Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full 16

On page 543 of Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, Conrad Black says that Richard Nixon in 1968 "campaigned widely with Senator Edward Brooke, the African-American Massachusetts Republican, who was at this point the highest elected black official in the country's history."

After reading this passage, I became curious about Edward Brooke.  Who was he?  Why was he a Republican?  What kind of Republican was he?  Was he a conservative Republican, or a moderate or liberal Republican?

I read the wikipedia article about him.  Apparently, I had heard the name before I read Black's reference to him, since Edward Brooke is the person Barbara Walters claimed she had an affair with throughout the 1970's.  In terms of political ideology, Brooke leaned more towards the more liberal George Romney and Nelson Rockefeller wings of the Republican Party.  Brooke initially supported Romney for the 1968 Presidential nomination, then Nelson Rockefeller.

In reading about Brooke, I wondered why exactly he was a Republican.  His positions (at least the ones that I was reading about) struck me as socially, economically, and militarily liberal.  According to this article, however, Brooke was not a fan of big government, and he believed in promoting a strong work ethic (which is not to say that liberals don't want people to work), as well as a balanced budget and "cutting costs".  The wikipedia article says that Brooke was a strong supporter of the Job Corps, the Office of Economic Opportunity, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which were parts of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.  Perhaps Brooke especially supported the parts of the Great Society that would give people a hand-up, not just a hand-out.

I also found a line from this article excerpt to be interesting: "...it was Edward W. Brooke who represented the most important moderating voice of black conservatism. Yet his reasoned challenges to ultraconservatives, including Barry Goldwater, won few blacks in the 1960s and 1970s when civil rights leaders garnered support for liberal agendas."  

Brooke was the first African-American Attorney General of a state, and the first African-American elected by popular vote to the U.S. Senate.  Brooke won the election to U.S. Senate in 1966, and he served until he was defeated by Democrat Paul Tsongas.  You may remember Tsongas from the 1992 Presidential election, or the Saturday Night Live skit in which Mike Myers played him.  "Tsongas!"

Is Christianity Deep and Profound?

A question that I asked myself at church this morning is this: Is Christianity really that deep and profound of a religion?   My pastor was saying that it is.  And our liturgy and Psalm 139 say that God has numerous thoughts, which we are not able to count.  But, when I look at Christianity, it doesn't strike me as overly deep or profound.  I'm not saying that I know everything or even most things about it and its various manifestations and holy writings.  But I do believe that I have a fairly decent handle on its overall repertoire, and, even when I come across things about it that I do not know, I am not particularly awed, nor do I feel as if I am traveling in very deep waters.  There's enough for me to learn that I can stay entertained by reading and thinking about the Bible.  But the Bible and Christianity do not strike me as particularly deep or profound.

That's all I'm in the mood to write in this post.

Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full 15

For my blog post today on Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, my focus will be on President Lyndon Johnson's handling of the economy.  What follows are some things that Black says about that issue:

Page 477: Lyndon Johnson "rammed through the measures, and spent and spent until the red ink was ankle-deep, though nothing the country could not handle."

Page 478:  "Johnson appears to have surmised that he could conduct a limited war without it interrupting his War on Poverty...while cutting taxes, making the social safety net leakproof, and advancing civil rights."

Page 505: "The tax cuts produced revenue increases and a briefly balanced budget, an isolated event in decades of deficits."

Page 520: "Johnson "was the nation's greatest tax-cutter, except for possibly Calvin Coolidge, and its greatest budget-balancer since Coolidge..."

So which was it?  Was President Lyndon Johnson someone who tried to have his cake and eat it, too: one who thought that the government could somehow spend more on domestic programs and the Vietnam War, while cutting taxes, with the result that Johnson spent the U.S. into the red?  Or was Johnson a budget-balancer, whose tax cuts (presumably the Revenue Act of 1964, which he signed into law) increased revenue?  As is often the case, there is probably an element of truth in both narratives.

A while back, a liberal blogger wrote a post arguing that the economy often does better under Democratic Presidents than it does under Republican Presidents.  As a conservative at the time, I replied that there are Democratic Presidents who enact conservative economic policies, and there are Republican Presidents who enact liberal economic policies.  Kennedy and Johnson, for example, had tax cuts.  But George H.W. Bush, a Republican, cooperated with the Democratic Congress in raising taxes.  The fact that Democratic Presidents often preside over a better economy than Republican Presidents does not prove that liberal economic policies are better than conservative ones, I was arguing.

In retrospect, I think that my point was legitimate, but things are probably more complex than I assumed.  There are times when the same President can support a conservative economic policy plank one day, and a liberal economic plank on another day.  Ronald Reagan, for instance, helped to enact a generous tax cut, but later he supported tax increases.  Moreover, there are disagreements about whether or not certain policies are even damaging to the economy.  There are conservatives who love to blame the recession under President George H.W. Bush on his tax increases, but at least one economist argued that Bush I's tax increases got the deficit under control and contributed to the economic boom that would later come under President Bill Clinton.  Which ideology about the economy produces a better economy?  What policies work and don't work?  I suppose it depends on what factors one wants to consider, and where one wants to look.

But on to the economy under Lyndon Johnson!  Did Johnson's Presidency prove that tax cuts lead to a better economy and increased government revenue, confirming the supply-side doctrine?  Well, I'm not going to dogmatically say one way or the other, but I would like to present some factors for consideration.  First of all, while the national debt did not increase that much under President Lyndon Johnson, this article attributes that to Johnson's ten percent tax discharge, as Johnson sought some way to pay for both the Great Society and the Vietnam War.  Although Johnson was responsible for a generous tax cut, he also believed that there needed to be a tax to pay for some of the spending that Johnson wanted.  Second, some have argued that Johnson's balanced budget was a numbers gimmick: that Johnson actually had a deficit, but he was hiding that by counting in the overall budget the money from the trust programs (i.e., Social Security).  See here , here, and here.  Third, inflation increased under President Lyndon Johnson, and there are arguments that this was because tax cuts and increased government spending resulted in more demand, which surpassed supply (see here).

Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full 14

For my blog post today about Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, I'll use as my starting-point something that Black says on page 460.

"Nixon moved on to Saigon and conducted his usual extensive private tour.  He was appalled at the views of his former running mate, [Henry Cabot] Lodge, who had bought into the groupthink of the academics and theorists around Kennedy and now Johnson, immortalized in David Halberstein's description 'the Best and the Brightest.'  It was about these people, when Johnson effused to the late Sam Rayburn about how intelligent they were, that Rayburn said, 'I hope you're right, but I just wish one of them had ever run for county sheriff.'  The word from Johnson's inherited entourage at this point was that the war in Vietnam could be won with social spending, acts of goodwill, and encouragements to democracy.  An inexpressible, unbelievable tragedy, on a new, hideously magnified scale was about to spring, whole, from its Indochinese cradle and be unleashed upon the world."

I first heard about "the Best and the Brightest" when I was working at a library.  One of the workers there, an older gentleman and a long-time right-winger, told me about the concept as it pertained to the Kennedy Administration.  The library was having a book sale, and one of the books on the sale-truck was Arthur Schlesinger's A Thousand Days, which is about the Kennedy Presidency.  I was asking my co-worker if he wanted the Schlesinger book, and he scoffed.  He told me that Schlesinger was one of those "Best and the Brightest" who was around Kennedy.  "They thought they were such experts," he told me.  "What you or I thought would be of no account to the upper echelon, but these Best and the Brightest were considered so wise."

There is a strong part of me that is anti-intellectual elite.  I can't deny that.  And it's a bipartisan sentiment.  For example, I can scoff at the Best and the Brightest around Kennedy and Johnson, who thought that they were so smart yet had ideas about the Vietnam War that did not seem to work.  Right-wingers may scoff at how these Best and the Brightest believed that a humanitarian approach to Vietnam would have ameliorated the war and brought Vietnam along the yellow-brick road to democracy.  But one could easily scoff at right-wing intellectuals, as well.  The neocons in the Bush Administration were smart, well-educated people.  Some of them, if I'm not mistaken, were called vulcans.  And yet, did their "get tough" strategy on the Middle East actually work?  Many, for good reason, are quite skeptical.

The thing is, I don't want to go to the other extreme and say that knowledge does not matter.  Going back to my co-worker's comment, I would much prefer for the President to consult someone who knows more than I do about the history of regions, economics, politics, culture, etc., than for the President to consult me.  When a person has knowledge, he has more that he can work with, even if his judgment is not always that good.

Psalm 124

For my blog post today about Psalm 124, I will quote from this United Church of God commentary, which quotes the Zondervan Student Bible:

"Yet God has given deliverance, seen also in the figure of a bird escaping the fowler's snare-the trap of a bird trapper (compare 91:3). The Zondervan Student Bible comments: '"Some trouble is quick-bang and it's over…but with other trouble, trying to escape only gets you more deeply entangled…if you try to undo the damage, you only make it worse. That's exactly the picture of 'the fowler's snare.' The bird that caught its neck in the noose only tightened the snare's choke-hold by struggling. The bird could not get out by its own effort. But this time, says David, the snare has miraculously broken, and the bird has flown to safety. When you escape that way, there's only one person to thank: the Lord' (note on verse 7)."

Luke and Divine Inspiration

My church started a new Bible study last night.  We're going through Luke: Gospel of Reassurance, with Michael Card.  The main theme last night was who Luke was and how that influenced his writing of his Gospel.  Luke was a Gentile, and that influenced him to highlight the Gospel going to the Gentiles.  He was a physician, and Michael Card said that the physicians he knows are men of prayer, and that could be why Luke's Gospel has a lot of emphasis on prayer.  Michael Card speculated that Luke was a slave, since many physicians in the ancient world (such as Emperor Augustus' physician) were slaves, plus Luke was a slave name.  Could Luke's status as a slave (assuming that Michael Card is correct on this) explain the sensitivity of his Gospel to the poor and the marginalized?

We read Luke's introduction in Luke 1, where he said that he was gathering information from eyewitnesses and was writing so that Theophilus might know with certainty about that in which he had been instructed.  Michael Card said (if I remember correctly) that the stories in Luke about Jesus' birth and childhood may have been due to Luke's consultation of Mary, the mother of Jesus.  The pastor was asking if people in the ancient world would value Luke's references to the testimony of eyewitnesses rather than the testimony of eyewitnesses themselves, of the sort that we see in Matthew's Gospel.  (My pastor believes that the apostle Matthew, who was with Jesus as a disciple, wrote the Gospel of Matthew.)  People in the group were acknowledging the difficulty of writing a history from the testimonies of eyewitnesses, since different people have different accounts.  But the people in the group seemed to believe that Luke wrote an accurate life of Jesus, for physicians pay attention to details, and Luke, according to II Timothy 4:9-11, stuck with Paul when others had forsaken him, showing that Luke was a man of character whose Gospel can be trusted. 

Our workbook asked: "How do you think the Holy Spirit was involved in the process of Luke's researching and writing his account, which eventually came to be included in Scripture?"  That is an excellent question, even if you are a believer who does not accept all of Michael Card's ideas about the authorship and composition of the Gospel of Luke, preferring other scholarly scenarios instead.  Where does Luke end, and where does God begin?  I one time wrote a paper for a Jewish theology class, in which I was seeking to explain my view as to how the Bible was divine revelation.  I wrote that I believed that God inspired human authors, while preserving their own personalities.  My professor was puzzled by that model of revelation.  He wondered if I was saying that the Bible contained God's words, or human authors' words, or somehow both.

I don't have a fully satisfactory answer to my professor's question, but I wonder: maybe God could communicate truth while still preserving the personality of the human authors.  Who Luke was as a person may have influenced him to highlight certain aspects of God's truth----the Gospel going to the Gentiles, social justice, prayer, etc.----but he was still communicating aspects of God's truth.  By reading Luke, perhaps we're getting a window into the mind of Luke, but also (on some level) the mind of God. 

Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full 13

For my blog post today for My Year (or More) of Nixon, I will feature two quotes.  The first is from the book that I am reading now, Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full.  The second is from Roger Morris' Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician. 

On page 449 of Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, Black states the following about Nixon's frustration with Dwight Eisenhower:

"Nixon steadily ran strongly in polls of Republicans expressing a presidential preference, but always said that he was not a candidate for the 1964 nomination.  When Eisenhower enumerated for the press ten Republicans that he thought would be good presidents, and left Nixon out, Nixon let his displeasure be known at a fashionable dinner table.  He knew this would be reported to Eisenhower, who called the next day and said that Nixon had made his point many times that he was not a candidate.  Nixon pointed out that, as reported, Eisenhower was not confining himself to declared, or even likely, candidates, and the former president told a reporter the following week that if there were a 'sudden wave of support' for Nixon, he would certainly be qualified.  Nixon had had about as much of Eisenhower's condescensions as he could take, and referred to his former boss from time to time as 'that senile old bastard,' which was in fact the opinion that he had intermittently had of him since the fund crisis thirteen years before.  Nixon was aware of Eisenhower's qualities and of his historic status, but it was a relief to drop the mask of exaggerated deference, at least occasionally and in private."

On pages 135-136 of Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician, Roger Morris talks about a possible reason that Richard Nixon as a young man loved football:

"Later, reporters were ever puzzled at why he had played football so long and so punishingly at Whittier and, even with the cheers when he finally got in the game, with such failure and humiliation.  In the end, thought Wood Glover, 'He just enjoyed the game.  He enjoyed being around it.'  He found among the football team, even apart from their locker room bull sessions, the candor and freedom from artifice that he had seen in his father, and that was missing in much of the rest of his universe.  If the Milhouses were a tribe of quiet, compelling women, if debate and academics demanded subtlety and maneuver, the football field was a world of men and a kind of raw honesty.  'I think he liked the contact with those people,' Ingrum said.  'And I'm not too sure that he didn't enjoy it more than he did with just the scholar type, because I think he was challenged from a different standpoint.  You know, the athletes don't give a hoot what they say or when they say it...and I think Dick enjoyed the comradeship and the straightforwardness."

So end the readings!

The reason that I love these passages is that they express how artificial and intimidating the social world can be.  There are so many subtleties and nit-pickings and politics and jerks in the world today, that it's a challenge for neurotypical people to get through this jungle, let alone people with Asperger's, or others who feel as if they don't have a social map!  Nixon was happy when he could take a brief break from his need to be obsequious towards Eisenhower and could express what he really thought about Eisenhower and his history of condescension towards Nixon, even if Nixon could only take that break in private.  And Nixon as a young man probably liked football because it was so raw and honest----it didn't have all the nuancing and subtleties of academia, or the repression of feelings from his Quaker heritage.  Rather, athletes were blunt in saying what they thought, and football involved tackling.  You'd think that people with Asperger's would gravitate towards sports.  But my impression is that this often does not happen.  For one, there are many with Asperger's who lack ability in sports (though there are exceptions).  Second, because Aspies are different, they can be targets of bullying, sometimes by the blunt athletes, who may not feel bound by the rule of propriety that says that one person should not bully another.  I'm not saying that all or even most athletes are like this, but this sort of thing does happen.