New Focus on an Odd Spot

National Archives/Reuters - 'SICK MAN AT YALTA' During the cold war, detractors claimed that Stalin took advantage of Roosevelt's ill health at the Allied conference in 1945, just before the president died.

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt died unexpectedly on April 12, 1945, in Warm Springs, Ga., the White House lost no time announcing a cause of death.

The 63-year-old president, the shocked and grieving nation was told, had died of cerebral hemorrhage. (“Last Words,” read a front-page headline in The New York Times: “ ‘I Have a Terrific Headache.’ ”)

That Roosevelt died of a stroke is undisputed. But what caused it is a medical mystery that has persisted to this day, a mystery heightened by the secrecy in which he, his aides and his doctors always insisted on shrouding his health.

Now a new book — “F.D.R.’s Deadly Secret,” by a neurologist, Dr. Steven Lomazow, and a journalist, Eric Fettmann (PublicAffairs) — revives an intriguing theory. Look closely at Roosevelt’s portraits over his 12-year presidency. In his first two terms, there is a dark spot over his left eyebrow. It seems to grow and then mysteriously vanishes sometime around 1940, leaving a small scar.

Was the spot a harmless mole? Or a cancerous melanoma that spread to contribute to, or even cause, his death? Melanomas, after all, are known for causing strokes from bleeding when they spread to the brain. This hypothesis is not new.


 

Tracking F.D.R’s Mole


The speculation about a melanoma cannot be verified because there was no autopsy and no known biopsy, and most of Roosevelt’s medical records disappeared shortly after his death from a safe in the United States Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Md.

Disappeared? Or were made to disappear?


Even in the 1940s, some Washington insiders claimed that Roosevelt knew he was seriously ill, if not dying, when he ran for his final term, and that was one of the reasons he dumped his vice president, Henry A. Wallace, from the Democratic ticket in favor of Harry S. Truman. But most historians say he picked Truman for political reasons, not for his qualifications.

Curbing size of bog firms

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Glass-Steagall Act, passed in 1933, separating commercial and investment banking.

And Bill Clinton signed the bill that repealed the Act.

Masters and Commanders

The other new book on the New Book cart at Information Desk today that intrigued me:

It looks at FDR and Churchill (masters) and George C. Marshall and Alan Brooke (American and English generals, commanders). Interesting viewpoint considering the four as principals in the war effort. The author, of course, has his own website.


Why, when the most direct route from Britain to Germany was through north-western France, did the western allies first launch assaults on North Africa, Sicily and Rome? Why, if D-Day was intended to be the start of the Allies’ great thrust into Germany, did four hundred thousand men land five hundred miles to the south, in southern France, two months later? Why did the Allies not take Berlin, Vienna or Prague, and allow the Iron Curtain to descend where it did?

New Deal Revisionism: Theories Collide

A March 1933 cartoon from The New York Times expressed confidence in the new president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt




















For more than half a century, America’s political leaders — Republican and Democrat — have sought to wrap themselves in the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the man credited with replacing fear with hope and ending the Great Depression. But in recent years some writers and economists have been telling a version of this story that is quite different from the one generally taught in school or seen on the History Channel.

In this interpretation Roosevelt is a well-meaning but misguided dupe who not only prolonged the Depression but also exacerbated it. For many people, it’s like hearing that Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother and not the wolf is the rapacious killer.

Since the financial crash this fall, the revisionist look at the Great Depression has attracted new attention; it even recently made its way onto Stephen Colbert’s television show. But more than that, it has become an intellectual banner for Republican opponents of the Obama administration’s ambitious bailout and stimulus proposals.

Amity Shlaes, a syndicated columnist who works at the Council on Foreign Relations, helped ignite this latest revisionist spurt with her 2007 book, “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.”

“The deepest problem was the intervention, the lack of faith in the marketplace,” she wrote, lumping Herbert Hoover and Roosevelt together as overzealous government meddlers.

I thought that Herbert Hoover had too much faith in the marketplace. And, lack of faith? The free market crashed because of excesses by business and the lack of action by Hoover's administration.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s role in ending the Great Depression has come under new scrutiny in recent years















She and other critics of the New Deal credit Roosevelt with some important innovations, like restoring confidence in banks and establishing social insurance. Nonetheless, they argue that most of his mucking about in the economy crowded out private investment and antagonized the business world, and thus delayed recovery.

Sounds like the Fox News historical interpretation. And this next one?

Anna Schwartz, who collaborated with Milton Friedman on a classic study of the Depression, and the Nobel Prize winner Robert E. Lucas Jr. argued that the idea of stimulating the economy with federal spending is a fairy tale. Government spending just crowds out private investment, they asserted; the money supply is the only thing that matters.

Pure bullshit, really. They must think Ronald Reagan is still President.

Men lining up for free dinner in New York in the early days of the Great Depression




















“I’m wound up here,” said Jeff Madrick, as he tried to cram in a wide-ranging defense of the New Deal during his brief remarks. Mr. Madrick, who directs policy research at the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School, pointed out that considering the deep pit the economy had fallen into during the Depression (when production fell by nearly one-third), the government’s deficit spending (just 5 percent of the gross domestic product) was actually quite modest. Even so, he said, it managed to reduce the official unemployment rate from a high of 25 percent in 1933 to just under 10 percent by 1936.

Nick Taylor, the author of “American-Made,” a history of the Works Progress Administration, said Roosevelt’s flurry of activity restored confidence. Not only did his administration rapidly create jobs for legions of jobless Americans, Mr. Taylor said, it also simultaneously built bridges, roads and dams, and brought light, electrical power and water to large swaths of the country. That 20th-century infrastructure laid the groundwork for the country’s phenomenal growth in the 1950s and ’60s.

Yes, unemployment bumped up in 1937, but it was caused by Roosevelt’s ill-advised attempt to balance the budget, he said. When Roosevelt reversed that policy, unemployment began to inch down again.

New Deal Architecture Faces Bulldozer

A mother and children in 1938 in Greenhills, Ohio, a planned community built by the government in the Great Depression.













Greenhills, shown in 1939, was championed by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt as providing a healthy environment.

With Friends Like These

Both the left and the right wings are yelping, whilst President Obama tries to govern from the center.

These are all minor perturbations, you might say, and you’d get no argument from me. But they’re also signs of real fissures and may presage real fights that Obama will have to cope with as he seeks to rescue the economy, renovate American foreign policy, remodel our health-care system, reengineer our energy policy, and reinvent our politics in the bargain. All indications so far scream that Obama is determined to govern from the center. Which means that both the right and the left will have cause for complaint. The only question is which will prove a bigger pain in Obama’s buttocks.

Quite an agenda, and he'll have to drag many of us kicking and screaming.

Certainly the opposition of the right will be louder, more relentless, and often extravagantly obnoxious. Consider Limbaugh, attempting to justify his declaration of his desire to see Obama founder, telling Sean Hannity: “We are being told that we have to hope he succeeds, that we have to bend over and grab the ankles … because his father was black.”

Borderline racism, really, but he is such a buffoon.

Limbaugh is a clown, of course, but he’s also the most prominent conservative in the country, and one whose influence may actually grow among Republicans, given the abject disarray in which the party currently finds itself. Bereft of a coherent set of ideas, possessing no obvious national leader, the right flank of the GOP appears increasingly likely to adopt a stance of reflexive obstructionism toward Obama’s agenda. The clearest indication has been the performance of Cornyn, who chairs the Republican Senatorial Committee, with regard to Clinton and Holder. In the former case, Cornyn claimed to be after greater transparency from Bill Clinton’s foundation; in the latter, he was looking for a commitment from the incoming attorney general to not prosecute Bush officials for the torture of detainees. Neither gambit was likely to have any actual effect. Instead, they were designed to make a point—and poke a stick in Obama’s eye.

Poke a stick in his eye exactly; testinng him, putting him on notice there will be fighting.

Not all the roadblocks being thrown up by the right are quite that mindless, however. Holds have also been placed on Obama’s nominees to head the EPA and the Council on Environmental Quality—both likely part of a longer-term strategy to fight the climate-change legislation soon coming down the pike. Over in the House, meanwhile, Minority Leader John Boehner’s howling over Obama’s stimulus package is intended to maintain pressure for more tax cuts and less spending, a maneuver that seems to be having the desired effect.

Putting a positive spin on Obama's actions, I'd say he is coopting Boehner; others on the left, liberals, Democrats, are howling that he is caving in to the Republicans.

The left has its own set of concerns about the stimulus—indeed, the diametrically opposite ones that are animating the right. From the moment that Team Obama floated details of the plan, liberals have complained that the ratio of tax cuts to investment was seriously out of whack as a matter of sound economics; and also that, in political terms, it represented a sort of pre-capitulation to the Republicans both unnecessary and unwise. Leading the chorus of critics has been Paul Krugman, who observed the other day in his blog that the House had scaled back mass-transit spending in order to accommodate the tax cuts. “I feel a bit of post-partisan depression coming on,” Krugman sighed.

Krugman might be feeling a post-Nobel ego-inflation as well.

The liberal angst over Obama simmered throughout the transition, fired by a set of appointments, especially on economics and national security, so conspicuously centrist that it seemed to some Washington players almost designed to alienate progressives. “They didn’t throw any bones to the left,” says one prominent Democrat. “And they’re just too smart for that to have been an accident.” But the worries never came to a boil, and they may not for some time. Indeed, the left thrilled to the initial set of executive orders issued by Obama during his first two days in office...

As I see it, he has put the left on notice that he is a centrist, he is in charge, and they will have to live with it. He won.

But it’s not hard to see where Obama and the left could be on a collision course.

Perhaps.

As a practical matter, Obama’s management of ideological extremes will play out in his dealings with Congress. And here the difference between the House and Senate will test his dexterity. In the House, with its substantial Democratic majority and the absence of the filibuster, Obama can afford—and is sure to be pressured by his party—to build coalitions from the left toward the center. But in the Senate, a unified minority has the ability to bring his legislative agenda grinding to a halt. So the need for Republican cooperation is essential, and thus the imperative will be to stitch together coalitions from the center out. The tension between the two strategies is obvious; a hell of a balancing act is required.

I have faith that he can do it, and will do it.

Judging from Obama’s early moves, most old Washington hands have concluded that the new administration is focused mainly on the Senate. “Everything they’re doing seems to me to be about getting to 60 [votes],” says one such observer. “They forgive Lieberman. They play nice with Susan Collins. They play nice with McCain; I mean, my God, they appoint Janet Napolitano to Homeland Security so that McCain won’t have a serious opponent in Arizona and have to run more to his right. It’s almost diabolical.”

I can not believe they are that dumb.

This is why the left has much more leverage with him (and much greater potential to be a thorn in his side) than does the right. Yet the sheer scope of the ambitions that Obama seems to have for his presidency require broad majorities. He appears to take this business of unifying the country seriously, and to do that will require him not just to appear to reach out rightward but to actually … you know, do it.

Overambitious? Time will tell. Yet with Lincoln and FDR as role models, he has my confidence.

Insights Both Fresh and Tested

The typical books-of-the-year list is confined, with good reason, to books that were published during that year. But the crush of recent economic news means that several older books suddenly have a new relevance. So while 2008 books still dominate my choices, you will also find a prophetic book from 2003 and a classic from the late 1950s. The idea is to create a reading list for anyone trying to make sense of the world right now.

The obvious place to start is the financial crisis, and the clearest guide to it that I’ve read is “Financial Shock” by Mark Zandi, a founder of the research firm Moody’s Economy.com.

I recently read the early parts of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s trilogy, “The Age of Roosevelt,” written more than a half-century ago. It is a bit triumphalist, but its age offers an advantage I hadn’t anticipated: you can draw the historical analogies for yourself. The debt-fueled business excesses of the 1920s sound especially, and chillingly, familiar.

I also asked Barry Gewen, an editor at The New York Times Book Review, if he would put together a canon of Depression books, and we have posted the list on our economics blog, nytimes.com/economix. At the top is “Freedom From Fear,” David Kennedy’s 1999 Pulitzer Prize winner (which, at almost 1,000 pages, is still 1,000 pages shorter than the Schlesinger trilogy).

To try to keep the current crisis from turning into a depression, the Obama administration is going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars next year, much of it on a vast infrastructure program. And it so happens that one of the better-reviewed nonfiction books of 2008 was, in large part, about infrastructure. The book is “Traffic” by Tom Vanderbilt. The reviews focused on Mr. Vanderbilt’s entertaining tour through the anthropology of driving. But “Traffic” also has a larger message.

The next book was written more than five years ago, but it’s still the closest thing to an obituary for the Big Three car companies, as they once were. It was written by Micheline Maynard, a longtime automobile journalist who now works for The Times, and it’s called “The End of Detroit.”

“Detroit’s long reign as the dominant force in the American car industry is over,” she wrote, in the first sentence of the first chapter. She predicted that one of the Big Three could collapse within a decade. “The ultimate irony,” Ms. Maynard continues, is that Detroit “has been defeated by companies that did the job Detroit once did with unquestioned expertise: turn out vehicles that consumers wanted to buy and vehicles that captured their imaginations.” The Big Three’s ability to solve this problem, quickly, will largely determine their postbailout fate.

That's in a book published in 2003. It is, obviously, prophetic. I think that within two years there will be only 2 Detroit companies, and neither will be that strong. Chrysler and GM might well merge, but the sum of two sick companies will be one bigger sick company.

And, then, politics.

From the left, Larry M. Bartels, a Princeton political economist, explained in “Unequal Democracy” that the economy has consistently performed better under Democratic presidents than Republican ones over the last 60 years. For middle-class families, incomes have risen more than twice as fast under Democrats as under Republicans. Mr. Bartels makes a strong case that the pattern is more than coincidence. I’m not sure that cause and effect are as tightly linked as he suggests. But his critics have yet to come up with an argument as strong as his.

From the right, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam pleaded with their fellow Republicans to come up with an economic strategy beyond tax cuts. In “Grand New Party,” Mr. Douthat and Mr. Salam lay out an alternate agenda, for overhauling taxes, lowering health care costs, improving schools and reducing the number of single-parent families.

Lower health costs, better schools, social engineering; they're rightists?

Finally, I will mention a book that I already recommended once this year — “The Race Between Education and Technology,” a history of American education by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz.

Solis to Be Obama’s Pick for Labor

One more post to be filled. Yesterday I had read some reports (read leaks, but from whom?) that Governor Jennifer Granholm was slated for appointment to the Labor post. Now I see reports that wasn't interested. And now reports are out that the post will be filled by a Represenative from California.

Representative Hilda Solis, a California Democrat, is President-elect Barack Obama’s choice to be Labor secretary, according to Democratic officials.

Not a name I'm familiar with, frankly.

Solis, 51, is a four-term member of Congress with an extensive record on environmental issues. Her legislative accomplishments include spearheading a bill to provide workers with training for “green-collar” employment. Such initiatives are a hallmark of Obama’s plan to address the country’s energy needs and create new jobs.

I am not sure why a person's age is always reported. A liberal Democrat from California, who is a Hispanic woman. It'll be interesting to look at the Cabinet as a whole and break it down.

Solis, who grew up in a union household in Los Angeles County, is a favorite of labor groups, including the Service Employees International Union.

A conciliatory gesture to labor. Perhaps even more, a signal.

Labor officials have been grumbling recently that some of Obama’s Cabinet choices lack strong labor ties. Union chiefs also question why Obama didn’t announce his choice for Labor secretary when he introduced his core economic team, putting them on alert about what kind of influence the Labor Department will have in the new administration.

A lot of liberals, a lot of Democrats have been grumbling about Obama appoinments, while Republicans and moderates have been largely, even almost completely, quiet. Of course, the right wing is trying to tar Obama with a Blagojevich brush (coz they got nothing else to pin on him for now, rumours of his Communism having been proven wholly exaggerated, er, false).

Solis would succeed Elaine Chao, who has held the job for all eight years of the Bush administration, making her the longest-serving Labor secretary since Frances Perkins under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

That's an interesting tidbit.

The New Liberalism

A liberal writer's piece in the New Yorker. Aside from the rather usual analysis, with some twists, granted, there are some interesting sentences and ideas.

For the first time since the Johnson Administration, the idea that government should take bold action to create equal opportunity for all citizens doesn’t have to explain itself in a defensive mumble. That idea is ascendant in 2008 because it answers the times. These political circumstances, even more than the election of the first black American to the highest office, make Obama’s victory historic.

That bold government action is an idea for the times, more than Obama being black, is what makes his election historic? I fail to agree with that assessment.

Pray tell, what does the President-elect read? asks Packer.

A Harvard Law professor and former colleague of Obama at Chicago Law School, who has written a book, Nudge, perhaps is one of those titles.

Cass Sunstein, the Harvard law professor and author, was Obama’s colleague for many years at the University of Chicago Law School. Sunstein’s most recent book, “Nudge,” co-written with the behavioral economist Richard Thaler, tries to find a new path between governmental control and the unfettered free market. “Nudge,” Sunstein said, is about “ways of helping people to make better choices without requiring anybody to do anything. It’s a conception of government that is reluctant to impose mandates and bans but is kind of shrewd about enlisting what we know about human behavior in good directions.” Sunstein added that the book is well known in Obama’s circle; Obama’s top economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, also of the University of Chicago, has read it, and Sunstein has discussed its ideas with Obama. In “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama included a proposal from Sunstein and Thaler that would have employees automatically enrolled in retirement plans, with the option not to participate, because “evidence shows that by changing the default rule, employee participation rates go up dramatically”—a non-coercive “nudge” toward better decisions. “He knows an astonishing amount about cutting-edge economic thinking,” Sunstein said.

It is true, and a good twist: make the default be yes, rather than no.

Sunstein’s Obama is the post-partisan one. He calls Obama a “visionary minimalist,” meaning someone who wants to pursue large goals in a way that offends the deepest values of as few people as possible.

Minimalism is more in tune with the day than is the maximalism of FDR or LBJ. New times call for new ideas and a new paradigm.

Sunstein suggested as the governing philosophy of an Obama Presidency the idea of “deliberative democracy.” The phrase appears in “The Audacity of Hope,” where it denotes a conversation among adults who listen to one another, who attempt to persuade one another by means of argument and evidence, and who remain open to the possibility that they could be wrong.

It calls for informed voters who are virtuous and engaged. Che said that revolution required a new human being, who went beyond the limitations of the old order.

The real problem with partisanship, Obama believes, is that it’s no longer pragmatic.Partisan politics, defined merely as demagoguery or stupidity, is easy to reject—but doing so doesn’t take us very far. It’s like calling on everyone to be decent. At its weakest, post-partisanship amounts to an aversion to fighting, a trait that some people who know Obama see in him.

Nice to think partisanship is bad; it is. But it still works. Or does it? Libby Dole lost, even after calling her opponent Godless; or perhaps she lost because such tactics were seen as desperate and unseemly.

The Clintons, in the end, could not defeat Obama, even if early on, and as late as the Pennsylvania primary, they savaged him. The Republicans tried it, too.

They tried like hell. They called him an élitist, a radical, a socialist, a Marxist, a Muslim, an Arab, an appeaser, a danger to the republic, a threat to small children, a friend of terrorists, an enemy of Israel, a vote thief, a non-citizen, an anti-American, and a celebrity. Obama didn’t defeat the Republicans simply by rising above partisanship, although his dignified manner served as a continual rebuke to his enemies and went a long way toward reassuring skeptical voters who weren’t members of the cult of “Yes We Can.” It turned out that the culture war, in spite of Sarah Palin’s manic gunplay, was largely over. Obama won because he had a vastly superior organization, a steely resilience that became more evident in October than it was in January (for which he owes a debt to Hillary Clinton), and a willingness to fight back on ground on which the majority of Americans—looking to government for solutions—now stand.

That dignified manner is part of his post-partisanship. And he hot back, too, just not with the shrillness of Palin. Or the desperation of McCain.

Obama was able to make a powerful case for a break with conservative economics, in part, because he doesn’t carry the scars of recent history. “He’s not intimidated by the issue frames that have bedevilled Democrats for the last couple of decades,” one of the advisers said. “There’s never been a sense of having to triangulate.” By the end of the campaign, Obama wasn’t just running against broken politics, or even against the Bush Presidency. He had the anti-government philosophy of the entire Age of Reagan in his sights.

Which I think needs to be done decisively: government is not the problem, and can be part of the solution.