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October 2017

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A Hero in Spite of Himself Ulysses S. Grant won the war, won the presidency and won the battle against his own worst tendencies. Geoffrey C. Ward reviews ‘Grant’ by Ron Chernow. see note please

By on October 7th, 2017

Ulysses S. Grant was a modest man, famously magnanimous toward his defeated enemies, but the myth of the Lost Cause irritated him. “The Southern generals were [seen as] models of chivalry and valor,” he once complained, while “our generals were venal, incompetent, coarse. . . . Everything that our opponents did was perfect. [Robert E.] Lee was a demigod, [Stonewall] Jackson was a demigod, while our generals were brutal butchers.”

Grant’s annoyance was understandable—and prescient. In the century that followed, no one’s reputation would suffer more at the hands of historians sympathetic to the defeated South than his. He was caricatured as a callous, plodding, sometimes drunken commander whose victories were due exclusively to Union advantages in men and materiel, a lucky general who became a politically clueless president, blind to corruption and bent on exacting revenge against the white citizens of the former Confederacy.

Over the past 20 years or so, scholars have done a great deal to rehabilitate Grant’s standing. A year ago, Ronald C. White, the author of the widely praised “A. Lincoln: A Biography” (2009), published his “American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant,” hailed in these pages by Harold Holzer as “like Grant himself” likely to “have staying power.” It demonstrated that Grant was not only the architect of Union victory but a two-term president with substantive achievements—among them, the virtual destruction of the Ku Klux Klan, restored relations with Great Britain, and soldiers sent south to protect the rights of at least some of the African-Americans he had helped to free. Too often, these have been overshadowed by the scandals that beset his second term.

If Mr. White’s book is Large, at 826 pages, Ron Chernow’s new biography, “Grant,” is Extra Large, at well over 1,000. Not one of those pages is boring. As readers of Mr. Chernow’s best-selling lives of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and others know, he is a compelling storyteller. Much of the story he sets out to tell here may by now seem familiar, but he adds rich detail and brings to vivid life the reticent, unprepossessing but resolute man whom Walt Whitman called “nothing heroic . . . and yet the greatest hero.”

Every biographer has had to deal with the question of Grant’s drinking. Did he really drink too much? If so, did it interfere with his duties as soldier or statesman? Mr. Chernow is unequivocal: “Grant was an alcoholic,” he writes. For him, “alcohol was not a recreation selfishly indulged, but a forbidden impulse against which he struggled for most of his life. . . . The drinking issue . . . so permeated Grant’s career that a thoroughgoing account is needed to settle the matter.” Mr. Chernow does his best to provide one.

There is no question that drinking helped destroy Grant’s early career. Trained at West Point, calm and courageous in combat during the Mexican War, he drank only after the fighting ended, establishing the pattern he would follow for years.

He was a binge drinker. He could go for months without a drink, but as he himself once confessed to a friend who tried to fill his champagne glass: “If I begin to drink I must keep on drinking.” He actually consumed less alcohol than many of his fellow soldiers, but thanks to what one remembered as his “peculiar organization”: “a little did the fatal [work] of a great deal. . . . He had very poor brains for drinking.”

He knew he did and tried to stop, even joining the Sons of Temperance in 1851. But within a year he was drinking again. Three years later, stationed at a remote garrison on the California coast—bored, depressed and longing for his wife, Julia, and the children whom he hadn’t seen in two years—he suddenly resigned from the Army. No contemporaneous document survives to explain his reason, but Mr. Chernow makes a convincing case, based on a wealth of testimony elicited by biographers in later years, that his commanding officer had confronted him with a stark choice: resign or face the humiliation of a trial for drunkenness.

In that era, when excessive drinking was seen as evidence of moral failure rather than chronic disease, once the word “drunkard” was attached to a man’s name it was almost impossible to shake. When Grant rejoined the Army in 1861, whispers about his drinking haunted every step of his astonishing climb from captain of a company of Illinois volunteers to lieutenant general in command of all the Northern armies in just four years.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Ken Burns’s ‘Vietnam’ Is Fair to the Troops, but Not the Cause The antiwar narrative could have been lifted from PBS’s last effort, which aired in 1983.By Mark Moyar

By on October 7th, 2017

For the past several years, American and South Vietnamese veterans awaited Ken Burns’s “The Vietnam War” series with gnawing fear. Would Mr. Burns use his talent and prestige to rehash the antiwar narrative, which casts veterans as hapless victims of a senseless war? The program’s final episode has aired, and it is safe to say that worries about the portrayal of veterans were somewhat misplaced, while those concerning the war itself proved justified.

Mr. Burns and co-producer Lynn Novick should be commended for giving veterans a central role in the series. In the interviews, American veterans explain they were driven to serve mainly out of patriotism and admiration of veterans in their communities. They denounce the caricature of veterans as deranged baby-killers. Several South Vietnamese veterans are featured as well, a welcome change from earlier productions.

The treatment of the war itself is much less evenhanded. The documentary corrects a few of the mistakes that have been common to popular accounts, for instance acknowledging that Ho Chi Minh was a full-blooded communist, who pulled the strings of the ostensibly independent southern Viet Cong. Yet the show mostly follows the same story line as the last PBS megaseries, “Vietnam: A Television History,” which aired in 1983.

The documentary’s 18 hours highlight the worst military setbacks incurred by the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies, while spending little time on the far more numerous battles in which the North Vietnamese suffered decisive defeat. Most of the combat scenes involve one or two Americans speaking somberly over gloomy music while the screen displays images of American troops who are dead, wounded or under fire. The interviewees then explain how the trauma and futility of battle led to their disillusionment with the war. On the few occasions when we hear of the excitement, camaraderie and pride that are as much a part of war as the fear and sorrow, the words usually come from the mouths of North Vietnamese veterans.

Some American troops did become disenchanted, joining the likes of John Kerry and Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and they deserve to be heard. But they do not merit the disproportionate airtime they are given in this series. Even by the most generous estimates, Vietnam Veterans Against the War never represented more than 1% of Vietnam veterans, whereas 90% of Vietnam combat veterans said they were glad to have served, and 69% said they enjoyed their time there, according to a 1980 survey conducted by the Veterans Administration. Yet about one-third of the American military veterans in the show otherwise espoused antiwar views, and few of the other interviewees expressed pride or satisfaction in their service.

Among those surveyed by the Veterans Administration, 92% agreed with the statement that “the trouble in Vietnam was that our troops were asked to fight in a war which our political leaders in Washington would not let them win.” This subject seldom arises in the on-camera interviews or in the narration, presumably because it doesn’t fit the narrative of an unwinnable war. The audience does not hear of the bitter disputes in Washington over the use of U.S. ground forces in Laos or North Vietnam. Nor does it mention revelations from North Vietnamese officials acknowledging that such measures would have thwarted Hanoi’s strategy.

The documentary disregards most of the positive achievements of America’s South Vietnamese allies. Viewers are told that South Vietnam’s strategic hamlet program—which sought to stem communist influence in the countryside—destroyed itself by alienating the rural population. Never mind that numerous North Vietnamese communists have admitted the program hurt them until it was disbanded after the American-sponsored coup of November 1963. The remarkable improvement of the South Vietnamese armed forces after the Tet Offensive receives less attention from the filmmakers than the Woodstock Festival.

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Cuban Communism, in Fact and Fiction Best-selling suspense novelist Nelson DeMille discusses his writing career and his latest book, which lampoons Yalies touring Havana. By John J. Miller

By on October 7th, 2017

A Yale tour group visits a Havana restaurant in “The Cuban Affair,” the new novel by Nelson DeMille. As the Cuban handler expounds on the blessings of socialism, several of the Yalies nod in thoughtful agreement. “If they spent an hour in a kennel, they’d probably come out barking,” quips Mr. DeMille’s narrator. “So much for an Ivy League education.”

The point is made and the scene moves on—but during a conversation over coffee at Chicago’s Four Seasons Hotel, where Mr. DeMille is staying during a nationwide book tour, the author muses on the root of the problem. His mind turns to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian author and dissident, who died in 2008. “Intellectuals said socialism is good if you do it right. Solzhenitsyn said: No, it’s coercive by its nature. There are millions of people in the world and in this country who don’t know that. They can even visit Cuba and not change their thinking one iota,” Mr. DeMille says. “They are intellectually or emotionally tied to some kind of ideal.”

They’re also easy to lampoon—and Mr. DeMille’s wit is on full display in “The Cuban Affair,” his 20th major suspense novel, following the likes of “Plum Island” (1997) and “The General’s Daughter” (1992), the latter adapted as a 1999 movie starring John Travolta. The new book came out Sept. 19 and is on the fiction best-seller lists. Mr. DeMille calls it “an old-fashioned chase-and-escape action adventure.” Its Cold War theme echoes “The Charm School” (1988), perhaps Mr. DeMille’s best-known novel.

Mr. DeMille, 74, was born in Queens and grew up on Long Island, where he still lives. In 1966 he was a student at Hofstra University: “I was kind of bored at school and didn’t sign up for the spring semester.” He received a draft notice, enlisted in the Army, and attended officer candidate school. Then he shipped off to Vietnam, where he saw combat as a platoon leader during the Tet Offensive. After three years in uniform, he returned home, finished his degree, and tried to write what he calls “the Great American war novel.”

A book editor told him nobody wanted to read about Vietnam. So Mr. DeMille switched to police procedurals, pumping out six cheap paperbacks. He didn’t make much money, but he sensed he was in the right place: “If you’re a painter and you’re living in Paris in the 1920s, you’re where you need to be. If you’re a writer, you need to be in New York. I don’t care if anybody else says, ‘Yes, you can do it from your farmhouse in Dubuque.’ Being in New York helped.” Under pen names, he wrote a biography of Barbara Walters (as Ellen Kay ) and a fictionalized book on sharks (as Brad Matthews ). “That’s when ‘Jaws’ was out,” he explains. “It was on-the-job training. I was learning my craft.”

When a talent-spotting publisher advanced him a five-figure check, he began to draft “By the Rivers of Babylon,” the 1978 novel that became his first hardcover book—and also one of the first thrillers to take on Middle Eastern terrorism. Since then, Mr. DeMille has written a novel roughly every other year, selling tens of millions of copies. He’s in talks to turn the tales of one character—a New York police detective called John Corey, the hero of seven books—into a television show.

“I’ve been offered bonuses to write faster,” says Mr. DeMille. Many big-name novelists publish annually, encouraging fans to mark release dates on their calendars as if celebrating a birthday. Not Mr. DeMille. “To do a book a year every year is just incomprehensible to me,” he says. “The quality would suffer. Stephen King can do it. He’s a brilliant storyteller. Other writers aren’t doing their best because they’re rushing it.”

Mr. DeMille likes to tell a joke—I heard it twice, during our afternoon conversation and then during an on-stage interview at an evening event in Arlington Heights, Ill. It involves James Patterson, a friend of Mr. DeMille’s who is famous for his commercial success, aided by co-authors who help him publish at a dizzying clip: “I called James the other day and his wife picked up. She said her husband couldn’t come to the phone because he was working on a book. I said, ‘That’s OK, I’ll hold.’ ”

Contributing to Mr. DeMille’s slow pace is his aversion to technology. He composes his books with a pencil in longhand; assistants decipher his handwriting and type it up for him. He makes revisions by marking on the printed pages. He owns a flip phone and says he doesn’t use the internet much.

For a man so set in his ways, “The Cuban Affair” represents quite a change. After his last book, “Radiant Angel,” came out in 2015, Mr. DeMille thought about calling it quits. “My sales had flattened at a high plateau,” he says. “That’s a reason to stay in the business—and also a reason to get out. I was vacillating.” He changed agents, left his longtime publisher, and signed a three-book deal with Simon & Schuster. “I felt a lot of the old enthusiasm again,” he says.

He also invented a new character, Daniel Graham “Mac” MacCormick, a wisecracking veteran of the war in Afghanistan who runs a charter-boat business in Key West, Fla. “A lot of characters from my past books are approaching Social Security age,” Mr. DeMille says. “The magic number in Hollywood and popular fiction seems to be about 35 years old.” For insights into the mind of a character less than half his age, Mr. DeMille consulted his son, a 37-year-old screenwriter.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Georgetown University Stumps for the Muslim Brotherhood : Andrew Harrod

By on October 7th, 2017

The Muslim “Brotherhood [MB] is traditionally a reformist, gradualist movement [which] is working on social change,” stated the Egyptian MB member Amr Darrag at a Georgetown University panel last month. With that, Darrag and his fellow speaker, the British-Iraqi MB operative Anas Altikriti, added to Georgetown’s longstanding history of enabling the MB’s deceitful use of liberal language to mask totalitarian goals. Georgetown’s Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) hosted the event, which was titled: “Post-Arab Spring Middle East: Political Islam and Democracy.” A pro-Islamist bent was inevitable given that the moderator was ACMCU director Jonathan Brown.

he Muslim “Brotherhood [MB] is traditionally a reformist, gradualist movement [which] is working on social change,” stated the Egyptian MB member Amr Darrag at a Georgetown University panellast month. With that, Darrag and his fellow speaker, the British-Iraqi MB operative Anas Altikriti, added to Georgetown’s longstanding history of enabling the MB’s deceitful use of liberal language to mask totalitarian goals.

Georgetown’s Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) hosted the event, which was titled: “Post-Arab Spring Middle East: Political Islam and Democracy.” A pro-Islamist bent was inevitable given that the moderator was ACMCU director Jonathan Brown. This professor has his own professional links to MB groups and is the son-in-law of convicted terrorist Sami Al Arian. In February, Brown was widely criticized after he gave a speech at a MB think tank justifying the practice of slavery within Islam.

Before the event, MB expert Eric Trager warned against Darrag’s visit to America: “The Muslim Brotherhood is an international hate group that seeks” to establish a “global Islamic state or neo-caliphate.” Speaking at the event, Altikriti, whom the Hudson Institute describes as “one of the shrewdest UK-based Brotherhood activists and the son of the leader of Iraq’s Muslim Brotherhood,” dismissed Trager’s article as “hilarious.”

Despite Altikriti’s insistence elsewhere that he has no connection to the Muslim Brotherhood, he describesthe movement as “the most important democratic voice that espouses multiculturalism, human rights and basic freedoms.” He also maintains that, while indeed part of the “spectrum” of “political Islam”, groups such as Al-Qaeda and Islamic State are “abnormal phenomena” and not ideologically related to the Brotherhood. By contrast, Lebanese-American Middle East expert Walid Phares has identified the MB as the “mothership for the jihadi ideologies.”

Notwithstanding Altikriti’s support and apologetics for Hamas, an MB affiliate and the totalitarian ruler of the Gaza Strip, he expressed a desire for “far more political players and actors throughout society than political Islam.” He added that if the “only alternative to authoritarian regimes is political Islam, that’s a choice that I would loathe.”

Altikriti’s suspect celebration of pluralism echoes his previous descriptions of his own organization, the UK-based Cordoba Foundation. Altikriti has told Al Jazeera that his foundation “rehashes positive memories” of an ostensible period of multicultural coexistence in medieval Islamic Spain. Prime Minister David Cameron, however, describes the Cordoba Foundation as a “political front for the Muslim Brotherhood,” while the United Arab Emirates has designated the foundation a terrorist organization.

Darrag, meanwhile, was a former minister in Egypt’s MB-led government under Mohamed Morsi, until its 2013 overthrow. Darrag argued that under Morsi the MB wanted “to go back quickly to stability, to establish institutions, elections, get a parliament, constitution, a president, all the institutions that would be perfectly fit for an established democratic system.” He denied Islamist involvement in the “Arab Spring,” arguing that protestors “didn’t go out to ask for the application of sharia.” Trager has noted in fact that Darrag played a central role in creating under Morsi a new, sharia-focused Egyptian constitution.

Darrag also claimed that the MB rejects violence in its pursuit of political reform. He described the work of his Istanbul-based Egyptian Institute for Political and Strategic Studies (EIPSS) as the promotion of liberal, democratic issues, such as “transitional justice” and “civil-military relations.” Once again, however, Trager has noted that EIPSS “presents itself as a scholarly think tank, but it often promotes violent interpretations of Islamic texts” in Arabic-language articles — yet another example of the MB feigning nonviolence.

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U of Michigan president trash-talked Trump before, after election, emails reveal By Caleb Parke, Fox News

By on October 7th, 2017

The head of the University of Michigan disparaged President Donald Trump and his supporters, both before and after the 2016 election, in numerous emails sent to faculty and staff, court documents show.

The emails were released this week as a result of a lawsuit settlement with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which sued UM for failing to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request surrounding President Mark Schlissel’s Trump-related emails.

The FOIA request was filed a few days after the November election by Mackinac Center’s Derek Draplin, who was looking into the university’s decision to host events for students who were upset about the election. The center noted that the University of Michigan receives over $1 billion in taxpayer funds each year and Schlissel is a public employee.

The earliest of the emails released is from Aug. 12, 2016, and it includes a Washington Post article written by a college president explaining how he will “teach Trump” to his students, “calling out the candidate’s bigotry.”

In the next email, Schlissel explains to a UM colleague why he didn’t go for the “typical light feel good” summer convocation speech, noting that he had a room full of “first-time voters” before him.

“I realize that some may interpret this as anti-Trump although there is nothing explicit in the remarks,” Schlissel wrote. “That’s just the way it will have to be. I would feel awful if Trump won the election and I was too afraid of appearing political to make any effort to encourage our students to thoughtfully participate. I am willing to accept the criticism since I think it’s very important.”

Weeks later, on election night, Schlissel responded to an email from Andrea Fischer Newman, a Republican member of the university’s board of regents, about an article by The College Fix with video of a Michigan professor’s lengthy rant against voting for Trump.

The professor warned students they would lose civil liberties, Roe v Wade would be reversed and said they could kiss goodbye affirmative action and equal pay, among other things, if Trump was elected.

“It’s not inherently wrong for a faculty member to take a position on any issue, including an election,” Schlissel wrote to Newman. “The key is that they are solicitous and tolerant of the views of students that disagree and that those students don’t feel persecuted in any way.”

The University of Michigan president changed his tune after Hillary Clinton lost, speaking at an anti-Trump rally, then writing in an email two days after the election that it’s the public university’s job to aid in “pushing back against the idea that facts don’t matter, that science isn’t relevant to decision making and that people with white skin don’t belong here.”

Schlissel added that he was “torn on recommendations for appointees” since he couldn’t “imagine lending one’s name to a Trump administration.”

In another email following his anti-Trump remarks, Schlissel called it “ironic” that a “minority of Trump supporters” at UM “now feel marginalized and ostracized in our campus milieu and post-election activity.”

The Mackinac Center said the emails were being withheld in violation of the Freedom of Information Act by claiming the email were protected conversation under law when none of those emails met that standard.

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