Nation Voices

American Exceptionalism, According to Oliver Stone

Katrina vanden Heuvel — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 15:06:57 +0000

Oliver Stone. (Courtesy of Showtime)

Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

Oliver Stone’s 10-hour documentary series, The Untold History of The United States, which first appeared on Showtime in 2012, is about to be rereleased this month on DVD with three new episodes and a post-series conversation between Stone and his frequent collaborator, author and activist Tariq Ali.

The series, which is remarkably free of talking heads and offers a treasure trove of historical footage, kicks off with an alternative narrative of the Cold War. Like many historians, Stone believes that, had Franklin Roosevelt lived, he might have avoided the Cold War. If the Democrats had not dumped Vice President Henry Wallace in favor of Harry Truman in 1944, Stone contends, Wallace would have carried on FDR’s policies and “there might have been no atomic bombings, no nuclear arms race and no cold war.

Untold History is full of such tantalizing what-ifs. What if Kennedy had lived? Would there have been a Vietnam War? What if George W. Bush had taken the advice of US intelligence operatives more seriously before the 9/11 attacks? Could the disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq have been avoided?

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Most historians tend to avoid this “counterfactual” or “what if” history, but these alternative scenarios provide thought exercises that help us consider what might have happened if history had taken a radically different course. They make us more aware of the missed opportunities, the roads not taken. They challenge the prevailing orthodoxy and narrow consensus of our contemporary political debate. And they teach us about the past so that we can learn from it.

Stone has said that in high school and college he was taught a “Disneyfied” version of American history. He resolved to use his talents as a filmmaker to challenge that version. This he has done through popular fictionalized history and political films such as Salvador, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Wall Street and its sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

As he and his collaborator Peter Kuznick wrote, “Historically-challenged students turn into historically-challenged adults who make for unqualified citizens. Our republican system requires a literate, educated, and knowledgeable public.” Unfortunately, today’s students “know very little history. Second, much of what they do learn is extremely partial or flat out wrong.”

Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

This Week in ‘Nation’ History: Government Shutdown as Coup d’État

Katrina vanden Heuvel — Sat, 28 Sep 2013 14:00:00 +0000

The US Capitol. (Wikipedia / Ingfbruno)

It’s beginning to look a lot like 1995, with Congress again bringing the country perilously close to a government shutdown. Despite the House Republicans’ quixotic attempt to tie the funding of basic services to the repeal of Obamacare, Karl Rove himself calling such a tactic “ill-conceived,” and, finally, last week’s pointless exhibition of endurance by Ted Cruz’s bladder, it appears the Republican Party is about to crown itself with the highly dubious distinction of having once again dragged the US government to a new low of impotence, paralysis and dysfunction.

That is not an accidental consequence of “divided government…unable to settle its differences,” as one reporter suggested, noting the 1995 parallel. Rather, dramatizing the supposed precariousness of public services by forcing their arbitrary cessation makes it easier for conservatives to argue that the market alone should determine the proper distribution of wealth, goods, and services in American society. There is no smaller government than none at all. As the radical political philosopher Sheldon Wolin argued in a remarkable 1996 essay in The Nation, “Democracy and the Counterrevolution,” the effort “to stop or reconstitute government in order to extract sweeping policy concessions amounts to an attempted coup d’état.” Wolin’s brilliant essay reminds us how shutdowns and austerity economics fit within the broader Republican philosophy of governance—or lack thereof—and how that philosophy is antithetical to the defining principle of democracy: rule by the people.

* * *

Last winter’s government shutdown, contrary to media reports, was not about innocent bystanders—government workers, recipients of benefits or tourists—however genuine their hardships. It was about the broad scheme of power in the nation. Under what was dismissed as posturing, serious political changes were being tested. If we ask, “What kind of authority could justify disrupting and holding an allegedly democratic system hostage in the name of ‘a balanced budget in seven years’ and then attempt to dictate the precise kind and amount of government services that are to be permitted to resume?” the answer is not: “The authority of officials elected to run the government.” Deliberately paralyzing an elected government is far different from the ordinary partisanship that attends appropriations.

The shutdown was, instead, a direct challenge to the principle that in a democracy the government belongs to the people. It is theirs either to reconstitute by prescribed means, such as the amending process, or to halt by resistance or disobedience if it governs tyrannically. For the President or Congress to undertake to stop or reconstitute government in order to extract sweeping policy concessions amounts to an attempted coup d’état by what The Federalist (normally the political bible of Gingrich and other self-styled conservatives) would have condemned as a “temporary majority.”

Media observers suggested hopefully that the confrontation between Democratic President and Republican Congress might usefully be carried forward to November when “the people” could decide whether they wanted an interventionist or a greatly reduced government. That very formulation implied yet another potentially dangerous conception: that national elections should not be primarily about choosing leaders or expressing party preferences but should serve to focus a Great Issue and force a crucial turning point. The correct name for that conception is “plebiscitary democracy,” and it represents an outlook that is profoundly anti-democratic. Consider what social and economic forces would frame the terms of the plebiscite, or the level of debate that would take place, or the inflated mandate that the victors would claim or the implications of such an event for reinforcing the idea of the citizen as a spectator ready to salivate at the mention of tax cuts. Unfortunately, plebiscitary democracy is not a farfetched notion but a short, highly cost-effective step from the “democracy” quadrennially produced by those who organize, finance and orchestrate elections. Given what elections have become, the effect of national plebiscites on the fundamental shape of government should give pause to anyone who cares about the prospects of democracy.

* * *

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A vote on the role of government appears in an ominous light if we recall that when the Congressional Republicans announced their determination to “shut down Washington” and democracy’s government was nearly paralyzed, there was no mass protest, no million-citizen march on Washington, no demand to reclaim what is guaranteed by the Constitution. At a meeting of freshman Republican Representatives, someone reportedly asked, “Anybody got problems back home with the fact that the government’s shut down?” Not a hand was raised.

The lack of response testifies to the truly terrifying pace at which depoliticization is being promoted and the depths of the alienation separating citizens from their government. Each national election serves to deepen the contempt of voters for a system that they know is corrupt, and they doubt it can be remedied by requiring lobbyists to register. Despair is rooted in powerlessness, and powerlessness is not an unintended but a calculated consequence of the system, of which cash bribes to encourage poor African-Americans of New Jersey not to vote—a Republican campaign strategy in 1993 boasted about by Christine Todd Whitman’s campaign manager, Ed Rollins—supplied a crude instance. “Balancing the budget” is not simply about forcing government to live within its means “like the rest of us.” The projected cuts in education, social services and health care strike at the political power of ordinary Americans as well as their standard of living.

* * *

The complete text of Wolin’s 1996 essay can be found here. Subscribers to The Nation can access our fully searchable digital archive, which contains thousands of historic articles, essays and reviews, letters to the editor and editorials dating back to July 6, 1865.

Odds and Ends (Reed’s Away)

Eric Alterman — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 17:06:38 +0000

Bill de Blasio and his family protest the shutdown of the Long Island College Hospital and Interfaith Hospital (Bill de Blasio/Flickr)

My new Think Again is called “Bill de Blasio, ‘Sandalista’.” Its opening line is “Did Bill de Blasio force his friends to say “Neek-a-ro-wha” once upon a time?”

And the paywall--that’s right a paywall on a press column so the press won’t read it--on my last week’s --um, what was that Elvis line again? Oh yeah. “Yesterday’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip papers.”--column, is here Frank Bruni, the Plutocrats’ Pundit

One thing: I’ve felt a little guilty for having my corporate bank account at HSBC for the past year because, as you may know, they were the favored bank of terrorists and drug launderers; they enjoyed this status knowing just what they were doing, and got away with it, because the courts decided they were too big to be forced to follow the law. I also hated the fact that their machines sucked and I could not ever deposit a check unless the bank was open.

Well, they finally got new machines, but guess what? Yesterday, after 14 years as a customer, I got a letter telling me that they were firing me as a customer. Got that? Drug runners, murderers, terrorists, and of course money launderers are totally cool with HSBC USA but writers, well, forget it. They didn’t even give me a reason. I know that this is what people call a “white person’s problem,” but it is also an example of why we should have sent these SOBs to jail.

One last thing: I was sick on Monday and I think I experienced my best day of TV ever.

1) Foyle’s War

2) The second to last Breaking Bad. (Meanwhile watch this.)

3) Ray Donovan from the night before: a much under-rated show with a terrific cast, but I guess James Woods won’t be coming back. (Funny, this show has two great right-wing jerks playing great roles: Woods and of course, the politically horrible, Jon Voight.)

4) A “Boardwalk Empire.”

5) One episode of silly “Web Therapy”--the one with “Fiona, Don’t Hit Me in the Face”, fun, silly show.

6) The final two episodes of “Prisoners of War.” Do you guys know about POW? It’s the Israeli show that inspired “Homeland.” And it’s way better. It’s one of the best things ever. You can only watch it on Hulu Plus, of which I got a month for free. Maybe you can too. I see it also has the entire Criterion Collection there too. Makes it worth it, once you start paying.

So I guess what people are saying about TV being the richest art form of our times, well, I hate myself, but it’s true.

Alter-reviews:

I listened to a couple of books I want to recommend this week. One was the new Jonathan Lethem--who, together with Franzen--is I think the best thing we have going, right now. It’s called Dissident Gardens and you can see a video conversation with Lethem about its reviews here and you can read reviews of the audio, read by Mark Bramhall, here. Warning: I hated the ending. Also, there’s too much about bowel movements (but anything at all is too much).

It’s not on the same level, but still insightful and enjoyable is the short story collection by Tom Perrotta--bard of the suburbs--called “Nine Inches.” It’s not that nine inches you pervert. Then again, it’s not that far away from it, either. It’s a great audio book because with short stories, you’re never in the middle of anything and forgetting where you were. It’s on Macmillan Audio and read by William Dufris.

So I don’t know what being 83 is all about, but if I can do anything if and when I’m ever that age, I will want to do something as well as the great Ahmad Jamal writes and most especially plays. His new album, “Saturday Morning” is a follow-up to last year’s great “Blue Moon,” and lucky yours truly, I got to see his fine band-- Reginald Veal on bass, Herlin Riley on drums and Manolo Badrena on percussion-- play most of it at Rose Hall last weekend for the show’s first set. For the second set, the band was joined by the Wynton and the rest of the rest of the Jazz@LC orchestra for new arrangements of Ahmad classics. Highlights included “Baalbek,” arranged by alto saxophonist Sherman Irby, and “Manhattan Reflections” arranged by trumpeter Marcus Printup, and finally saxophonist Ted Nash’s version of “Kaleidoscope.” you can check out the rest of the season here, and find Mr. Jamal’s beautiful last two albums anywhere fine music is sold.

I am also enjoying the nice new package from the Dead. Apparently, on August 27, 1972, just back from “Europe, ’72, they did a show with the newish line-up which included Keith and Donna, but not Mickey Hart, who was busy being bummed out about his dad stealing all the band’s money and of course, Three cds and a DVD, “Sunshine Daydream” has a great set, and a lot of naked people dancing and complaining from the band stand about the heat. It was a trip for the Merry Pranksters and benefit for the Kesey family’s Springfield Creamery--which implies, at least to me, a lot of acid being consumed, and has historically been considered the most-requested live show in Grateful Dead history.

Setlist includes: "Sugaree, " "Deal, " "Black-Throated Wind, " "Greatest Story Ever Told, " "Bird Song" and a "Dark Star" that runs a wonderful 30 minutes. 3 CD/1 DVD Concert film with all-new stereo and 5.1 audio mixes mixed and mastered to HDCD from the original 16-track tapes. It’s called “Sunshine Daydream”

Speaking of acid trips, Real Gone Music has released a show I went to but did not take acid at--I never actually have taken acid, for those of you keeping score at home, of the Jefferson Starship: Live in Central Park NYC May 12,1975 (2 CD Set). 100,000 in Central Park, many of them in trees. It was broadcast by unless you were a tree, not much (a constant theme of the concert is WNEW-FM, which had to pay for the repairs to the park. It preceded the release of Red Octopus, and so the material is as much “Airplane” as “Starship,” and the sound quality is high-level bootleg, ie radio rebroadcast. The line-up is Paul Kantner, Grace Slick, Marty Balin, David Freiberg, Craig Chaquico, Pete Sears, John Barbata and Papa John Creach. I’m also enjoying Real Gone’s release of “Fire On The Mountain: Reggae Celebrates The Grateful Dead Vols. 1 & 2.” Both versions have been out of print for a while and it’s perhaps not surprising but certainly gratifying how much sense it appears to make when you listen. Performers include "Toots" Hibbert, Culture, Joe Higgs, Steel Pulse, Mighty Diamonds, Judy Mowatt, Dennis Brown, Michael Rose, Ras Michael, Gregory Isaacs and many, many others dong the Dead.

Finally, I’m excited about the fact that I’ll be going to the first annual fundraiser event on October 6 at En Japanese Brasserie in Manhattan to support Carlos Santana and The Friends of the Coltrane Home for a benefit that they are doing to pay for the pressing restoration needs of the historic home in Dix Hills, Long Island, of jazz legend John Coltrane and his wife, Alice Coltrane. Coltrane composed A Love Supreme there and 2014 is its 50th anniversary. The event will include my close personal friend Brother Cornel and also Ashley Kahn, who wrote the book, "A Love Supreme" ably edited by the estimable Rick Kot. Ravi Coltrane and his quartet will play and I’m guessing so will a lot of other great players. Tickets are $200 and are fully tax-deductible at http://coltranehome.eventbrite.com.

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The mail:

Louis Anthes

Reed,

I really liked the article ["How the Media's Process Obsession Stifles Liberalism and Undermines our Democracy"], both in terms of style—persuasive, critical, analytical—but also the meat of it about "process."

There is an old debate in law school, which I attended, about procedural due process and substantive due process—you likely know about it. Your article reminded me of that distinction, and the something struck me.

The political system's process has become so dysfunctional that the smallest of processes are themselves of high strategic value. Sen. Ted Cruz can threaten to shut down the government just by talking. Of course, that Cruz procedure can only be effective in a network of coincidental prior procedures that have been already executed to aligning the public calendar with the private agendas of various factions of government. In other words, the GOP House has put Cruz in that position to use his filibuster to achieve collateral political goals.

Journalism, in this context, can't help but focus on proceduralism—hell, the number of emails daily I receive asking me for $3 to defeat Cucinelli or $3 to stop the defunding of Obamacare, you'd think telecommunications and banking and politics are all destined to merge into one seamless code of efficient virtual political gestures.

It is not as if grand themes about freedom and the common welfare and domestic tranquility will substitute for substantive journalism, whatever that could mean in this day and age.

It may very well be the case that politics can only be disrupted in a context where economics merges political communication into a limited, narrow domain of cultural practice. It may become the case that political disruption—especially in our journalism (I'm thinking of Hunter S. Thompson)—serves to identify what the future calls "progressivism", and their future views on history, or today's progressivism, will make talk about the Constitution itself, procedures and platitudes, all seem a little quaint and more likely just plain irrelevant.

Editor's note: To contact Eric Alterman, use this form.

Chris Hayes takes on the debt ceiling debate.

The Case for Gun Liability Laws

Katrina vanden Heuvel — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 14:42:05 +0000

(AP Photo/Ricardo Moraes)

Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

Knives. Automobiles. Cold medicine. Alcohol. Cigarettes. Coffee.

What do these items have in common?

They’re all held to a higher safety standard than firearms.

Because of product-liability law, manufacturers must equip them with proper warnings, limitations and built-in designs that enhance their safety.

If they don’t, consumers can sue them for harm caused by the product. And all consumer products manufacturers are required to ensure that their products are free of design defects and don’t threaten public safety.

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Guns, as Jonathan Lowy of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence’s Legal Action Project has said, are “the only consumer product in America with no federal safety oversight.”

Firearms haven’t always been a protected class; but as the industry lost millions in lawsuits over the years, liability protection became the NRA’s holy grail.

Before 2005, the Brady Center — named for President Reagan’s press secretary James Brady, who was shot and paralyzed in a failed assassination attempt on the president — had launched multiple lawsuits around the country. Los Angeles, New York and 30 other cities, counties and states had filed civil lawsuits against gun manufacturers — including a $100 million suit against the gun industry by Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1999. The pain inflicted on negligent manufacturers was real and it was expensive. In 2003, Bryco Arms declared bankruptcy after paying $24 million in the case of a 7-year-old boy who was paralyzed by a defective gun.

Before the gun lobby successfully killed all gun control legislation, there were some key wins in the fight to hold gun manufacturers liable. Last year, the New York State appellate court ruled that a Buffalo man who was shot nearly a decade ago could sue the gun manufacturer, distributor and dealer. In January 2013, Rep. Adam Schiff introduced legislation to fight legal immunity for gun manufacturers and dealers, the Access to Justice for Victims of Gun Violence Act.

Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

How the Media’s Process Obsession Stifles Liberalism and Undermines our Democracy

Eric Alterman and Reed Richardson — Fri, 20 Sep 2013 16:56:20 +0000

Frank Bruni. (AP Photo)

Think Again: Austerity Kills, and So Will the Sequester

My Nation column is called “Frank Bruni, the Plutocrats’ Pundit.” But happily for Mr. Bruni, and unhappily for everyone else who might like to read it but is not a subscriber to The Nation, under a new and in my view, deeply misguided new Nation policy, it is presently behind a paywall. Personally, while I am philosophically pro-paywall, I do not understand the logic of having a press column hidden from the rest of the press—along with everyone else save subscribers—but of course such decisions are made well above my paygrade.

I had a lot of music and theater to review this week, but I’m in a bad mood about the above, so here’s Reed:

Well, no, not quite yet. I do want to give props to the Playwrights Horizons Theater Company, together with the Wooly Mamouth in Washington, together with author Anne Washburn, composer Michael Friedman and director Steve Cosson, for their insanely audacious “Mr. Burns: A Post Electric Play,” which manages to combine The Simpsons, Cape Fear (both versions), the apocalypse, Gilbert and Sullivan and Grease into one unholy mess. Well, it’s a lot more than a mess. Much of it is brilliant. All of it is over the top. The Times’s rave is here. Mr. Brantley is apparently a lot smarter than I am, or a much bigger fan of Messrs. G and S, and so enjoyed the third act far more than I did. But the first two were brilliant.

Now here, (finally) is Reed:

How the Media’s Process Obsession Stifles Liberalism and Undermines our Democracy
by Reed Richardson

In our democracy, where we depend upon a free exchange of ideas and information, definitions matter. They act as an invaluable cognitive tool to help frame the polity’s thinking about issues in a broader context. When done right, they can also enable a better understanding of a complex problem confronting our country and help guide public debate toward a range of practical solutions. Settle for an imprecise or lazy description, however, and an important issue can be quickly hijacked by demagogues or bogged down in mindless minutiae. And since journalism remains our primary mechanism for dialogue between the governing and the governed, it’s incumbent upon those who practice it to think closely about how they define the issues and the context that follows.

Unfortunately, many journalists seem incapable of this nuance, even when it concerns thinking about their own profession. In a media environment increasingly unmoored from the clear-cut organizational cues of the past century, too many still cling to a clubby mindset that attaches journalistic authority to the actor, not the action. Not surprisingly, Congress has absorbed this same rigid viewpoint into its debate over a (flawed) federal media shield law. But fixating on who is a journalist, rather than what journalism is, is to miss the point. Even more importantly, the policy outcome of this narrow-mindedness could actually end up harming the robust, independent journalism that Congress ostensibly seeks to protect. Here again, definitions matter.

Still, as much as it is anathema to the First Amendment to have the government in the position of certifying who is or isn’t a journalist, we’re in pretty rarefied air here. The public, no doubt, couldn’t care less. And to be fair, they’re probably right, particularly when there’s a much larger problem plaguing journalism, one that has much more direct impact on the quality of the public’s day-to-day lives. And at the core of this problem lies another incorrect definition.

Media critics, whether professional or unpaid (or, like me, both), have long used short-hand terms like “mainstream media,” or “establishment media,” or “Beltway media” when translating individual critiques across a broader group. I’ve never really liked any of these terms and neither, it seems, do conservatives, who have their own vernacular, from the worn-out trope of the “lib-rul media” to the wet spaghetti-like wit of Sarah Palin’s “lamestream media” to Rush Limbaugh’s bombastic “drive-by media.” But except for Limbaugh’s not-so-subtly racially loaded term, all of the others fall into the same logical trap as the media shield law—they focus on the who, not the what. Mis-defining the phenomenon in this way, in effect, marginalizes and masks the critique, as it doesn’t encourage a deeper look into the faulty behavior at issue. If you think about the what of journalism first, though, you’ll find a universal thread woven throughout the credulous and irrelevant reporting and piss-poor punditry one encounters these days—it’s all about process.

In other words, it’s not the mainstream media doing a disservice to our democracy; it’s the process media. To be clear, when I refer to the process media, I’m not talking about “process journalism,” the iterative, publish-first-edit-later online news approach advocated by new media folks like Jeff Jarvis. Theirs is more of a technical, inward-looking term that refers to journalism as process. Mine is a more intellectual, outward-looking term of journalism about process. While distinct, these two phenomena are not unrelated. Process journalism’s ethos of constantly pushing content, often across multiple online channels and social media platforms, has created an almost infinite marketplace for news. While this has had the salutary effect of democratizing the news in our democracy, it has also had the unfortunate side effect of inflating what constitutes news. Thus, no campaign trail tidbit or catty Senate cloakroom comment is now too insignificant or irrelevant to publish.

Thus, process media stands as a definition better suited to the egalitarian realities of today’s press coverage. No doubt, the reporters and the editors and—Lord knows—the pundits at the New York Times routinely suffer from an obsession with the political process. But to lump everything everyone does for the Times into the same critical bin is unfair to the substantive, world-class reporting and writing it produces everyday. By the same token, the listicle-loving, Twitter-mad website BuzzFeed might ordinarily escape the scrutiny of press watchdogs, but that too constitutes an injustice. There is perhaps no beat more process infested than a presidential campaign, and as the feckless press coverage of 2012 demonstrated, a tidal wave of process Tweets from BuzzFeed can now drown out real policy discussion just as easily as a muddle-headed Times columnist’s op-ed.

That modern journalism—and political journalism, in particular—has gravitated toward a process-first, meta-news model is perhaps not surprising. After all, journalism itself is a never-ending activity in striving toward an always elusive goal, as it says right in the first tenet of the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism’s Principles of Journalism: “‘[J]ournalistic truth’ is a process that begins with the professional discipline of assembling and verifying facts.” [italics mine]. As a result, the Washington press corps might naturally come to judge granular snapshots of Capitol Hill ephemera and presidential credibility as more worthy than long-gestating stories about the real-world impact of Congressional obstruction or foreign policy negotiations.

The allure of the process-media mindset is undoubtedly strong, as it handily reinforces a kind of unthinking objectivity on the coverage. For instance, if I’m just content to report dueling talking points between House Republicans and Obama on a topic like funding the government, without any adding any broader context about how a shutdown might harm the country and cost thousands of people their jobs, I can avoid being criticized as favoring a specific policy outcome or of being biased toward the president. (Or I might also say debunking Republican myths about Obamacare isn’t my job either.) Of course, a free-thinking, reality-based press corps should be courageous enough to say economic hara-kiri isn’t in our democracy’s best interests, but this calculus doesn’t add up within the process media world.

In fact, rather than offering a safe harbor of objectivity, this process-media mindset actually brings with it a number of deeply-rooted biases. The first of these is an inherent passivity and predisposition for the status quo. Forgive my pedantry, but process media coverage—as opposed to enterprise or advocacy journalism—needs, well, a process to cover. It’s simply not in the process media’s DNA to champion an unpopular or overlooked issue on its own. Instead, it prefers topics already endorsed by the DC conventional wisdom.

As a result, process-obsessed media pundits on Sunday morning news shows freely agitate for unnecessary austerity measures like deficit reduction and entitlement reform—long-time talking points for Republicans in Washington. And yet they mostly ignore legitimate crises like climate change and gun violence—both of which, sad to say, have mostly been abandoned by both parties. (If you want proof of the short and selective attention span of the process media, check out this chart of gun control coverage over the past year.) A press corps that is always reacting, however, will have a much harder time holding accountable those politicians that it relies upon to make news.

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But while the process media is itself reactive, its most elemental prejudice in those it covers is toward action—confrontation over compromise. Doing something—anything!—boldly, draws more attention and praise from the process media, no matter how foolhardy or counter-productive the end result. Thus, it literally took years before the process media felt comfortable offering up even the mildest critiques of President George W. Bush’s disastrous war in Iraq. But when Obama wisely backtracked from his original, horribly ill-conceived plan for unilateral military airstrikes in Syria, the process-media poobahs wasted no time in pouring their derision over him. As this Washington Post op-ed ably demonstrates, however, their anger wasn’t directed at the substance of his policy decision—of which, Greg Sargent notes, there was almost no discussion—just the circuitous process by which he made it. Likewise, after the mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard earlier this week, one could find another Post pundit bravely wallowing in the process without ever taking a stand on the actual issue of gun control.

Over time, this misguided fascination with the micro- and the meta- of news has a pernicious cumulative effect on both politicians and the public. Thanks to this process bias, the ostensibly objective press slowly but surely signals its subjective preference for one set of policy choices, as defined through the positive or negative feedback loop of its coverage. Thus, shock-and-awe military strikes routinely draw more favorable press treatment than slow-motion diplomacy. Obstruction enjoys the press’s tacit approval, though it claims to favor negotiation. Grandstanding pays off more than legislating. Insiders matter more than outsiders. Powerful over the powerless.

It is worth pointing out that all of these biases tend to tilt against policy solutions favored by liberals. In fact, when viewed through this process media frame, one can easily see how a press corps mostly populated by individuals with socially liberal views could nonetheless be co-opted into facilitating a broad-based conservative policy agenda for the past thirty years. But just as it isn’t in our nation’s long-term interests for one of its two main political parties to willfully abandon its role in governance to embrace spiteful self-destruction, neither is it healthy when our press corps abdicates its constitutional duty to enrich the discourse by obsessing over trivial palace intrigue.

To be sure, our republic will always be a work in progress, as the Framers acknowledged in the very first line of our government’s founding blueprint. But recall that immediately following the humble talk of forming “a more perfect Union,” the Constitution lifts its gaze beyond the day-to-day machinations of government to clearly articulate broad principles—Justice, domestic Tranquility, common defense, general Welfare, and the Blessings of Liberty—that still define success for our country and its citizens 226 years later. It’s long past time our press corps relearn why these definitions still matter.

Contact me directly at reedfrichardson (at) gmail dot com. I’m on Twitter here—(at)reedfrich.

Editor's note: To contact Eric Alterman, use this form.

This Week in 'Nation' History: Iran and the US, From Coup to Revolution—to Détente?

Katrina vanden Heuvel — Fri, 20 Sep 2013 14:00:00 +0000

(Reading / Simpson) via Flickr.com

Just days before his arrival in New York for the UN General Assembly, advisers to Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, announced their government’s willingness to directly negotiate with the United States in order to end the decade-long nuclear standoff and to remove international sanctions that have crippled the Iranian economy. “We must work together to end the unhealthy rivalries and interferences that fuel violence and drive us apart,” Rouhani wrote in an op-ed in Friday’s Washington Post.

If sincerely pursued, these promising developments have the potential to repair fraught, decades-old cleavages in the American-Iranian relationship. While many on the American right would prefer to believe those frictions began with the Islamist-led revolution of 1979, many Iranians still remember the US-backed coup of 1953 which overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh, a democratically-elected prime minister—its well-known participation in which the CIA only officially acknowledged last month—and how, for decades after, American companies and government officials exploited the Iranian economy and directly assisted in the suppression of its people.

Throughout those decades, Nation writers reported from Iran about the discord, anger, and frustration American meddling had instilled in the Iranian people. After 1979, writers like Kai Bird and the late Fred Halliday reported on the promise and eventual disappointment of the revolution. Reading these articles today, perhaps at the dawn of a new era in Iranian-American relations, gives a sense of how much has gone wrong between the two countries, but also how much could be set right with smart diplomacy and new leadership.

***

In the September 24, 1960 issue of The Nation, a Fulbright scholar named Stanley Cooperman wrote a remarkable article, “Iran’s False Front,” detailing the extent of American activity in the country and the bitter resentment it was causing among the people. With telling detail and astounding prescience, Cooperman’s article provides a window onto life in Iran during the Shah’s regime and, in hindsight, shows why the revolution which eventually did come bore such ill-will toward the United States:

Teheran seems almost a boom town. Construction is proceeding at an enormous rate, and there is hardly a block, especially in the northern or ‘European’ sections, that is without its new apartment building. These new buildings, however, are inhabited almost exclusively by Europeans, especially Americans; the rents are extremely high by any standard, and astronomical for an economy in which an experienced engineer earns $200 a month, or just about the cost of a decent apartment…

It is, most certainly, a typical Alice-in-Wonderland situation: American dollars are being spent on structures only Americans can afford to rent. One Persian, an office supervisor, explained it this way: “I hate the sound of foreign aid. Before American dollars started coming here, I had one job and a decent apartment. Now I have three jobs and still had to leave my apartment because the landlord wanted to rent to an American. Who is being ‘improved,’ anyway? …

Several men in the American Embassy here…admit that the middle class has become increasingly disaffected under the Shah’s regime. They add, however, that these ‘dreamy individualists’ could never take matters into their own hands…

Until the Persian Government realizes that a politically disenfranchised middle class is potentially dangerous; and until the Shah himself realizes that Westernization, as it is now proceeding in Iran, has increased rather than decreased social and economic pressure, the Imperial Army must continue to train its guns upon the capital city. There is, certainly, no impending ‘revolution’; political apathy, for the time being, is no less marked than the cynicism voiced privately by so many Persians in all walks of life. But political apathy is a poor foundation for any government, especially in the Middle East. Given the emergence of a powerful personality at the right moment, or a shift in world power alignments, and the ‘dreamy individualism’ of Persia may explode once again, with serious consequences.

Cooperman eventually became a well-known poet and critic, but he died in 1976, just two years before he would have seen that prediction come almost entirely true.

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***

Mass protests against the shah did explode in 1978, uniting in opposition disparate elements of a long-seething population. Linda Heiden, a longtime freelance journalist who still writes about the Middle East, wrote an article for The Nation that October, “Iran Against Pahlavi: The Peacock Throne Under Siege,” in which she countered the view, then prevalent in Western media, that Pahlavi had suddenly turned into a reformer—one, as Time magazine wrote at the time, “deeply wounded by events spawned from his own dream for Iran…searching for ways to calm his troubled people.” That, Heiden wrote, was bunk:

One does not have to dig very deeply to find the roots of the dissent. The Shah’s economic development programs, designed and executed with considerable U.S. Government and corporate assistance, have been disastrous for Iran’s workers and peasants. Land reform implemented through the Shah’s ‘White Revolution’ has forced millions of peasants into the cities, pushing pay scales for unskilled labor below subsistence levels. Meanwhile, the most fertile land has been increasingly turned over to capital-intensive agribusiness concerns owned or controlled by such multinational corporate interests as the Chase Manhattan Bank, Dow Chemical and John Deere Corporation…

This economic pattern contributes handsomely to the profits of certain sectors of the Western economies, but it neither strengthens Iran’s productive capacity nor relieves its pressing social ills. Even the massive industrialization envisioned by the regime depends heavily on foreign technology, investments and skilled labor. Furthermore, these projects are affected by international price structures and markets for their successful operation and thus inflict the burdens of foreign inflation rates, market fluctuations and monetary crises upon the Iranian economy. By the time the Shah’s costly nuclear energy program, highly sophisticated communications network and labyrinthine, corrupt bureaucracy have been funded, there is little left to alleviate the social ills that are now pushing his unwilling subjects to revolt.

Today’s readers might be taken aback by the reference to the shah’s nuclear program, supported by the United States and its European allies, which reportedly included a clandestine weapons component. Ayatollah Khomeini discontinued the program after 1979, believing it contravened Islamic law and morality, though a few years later he reversed course.

By January, the opposition movement had forced the shah to flee with his family. Momentarily, at least, it looked as if the motley collaboration between Iranian liberals and Islamists could help a modern Iran move beyond its authoritarian inheritance. Nation editorial board member Richard Falk, in “Iran’s Home-grown Revolution” (February 10, 1979), wrote:

Not only is the political, economic and cultural destiny of an important country at stake, not only is a fundamental challenge to American foreign policy involved, but a completely new revolutionary process is unfolding in Iran that is independent of the legacy of all previous revolutions. Its success or defeat will inevitably exert an awesome impact on the overall prospects of some 700 million Moslems elsewhere, and, quite possibly, on non-Moslem peoples throughout the third world…

For religion to assume a revolutionary posture is to challenge Western pre-conceptions that a religious outlook is irrelevant, or even hostile, to social change. The religious core of the Khomeini movement is a call for social justice, fairness in the distribution of wealth, a productive economy organized around national needs and a simplicity of life style and absence of corruption that minimizes differences between rich and poor, rulers and ruled.

That optimism soon yielded, in The Nation as well as among many in Iran and around the world, to great frustration and acute discontent. After visiting Iran in the spring of 1979, Kai Bird—then Nation assistant editor, later a Washington correspondent, acclaimed writer, and now a contributing editor—wrote in “Making Iran Safe for Theocracy”:

The Iranian revolution has soured the hopes of many who expected so much more in the way of radical economic reforms and a genuinely indigenous, albeit Islamic, democracy. That the leading actors turn out to be flirting with the authoritarian ways of the Pahlavis can only arouse disappointment, but there are other, more democratic actors waiting in the wings. And they have witnessed a revolution that felled a hitherto unchallenged dictatorship. That momentous precedent will not soon be forgotten.

But two years later, the situation had only deteriorated, leading the late Fred Halliday, a widely-respected expert on Iran and the wider Middle East, to declare it a “stolen revolution.” The Islamicization of Iran represented anything but the true, “indigenous” spirit of the country, he wrote:

Khomeini ceaselessly preaches the message that he stands for pure Iranian and Islamic values against the alien, corrupt and foreign values of the Westernized elite. But Iran was never a country with a homogenous Islamic culture. It has pre-Islamic values and traditions, and a great degree of ethnic diversity within it…Under the guise of elevating indigenous values over alien ones, and by invoking anti-imperialism, the Khomeini forces are trying to impose their narrow set of values on a culture which has long been heterogeneous. And there are some Iranians who point out ruefully that nothing is more alien that the Bedouin religion which the Arabs imposed on the country in 642 A.D.

Now thirty years later, there appears to be a potential for a US opening with Iran that is almost on historical par in its significance with the opening with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985-86. It seems that for economic and broader international reasons Iran's political establishment has decided to pursue an opening to the United States that could lead to a nuclear agreement, make Iran a constructive partner in securing the elimination of chemical weapons in Syria and in arranging some kind of negotiated settlement, help bring about an Israeli-Palestinian peace with its positive influence on Hamas, and stop the rush toward sectarian war in the Middle East. President Obama, who for the first time has written directly to an Iranian President (the contents of his letter still unknown), now has a historic opportunity—one in the US's national security interests—to craft an accord with the country's new leaders. Yet it remains an open question as to whether, given his foreign policy team and the fractious politics of Washington, he will be able to do so.

The days ahead will reveal if President Obama acts boldly and constructively to takes steps that could re-define, some might say salvage, his second term. As the Syria crisis demonstrates, if the US is to achieve long-lasting resolution to the Middle East's security challenges, it must test and seize all diplomatic and political solutions.

***

Subscribers to The Nation can access our fully searchable digital archive, which contains thousands of historic articles, essays and reviews, letters to the editor and editorials dating back to July 6, 1865.

GOP Madness on Display

Katrina vanden Heuvel — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 20:06:23 +0000

(Courtesy of Flickr user mar is sea Y)

Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

Five years after the onset of the worst financial collapse in our history, we still have not recovered. President Obama used the fifth anniversary of the financial collapse to remind Americans of the “perfect storm” he inherited, and of the steps he took to save the economy from free fall, rescue the auto industry and save the financial system.

He would understandably like a little credit for the 7.5 million new private sector jobs, the passage of comprehensive healthcare reform and the changes in the tax code that left those earning over $450,000 paying a bit more in taxes.

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Much was done, but in the end, far too little. The economy has not recovered the jobs that were lost in the Great Recession. The rate of job creation has barely been able to keep up with new entrants into the labor force. Over 20 million people are still in need of full-time work. The top 1 percent has captured virtually all of the rewards of growth coming out of the collapse, while the majority of Americans have been left out of the recovery. Wages for most Americans aren’t keeping up with costs. The big banks are more concentrated and larger than ever. Derivatives remain a largely unregulated weapon of financial mass destruction.

In his statement Monday, President Obama acknowledged this reality. The trends that were undermining the middle class before the Great Recession, he noted, have grown worse since the downturn. “We’ve cleared away the rubble,” the president said, but we have yet to build “a new foundation” for growth, good jobs and widely shared prosperity.

Obama used this backdrop to set the terms of the coming debate on the budget. The Republican right is once more gearing up to hold America hostage, threatening to shut down the government or default on our debts to get its way.

Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

‘Let’s Test Russia’s Resolve’

Katrina vanden Heuvel — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 19:32:51 +0000

Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel went on Democracy Now! today to speak about how the United States should “test Russia’s resolve” to disarm Syrian chemical weapons. She said that while she was not an “optimist” with regard to US-Russian relations, collaboration was key to help sort out different conflicts in the Middle East. For example, she explained, “you have to engage Russia in resolving Iran.” vanden Heuvel added that such collaboration would lead to a “new internationalism that is not defined by military strikes, by drones, certainly not by land wars anymore.” She continued: “And to seize that non-imperial, democratic narrative of a new national foreign policy seems key.”

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—Nicolas Niarchos

Take Action: Demand Your Reps Vote No on Military Intervention in Syria

The Real Credibility Crisis in Washington: Congressional Republicans

Eric Alterman and Reed Richardson — Fri, 13 Sep 2013 14:37:03 +0000

House Speaker John Boehner. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

My new Think Again: Rupert Makes the News—Literally. It’s about Murdoch and the Australian elections, Tony Blair and Iraq, and what a bad idea it would be to allow him to take over The LA Times and the Chicago Tribune, etc.

A few things:
1) I ran into Marshall Berman with my kid at the Metro Diner on 100th and Broadway on Tuesday night and we talked optimistically about de Blasio. Metro was our place, apparently. I learned that the following day, also at the Metro Diner, Marshall had a fatal heart attack. Todd Gitlin has a nice piece about him here.

Classy John Podhoretz, in a tweet, compared this brilliant Jewish/humanist scholar to a Nazi, the day after his death. Which is funny because his brother in law, Elliot Abrams, enabled actual genocide in Guatemala and proceeded to slander the people who tried to stop it as Communist sympathizers. You can read about that here. His sister Rachel wanted to see genocide committed against Palestinians who supported Hamas. Don’t believe it? Here’s what she wrote. They were:

“the slaughtering, death-worshiping, innocent-butchering, child-sacrificing savages who dip their hands in blood and use women—those who aren’t strapping bombs to their own devils’ spawn and sending them out to meet their seventy-two virgins by taking the lives of the school-bus-riding, heart-drawing, Transformer-doodling, homework-losing children of Others—and their offspring—those who haven’t already been pimped out by their mothers to the murder god—as shields, hiding behind their burkas and cradles like the unmanned animals they are, and throw them not into your prisons, where they can bide until they’re traded by the thousands for another child of Israel, but into the sea, to float there, food for sharks, stargazers, and whatever other oceanic carnivores God has put there for the purpose.”

(And I haven’t even mentioned Norman or Midge. Sheesh, what a family: The Madoffs of political punditry and policy. As if the Jewish people have not suffered enough...) And of course Berman's wonderful "All That's Solid Melts Into Air" is a more significant contribution to culture than that of all Poddies added together.... Still comparing a gentle Jewish writer to a Nazi a day after his death would get any editor fired—especially an editor of a Jewish magazine—if only daddy had not gotten him the job.... lucky “John P. Normson” can begin atoning tonight.

2) The terrific British World War II detective series, Foyle’s War starts its seventh three-episode season on PBS this weekend. You can find the recently released on bluray and dvd with more than two hours of bonus features which I haven’t had a chance to watch yet. British television specialist Acorn is streaming them the day after broadcast at www.Acorn.TV and offers all previous 22 episodes. You’ll be grateful to me if you’ve not yet indulged. Also out on bluray from Acorn, Prime Suspect: The Complete Collection. I’ve reviewed them here before when on DVD and I do recommend it, though not as strongly as Foyle.

3) How did you know? From the Times New York Today file: The former good-guy pro wrestler Bruno Sammartino (your childhood hero, perhaps) donates a replica of his championship belt to the Italian American Museum and speaks out against bullying.

Now here's Reed:

The Real Credibility Crisis in Washington: Congressional Republicans
by Reed Richardson

There’s one word that, like a bad penny, keeps re-appearing among pundits and politicians these past few weeks: credibility. It has become the overly simplistic prism through which the Beltway crowd now views every one of President Obama’s decisions regarding the civil war in Syria. Sad to say, the president himself isn’t above invoking this nebulous idea of “credibility” to justify his plans for military strikes against the Assad regime. (A use of force that I oppose.) In the world of our nation’s capital, conventional wisdom has once again turned the focus of a complicated policy issue with broad, life-and-death consequences into an insular, petty, process story.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, certainly. Still, it’s no less striking to see how the Capitol Hill crowd’s obsession with phony credibility mirrors horserace political coverage that is thoroughly uninterested in policy outcomes or facts on the ground. For example, when Obama belatedly decided to seek Congressional approval—an abrupt, last-minute move, but a wise one nonetheless—hyperventilating pundits only howled even louder about the long-term danger of his indecisiveness. Of course, this exercise of democracy wouldn’t degrade our military’s capability to strike Syria one bit. It was, however, a major transgression against the Beltway’s fascination with “decisive” “resolute” “leadership.” Or as one pundit put it, with seemingly little interest in having the head of our executive branch abide by the Constitution, Obama wasn’t following “presidential best practices.”

Likewise, when an 11th hour bid from Russia again changed the policy landscape on Syria—offering the Obama administration a potential modus vivendi it smartly pursued—many of the same DC insiders previously outraged at the president’s rush to war immediately began deriding the plodding pace of diplomacy. No doubt, Russia’s President Putin is a disingenuous partner, at best, but that doesn’t change the fact that a brokered, diplomatic solution offers the only real chance for the US to effectively achieve its broader policy goal—securing and destroying all of Assad’s chemical weapons stores—without having to invade another Middle East country. It is a low bar for sure, but after eight years of the Bush administration, I’ll take any foreign policy—ad hoc or not—that ends up eliminating actual WMDs without causing tens of thousands of deaths.

American credibility isn’t actually at risk from the president’s pursuit of a peaceful solution to Syria’s WMDs. Instead, the real credibility crisis in Washington is that the Republican Party is simply no longer capable of or interested in the responsible governance of our nation. Though this crisis has been brewing for years and now threatens the very functioning of our democracy, it doesn’t generate anywhere near the same amount of concerted pundit outrage or frantic media attention.

Since the GOP gained a majority in the House in 2010, Congress has effectively ceased normal legislative work. Undermined by a nihilistic Tea Party rump that reflexively opposes anything the president supports, the House Republican caucus now routinely fails at passing even its own conservative legislation (and boasts of job approval ratings nearing the single digits). Speaker Boehner, in a flailing attempt at remaining relevant, has tried to co-opt the hardcore, repeal-everything message, but to no avail. Instead, he’s grown increasingly irrelevant and ineffectual.

Consider that nearly two years ago—before recent GOP voting debacles on the fiscal cliff, Sandy aid, health care legislation, and the farm bill—the DC insider publication Politico ran a story with the headline: “Has John Boehner lost control?” This week, when asked about the latest uproar from his caucus’s right flank—over a bill deemed controversial because it would dare to pass a continuing resolution without defunding the Affordable Care Act—the Speaker sounded like a man both beset and bemused by the surreal state of his party’s direction.

“A reporter asked [Boehner] whether he has a new idea to resolve the government funding fight. He laughed and said, ‘No.’

‘Do you have an idea?’ he asked the reporters. ‘They’ll just shoot it down anyway.’”

This kind of alarming acknowledgement should be front-page news. It should be a nightly topic of cable news talk shows. It should be an ongoing point of discussion in op-ed pages across the country. But, again, the media’s process-obsessed mindset won’t let it step back to see the broader outcome for such obstruction. Hence, elected Republican officials in Washington pay no price for proudly spouting rhetorical doubletalk that would no doubt make George Orwell’s head spin:

“Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., said this is a fight conservatives are ready to have, despite the political stakes for the GOP being seen as forcing a fight over shutting down the government.

“‘I think that's a risk you have to take,’ he said, ‘Any path forward, there's a political downside to it. We didn't come here to get re-elected and have safe political careers. We came here to get things done.’”

That’s right, in Kingston’s mind, getting things done can be defined as hijacking the federal government in pursuit of a quixotic political crusade (one that a strong majority of the public opposes). And keep in mind that Kingston is one of three House conservatives—along with Paul Broun and Phil Gingrey—running for the open Georgia Senate seat next year and he is considered the most moderate of the three. Only in an era where the modern Republican Party has fully gone off the rails and abandoned any pretense of legislative credibility could someone like Kingston be characterized in the press as “not known for being a hard liner.”

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Exacerbating this breakdown in the GOP is an ongoing internecine battle between House and Senate Republicans that is mostly ignored by the pundits. A cadre of hard-right conservative GOP Senators, led by Ted Cruz, have effectively gone rogue, disregarding their party’s leaders who (rightly) fear the GOP will be blamed for a government shutdown later this fall. Nevertheless, Cruz has taken to criss-crossing the country like a snake oil salesman, captivating the Republican base with chimerical tales of how they can overturn Obama’s signature health care achievement if they just hate the government hard enough.

Sadly, this abdication of any credible interest in governance on the part of Republicans is all too often unfairly balanced against trifling Democratic moves by the media. Or the GOP’s behavior is inexplicably blamed on Obama as his fault for not “leading.” Either way, what’s left unsaid is the critically important challenge facing American credibility right now. And it isn’t that our president might be willing to change his mind occasionally in an attempt to avoid unnecessary war. It’s that the Republican Party has decided it is unwilling to change its mind about conducting an unnecessary war against government.

Contact me directly at reedfrichardson (at) gmail dot com.
I’m on Twitter here—(at)reedfrich.

Editor's note: To contact Eric Alterman, use this form.

This Week in 'Nation' History: Saul Landau's Investigations of US Ties to the Pinochet Regime

Katrina vanden Heuvel — Fri, 13 Sep 2013 14:00:00 +0000

Former US Minister of Foreign Affairs Henry Kissinger meets with General Augusto Pinochet of Chile. (Reuters)

This past week was marked by the coincidence of two sad and related occasions: Wednesday, September 11, was the fortieth anniversary of the American-backed coup that overthrew the socialist President of Chile, Salvador Allende; on Monday, the great journalist and documentary filmmaker Saul Landau—a lifelong friend and contributor to The Nation—died at 77.

Landau’s first articles for The Nation were based on a years-long investigation into the assassination of Allende’s foreign minister, Orlando Letelier, by a car bomb in Washington, DC, in late September 1976. In his Nation pieces and in his widely acclaimed 1980 book, Assassination on Embassy Row, written with his frequent collaborator, John Dinges—our reviewer Jorge Nef called it “a provocative study [that] reads like an absorbing spy thriller”—Landau painstakingly demonstrated that the US intelligence community’s complicity with the Pinochet regime’s crimes did not end with the tragic 1973 coup.

Just a month before he was killed, Letelier—then a fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies, now celebrating its fiftieth anniversary—published a remarkably prescient article in The Nation titled “Economic ‘Freedom’s’ Awful Toll: The Chicago Boys in Chile,” extensively documenting the efforts of American-trained conservative economists to convince Pinochet’s regime “that they were prepared to supplement the brutality, which the military possessed, with the intellectual assets they lacked.” In an editorial the week after the bombing—which also killed 24-year-old Ronni Moffitt, Letelier’s assistant at the IPS and a US citizen, and injured her husband, Michael, sitting in the backseat—The Nation wrote: “Letelier made the essential political connection in that article—that the kind of economic organization the United States was fostering on Chile absolutely required a ‘system of terror…to succeed.’ And now that system of terror has reached out and struck down by murder an opponent of the dictatorship which the United States did so much to install.”

Landau and Ralph Stavins, both colleagues of Letelier’s at IPS, immediately embarked on an investigation to determine both who was directly responsible and who was complicit. In a March 1977 Nation article dramatically titled, “This Is How It Was Done,” Landau and Stavins laid out the evidence linking the Chilean secret police—DINA—to the crime:

Our evidence indicates that a high-level DINA agent landed in Miami on September 13, 1976, and met with a group of Cuban exiles who had already been alerted that a “contract” was in the offing. The DINA agent worked out the details of the Letelier assassination with four young terrorists, noted for their daring and cold-bloodedness. Having secured a plastic explosive and a detonating device, they departed for Washington. There they met with DINA agents, posing as Chilean officials, stationed at the Chilean Embassy. The Washington-based operatives briefed the exiles on Letelier’s habits, his car description, daily departure times, route to work, parking location, and probable work schedule at the Institute for Policy Studies during the following week.

Landau and Stavins then provided a vivid, clock-ticking account of the assassination based on their six-month investigation:

As Letelier entered Sheridan Circle, a hand in the [assassins’] gray car depressed a button. Michael Moffitt heard the sound of “water on a hot wire” and then saw a “white flash.” Thrown clear of the explosion, Moffitt tried to free the unconscious Letelier from the wreckage on top of him. His legs had been snapped from his body and catapulted some 15 feet away. Ronni Moffitt stumbled away from the smoldering Chevrolet; she seemed to be O.K., but in fact had suffered a severed artery and soon bled to death. Michael screamed out into the world, “The Chilean Fascists have done this.”

Landau and Stavins then began to unravel the connections between the assassins and top members of the US government and media elite, which Landau developed further in later Nation investigations:

Most of the FBI and Justice Department officials investigating the murders have made a concerted effort to bring the ‘perpetrators to the bar of justice. At the same time, other agents inside the government have leaked material from Letelier’s briefcase, seized by the police as potential evidence at the time of the explosion. The leaked material first appeared on the desks of several officials of the Inter-American Development Bank, where Letelier had served for many years. Next, the briefcase material was given to newspaper columnists Jack Anderson and then to Evans and Novak. The columns which these men wrote attempted to discredit Letelier and divert attention from the actual killers—General Pinochet, the Chilean junta, the DINA and their Cuban exile hit men.

The names of most of the killers, their motives, and their modus, operandi are now known to the Justice Department. What remains are the more fundamental questions: will the U.S. authorities be allowed to gather sufficient evidence to bring the killers to trial? Will they name General Pinochet and other ruling junta members who ordered the assassinations? And will the role of U.S. intelligence and defense agencies, which had previously trained junta leaders, DINA agents and the exiles, be revealed in full?

A few years later, Landau himself helped reveal more of that role, in collaboration with John Dinges. In “The Chilean Connection” (November 28, 1981), they revealed new information about how the CIA may have provided crucial information and even assistance to Letelier’s and Moffitt’s killers:

In the early summer of 1976, Col. Manuel Contreras, head of DINA, Chile’s secret police, launched an operation to assassinate exiled Chilean leader Orlando Letelier. It has now been learned that within a few days of setting that plot in motion, Contreras mace a secret visit to Washington, D.C., where he met with officials of the Central Intelligence Agency and also negotiated the purchase of illegal weapons and electronic spying equipment with a firm run by former C.I.A. officers Edwin Wilson and Frank Terpil.

Wilson and Terpil gained notoriety after a Federal grand jury accused them of exporting terrorist goods and services to Col. Muammar ‘el-Qaddafi of Libya, whose regime is high on the Reagan Administration’s enemies list. By 1978, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had established that DINA agents killed Letelier on U.S. territory. That evidence, combined with the newly revealed materials showing that former C.I.A. officials cooperated with other DINA covert operations in the United States, would seem to compromise the Administration’s efforts to rehabilitate Chile’s military dictatorship as an anti-Communist ally.

In a follow-up article the following year, “The C.I.A.’s Link to Chile’s Plot,” Landau and Dinges revealed that Contreras had also met twice with the second-highest ranking official at the CIA, deputy director Vernon Walters. One meeting occurred just a month before the assassination.

Walters’s name has arisen several times in connection with Contreras and the DINA agents plotting the murder, according to the evidence compiled by the F B I That evidence shows that Walters traveled to Asuncion, Paraguay, in June 1976 on agency business. A month later, two DINA agents assigned to kill Letelier arrived in Paraguay to obtain false passports, using Walters’s name and alleging that Walters and the C I A knew about the DINA mission to Washington Walters has denied he had anything to do with the DINA agents or the false passports…

The biggest question left unanswered concerns the relationship of the C I.A to DINA and to [Leterlier assassin Michael] Townley at the time of the assassination. Why were DINA agents able to come and go freely in the United States? Were C.I.A. officials involved in circumventing the Congressional arms embargo against Chile, and so obliged to keep silent about DINA activity in Washington at the time of Leteher’s assassination for fear of revealing another C.I.A. covert action scandal?

In 1987, Landau and Dinges conducted an interview with Armando Fernández Larios, a former DINA official, who fled to the United States so he could reveal the truth of Pinochet’s direct involvement in the Letelier assassination. The authors spoke with Fernández Larios in a Virginia motel room under strict US Marshal Service security.

Fernandez has named six generals and colonels as having had a direct role in the murder or in ordering the cover-up. And he has pointed a finger at the President. He says DINA deputy chief Espinoza, one of the few insiders in a position to know, told him that Pinochet himself had given the order to kill Letelier. According to Espinoza, Fernandez said, DINA chief Contreras admitted to another general that he had set the Letelier assassination in motion because he had been so ordered. When asked by whom, Contreras replied “Ask the chief”—which both Espinoza and Fernandez took to be a reference to General Pinochet, Contreras’s only superior.

On so many issues—from Chile to Iraq, globalization to nuclear fallout—Landau “called us all to thought, gave an example to emulate in his fights for justice and left his mark forever,” as Nation intern Andrés S. Pertierra writes in his moving commemoration. It was The Nation’s honor to publish his work at such an early and definitive moment in his career, when he sought to uncover who was responsible for the brutal and untimely death of his dear and principled friend.

Read this post in Spanish.