A New Go-To Guy?

I saw a poll yesterday that said the three least popular people in American public life were Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Republican Leader John Boehner, and Timothy Geithner, Treasury Secretary. Pelosi and Boehner don't really interest me but Geithner is of an entirely different order of being. He has been at the center of U.S. economic policy for most of his adult life and was a favorite of Bob Rubin and Larry Summers when all three were at Treasury in the Clinton years. And inconsequential people do not end up running the New York Fed, as Geithner did. The point I'm trying to make here is that Tim is showing signs of becoming the Bob McNamara of the Obama Administration. He seems to strike his superiors as the indispensable man whose brain power and energy mow down opponents just as Mac's calculator, cost-benefit analysis mind did in the '60's.

The Viet Nam War was the result of the best and brightest work of Bob McNamara and his genius colleagues and it haunted him the rest of his long life. Tim Geithner is about Mac's age when JFK chose him to run the Pentagon and I do hope that his old age will be serene and filled with the praise that follows wise and successful leadership. What he does now will determine the nature of his, and our, final years.

"That's the Way It Is"

Everyone remembers Walter Cronkite announcing JFK's death from the CBS newsroom, his Viet Nam and space program reporting and election nights. One of my favorite Cronkite moments came the night he reported the bombing of a black church in Alabama in the early sixties where several people died. The governor, George Wallace, was being defiant and obnoxious in a film clip, as he always was in those days. When the camera came back to Walter he was wincing in disgust at Wallace. Cronkite's expression said it all. The hooligans on Fox couldn't achieve such a moment to save their lives. Thanks, Walter, for getting us through the 60's and 70's. You are the gold standard.

It is 117 degrees here in the desert today so we are about to head off to L.A. where it will be 40 degrees cooler. Red wine in a cool room high above it all is my idea of a well-spent weekend.

Obama Meets the Pope: The Pope Meets Obama

A writer for the Catholic journal America quotes a correspondent for a U.S. publication who covers the Vatican as saying that all the American monsignors there are "Bush-loving, Fox-watching Republicans," but that all the Italian monsignori are ga-ga for Barack Obama. The wing-nut faction in the U.S. Catholic Church badly overplayed their hand in the run-up to Obama's May speech at Notre Dame and will pay the price for it. That price is a descent into irrelevance as the world, their country, and their church change before their very eyes and they are powerless to do anything but be stupid witnesses. Barack Obama is not Catholic but he is, to my mind, a better Catholic than this whole lot of churchist reactionaries.

McNamara

Robert McNamara died today. From 1961 to 1968 he was Defense Secretary for Kennedy and Johnson. Robert McNamara and the Vietnam War are inseparable, they are one, he believed in it, he sold it the way he sold cars as president of Ford Motor Co., he was--as today's headlines put it--the architect of the war. And he was as wrong as a powerful government official can be about the single greatest foreign policy issue of his day. In the '90's he wrote two books on Vietnam and said that he and his cohorts had been "wrong, terribly wrong" about the war from the start. That seemed rather too late to many Americans.

I heard him speak in San Francisco about ten years ago when he wrote his second book. At the end of the evening I shook hands with him--he had a bone-crushing handshake--and told him I appreciated his current work of atonement and truth-seeking. I was one to talk!--like most Americans , I believed him and Johnson until very late in the game. I was not drafted; McNamara's problems are the families and friends of those who were and did not come home alive.

C-SPAN has re-run a 1995 interview with him today and the old contradictions and bluster were still there. What was he like when he died?

One Crazy Chick

Mrs. Palin spoke nonsense for about 20 minutes in her Wassila back yard--addressing family and friends but looking into a camera--while the water fowl in the lake behind her heckled with Bronx cheers. She is quitting her job as governor for no discernible reason and, like her spiritual father Nixon, saying people are being really crummy to her but she has a way to rise above all that--(she really doesn't--just like Dick, she's making all this up as she goes along). Let's see: part-time mayor of a town of 5000 mushers, and half-term governor who walked out of the job and told the people of her state to go stick it. What can I say about her that Don Rickles wouldn't say so much better?

John McCain has a lot to answer for to the American people for foisting this K-Mart check-out girl on us and claiming she was serious stuff. He is not a responsible leader, but a reckless Top Gun in the game only for himself. Sanford, Ensign, Vitter, and all the others ad nauseum, and now Mrs. Palin's Fourth of July implosion: this Republican decay is really
starting to stink up the joint.