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| 5/23 |
| 2008/2/22-25 [Politics/Domestic/President/Reagan, Politics/Domestic/President/Bush] UID:49213 Activity:high |
2/21 Isn't it weird that assassinated or attempted assassinated
presidents are usually portrayed as good presidents in
media, books, etc? Do we EVER say bad things to people in their
obituaries? I mean, if president Nixon was assassinated, would
we say nicer things today?
\_ Well thank god no one tried anything funny on George W Bush,
otherwise he'd be known as a great President. -Democrat
\_ Counterexample: Gerald Ford. -tom
\_ listen up tom holub, the key word is usually
\_ I'm not sure Ford is a good example, his obits seem
positive:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/863634.stm
http://preview.tinyurl.com/2e9n3k (washingtonpost.com)
http://preview.tinyurl.com/y5yxvu (telegraph.co.uk)
And the only real "bad thing" I've ever heard
about Ford that I've heard (from non-kooks) is that
he was klutzy.
And the only really "bad thing" I've ever heard re
Ford (from non-kooks) is that he was klutzy.
\_ Ford was ineffectual. Obits are never negative; even
Nixon got transformed into a respected elder statesman. -tom
\- Notes on the Passing of an American Monster:
http://home.lbl.gov:8080/~psb/Articles/Politics/NixonObit-HST.txt
There were plenty of negative comments upon the death
of the Indonesian Crook Suharto.
There were plenty of negative comments about
Benazir Bhutto. By Shashi Tharoor, William Darymple etc.
Not a pol but see: http://www.slate.com/id/2111506
YMWTFG(samuel johnson lapidary)
YMWTGF(samuel johnson lapidary)
You guys dont know what you are talking about.
\_ Nixon just looks better relative to the current disaster
in chief. They are both crooks but I don't remember Nixon
accused of being incompetent and/or intellectually stunted.
\- i have kind of a soft spot for nixon [and musharaf]
but it is kinda hard to compare W and RMN because
the time have changed. for example W would never make
the times have changed. for example W would never make
the kinds comments to Condi about being black as Nixon
did to SuperK about being jewish. but of course SAGENEW
never shot an old man in the face and then got him to
apologize to the country.
\_ I hear "A Legacy of Ashes" isn't kind to JFK, but I haven't read
it yet.
\_ key word: usually
\_ This may be the best motd meme since "obviously you've
never served."
\_ "Richard Nixon, hero of his age, began the long painful draw down
of troops which later led to the end of the Vietnam conflict, also
responsible for opening China to the West, ending the long cold war
with our former foe, he shall always be remembered as the greatest
American President of his era before he was assassinated by unknown
Democrats".
agents".
\_ Pinochet had some pretty mixed obituaries, but no I have never
seen a bad one for an assassinated US President. You might be
able to find one written by a foreign newspaper.
\_ I was in Santiago the day Pinochet died:
http://flickr.com/photos/tholub/365629145 -tom
\_ Reagan was attempted assassination, and supposedly he was a bad
president.
\_ He defeated an EVIL communist regime and his STAR WARS
legacy helped us advance our space programs. He is an
all American HERO and a nice looking actor.
\_ Thanks to Star Wars we got to shoot down a sattelite.
And the fact that the weather cooperated.
\_ ... and the fact that the satellite is in a lower
altitude than normal orbiting ones.
\_ But not lower than an ICBM. |
| 5/23 |
|
| news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/863634.stm Printable version Obituary: Gerald Ford Gerald Ford Ford: The unexpected president (image: Gerald R Ford Library) Gerald Ford was the first - and so far only - US president never to win a national election of any kind. A hugely experienced Congressman, he became President Richard Nixon's vice-president in 1973, when Spiro Agnew resigned amid corruption charges Ten months later, Nixon himself stood down over the Watergate scandal, and on 9 August 1974, Ford became the 38th president. It was a difficult period for him to take over, in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal and with the country in a severe recession. When he left office two and a half years later, after a narrow election defeat, he said he was proud to be handing over the country to President Carter in better shape than he had found it. The new president, in turn, thanked him for all he had done to heal the wounds of Watergate. Gerald Ford playing football at Yale Ford was a college football star (image: Gerald R Ford Library) Gerald Rudolph Ford was born in Omaha, Nebraska. His name then was Leslie Lynch King Jr, but his parents divorced when he was a toddler, and his mother married a Gerald Ford. He grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and became something of a football hero, playing centre in the University of Michigan's undefeated national teams of 1932 and 1933. He turned down a number of professional contracts, deciding instead to go to Yale Law School, where he helped to pay his way by coaching fellow students in boxing and football. Ford was adopted as the Republican candidate for a safe seat in southern Michigan, and was elected to Congress in 1948. The same year he married Elizabeth Ann Bloomer, a former model and a divorcee, later to become famous in her own right as a reformed alcoholic and founder of the Betty Ford Center, which helped pioneer the treatment of drink and drug addiction. Possibility of power In 1965 Gerald Ford was elected Republican leader in the House. He was a member of the Warren Commission which investigated the assassination of President Kennedy - concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone - and co-author of a book, Portrait of an Assassin. Gerald and Betty Ford Ford supported his wife Betty through her battle with alcoholism Outside Congress, Ford was little known but, in 1973, Spiro Agnew resigned. President Nixon, an old friend, nominated Ford as vice-president. He was then 60 and had been in Congress for a quarter of a century. With President Nixon's own position in growing danger, there was soon speculation about the possibility of Ford succeeding him. After Nixon's admission of guilt early in August 1974, Ford announced he intended to bow out of the impeachment "debate", while standing by his belief that President Nixon was innocent. Pardon for Nixon On 9 August, Nixon resigned and Ford was sworn in as president. His first address to the two Houses of Congress was something of a triumph for him and he made an excellent impression at a televised news conference. But the honeymoon came to an abrupt end when, a month to the day after he had taken office, he granted Nixon a full pardon for all offences against the United States which he might have committed while in office. US helicopters in Vietnam Vietnam: Ford ended the only war America ever lost This provoked a political and moral storm, and the ruling was bitterly opposed in many quarters, but the president appeared unmoved. Shortly afterwards, he offered an amnesty to thousands of young Americans who had either evaded conscription or deserted during the Vietnam war. The Republicans had a severe setback in the mid-term elections in November 1974 and the president, in his efforts to overcome inflation, unemployment and a serious energy shortage, had to deal with a Congress in which many of his proposals were stalled by the Democrats. Struggles with Congress Before long, however, it became clear that despite his problems, the man who once admitted "I'm a Ford, not a Lincoln" enjoyed being president and intended to seek the Republican nomination in the 1976 election. Jimmy Carter Ford lost the 1976 presidential contest to Jimmy Carter In foreign policy, Ford and his Secretary of State, Dr Henry Kissinger, continued the Nixon policies of detente with the Soviet Union and a search for a Middle East settlement. Ford went to the Soviet Union, South Korea and Japan, becoming the first US president to visit Tokyo. He returned to a worsening economic situation and a continuing running fight with Congress. During his first year in office he had to use his veto 36 times. In September, there were two attempts on the president's life, one in Sacramento, the other in San Francisco. After a neck-and-neck race with Ronald Reagan, Ford narrowly won the party presidential nomination in 1976. The contest against the Democratic party nominee, Jimmy Carter, turned out to be surprisingly dull. Ford, representing continuity and safety, started well behind in the public opinion polls but caught up steadily. Narrow defeat In one of his three television appearances with Carter, he made a slip of the tongue by asserting that Eastern Europe was independent of Soviet domination, and brought a good deal of ridicule upon himself. In the end, Carter won narrowly, by 18 million votes, courtesy of a twin-track approach which saw him portrayed as a favourite son in the South and as a champion of marginalised voters, most notably farmers and Christians, in the North. Ford, in his farewell State of the Union report to Congress, spoke of his pride that America was at peace and warned the nation to keep up its defences in the face of a steady build-up of Soviet military forces. Gerald Ford wearing the Medal of Freedom Gerald Ford was awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1999 Out of office, Gerald Ford remained an active, if marginal, political voice. In 1980, he came within an ace of being nominated as Ronald Reagan's vice-presidential running mate, before his demand for wider powers and responsibilities ruled him out. Despite his Republican beliefs, he championed affirmative action, arguing that it was consistent with "the notion of America as a work in progress". And his belief in the importance of research into therapeutic cloning, a pro-choice stance on reproductive rights and his endorsement of civil unions for gay people, placed Ford at odds with much of his party. In 1999, Bill Clinton presented Ford with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the US's highest awards. More recently health problems, including a series of strokes, had limited his public appearances. Gerald Ford's reputation was always that of a decent, friendly man, calm, patient and fair-minded, although somewhat lacking in flair and imagination. A self-confessed "man of the House," he kept a keen eye on the workings of Congress, even after leaving the Oval Office. Above all, he showed consistent dedication in endeavouring to fulfil his pledge that he would do his best for America. |
| preview.tinyurl.com/2e9n3k -> www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/27/AR2006122700528.html Led in Watergate's Wake By JY Smith and Lou Cannon Special to The Washington Post Wednesday, December 27, 2006; His wife, Betty, reported the death in a statement last night. "My family joins me in sharing the difficult news that Gerald Ford, our beloved husband, father, grandfather and great grandfather has passed away at 93 years of age," Betty Ford said in a brief statement issued from her husband's office in Rancho Mirage, Calif. "His life was filled with love of God, his family and his country." Gerald Ford and the Press Ron Nessen, press secretary to President Gerald Ford from 1974 - 1977, discusses the former president, from his rise to the presidency after the Watergate scandal to his unsuccessful bid to be elected president. Facebook Ford died at 6:45 pm Tuesday (PST) at his home in Rancho Mirage, about 130 miles east of Los Angeles, his office said. Ford had battled pneumonia in January and underwent two heart treatments -- including an angioplasty -- in August at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. "For a nation that needed healing, and for an office that needed a calm and steady hand, Gerald Ford came along when we needed him most," Bush said this morning. He praised Ford's integrity and "great rectitude" and said the nation will always be grateful for his service. Vice President Cheney, who served as Ford's chief of staff in the White House, said Ford "embodied the best values of a great generation: decency, integrity, and devotion to duty." Ford was the longest-living ex-president, followed by Ronald Reagan, who also died at 93. Former first lady Nancy Reagan remembered him in a statement as "a dear friend and close political ally" of the Reagans, praising him for speaking out "on issues important to us all" and for his early support of stem cell research, the AP said. Ford was the only occupant of the White House never elected either to the presidency or the vice presidency. A former Republican congressman from Grand Rapids, he always claimed that his highest ambition was to be speaker of the House of Representatives. He had declined opportunities to run for the Senate and for governor of Michigan. The former Maryland governor was under investigation for accepting bribes and kickbacks. "My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over," Ford said in his inaugural address. "I believe that truth is the glue that holds government together, not only our government, but civilization itself. That bond, though strained, is unbroken at home and abroad." In the 2 1/2 years of his presidency, Ford ended the US involvement in the war in Vietnam, helped mediate a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Egypt, signed the Helsinki human rights convention with the Soviet Union and traveled to Vladivostok in the Soviet Far East to sign an arms limitation agreement with Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet president. Ford also sent the Marines to free the crew of the Mayaguez, a US merchant vessel that was captured by Cambodian communists. On the domestic front, he faced some of the most difficult economic conditions since the Great Depression, with the inflation rate approaching 12 percent. Chronic energy shortages and price increases produced long lines and angry citizens at gas pumps. In the field of civil rights, the sense of optimism that had characterized the 1960s had been replaced by an increasing sense of alienation, particularly in inner cities. The new president also faced a political landscape in which Democrats held large majorities in both the House and the Senate. But Ford's overriding priority was ending the constitutional and political crisis known as Watergate. It had begun June 17, 1972, when five operatives of Nixon's reelection campaign were caught breaking into Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office building. But as the situation unfolded, the central question was whether Nixon had tried to obstruct the subsequent investigation. A special prosecutor sought answers on tapes Nixon had made of his Oval Office conversations. The president resisted turning them over on the ground that this would violate executive privilege, but in July 1974, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled against him. Within days, prosecutors found a tape on which Nixon apparently ordered a coverup. The House judiciary committee approved three articles of impeachment. Faced with the virtual certainty of a trial by the Senate, Nixon resigned. Ford said he believed that his signal achievement was healing the national divisiveness caused by the "poisonous wounds" of Watergate, as he put it in his inaugural speech. "There is no question that this is the thing I contributed," Ford said 30 years later, in an Aug. When he assumed office, Ford immediately made clear his intention to change what historian Arthur M Schlesinger Jr. He was "acutely aware," he said in his inaugural address, that he had not been elected to the position he held, and he asked Americans "to confirm me as your president with your prayers." He said he had neither sought the presidency nor made any "secret promises" to attain it. "In all my public and private acts as your president, I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candor with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy at hand. our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. But there is a higher power, by whatever name we honor Him, who ordains not only righteousness but love, not only justice but mercy. "As we bind up the internal wounds of Watergate, more painful and more poisonous than those of foreign wars, let us restore the golden rule to our political process and let brotherly love purge our hearts of suspicion and hate." A new spirit was soon evident in the nation's leadership. He was freely contradicted by his eldest son, and his aides said what was on their minds without waiting for official clearance. In the press office, he appointed Jerald F terHorst, a respected Washington correspondent, as his chief spokesman. The only acknowledgement he received in return was a six-paragraph statement from Nixon in San Clemente saying that "I can see clearly now . that I was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate, particularly when it reached the stage of judicial proceedings and grew from a political scandal into a national tragedy." Ford said the pardon was necessary to bring Watergate to a close, that he would have had to pardon Nixon sometime in any case and that it was easier to do it sooner than later. Every opinion poll showed a large majority of Americans opposed the pardon. It was denounced in Congress, including by members of Ford's own party. Republican officials gloomily and accurately forecast that it had reintroduced the Watergate issue into the 1974 elections, which proved to be a Democratic landslide. It was widely assumed that Ford had doomed his political career. By January 1975, his approval rating had plummeted to 36 percent. Not even two assassination attempts, both in California in 1975, generated significant popular support. The consequences included a three-month delay in confirmation of Ford's choice of former governor Nelson A Rockefeller of New York as vice president. In congressional hearings, it was disclosed that Rockefeller had made large private gifts to employees on the New York state payroll and that he had played a hidden role in financing a campaign book against Democratic gubernatorial nominee Arthur Goldberg. The disclosures undermined his ability to play an influential role in the Ford administration. Many conservative Republicans in Congress joined Democrats in opposing Ford's programs. Ronald Reagan of California, the darling of the right wing of the GOP, announced his intention to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 1976. Ford beat back the Reagan challenge, but he narrowly lost the general election in November 1976 to the Democratic candidate, former governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia. Asked in his 2004 interview with The Post whether the pardon had hurt him in the 1976 election, Ford replied, "It probably did. There is a group of bitter people who never forgave me and probably ... |
| preview.tinyurl.com/y5yxvu -> www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/12/27/uford327.xml In pictures: The 38th president Gerald Ford, the 38th President of the United States who died on Boxing Day aged 93, entered the White House in August 1974, after President Nixon had resigned as a result of the Watergate cover-up. Though Ford had been minority leader in the House of Representatives since 1965, he had never been seriously considered as a potential president. advertisement There had been some talk of him as a candidate for the vice-presidency in 1960, and Nixon had discussed this possibility with him in 1968. Ford's highest ambition, though, had been to become Speaker of the House. This hope had been dashed when, even in the wake of Nixon's landslide victory in 1972, the Republicans failed to gain a majority in the House of Representatives. Ford had decided to stand for his House seat for one more term, and then retire from politics. His world changed in October 1973 when Nixon's vice-president Spiro Agnew was forced to resign in the face of corruption charges. Nixon would have preferred to nominate Nelson Rockefeller or Ronald Reagan -- still more John Connally -- as Agnew's replacement, but he was already deeply mired in the Watergate affair, and Ford was the only candidate certain of nomination by the Democratic majority in Congress. There was a widespread view of Ford as honourable, decent, but not overly bright. "There's nothing wrong with Jerry Ford," Lyndon Johnson is supposed to have remarked, "except that he played football too long without a helmet." Or again, from the same source: "Jerry Ford can't walk and chew gum at the same time." In fact, Ford, while no genius, was perfectly competent; Harold Wilson was struck by his ability to master complex briefs. Years later, as Nixon pondered his demise, he came to believe that Ford's ready acceptability to Congress had been an integral ingredient in his ruin. As vice-president, Ford loyally upheld the line that Nixon was innocent of involvement in Watergate. Every expression of confidence, though, became the prelude to further revelations that confirmed the President's guilt. Ford did not confront Nixon directly, since he knew that Nixon would have denied culpability. |
| home.lbl.gov:8080/~psb/Articles/Politics/NixonObit-HST.txt From Rolling Stone, June 16, 1994 HE WAS A CROOK by Hunter S Thompson MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK DATE: MAY 1, 1994 FROM: DR. HUNTER S THOMPSON SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON: NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER.... HE WAS A LIAR AND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA.... "And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird." He was the real thing -- a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that "I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon." I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together. "Don't worry," he said, "I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you." It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel lonely. As long as Nixon was politically alive -- and he was, all the way to the end -- we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws. That was Nixon's style -- and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Nixon was a navy man, and he should have been buried at sea. These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon's immediate family strongly opposed both of them. In the traditionalist style, the dead president's body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in canvas sailcloth and dumped off the stern of a frigate at least 100 miles off the coast and at least 1,000 miles south of San Diego, so the corpse could never wash up on American soil in any recognizable form. The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the poten- tially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all, the President of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable -- some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland. It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already. If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern -- but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man -- evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him -- except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship. It is fitting that Richard Nixon's final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many children. Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. "It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard," said one. Many were incensed about the howitzers -- but they knew there was nothing they could do about it -- not with the current president sitting about 50 yards away and laughing at the roar of the cannons. The funeral was a dreary affair, finely staged for TV and shrewdly dominated by ambitious politicians and revisionist historians. Billy Graham, still agile and eloquent at the age of 136, was billed as the main speaker, but he was quickly upstaged by two 1996 GOP presidential candidates: Sen. Pete Wilson of California, who formally hosted the event and saw his poll numbers crippled when he got blown off the stage by Dole, who somehow seized the No. Dole's stock went up like a rocket and cast him as the early GOP front-runner for '96. Wilson, speaking next, sounded like an Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator and probably won't even be re-elected as governor of California in November. He set the tone for the day with a maudlin and spectacularly self-serving portrait of Nixon as even more saintly than his mother and as a president of many godlike accomplishments -- most of them put together in secret by Kissinger, who came to California as part of a huge publicity tour for his new book on diplomacy, genius, Stalin, H P Lovecraft and other great minds of our time, including himself and Richard Nixon. Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to see Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor Hirohito. These revisionists have catapulted Nixon to the status of an American Caesar, claiming that when the definitive history of the 20th century is written, no other president will come close to Nixon in stature. "He will dwarf FDR and Truman," according to one scholar from Duke University. Nixon was no more a Saint than he was a Great President. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the US Army lost in all of WW2, and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard. Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the s... |
| www.slate.com/id/2111506 The life of the cultivated mind should be private, reticent, discreet: Most of its celebrations will occur with no audience, because there can be no applause for that moment when the solitary reader gets up and paces round the room, having just noticed the hidden image in the sonnet, or the profane joke in the devotional text, or the secret message in the prison diaries. Individual pleasure of this kind is only rivaled when the same reader turns into a writer, and after a long wrestle until daybreak hits on his or her own version of the mot juste, or the unmasking of pretension, or the apt, latent literary connection, or the satire upon tyranny. The 20^th century was perhaps unusual in the ways in which it forced such people to quit their desks and their bookshelves and to enter the agora. Looking over our shoulders, we do not find that we have much respect or admiration for those who simply survived, or who kept the private life alive. We may owe such people more than we know, but it is difficult to view them as exemplary. Our heroes and heroines are those who managed, from Orwell through Camus and Solzhenitsyn, to be both intellectual and engaged. For her, the act of literary consumption was the generous parent of the act of literary production. She was so much impressed by the marvelous people she had read--beginning with Jack London and Thomas Mann in her girlhood, and eventually comprising the almost Borgesian library that was her one prized possession--that she was almost shy about offering her own prose to the reader. Look at her output and you will see that she was not at all prolific. If it doesn't seem like that--if it seems as if she was always somewhere in print--it is because she timed her interventions very deftly. By the middle 1960s, someone was surely going to say something worth noticing about the energy and vitality of American popular culture. And it probably wasn't going to be any of the graying manes of the old Partisan Review gang. Sontag's sprightly, sympathetic essays on the diminishing returns of "high culture" were written by someone who nonetheless had a sense of tradition and who took that high culture seriously (and who was smart enough to be published in Partisan Review). Her acute appreciation of the importance of photography is something that now seems uncontroversial (the sure sign of the authentic pioneer), and her "Notes on 'Camp' " were dedicated to the memory of Oscar Wilde, whose fusion of the serious and the subversive was always an inspiration to her, as it is, I can't resist adding, to too few female writers. In a somewhat parochial time, furthermore, she was an internationalist. I once heard her rather sourly described as American culture's "official greeter," for her role in presenting and introducing the writers of other scenes and societies. There was no shame in that charge: She--and Philip Roth--did a very great deal to familiarize Americans with the work of Czeslaw Milosz and Danilo Kis, Milan Kundera and Gyrgy Konrd. In Against Interpretation, published in 1966, she saw more clearly than most that the future defeat of official Communism was inscribed in its negation of literature. When Arpad Goncz, the novelist who eventually became a post-Communist president of Hungary, was invited to the White House, he requested that Susan be placed on his guest list. It's hard to think of any other American author or intellectual who would be as sincerely mourned as Susan will be this week, from Berlin to Prague to Sarajevo. It took a certain amount of nerve for her to stand up on stage, in early 1982 in New York, and to denounce martial law in Poland as "fascism with a human face." Intended as ironic, this remark empurpled the anti-anti-Communists who predominated on the intellectual left. But when Slobodan Milosevic adopted full-out national socialism after 1989, it took real guts to go and live under the bombardment in Sarajevo and to help organize the Bosnian civic resistance. She did not do this as a "tourist," as sneering conservative bystanders like Hilton Kramer claimed. I know, because I saw her in Bosnia and had felt faint-hearted long before she did. Her fortitude was demonstrated to all who knew her, and it was often the cause of fortitude in others. She had a long running battle with successive tumors and sarcomas and was always in the front line for any daring new treatment. Her books on illness and fatalism, and her stout refusal to accept defeat, were an inspiration. So were the many anonymous hours and days she spent in encouraging and advising fellow sufferers. But best of all, I felt, was the moment when, as president of American PEN, she had to confront the Rushdie affair in 1989. It's easy enough to see, now, that the offer of murder for cash, made by a depraved theocratic despot and directed at a novelist, was a warning of the Islamist intoxication that was to come. But at the time, many of the usual "signers" of petitions were distinctly shaky and nervous, as were the publishers and booksellers who felt themselves under threat and sought to back away. Susan Sontag mobilized a tremendous campaign of solidarity that dispelled all this masochism and capitulation. I remember her saying hotly of our persecuted and hidden friend: "You know, I think about Salman every second. I would have done anything for her at that moment, not that she asked or noticed. With that signature black-on-white swoosh in her hair, and her charismatic and hard-traveling style, she achieved something else worthy of note--the status of celebrity without any of the attendant tedium and squalor. She resolutely declined to say anything about her private life or to indulge those who wanted to speculate. ") A man is not on his oath, said Samuel Johnson, when he gives a funeral oration. One ought to try and contest the underlying assumption here, which condescendingly excuses those who write nil nisi bonum of the dead. Could Susan Sontag be irritating, or hectoring, or righteous? She said and did her own share of foolish things during the 1960s, later retracting her notorious remark about the white "race" being a "cancer" by saying that it slandered cancer patients. In what I thought was an astonishing lapse, she attempted to diagnose the assault of Sept. Even the word "general" would have been worse in that sentence, but she had to know better. She said that she didn't read reviews of her work, when she obviously did. It could sometimes be very difficult to tell her anything or to have her admit that there was something she didn't know or hadn't read. If she was sometimes a little permissive, launching a trial balloon only to deflate it later (as with her change of heart on the filmic aesthetic of Leni Riefenstahl) this promiscuity was founded in curiosity and liveliness. About 20 years ago, I watched her having an on-stage discussion with Umberto Eco in downtown New York. Eco was a bit galumphing--he declared that his favorite novel was Lolita because he could picture himself in the part of Umberto Umberto. Susan, pressed to define the word "polymath," was both sweet and solemn. "To be a polymath," she declared, "is to be interested in everything--and in nothing else." She was always trying to do too much and square the circle: to stay up late debating and discussing and have the last word, then get a really early night, then stay up reading, and then make an early start. She couldn't stand affectless or bored or cynical people, of any age. She only ventured into full-length fiction when she was almost 60, and then discovered that she had a whole new life. And she resisted the last malady with terrific force and resource, so that to describe her as life-affirming now seems to me suddenly weak. |
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| washingtonpost.com -> www.washingtonpost.com/ Numbers, History Cast Shadow on Bush Hopes Despite close horse race with Kerry, president's approval ratings trail those of predecessors who won reelection. Soldier Details Iraq Abuse Defendant in prison scandal gives account of detainee treatment, offers to plead guilty. IN MOVIES New releases: "Troy," "Breakin' All the Rules," "Young Adam," "Godzilla: Uncut," "Word Wars," "With All Deliberate Speed." IN STYLE Fox issued a stunning news release for a reality special called "Seriously, Dude, I'm Gay" in which, two heterosexual men will try to convince people that they are gay. |