Schneier on Security

A90210 • April 29, 2019 10:28 AM

Robert Caro for the hour https://www.democracynow.org/2019/4/29/from_lbj_to_robert_moses_robert

“AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to one of the nation’s most celebrated writers, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Caro. He’s out with a new book titled Working, that gives an inside look at his remarkable research and writing process. And it does appear that Robert Caro is always working.

Forty-five years ago, he published his first book, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. Over a seven-year-period, he conducted over 500 interviews for what turned out to be a 1,200-page book looking at how Robert Moses reshaped the nation’s largest city, New York. The Modern Library would later name The Power Broker as one of the top 100 nonfiction books of the 20th century, along with such works as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk.

And Caro hasn’t stopped working since. For the past 45 years, Robert Caro, with much help from his wife Ina, has been researching the life and times of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, from his childhood in Hill Country, Texas, to his time in the White House. Four volumes have been published so far: The Path to Power, Means of Ascent, Master of the Senate and The Passage of Power. They total more than 3,000 pages. Robert Caro is now writing the fifth volume, looking at Vietnam, the Great Society and President Johnson’s decision not to seek re-election in 1968.

Robert Caro has been described as “the greatest political biographer of our times” and “America’s biographer-in-chief.” But to reduce Caro’s work as simply biographies of great men misses the point. Caro uses both Moses and Johnson to show how political power works. Caro writes that by focusing on Robert Moses, he was able to explore, quote, “the realities of urban political power, power in cities, [power] not just in New York but in all the cities of America in the middle of the twentieth century.” With LBJ, Caro helped expose how national power works in the Senate and the presidency. Robert Caro once told Kurt Vonnegut, quote, “What I’m trying to do, is to show not only how power works but the effect of power on those without power. How political power affects all our lives, every single day in ways we never think about,” he says.

Well, with Democracy Now! co-host Juan González, who today is joining us from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, we’re spending the hour with Robert Caro.

Welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us, Robert.

ROBERT CARO: Great to be with you.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go back to 55 years ago. In fact, it would be 55 years ago in July that President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And go back a few months before that, when Lyndon Baines Johnson, standing next to a blood-spattered Jackie Kennedy, would be sworn in as president. He could have taken on any issue at that point, becoming president. Warned by many in his inner circle, “Don’t do the Civil Rights Act. Don’t lose the South,” he moved forward. Describe for us—set the stage and the place. Talk about LBJ’s decision to go this route.

ROBERT CARO: Four days after the assassination, he has to give an address to the joint session of Congress. He’s not even in the Oval Office yet. He’s still working out of his private home in Washington. Three or four of his speechwriters are sitting around the kitchen table trying to draft a speech. And at some point Johnson comes down wearing a bathrobe and asks them how they’re doing. They say, “Well, the only thing we’re all sure of is don’t make civil rights a priority. If you anger the Southerners who control Congress, they’re going to stop your whole legislative program, like they did Kennedy. It’s a noble cause, but it’s a lost cause. Don’t fight for it.” And Lyndon Johnson says to them, “Well, what the hell is the presidency for then?” And, of course, in his speech, he says, with all the Southern senators sitting in a row in front of him, “Our first priority has to be the passage of the civil rights bill.”

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about the battle that ensued? You particularly focus on Richard Russell, and you pit these two—well, they pitted themselves against each other.

ROBERT CARO: Well, Russell—you know, Johnson convinced the Southern senators—for 20 years before 1964, every vote that he made was on the side of the South. He not only supported every Southern bill and opposed every civil rights bill, but he was a Southern strategist. And Russell took him under his wing. Richard Russell was the most powerful figure in the Senate. He was the head of the mighty Southern Caucus. You have to understand, Amy, in that year—I forget the—I may have the numbers wrong here, but approximately right—of the 16 great standing committees in the Senate, 11 were chaired by Southerners or their allies. They had all the power in the Senate. And Russell raised Lyndon Johnson up to the position of majority leader. It was him who really put Johnson in.

So, I would speak to some of the Southern senators. And I asked one of them—I remember Herman Talmadge, who was actually dying when I finally got to talk to him. He was the senator from Georgia. Finally talked to me, and I’m asking him about this, …”

A90210 • April 29, 2019 2:48 PM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGQxI0G6mKk
For rat-fuc ker Roger Stone, Hot Rats, Frank Zappa – Peaches En Regalia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p47fEXGabaY
Ricky Martin – Livin’ La Vida Loca

A90210 • April 29, 2019 7:38 PM

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/ben-wittes-five-conclusions-mueller-report/588259/

https://mobile.twitter.com/DavidKris/status/1122984649796374530
“If I didn’t have time to read the Mueller report, but wanted more than just a tweet or two or a newspaper headline, then this piece from Ben Wittes is what I’d read first. The best mid-length assessment of the report I have seen.”

A90210 • April 30, 2019 4:28 PM

@Gordo

“A $5 billion fine from the FTC is huge — unless you’re Facebook”

You might be interested in this Opinion piece by Kara Swisher of Recode about adding a zero to Facebook’s fine.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/opinion/facebook-fine.html

“How can I describe the fine of between $3 billion and $5 billion that Facebook is likely to pay to the Federal Trade Commission — which will doubtlessly be touted as its largest ever — to settle the government’s inquiry into what the social networking giant called “our platform and user data practices”?

How about: It’s a parking ticket. Not a speeding ticket. Not a DUI …”

A90210 • May 1, 2019 9:46 AM

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/06/john-bolton-on-the-warpath

“… Bolton has spent decades in federal bureaucracies, complaining often of hating every minute. He has written wistfully of a note that Goldwater sent to an offending colleague: “Dear Bill: I am pissed off.” Though Bolton says that he has never written such a letter, he has established himself as a ferocious infighter—often working, either by design or by accident, against the grain of the place to which he’s assigned.

In May, 2001, Bolton was named Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs. The terror attacks of September 11, 2001, came a few months later, and the State Department and the White House were often in conflict about how to react: Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, urged an assertive use of military power abroad, while Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, was more restrained. Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell’s chief of staff, told me that Bolton was appointed to his position only at Cheney’s insistence. “Everyone knew that Bolton was Cheney’s spy,” Mark Groombridge, an aide to Bolton at the time, told me.

George W. Bush’s Administration had vowed to attack any “rogue nation” that developed weapons of mass destruction, and Bolton began a public crusade against America’s enemies, real and presumed. In May, 2002, he spoke at the Heritage Foundation, where he accused the Cuban government of developing an ambitious biological-weapons program and of collaborating with such pariah states as Libya and Iran. As he prepared to give similar testimony to Congress, Christian Westermann, an analyst at the State Department’s internal intelligence bureau, told him that the bureau’s information did not support such a view. (Westermann declined to comment for this story.) Bolton, according to several officials, threatened to fire him. “He got very red in the face and shaking his finger at me, and explained to me that I was acting way beyond my position for someone who worked for him,” Westermann later testified. “I told him I didn’t work for him.” Bolton began excluding Westermann’s supervisor from daily briefings and, after an unsuccessful attempt to fire him, tried to transfer him to another office.

Carl Ford, who oversaw the intelligence bureau, complained to Powell that Bolton was misrepresenting the views of its officials. Powell decided to have Ford brief Congress in Bolton’s place. Bolton was angry enough that he didn’t speak to Ford for six months. Then, as Ford was preparing to retire, Bolton called him on the phone. “He told me he was glad I was leaving,” Ford said. (Bolton denies making this call.)

Bolton’s immersion in the arcana of weapons of mass destruction encouraged an absolutist view. “The first thing he thinks about in the morning is protecting Americans from nuclear weapons,” Sarah Tinsley, who has worked as an aide to Bolton since the eighties, told me. In 2003, as he prepared testimony for an appearance before Congress, he described Syria’s efforts to produce nuclear and biological weapons as an urgent threat—an assessment that intelligence agencies thought was exaggerated. A bitter internal debate ensued; the accusations endangered the Syrian government’s coöperation in hunting suspected terrorists. “We were getting some of our best, if not our best, intelligence on Al Qaeda from Damascus,” Lawrence Wilkerson told me. Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State, took Bolton aside and “told him to shut up,” Wilkerson said. Before Bolton testified to Congress, much of his language was diluted. Armitage reached out to a team of intelligence officers who vetted public statements made by State Department officials, and asked them to give special scrutiny to Bolton’s. “Nothing Bolton said could leave the building until I O.K.’d it,” Thomas Fingar, who led the team at the time, told me.

As the Bush White House made the case to invade Iraq, Bolton came into conflict with José Bustani, who was in charge of overseeing the Chemical Weapons Convention—a treaty, endorsed by the U.S. and a hundred and ninety-two other countries, that bans the production of chemical weapons. Bustani, a former senior diplomat from Brazil, was negotiating with the Iraqi government to adopt the treaty, which mandated immediate inspections by outside technicians. He thought that, if inspectors could verify that Iraq had abandoned its chemical-weapons program, an invasion wouldn’t be necessary. But, he told me, when the Iraqis agreed to accept the convention, the Bush Administration asked him to halt his negotiations. “I think the White House was worried that if I succeeded it would mess up their plans to invade,” he said.

Not long afterward, Bustani recalls, Bolton showed up at his office in The Hague and demanded that he resign. When Bustani refused, Bolton said, “We know you have two sons in New York. We know your daughter is in London. We know where your wife is.” (Bolton has denied this.) Bustani held firm, and the White House, determined to remove him, convened an extraordinary session of the Convention’s members—in many cases, Bustani said, paying the travel expenses of delegates to insure that they attended. The group voted forty-eight to seven, with forty-three abstentions, to cut short Bustani’s term.

Later that year, Bustani was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, for his work against chemical weapons. When U.S. troops moved into Iraq, they found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Commentators across the political spectrum have decried the invasion—even Trump calls it “a big, fat mistake”—but Bolton hasn’t changed his view. In 2015, he told the Washington Examiner,

“I still think the decision to overthrow Saddam was correct.”

[emphasis mine] …”

A90210 • May 3, 2019 1:58 PM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCXVxE_YeP4
Artie Shaw – Begin the Beguine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2S1I_ien6A
Benny Goodman – Sing Sing Sing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9J5Zt2Obko
Gene Krupa – Sing Sing Sing