Topic: Harry Truman

We’re Already There

Abe Greenwald 05.19.2008 - 5:41 PM

Joe Lieberman’s party allegiance is a much-discussed issue. One of the most interesting moments of Sen. Lieberman’s lecture last night came when he described his reason for staying in the Democratic Party.

As others here have mentioned, Lieberman believes it’s important for both parties to have strong national security wings. It’s frustrating to witness the Democrats’ shabby treatment of Lieberman, but his point is important. Lieberman’s going to the GOP would leave the Democrats the official foreign policy softies. National security is more than an ideological issue, it’s a survival issue, and if Democrats and Republican became strictly polarized in this regard, the decision to deal with threats would hinge on party affiliation.

Which is actually what we’re witnessing in the unofficial beginning of the general election, anyway. Barack Obama sees Iran as a “tiny” threat, and American SUV’s as a dangerous liability. John McCain sees Iran’s triple-threat of terrorism, hegemony, and nuclear technology for exactly what it is: deadly. Worse still, Democrats are scrambling to defend Obama’s official position of talking to Tehran without preconditions. The de facto politicization of national security is already here.

Senator Lieberman’s instincts are admirable. Unfortunately, one man, even with courage, does not a wing make. If and when the Democratic Party ever returns to the robust national security platforms of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy, it will swing in that direction of its own momentum. Even a man as brave as Joe Lieberman is beyond halting an ideological wilting of this magnitude.

“Citizens of Israel: Masada shall never fall again, and America will be at your side.”

John Podhoretz 05.15.2008 - 10:13 AM

What follows is the text of President Bush’s speech today in Jerusalem:

President Peres and Mr. Prime Minister, Madam Speaker, thank very much for hosting this special session. President Beinish, Leader of the Opposition Netanyahu, Ministers, members of the Knesset, distinguished guests: Shalom. Laura and I are thrilled to be back in Israel. We have been deeply moved by the celebrations of the past two days. And this afternoon, I am honored to stand before one of the world’s great democratic assemblies and convey the wishes of the American people with these words: Yom Ha’atzmaut Sameach.

It is a rare privilege for the American President to speak to the Knesset. Although the Prime Minister told me there is something even rarer — to have just one person in this chamber speaking at a time. My only regret is that one of Israel’s greatest leaders is not here to share this moment. He is a warrior for the ages, a man of peace, a friend. The prayers of the American people are with Ariel Sharon.

We gather to mark a momentous occasion. Sixty years ago in Tel Aviv, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel’s independence, founded on the “natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate.” What followed was more than the establishment of a new country. It was the redemption of an ancient promise given to Abraham and Moses and David — a homeland for the chosen people Eretz Yisrael.

Eleven minutes later, on the orders of President Harry Truman, the United States was proud to be the first nation to recognize Israel’s independence. And on this landmark anniversary, America is proud to be Israel’s closest ally and best friend in the world.

The alliance between our governments is unbreakable, yet the source of our friendship runs deeper than any treaty. It is grounded in the shared spirit of our people, the bonds of the Book, the ties of the soul. When William Bradford stepped off the Mayflower in 1620, he quoted the words of Jeremiah: “Come let us declare in Zion the word of God.” The founders of my country saw a new promised land and bestowed upon their towns names like Bethlehem and New Canaan. And in time, many Americans became passionate advocates for a Jewish state.

Centuries of suffering and sacrifice would pass before the dream was fulfilled. The Jewish people endured the agony of the pogroms, the tragedy of the Great War, and the horror of the Holocaust — what Elie Wiesel called “the kingdom of the night.” Soulless men took away lives and broke apart families. Yet they could not take away the spirit of the Jewish people, and they could not break the promise of God. When news of Israel’s freedom finally arrived, Golda Meir, a fearless woman raised in Wisconsin, could summon only tears. She later said: “For two thousand years we have waited for our deliverance. Now that it is here it is so great and wonderful that it surpasses human words.”

The joy of independence was tempered by the outbreak of battle, a struggle that has continued for six decades. Yet in spite of the violence, in defiance of the threats, Israel has built a thriving democracy in the heart of the Holy Land. You have welcomed immigrants from the four corners of the Earth. You have forged a free and modern society based on the love of liberty, a passion for justice, and a respect for human dignity. You have worked tirelessly for peace. You have fought valiantly for freedom.

My country’s admiration for Israel does not end there. When Americans look at Israel, we see a pioneer spirit that worked an agricultural miracle and now leads a high-tech revolution. We see world-class universities and a global leader in business and innovation and the arts. We see a resource more valuable than oil or gold: the talent and determination of a free people who refuse to let any obstacle stand in the way of their destiny.

I have been fortunate to see the character of Israel up close. I have touched the Western Wall, seen the sun reflected in the Sea of Galilee, I have prayed at Yad Vashem. And earlier today, I visited Masada, an inspiring monument to courage and sacrifice. At this historic site, Israeli soldiers swear an oath: “Masada shall never fall again.” Citizens of Israel: Masada shall never fall again, and America will be at your side.

This anniversary is a time to reflect on the past. It’s also an opportunity to look to the future. As we go forward, our alliance will be guided by clear principles — shared convictions rooted in moral clarity and unswayed by popularity polls or the shifting opinions of international elites.

We believe in the matchless value of every man, woman, and child. So we insist that the people of Israel have the right to a decent, normal, and peaceful life, just like the citizens of every other nation.

We believe that democracy is the only way to ensure human rights. So we consider it a source of shame that the United Nations routinely passes more human rights resolutions against the freest democracy in the Middle East than any other nation in the world.

We believe that religious liberty is fundamental to a civilized society. So we condemn anti-Semitism in all forms — whether by those who openly question Israel’s right to exist, or by others who quietly excuse them.

We believe that free people should strive and sacrifice for peace. So we applaud the courageous choices Israeli’s leaders have made. We also believe that nations have a right to defend themselves and that no nation should ever be forced to negotiate with killers pledged to its destruction.

We believe that targeting innocent lives to achieve political objectives is always and everywhere wrong. So we stand together against terror and extremism, and we will never let down our guard or lose our resolve.

The fight against terror and extremism is the defining challenge of our time. It is more than a clash of arms. It is a clash of visions, a great ideological struggle. On the one side are those who defend the ideals of justice and dignity with the power of reason and truth. On the other side are those who pursue a narrow vision of cruelty and control by committing murder, inciting fear, and spreading lies.

In the Kitchen with Bin Laden

Peter Wehner 04.22.2008 - 10:30 AM

Senator Hillary Clinton has a new ad that describes the presidency as “the toughest job in the world. You need to be ready for anything–especially now, with two wars, oil prices skyrocketing, and an economy in crisis.” The ad quotes Harry Truman–”if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen”– and concludes with this question: “Who do you think has what it takes?”

Among the images in the ad is one of Osama bin Laden. It turns out that was too much for some of Barack Obama’s supporters. In his interview last night with Clinton, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann said:

Let me ask you about the campaign and something you said in Pittsburgh today and again, let me read the quote about being president. “It’s the toughest job in the world and you have to be ready for anything. Two wars, skyrocketing oil prices, an economy in crisis. Well, if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen.” That is almost word for word the narration of this new ad that your campaign put out today, and that ad flashes a very brief image of Osama bin Laden. For nearly six years now since Senator Max Cleland was cut down by a commercial that featured a picture of bin Laden, that has been — that tactic has been kind of a bloody shirt for many Democrats. Is it not just, in your opinion, as much of a scare tactic for a Democrat to use it against another Democrat, as it is for a Republican to use it in a race against the Democrat?

Jamal Simmons, a Democratic strategist, was on CNN making the same complaint:

What’s really disappointing about this ad is all of us should remember in 2002 when the Republicans ran an ad featuring Osama bin Laden against Max Cleland. And all the Democrats were upset about that, because they used Osama bin Laden to stir up fear. And now here we are again, watching Democrats use Osama bin Laden to stir fear against other Democrats.

The Max Cleland ad has become an urban legend in some quarters. According to this narrative, an ad run by Cleland’s opponent, Saxby Chambliss, questioned the patriotism of Cleland, a man who served in Vietnam and became a triple amputee. In point of fact, this ad did no such thing. Cleland had voted multiple times against a homeland security bill that would have given the President freedom from union rules which Bush had deemed necessary to make the new Department of Homeland Security more effective. Chambliss’s ad included pictures of bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, underscoring the threats faced by America. At no point was Cleland’s patriotism impugned. What the ad did do was dispute Cleland’s claim that he had the “courage to lead” and that he “supports President Bush at every opportunity.”

So it has come to this: simply the picture of Osama bin Laden in an ad highlighting threats to America has become a “scare tactic” and a “bloody shirt for many Democrats.” Forget the fact that the threats we face are real, that bin Laden was responsible for killing almost 3,000 Americans on September 11th, and that he is leading figure in a jihadist movement that wants to destroy our country and kill many more of our people. Using the image of bin Laden is verboten.

This is yet one more example of the delicate sensibilities and manufactured outrage that makes people wonder about contemporary liberalism. I suspect Americans are more concerned with the threat posed by bin Laden than they are concerned by the use of his image in an ad. The public is right to be impatient with such childishness.

What Is She Thinking?

Abe Greenwald 04.18.2008 - 6:18 PM

In keeping her commitment to run the worst presidential campaign in recent memory, Hillary Clinton has once again refused to step aside and let media momentum turn her opponent’s blunder to her benefit. She couldn’t get out of the way of Snobgate and now she’s about to go down hard in the wake of her own debate victory. Here she is speaking in Philadelphia today, overplaying her hand yet again:

I know some of my opponent’s supporters and my opponent are complaining about the hard questions . . .Well, having been in the White House for eight years and seeing what happens in terms of the pressures and the stresses on a president, that was nothing . . .I’m with Harry Truman on this. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

Does she not remember literally crying only a few months ago because “it’s not easy” to run for President? Does she not remember turning that moment of perceived vulnerability into a battery recharge, claiming to have found her voice in those tears? Does she not remember scolding debate moderators on the spot for unfairly making her field questions before Obama?

Hilary Clinton is blind to history. Whether it’s Tuzla, her husband’s pardoning of terrorists, or her own recent words, she can’t imagine the possibility of being fact-checked or called out on a simple matter of public record. This quality is more than a little chilling in someone hoping to be President. It is only a matter of time before Obama exploits this recent burst of hypocrisy and Hillary looks even worse.

It’s About Politics, Not Race

James Kirchick 03.19.2008 - 3:01 PM

The revelations about Jeremiah Wright are so strange precisely because it’s next to impossible to imagine Barack Obama agreeing at all with this man’s incendiary remarks. I don’t think for a second that Obama’s cool demeanor is a put-on; that he’s masking some sort of pent-up anger and resentment. Yet Obama obviously respects Wright, and has for some time. This leaves me to consider what is it about Wright that so attracts Obama. And that leads me to some troubling conclusions.

Given everything that is known about Barack Obama, and the totality of what he has written and said, there is absolutely no reason to believe that he adheres to the racial grievance theory of America articulated by the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, whatever the Clintons might want to imply. Rather, the legitimate concern about Obama ought to be, and has always been, about his politics. Is he sympathetic to the hard left narrative of America, and if so, does this influence his views about the use of American power? The recent remarks of his wife suggest that he might; one hears a distinct echo of Wright in her statements about this country. Instead of worrying about what Obama knew and when he knew it, we should be asking him what he thinks of Harry Truman (strange that this titan of the anti-communist cause and the Democratic Party never appears anywhere in Obama’s rhetoric) and the way he went about ending World War II. That seems like a far more relevant, not to mention fair, question for a commander in chief than, “Do you agree with your Pastor that the government invented HIV to kill black people?”

“The True Neocon”

Max Boot 03.07.2008 - 10:05 AM

If there are still conservatives out there fretting that John McCain (lifetime American Conservative Union voting record: 82.3%) is “too liberal,” they should check out this hit job from the house organ of the American left, The Nation. After reciting the tired clichés about what a terrible temper McCain supposedly has (something said about many other Presidents, including Teddy Roosevelt and Harry Truman), author Robert Dreyfuss recounts with horror McCain’s plans to “carry the ‘war on terror’ deep into the twenty-first century.”

He provides a brief overview of some ideas McCain has put forward, from reorganizing the CIA to creating a League of Democracies as a supplement to the UN. All of these come with a gloss of horrified quotes from the usual suspects, such as Larry Wilkerson (Colin Powell’s former chief of staff who has been one of the Bush administration’s most vociferous critics) and liberal foreign policy scholars Larry Korb and Ivo Daalder. Daalder is quoted as calling McCain “the true neocon,” which isn’t intended as a compliment–but may well be seen that way by some nervous conservatives.

Dreyfuss highlights McCain’s support for tough action to combat America’s foes, from Russia to the Middle East. But he doesn’t even mention a host of other positions McCain has taken that should horrify Nation-ites. The Republican nominee is in favor of the Patriot Act. He’s in favor of reauthorizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act with immunity for telephone companies that cooperate with the government. He is opposed to limiting the CIA to the interrogation techniques laid out in the Army interrogation manual. And while he wants to close the detention facility at Guantanamo (which has become, rightly or wrongly, an international embarrassment), he hardly wants to let the inmates go free. He proposes to move them to the federal prison at Fort Leavenworth (where conditions would probably be more grim) and to try them through military tribunals, not through the normal criminal courts so many leftist activists want.

Perhaps these other positions could be the subject of a future expose in The Nation. As a supporter of (and foreign policy adviser to) Senator McCain, I can only hope for more such attacks, which should help to solidify the Right around his candidacy without alienating any centrists.

Not Quite a Knight

Max Boot 01.29.2008 - 3:49 PM

Ted Kennedy’s endorsement has sent the political and pundit class swooning. In a typically over-the-top comment, the Washington Post anoints Barack Obama as “Camelot’s New Knight”. But will this knight do any better than the original standard bearer?

John F. Kennedy has been enveloped in a halo since his assassination, but it is important to recall how unimpressive his presidency looked before his tragic demise. Kennedy did not distinguish himself in dealing with foreign policy crises early in his term, notably the Bay of Pigs and the erection of the Berlin Wall. (Khrushchev got the idea that he could be rolled, and the result was the Cuban Missile Crisis.) Mercifully the world escaped
without a nuclear war, but it was a close-run thing. Kennedy also began to get America embroiled in the Vietnam War. In retrospect, many were left pining for the steady, sober leadership of the more proven Eisenhower, who had led vast armies before occupying the Oval Office.

The knock on JFK was that he was just a kid without high-level leadership experience. And that was true. He had not been vice president for eight years like his 1960 election opponent. But he was considerably more experienced than Obama. By the time he became President, Kennedy had fought in a world war and spent 15 years in Congress. Obama, by contrast, has spent seven years in the Illinois state Senate and just three years in the U.S. Senate. His military and foreign policy experience is essentially
nonexistent.

Ted Kennedy tried to wave away objections about Obama’s inexperience:

There was another time, when another young candidate was running for President and challenging America to cross a New Frontier. He faced public criticism from the preceding Democratic President, who was widely respected in the party. Harry Truman said we needed “someone with greater experience” – and added: “May I urge you to be patient.” And John Kennedy replied: “The world is changing. The old ways will not do…It is time for a new generation of leadership.” So it is with Barack Obama. He has lit a spark of hope amid the fierce urgency of now.

Notwithstanding the “fierce urgency of now” (whatever that means), a new generation of leadership isn’t necessarily to be preferred if it doesn’t know what it’s doing. Obama could turn out to be an extraordinarily competent president—more competent even than JFK. But there is nothing in his record or background to suggest that he is, as Ted Kennedy says, “ready to be President on day one.” The Obama learning curve could be steep and the country could pay the price, just as it did when Ted’s older brother took office.

The Politics of the Playground

James Kirchick 10.23.2007 - 9:53 AM

Last month, in response to the overwhelming passage of the Kyl-Lieberman amendment labeling Iran’s Revolutionary Guards a terrorist group, Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson had this to say:

Calling them names, labeling them terrorists, drawing up military options is just making the situation worse and inflaming the Muslim world.

That this utterance received so little attention might be due to the fact that it is only the latest in a string of Richardson gaffes, from a professed belief that homosexuality is a “choice” to calling Al Sharpton “governor” (woe betide the day Sharpton earns that title). Or perhaps the press largely ignored this statement because Richardson is a second-tier candidate. Either way, that a former Democratic Congressman, governor, potential Senator, and, most importantly, United Nations ambassador thinks that “calling [terrorists] names” is “making the situation [with Iran] worse” indicates that playground politics hold sway over an influential portion of the Democratic Party.

Weekend Reading

Sam Munson 03.16.2007 - 4:01 PM

In May 1969, the critic Lionel Abel published an essay in COMMENTARY taking forceful issue with a new book, American Power and the New Mandarins, by Noam Chomsky, a professor of linguistics at MIT who was then only beginning to make a name for himself as an influential left-wing scourge of American “imperialism.” The immediate subject of Chomsky’s book was the American intervention in Vietnam, but his intent was to place this conflict within a much broader context—namely, the supposedly uninterrupted history of American malefaction on the world scene. (Chomsky did not spare his own kind, either: he attacked American intellectuals, the “new mandarins” of his title, for what he saw as their shameful, passive complicity in their government’s evil deeds.)

Abel’s essay, entitled “The Position of Noam Chomsky,” focused devastatingly on the chief moral underpinning of Chomsky’s argument: namely, that America’s wanton and self-interested resort to force in foreign lands robbed it of any standing or credibility in the struggle it professed to be waging against Communist totalitarianism. Along the way, Abel also dealt in passing with Chomsky’s distorted version of a speech given by President Harry Truman at Baylor College linking economic freedom with political freedom, a speech interpreted by Chomsky in his book as a thinly veiled justification for the global spread of American-style capitalism by any and all means.

Churchill’s Ghost(writer)

Hillel Halkin 03.14.2007 - 3:24 PM

One can react in various ways to the unearthing by a Cambridge University researcher of a never-published 1937 article by Winston Churchill. This article, entitled “How The Jews Can Combat Persecution,” may actually have been, we are told, the work of a pro-fascist ghostwriter named Adam Marshall Diston.

One can, for instance, be disappointed to find out that Churchill used ghostwriters. Et tu, Winston?

One can accept Churchill’s use of ghostwriters but still wonder: a fascist ghostwriter? In 1937? And even if for some inexplicable reason Churchill saw nothing wrong with this, why on earth would he have asked such a person to write about the Jews?

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