Just Above Sunset

That wise woman who uses the pseudonym Digby is onto something when she writes about Integrity.  Aren’t all serious political pundits – those who tell us what to make of all the events swirling about – serious white men in Washington, called into the Fox News or CNN or MSNBC studios between their thoughtful nine-hundred-word columns to fold their hands across their chests, look thoughtful, and smugly chant the words they had written the day before?  Then the host mutters respectfully and the pundit nods – tastefully accepting the moderate awe offered.  And we viewers know what we are to think.  The few women pundits – Eleanor Clift and Ann Coulter, for example – are not that significant, the former a shrill moderate-progressive and the latter a bit of a freak, given to purposefully outrageous taunts.  And none of these people are from Santa Monica.  No “serious” people are from Santa Monica, save for the strange folks buried in the air-conditioned offices of the Rand Corporation in their new digs, at 1776 Main Street (with that quite appropriate sculpture), a block from the beach.  But Digby is from Santa Monica.  Don’t hold it against her.

What caught her eye on the matter of integrity was this essay in the New York Times by Watergate conspirator Egil Krogh (one of the best names from the last major era of Republicans-Gone-Wild scandal in Washington).  So what’s up with Eagle Crow (that’s what you heard on the news, as no one was spelling it out) these days?

First some background.  Egil “Bud” Krogh, Jr. (the name is Norwegian) went to prison for his role in the Watergate scandals.  After his service in the Navy he went to law school, then to work at Hullin, Ehrlichman, Roberts and Hodge – the law firm of family friend John Ehrlichman, and he joined Ehrlichman in the counsel’s office of Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign.  He helped with the arrangements for the inauguration, then he joined the Nixon administration as an advisor on the District of Columbia and later as liaison to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, where he met G. Gordon Liddy.  And he’s the guy who, in that post, handled the visit of Elvis Presley to the White House on December 21, 1970 (Krogh wrote a book about that).  More importantly, Ehrlichman next made Krogh head of the “Special Investigation Unit” in the White House – Krogh and crew were known as the “Plumbers.”  Krogh brought Liddy into his new office.

So when the administration decided to pursue the Pentagon Papers leakers – Ellsberg spirited those papers out of Rand in Santa Monica, made copies here in West Hollywood, and got them to the New York Times and all – it was Krogh who approved the September 1971 burglary of the office of Lewis Fielding, Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist (Liddy and E. Howard Hunt did the actual the actual breaking-in).  That didn’t work out so well.  On November 30, 1973, Krogh pled guilty to federal charges of conspiring to violate Fielding’s civil rights and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.  He was sentenced to two to six years in prison, but he served only four-and-a-half months and was released June 21, 1974.

Krogh was disbarred by the Washington State Supreme Court in 1975, but in 1980 he successfully petitioned to be readmitted, “based on his recognition and acceptance of his wrongdoing.”  Now he’s a partner at Krogh & Leonard in Seattle and using his “personal experience” as a warning, lecturing on legal ethics.  His book on all this, Integrity: Good People, Bad Choices, and Life Lessons from the Nixon White House, is due out soon (see Amazon) - thus the Times column.  Everyone is selling something.

Oh heck, add some irony.  Krogh’s employment with the plumbers was terminated when he refused to authorize a wiretap.  And his brother-in-law is Peter Horton, director and executive producer of the hit ABC series Grey’s Anatomy.

But enough of that.  Here’s what he says in the Times –

I no longer believed that national security could justify my conduct. At my sentencing, I explained that national security is “subject to a wide range of definitions, a factor that makes all the more essential a painstaking approach to the definition of national security in any given instance.”

Judge Gerhard Gesell gave me the first prison sentence of any member of the president’s staff: two to six years, of which I served four and a half months.

I finally realized that what had gone wrong in the Nixon White House was a meltdown in personal integrity. Without it, we failed to understand the constitutional limits on presidential power and comply with statutory law.

In early 2001, after President Bush was inaugurated, I sent the new White House staff a memo explaining the importance of never losing their personal integrity. In a section addressed specifically to the White House lawyers, I said that integrity required them to constantly ask, is it legal? And I recommended that they rely on well-established legal precedent and not some hazy, loose notion of what phrases like “national security” and “commander in chief” could be tortured into meaning. I wonder if they received my message.

He sent the White House staff a memo in 2001, warning them to do the right thing?  Didn’t we all?  Just kidding – but it seem impossible that anyone there wanted to hear from one of the Watergate guys, particularly the one who ran “the plumbers” and went to jail for authorizing burglaries and such things.  Whatever damning psychiatric details they expected find in Ellsberg’s medical records, and how they expected to leak those and use those to discredit the guy, really doesn’t matter.  They couldn’t find them when they got there.  The guy incompetently led incompetents.  And they certainly didn’t see any danger.  They were integrity personified – at least that was the platform they ran on.

But is seems Krogh did sense early on that using national security to justify what was both illegal and morally questionable (often two different things, if it matters), even if competently done, just led to trouble.

That fell on deaf ears, if he even sent the memo, for what Digby sees as a very good reason –

With the demands for the pardon of Scooter Libby, we can see that today’s entire Washington establishment, not just the Bush administration, believes that lawbreaking and smearing of reputations in the name of national security is just the “dark art of politics.” Indeed, people who practice these “dark arts” are extolled as the greatest patriots in the land by people like the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Senators and national opinion leaders.

And there is this anecdote –

I remember after the 2000 election debacle, a rather exasperated acquaintance explained to me that Americans respect winners and it didn’t matter how Bush took office, all that mattered was that he did. Even at my advanced age I was a bit shocked by such cynicism. But as I watched the way the media and the political establishment treated Bush, I had to admit that, at least as far as the leadership class of America was concerned, he was right. But it was even worse than what he said. There was a distinct undercurrent of special respect for the fact that Bush had not only won, but that he’d done it in such a way that everybody knew he’d manipulated the system and there was nothing they could do about it. That audaciousness made people bow down. On some level he wanted people to know he cheated and he wanted them to recognize that he got away with it. That’s real power.

Yep.  And back in August 2004, in these pages, it was framed this way –

Bully-worship is empowering, when nothing else is. Something about surrogate power, I suppose – and as I have maintained for a long time, this has to do with seeing someone doing or saying what you wish you could do or say, but cannot. When Bush tells the rest of the world to shove it - choose your issue or treaty or international law or whatever (the constitution will do as an example too) - the folks Joseph identifies get at least a partial erection. That’ll do. Bush’s election strategy will be to play to that strength, if that’s the right word.

You have to remember the Yale days –

But Digby maintains, rightly, that this is a bigger problem than just this administration –

It is a defining characteristic of our entire political culture. We are in an era of ruthless power politics –  institutions arrayed against institutions, levers of influence and action set against each other in a battle for supremacy. Those who have the superior ability to dominate and manipulate those institutions are able to advance their goals and agenda. The Republicans have been far better at this than Democrats.

And now what?  There’s this –

… it remains for liberals and progressives to figure out how to traverse this culture without losing their souls. It’s clear that most of the DC establishment and the political media lost its way some time ago, allowing themselves to be led by corporate values and slick GOP public relations. It does us no good to be naive and expect everyone to “just say no” and “do the right thing.” As I said, this is an era of power politics and if you don’t exert power with intelligence and energy (and integrity) when you have it, average citizens who will pay the price when the Republicans return to power by any means necessary. The situation is what it is, and if we are going to change it, it’s going to take time and dedication to changing the entire political culture in fundamental ways.

And the history lesson –

The founders understood how power can corrupt, which is why they designed a clunky system of government that would impede its application. But nothing can stop it when so many people are working in tandem to do so. The answer then, is not to depend upon personal integrity but to insure that our systems are working properly and that those who corrupt it are held accountable for what they have done when they lose institutional power at the hands of the people. If there is one consistent mistake that Democrats have made over the past forty years, it’s the impulse to forgive and forget which has created a radical Republican party that believes it can get away with anything. (”Reagan proved deficits don’t matter … this is our due…”) Our system has been so thoroughly corrupted by this lack of accountability that partisan impeachments, stolen elections and illegal wars are taken for granted as perfectly normal (if “dark”) political arts.

So perhaps personal integrity is beside the point and you just have to use the rules –

There have always been crooks and liars in politics. It’s the failure of our institutions to properly guard their prerogatives and police the political system that is the true failure. And that is something that we can fix. The Republicans must be held to account for their reckless rule, and that means following these investigations all the way to 2020 if that’s what it takes. We may not have time to impeach Bush or Cheney, but if we hold both houses of congress we have years to ensure that these crimes are not covered up and that the people of this country are reminded that corruption and cheating have negative consequences.

Yeah, but what do you do with a culture that worships the bad boy who breaks the rules?  Everyone loves a rebel and all that.  That includes corruption and cheating,

As I said in February 2004 –

My view is skewed by living in Hollywood for almost fifteen years.  Need I say more?  It’s a joke.  I’m not kidding when I say I sense most folks love the idea that they, some fine day, could, maybe, be rich themselves, and then abuse others. 

Cheney and Halliburton?  Hell, it excites them to think about what he gets away with.  Bush - inarticulate, proudly ignorant, scornful of those who read - and in love with abusing those who oppose him?  They LOVE that.  It feeds their fantasies.

When you’re powerless you tend to think of revenge without effort.  You admire Bush.  You want to be just like him – a fellow with enormous power no discernable talent who doesn’t have to take crap from anyone.  Folks think it’s cool when he smirks at intellectuals and foreigners.  They imagine how good it would feel to be able to pull that off in their own lives. 

And that’s why I suspect he’ll win the next election easily.  He’ll ride to victory on a wave of popular anger and resentment against how unfair the world is.  

Cynical?  You bet.

And he did win, and we are where we are.  Egil Krogh is a loser.  What does he know?

In Dialogs under the Full Moon, the JUST ABOVE SUNSET crew from coast to coast ripped into the news of June 28 – and that included the Supreme Court decision on school desegregation plans.  The court, it seems, ruled five to four that when devising how to encourage racial diversity in a school district, one cannot take race into account.  What?  What are you supposed to do then?  But the ruling was clear.  Taking race into account is inherently bad – that seemed to be the idea.  They would have none of that.

Of course many saw this as, in effect, a reversal of the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that held that racially segregated schools were actually unconstitutional – “separate but equal” was a crock, and everyone should be treated the same, even if they were black.  So everyone should get a fair shot at getting a reasonable education.  Getting there has been difficult at times – bussing plans to move kids around in a school district to even things out and all the rest.  When you “level the playing field” there are inevitable problems, particularly if you’re part of a hillock, and not in a divot.  That seemed to be the problem raised in the case decided this term – in the two districts involved, some kids didn’t get to go to the school they wanted to go to, being bounced from the school’s enrollment list by minority students.  The parents called foul – pointing out that this was itself racial discrimination – and sued.  When they lost in each lower court they appealed on up, and finally the Supreme Court agreed to look at the matter.  The Supreme Court reversed all the lower court rulings, agreeing with the parents.  White folks have rights too – everyone is always picking on them, or something to that effect.

As noted in the dialogs, the majority opinion paid lip-service to Brown v. Board of Education – it was a fine idea.  The five concurring justices just held that moving certain students from one school to another – when the “other” school was crappy – because those particular students were not minority students, was simply unfair.  It was blatant racial discrimination, and the school districts involved should stop doing anything of the kind.  They should not consider race in any effort at racial diversity.

Rick, the News Guy in Atlanta, watched events on the network he helped build in the eighties.  He saw CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin, standing in front of the steps that morning, relay an exchange between Chief Justice Roberts – who implied out loud that the white students denied their first choice in this case had been just as wronged as the black students in Brown who were denied access to white schools in the fifties – and Justice Breyer – who’s response to this was something like, “You’ve got to be kidding, comparing all this to Jim Crow!”

It sure looked like whatever Brown v. Board of Education established was dead – when you deny use of the most obvious tool to implement the thing, you make the whole concept kind of a cruel joke.

Our friend, the high-powered Wall Street attorney, wasn’t so sure Brown v. Board of Education was dead.  He argued that you had to read the decision carefully, and think about it.  The link is here if you wish to do so.  He has, however, had second thoughts –

If I may bring the conversation back to the USSC, I want to clarify my position from yesterday regarding the case that some say overturned Browne v BOE.  In further reading (though by no means a complete reading) I notice that while they did not overturn Brown they eviscerated the hell out of it.

We can’t undo what happened before the Civil War and too many people on all sides use that for their own effect. No one should get a free ride because their dad just happened to be president of the United States anymore than a person should get a free pass or feel owed because of something that happened two hundred years ago.  Entitlement is wrong on both sides.  What is needed is a level playing field.  We can’t make it more level for some more than others to redress past grievances.

Nope, no easy answer here.

My kids certainly have a better shot than others, but as I pointed out to Samantha and Daniel, their cousins (my older sister’s kids) have no choice but to be successful because they don’t have the same economic advantage that Samantha and Daniel have.  My kids don’t have as much incentive to do well because they know that a certain amount of money will always be there.  That being said, Daniel is in DC at a summer program at GW this summer. Part of his activity is working at a camp for children from Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan.  Sam is working full time at a day care center looking after two year olds and taking two semesters in six weeks. They understand hard work.  Does W?

Part of what Daniel will be doing is going to the Whitehouse, Pentagon, and Congress.  I told him if he so much as shakes W’s hand he won’t be allowed in my house ever again!  Needless to say Daniel knows his old man is crazy.

In any event, I will go back to the wonderful world of regulatory law and try to stay out of trouble such as that above.  I guess I should defer to the talking heads, who have a better understanding.

Perhaps one doesn’t need talking heads.  One just needs to think about it.  Rick, the news Guy in Atlanta, does just that –

First of all, I would ask John Roberts how his statement, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” is different from, “The way to stop murder is to stop murdering people.” My response is that I neither discriminate on the basis of race, nor do I murder people, and yet both these behaviors seem to continue unabated. I’d suppose, assuming there’s a compelling public interest in these matters, we would need laws against these things, but at the very least, I’d think some sort of governmental intervention might be called for.

But of course, Roberts is not so much talking about “race discrimination” as he’s talking about “Affirmative Action.” Although the two are related, they are not the same thing and, I’d argue, should not be confused with one another.

“After all,” the argument goes, “we put federal laws on the books in the 1960s concerning voting rights and hiring and whatnot, so doesn’t that mean we’re off the hook?”

Not quite. Why not? Because it gives us white Americans an unfair head start.

Think of it this way: Imagine your great- great- great-grandparents were kidnapped from Africa and forced to come to this country, then forced to work as slaves and not allowed to learn to read or write, much less continue to live as a family as their siblings and spouses are sold off to other slave owners, and then, with emancipation, forced out onto the streets as “freemen,” but not allowed to send their kids to school – or at least to schools as good as the white kids got to go to – and therefore can’t get a proper job, even if they’re qualified for it.

How much encouragement would they likely give to their kids – to get a good education and get a good job and work hard is the way to get ahead in America? And how much encouragement will those give to their kids? And they to theirs?

And now that Jim Crow laws are outlawed, who would be naive enough to think the playing field has now been leveled? I learned from my parents, who learned from theirs, who learned from theirs, and so on, that if you learn hard and work hard, you can do quite well in America; but what if my ancestors had been slaves? I might not be sitting here now, writing these things.

True, depending on what they learn from their parents, not all kids – whether white or black – get the same level playing field that other kids get. But if it’s not level because of the doings of a country – such as allowing slavery to be legal, and later, allowing Jim Crow laws to exist – it’s that country’s duty to try its best to not only correct the errors of its past but to address the modern consequences of those errors.

With all our thinking that letting “the chips fall where they may” is the fair approach, we need to realize that doing so seems, statistically, to work against the descendants of slaves and other blacks who were officially held down in early America, and also that we whites are the present day beneficiaries of those same past injustices.

The big question is how to fix this.

So-called “Affirmative Action” programs tried to address the problem of “institutional” or “systemic” discrimination – that is, not necessarily specific and concrete cases of someone not getting into a school because they’re the wrong color, but because they come from a community school system still struggling to correct the consequences of its history. A hiring manager may not specifically turn down a person because she’s black, it’s just that this is a company that’s just not used to hiring people who have not been recommended by someone who already works here – and, of course, all who already work here just happen to be white males.

Are these problems that need to be addressed? I think so, although how to solve them is beyond me.

But I do think we at least need to be aware of them, and I’m just not convinced that John Roberts, and those that put him in his present job, are.

No, they are not.  And add to that the sense of being a victim – that everyone is always picking on white males and evangelical Christians and all that sort of thing, when they, individually, have done nothing wrong at all, and feel they are the best of the best Americans, getting things done, building wealth, doing what Jesus really wants, and thus making America what it should be.  The slow change over the last six years in the temperament and viewpoint of the justices appointed to serve in the federal district courts, appellate courts, and now the Supreme Court, made this week’s decision on “diversity” inevitable.  Not only are they fighting back, they’ve won.

It seems a victory for the oppressed white folks.  Is there another way to see it?

From our attorney in New York –

That’s cheery thought, isn’t it?

Footnote:

Walter Dellinger, an attorney in DC and the Douglas B. Maggs professor of law at Duke, sees things Rick’s way –

I woke up at 4 this morning to the realization that I cannot begin to understand how Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues could really think that the efforts of the people in Jefferson County, Ky., and Seattle to have white and black students educated together is anything remotely like the system of racial apartheid, subjugation, and servitude practiced in the American South. His concluding sentence, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” equates two such fundamentally different practices that it leaves me stunned.

I want to try to convey a sense of how profoundly misguided and ahistorical that conflation is. Let me return to the most rhetorically powerful argument against the two school-district plans in this case: the fact that they would require some parents to say to a child, “You can’t go to that school because of your race,” just as black parents had to say to their children in the South before Brown.

Think first about being a black parent explaining race to a child in North Carolina in 1963. That year, Gov. Terry Sanford went on statewide television to urge an end to segregation in public accommodations and read a letter from a black soldier stationed at Fort Bragg describing what it was like to drive his children from eastern North Carolina to visit their grandparents in Texas. It was a harrowing experience, he wrote. Planning that trip was like a military operation; every supply that might be needed had to be packed and stuffed in the car for a trip of more than 1,000 miles. When they were hungry, they could not buy food. When they were tired, they knew they would be turned away from the motel. They traveled in fear that a child would become sick on the trip. Day after day they would drive by tourist sites and amusement parks that they could not enter; gas stations at which the children were barred from the restroom. How do you explain to a child why she can’t go to the swimming pool, play in the park, or go to the movie? At home or on the road, this was an experience a child of color had repeatedly every day. Every day. And the reason: The child was an inferior being whose very presence in a place would be repulsive to the community.

Is that what happens under the Louisville or Seattle plans? What some parents will sometimes have to say to their children under these plans is something like this: “You will be going to PS 111 instead of PS 109 this year, and here’s why: Our community is trying to make sure that we get over the racial separation that has been such a troubled part of our history. So we want to make sure we have a pretty good number of white and black children in all of our schools. It’s important, even though it sometimes means you don’t get your first choice of a school assignment this year.” As I read the record, that is unlikely ever to happen more than once to any child white or black. What is the big deal?

Why is it so critical that we “get beyond race” in every possible way? Get beyond despising or disliking people because of their race, yes. Get beyond oppressing people because of their race, yes. But avoiding any consideration of race as though it were toxic? I don’t understand that.

The court’s decision is everything conservatives should abhor. It is a form of social engineering dictated from Washington. It ignores the principle of local control of schools. It sets aside the judgment of elected officials, even though nothing in the text of the Constitution requires that result, and the original understanding at the time of drafting of the 14th Amendment is solidly against it. It equates the well-intentioned and inclusive programs supported by both white and black people in Louisville and Seattle with the whole grotesquerie of racially oppressive practices which came down, as Charles Black once said, in apostolic succession from slavery and the Black Codes.

The plurality opinion is elegantly reasoned and reads as if it could have been written by a law review president. But it fails the very first lesson taught to preschoolers who watch Sesame Street: “Which of These Things Is Not Like the Others?”

… [You can] invokes the specter of saying to a child: “Sorry, you’re the wrong color.” But it is a fundamentally different matter to say, as the South did before Brown, “Sorry, you’re the wrong color because you are an inferior being whose presence would contaminate the school,” and to say, “Sorry, you’re the wrong color for this school assignment because we are attempting to bring the races of our city together and it’s important to have a lot of kids of different color.” It’s very different, especially when it is a very occasional event, not part of a systemic, pervasive regime of subjugation. In its bottom line, Justice Kennedy’s opinion declares it unconstitutional for a school district to use the most effective means of achieving an integrated school system. Finding that this violates the 14th Amendment belies both text and history, and turns Brown upside down.

See also Dahlia Lithwick – same discussion earlier –

I’m not surprised the dissenters are pissed. What Roberts holds out as a dispassionate, mechanistic, and apolitical legal project is in fact an ideological and immoderate attack on a principle they believed to be inviolate. And I imagine it’s insulting after a while for the dissenting justices to be cast in the role of irrational hysterics. Someone pointed me today to the most amazing portion of Breyer’s dissent, in which he says the problem with the plurality’s logic “lies in its overly theoretical approach to case law, an approach that emphasizes rigid distinctions between holdings and dicta in a way that serves to mask the radical nature of today’s decision. Law is not an exercise in mathematical logic.”

And so it goes.