Richard Reeves, who is best known as a presidential biographer having written reliable and useful monographs on John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan (though my favorite of his oeuvre is his 1982 retracing of Alexis de Tocqueville’s American visit, American Journey: Traveling with Tocqueville, an undertaking French celebrity intellectual Bernard Henri Lévy recently refreshed) has published an account of what is frequently called the first shot in the Cold War: Daring Young Men: The Heroism and Triumph of The Berlin Airlift—June 1948-May 1949.

Explaining on how he came to write this book, Reeves writes:

I spent the better part of the last 20 years researching and writing a trilogy on the American presidency, doing books on John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. I knew I had said what I had to say on all that. I had to find some new subjects. At the same time, I continued writing a syndicated column for newspapers around the country, an exercise that kept me up on the politics and people of the day and of the 21st century. I was not happy many of those days. My country was becoming, or being—seen as, arrogant, self-righteous, and brutal—a monster using its very substantial power to try to enforce a new order, a kind of neo-imperialism. Of course, we meant well; Americans usually do. After all, didn’t these people want to be like us?

The Berlin Airlift is a piece of national history that at the least is a splendid example of enlightened self-interest. In June 1948, Soviet leader Josef Stalin ordered the Red Army to blockade the city, a stranglehold that intended to drive Allied occupational troops out of Berlin, which through some bizarre accident of history was deep inside the Soviet zone. Despite a National Security staff and Joint Chiefs who were nearly unanimously opposed, President Truman opted to stay and additionally ordered the airlift, which was an intricate logistical operation—planes taking off and landing every 90 seconds delivering food, fuel, and medical supplies to a demolished Berlin’s two million inhabitants.

By combing service records and conducting hundreds of interviews, Reeves was able to assemble a truly feel-good adventure from the selfless efforts of the 20,000 veteran civilian airmen who flew the 300 beat-up old planes in an improbably altruistic adventure that was also a strategic victory for what came to be the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Daring Young Men is an uplifting, multi-level story—a good story about doing good. Yet, in ruminating about it, two thoughts grab me: what does it say about the United States that Richard Reeves has to go back 70 years for an example of the decent America he grew up in, and, wouldn’t it have been great if there had been some residue of national decency to spur the Bush government to help New Orleans?

But so it goes. —Robert Birnbaum, Feb. 9, 2010

As an almost lifelong observer of presidential politics—which I have come to view as the American quadrennial carnival of democracy—I sadly assert that the once energizing and redemptive spectacle of Americans choosing their president has become a pallid, limpid specter of democracy. This observation began with the Adlai Stevenson-Dwight Eisenhower campaign of 1956 and was ramped up by Theodore H. White’s The Making of The President 1960 (he went on to write three more volumes) and Sen. Eugene McCarthy’s nomination speech for Stevenson in Los Angeles at the 1960 Democratic Convention.

The clip does McCarthy’s eloquence and Stevenson’s stature scant justice.

I have in other places claimed and, hopefully, argued well that that scoundrel of mid-century politics and disgraced president, Richard Nixon, had much to do with the degradation of American democracy—though it was inevitable that advertising and marketing would become the lingua franca of our political process. And elsewere I have bemoaned the virtual disappearance of those singular journalists and reportorial voices with original points of view—the journalism of the pack (which often includes feeble references to the existence of such a thing) having become the current rising tide. Mailer, Izzy Stone, Jules Feiffer, Murray Kempton, Hunter S. Thompson, Tim Cruise, Michael Thomas, Michael Ventura—where are they?

But that’s grist for another grinding.

Thankfully there are now easily accessed alternatives to the gibberish and blather of the television world. (Can someone explain to me what CNN’s claim of being the number one election center means and why Wolf Blather needs to repeat such claims endlessly?) Anyway, I came away from the last (so-called) presidential debate (less candidates Bob Barr and Ralph Nader) dismayed. John McCain continued to expose his lack of impulse control and made his desperation frighteningly prominent. Really, does he believe that Barack Obama (a United States senator, like himself) is a terrorist? Either way one answers that, does it put McCain in a favorable light? And, as Obama succinctly pointed out (at 37 minutes and 20 seconds in), this line of attack says more about McCain than about Obama.

The point (finally) is that there has been so little commentary, rhetoric, or declamation that rises to a level of inspiration or revelation—what we are bombarded with is the odiferous detritus of big money media.

A few exceptions to note:

• Donna Brazile, Al Gore’s 2000 campaign manager and Democratic party operative
• Comedian Sara Silverman’s savvy and very amusing political strategy
• And an interesting follow-up to the Great Schlep

And if you need a refresher in political tightrope-walking, here is Colin Powell offering a solemn and careful appraisal of Barack Obama and a reminder that the manic popinjay version of McCain we are seeing—rather than the well-regarded war hero and political independent Sen. McCain—is a disabling dose of late-onset entitlement and ambition.

You tell me. —Robert Birnbaum, Oct. 21, 2008

It is not beyond reason to assert that the small segment of humanity devoted to the written word can be further divided into those who find reading as an escape or departure from the real day-to-day world and those for whom it is, in part, a lens with which to view the festivities.

Somewhere in one of his books, Christopher Hitchens makes a point of expounding on the origin of the word “idiot,” which he asserts was the term in the Greek city-state of Athens, assigned to those who were disinterested in civil affairs—unengaged citizens, if you will. For reasons I should think are obvious, the state of the nation inescapably pervades the public ether and causes one to wonder about citizens in this great nation who fail to vote in political elections. (I haven’t checked but is it possible that more people vote on American Idol?)

Naturally, as all right-thinking Americans, I am looking to lay blame for the shameful turn from acceptable hardball politics (as it always was) to the current smash-mouth style favored by the self-righteous Right of our divided polity. I nominate Richard Nixon, who among other things brought West Coast advertising apparatchiks like Erlichman and Haldeman into his ‘68 campaign and then into the White House. You grasped that, yes? Advertising executives in the highest reaches of government. A few years ago Charles Baxter, another of our greatly underappreciated American writers, produced a very engaging collection of essays entitled Burning Down the House, which contained “Dysfunctional Narratives, Or ‘Mistakes Were Made.’”

Baxter lucidly opines:

The greatest influence on American fiction for the last twenty years may have been the author of RN, not in his writing but in his public character. He is the inventor, for our purposes and for our time, of the concept of deniability. Deniability is the almost complete disavowal of intention in relation to bad consequences. This is a made-up word, and it reeks of the landfill-scented landscape of lawyers and litigation and high school. Following Richard Nixon in influence on recent fiction would be two runners-up, Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

Their administrations put the passive voice, politically, on the rhetorical map. In their efforts to acquire deniability on the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran, their administrations managed to achieve considerable notoriety for self-righteousness, public befuddlement about facts, forgetfulness under oath, and constant disavowals of political error and criminality, culminating in the quasi-confessional, passive voice-mode sentence, “Mistakes were made.”

Well, to make an obvious point, they create a climate in which social narratives are designed to be deliberately incoherent and misleading. Such narratives humiliate the act of storytelling.

And that is not the worst of it, is it? —Robert Birnbaum, Oct. 1, 2008

If you thought Edward Meese, John Ashcroft, and Alberto Gonzales were shameful, you might want to take a short stroll down memory lane in this authoritative and apparently the first complete biography of Richard Nixon’s attorney general, who landed in a federal penal institution for his part in the Watergate break-in and cover-up. (A fate the above-mentioned miscreants have escaped.) If you are still haunted by the whys and what-ifs of Nixon’s second term, James Rosen’s thorough account should be of help, if not comfort. —Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 21, 2008