Letters Letters
DANIEL ELLSBERG--VIETNAM'S 'MYTH'? Boulder, Colo. Early in his review of my book Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg ["Pentagon Papers Chase," July 9], H. Bruce Franklin quotes words of praise and admiration for Ellsberg from a website designed explicitly to solicit tributes to Ellsberg. Franklin counterposes those tributes to my critical portrayal of Ellsberg, as if to imply that my portrayal doesn't jibe with reality. But as Franklin must know, people will often say very different things about a person when asked to pay tribute than in other circumstances--such as when talking to a biographer. That was true for a number of people in this case. Franklin appears to believe that none of the criticisms of Ellsberg expressed in my book have merit, and he suggests that Ellsberg deserves to be portrayed as a great man and a hero. He disparages my view that one of the main reasons Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers was to achieve greater recognition. He claims that Ellsberg's efforts to get the papers out through a member of Congress contradict my view. Has Franklin never heard of Senate hearings, televised ones at that, at which witnesses testify? Does he seriously believe Ellsberg wished to act anonymously? Franklin questions my "motives" for writing critically of Ellsberg. How about this one: a desire to get it right. I believe strongly that my portrait of Ellsberg is accurate. (It may surprise Franklin that I am perhaps to the left of Ellsberg politically.) Franklin finds fault with my use of sources who had reason to dislike Ellsberg but fails to note that many who applauded Ellsberg's release of the papers also speak critically of him in the book. Franklin repeats myths about Ellsberg's career that my book shows to be myths (e.g., that Ellsberg was "a principal contributor" to the papers). Franklin also misrepresents some of my views, as when he claims that I "continually belittle" the political impact of the papers. Actually, what I criticize several times is Ellsberg's belief that releasing the papers would end the war. If I did not think the papers were politically important, I would never have chosen to write about Ellsberg. Franklin also says that I don't understand what the papers were. That is nonsense, and I used them liberally in a book I wrote earlier on Vietnam (one Franklin may even have read). Curiously, Franklin deprecates me for calling the papers a "study." But aren't all histories studies? This one was called a study by those who participated in it. TOM WELLS Suffolk, Va. Tom Wells's biography of Daniel Ellsberg is a solid piece of work even if it's not very concise and has an error or two: For example, he has my attorney in the Pentagon Papers case getting some things terribly wrong but doesn't explain how that was typical of him throughout the case, the poor devil. More important, Wells presents the data that make the case that Ellsberg is a mythomaniac and a poseur. I know he is right, because I was there throughout: Ellsberg and I were joined at the hip for at least the seventeen-month indictment period and throughout the Ellsberg-Russo Pentagon Papers trial, a trial that materialized in response to my civil disobedience of 1971. If anything, Wells's work is an understatement, because Ellsberg is beyond mythomania. The story of the Pentagon Papers affair has only been partially told, with crucial parts having been covered up. Wells pulls back the curtain by an important amount but certainly not all the way. H. Bruce Franklin, in his review of Wells's book, makes a series of helpful small critical observations, but in the end he is wrong, terribly wrong, in dismissing the work as "an extended character assassination." In thus characterizing Wells's work Franklin himself is attempting to assassinate Wells's character. But let us dispense with that ugly word and get to the facts. Franklin makes a statement very similar to one made by John Dean in his Salon review of Wells's book when he says, "Nixon and his accomplices failed...to destroy Ellsberg's 'public image.' Now, three decades on, Wells seems to be trying to finish their botched job." Franklin doesn't mention the fact that Nixon failed because he didn't get my testimony; I went to jail rather than testify against Ellsberg, who has betrayed me by denying the cross I bear. Franklin should know that criticism often comes from both the right and left, and that the latter is different in form and substance from the former. In John Dean's attack on Wells, he goes to the left to defend Ellsberg. Dean attacks me, calling me embittered. But how can one be embittered when one has found the Holy Grail? Franklin's attack on Wells goes to the right. That they meet as bedfellows shouldn't be seen as strange, because they are both dealing with the Ellsberg myth. Many desperately need the Ellsberg myth in order to crowd out having to come to terms with the details of the abomination of desolation done by our country to Vietnam, not to mention their own guilt. How ironic that a conscious guy like Franklin, who wrote an entire book about mythmaking in America, falls for the Ellsberg myth. But so have many others; Ellsberg is said by many to be an icon of the peace movement. Wells shows him to be a false icon. His motives are obvious and of great interest. Faced with a false icon and committed to peace and progressive policy and ideas, Wells sees the absolute necessity of going beyond the press version of the Pentagon Papers affair and cleaning up the record. With false icons the movement for peace and progress is greatly hampered. Franklin, however, says Wells's motives are less obvious than Nixon's and are of no particular interest: "We might speculate that for some reason Wells simply has a visceral distaste" for Ellsberg. Hello!? Bruce!? Wake up! Wells has an admirable desire to see the peace movement with worthy icons and not false poseurs who will cave during crises, as Ellsberg did numerous times, from the publication of the papers to the trial to the third Indochina war. So many, Franklin included, get it wrong because they fail to break through the Ellsberg myth. The myth has Dan turning the documents over to Neil Sheehan. The truth, however, is that Ellsberg wanted to retain control, and when he saw that Sheehan and the New York Times had gone to publication, he tried frantically to stop them. Too late. The papers hit the street on St. Anthony's Day--June 13, 1971. Sheehan had ruined Ellsberg's plans to get the papers safely on the record, and then be called to be a star witness in Congressional hearings. At our trial Ellsberg said we had accomplished our goal by getting the papers out and that all we had to do was get off on a technicality, if we could. I disagreed; the war was still churning cruelly. We had to go on the offensive in the courtroom, taking risks commensurate with the need to oppose the scale of human savagery continuing in Indochina daily. Over the years the Associated Press has done periodic puff pieces on Ellsberg, usually failing to mention me at all, even though my civil disobedience shaped the case and won the trial because of my strategy and tactics. Whenever a study of the Pentagon Papers affair leaves me out, it can only cover much less than half the story and therefore fails almost totally in accuracy. In the few works to date, the authors have done poor research; the same cannot be said of Wells. Although his work is not at all the final say on the case or on Ellsberg, it does break new ground. The story deserves to be told; the Ellsberg-Russo Pentagon Papers trial exposed the crimes that resulted in the demise of Nixon. The key to telling the story appropriately comes from Howard Zinn's philosophy of history: It has to be told from the bottom up; it has to start with the Vietnamese people and the People's Army of Vietnam (called the Viet Cong and the NVA by the Westmoreland mentality, subscribed to by the press). The best vehicle for that is the top strategic intelligence project of the war: the RAND corporation's "Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project." Reams and reams of the RAND interviews are available and have been looked at by the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences, in Boston. It will be done one day when we realize the absolute necessity of producing an accurate and detailed history of the Vietnam War. In the meantime Wells's book must be read. ANTHONY JOSEPH (TONY) RUSSO www.PentagonPapersTRusso.com Hendersonville, N.C. Your excellent review failed to give credit to the courageous publisher of the papers in book form. Beacon Press, the publishing arm of the Unitarian Universalist Association, printed the complete Pentagon Papers in paperback, thereby incurring the wrath of the Nixon Administration. The liberal church group had to cope with an FBI fishing expedition to obtain its financial records. The federal incursion was beaten off, but at considerable cost. The incident is detailed in Warren Ross's The Premise and the Promise. THE REV. CHARLES W. GRADY FRANKLIN REPLIES Newark Tom Wells says his only motive in Wild Man was "to get it right," but he never does tell us what "it" is. I had assumed that "it" was expressed by the subtitle: "The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg." As I said in opening my review: "What a marvelous subject! Does any other person's life express more intensely the contradictions of American experience during the past fifty years?" But Wells never seems to get it, much less get it right. By ignoring the history of these times, Wells misses the significance of Ellsberg's life, including its profound meaning today. But how could Wells comprehend a subject as vast and vexatious as the life and times of Daniel Ellsberg, when he seems incapable of comprehending even my review, each point of which he either misses or misrepresents? Nowhere did I suggest that the book should be an uncritical hagiography; what I found missing was a biography of that ardent cold warrior so transformed by living inside the US war machine during the Vietnam War that he performed an antiwar act of still-transcendent importance and then dedicated the next thirty years of his life to peace activism. Wells asks again and again, Why did he do it? A good question, especially in the twenty-first century. But Wells ignores the obvious and crucial answers, turning instead to ahistorical psychobabble and decades-old memories of Ellsberg's associates, many with powerful motives to discredit him to legitimize their own behavior. Tony Russo gets it exactly right when he says that the key to telling the story is the Vietnamese people. It was indeed their heroic struggle that changed so many of our lives, even transforming a couple of RAND cold warriors like Daniel Ellsberg and Tony Russo into heroes. But Tony, you need to recognize that you and Ellsberg are still, to use your words, "joined at the hip." Suppose we also asked about you, Why did he do it? The answer would be much the same, as it would be for millions of other Americans who, inspired by the Vietnamese, committed antiwar actions that, though mostly far less effective and courageous than Ellsberg's and yours, were also brave and historic. H. BRUCE FRANKLIN VIET VETS--HOME TO ROOST Corte Madera, Calif. My book Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans' Movement took thirteen years to write and involved more than 600 interviews. It earned receptions in Washington from the National Office of Vietnam Veterans of America and from Senator John Kerry, and speaking invitations from the Vietnam Center at Texas Tech, from Vietnam Veterans of California and from the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences, in Boston. Clearly these people must know something that Michael Uhl doesn't, judging from his scathing review ["That's Vietnam, Jake," July 9]. Somehow Uhl manages to miss the fact that in a whole range of seminal veteran events--from the Winter Soldier Investigation and Dewey Canyon III to the shaping of a post-traumatic stress definition to the fizzling of the Agent Orange lawsuit to the Gainesville conspiracy trial to the Cranston office hunger strike to the Wadsworth Hospital strike to the crippling of the Vet Center program--I am the first writer to bother interviewing a whole range of participants to flesh out the historical account of these very important occurrences. Aside from saying that I correctly locate the genesis of the campaign to legitimize PTSD within the antiwar movement, Uhl has virtually nothing good to say about the book. He even misses the point of the PTSD chapter, which is that it is the first time the whole history of the creation of that definition was assembled from fresh interviews with dozens of the original participants--something no one had ever thought to do, and which now, because several key participants are gone, can no longer be done. In trying to synthesize the accounts of hundreds of witnesses, there are going to be contradictions and even outright mistakes. But Uhl deliberately misleads the reader time and again to make it appear that Home to War is rife with error. Uhl blasts me for my supposedly incorrect association of the Concerned Officers Movement (COM) with the Dellums committee hearings in April 1971, on US military atrocities in Vietnam--hearings organized in part by Uhl and his partner Tod Ensign. "COM played no role, nor did any active duty officer appear before the panel," asserts Uhl. Uhl incorrectly claims that COM was composed only "of antiwar officers still on active duty." In fact, the March 1971 COM newsletter, Common Sense, explains that many of its 600 members were no longer on active duty, since the military quickly released or demanded resignations from officers as soon as their membership in COM was discovered. Many officers did participate in the Dellums committee hearings, as revealed in the published testimony. My sources for the connection between COM and the hearings were my interviews with two key national organizers of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), Jack Smith and Skip Roberts. But here's the kicker: That issue of Common Sense reveals that Uhl's group, the Citizens' Commission of Inquiry (CCI), had been meeting for months with COM to gather atrocities testimony. The newsletter also mentions that COM members "are pointing with high hopes toward the April 24 rallies in Washington." Strange of Uhl not to mention such things. Uhl also claims that I'm way off in asserting that VVAW was leery of associating itself with the Dellums committee hearings--a statement made on tape by Jack Smith. Uhl claims he knows this assertion is false because he "spoke with frequently and knew quite well" most of the leadership of VVAW. In fact, during more than 100 hours of taped interviews with almost every major leader of VVAW, I never heard one of them mention Michael Uhl. The only one who mentioned him was his partner, Tod Ensign, who says, on tape, "Michael, because of his work with us, never really became part of VVAW." Uhl attacks me for failing to consult another important book on VVAW, Andrew Hunt's The Turning, as well as Big Book: Nobody Gets Off the Bus. In fact, Hunt, who began his book when I was well on the way to finishing Home to War, came to me for help, which I gave by phone and correspondence. And far from ignoring Big Book, I am a contributor to it. Perhaps the most egregious misrepresentation, an outright lie, is Uhl's claim that I have overlooked the true progenitors of CCI and its war crimes hearings: Bertrand Russell and his assistant Ralph Schoenman. I devote two pages to Russell and Schoenman and their connection to CCI, and I cite Schoenman's book Against the Crime of Silence in my footnotes. I don't have space to list all of Uhl's inaccuracies, like placing Dewey Canyon III in 1970 (instead of 1971), making Bob Kerrey sound like a leader of VVAW (he wasn't even a member), claiming John Kerry was charged with murdering a prisoner (a totally discredited campaign slur), claiming US atrocities in Vietnam were "almost always" against civilians (at least half I've read and heard of were against military prisoners and Viet Cong suspects) and putting twenty years between the Gainesville trial and the filing of the Agent Orange lawsuit (actually it was six years). Worse are the numerous ad hominem attacks against me in the piece--claims that I am "spooked by things progressive," that I am filled with "underexamined anxieties," that I am "overfascinated" with veterans and so forth. Such remarks betray Uhl's true bias and the fact that his review is really an agenda-driven act of vengeance and spite. "There's been bad blood between many in VVAW and the original group that created Citizen Soldier [the later incarnation of CCI] since the beginning," wrote Jan Barry, the founder of VVAW. Uhl's real beef is that I chose to focus on VVAW rather than CCI, the work of John Kerry and Ron Kovic rather than the work of Tod Ensign and Mike Uhl. Uhl has a right to attack my choices as a writer but not to misrepresent for his own ends the content, sources and overall care with which I put the book together. GERALD NICOSIA UHL REPLIES Walpole, Maine It's nice to know Gerald Nicosia has received support for his book within the very community with the greatest stake in advancing the--however deserved--entitlement agenda of veterans and the warrior mystique of their culture. Mazel tov! On his boast of being "the first writer...to flesh out the historical account" of PTSD as a disability of war, I praised the chapter, as he acknowledges. But many writers--Andrew Hunt, Judith Herman and Christian Appy, among others--have given credible accounts in trade publishing of this disability's emergent legitimization long before Home to War appeared. Take two on Nicosia's sketch of the Concerned Officers Movement (COM) is even more garbled than the original. CCI did meet frequently with COM activists beginning in late 1970; we were organizing events on behalf of the fledgling group. At one press conference, five COM members--all on active duty, incidentally--formally requested that their Pentagon superiors convene "courts of inquiry" into the widespread allegations of US atrocities. COM based its requests on "testimony" from a CCI-sponsored event that predated the Dellums hearings by almost five months. The facts on this combined CCI/COM action are all there, in Neil Sheehan's New York Times article (January 13, 1971). And, yes, when some members left the service, they remained affiliated with COM, and often with VVAW and CCI as well. But it was as an organization of active-duty officers that COM exercised its unique historical and moral powers. Many former officers did participate in the Dellums hearings; I was one of them. None of us were on active duty, and, I repeat, COM itself played no role whatsoever in the hearings. In what strikes me as the symbolic equivalent of shooting himself in the foot, Nicosia actually brags that his two principal sources for information about COM and the hearings had no connection to either. Nicosia tallies one point on my alleged "inaccuracies," misdating Dewey Canyon III; mea culpa. It was 1971, and I was there. As for "making Bob Kerrey sound like a leader of VVAW"--where is that exactly? And "claiming John Kerry was charged with murdering a prisoner"? I made no such claim. Both Kerrey and Kerry were busted by men who served under them in Vietnam, who reportedly remained their close friends even while revealing all to members of the Fourth Estate. The John Kerry story appeared initially in the senator's hometown paper, the Boston Globe (October 27, 1996). Far from being "charged"--or even investigated--the allegation against Kerry seems to have evaporated. That's fine with me. My review makes quite clear who I believe bears responsibility for US war crimes policies in Vietnam. But can anyone doubt that this smoking gun will reappear should Kerry eventually decide to contest for the presidency? That other "inaccuracy"--my failing to distinguish between Vietnamese civilians and VC suspects or military prisoners--has Nicosia done any homework on the Vietnam War? Nicosia claims to have helped Andrew Hunt, who wrote The Turning, and refers to phone calls and correspondence with the author. Strange that Hunt, who provides a long list of acknowledgments, does not mention Nicosia. Maybe I missed another footnote. And to accuse me of an "outright lie" in claiming that he "overlooked the true progenitors of CCI" and so forth borders on hysteria. I merely stated that Nicosia's version of the founding of CCI was "even more convoluted than his account of the Dellums hearings." None of Nicosia's 600 interviewees (211 cited, by my count) ever mentioned my name. Oh my! I should scorn this cheap shot, although I will immodestly suggest that such anonymity reads well on any organizer's résumé. But, for the record, if Nicosia were to call the VVAW principals he interviewed, he would be surprised at how many of them knew or remember me quite well. I never claimed to have been active in VVAW. CCI's offices were on the tenth floor of New York's "movement building," 156 Fifth Avenue; VVAW was three floors below, and for almost a year the two groups worked in coalition. So, Gerald, call especially VVAW co-founder Jan Barry, whose name you invoke to opine--quite correctly--that "bad blood" existed between my group, CCI, and some VVAW leaders after the Winter Soldier split in early November 1970. Such sectarian clashes, alas, were not our movement's finest hours. And speaking of Barry, here's a wee item that may convince Nicosia to haul his own unconscious up on charges of self-betrayal. He writes that my review makes it appear that "Home to War is rife with error." Surely he must know that "rife with error" is virtually the same phrase Barry assembles to sum up Home to War in his review, "A Troubling Tribute," for The Nonviolent Activist (July/August 2001). In the piece, Barry goes on to score Nicosia's work as "marred...by a lack of fact checking." Sound familiar? (To still the doubters, Barry and I have had no contact for several years, nor had I known of his review until after mine was published, whereas the thirteen years Nicosia worked on his book seems a sufficient span for checking a few facts.) Well, it gets worse. To my charge of Nicosia's being "overfascinated" with veterans in some voyeuristic fashion, Barry adds, "what fascinated Nicosia were the battles angry vets fought.... he dwells on disputes among the participants." But Barry really seems disturbed that Nicosia's "focus on dramatic moments in the lives of some extraordinary, outspoken activists obscures the lasting legacy of VVAW." Now that's the kind of friendly fire that can really wound the reputation of a book claiming to be "A History of the Vietnam Veterans' Movement." There are two problems with that subtitle. Home to War is not a history but a pastiche of recollections and anecdotes culled for the most part from Nicosia's many interviews. At best it aspires to the realm of oral history--would that it were!--a branch of historical discourse I in no way undervalue. Second, the accumulated experiences of Vietnam veterans, during our thirty-plus years of postwar readjustment and still counting, do not constitute a "movement." There was a movement, an antiwar movement, in which many vets were briefly active; the rest is Vet Cult, as I have attempted to show. Nicosia accuses me of a writing a "scathing" "ad hominem" "attack." My review is hardly favorable, but there's nothing personal about it. Except for the eyewitness digressions to tidy up the record, it's almost scrupulously academic. It was quite by accident that Home to War provided an occasion for suggesting a range of contexts in the evolution of US social policy and the culture and readjustment of US veterans of war in which the Vietnam veteran experience, spread over three decades, might be examined. "That saga," to quote the final line of Jan Barry's review, "has yet to be fully told." But as we linger near the subject of personal attacks, I am informed on good authority that Nicosia, upon reading my review, expressed an explosive urge to "blow up" my house. Now that's, at least potentially, "scathing," and certainly personal. MICHAEL UHL
Nov 29, 2001 / H. Bruce Franklin, Michael Uhl, Gerald Nicosia, and Tom Wells
Letters Letters
Boxing Days San Francisco Jack Newfield knows as much about boxing--and injustice--as any writer at work today. His article "The Shame of Boxing" [Nov. 12] captures the tragedy of this sport as few writers can. Anyone who cares about boxing knows that it can no longer be enjoyed without a drastic overhaul that puts fighters first. And anyone who cares about people must recognize that it is cruel to subject fighters to corruption, exploitation, manipulation and the real prospect of poverty, dementia and death. RICHARD NORTH PATTERSON Chalmette, La. As a lifelong, die-hard fan of the "sweet science" and someone who deeply cares about the sport, I found myself giving Jack Newfield a standing ovation at my computer after reading his great article. It should be mandatory reading for all state officials in the sport. Bravo. FELIX CASTRO Brooklyn, N.Y. Less than two months after the biggest terrorist attack ever, is The Nation not finding enough news so that it has to resort to a feature on...boxing?! (I admit I didn't read it, because I have no interest in it.) It seems irrelevant, given the urgent situation in the world now. MARISA BLACKWELL Los Angeles Thank you for Jack Newfield's article, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I was surprised to see an article about boxing in a progressive publication that wasn't a screed about how boxing is violent and therefore should be banned. As a boxing fan I agreed with all Newfield's prescriptions for fixing what's wrong with the sport, and I'd like to add one of my own: for fighters to wear helmets, as is done in Olympic boxing. DIANA WAGGONER Denver Boxing has no place in a civilized society. The only way to improve it is to ban it, immediately. STEVE READ Portland, Ore. I am totally impressed with one of the best- written and most thorough articles I've read on boxing. I cover men's and women's boxing, and Jack Newfield is right on. SUE T.L. FOX WBAN Network www.womenboxing.com www.womenboxingrecords.com www.boxeofemenino.com New York City For nine years, when I was working for radio station WMEX in Boston, I broadcast many boxing bouts--some with nationally known fighters as well as club fighters. I also spent a lot of time backstage, getting to recognize "connected" managers and promoters. The Mob was pervasive. Over the years, I saw a number of club fighters become cognitively disabled (punch-drunk). As with capital punishment, any "reforms" of the industry will be cover-ups of the fundamental brutality of a "sport" in which the participants are intended to maim each other--the more seriously, the better. During my years at ringside, often when there actually was a boxing bout--skill rather than assault--the crowd would derisively sing in waltz rhythm. As usual, Jack has done a first-rate job of muckraking, but there is no way to disguise that boxing is planned savagery. In a civilized society, it should be outlawed. Unless, of course, we are much less civilized than we claim to be. NAT HENTOFF Nashville, Tenn. Jack Newfield has demonstrated once more why professional boxing remains the most relentlessly corrupt and racially exploitative business enterprise in the United States. The most recent law from Congress, named for Muhammad Ali, won't bring the velvet out of the sewer. It won't begin to deal with the depth of sleaze that rips off fighters and fans. John McCain's commitment is admirable, but without a new, searching Congressional investigation with extensive public hearings, including confronting the meat-merchant promoters and managers, proponents of a national commission will never build support from the public or Senator McCain's Congressional peers. When we think of state-sanctioned death, capital punishment comes immediately to mind, and we are horrified at the thought of televising an execution. At the same time, the public is entertained twice or more a week with matches where state-sanctioned death is a sad possibility. There's another option. Because of the deaths and brain damage, the American Medical Association has called for a ban on boxing. Every credible health organization in the world has done the same. Newfield will argue that a ban won't work, that it would drive the filth underground or to other countries. Even a moratorium--a temporary ban until there's a national commission to clean it up--has no chance in today's environment. I congratulate The Nation for giving Jack Newfield's cause resonance. His has been a lone voice. And once every few months--in the faint hope that I will love it again--I feel the magnetic pull of the once "sweet science" and pay HBO or Showtime to prove that I hate it still. JOHN SEIGENTHALER SR. Chicago A trivial point, perhaps, and yet... Jack Newfield, in his great, definitive piece on the rottenness of the boxing game, has cited sixteen top writers on the subject. For some reason, he failed to mention the nonpareil: Nelson Algren. Two of those Jack named, Pete Hamill and Budd Schulberg, have often referred to Algren as the best of the lot. Whether it be in his short stories or his novels, his lyric style as well as his bite into the core of the rotten apple has always knocked me out. When will this guy ever be recognized as the keenest observer around? The constant ignoring of this man drives me nuts. STUDS TERKEL Alamosa, Colo. Jack Newfield mentions Bob Dylan's indictment of boxing in "Who Killed Davey Moore?" by saying "he has the manager, the referee and the crowd all defensively rejecting responsibility for the calamity." The song also includes a verse about the sportswriter's responsibility for the calamity. Did this strike a little too close to home? JOEL KAUFMAN San Luis Obispo, Calif. I disagree with Jack Newfield's claim that boxing takes such poor care of the fighters because they are black and Latino. Boxing was always rotten at the core. In the days when Jews, Irishmen and other white fighters dominated, the fighters usually got screwed much as they do today. Newfield also implies that white guys never could really fight. Tell that to the likes of Jerry Quarry, Carmen Basilio, Rocky Marciano and Jack Dempsey. TOM OGREN Davis, Calif. I was sure Jack Newfield would recommend abolishing professional boxing. A contest in which the object is to inflict enough injury to an opponent's brain that he falls to the canvas and cannot get up for at least ten seconds is not a sport any more than cockfighting is a sport. No reforms can get around that. As for the old cliché that boxing provides a ticket out of the ghetto, Floyd Patterson observed long ago that for everyone who escapes by boxing a hundred others are doomed to stay because they developed no other skills. We got rid of dueling and we can get rid of boxing. SHERMAN STEIN Los Angeles The International Brotherhood of Prizefighters is in the process of completing our 2001 fighter registry. We are also looking to break ground on our seventeen-story boxing glove, which will house the IBOP Hall of Fame. We are also implementing various pension plans and medical/life insurance plans for fighters. All sorts of things the boxing community has only talked about. Well, it is finally going to happen. ANTHONY TORRES International Brotherhood of Prizefighters Scottsdale, Ariz. I hold an Arizona manager's license, and I've been involved in professional boxing for more than fifty years in virtually every position, which qualifies me as--at the very least--knowledgeable about the sport. I would rank Jack Newfield's "The Shame of Boxing" as one of the most incisive, well-thought-out, honest pieces ever done. He has cast light on so many problem areas that I am moved to nominate him as the first national boxing commissioner--should that post ever be created. STEVE EISNER Honolulu Newfield sure knows his stuff. In Chicago, I fought in smokers as an amateur, billed as a hero of the "Famous Japanese American 100th Infantry Battalion," a Golden Gloves runner-up, 1946. I learned to fight as a kid in Eastside Los Angeles, Boyle Heights. We learned racist attitudes early--"Jew boys" can't fight, and never hit a "colored" fighter in the head, hit 'em in the stomach. I was taken aback when given the same advice by my handlers in Chicago. In close decisions I won over black fighters and lost to whites. I had to knock the white boys out to win. To beat the black fighters, all I had to do was remain standing at bell, no matter how groggy. Worse, I was once told to take it easy on a white prospect. Didn't knock him out, and lost. I figured then and there that I was just another bum. I quit. Newfield is right, only a union can clean out the Augean stable. "Stables"! We're animals--all of us in boxing and out in the real world too. Good thing I turned down Nichols, a black man, a nice guy not a Don King, who wanted me to join his stable. Worked in the steel mills, but they were worse. By the way, Newfield left out of his list of boxing greats Henry Armstrong, who held three championships at the same time, feather-, light-and welterweight, and fought the middleweight champ Ceferino Garcia to a draw. He left off his list of writers who touched on boxing James Jones (From Here to Eternity). God, what that Kentucky-born soldier in Farewell to Arms went through. Like me, he quit boxing for the rotten army officers and steel bosses. Like me, he got blacklisted. Unlike me, he didn't stick with the miners' union. Too bad, because the UMW got rid of the gangsters. Marx said, We're not a bunch of oxen. We're Spartacists, we're fighters. DON MATSUDA Santa Barbara, Calif. Readers may be interested in Sartre's discussion, in his posthumous (and unfinished) Critique of Dialectical Reason, of several of the themes broached by Newfield. Sartre writes, "Every boxing match incarnates the whole of boxing as an incarnation of all fundamental violence." Sartre's reflections on boxing were, in a sense, beholden to his larger philosophical agenda (e.g., rendering intelligible "struggle" as an incarnation of capitalist scarcity), yet they provide cogent reasons in support of Newfield's perceptive proposition that boxing is "more about Marx's concept of surplus value than notions of literary symbolism." Sartre seems to suggest that boxing is a concomitant of capitalism and will thus persevere as long as the latter, giving credence to Newfield's assessment of the impotence of calls to abolish the sport. Perhaps the many--I hesitate to use the words--reformist steps will someday lead to a vista atop the mountain in which both the elimination of boxing and capitalism are on the horizon. PATRICK S. O'DONNELL
Nov 29, 2001 / Our Readers
Fighting Words Fighting Words
Fighting Words Gerald Nicosia, author of Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans' Movement, here replies in detail to Michael Uhl's review of that book, which appeared in the July 9, 2001 issue of the magazine. Nicosia earlier rebutted Uhl in the more constricted space available in the September 17/24 "Letters" section. San Francisco Two months ago I complained about the irresponsible, ad hominem 4,000-word review by Michael Uhl of my book Home to War that appeared in The Nation. I submitted a response to the numerous misrepresentations and falsehoods that ran to about 2,000 words, and even so I was not able to deal with all of the vicious, unfair attacks and lies in the piece. I was told at first that I could only have 300 words to reply. I complained and was told I could have only 500 words; ditto, then 700 words. Finally I was given an absolute ceiling of 1,000 words. I did my best to reply to the most egregious errors in those 1,000 words. Now, it turns out Uhl has been given yet another 1,500 words to throw even more lies at me and my book--and to reprint another bad review from a different publication. Not only is this dirty pool--giving him 6,000 words and me 1,000-- but letting him print the substance of another bad review is totally unjust, since I was not allowed to print the substance of one of the dozens of rave reviews the book has received, in places such as the Boston Globe, Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Dallas Morning News. In his first piece Uhl claimed I had conducted 100 interviews. Now he claims it's 211. My acknowledgements name 431 principle interviewees (page 669-671) and there were at least another 200 spoken to more casually. Would it be too much to ask The Nation to simply count names before letting Uhl make his wild claims? Even more outrageously, The Nation allows Uhl to print unsubstantiated and completely false, malevolent libel: that I had "an explosive urge to blow up" his house. Is Uhl now a mindreader? What evidence is there of this plot to blow up his house? In printing such vicious nonsense, The Nation has descended to the level of The National Inquirer, and should be ashamed of itself. What will you print next week, Uhl's assertion that I was involved in blowing up the World Trade Center? There are other outrageous lies as well--the claim that Home to War is merely "oral history." The sources and notes to Home to War cite over seventy book-length works and hundreds of articles, as well as scores of other documents. Once again, a cursory look by the editors of The Nation would have shown this statement to be one more blatant, libelous falsehood. While Uhl is given no length limits in his attacks, even my short reply was substantially cut. Most damningly, a key sentence was removed, which revealed that Uhl himself had met with the Concerned Officers Movement only a month before the Dellums Committee Hearings. Why was that sentence cut? Once upon a time I believed the The Nation was a reliable critical voice on the political left. Once upon a time, I was even a Nation subscriber. I am now convinced that you are publishing some kind of trashy, political hit sheet. Again, in view of what was at one time an honorable publishing history, you folks should be ashamed. Now to the substance of Uhl's remarks: Once again, Uhl cannot spend enough words misrepresenting Home to War. He has now upped his count of my interviewees from 100 to 211. Try again, Mike. Pages 669-671 list 431 principle interviewees by name; there were hundreds of others spoken to more casually. He also claims my book is nothing but "oral history." The Sources and Notes to Home to War cite some seventy books and hundreds of articles and thousands of other documents, many acquired through Freedom of Information Act requests. Most vilely, Uhl claims I was beset by an "explosive urge" to blow up his house. Besides being poor at arithmetic, he also flunks mind-reading. Likewise The Nation allows Uhl to disparage my claim that I helped Andrew Hunt with his book The Turning. I would be happy to show my letters from Hunt to Uhl, The Nation, or anyone else--but, typical of these unfounded attacks, no one bothered to ask to see them. Perhaps most unprofessionally, The Nation allows Uhl, in continuing his attack on me, to quote substantially from another bad review of Home to War (by Jan Barry). Since I was severely limited in the length of my reply, I had no such opportunity to quote any of the dozens of rave reviews of the book. Where is the pretense of fairness here? How about giving equal time to these lines from the lead review in the Dallas Morning News (August 26, 2001) by Wilbur Scott, a Vietnam veteran who spent more time in combat and earned more medals than either Uhl or Barry: "Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans' Movement is far-reaching and exhaustive...the tapes, field notes and press clippings on which Nicosia has based his account constitute an impressive archive...the value of Nicosia's account lies in the details..." Yours truly, GERALD NICOSIA
Nov 29, 2001 / Gerald Nicosia
Letters Letters
'BLOWBACK' Washington, D.C. In his October 15 article "Blowback," Chalmers Johnson reiterates the widely circulated but incorrect notion that the CIA had a relationship with Osama bin Laden. For the record, your readers should know that the CIA never employed, paid or maintained any relationship whatsoever with bin Laden. It is true that the US government supported the Afghan mujahedeen in its fight against Soviet forces and that bin Laden was in Afghanistan during that time frame raising money and recruiting Arab fighters to fight the Soviets in the Afghan cause. That activity does not equate with the CIA maintaining a relationship with bin Laden, and it is time for that well-worn canard to be put to rest. WILLIAM R. HARLOW Director of Public Affairs Central Intelligence Agency Baltimore Chalmers Johnson's blowback theory of terrorism against the United States rests on shaky logical grounds, as it confuses causes with rationalizations. Virtually every social movement legitimizes itself as a reaction against some real or perceived injustice. But whether the historical events representing the claimed injustice are the actual cause of the movement is a totally different issue. It would be absurd to portray the rise of Nazism in 1920s Germany as a "blowback" to international Jewry, Bolshevism, Weimar's decadence or even the Treaty of Versailles. Fascism also emerged in Italy, where the purported "causes" were for the most part absent. However, both countries had similar class structures--reactionary landowners and industrialists, whose interests were threatened by labor mobilization, and who bankrolled bands of Fascist thugs to fight labor organizing. Following the same logic, the US policy in the Middle East and Central Asia is quite benign, especially when compared with our misdeeds in Latin America or the Far East. If the blowback argument were true, we should expect terrorist attacks coming from Chile, Nicaragua or Vietnam rather than from the Middle East. The blowback theory ignores internal factors responsible for the growth of Islamicist terrorism. These factors, strikingly similar to those responsible for the growth of European Fascism, include oil-rich aristocracies and military dictatorships bankrolling Islamicist fanatics to turn back social changes taking place there. The United States might have aided these efforts under the rubric of anticommunism but certainly did not create them, just as Henry Ford's birthday gifts for Hitler did not unleash Nazism. WOJTEK SOKOLOWSKI New York City Bravo for Chalmers Johnson's insightful and clearly stated article. One point I would like to have seen addressed: the possible "blowback" resulting from the toppling of the Taliban, which the US government and its motley coalition of allies is hellbent on doing, and replacing that government with another group of extremists--the Northern Alliance. Afghan women's rights groups like RAWA are sounding the alarm about the alliance, and we must listen. Not only is the Northern Alliance bound to continue the oppression of the Afghan people, but installing them in power is bound merely to repeat the blowback pattern. R. LONGWORTH JOHNSON REPLIES Cardiff, Calif. Does the CIA's director of public affairs really have as much contempt for the American people as he shows in his letter? The details he is suppressing are on the public record. The CIA supported bin Laden from at least 1984, including building in 1986 the training complex and weapons storage tunnels around the Afghan city of Khost, where bin Laden trained many of the 35,000 "Arab Afghans." They constituted a sort of Islamic Abraham Lincoln Brigade of young volunteers from around the world to become mujahedeen and fight on the side of the Afghans against the Soviet Union. Bin Laden's Khost complex was the one that Clinton hit in 1998 with cruise missiles; for once the CIA knew where the target was, since it had built it. It is true that the CIA used a formal cutout to make deliveries of money and weapons to the "freedom fighters." It did so to maintain a facade of deniability with the Soviet Union. All US money was funneled through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, which had taken the lead since 1982 in recruiting radical Muslims from around the world to come to Pakistan, receive training and fight on the Afghan side. In Peshawar, Osama bin Laden, the well-connected, rich young Saudi (he was born around 1957), became close friends with Prince Turki bin Faisal, the head of the Istakhbarat, the Saudi Intelligence Service, and Lieut. Gen. Hameed Gul, head of the ISI, all of whom were joined in a common cause with the CIA to defeat the Soviet Union. It is barely conceivable that Milton Bearden, the CIA official in charge of this "covert" operation, never shook hands with Osama bin Laden, but it is simply not true that they did not have a relationship. Moreover, two genuine authorities, Abdel Moneim Said of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, and Hazhir Teimourian, the prominent BBC and London Times analyst of Iranian Kurdish ancestry, claim that bin Laden received training directly from the CIA. Wojtek Sokolowski ignores the definition, which I supplied in my article, of the CIA term "blowback": unintended consequences of covert special operations kept secret from the American people and, in most cases, from their elected representatives. I am not talking about reactions to historical events but about ill-conceived, short-term, invariably illegal US clandestine operations to overthrow foreign governments or carry out state terrorist operations against target populations. The American people may not know what was done in their name, but the people on the receiving end surely do--including the people of Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1959-60), Congo (1960), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), Vietnam (1961-73), Chile (1973), El Salvador and Nicaragua (1980s), Iraq (1991 to the present) and very probably Greece (1967), to name only the most obvious cases. Sokolowski says that our record of misdeeds in the Middle East and Central Asia is "benign" compared with Latin America and East Asia and wonders when the "blowback" will start coming from those places. As I argued in my book Blowback, East Asia is still the place fraught with the greatest danger to the United States itself. For example, Okinawa, with its thirty-eight American military bases surrounding 1.3 million people, is America's version of the Berlin wall. When it becomes unraveled, as it surely will, it will take with it the entire American empire in East Asia. R. Longworth is right to remind us that there are cycles of blowback. The September 11 attacks and the Pentagon's current response of "bouncing the rubble" in Afghanistan are setting the stage for more rounds to come. This cycle will probably come to an end only when the United States has gone the way of the former Soviet Union. CHALMERS JOHNSON GRACE UNDER FIRE Chicago I have read political journals of all stripes for several years, and I have never seen an author respond to criticisms of his article with as much grace and honesty as Richard Falk did in the "Exchange" [Nov. 26] reviewing his "Defining a Just War" [Oct. 29]. Nor can I remember anyone else using such a forum to admit he was wrong. Try to find that in National Review. MICHAEL ROBBINS A LAST, FOND LOOK AT 'TAKINGS' East Lansing, Mich. I have been teaching property law, including the case of Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon, for more than twenty-five years. Richard Epstein is wrong when he says that the case "held that a regulation...could be treated as a compensable taking if it went 'too far'" ["Exchange," Nov. 19]. That remark by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was a dictum, not a holding. The actual ruling nullified the regulation. No compensation was awarded. Moreover, in 1987 the reasoning of the Brandeis dissent was adopted in the case of Keystone Bituminous Coal Association v. DeBenedictis. Brandeis and the Keystone court treated the regulation of undermining as nuisance prevention, a justification that Epstein favors elsewhere in his letter. Despite Epstein's protestations, his view on the takings clause is "radical." The Founders knew the difference between the words "regulation" and "taking." Plutocrats wish to blur this distinction. JACK ROONEY GOOD TO THE LAST DROP Oakland, Calif. It's unfortunate that both Christopher Hitchens and his critics have missed the real significance of the deliverance of Vienna in 1683 [ "Minority Report," Oct. 22, Nov. 19]. While pillaging the vast Turkish camp outside the city walls, a soldier in the Christian army is supposed to have come upon a Turkish soldier making coffee (very cool under fire, the Turks) and forced him at sword's point to disclose the secret of the wondrous beverage. Very soon thereafter, the Christian soldier opened the first coffeehouse in Vienna--thereby setting the West on the path of true civilization. RICHARD KLEIN HITCHENS REPLIES Washington, D.C. Richard Klein (who I very much hope is the same man who authored Cigarettes Are Sublime), if anything, understates matters. In addition to cracking the coffee code, enterprising Viennese pastry cooks began to bake a fragrant buttery roll to "go with." In recognition of the many arts and sciences mastered by their beaten foe, they formed the delicacy in the shape of a Turkish crescent or "croissant." The proprietors of Sacher's Hotel and the makers of Sacher torte were only building upon this enduring and delicious cross-cultural foundation. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Nov 21, 2001 / Christopher Hitchens, Chalmers Johnson, and Our Readers
Letters Letters
BIN LADEN'S BIZARRE BATTLE San Diego, Calif. Dilip Hiro makes many perceptive observations in "Bush and bin Laden" [Oct. 8], but the article is just as notable for what he chooses to leave out. Hiro's thesis is that "for bin Laden and Al Qaeda, attacking American targets is a means, not an end, which is to bring about the overthrow of the corrupt, pro-Washington regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan through popular uprisings." If that is indeed his goal and these are his means, then bin Laden goes about his business in the most wrongheaded way. Most likely he would be effective if he targeted Arab regimes, but he chooses not to. Nor does it seem that he puts much trust in popular uprisings. And even if he did, he would probably not be satisfied merely with overthrowing the Saudi, Egyptian and Jordanian regimes. Hiro makes bin Laden look like a conventional Arab nationalist, but his goal is far more ambitious: the replacement not just of regimes but of all Arab nation-states with a pan-Islamic state based on an extreme version of the Sharia. The full name of bin Laden's organization, of which Hiro lists only the first three words, is World Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and Crusaders. In a February 23, 1998, declaration, bin Laden and his associates issued a fatwa making it the individual duty for every Muslim anywhere to kill Americans and their allies--civilians and military--in order to liberate the al-Aqsa and Mecca's mosques and have their armies depart all the lands of Islam (see www.fas.org/irp/world/para/docs/980223-fatwa.htm) Bin Laden does view as his foremost enemy the United States and is even willing to hurt Muslims in order to humiliate it. He took great pride in his May 1998 interview with John Miller (see www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/interview.html) for attacking the US servicemen who sought to restore order and distribute food in Somalia, a Muslim nation, and for bringing about the collapse of their humanitarian mission. Nor is he just complaining about Israeli oppression of the Palestinians but rants about killing Jews. His support for Islamicist terror organizations from Kashmir through Chechnya shows the breadth of his ambitions. In this old-new worldview, bin Laden is still fighting the Crusaders of yore, even if in a bizarre twist he now counts Jews among the Crusaders. Hence, the remedies Hiro suggests--withdrawal of most US troops from Saudi Arabia and addressing urgently the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a worthy goal in itself--will never satisfy the bin Ladens. Even if the just solution of this conflict was reached, bin Laden could not be appeased. He would still have to be defeated. GERSHON SHAFIR HIRO REPLIES London Gershon Shafir should read my Nation piece "The Cost of an Afghan 'Victory'" [Feb. 15, 1999]. It has a fuller analysis of the February 1998 fatwa (religious decree) by bin Laden, who, by the way, is not a qualified Islamic religious-legal scholar (alim) and therefore not entitled to issue a fatwa. That article also examines the basis for the presence of US troops on Saudi soil and rejects the rationale provided by the Pentagon on three counts. Regrettably, more than ten years after the liberation of Kuwait, what is missing is an official statement by Washington along the lines of, "On such and such day we signed an agreement with Riyadh whereby US troops are to be stationed in Saudi Arabia for a period of x years with the following aims..." If Shafir, or some enterprising American journalist, were to extract this information from the White House or the Pentagon, we will all be the wiser. The rationale of bin Laden and his cohorts for attacks on US targets is to highlight to the pro-American regimes in the Arab world that they are resting on a foundation that is vulnerable. But the means they have employed are loathsome and inhuman, and they should be brought to justice. Unlike Shafir, I am not privy to bin Laden's plans after he succeeds in securing the withdrawal of US troops from the Saudi kingdom. Here again, were Saudi Arabia a country where public opinion polls were allowed, we would know what sort of support or opposition there is among Saudis on the issue of US forces on their soil. Perhaps the Bush White House--that font of democracy and freedom of speech--would urgently advise the Saudi monarch to conduct such a poll so that we could all, Shafir and me included, debate the matter in an enlightened way. DILIP HIRO LAW ENFORCEMENT: 'DISMAL FAILURE' Princeton, N.J. I count myself fortunate to be the target of one of Alexander Cockburn's milder forays into his favorite domain of slash-and-burn journalism ["Beat the Devil," Nov. 12]. His mixture of dismissive invective and anecdote leads nowhere, and when he proposes as a response reliance on law enforcement via the United Nations, without giving any indication that it has the slightest prospect of success, it seems reasonable to question his seriousness. The law enforcement model has been a dismal failure even with respect to familiar forms of terrorism, but to suppose that it can address such a massive challenge to the basic security of the leading state in the world is at best diversionary. RICHARD FALK COCKBURN REPLIES Petrolia, Calif. Come on, Professor Falk, the stakes are large and my tone was appropriately judicious. Whining about an entirely imaginary "slash and burn" onslaught is no way to defend your odd rationales for Bush's "just war." In fact I gather that you've become a tad uncomfortable with a position that has required you to cheer on the B-52s as they showered cluster bombs on "Taliban villages," as one Pentagon newsnik termed them, and with what Stephen Shalom, in an excellent demolition of your arguments on ZNet (www.zmag.org/shalomjustwar.htm) has called "Falk's strange moral logic: the U.S. war in Afghanistan is 'truly just' because the UN is incapable of acting by virtue of the U.S. unwillingness to go to the UN." ALEXANDER COCKBURN NO DEBATE Boston A notice ["On the Web," Nov. 5] refers readers to the "Chomsky-Hitchens debate on the roots of the terrorist attacks" on the Nation website, one of several such misleading references. There is no such debate. I responded to specific false charges on various topics, unambiguously refusing to enter into a debate in that context. The roots of the September 11 attacks were scarcely mentioned, with no disagreement that I can perceive. NOAM CHOMSKY 'HIDING BEHIND THE SOFA' London I am surprised that Victor Navasky, in "Profiles in Cowardice" [Nov. 5], didn't mention an interview that had many of us here in Europe hiding behind the sofa in embarrassment and disgust: the Letterman/Rather interview. While not doubting the genuine emotion of Dan Rather, we were shocked at his answer to the all-important "Why?" It went something like, "These people are losers, Americans are winners, and they are jealous of our success, that's why they do these things..." What?! The American public has trusted this man to tell them how it is for years; they look to him to inform, to educate and guide them through the difficult issues. Does this man not understand the amount of influence on public opinion he has? Much of the US media, with the "if it bleeds, it leads" mentality, have done the public a disservice over the past weeks. COLIN ROBINSON NO TOAST TO GHOST WORLD New York City Much as I hate to disagree with B. Ruby Rich ["Films," Sept. 3/10], I regretted the time and money I spent on Ghost World. Endowed with consumer spending power and youth, the two attributes our culture admires most, Enid and Rebecca can find no other way to entertain themselves than to pour derision, and then inflict actual harm, on those less well endowed. I agree with Rich that "if teenagers are a society's truest barometer, then Ghost World offers a rather worrisome forecast." If wishing that the filmmakers had cast a colder eye on Enid is a wish for "prefab cynicism," then number me among the cynics. But I'd rather see the movie as the best argument I've come across for community service as a high school graduation requirement. Perhaps if Enid had spent time with some AIDS babies, she might have acquired a wider focus, one that takes in problems more serious than her own boredom. But if nothing has given her this by the time she hits high school, I think we as a culture have something serious to worry about. KATE ELLIS POWER TO THE PUPPETS Brooklyn, N.Y. I am 16 and have worked with the Bread and Puppet Theater for many years. I was angered by Katha Pollitt's depiction of the theater in "Subject to Debate" [Nov. 5]. The presence of Bread and Puppet would not indicate how "depressing" an event is, nor is it grounded in the 1960s. This is evidenced by its involvement in the antinuclear movement in the 1980s and its extensive global justice work in the 1990s and 2000s. The theater has continued to grow and, in fact, the time of the theater's greatest following has been in recent years. SAM KIVELOWITZ
Nov 15, 2001 / Alexander Cockburn, Dilip Hiro, and Our Readers
Just Shut Them Down? Just Shut Them Down?
Readers respond to Matt Bivens's "Nuclear Power & Terrorism."
Nov 8, 2001 / Matt Bivens, Ray Yang, Brian O’Connell, Lefteri H. Tsoukalas, Kenneth Pitser, Alex Drinkwater Jr., Nadine LaVonne, Joey Marquart, and Warren Hoskins
Is This Really a ‘Just War’? Is This Really a ‘Just War’?
Nov 8, 2001 / Richard Falk and Our Readers
Letters Letters
Taking a Chance on... Takings Chicago William Greider's "The Right and US Trade Law: Invalidating the 20th Century" [Oct. 15] purports to explain the close connection between my "radical" views of the "takings" clause and the current litigation under Chapter 11 of NAFTA, which, among other things, requires signatory states to pay compensation whenever their laws involve expropriation and acts "tantamount to expropriation" of the private property of citizens. His article is a troublesome mixture of truth and half-truth laced with selective quotations from our phone conversation. Greider portrays me as an extremist and antigovernment ideologue who invented the theory of regulatory takings in order to defeat environmental regulation. He is wrong on every count. The idea that regulations that stop short of seizure of property could count as takings goes back at least as far as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's 1922 opinion in Pennsylvania Coal v. Mahon, which held that a regulation of the use of private property could be treated as a compensable taking if it went "too far." Even Greider, one hopes, would regard it as a taking for the state to forbid a landowner to enter his own property or to use it for any purpose at all, even if it did not seize the land. Any constitutional provision worth its salt has to be read to cover not only the precise wrong it identifies (e.g., takings) but also the substitutes available to states to achieve the same unconstitutional end. Once it is accepted--as mainstream US law has long recognized--that some regulations are tantamount to takings, the question arises, Which ones and why? To sort out Holmes's tangled knot, I have long championed a three-part approach that is far less radical (and more coherent) than Greider's garbled account of my views suggests. The first point is indeed a departure from established law. It says that there is no principled way to decide that some limitations on land use are takings and others are not. Partial restrictions can come at all levels, from small to large, and the continuum cannot be broken at an arbitrary point simply by saying that some are too big and others too small. By the same token, however, the willingness to think of all government regulations as takings most emphatically does not mean that all should be invalidated unless explicit compensation has been paid. At no point, for example, does Greider so much as mention the central place that implicit in-kind compensation plays in my system as a means for reducing the instances for which compensation is required. Many broad-based regulations do not only hurt property owners; they also benefit them by imposing like restrictions on neighbors. These benefits should count as compensation under the takings clause. In general this approach tends to validate broad-based regulation that both benefits and burdens regulated parties in equal proportion but does not save the regulation that imposes (usually by design) far greater restrictions on some landowners than on others. Zoning laws, for example, can fall into either category. In some cases they impose uniform restrictions (on exterior design, for example) that benefit the regulated landowner, and these restrictions can be imposed without any cash compensation. More important is the scope of police power dealing with health and safety. Greider writes misleadingly that the police power was an invention of the New Deal, but that is sheer historical myth. The invocation of the police power long predates the New Deal, and its proper articulation occupies a central place in my own "radical" exposition of the takings clause. In the Lochner decision, which invalidated a ten-hour workday for some (but not all) kinds of bakers, the question before the Court was if this statute fell within the state powers to regulate private property (and restrict private freedom of contract) to preserve public health and safety. In my view the case was correctly decided on the ground that the statute was in reality only a disguised "labor" statute, designed not to protect health and safety but to place nonunion workers at a disadvantage against union workers, given that the ten-hour work restriction had a greater impact on their ability to do business. (Nonunion workers had one long shift from late afternoon to early morning and slept on the job in between. Union workers had two shifts.) The Nation itself vigorously defended the decision in a May 4, 1905, story titled "A Check to Union Tyranny." The result in Lochner is fully defensible without resorting to the woolly and overbroad standard Greider falsely attributes to me, namely, that the takings clause means that "government must pay those businesses or individuals whose property value is in some way diminished by public actions." Understanding the police power is critical in evaluating NAFTA's provision on expropriation and state actions "tantamount to expropriation." For the record, these are the first words I have ever written on NAFTA, and close readers of Greider's article will note that it's only by inference and innuendo that I am made to appear to champion the broad reading of Chapter 11. The blunt truth, however, is that business interests who have pressed for compensation under NAFTA have not consulted me on the question--not surprising, as, contrary to Greider's nasty innuendo, I think Chapter 11 is a major policy mistake if it is read to require compensation whenever a state seeks to regulate or limit pollution. All nineteenth-century police power cases (including Lochner) held that pollution and nuisance prevention fell within the proper scope of the police power. I have extensively defended and developed that notion of legitimate state power in all my published writings. That said, the only questions worth arguing are those about the means chosen to reach a legitimate end: Was the ban discriminatory because it applied only to foreign investment (in which case it should be struck down)? Or was it overbroad (in which case the state should be given a fair degree of latitude)? From what little I know of the facts, the MTBE ban seems entirely appropriate, unless there are less restrictive means that could protect state and local water supplies, which does not seem to be the case. One does not have to believe, however, that the state must have the police power to regulate all sorts of "social and economic" issues in order to check pollution. Had Greider asked me about the particular case, he would have gotten this same emphatic answer. He could have written a far more powerful piece on NAFTA had he stated that the most determined defender of the takings clause lines up foursquare against the business interests that have relied on Chapter 11 to gut the state police power. But that would have required him to work through the implications of my position, which is inconsistent with his muckraking ambitions. RICHARD A. EPSTEIN Deming, Wash. Isn't a logical extension of the "Epstein Doctrine" the position that activities by corporations having adverse impacts on the commonweal (health, environment, etc.) also constitute "takings"? And that government is the public's litigator? CHARLES KNAUFT III Oakland, Calif. Government regulations are a "taking"? I say let's go for it--if business costs to society are also deemed a "taking." Let's eliminate all government regulation of business, but let's also stop the socialization of the costs of doing business. If a business pollutes, let it be sued by the government, or private persons in the name of the public, for "taking" the public's clean air and water. If its production machines cause serious injury or death, the business has "taken" the value of that person's life or limb and so must compensate him or her. If a large retail chain puts local mom-and-pops out of business, the chain should compensate them. Fair's fair, right? CHARLES B. HOLZHAUER Tucson, Ariz. At just exactly what point will the trade-offs become unacceptable to the multinational corporate robber barons? Will they cease their depredations against the environment when it is so irreversibly compromised that even their own children begin to sicken and die? Under William Greider's able pen, the arcane and complex subjects of regulatory takings and NAFTA's Chapter 11 are rendered eminently understandable. MARY PETERSDORF GREIDER REPLIES Washington, D.C. Professor Epstein's letter contains valuable news in his announcement that he too considers NAFTA's Chapter 11 "a major policy mistake" that poaches illegitimately on the government. Since he is a leading legal theorist on the right, this might be useful to critics, and perhaps environmentalists can recruit him as an expert witness. But don't count on it. A careful reader will note that Epstein's lawyerly style sprinkles dangling qualifiers and escape hatches throughout his assertions. When I asked him about Chapter 11, he brushed the question aside (then went off on the trade lawyers who--"talking about my work behind my back"--failed to consult him). Who knows, maybe my article persuaded him to distance himself from the Chapter 11 controversy, lest it drag down his own theory. Epstein complains that I garbled the meaning of his doctrine. But I am not alone. When we spoke, he told me, "One of the dismaying things about the debate is that none of my opponents get my position right. In fact, most of my supporters don't get it right." Of course my article quoted Epstein selectively--how could it not?--but I doubt that printing his extended remarks would improve the portrait. "I'm not a zero-government guy. I'm a limited-government guy," he explained in our interview. "Once you allow any form of income redistribution to take place from any individual or group to any other for any reason the state thinks appropriate, then the game of limited government is over." "I am a fierce defender of the yellow-dog contract." "I want to undo the administrative state to the extent I think it's an instrument of faction and wealth redistribution without any productive increase." I described his theory as "radical" and "reactionary." I did not call him an "extremist." I did not say the police power was an "invention" of the New Deal, only that the Supreme Court reinterpreted the doctrine to justify the New Deal's economic and social regulation. What Epstein calls "sheer historical myth" is the standard understanding among legal scholars, including conservatives. Epstein seems anxious to detoxify the most provocative elements in his theory by portraying his purpose as unexceptional reform--correcting certain logical anomalies in the constitutional meaning of "takings." The Fifth Amendment makes sense, he reasons, only if the requirement to compensate property owners is extended to cover partial injury from regulatory intrusions. Invoking Justice Holmes as his antecedent may be read as an inside joke--Holmes was among the progressive jurists who struggled many years to undo the property-first Lochner era that Epstein wishes to restore. More to the point, the Supreme Court, even the present one, has adhered to a contrary understanding, directly expressed in the Rehnquist Court's 1993 Concrete Pipe decision: "The mere diminution in the value of property, however serious, is insufficient to demonstrate a taking." If Epstein's logic is so straightforward, why would the Justices be obtuse? Perhaps because they recognize the profound upheaval in governance that would result if the Court consecrates his theory. The federal judiciary, as even Epstein obliquely acknowledges, would be picking and choosing which zoning laws are legitimate. Furthermore, as dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens observed in the Palazzolo case this past summer, an Epstein takings victory for property owners requiring government compensation would constitute "a tremendous--and tremendously capricious--one-time transfer of wealth from society at large to all those individuals who happen to hold title to large tracts of land at the moment this legal question is permanently solved." It seems a bit late to try to sanitize the implications. Epstein's protestation that his theory holds no threat to environmental laws involves one of those points neither his supporters nor his critics seem to get right, since they believe otherwise too. Both sides know that most of the domestic takings cases are in fact aimed at environmental regulation. Many are further aware of the disingenuous wrinkle at the core of Epstein's argument. Pollution laws are justifiable government action, he contends, so long as they are based on common-law nuisance doctrine--one property owner may not do harm to neighbors. Only, as Epstein assuredly knows, none of the major US environmental laws derive from the nuisance premise, because that would subject enforcement to an impossible thicket of litigious claims over who injured whom. Science knows that rising air pollution will cause more asthma victims, but proving which polluting factory caused someone's illness is an evidentiary test designed to defeat the objective. Likewise, wetlands are protected under the Clean Water Act not for aesthetic reasons, as he supposes, but because science knows the restorative, purifying powers of shallow marshes. Epstein followers like Edwin Meese call them "landing fields for ducks" and think developers should be compensated for not paving over this vital public-health resource. Epstein mentions his in-kind compensation scheme to show he is a sensitive social thinker. Property owners who benefit from public regulation, he suggests, should have that gain deducted from their injury claims. But why stop there? Why not send a bill to the farmer whose land is suddenly made more valuable because government built a new highway alongside it? Perhaps we should require the wealthholders to pay more for the Pentagon budget, since military protection disproportionately benefits those with greater assets. These are intriguing questions, but the subtext of Epstein's logic is the familiar market fixation of the Chicago school. Society's collective actions are to be broken down into a labyrinthine accounting system of individual gain and loss. This would make new work for lawyers and accountants. It would also further cripple government, which is the professor's main idea. Finally, the modern regulatory state is profoundly flawed and often ineffective, though not for the reasons Epstein cites. Major regulatory agencies are captured by their regulated industries. Laws are written with purposeful vagueness and loopholes, which will guarantee delayed enforcement often for decades. Business interests mobilize resources to stymie what the public seeks. Epstein would perhaps blame "factions" and say this is another reason to return to limited government. As I have written for many years, progressives ought to acknowledge the regulatory breakdowns more candidly and begin the search for new legal doctrine and governing mechanisms that might restore health to the defense of the common interest. That task is very difficult, I concede, while the right wing persists energetically in trying to invalidate what was accomplished in the twentieth century. WILLIAM GREIDER
Nov 1, 2001 / William Greider and Our Readers
Letters Letters
MUDDLED NATION New York City On October 11, an alliance of Latinos, blacks and union members came close to a historic victory in New York. Alas, media rang...
Oct 25, 2001 / Our Readers
Letters Letters
TERRORI$T CA$H--$TAY$ CLEAN St. Clairsville, Ohio Lucy Komisar's June 18 "After Dirty Air, Dirty Money," on money-laundering [posted on the Nation web...
Oct 18, 2001 / Roane Carey and Our Readers