Quote of the Day (Mike Royko, on an Earlier War Over an Oil-Rich Mideast Nation)

“In two or three years, Kuwait will be close to looking as it did before Iraq looted and plundered it. But I guarantee that the West Side of Chicago, much of the Bronx, and the slums of Newark, Gary, New Orleans, and other American cities will be the same mess they are now. That’s because Kuwait sits atop an ocean of liquid gold. It can hire the giant Bechtel corporation and other globe-hopping companies to perform a miraculous rehab job. Unfortunately, nobody is drilling gushers on the West Side of Chicago or in Detroit or the Bronx. And Bechtel doesn't take our IOUs.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper columnist Mike Royko (1932-1997), “Kuwait’s Future Brighter Than Ours,” originally published in the Chicago Tribune, Mar. 12, 1991, reprinted in One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko (1999)

Operation Desert Storm concluded 35 years ago this past Saturday. The outcome made a national hero of General Norman Schwarzkopf, briefly boosted President George H.W. Bush’s approval rating, and even now retains something of a retrospective glow: a conflict with comparatively few American casualties, with a limited objective—Saddam Hussein’s occupation forces thrust out of Kuwait.

But every war has unintended, often deleterious, consequences, and the 1990-91 Gulf War was no different. To ensure that Saddam would not threaten a key oil-rich ally, Bush stationed American forces in Saudi Arabia, which Osama bin Laden saw as an “infidel” offense against Islam’s holiest sites. He launched al Qaeda in an attempt to drive them out.

Right on the anniversary of that first Gulf War, another Mideast war of choice was launched. Already there are casualties, and sites have been hit not only in Iran, but elsewhere in the Mideast.

Even if the war concludes with an outcome that President Trump proclaims favorable, we won’t know for years—as also with the replacement of a prior leader with the Shah of Iran in 1953—whether this will be in long-term American interests.

The region has a long memory, and you can bet it’ll remember that Trump told The New York Times back in 2016 how his policy for fighting the Islamic States would differ from Barack Obama’s: “I’ve been saying it for years: Take the oil.” It’s impossible to ascribe good motives to a country that’s elected a leader who so unashamedly proclaims self-interest.

I wish Mike Royko were alive to comment on all this. Long ago, when Trump was only a tabloid fixture, the columnist, in a hilarious February 1990 piece, informed readers, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, that Marla Maples was not the aspiring mogul’s mistress but, according to “a very high-ranking source in the Trump Organization,” his personal laundress:

“And that, pure and simple, is the reason Mr. Trump kept her nearby, in a hotel room one floor below his, and brought her to Aspen and took her on his yacht and had her accompany him to parties and other social events.”

But in this “Quote of the Day,” Royko got serious, pointing out what remain American problems: neglect at home while millions are spent on foreign conflicts. 

(Though progress has been made in some neighborhoods in the areas mentioned, too many remain symbols of urban decay. And before long, the pain spread beyond the inner city: from 1980 to 2016, the Great Lakes region lost ground economically, with Michigan, Wisconsin, and western Pennsylvania performing particularly badly, according to Indermit Gil’s 2019 analysis for the Brookings Institution.)

Much like “Make America Great Again,” the notion of “America First” was a chimera, a propaganda slogan conceived to create a scapegoat—aid going to foreign governments or, worse still, foreigners coming to this country—for this nation’s underinvestment in its own material and human resources.

Don’t imagine for a moment that this situation will be redressed in that den of scorpions, the Middle East. Even the quick takeover of Venezuela ended up costing $3 billion for its late August-to-early February military buildup, according to Becca Wasser, a military strategy expert at the Centre for a New American Security, a think-tank.

The Iranian campaign is already longer than that, even beyond the walkover stage, courtesy of an administration equally lacking competence and conscience. We’d better hope that this conflict won’t devolve into the quagmire that the Second Gulf War became under George W. Bush.

Quote of the Day (Anton Chekhov, on Russia)

“Russia is an enormous plain across which wander mischievous men.”—Russian playwright and short-story writer Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), Note-book of Anton Chekhov, translated by S.K. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf (1921)

The trouble is, a mischievous man ends up the ruler of the country, with similar men as his minions.

Photo of the Day: Mountain of Snow, Veterans’ Memorial/Depot Square Park, Englewood NJ

I took the image accompanying this post two days ago, after rising temperatures had helped melt some of the 27 inches of snow from earlier in the week. To clear space in the large parking lot just north of our city’s downtown, a tractor moved all that white stuff into a mammoth pile.

Make that two mammoth piles. The one seen here was in the park. Another was in a single spot in the parking lot.

Believe it or not, these piles were even wider and higher when the tractor finished its work. I’m just hoping that Mother Nature will take care of the rest in short order and reduce it all to large puddles.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Maude,’ In Which She Praises a New ‘Hit Single’)

[Maude Findlay is alarmed as she comes into her living room to find daughter Carol dancing “The Hustle” with lecherous middle-aged married businessman Randy Cutler, who’s about to buy a store from Maude’s husband Walter.]

Maude Findlay [played by Bea Arthur] [turning off the record, picking up another one]: “Randy, Randy, I’m so sorry to interrupt, but you must hear the new album Walter just bought: “Charlton Heston and ‘The Ten Commandments.’ That's the one that has that hit single ‘Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery.’” —Maude, Season 4, Episode 12, “Walter’s Ethics,” original air date Dec. 1, 1975, teleplay by Arthur Marx and Bob Fisher, directed by Hal Cooper

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Renee Roden, on the Continuing Memory of the Transfiguration)

“The Eucharist—the community’s shared anamnesis or remembering of Christ’s sacrifice and Christ’s revelation of himself in glory—makes Christ truly present in our world. Rather than building a monument in response to holiness, we are called to become the living stones. Our lives, our hearts, and our communities are called to become a testament to the transfiguration we have seen. The church is not real estate. We don’t need to pitch a tent. We just have to go out and share the memory.”—Journalist and author Renee Roden, “A Reflection for the Feast of the Transfiguration,” www.USCatholic.org, July 31, 2023

The image accompanying this post, The Transfiguration, was created by the Italian Renaissance painter Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, a.k.a. Raphael (1483-1520).

Flashback, February 1966: Susann’s ‘Pink Trash’ Takes Publishing World by Storm

In writing Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann was biting the hand that wouldn’t feed her. A flop as an actress, she took revenge on the theater and film industries that scoffed at her talent with her first novel, published this month 60 years ago.

As an early 1980s undergrad, I nodded in agreement when one of my English Department professors confidently predicted that, though Valley of the Dolls had topped the bestseller lists, its lack of merit would eventually put it out of print. He turned out to be only half right.

At one point, the novel went out of print and stayed that way for 15 years. But a clamor must have gone up for this guilty pleasure, because in the autumn of 1997 it was reissued, leading to a phrase associated with it making its appearance in The Atlantic Monthly’s “Word Watch” column in April 1998: “pink trash,” defined as “the newly revived literacy” of Susann’s novel.

“Word Watch” drily noted the term’s origin: “reports that [Susann] typed her manuscript on pink paper.” The “trash” part of the phrase came from the book’s subject matter, “the seamy side of show business.”

Maverick publisher Bernard Geis took a flyer on the book when other, more reputable publishers, as revolted by its awful style and structure as by its tawdry content, passed when it was offered to them.

Little did he know that the author he gambled on would capitalize on changing sexual mores and her own tireless promotional know-how to push the novel to the top of the bestseller list—or that she would become so annoyed by him that she’d dump him when she got to her next book, The Love Machine.

Over the prior decade, readers had become accustomed, through novels like Grace Metalious’ Peyton Place and D.H. Lawrence’s long-banned Lady Chatterley’s Lover, to more graphic depictions of sexuality. Now, Ms. Susann was not only including pre-marital and extra-marital sex, but same-sex relationships.

Moreover, with jazz and rock ‘n’ roll musicians continually in the news for experimenting with hard drugs, all the pill-popping that the author included (the “dolls” of the title referred to valium) paled by comparison.

For readers actually paying attention to characters, Susann included entertainment figures that most, if not all, of her readers could have guessed at: a Broadway musical-comedy star jealous of her perch (Ethel Merman); a rising young star who becomes addicted to pills (Judy Garland); a blond beauty (Marilyn Monroe); and a reputed “good girl” who, at the start of her career, becomes involved with an older, married man (Grace Kelly).

Valley of the Dolls was a roman a clef (literally, “novel with a key”), a literary genre that over the years has figured in The Sun Also Rises, Tender Is the Night, and The Dharma Bums. But Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Jack Kerouac possessed something that Susann clearly didn’t: ability.

Maybe you are among the relative few who know something of the story of Susann from the 2000 film Isn’t She Great, with Bette Midler as the obstreperous author. I stress the word “something” because, as with so many “based-on-fact” movies, it departs from reality in some respects. (For instance, the character “Michael Hastings,” stunned by the cyclonic Ms. Susann, was actually legendary editor and author Michael Korda.)

But the movie was correct in one respect: publishing staffers who dealt with her on a regular basis probably wanted to scream “Help!” whenever they heard her on the phone or, worse, saw her entering their offices.

But booksellers from coast to coast loved her. She’d come in laden with all kinds of stuff: gifts, personalized copies of her books, and, for the truckers hauling them from the warehouse, trays of Danish pastries.

And, because, through contacts made by her publicist husband Irving Mansfield, she’d appeared on “The Tonight Show” with provocative opinions on everything, crowds would be waiting on her book tours. In fact, her great innovation wasn’t her content or style but the author promotional circuit.

More than a few critical brickbats came Susann’s way, though the ones that may have hurt the most came from Gloria Steinem (who lamented her opposition to feminism) and Sara Davidson (who, after taking advantage of her hospitality and thoughtfulness in an interview—including making a call from the house and lamenting her love life—savaged the novelist and Mansfield).

Five years ago, in an interview with Literary Journalism Studies, Davidson copped to misgivings about her article. She seemed especially apologetic about making all-too-easy sport about the couple’s lifestyle, but there was a larger flaw she didn’t admit to: invading the family’s zone of privacy.

At one point, Davidson noted, “A subject Jackie and Irving never bring up is their son. When questioned, they say the boy is sixteen and in school in Arizona.”

What Davidson didn’t know—one hopes, anyway—is that Guy Hildy Mansfield had been diagnosed with severe autism/Kanner’s syndrome at age three. After treatment for cancer in 1962, Susann may have believed she was on borrowed time, so she wanted to make enough money to ensure his institutional care after she was gone.

She didn’t have very much time, but she did make it count. Before she died at age 56 in 1974, Susann penned three more scandalous bestsellers: The Love Machine, Once Is Not Enough, and Dolores.

Before Susann, publishing tended to be a rather tweedy gentleman’s profession. She swept in with a different attitude: "A new book is like a new brand of detergent," she said. "You have to let the public know about it. What's wrong with that?" For a publishing industry that, especially in the 1960s, began to transition from independent houses to corporate subsidiaries, her mindset fulfilled the imperative to meet the bottom line, come what may.

(The image accompanying this post comes from the 1967 film adaptation of Valley of the Dolls, starring Barbara Parkins, Sharon Tate, and Patty Duke.)

Quote of the Day (Francois Mauriac, on a ‘Close Correspondence Between Individual and Collective Crimes’)

“The mystery of evil—there are no two ways of approaching it. We must either deny evil or we must accept it as it appears both within ourselves and without — in our individual lives, that of our passions, as well as in the history written with the blood of men by power-hungry empires. I have always believed that there is a close correspondence between individual and collective crimes, and, journalist that I am, I do nothing but decipher from day to day in the horror of political history the visible consequences of that invisible history which takes place in the obscurity of the heart. We pay dearly for the evidence that evil is evil, we who live under a sky where the smoke of crematories is still drifting. We have seen them devour under our own eyes millions of innocents, even children. And history continues in the same manner. The system of concentration camps has struck deep roots in old countries where Christ has been loved, adored, and served for centuries. We are watching with horror how that part of the world in which man is still enjoying his human rights, where the human mind remains free, is shrinking under our eyes.”—French novelist (and lifelong Catholic) Francois Mauriac (1885-1970), Nobel Literature Prize acceptance speech, delivered on Dec. 10, 1952, in Stockholm, Sweden

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Born Yesterday,’ on the ‘Struggle Between the Selfish and the Unselfish’)

[Reporter Paul Verrall is discussing Harry Brock, a vulgar, hot-tempered, corrupt tycoon, with the businessman’s mistress, Billie Dawn.]

Paul Verrall [played by William Holden]: “Harry's a menace.”

Billie Dawn [played by Judy Holliday]: “He's not so bad. I seen worse.”

Paul: “Has he ever thought of anyone but himself?”

Billie: “Who does?”

Paul: “Millions of people, Billie. The whole history of the world is a story of a struggle between the selfish and the unselfish.”

Billie: I can hear you.

Paul: “All that's bad around us is bred by selfishness. Sometimes selfishness can even get to be a - a cause, an organized force, even a government. And then it's called fascism. Can you understand that?”

Billie: “Sort of.”

Paul: “Well, think about it.

Billie: You're crazy about me, aren't ya?”

Paul: “Yes.”

Billie: “That's why you're so mad at Harry.”

Paul: “Listen, I hate his life, what he does, what he stands for—not him. He just doesn't know any better.”

Billie: “I go for you, too.”—Born Yesterday (1950), screenplay by Albert Mannheimer and Garson Kanin based on Kanin’s play, directed by George Cukor

Quote of the Day (Alfred Kazin, on a ‘Gelatinous Muddy Mess’ of Deep Winter)

“Deep winter, yellow sky last night when I went to bed and yellow sky when I woke up. All the streets and skies and buses and people merge into a gelatinous muddy mess. I am depressed by the inability to walk freely—the sky comes down on me from morning on.” —American literary critic and memoirist Alfred Kazin (1915-1998), A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin (1996)

After this week’s blizzard, the roads and side streets are clear by now, but many street crossings are still a mess. You have to step gingerly lest you step into the squishy remnants of the storm. Don’t even think about walking out at night; you can’t discount the dangers of refreezing.

As they used to say on Hill Street Blues: let’s be careful out there.

Quote of the Day (Theodore Roosevelt, Warning About 'Special Interests’ vs. Democracy)

"At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth.” —U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), “The New Nationalism,” speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, August 31, 1910

Quote of the Day (Samuel Butler, on ‘True Inspiration’)

“Inspiration is never genuine if it is known as inspiration at the time. True inspiration always steals on a person; its importance not being fully recognised for some time. So men of genius always escape their own immediate belongings, and indeed generally their own age.”—English novelist and critic Samuel Butler (1835-1902), Samuel Butler's Note-Books, edited by Geoffrey Keynes and Brian Hill (1952)

Verse of the Day (W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, on a Long-Kept Secret)

“At last the secret is out,
as it always must come in the end,
the delicious story is ripe to tell
to tell to the intimate friend;
over the tea-cups and into the square
the tongues has its desire;
still waters run deep, my dear,
there's never smoke without fire.”— English-born American poet, critic and playwright W. H. Auden (1907-1973) and Anglo-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, memoirist, and diarist Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986), The Ascent of F6: A Tragedy in Two Acts (1936)
 
Well, in the case of The Person Formerly Known as Prince Andrew, Duke of York, that would be secrets, plural. And they are probably not all out, but so many have emerged about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein that he has been stripped of his royal title and, as of last week, arrested on “suspicion of misconduct while in office.”
 
Before his (since terminated) marriage, this ex-royal enjoyed something of a reputation on Fleet Street of what might be called in the British Isles “a bit of a lad.” But nothing prepared the country for the firestorm surrounding e-mails and photos released from the Epstein files that further undermined Andrew’s disastrous attempt at damage control a few years ago.
 
Like Mark Twain, I have long believed that “the kingly office…is no more entitled to respect than the flag of a pirate.” But these days, I think that the British are doing far more to hold to account those in the highest positions of their country than we are here in the United States.
 
And that goes for the fellow here who would like to hold all power, with nobody to second-guess him. All his talk about the Epstein revelations having “exonerated” him only leaves most of us exasperated. If he’s really innocent, why not release the remaining 3 million documents?
 
(The image of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor that accompanies this post was extracted from a photo of him with Juan Manuel Santos, President, Republic of Colombia. It was taken on Nov. 9, 2017, on the presentation of the Chatham House Prize, and was made available by Chatham House. Since then, Andrew’s title, along with his smile, has disappeared.)

Photo of the Day: The Calm Before the Snowstorm

Like so many New Jerseyites, I waited patiently for the 12-plus inches of snow from the storm in late January to melt away. In the past week, courtesy of higher temperatures and rain, it finally receded to a more manageable level.

Then came the news that four weeks to the day of that big storm, another, with maybe even more snow and higher winds, was going to hit.

I wasn’t in the best frame of mind, then, when I drove out to Overpeck Park, not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ, for the kind of walk I hadn’t been able to take in weeks. Despite large puddles in spots, many other area residents felt similarly and circled the large track on the field.

If anything heartened me as I thought of what was to come within 24 hours (and even as I type this, I can see the flakes following), it was that earlier this winter, the days would have been shorter and I wouldn’t have able to take the attached picture of the glorious late-afternoon sky—and that it might take less time for traces of this latest brutal storm to disappear.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Abraham Heschel, on How the Prophet Disdains ‘Conventional Lies’)

"The prophet is a person who suffers from a profound maladjustment to the spirit of society, with its conventional lies, with its concessions to man's weakness. Compromise is an attitude the prophet abhors. This seems to be the implication of his thinking: compromise has corrupted the human species. All elements within his soul are insurgent against indifference to aberration. The prophet’s maladaptation to his environment may be characterized as moral madness (as distinguished from madness in a psychological sense)." — Polish-born American Jewish theologian Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel (1907-1972), The Prophets (1962)

Quote of the Day (Tom Robbins, on Being ‘Extremely Reverent’)

“I’m extremely reverent; it just depends what I’m looking at. From the outside, my life may look chaotic, but inside I feel like some kind of monk licking an ice cream cone while straddling a runaway horse.” —American novelist Tom Robbins (1932-2025), quoted by Rob Liguori, “ ‘I Don't Let It Snow on My Fiesta,’” The New York Times Sunday Magazine, May 25, 2014

This cropped image of Tom Robbins, in San Francisco at a reading sponsored by Booksmith, was taken on Sept. 24, 2005, by 48states (talk).

TV Quote of the Day (‘Yes, Prime Minister,’ on What Worries the U.K. Government)

James Hacker [played by Paul Eddington]: “Humphrey, I'm worried.”

Sir Humphrey Appleby [played by Nigel Hawthorne]: “Oh, what about, Prime Minister?”

Hacker: “About the Americans.”

Appleby: “Oh yes, well, we're all worried about the Americans.” — Yes, Prime Minister, Season 1, Episode 6, “A Victory for Democracy,” original air date Feb. 13, 1986, teleplay by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, directed by Sydney Lotterby

Forty years after this episode in this hilarious series aired, the British have even more to worry about their partner in the “special relationship” than they did back when it only concerned Americans going crazy about Communist subversion.

Now, the Prime Minister has so much more on his mind—like whether the current American President will destroy the transatlantic alliance, subvert representative governments around the globe, spark a trade war by ratcheting up tariffs, or use Royal Air Force bases for potential unilateral strikes on Iran.

Moreover, the Prime Minister and King Charles are sweating over what else the Americans have in the Epstein files—like whether they could make matters even worse, if possible, for the former Prince Andrew, and, with more revelations spilling out about additional cabinet ministers, whether the government of Keir Starmer could fall.

This Day in Film History (Death of Stanley Kramer, Postwar Liberal Producer-Director)

Feb. 19, 2001— Stanley Kramer, a director and producer who stirred audiences’ consciences with provocative sociopolitical content, died at age 87 at the Motion Picture Home in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, Calif., from complications of pneumonia.

It had been more than two decades since Kramer had retired from the movie business, and more than three since his films had made money or even won critical acclaim. In the quarter century since his death, both conservatives and liberals, in agreement on little else, believe that he was as stodgy in technique as square in outlook.

But Kramer had a two-decade run in which he attracted major stars and made profitable movies with content that risk-averse, politically conservative studio executives regarded as radioactive. 

He might not have been the flashiest, most innovative director, but he was important for making Cold War America look in the mirror he held up to it on injustice at home.

Coming of age in Hell’s Kitchen in New York during the Great Depression, hearing his mother extol her clerical job at Paramount Studios in Gotham, Kramer eventually made his way to Los Angeles, where he got ground-up training in the film industry as a carpenter, screenwriter, editor, and producer before his rise was interrupted by a stint in the Army Signal Corps during World War II.

The fracturing of the studio system in the late 1940s opened the way for someone like Kramer who had, in effect, adopted guerrilla tactics in producing his early independent pictures, on the cheap and on the fly. Because of its sensitive subject, Kramer shot Home of the Brave (1949), generally considered the first movie on racism to be distributed by a Hollywood studio, in seventeen days in total secrecy under a different title.

A five-year contract he signed as an independent producer for Columbia Pictures in 1951 guaranteed a steadier financial base and higher budgets, but at the price of being second-guessed by studio head Harry Cohn, whom Kramer later described as “vulgar, domineering, semi-literate, ruthless, boorish and malevolent.”

High Noon, a taut western with a not-so-subtle message about the dangers of McCarthyism, represented perhaps his greatest triumph in this period while also damaging a friendship and giving him a reputation for having the courage of someone else’s convictions.

After his producing partner, screenwriter Carl Foreman, ran afoul of the House Committee on Un-American Activities for refusing to “name names” of Communists he had known earlier in the industry, Kramer bought his share of the partnership, and would have totally erased his participation in the movie were it not for protests by director Fred Zinnemann and star Gary Cooper.

A move into the director’s chair, Kramer felt, was a natural progression for him, considering how he had become so involved with all aspects of his films to date. 

But it took a couple of years before he hit his stride with The Defiant Ones (1958), with Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier as escaped convicts forced to overcome their differences over race—a dramatic encapsulation of the conflict starting to rage in earnest in America during that time.

Over the next nine years, Kramer would delve into nuclear annihilation (On the Beach, 1959), evolution and church-state relations (Inherit the Wind, 1960), antisemitism (Judgment at Nuremberg, 1961, and Ship of Fools, 1965), greed (his atypical 1963 breakneck farce, It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World), and, most controversially, interracial marriage (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, 1967, in the image accompanying this post).

What The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael lambasted as Kramer’s “irritatingly self-righteous” themes may have limited the director’s critical acceptance. But with his movies continuing to mint box-office gold, Hollywood congratulated him—and itself, for appreciating him—with the Irving Thalberg Award for overall excellence at the 1961 Oscars.

But after Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Kramer never had another success. A self-described New Deal Democrat, he fell out of step with youth that gravitated towards more radical “New Left” politics, telling film historian Donald Spoto that he had been “somewhat viciously attacked along the way for being part of a ‘do-good' era.”

I don’t think that audiences simply tired of Kramer’s politics or of his largely stationary camera. Many were driven to distraction by his earnestness, an outlook that naysayers found out of place in an age gone so stark, raving mad that it required movies with the kind of subversive style and substance of The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde.

I question whether any Kramer-directed movie has served as fodder for film-school sessions on technique, but, by directing 14 different actors in Oscar-nominated performances, he displayed a deft touch with often skittish professionals, and his influence runs stronger than many cynics care to admit:

*Aaron Sorkin’s penchant for courtroom drama (the scripts for A Few Good Men and The Trial of the Chicago Seven) and preachy politics (The West Wing) owes much to him.

*Quentin Tarantino has compared him to Oliver Stone, except that the controversial J.F.K. auteur was not a “clumsy filmmaker” like Kramer.

*And, with Judgment at Nuremberg, Kramer paved the way for Steven Spielberg’s searing Holocaust drama, Schindler’s List.

Today, the Producers Guild of America presents the Stanley Kramer Award to honor films that highlight significant social issues, including, for example, Good Night, and Good Luck, The Normal Heart, and Get Out.

Quote of the Day (Jesse Jackson, on Using American Influence in Northern Ireland)

“If legislation were passed supporting the MacBride Principles, as President I would sign it into law. Any President should.”—Democratic Presidential candidate and civil-rights advocate Jesse Jackson (1941-2026), quoted in “Simon-Jackson on Ireland,” The Irish People, Mar. 19, 1988

The many obituaries and career assessments of Jesse Jackson since the announcement of his death earlier this week have understandably focused on his impact as the most important African-American leader between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama.

But more broadly, he may have been the most radical major party candidate in American history since William Jennings Bryan. His concerns touched on not just the problems faced by this nation’s working class but those abroad.

Over the last decade, in writing (with Rob Polner) a biography of Paul O’Dwyer, An Irish Passion for Justice, I became fascinated with why this Irish-born New York radical lawyer, politician, and activist supported Jackson’s insurgent Presidential bids in 1984 and 1988.

Particularly since 1969, with the start of the sectarian “Troubles” that convulsed Northern Ireland, O’Dwyer had sought Democratic politicians aiming for national office who would aggressively press Great Britain for a negotiated settlement to the conflict.

Rather than George McGovern, an antiwar liberal who might have normally won his endorsement, he ended up supporting Shirley Chisholm in the 1972 Presidential primaries because, unlike the Senator from South Dakota, she took an unequivocal stance favoring Irish unification.

Additionally, in the U.S. at large as well as in New York State, O’Dwyer had long felt uncomfortable with the party’s lack of Black leadership. With Jackson’s ringing oratory on behalf of a “Rainbow Coalition” of white and Black voters motivated by economic unrest in the Reagan era, O’Dwyer saw a charismatic candidate who could break through.

To an extent not always understood by many who focus on particular countries, the struggle for civil rights has taken inspiration from around the world. Henry David Thoreau’s concept of civil disobedience profoundly shaped Mahatma Gandhi’s strategy of passive resistance to British rule in India, which in turn influenced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the segregated American South.

In the late 1960s, civil-rights marches staged by Ulster Catholics drew on the non-violent protests of African-Americans under the leadership of Dr. King. 

And, as civil rights activism moved to a different spot on the globe in the Seventies and Eighties—South Africa—many Ulster nationalists and their American supporters glimpsed another, economic model with potential for exerting pressure on a recalcitrant regime: the Sullivan Principles.

In 1977, as a tool against apartheid, the Rev. Louis Sullivan of Philadelphia conceived non-discrimination guidelines that companies investing in South Africa should follow to ensure fair employment. 

Seven years later, the Irish National Caucus fashioned a similar cudgel against the “the systematic practice and endemic nature of anti-Catholic discrimination” in Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland since partition in 1921, naming the MacBride Principles after Sean MacBride, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and co-founder of Amnesty International.

These nondiscrimination and corporate codes appealed to O’Dwyer. Peter King, a conservative Long Island Republican who made common cause with the progressive Democrat on Ulster, remembered about his ally, in an interview with Rob and myself for our biography:

“Paul was really a lawyer at heart, and saw things through the vision of a lawyer. Even though he was in politics, and ran for office a number of times, he had that legal direction— how can this be done, how can the law be changed, how can we put certain protections in. Even in the frenzy of a political or nationalist moment, he was at his core a lawyer.”

Jackson, along with another 1988 Democratic Presidential candidate, Senator Paul Simon, responded to a questionnaire from the Ad Hoc Congressional Committee on Irish Affairs, with the response above on the MacBride Principles.

A few weeks later, just before the Democratic Presidential primary in New York, O’Dwyer introduced Jackson to Irish politicians and lawyers at a fundraiser, extolling the candidate’s interracial vote-getting potential.

Though the party’s eventual nominee, Michael Dukakis, had endorsed this corporate code of conduct as governor of Massachusetts, he did not discuss it much on the campaign trail after securing the nomination.

In any case, his failure at the polls that autumn meant that it would take another four years before O’Dwyer found, in Bill Clinton, a candidate willing to endorse the MacBride Principles and appoint a special envoy to facilitate the peace process in Northern Ireland.

With Jackson’s passing—and access to his papers and the recollections of friends and family members—the time is ripe for historians and biographers to investigate and weigh the legacy of this complicated but critically important American progressive. His advocacy on behalf of Northern Ireland should be a part of such research.

(The portrait of presidential candidate Jesse Jackson that accompanies this post was taken during the 1980s by Jesse Jackson for President, Inc.)

Quote of the Day (Katie Martin, on Bitcoin and the ‘Tech Wreck’)

“The shock to bitcoin is brutal for those who have placed their life savings in this thing. But the warning signs were there all along, and those who bought it anyway can reasonably be expected to have done so with their eyes open. Theirs is a pool of capital that has been placed in this unproductive belief system for too long. In this more sober market environment after the ‘tech wreck,’ now is the time for that money to do something more useful in the financial system.”— Market trend columnist Katie Martin, “The Long View: Bitcoin Blues and ‘Tech Wreck’ Signal a Fundamental Reset,” The Financial Times, Feb. 7-8, 2026

The image accompanying this post, of a bitcoin logo with digital enhancements, was taken on June 2, 2025, by Dmar198.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (The Prophet Joel, With a Thought for Lent)

“ ‘Yet even now,” says the Lord,
    “return to me with all your heart,
with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;
     and rend your hearts and not your garments.’
Return to the Lord, your God,
    for he is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love,
    and repents of evil.”—Joel 2:12-13
 
The image of Joel accompanying this post is a detail from the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, by the Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564).

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The American President,’ on an Institution No Longer Around)

[Walking with each other before delivering his State of the Union address]

Sydney Ellen Wade [played by Annette Bening]: “How'd you finally do it?”

President Andrew Shepherd [played by Michael Douglas]: “Do what?”

Sydney: “Manage to give a woman flowers and be president at the same time?”

Andrew: “Well, it turns out I've got a rose garden.”— The American President (1995), screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, directed by Rob Reiner

It’s funny how seeing a movie decades apart can make you look at it in completely different ways. Case in point: The American President, which I viewed shortly after it came out in November 1995 and again yesterday afternoon, at a special Presidents’ Day presentation at the Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee, NJ. (It featured an excellent introduction by Fairleigh Dickinson University Professor Pat Schuber on the evolving nature of the Presidency.)

When I heard the above exchange three decades ago, for instance, I groaned at lines so corny that even Frank Capra (such an obvious inspiration for the movie’s creators that he’s even referenced at one point) wouldn’t have served them up.

Yesterday, I groaned for a different reason: the Rose Garden that President Shepherd makes use of no longer exists, in the beloved form that Americans of both major political parties cherished. And all because of one man.

Years ago, I had decidedly mixed feelings about Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay, as I did in my few attempts to watch the TV show for which this film was, in effect, a dry run: The West Wing. It raised valid concerns about America’s polarized environment, the microscope under which modern Presidents exist, and the precious lack of personal privacy they enjoy.

But with its bad guys—all Republicans without a single redeeming ideological or social value—it created straw men that his heroes (liberal Democrats) could easily swat away. At least George Bernard Shaw, also given to long speeches in his plays, gave his devils their due, which made rebutting them all the more convincing.

Moreover, Sorkin's heroes possessed few complications, with their real-life inspirations bleached of their flaws when depicted in fictional form. In this film, as a centrist liberal facing a sex scandal promoted by the opposition, Shepherd had clear affinities with the President at the time, Bill Clinton.

Except for this fact: Clinton not only had to issue a false denial that only the most gullible believed about a past affair (with trashy entertainer Gennifer Flowers), but his campaign labored mightily to stamp out entire “bimbo eruptions,” while Shepherd was a lonely widower enchanted by a single intelligent, lovely environmental lobbyist.

Despite these shortcomings, time had raised my opinion of The American President from decidedly mixed to good, if not great. It was even better cast than I had recalled, with Samantha Mathis, John Mahoney and Wendie Malick in interesting supporting roles, and several lines and situations rang with unexpected prescience.

In his climactic speech, for example, Shepherd not only identified the divisive electoral strategy of his rival (an obvious Newt Gingrich stand-in), but the same one employed by the current Oval Office occupant for the last decade: “Whatever your particular problem is, I promise you, Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things and two things only: making you afraid of it and telling you who's to blame for it.”

And, when Martin Sheen’s chief of staff A. J. MacInerney tells Michael J. Fox’s idealistic aide, “The President doesn't answer to you,” Fox could answer for today’s citizenry outraged by daily lies and civil liberty violations: “Oh, yes he does.…I'm a citizen, this is my President. And in this country it is not only permissible to question our leaders, it's our responsibility!”

Photo of the Day: Honest Abe’s Stovepipe Hat

Few objects are so associated with a single person as the stovepipe hat with Abraham Lincoln. This form of headgear was quite popular in the 19^th century, but, if you’re like me, you’re hard pressed to think of another wearer than America’s 16^th President.

I photographed the one you see here back in June 2021, while in Manchester, VT, for a beloved relative’s wedding. It’s part of the items on display in Hildene, the summer home of Robert Todd Lincoln, the President’s oldest son.

Abe Lincoln wore several such hats in his lifetime, as soon as he was old enough to afford one in adulthood. It certainly afforded convenience (he took to carrying his paperwork in it as a young attorney), but I think it also made him look more imposing. 

Typically seven to eight inches tall, these hats, when topping his 6 ft.-4 in. frame, brought his total height to nearly seven feet tall, making him stand out as much as modern pro basketball centers.

Believe it or not, this hat—black and narrow-brimmed, made from glossy black pile textile that covers a paper card support—is only three of Lincoln’s still in existence. Evidently he bought it at Siger and Nichols, a firm then based on Maiden Lane in New York City.

There are plenty of reasons to visit Vermont, but if you find yourself in the southwestern corner of the state, you should make it a point to visit Hildene.

Robert Todd Lincoln was one of the more consequential offspring of American Presidents, serving variously as Secretary of War, U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain, and president of the Pullman railroad company.

But there is no doubt that all visitors to this 24-room Georgian revival mansion will want to view its historic exhibit associated with Robert’s father, which not only includes this hat but also an oval dressing mirror from the White House and a Bible owned by the President.

Abraham Lincoln’s words and actions still matter to America. But artifacts like this hat at Hildene also have their function: sort of like relics of a man who’s become known, in effect (and probably to his ironic amusement, could he see it), as America’s great secular saint.

Quote of the Day (Ron Chernow, on George Washington’s ‘One Major Blunder As President’)

“Washington committed only one major blunder as president: He failed to put his name on Mount Vernon and thereby bungled an early opportunity at branding. Clearly deficient in the art of the deal, the poor man had to settle for the lowly title of father of his country.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow, “Ron Chernow Stands for Press Freedom at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” www.pen.org, April 30, 2019

This Day in British History (Birth of Brendan Bracken, Diehard Churchill Ally)

Feb. 15, 1901— Brendan Bracken—a mysterious figure who, despite being three decades younger than Winston Churchill, became his closest friend and Minister for Information in his wartime Cabinet—was born in Templemore, County Tipperary, Ireland.

A lanky, bespectacled redhead with charm and energy to spare, Bracken was hard to miss in any assembly. But, if people had no trouble picking him out, they had plenty in figuring him out. 

Who was he? Where did he come from? How had he become so indispensable to Churchill? Why was there a break in their relationship for five years before Bracken re-committed himself to his mentor in the latter’s darkest political hours?

For a long time during his rise in business and politics, even the last part of that first sentence above—about Bracken’s date and place of birth—would have been murky. 

The truth was that Bracken’s father, a well-to-do builder and member of the Fenian brotherhood that sought Irish independence, died when Brendan was three and that his stepfather years later was likewise of republican sympathy.

But by his teens, Bracken was acting so wildly that his mother packed him off to a Jesuit boarding school in Dublin and, when that effort to curb him failed, even further, to a similar institution in Australia.

At age 18, with Ireland plunged into its war of independence from Britain, Bracken was back in Dublin. He embraced his mother’s Unionist sympathies but not her Catholic faith. In the next several years, he not only rejected his Irish identity but bewildered former and newfound acquaintances by denying he had one, passing himself off as Australian. 

At various times, he also changed his age when the circumstances were advantageous and claimed that a brother had died when actually, like all family members except his mother, Bracken was estranged from him.

In 1923, the most important event in his life occurred when he met Winston Churchill. That December he organized Churchill’s unsuccessful General Election race as a Liberal in Leicester West, then another, four months later, as an independent. Finally by the end of 2024, Churchill won a safe seat in a return to the Conservative Party he had abandoned 20 years before.

An astonishing rumor, fed as much by the pair’s close relationship as by the red hair they shared, was that Bracken was his chief’s illegitimate child. The aide not only didn’t deny it but, some suspect, may have even spread the gossip. 

Churchill’s wife Clementine, already fuming that her husband's newfound friend was sleeping in the house with his feet up on the sofa, demanded answers, only to be blithely assured by the great man, “I looked it up, but the dates don’t coincide.”  

Though the rumor was untrue, it's hard not to think of the two men as surrogate family members. Bracken was more responsible, even-tempered and helpful than Churchill's choleric and alcoholic son Randolph. And in Churchill, Bracken found something of a father figure, an affectionate presence who fully shared his Unionist, even imperial, sympathies.

With Churchill’s return to the House of Commons, their paths diverged for a time, with Bracken displaying a talent for finance and business management. He became a publishing mogul, becoming chairman of the Financial News in 1928 and, 17 years later, merging it into The Financial Times, making that paper with its distinct paper color the institution it remains.

This business acumen and journalistic influence became indispensable to Churchill by the end of the decade, when this lifelong politician struggled through the decade known as his “Wilderness Years,” the period when, his relentless ambitions stymied, he was without a Cabinet post, a mere back-bencher.

In 1929, having won election as a Conservative in the North Paddington seat, Bracken allied himself again with Churchill, becoming for the next 10 years a foul-weather friend who stood by him in his lowest political and financial moments.

It was bad enough that Churchill found himself out of step with Conservative leadership on Indian policy, King Edward VIII’s abdication crisis, and appeasement towards Nazi Germany. But his spendthrift habits put him continually in financial danger.

In 1938, press baron Max Beaverbook, disapproving of Churchill’s increasingly dire warnings about Adolf Hitler’s rearmament campaign, terminated his contract for writing an Evening Standard column. 

Without this desperately needed source of funds, a despondent Churchill made plans to sell Chartwell, the home into which he had poured so much of his money.

It was Bracken who came to his rescue by having his associate Sir Henry Strakosch buy Churchill’s American stocks at their original purchase price and pay him interest to boot.

Strakosch performed similar financial magic in 1940, as Churchill moved to the forefront of the movement to fight the Nazi war machine no matter the cost.

Had these arrangements been revealed at the time, they might have opened Churchill up to attempts to discredit his wartime efforts—as indeed has happened now from the American far right, with Darryl Cooper labeling Churchill “the “chief villain of the Second World War” in an interview conducted by Tucker Carlson.

Bracken was as instrumental in ensuring that Churchill finally became Prime Minister as he had been in keeping him from declaring bankruptcy. 

With Neville Chamberlain’s leadership fatally undermined by a closer-than-expected no-confidence vote in the House of Commons, Churchill told Bracken he was willing to serve under Chamberlain’s desired successor, Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax. 

Bracken got his friend to remain silent in the high-level meetings if Halifax were proposed to lead the new government. In the end, Halifax, saying it would be difficult to lead the war effort as a House of Lords member, left the field effectively open to Churchill.

In 1941, Churchill named Bracken his Minister of Information—in effect, in charge of wartime propaganda. Two authors distinctly unimpressed by what they learned about Bracken at close range in the war obliquely targeted him in their novels.

Evelyn Waugh told future biographer Christopher Sykes that Brideshead Revisited’s Rex Mottram was his only character fully drawn from life. Though he tried to disguise the source by making Mottram a Canadian, other details—notably, the character’s colonial origins, opportunism, overwhelming business success, and lack of devotion or even interest in Catholicism—pointed towards Bracken. 

And George Orwell was so incensed by the restrictions under which he labored in Bracken’s Ministry of Information, it was said, that he was inspired to create Big Brother in 1984, with the character’s kinship with the politico hinted at in their initials: B.B.

Churchill’s landslide defeat in the 1945 General Election—in a campaign not helped by Bracken’s advocacy of an overly negative, partisan tone—left the two men out of power.

When Churchill returned to Downing Street six years later, Bracken announced that ill health precluded his continuation in politics. But he was not done serving his mentor and hero.

In June 1953, Bracken joined the Prime Minister’s inner circle in covering up the news of Churchill’s massive stroke, claiming only that the leader required “complete rest” for a while, ensuring that there would be no accurate UK coverage of the problem. 

It wasn’t until a year passed that Churchill, having made a great recovery in the meantime, gave even a hint of his health crisis.

By this time, the health of Bracken himself, a lifelong chain smoker, was in more serious danger. Upon hearing the news of the death of his stalwart friend in 1958 from lung cancer, Churchill lamented the loss of “poor, dear Brendan.”