attendant armed with a wheel chair who transported my father to the last available bed in the facility. We had made it.
This final chapter in my dad’s life got off to a better start than I could have imagined. To be honest, I had terribly dark thoughts before and during the trip but they were all for naught. I wasn’t all that positive dad would survive the trip and I wasn’t happy about the thought of my father breathing his last as we cruised along 1-84. But things were coming together. My brother was on his way in to Hartford and would arrive the following day. He would take the first shift and stay with my father. I would leave that night and return in seven days time. Still there was one more thing I needed to do before I returned to Los Angeles.
The next morning I visited dad in his room. He was more sanguine, attentive and even euphoric. The hospice doctor came by and introduced himself. Immediately he managed to put my father at ease and adjust his medications to find the level of right pain relief which made my father comfortable yet still able to communicate.
My cell phone rang. On the other end was a woman about whom I knew nothing. “Is this Michael?” she asked. “You don’t know me but I’m Toni, your father’s first wife.” Stunned, I almost dropped the phone. “How is he?” Nervously, I filled her in best as I could. I knew he was married before my mother, to a woman at Radcliffe who was his college sweetheart. They were together for seven years and they traveled all over Asia together, including a long stint in China while he worked for the Springfield Republican and strung for the Christian Science Monitor. Apparently she had a sense--and wanted no part--of my father’s upcoming political troubles. So when they returned from China in 1945, she left him.
Dad must have had an inkling who the caller was and he sat up and straightened himself, quite alert and eager to talk. I handed him the phone and left the room so they could say their final farewells.
Outside at a pay phone, I called all the local funeral homes with the twin purposes of making arrangements for my father but also trying to glean information regarding the whereabouts of my grandmother’s ashes.
One owner suggested I call every funeral home in Springfield where my grandmother lived. I called my uncle who could not remember anything, “Your father was supposed to take care of that,” he jokingly told me, even then unable to resist the urge to tweak his older brother. “I guess he screwed that up too.”
So I started dialing. I called every funeral home inquiring about the ashes for Geneva Schaffer Deane, a descendent of German immigrants, valedictorian of the 1904 class at Vassar College and my grandmother. None of them had any information about her ashes whereabouts.
Still I did get one piece of good news. In Massachusetts and other states, it is illegal to throw away human remains of any sort. So funeral homes are obligated to keep them for a certain time, then are allowed to bury them but only with the provision that the burial is clearly documented so any family member can recover the ashes at any time. So I had hope.
But I was running out of ideas. Fortuitously, I had the idea to check my grandfather’s obituary and see who handled his remains. That turned out to be the Dickinson Funeral Home but I had already called them and they offered no help.
Rather than call again, I decided to go to the funeral home directly. When I pulled into the parking lot I realized I had been there before.
The building was understandably silent, given the nature of their work. A young woman quietly greeted me and I explained the purpose of my visit. She was indeed the person to whom I had spoken to previously but given the circumstances of my trip she listened dutifully. Without protest, she went into another room and pulled out a long ledger of sorts. Inside were the names of those whose ashes were either downstairs in the basement or buried at a nearby cemetery.
They were entered chronologically of course and she reviewed the entries from 1960 on. She skimmed page after page, sliding her hand down upon each name to emphasize her determination and attention to detail. Finally she stopped at one name. “I have a Deane here but it is Hugh G. Deane, not Geneva Deane,” she said matter-of-factly. “That’s my grandfather,” I told her.
Hugh Gordon Deane died a month before I was born and not meeting him was and is one of my life’s greatest disappointments. He was by all accounts an incredibly kind man, soft spoken with a slight southern lilt to his accent. As a teenager he moved from Washington DC to Springfield where he met my grandmother. He was a self-made man, president of the Hamden Steel Grinding Co. and quite successful until the depression. He had a knack for working with his hands, particularly carving things or making the odd batch of bootleg wine during prohibition. Everyone loved him and, as my second cousin Jim remembers, he had a kind word for everyone. He and my grandmother were renowned for their generosity. During the depression, their home at 183 Dartmouth Terrace was well known among the transient community as a place where you could get a free meal. The railroad tracks ran nearby at the far end of the dingle, just south of the house. Many times, I’m told, my grandfather would answer a morning knock at the back door with the greeting, “C’mon in. I’ve just made breakfast for you.” And he would give the man his own breakfast.
I knew my father and uncle had claimed my grandfather’s ashes and buried some of them at the old homestead in Springfield, some in Mount Kisco where I grew up and some in New Jersey where my uncle raised his family.
“If you have any family ashes downstairs, they are probably my grandmother,” I told her. She shook her head, still skeptical. “That’s unlikely but I’ll look.”
She hurried off. Five minutes later she returned with a small brown cardboard box. Inside was an urn with the engraved initials HGD. I opened the urn carefully. Inside was a small plastic bag full of gray ash with a tag attached. It read: Geneva Schaffer Deane.
She gasped, then smiled, pleased to have helped. I couldn’t believe my good fortune.
An hour later I strode into my father’s room, my grandmother’s ashes in tow. Dad was awake, visiting with my brother who had arrived minutes before. I handed him the box. He and my brother both looked puzzled. “Grandma’s ashes,” I explained. My brother looked shocked. My father, who I never remember seeing shed a tear, started to cry.
Dad treasured family and friendships. He did indeed enjoy his role as the family patriarch, holding court in his final few weeks of his life as generations came to pay respects. It brought him great joy.
My father Hugh Gordon Deane Jr. died weeks later on June 25, 2001. Regrettably, I was not there for his death.
He was far from perfect, not a terribly good father or husband but he a very good man. My father was an intellectual with an unbounded interest in learning. He was quite modest, carrying himself with a quiet dignity. He possessed an almost unerring analytical mind and was always a head of the curve whether it was on China, on civil rights or on the conflict in Vietnam. He had courage, often willing to take an unpopular position and not back down in the face of real hardship.
His moral compass included a genuine and deep respect for each and every human being, not withstanding their thoughts, their values, their beliefs or their origins. His judgment and moral principles shaped his work and therefore his life, his moral compass existing in a world where, as one of his friends pointed out to me, far too many people are engaged in self-serving activity and comfort as a foremost concern.
He was a writer who wrote two books and countless articles. He was also a victim of McCarthyism, blacklisted for a series of articles on China that prophetically predicted the communists would prevail—a casualty of the notion that conspiring Americans had somehow lost China.
My father was compelled to write these stories that reflected the imperfection of the human condition: the paucity of justice, the inadequacy of compassion and the lack of sensibility toward the sufferings of our fellow man. In doing so he was willing to brave the disapproval of his peers, the censure of his colleagues, the wrath of society. Moral courage is a rare but a vital commodity for those who seek to transform a world that yields most painfully and most reluctantly to change.
Like all of us, he was prey for the usual human failures. But on the essentials, for the long run, in good times and bad, he followed his beacon about as well as anyone else kept busy in the heavy engagements of an active and productive life. That simple moral compass held him true on course until the end.
In life, he gave of himself to us. His keen mind stirred us. He offered his moral compass to guide us and a good kind heart from which the laughter came. He gave us a sense of purpose and a profound wit. He gave us kindness and strength.
In writing his eulogy I realized that in death he gave many of us one last gift, that of his love of family and for his roots. In doing so, he introduced and reintroduced family members to one another, allowing once dormant relationships to thrive and flourish. He gave that so we might give of ourselves which, when you think about it, is one amazing farewell.
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Axis of Assholes-Bob Woodward
Over the past few months, I'm constantly reminded of the leitmotif running through Paddy Chayefsky's Network. The Howard Beale character, wonderfully portrayed by the late Peter Finch, becomes unhinged and shouts that "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore."
I too wonder if I am becoming a bit unhinged. Is anyone else out there as mad as I am? I'm angered that Bush and his axis of assholes are running this country in to the ground. When are we going to hold these criminals and incompetents responsible?
Frankly there are just so many of these clowns out there, whether they be the architects or merely the enablers of the Bush Administration disasters. The list includes the Frat-Boy-in-chief of course, along with the tough-talking coward Dick Cheney, the war criminal Donald Rumsfeld, the legend-in-his-own-mind Karl Rove (permanent Republican majority? Just watch 2008 asshole), the woefully ill-prepared Condi Rice (who used to work for Gary Hart and then decided to work for a moron-in-chief in what can only be consider some sort of faustian bargain) and a lot of other gutless jokers serving in and about the White House.
And of course some of those prominent enablers are in the media. Originally I intended to write a more comprehensive piece on the decline of journalism, having gone to journalism school and plied that trade myself. The obvious easy targets are the NY Times and Washington Post. I don't consider broadcast journalism to be much more than a headline service. And Fox? Well it is run by the Republican political operative Roger Ailes. No need to say more.
The New York Times certainly has baggage with its support for the Iraq war, its withholding of the domestic spying story and of course Judith Miller. The NYT has blood on its hands with the ramping up to war from Thomas Friedman and the ineffectual Bill Keller asleep at the helm. Miller of course rivals Keller's incompetence and has the additional baggage of being both contemptibly inept and apparently a bit too keen to use her sexual prowess on interview subjects so perhaps she is too easy a target. Suffice it to say she is a classic example of an intellectually and morally bankrupt reporter co-opted by power. Her career is over.
Miller does share a common trait with Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. Apparently they both are not as smart as they think they are.
Woodward carries the title of assistant managing editor of the Washington Post. He used to be a journalist. Not any more. Nowadays Woodward busies himself as the official Washington stenographer to the rich and powerful, serving their interests while promoting himself. He tends to take himself far too seriously while--sadly enough--trading access for truth and thereby allowing his unwitting readers to be mislead and manipulated by his stories while he poses as an investigative journalist.
Most importantly Woodward seems to confuse "being close to power" to "speaking truth to power." Woodward hasn't spoken truth to power since Watergate and looking back at his post Watergate resume, one wonders what his contribution really was in that collaboration with Carl Bernstein.
Is the truth more important to him then than personal ambition? I think not. Was it ever? Only he can answer that.
Woodward practices a kind of journalism, perversely popular in the political and the entertainment industries, commonly called "access journalism". This involves a sometimes questionable trade-off between sources and methods, where unattributed information will at least ensure that the anonymous source has his side of the story published. Unfortunately access journalism can be sullied by those with an axe to grind and it also brings the expectation of quid pro quo. Access journalism can be further complicated because it involves playing and rewarding favorites. So a story's subtext becomes less about truth and more about agenda. For those less gifted intellectually, the problem becomes in trying to distinguish between the two.
To a journalism student in the 1970s, Woodward was a demigod, having broken one of the most important stories of our life time.
But it has been a slow steady down hill slide ever since. Since Watergate Woodward has written a series of best selling but occasionally embarrassing books. After The Final Days (1976, with Bernstein), he followed with The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court (1979, with Scott Armstrong), Wired, the Life and Times of John Belushi (1985), Veil: The Secret Wars of the C.I.A., 1981-1987 (1987) and The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House (1994). Several were attacked by critics who saw Woodward as fawning over his subjects, According to Christopher Hitchens (another of my not-so favorite journalists because one he is an unrepentant supporter of the Iraq war AND two because he has the appearance of being constantly liquored up), they all use the same template. Reward access, punish those who shun Woodward. To his credit Hitchens is right on point.
Curiously Hitchens also points out that one book has effectively disappeared from Woodward's resume. In "The Man Who Would Be President," co-authored with David Broder, Woodward actually proposed serious consideration of J. Danforth Quayle as a successor to the Reagan-Bush tradition.
As Hitchens observed, the book concluded with the thought that Quayle would still have to beat such formidable "rivals as Baker, Jack Kemp, Richard B. Cheney, Senator Phil Gramm of Texas and, doubtless, others." Years later, the mind reels at this rather dubious conclusion. J. Danforth Quayle? No wonder Woodward doesn't acknowledge the book.
Hitchens makes the significant point that passages like the above are a handy reminder of the essential shallowness and vanity of Washington journalism, and indeed of the ethereal mediocrities that it purports to "cover" even as it acts as their megaphone.
Later came Woodward's conversation with the dying or already dead Bill Casey. I read Veil with a healthy dose of skepticism, still willing to give him the doubt though the Casey death bed conversations left me more than puzzled.
The downward spiral continued when Woodward completely compromised himself by trading truth for access to the Shrub Bush White House resulting in two books about the war in Iraq. Bush at War (2002) and Plan of Attack (2004) were both viewed as positive reviews of Bush's presidency. In an attempt to solidify his position as Washington's power boy, Woodward became an apologist and an enabler to a morally and ethically bankrupt administration. Now I understand why Joan Didion, who had written a lengthy evisceration of Woodward in the NY Review of Books in 1996 noting Woodward's reliability as a water carrier for his sources and the "disinclination of Mr. Woodward to exert cognitive energy on what he is told," calls his books "political pornography". She is being kind.
Woodward was also given incredible access for his next book State of Denial: Bush at War (2006) on Shrub's second term. The White House, ecstatic at Woodward's highly flattering treatment of Bush in Plan of Attack and Bush at War, gave Woodward extraordinary access, confident that he would put a kindly revisionist construction on their disastrous handling of the nation's affairs. Woodward, though, sensing the political winds shifting away from the Bush Presidency chose to offer up a slightly more critical analysis. Way to go Bob!
But for me, any doubts I had about Woodward as the consummate Beltway boot licker evaporated in 2005 when Woodward famously weighed in on Valerie Plame fiasco, attacking Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation numerous times on MSNBC's Scarborough Country, on CNN with Wolf Blitzer as well as other CNN programs including Reliable Sources and Larry King Live. At first Woodward chose a professional attack, claiming Fitzgerald's investigation was "just running like a chain saw right through the lifeline that reporters have to sources who will tell you the truth, what's really going on," and was "undermining the core function in journalism."
What he did not say was that he was part of the story, a sin that is really quite unforgivable. In November of 2005, the Washington Post revealed that Woodward had testified under oath on November 14 that in June 2003, a "senior administration official" told him that former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV's wife, Valerie Plame, worked at the CIA. In fact, Woodward had a personal stake in the outcome of the investigation. He personally mislead the public, his employer and his colleagues. He crossed the line--deliberately, and betrayed everyone but his source in the process while looking to cover his ass. So while Woodward was fully expecting to be subpoenaed by Fitzgerald's office, he still felt compelled and freely able to comment on Fitzgerald's investigation. How arrogant is that?
And comment he did. His statements to Larry King on CNN in October of 2005 were more targeted and more political: "And there's a lot of innocent actions in all of this, but what has happened this prosecutor...Well, this is a junkyard-dog prosecutor, and he goes everywhere and asks every question and turns over rocks and rocks under rocks and so forth." While seeking to marginalize Fitzgerald and his investigation, Woodward conveniently chose not to disclose that he, too, was a "rock" he did not want Fitzgerald to turn over.
And then matters got worse. Woodward made other false, inflammatory and contradictory statements regarding the Plame matter. On the Chris Matthews Show, Woodward baselessly claimed that Wilson's 2002 report to the CIA on the purported sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq contradicted his July 6, 2003, New York Times op-ed, in which Wilson claimed it was unlikely such a transaction occurred. On Larry King Live, Woodward claimed that the CIA completed a "damage assessment" of Plame's outing and found that no serious harm had been done, only to be contradicted two days later by his own paper, which reported that the CIA has done no formal damage assessment.
Still on other occasions, Woodward dismissed the controversy as much ado about nothing. Some of Woodward's less admiring colleagues at the Post have vivid recollections of his unending belittling of the whole Plame affair as something of little consequence, "laughable", and "quite minimal". On NPR's Fresh Air, Woodward said: "There was no national security threat. There was no jeopardy to her life. There was no nothing. When I think all of the facts come out in this case, it's going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great."
Huh?
Judy Miller was quite rightly savaged for accepting what she claimed to be special credentials from the Pentagon in return for confidentiality. So what are we to say about Woodward, who is given special access and then repays the favor by belittling the Plame scandal, while simultaneously concealing his own personal knowledge of the White House's schedule on the outing of Valerie Plame? This is the great investigative journalist Bob Woodward? The wonderboy who broke the Watergate story? The wizard has been revealed to be nothing more than a partisan political hack touting a Republican agenda. For me, there is no question that Woodward has been carrying water for the Bush Administration since day one.
Like his assessment of Bush in his first two books, Woodward is on the wrong side of this. He emerges completely compromised, the quintessential insider. He is so far inside that he is no longer a reporter but more of a court story teller, even court jester. The fact that he felt comfortable opining on a story that involved him shows us that he has no shame, no sense of responsibility or clarity, no sense of ethical behavior, no sense of the public good. He is only interested in promoting himself and his coterie of Washington insiders with little regard for the public interest.
As one fellow blogger noted, Woodward has been bought and sold. He is what Phillip K Dick would have called, a "Yance" man, part of the ruling elite that keeps the wool pulled over the eyes of the great unwashed masses, in the service of the rich and powerful.
Woodward personifies the ultimate and ugly beltway creed: access coupled with primacy to perpetuate the status quo trumps clarity, accountability and the public good. For a so-called investigative journalist, how sad is that?
I too wonder if I am becoming a bit unhinged. Is anyone else out there as mad as I am? I'm angered that Bush and his axis of assholes are running this country in to the ground. When are we going to hold these criminals and incompetents responsible?
Frankly there are just so many of these clowns out there, whether they be the architects or merely the enablers of the Bush Administration disasters. The list includes the Frat-Boy-in-chief of course, along with the tough-talking coward Dick Cheney, the war criminal Donald Rumsfeld, the legend-in-his-own-mind Karl Rove (permanent Republican majority? Just watch 2008 asshole), the woefully ill-prepared Condi Rice (who used to work for Gary Hart and then decided to work for a moron-in-chief in what can only be consider some sort of faustian bargain) and a lot of other gutless jokers serving in and about the White House.
And of course some of those prominent enablers are in the media. Originally I intended to write a more comprehensive piece on the decline of journalism, having gone to journalism school and plied that trade myself. The obvious easy targets are the NY Times and Washington Post. I don't consider broadcast journalism to be much more than a headline service. And Fox? Well it is run by the Republican political operative Roger Ailes. No need to say more.
The New York Times certainly has baggage with its support for the Iraq war, its withholding of the domestic spying story and of course Judith Miller. The NYT has blood on its hands with the ramping up to war from Thomas Friedman and the ineffectual Bill Keller asleep at the helm. Miller of course rivals Keller's incompetence and has the additional baggage of being both contemptibly inept and apparently a bit too keen to use her sexual prowess on interview subjects so perhaps she is too easy a target. Suffice it to say she is a classic example of an intellectually and morally bankrupt reporter co-opted by power. Her career is over.
Miller does share a common trait with Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. Apparently they both are not as smart as they think they are.
Woodward carries the title of assistant managing editor of the Washington Post. He used to be a journalist. Not any more. Nowadays Woodward busies himself as the official Washington stenographer to the rich and powerful, serving their interests while promoting himself. He tends to take himself far too seriously while--sadly enough--trading access for truth and thereby allowing his unwitting readers to be mislead and manipulated by his stories while he poses as an investigative journalist.
Most importantly Woodward seems to confuse "being close to power" to "speaking truth to power." Woodward hasn't spoken truth to power since Watergate and looking back at his post Watergate resume, one wonders what his contribution really was in that collaboration with Carl Bernstein.
Is the truth more important to him then than personal ambition? I think not. Was it ever? Only he can answer that.
Woodward practices a kind of journalism, perversely popular in the political and the entertainment industries, commonly called "access journalism". This involves a sometimes questionable trade-off between sources and methods, where unattributed information will at least ensure that the anonymous source has his side of the story published. Unfortunately access journalism can be sullied by those with an axe to grind and it also brings the expectation of quid pro quo. Access journalism can be further complicated because it involves playing and rewarding favorites. So a story's subtext becomes less about truth and more about agenda. For those less gifted intellectually, the problem becomes in trying to distinguish between the two.
To a journalism student in the 1970s, Woodward was a demigod, having broken one of the most important stories of our life time.
But it has been a slow steady down hill slide ever since. Since Watergate Woodward has written a series of best selling but occasionally embarrassing books. After The Final Days (1976, with Bernstein), he followed with The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court (1979, with Scott Armstrong), Wired, the Life and Times of John Belushi (1985), Veil: The Secret Wars of the C.I.A., 1981-1987 (1987) and The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House (1994). Several were attacked by critics who saw Woodward as fawning over his subjects, According to Christopher Hitchens (another of my not-so favorite journalists because one he is an unrepentant supporter of the Iraq war AND two because he has the appearance of being constantly liquored up), they all use the same template. Reward access, punish those who shun Woodward. To his credit Hitchens is right on point.
Curiously Hitchens also points out that one book has effectively disappeared from Woodward's resume. In "The Man Who Would Be President," co-authored with David Broder, Woodward actually proposed serious consideration of J. Danforth Quayle as a successor to the Reagan-Bush tradition.
As Hitchens observed, the book concluded with the thought that Quayle would still have to beat such formidable "rivals as Baker, Jack Kemp, Richard B. Cheney, Senator Phil Gramm of Texas and, doubtless, others." Years later, the mind reels at this rather dubious conclusion. J. Danforth Quayle? No wonder Woodward doesn't acknowledge the book.
Hitchens makes the significant point that passages like the above are a handy reminder of the essential shallowness and vanity of Washington journalism, and indeed of the ethereal mediocrities that it purports to "cover" even as it acts as their megaphone.
Later came Woodward's conversation with the dying or already dead Bill Casey. I read Veil with a healthy dose of skepticism, still willing to give him the doubt though the Casey death bed conversations left me more than puzzled.
The downward spiral continued when Woodward completely compromised himself by trading truth for access to the Shrub Bush White House resulting in two books about the war in Iraq. Bush at War (2002) and Plan of Attack (2004) were both viewed as positive reviews of Bush's presidency. In an attempt to solidify his position as Washington's power boy, Woodward became an apologist and an enabler to a morally and ethically bankrupt administration. Now I understand why Joan Didion, who had written a lengthy evisceration of Woodward in the NY Review of Books in 1996 noting Woodward's reliability as a water carrier for his sources and the "disinclination of Mr. Woodward to exert cognitive energy on what he is told," calls his books "political pornography". She is being kind.
Woodward was also given incredible access for his next book State of Denial: Bush at War (2006) on Shrub's second term. The White House, ecstatic at Woodward's highly flattering treatment of Bush in Plan of Attack and Bush at War, gave Woodward extraordinary access, confident that he would put a kindly revisionist construction on their disastrous handling of the nation's affairs. Woodward, though, sensing the political winds shifting away from the Bush Presidency chose to offer up a slightly more critical analysis. Way to go Bob!
But for me, any doubts I had about Woodward as the consummate Beltway boot licker evaporated in 2005 when Woodward famously weighed in on Valerie Plame fiasco, attacking Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation numerous times on MSNBC's Scarborough Country, on CNN with Wolf Blitzer as well as other CNN programs including Reliable Sources and Larry King Live. At first Woodward chose a professional attack, claiming Fitzgerald's investigation was "just running like a chain saw right through the lifeline that reporters have to sources who will tell you the truth, what's really going on," and was "undermining the core function in journalism."
What he did not say was that he was part of the story, a sin that is really quite unforgivable. In November of 2005, the Washington Post revealed that Woodward had testified under oath on November 14 that in June 2003, a "senior administration official" told him that former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV's wife, Valerie Plame, worked at the CIA. In fact, Woodward had a personal stake in the outcome of the investigation. He personally mislead the public, his employer and his colleagues. He crossed the line--deliberately, and betrayed everyone but his source in the process while looking to cover his ass. So while Woodward was fully expecting to be subpoenaed by Fitzgerald's office, he still felt compelled and freely able to comment on Fitzgerald's investigation. How arrogant is that?
And comment he did. His statements to Larry King on CNN in October of 2005 were more targeted and more political: "And there's a lot of innocent actions in all of this, but what has happened this prosecutor...Well, this is a junkyard-dog prosecutor, and he goes everywhere and asks every question and turns over rocks and rocks under rocks and so forth." While seeking to marginalize Fitzgerald and his investigation, Woodward conveniently chose not to disclose that he, too, was a "rock" he did not want Fitzgerald to turn over.
And then matters got worse. Woodward made other false, inflammatory and contradictory statements regarding the Plame matter. On the Chris Matthews Show, Woodward baselessly claimed that Wilson's 2002 report to the CIA on the purported sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq contradicted his July 6, 2003, New York Times op-ed, in which Wilson claimed it was unlikely such a transaction occurred. On Larry King Live, Woodward claimed that the CIA completed a "damage assessment" of Plame's outing and found that no serious harm had been done, only to be contradicted two days later by his own paper, which reported that the CIA has done no formal damage assessment.
Still on other occasions, Woodward dismissed the controversy as much ado about nothing. Some of Woodward's less admiring colleagues at the Post have vivid recollections of his unending belittling of the whole Plame affair as something of little consequence, "laughable", and "quite minimal". On NPR's Fresh Air, Woodward said: "There was no national security threat. There was no jeopardy to her life. There was no nothing. When I think all of the facts come out in this case, it's going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great."
Huh?
Judy Miller was quite rightly savaged for accepting what she claimed to be special credentials from the Pentagon in return for confidentiality. So what are we to say about Woodward, who is given special access and then repays the favor by belittling the Plame scandal, while simultaneously concealing his own personal knowledge of the White House's schedule on the outing of Valerie Plame? This is the great investigative journalist Bob Woodward? The wonderboy who broke the Watergate story? The wizard has been revealed to be nothing more than a partisan political hack touting a Republican agenda. For me, there is no question that Woodward has been carrying water for the Bush Administration since day one.
Like his assessment of Bush in his first two books, Woodward is on the wrong side of this. He emerges completely compromised, the quintessential insider. He is so far inside that he is no longer a reporter but more of a court story teller, even court jester. The fact that he felt comfortable opining on a story that involved him shows us that he has no shame, no sense of responsibility or clarity, no sense of ethical behavior, no sense of the public good. He is only interested in promoting himself and his coterie of Washington insiders with little regard for the public interest.
As one fellow blogger noted, Woodward has been bought and sold. He is what Phillip K Dick would have called, a "Yance" man, part of the ruling elite that keeps the wool pulled over the eyes of the great unwashed masses, in the service of the rich and powerful.
Woodward personifies the ultimate and ugly beltway creed: access coupled with primacy to perpetuate the status quo trumps clarity, accountability and the public good. For a so-called investigative journalist, how sad is that?
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Short bits and clips-Hillary Clinton
On the Hillary Clinton love fest with virtually every poll having her out front: I would love to be able to vote for her but in good conscience I can't. It has nothing to do with gender--I hope we have a woman president soon--just not her.
She represents everything that is wrong with politicians in general and the Democratic Party in particular. She has not only been on the wrong side of issues like Iraq while she served as an enabler for this corrupt and incompetent administration. She stood by silently while others stood up to the Axis of Liars. And more importantly, she doesn't have the humility to admit her mistakes. Hillary, like her husband, is a conservative to centrist Democrat. But unlike her husband, she shows a lot of hubris and almost no discernible ability to lead. She waits for others to take a position and then when it is safe, she reveals herself.
Barack Obama opposing the war when it was politically expedient not to do so defined leadership. Similarly John Edwards being out in front on poverty and health care defines leadership to me.
Recently Hillary Clinton began taking on Bush and Iraq which for me is too little too late or, to borrow from Mao, paper tiger stuff which is really lame.
I'm also quite certain Hillary is the candidate the Republicans want to see on the Democratic side because her negatives are too high and they know she would probably lose to a milk toast Republican. Too many conservatives and moderate Republicans hate her. And too many of us on the left don't like her either and will be tempted to stay home.
For me the strongest ticket Democrats could muster would be Edwards/Obama or Obama/Edwards. Of course being a contrarian I feel politically closest to Dennis Kucinich but that ain't gonna happen.
She represents everything that is wrong with politicians in general and the Democratic Party in particular. She has not only been on the wrong side of issues like Iraq while she served as an enabler for this corrupt and incompetent administration. She stood by silently while others stood up to the Axis of Liars. And more importantly, she doesn't have the humility to admit her mistakes. Hillary, like her husband, is a conservative to centrist Democrat. But unlike her husband, she shows a lot of hubris and almost no discernible ability to lead. She waits for others to take a position and then when it is safe, she reveals herself.
Barack Obama opposing the war when it was politically expedient not to do so defined leadership. Similarly John Edwards being out in front on poverty and health care defines leadership to me.
Recently Hillary Clinton began taking on Bush and Iraq which for me is too little too late or, to borrow from Mao, paper tiger stuff which is really lame.
I'm also quite certain Hillary is the candidate the Republicans want to see on the Democratic side because her negatives are too high and they know she would probably lose to a milk toast Republican. Too many conservatives and moderate Republicans hate her. And too many of us on the left don't like her either and will be tempted to stay home.
For me the strongest ticket Democrats could muster would be Edwards/Obama or Obama/Edwards. Of course being a contrarian I feel politically closest to Dennis Kucinich but that ain't gonna happen.
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