As Alinsky’s former aid Nicholas von Hoffman has recently pointed out, Obama was eleven when Alinsky died, and – based on some of Obama’s political miscues to date – Alinsky’s influence would be hard to find.

There seem to be two problems with Gingrich’s Alinsky allusions. First, there is no evidence that Obama is following an Alinsky agenda, and second, even if it were, there is no reason to think that an Alinsky agenda is anything like that which Gingrich implies it would be.

The many references to Alinsky led me to read Sanford Horwitt’s “Let Them Call Me Rebel”, his well researched and very well respected biography of Alinsky, published in 1989. Based on Horwitt’s book, and various other things I have read, I have reached a number of conclusions not about the relationship of Obama and Alinsky, but the relationship between Gingrich and Alinsky.

Let me give you some examples.

1. In spite of the continual allegation of various right wingers and right wing organizations, Alinsky was most definitely not a Communist, not a Communist fellow traveler, and not a Marxist. There is no evidence whatsoever that he, or the organizations he led or created, had Communist connections. During the McCarthy era, as you might expect, a fair amount of attention was paid to this very active community organizer; no evidence of any Communist or Marxist connection was ever found.

Obviously, Gingrich is not a Communist nor a Marxist (as far as I know).

So, here, they are similar.

2. Alinsky didn’t like liberals. He felt that liberals were for the underdog as long as they didn’t have to get their hands dirty, that their liberal instincts were primarily intellectual, and that you couldn’t rely on liberals to act on their liberal instincts.

Of course, Gingrich doesn’t like liberals, either (albeit, perhaps, for different different reasons).

So, here, we have another point of comparison between Gingrich and Alinsky.

3. Alinsky was against welfare and against the concept of a welfare state. He was a vocal opponent of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. He felt that these programs did not help the underclasses of the country, but would keep them in their places and make them dependent.

Here, we have an absolute Alinsky/Gingrich parallel.

4. Alinsky’s goal was to help non-elite communities organize themselves so that they could pressure the elite to accomplish their own political goals. (His particular talent was to teach communities how to do this, to identify potential leaders of the community, and to bring varying – and often warring – elements of the community to work together, often for the first time.)

Listen to Gingrich. He doesn’t style himself a “community organizer”, but, with all of his anti-Washington, anti-New York talk, he is speaking to people in the same financial condition and people who deem themselves equally powerless.

So, again, although their goals may be different, their audiences and their overall approaches to those audiences are closer than you might think. And, by the way, some of their communities are the same. Now Gingrich has not come out for any specific programs targeting African-Americans, Alinsky came to his work in black communities rather late in his career. He worked mainly with low income, immigrant, white ethnic communities. Alinsky believed for a long time that it would be too difficult to try to organize African-Americans, and that one of the biggest problems of the cities was the increasing black populations and their intrusion on white neighborhoods, and resulting white flight. His goal was to stabilize the white neighborhoods – one way to do this was to keep the blacks out or limit the number of blacks moving in, having racial quotas. Gingrich and Alinsky lived at different times – but would Gingrich have had a different philosopher here?

5. Now, it is true that, in order to gain his objectives, Alinsky would support a number of activities that might not obtain the approval of the New York Times’ Ethicist. It has been said that he believed that “the ends justified the means” – I think this is quite an exaggeration, but Alinsky did use controversial techniques (largely, having large numbers of poor folk show up in places where their presence would not be appreciated).

I don’t really know what Newt would think about techniques such as those used by Alinsky; he would most likely have opposed many of Alinsky’s specific actions. But he is, in his own way, an activist and if he were working locally, rather than nationally, I am not certain that he would not have engaged in similar tactics. But I don’t know.

5. Alinsky’s largest allies in his community organizational efforts were the established churches. He was particularly close to the Catholic church in Chicago, as his original work were done in Catholic ethnic (Polish, Irish, etc.) neighborhoods. Later, in his career, he also worked with many Protestant churches. Although Alinsky himself was Jewish, he did not work closely with any Jewish religious or civil organizations.

Most of Gingrich’s followers are religious, and, if he has not become yet the favorite of the conservative Christian groups, he is still pushing to be.

On work with religious organizations, I think Alinsky and Gingrich have a lot in common.

6. We know today that Gingrich is high on bombast, that he likes to say controversial things, that he likes to stir the pot, that he is sometimes fast and loose with the truth.

Guess what? You can say the exact same things about Alinsky.

7. We also see that some people who were previously close to Gingrich have turned against him, sometimes because of substance, and sometimes because of personality.

Guess what again? This is also the story of Alinsky’s relationships with many with whom he worked, and who supported him, over his career.

8. Finally (if this is relevant), we all know about Newt Gingrich’s marital history. We know that he left his first wife, when she was very sick with cancer. We know that he left his second wife, to marry a younger woman with whom he had been having an affair for several years.

Believe it or not, Alinsky’s history is virtually identical, except Alinsky was more efficient. Alinsky’s first wife died in a tragic drowning accident. After a number of years, he remarried apparently very happily, but his wife came down with MS. As her condition worsened, she moved to a vacation house they had bought in Carmel, California, and Alinsky was not there very often. And he met a new woman, thirty years his junior (58/28) and divorced his wife, so he could marry his young friend, after their affair had continued for several years.

Hard to find two people more alike than Alinsky and Gingrich in their treatment of ill wives.

Conclusion:

All of this is not to say that they were clones of each other. Their political positions were not the same. They probably would not have been best friends. But as to personality and tactics, Newt Gingrich and the Saul Alinsky he loves to target, were peas in a pod.

One more thing. Look at Barack Obama, and go back and see how he compares with the characteristics of Alinsky described above. Is there any similarity at all? I can’t find it.

There are a number of reasons for this. For one, assuming the book was not substantially ghost-written, Weizmann is a very good wordsmith. The style of the book, which is quite personal, keeps you going, just like a good thriller. He is especially good, I think, at describing the people with whom he had come in contact – and he sure came in contact with a lot of well known people.

This in itself is extraordinary, and is obviously a reflection of Weizmann’s exceptional qualities. He was born in a small shtetl, not far from Pinsk, in czarist Russia (in 1874). His family was large; he describes his family as middle-class, but if so, it was middle-class without money. He was sent to school in Pinsk, presumably because of his intelligence, which was a monetary strain on everyone. His description of his home town of Motol and his years in Pinsk are fascinating:

“I have said that Motol lay in one of the darkest and most forlorn corners of the Pale of Settlement….It is difficult to convey to the modern Westerner any idea of the sort of life which most of the Jewish families of Motol led, of their peculiar occupations, their fantastic poverty, their shifts and privations. On the spiritual side they were almost as isolated as on the physical. Newspapers were almost unknown in Motol. Very occasionally, we secured a Hebrew paper from Warsaw, and then it would be a month or five weeks old. To us, of course, the news would be fresh.”

and

“In Pinsk, as in Motol, I had no social contact with gentiles. They formed, indeed, a minority of the population, and consisted chiefly of administrators, railway officials and workers, the management of the canal and a number of big landowners whose estates were in the vicinity but who maintained town houses. The Jewish population differed from that of other towns of the Pale in that it possessed, in additional to the usual overload of traders and shopkeepers, a comparatively large class of river and factory workers. Jews made up the majority of the porters, navvies and raft pilots. These last were a skilled class. It needed training and aptitude to manipulate the rafts upstream on the Pina and into the canal in such a fashion as not to damage the locks. Other Jews worked in the match factory and the sawmills.”

After learning a little about Zionism in Pinsk, he continued his studies in Berlin:

“It was a curious world, existing, for us Jewish students, outside of space and time. We had nothing to do with our immediate surroundings outside of the university. In Berlin – and later when I was at Freiburg and Geneva – local politics, German and Swiss, did not exist for us In part this was due to our tacit fear of destroying our own refugee opportunities. But it sprang mostly from the sheer intensity of our inner life. And there was a third factor. If we constituted a kind of ghetto…it was to a large extent because most of us were practically penniless. I, with my hundred marks allowance a month…was among the well-to-do. But I think I can safely say that during all the years of my sojourn in Berlin I did not eat a single solid meal except as somebody’s guest.”

In Berlin, Weizmann studied chemistry, a field in which he excelled as much as he did in Zionism:

“Here, in Berlin, I grew out of my boyhood Zionism, out of my adolescence, into something like maturity. When I left Berlin for Switzerland, in 1898, at the age of twenty-four, the adult pattern of my life was set. Of course I learned a great deal in later years; but no fundamental change took place; my Zionist ideology, my scientific bent, my life’s purposes, had crystallized.”

He was in Geneva when Theodor Herzl appeared on the world scene. Weizmann’s Zionism was different from Herzl’s. Herzl was a proponent of political Zionism – work with the world’s political and financial leaders to set aside the land for Jewish settlement, and Jewish settlement and development would follow. Weizmann was closer to the philosophy of Achad Ha’am, cultural Zionism – create the basis within Europe’s Jewish population for the development of a new state, and the people will be ready when the land is ultimately available. Not that Weizmann disagreed that some political activity also was required – but this was not then his primary focus.

As an example of Weizmann’s ability to capture the personality of those with whom he came in contact, try this:

“Martin Buber is now a professor of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem; fifty years ago, he was a young aesthete, the son of a rich father, a rather odd and exotic figure in our midst. In spite of his handsome allowance from home, he was usually in debt; for he was a connoisseur of the arts and a collector of expensive items. We were good friends, thought I was often irritated by his stilted talk, which was full of forced expressions and elaborate similes, without, it seemed to me, much clarity or great beauty. My own inclinations were towards simplicity, and what I admired most was the ability to reduce a statement to its essential elements. Buber was only beginning to develop the incomparable German style which, many years later, produced his remarkable translation of the Bible.”

His reason for his move to England in 1904, when he was thirty, is expressed as follows:

“My flight to England, in 1904, was a deliberate and desperate step. It was not, to be sure, real flight….I was in danger of being eaten up by Zionism, with no benefit either to my scientific career or to Zionism. We had reached, it seemed to me, a dead end in the movement. My struggles were destroying me; an interval was needed before the possibilities of fruitful work could be restored. Achieving nothing in my public effort, neglecting my laboratory and my books, I was in danger of degenerating into a Luftmensch, one of those well meaning, undisciplined, and frustrated “eternal students” of whom I have already written. To become effective in any sense, I had to continue my education in chemistry and wait for a more propitious time in the Zionist movement”.

In England, Weizmann went to Manchester where he wound up teaching and running a laboratory at the University, while maintaining contact with Manchester Zionists. Two years after his arrival, he increased again his Zionist activity, coming out against the Herzl proposal to have Uganda substitute for Palestine, at least on a temporary basis. While Weizmann is quite critical of Herzl throughout the book, at no time is he more critical than when speaking of the split in the Zionist movement (which he fully describes) over the issue of Uganda.

While still at Manchester, Weizmann made his first trip to Palestine, describing in detail what he saw, and first began to think about the possibility of establishing a university in Palestine, which eventually became a reality as Hebrew University. His description of the germination of thoughts about such an institution, the acquisition of a site, the holding of a keystone ceremony well before any construction could start, and the eventual fundraising for and creation of the university itself makes up a significant part of Weizmann’s story. As does the decision to create a technical institute in Rehovoth, and the dedication of that institute as the Weizmann Institute of Science.

We all know what a tragedy World War I was. Weizmann discusses the war, among other things, from a Jewish perspective. He describes the fate of the Jewish populations of central and eastern Europe – the Polish Jewish population was pushed further into poverty by the armies crossing the country back and forth, and the Russian Jewish population (the other massive group assumed to be major source of future Zionist activity) was simply and quickly lost to the Zionist movement by virtue of the Bolshevik revolution and the cut-off of all contact with the rest of the Jewish world. These events turned Zionism upside down, and some Jewish leaders felt that the practical basis of Zionism was lost, and that assimilation into European populations was the more likely future course of action.

But it was also the war that led Weizmann to the next phase of his career – working with and for the British government helping the development of artificial acetone and the production of substitutions for rubber. What you learn is that Weizmann was as accomplished as a scientist as he was a Zionist leader. And it was the scientific work that Weizmann was providing to the government that brought him into contact with the British political leadership, and it was this contact that led to the eventual issuance of the Balfour Declaration, providing that the Jews had a right to a homeland in Palestine.

The details of the events leading to the Balfour Declaration, the effect of the declaration on post-war politics, the British assumptions that led to the League of Nations mandate to control Palestine (in part to counter French influence in the middle east), and the grave disappointments during the mandate period are all described from the author’s unique perspective, as are the events that led to the end of the mandate period and the declaration of the state of Israel. And of course, Weizmann’s reaction to the tragedies of the Second World War, not only of the Holocaust, but also the death of his oldest son, a pilot for the RAF, whose plane was lost off the coast of France. And, finally, the growth of the American Zionist movement, and how the Brandeis faction of American Zionism refused to let the World Zionist Organization (of which Weizmann was then president) to take a lead role in the Zionist movement, preferring more of a federating movement, with each national group acting independently, the international group having only a coordinating function. This led to a lengthy estrangement between Brandeis and Weizmann, although Weizmann respected Brandeis’ abilities greatly.

“Trial and Error” is a memoir of a fascinating and talented personality, it is the story of Jews of the shtetl, Jews of pre-war Europe, Jews of England and Jews of Palestine. It is the story of the important career of a world class chemist, and of the growth, and tribulations, of the world Zionist movement. It is the story of a world of personalities with whom Weizmann was in contact: Zionist leaders (Herzl, Achad Ha’am, Jabotinsky), religious leaders, Jewish intellectuals, military leaders (Allenby, Lawrence, Wingate), leaders of finance, scientists (including, among others, Albert Einstein) and political leaders: not only did Weizmann associate with British leaders (such as Lloyd George, Asquith, Balfour, Chamberlain, Churchill), but with Americans (Roosevelt, Welles, Brandeis, Frankfurter) and other world leaders (including Mussolini, with whom he met several times).

But who is omitted? Who is left out? Like the absent Moses from the Haggadah, the missing person in this set of memoirs is David Ben-Gurion, who is mentioned only two or three times, each time almost as an aside, towards the very end of the story. Weizmann and Ben-Gurion did not get along at all – two strong men with very different ideas on how Jewish Palestine should be developed. While with regard to the other figures with whom Weizmann came into conflict or had particular disagreements, he has no hesitancy to explain in detail their opposing principles and the effect of these differences on their personal relationship, he did not do so with Ben-Gurion. Why, I am not sure. He just chose to ignore him.

Shortly after they arrive, they are visited by their friend (and her photo editor), Richard, and his new, young girlfriend, Mandy. Mandy is different from Sarah and James – she is an event planner, who searches for the light and the beautiful – the optimist, who views a half full world, rather than the half empty world of the war journalists.

Sarah and James make fun of Richard’s infatuation – Richard, on the other hand, says that his relationship with Mandy is more than infatuation, and he too is tired at looking at the downside of everything. As the play goes on, James tends to agree – he wants to write about movies, not real life; he wants to marry Sarah and (although she reveals an affair she had in Iraq after James returned to the states), they wed (as do Richard and Mandy).

But all is not well, and as Sarah’s recovery continues and her health improves, she itches more and more to get get back to the war zone, to escape her reality, to point her camera and see “time stand still”.

The audience was more enthusiastic than I was, although I recognized a well performed show. I just am not sure what I thought of it.

Also went to the Forum Theatre’s “Sex on the Brain”, a compilation of seven (?) short plays, locally written and performed, one night only. The plays varied in interest (to me) and quality – the best were very good. The theater was filled (Round House Silver Spring) and a good time had by all. Daughter Hannah collaborated on and performed in one of the pieces.

Food: I have to say that the sesame chicken at Kao Thai in Silver Spring was first class – and that at our second meal at Blue 44, everyone enjoyed the food as well. Tried my second $5.95 lunch special at Chinatown Express. As the first time, the food wasn’t even worth $5.95.

Lectures: Eugene Kinlow of DC Votes gave a nice presentation going over the history of voting rights in the District of Columbia and the successes (small) and failures (larger) so far of his organization as it continues to fight for legislative voting rights for DC’s residents. Pointing out that the United States is currently the only democracy that does not permit residents of its capital to have full voting rights, the prospects are not good, although polls show that Americans, when informed of the situation, are overwhelmingly in favor of giving DC a vote. But politics are politics, one supposes, and Republicans don’t want to create more Democratic votes, and no one really cares.

An even more interesting lecture, or rather book talk, was by Vadim Birstein at the International Spy Museum talking about his new book, SMERSH, the story of the Soviet Union’s military counter-terrorist organization, active for only three years, 1943-1946. But what a three year period it was – enough time for SMERSH to capture Solzhenitsyn, and Wallenberg, and even to participate in the Nuremberg trials (evil judging evil). Under the control of Stalin’s paranoia, SMERSH was created, separate from the NKVD, to root out subversion in the military. During the war, approximately 6,000,000 Russians were captured by the Germans and put into prison camps. Upon their release, each was vetted by SMERSH – of the 6,000,000, approximately 600,000 were accused of traitorous activity, providing info to the Germans, and arrested, tried and executed. If they readily confessed, the escaped much of the torture of the system in the three “investigatory” prisons run by the organization. If not, they were subjected to more physical and psychological torture until they did confess. Their trials were not really trials – it was simply a case of a SMERSH judge reading and approving a report written by the SMERSH investigator setting forth the crime and the suggested punishment – the defendant was not even present.

After the war, SMERSH was disbanded and combined with a broader ministry. Its influence was felt for a long time by the families of its victims.

Film – only on TV, but I watched a movie called “Das Fraulein”, filmed about five years ago in Switzerland, which has gotten mixed reviews, but which I thought to be quite effective. It follows three women from the former Yugoslavia, who are trying to build lives in Zurich – one married, whose husband wants to return to Bosnia to a home they are hoping to build near the sea but who has been in Switzerland so long that she feels her life, as well as her children, are there and does not want to leave; one, whose lover from Serbia never made the trip, and who has been living a bitter, independent and self-isolating life managing a cafe ever since; the third, a much younger woman, recently arrived, looking for life, but harboring a possibly fatal disease. It’s a fairly low key film, and that’s the way it should be.

Instead, she claimed that it was impossible to foretell the future, and that after all she is a historian, and her skill is interpreting the past. Keeping with her profession, she said that she went back and looked at the writings of Jewish sociologists of the 1950s and 1960s and at their predictions for the future. Many of their predictions did not come to pass: the demise of orthodox Judaism in the United States being perhaps the most notable. But even more interesting were the changes that they did not foresee: Jewish day schools, the increasing role of women in ritual, Jews by choice, the complex relationship with Israel and Israeli policy, the immigration from the Soviet Union, the growth of the havurah movement, etc. Proving her point as to the difficulty of predicting the future.

She went on to talk about Jewish history in American, her field. This part of her presentation was not as successful, I don’t think, in large part, in part because the topic is so broad. She didn’t give a chronological presentation, but instead concentrated on five facets of American life that she believe facilitated Jewish integration and success in this country. They were as follows (obviously abbreviated):

1. The United States is a society of immigrants. Jews were immigrants like the others.
2. The United States has unfortunately always been a society based on race; the Jews were always considered to be ‘white’.
3. The economy of the United States has, with setbacks of course, evidenced steady progress, and the Jewish population has been positioned to take advantage of that progress, particularly in fields of commerce.
4. Religious freedom as a facet of American society, and in particular how religious discrimination in the United States was much more anti-Catholic than anti-Jewish.
5. Political office in the United States has never been dependent on religious affiliation.

She went through detailed explanations of how these various elements supported Jewish success. While there was little to argue with in her presentation, I thought there were some equally important points that Diner did not make. Most importantly, she did not talk about the American constitution itself, which in two ways at least, helped protect Jews in America. First, the various anti-discrimination provisions of the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments, which prohibited discrimination based on religious preference or many other categories. Secondly, the balance of power provisions of the constitution, which provide that the judiciary, and not the legislature, have the ultimate power in determining constitutional questions. She also did not talk about the nature of the original Jewish settlers, who came to this country to become a part of society and not to exclude themselves from it, and who set the tone for the many more who came later. Nor the financial success of many Jews and how that success translated into social influence and power. Nor the many social organizations, such as the Masonic orders, which treated Jews and Christians equally and allowed the to meet and work together in ways otherwise not possible. And only in response to a question did she discuss the Jewish role in media and entertainment and how that has affected the larger society’s view of itself.

I enjoyed the presentation. It gave me a number of ideas. But I think she could have developed her thesis better in some respects.

Vanity Fair – January. It was a pretty good edition, with an interesting biographical sketch of Rick Perry (“But ‘candidates who aren’t that smart can be really good,’ points out one Democratic consultant in Austin, ‘because they stay on message. A guy like Rick, you tell him there are three things you have to say, and it’s all you have to say, he’ll do it.’ If he cane remember them, that is.”) An interesting, somewhat depressing and not too profound account of Lady Gaga [not that I know who she really is] and her parents, with some photography by Annie Liebovitz including one unnecessary and not very attractive nude photo of the young singer. An article about the Japanese who choose to work to help clear up the radioactive earthquake site and the American expert Dr. Robert Gale who advises them. A very interesting article about George Kennan’s increasing concern about changes in the U.S., as we became more and more the policeman of the world, and a nation dependent upon our military establishment. A surprisingly interesting (even if the conclusion of the story is unclear) of the effect of Ted Forstmann’s illness on the fate of his IMG, and the actions of board member Michael Orvitz, potentially to take control of the company. An article on the courtship of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip of Greece 65 years ago (which I did not read in full). And, what I assume is Christopher Hitchens’ last piece, where he tears apart the idea that “what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger”, as he weakens and weakens from chemotherapy and radiation therapy.

Placebos. Fascinating article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, stating that various studies have shown that often:
1. placebos work as well as real medicine
2. placebos work as well as real medicine even if the patient knows it’s a placebo
3. positive mental changes can come about from imagining placebos which can work as well as taking medicine, even if you don’t take the placebo.
Really?

Caps. Last night, went to the Caps/Calgary game, which the Caps won 3-1 for their fourth straight. They still have a way to go, but Vokoun looks good in goal, Ovechkin looks like the old Ovechkin, and Backstrom and Johannson played very strong games. Does this mean that the Caps are ready to re-rise to the top? Certainly not clear, yet.

Lecture by Ron Nessen: Ron Nessen, former Vietnam correspondent, White House correspondent, and Press Secretary to Gerald Ford, spoke this morning, sponsored by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. His presentation was based on his experience between 1962 and 1977, as stated in his new book, “Making the News, Taking the News”. His Vietnam experience, including when he was embedded with the 101st Airborne Division and when he was seriously wounded and shipped back to Walter Reed Army Hospital, his time as NBC correspondent during the Nixon and early Ford presidencies and then his time as Ford’s press secretary. He is a very engaging speaker, he allowed for a lot of insight without giving away state secrets, and fielded questions as if he had had a lot of experience during this when the stakes were much greater. I’d recommend you looking at the book.

Finally, “The Worlds Within Her” by Canadian writer Neil Bissoondath, a Trinidad born author of Indian ethnicity (he is Naipul’s nephew). A prize winning book, published about 12 years ago, it captured me because I liked its rhythm. Short, short chapters, carrying several connected and family-related plot lines, weaving back and forth. Yasmin, a news anchor married to an architect, born in Trinidad, but resident of Toronto since she was four, brings her mother’s ashes back to Trinidad, where she meets family members with whom she has had little contact. Her father (whom she does not remember) died before she and her mother moved north, but her father’s sister and brother still live in the old family house. Yasmin learns a lot on her trip to Trinidad, the readers learn a lot about Yasmin’s life (the good and the very bad) in Canada, and also about the life of her late mother, whose visits to a friend in a nursing home are reported in one of the chains. Yasmin, however much she learns, does not learn everything, but we do. Many issues are raised – family (blood and marriage) relationships, unspeakable tragedy, ethnic identity, political and economic frustrations. Recommended highly.

But, hold on, perhaps things are not so different this year. Remember 1968 (if you can), when the Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater, right wing, conservative Arizona senator, who led his party to an extraordinary defeat, carrying only six states (Arizona and 5 states of the deep south) and receiving only about 36% of the popular vote nationwide. How did the Republicans choose such an unelectable candidate, and was he in fact unelectable or did they make a series of mistakes during the campaign that sealed Goldwater’s fate?

A surprisingly interesting and readable book on the subject was published about five years ago. Written by J. William Middendorf II, the treasurer of the Goldwater campaign, and later American ambassador to the Netherlands, titled, “A Glorious Disaster”, the book describes (accurately, I would think) the Goldwater campaign as a disastrous campaign for the presidency in 1968, but as the genesis of today’s Republican party, a party dominated not by the traditional moderate eastern elite (Rockefeller, Scranton, Eisenhower, Javits, etc.), but by a new breed – ideological conservatives. Middendorf shows how so much of today’s Republican party’s ideology and organization are based on changes, in personnel and positions, developed during the Goldwater campaign.

When you look at the ideological positions of the Goldwater campaign, you see the ideological positions of many of today’s main line Republicans. When you look at campaign techniques – how funds are raised and accounted for, how polling is conducted, how public relations are handled – you see today’s mechanisms have their origins in the Goldwater campaign. When you look at the Conservatives criticism of the policies of the Democrats in 1968, you see they concentrated on the same ‘big government’ issues that resonate today. When you look at the personnel who first got involved during the Goldwater campaign – including Bill Buckley, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan – you certainly see the course the Republican party adopted and how it continued (and became so successful) to the present day.

Middendorf’s position is that Goldwater lost the election, but that the lessons learned in this loss have served the Republicans well, and led to the future victories of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and to the way the party relates to American voters today. At the same time, Middendorf is quite critical of the way the party handled this ideological transformation in 1968, the general sloppiness of so much of the campaign, the personal in-fighting that went on. He is equally critical of Goldwater’s campaign tactics. Gingrich-like, Goldwater had a hard time sticking to the message, and not going off on his own, giving off the cuff responses to questions with answers that came back to haunt him, often being misinterpreted and distorted, but always giving the Democrats fodder for their own campaign. Most harmful was not Goldwater’s position on civil rights (abhorrent as it might have been), which the moderate base of the country could probably ignore in 1968, but rather Goldwater’s perceived position as being nuclear slap-heavy, with a series of statements that appeared to broaden the number of situations where Goldwater thought tactical nuclear weapons would be available for use, including situations where the President would not personally have to approve their use. Whether or not Goldwater really was advocating an expanded potential use of nuclear weapons, or whether he was simply carelessly restating existing federal policy, was irrelevant – the damage was done.

The lessons for today (for Democrats and Republicans) are clear.

Our dinner was elegant, but simple – sauteed flounder, celery root puree and braised broccoli rabe (hummus and carrots as an appetizer, and a bottle of Prosecco to drink). Our movies were interrupted by the Capitals/Blue Jackets hockey game – we were pleased to see the Caps come from a 2-0 clear defeat (after two periods) to a 4-2 victory (after three).

Before the game, we watched “The King’s Speech”, last year’s “best picture”. As most readers probably agree, it’s an excellent film – beautifully acted, well directed, easy to follow, and completely enjoyable to watch. My problem, though, is one that I have often with films and plays based on history – they distort the history in the name of artistic license. In and of itself, this may not be a problem; the problem arises because those who see the film think they know the history and pretty soon the film creates the history and the history itself is distorted. I have noted this a number of cases, such as in Theater J’s “The New Jerusalem”, which purports to tell the story of the excommunication trial of Spinoza…….., but doesn’t.

There is a very interesting section on historical accuracy on the Wikipedia article on “The King’s Speech” – I suggest you look at it. You will learn how the timing of Logue’s treatment of the future George VI was compressed and changed, how the familiarity between royalty and commoner was overstated, and so forth. Yes, Edward abdicated and George became king. Yes, George was a stammerer from early childhood. Yes, he was helped, both before and after his coronation, by one Lionel Logue. But the devil is in the details, and the details of the movie are different from the details of history.

As to “The Hope”, my reaction was quite different. I was disappointed in the film, after having looked forward to what I thought was a terrific concept for a movie. I just thought that all of the characters, the whites and the blacks, were so stereotypical, shallow and predictable, as to make the movie less than a credible account of the relationships between white housewives and black maids in the Mississippi of the 1960s. Now, I haven’t read the book (and won’t be reading it), and maybe I’d feel differently if I had read it. For those who are interested in the general subject, I also suggest they read Fannie Cook’s “Mrs. Palmer’s Honey”, published in 1946. It talks of the relationship between the Palmer family in St. Louis and their maid Honey who (although they never thought about it) had a life of her own about which they knew nothing, while she, Honey, knew everything about theirs.

An Israeli mystery, Batya Gur’s “The Saturday Morning Murder”, a murder of a Jerusalem psychoanalyst, which left me cold. That was a surprise as Gur, who died much too soon several years ago, is so well recommended. But this was, I think, her first book, so I should try again.

My first attempt to read Nadine Gordimer, and I will finish it up this weekend. “The Pickup”, the story of a young white South African woman, somewhat rebellious daughter of a wealthy father, who takes as her lover and then husband an illegal Arab immigrant, who is deported back to his desert country (unnamed, but presumably Morocco). She decides to follow. Not sure yet how it will turn out.

Wasting time at the National Gallery’s showing of Andy Warhol’s “Velvet Underground”. If you are offered the opportunity to see it, run FAST in the opposite direction. The visit saved, though, by the exhibit of Renaissance bronzes by Antico, and the photography of Harry Callahan.

It was a very interesting story, one that I had not heard about before. And, truth be known, one that I heard nothing about it subsequently, so I forgot the story, like so many others. Until I came across a recent book by Mary Kay Ricks called “Escape on the Pearl: the Historic Bid for Freedom on the Underground Railroad”, published about four years ago.

The book tells two parallel stories. First, the attempted escape of 77 slaves on the Pearl, the capture of the ship as it faced weather difficulties before hitting open water, and the fate of slaves (particularly of the two young Edmondson sisters and their large family), as well as the crew members and captain. Second, the story of slavery in the District of Columbia and, to an extent, the nation as a whole.

The District of Columbia permitted slavery since the day it was carved from slave states Virginia and Maryland. This does not mean that slavery was extensive – by the 1840s, there were over three times as many free blacks as slaves in the District. In fact, slavery in the Maryland/Virginia area became less prevalent as the 19th century progressed; the slave-rich tobacco economy had suffered as slavery as a major force moved south to the cotton states. It was far from unusual for the local slave markets to offer mid-Atlantic slaves for sale to traders who brought them south for resale at a high profit.

While there was little pressure to end slavery in the South during the first decades of the 19th century, there were increasing battles over whether slavery would be permitted in newer states and territories. The Missouri compromise of 1820 permitted the entry of Maine as a free state, Missouri as a slave state and stated that no slaves could be admitted to states north of a certain parallel. In the 1830′s, anti-slavery agitation grew throughout the North, and made its entry into the District of Columbia; the underground railway became quite active, the 1848 attempted escape on the Pearl was the most extreme manifestation of its activities.

The Missouri Compromise became history in 1850, when California was admitted as a free state, but other territories conquered through the Mexican War allowed to establish their own policies. The 1850 compromise was accompanied by a vastly strengthened fugitive slave act, which made it much easier to retrieve slaves who had escaped to the North, even if they had lived there as free blacks for decades. This in turn was affirmed by the infamous Dred Scott case in 1857, just a few years before Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860 and the first shots of the Civil War at Ft. Sumter in 1861.

In 1862, President Lincoln signed legislation finally freeing the slaves of the District of Columbia, six months before the effective date of the Emancipation Proclamation which purported to free the slaves of the South.

Throughout all of this, “Escape on the Pearl” deals with the fate of the participants in the unsuccessful attempt escape. And there fates were difficult ones – most wound up in prison for a while, some longer than others. Some of the slaves were taken back by their masters, but most weren’t and were sold, with families split, etc. And the fate of the Edmondsons is more than a story unto itself – worth reading the book just for their story.

Recommended.