Category: Politics, Religion & Money

The Posturing Gadfly

I watched another one of the Firing Line videos, made available on YouTube by the Hoover Institution Library. Only one month before Nixon resigned the presidency, William F. Buckley, Jr. sat with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who were promoting their book, All the President’s Men.

In hindsight, Buckley strikes me as a rather unimpressive pundit and debater. As I saw in the way he handled John Kenneth Galbraith, Buckley would bring up irrelevant and arcane ‘whataboutisms,” or he’d change the subject outright, or he’d resort to small personal digs. With Woodward and Bernstein he fell flat and clearly had trouble when attempting to articulate some inchoate thoughts.

In my post about the American Masters profile of Buckley, I said the only domestic major issue of his time that he got right was Watergate. Now I see that Buckley actually gave Nixon the benefit of the doubt right up to the end. All he really did was accept the inevitability of Nixon falling on his sword.

Woodward and Bernstein were very impressive on Firing Line. While remaining respectful of William F. Buckley, Jr., they held an unwavering advantage over him from the start. They masterfully handled Buckley’s various attempts at redirecting the interview onto irrelevant tangents. Buckley even brought up that favorite right-wing wet dream of Dick Cheney and Antonin Scalia, of the necessity to torture someone who has threatened to blow up a city with a nuclear weapon. Bernstein quickly and directly put the conversation back on track, while Woodward strategically played up to Buckley with some cleverly tailored flattery. Their way of working together can be seen in the famous movie adaptation with Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford.

To Buckley’s credit, once he finally realized he was outmatched he mostly listened to Woodward and Bernstein. Perhaps it was because of the timeliness of the subject, or maybe Buckley allowed himself to consider the pair his journalist peers, at least for the moment. It’s revealed they turned down Buckley’s first request for a visit, and they almost rejected his second request.

We’re approaching the 50th anniversary of Tricky Dick going down the drain by flying away in a helicopter. Anyone who wants to be reminded of just how good Woodward and Bernstein were at their jobs, or for anyone who doubts their significance in what happened fifty years ago, this is a must-see hour.

As before, I am linking rather than embedding, because of the disclaimers at the start of the video. Clicking the picture will take you there. If the Hoover Institution were serious about their copyright claim, they would not allow their videos to be embedded.

Those Jobs Ain’t Comin’ Back

Bruce Springsteen recorded “My Hometown” in 1983. By the time I heard the song, I had seen for myself what he was singing about.

I was familiar with the harmful competitive effect shopping malls had upon downtown storefronts in the 70’s. What I saw on in the 80’s, during my business travels to Ohio and Illinois, were formerly thriving company towns struggling with unemployment. I was reminded of the textile mill towns back home that had been devastated by the mills moving to Southern states.

What happened to the once mighty American steel industry, that declined so rapidly in the 80’s? Were foreign governments dumping steel on the market for less than the cost of production? Or were foreign competitors making steel more efficiently, while American steel manufacturers had failed to innovate?

There’s a comment at the end of the podcast, about the steel industry showing up in pop culture. Big Steel’s influence extended all the way to a galaxy far, far away.

Ted Talk – 2

The motivator behind finally telling this story is Martin Baron’s memoir, Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and THE WASHINGTON POST. In chapter 18, “Uprisings”, Baron explains what he considers to have been his failure, as the Post’s editor, at resolving the disconnect he felt with Black staffers in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder in 2020.

Ted was hired, and after attending a week of employee orientation he joined my group. The job required a decidedly mixed skill set. It was split between a lot of hands-on technical work and teaching classes on how to use the system. (My most difficult challenge in doing that was at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C.)

Someone who wasn’t comfortable with frequent air travel, technical troubleshooting under pressure, or public speaking wouldn’t have been qualified. Ted seemed suited to the job. He liked electronics, he was well-spoken, and his personality reminded me of the DJ’s I’d worked with in radio. In fact, Ted had a side gig as a club DJ.

The technical aspects of the job required a lot of time to learn; one year for basic proficiency. So the goal for new hires was to get them up to speed as quickly as possible, to start traveling and to provide the onsite training.

Everyone in my group needed to be able to fill in for one another to do the traveling and the training. For the technical work, I tried to give each of them their own specialty.

For many years I was the go-to guy for customer data communications problems. Dealing with the confounding aspects of serial interfacing and data flow control in the Universal 7-Part Data Circuit model was a big part of my job. (Thank you Intel, for implementing unidirectional XON/XOFF flow control in your modems!)

Ted had an interest in, and aptitude for, data communications. Which made sense to me, because just as I had been a radio DJ, Ted was a gear head with his own DJ setup. I welcomed the chance to train Ted and offload some of that datacomm work.

Ted Talk – 1

This will be a very long post, and I don’t want to write it in a single sitting, so I’ll publish it in sections. How many? Don’t know. I haven’t written it yet!

It’s a story that I have been unsure about writing for as long as I have been Prattling with WordPress. There will be no graphics, no audio, and no video. What there will be is a true story from the years when I was a boss. There’s a big reveal that, considering the subject, I won’t hide until the end. I had to fire Ted, the only Black man I ever hired.

Starting salaries where I worked were low. With a Bachelor’s degree I was hired for a base salary of only $9,000, which is equivalent to $31,500 today. The opportunity had a lot of potential, including an annual bonus and the chance to purchase the company’s privately held stock. That potential was ultimately realized, with the immediate benefit of being able to work with my friends from college.

The company’s low starting pay was a problem in another way, once I became responsible for hiring people into my small group. After being promoted from my entry-level position I did a lot of traveling. Personally I thought of the travel requirement as a benefit, and I pitched it that way to job applicants. Nonetheless, the money that came with the job limited the candidates who were willing to accept an offer.

As far as I know, Ted was the only Black person who was ever interested in joining my group. With no directly related experience required for the position, Ted was a qualified applicant. I recall one specific, unusual detail from his resume. He named himself as one of his references. When asked about it, Ted said he was his own best reference. I wasn’t going to exclude Ted from consideration simply because I thought it was an odd thing to do on a resume, but my internal “little warning bell” was ringing.

Perhaps Ted had gotten the idea from a resume guidebook? What Color Is Your Parachute? was popular at the time. Or was I, as a White guy, seeing an unfamiliar aspect of Black culture? I talked it over with my boss, and we decided we were okay with it. I offered Ted the job, at the same starting salary as everyone else, and he accepted.

The Tongue Lashings of William F. Buckley, Jr.

While in college I was a fairly regular reader, at the library, of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review magazine. Along with reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, I was interested in conservative ideas, but came away unable to embrace them. I didn’t, however, register as a Democrat until twenty years later, during Bill Clinton’s second term. Newt Gingrich made it obvious that the Republican Party was no longer interested in governing, but in merely holding onto power.

I understand rich people wanting to protect their accumulated money, because it’s also true for those of us who are reasonably well off. What I can’t abide is Republicans being offended by the very existence of certain people. Their tolerance is tested when “those people” insist upon being seen and heard. In short, Republicans don’t believe in live and let live.

History has shown, to my satisfaction, that William F. Buckley managed to end up on the wrong side of every major domestic issue of his time, with the exception of Watergate. Defending the Democrats’ war in Vietnam must have been the height of irony for him. What would Buckley have thought of Trump’s advocacy of Putin’s Russia?

Buckley seemed to delight in ad hominem jibes at his political sparring partners. He was known for his verbal jousting with Gore Vidal. I don’t recall anyone ever comparing Buckley’s highly affected mannerisms to his contemporary, and fellow New Yorker, Truman Capote, who also enjoyed indulging in witty personal slights. This new American Masters documentary does a good job of damning William F. Buckley, Jr. with high praise.

As pointed out in the documentary, Buckley made many appearances on college campuses, and students enjoyed meeting him. As I have mentioned before, I was influenced in college when meeting Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith.

Here are Buckley and Galbraith at the start of Reagan’s first term, when the ideas of John Maynard Keynes had been overshadowed by Friedrich August Hayek, by way of Milton Friedman’s Chicago School laissez faire economics. Neither Buckley nor Galbraith lived long enough to see a Republican administration embracing Keynesian government intervention to save American Capitalism.

https://youtu.be/0iq7vktSXVg

Note: I have linked to this video, rather the embed it, because of the warning about unauthorized distribution. The Hoover Institution Library & Archives doesn’t prevent embedding, which undermines the disclaimer.